Are violent protests cleansing, like Fanon said?

By Liezille Jacobs and Julian Jacobs

Frantz Fanon, often referred to as the psychiatrist who prescribed violence, would turn in his grave at the condemnation of the student protests because he believed overcoming oppression could be realised through a violent uprising of the masses.

Fanon said the slave thinks of overthrowing his master while being subjected to violence from the master. Thousands of students across South Africa protested non-violently and violently to the oppressive brutality of the university system, a system that is not adequately responding to the needs of its students. Armed with passion and purpose they seemed to have Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth as their handbook.

Looking back at our inaction and failed attempts while we were students at the University of the Western Cape, and the university administrators’ inability to make fees fall during the annual “Hek Toe” marches, this led to the recent #UWCShutDown and #FeesMustFall protests.

Having borne witness to their parents’ unspeakable suffering inflicted by the apartheid government the “born-frees” are eager to show how incredibly temporary their “freedom” is. The university system has been likened to the colonial, apartheid system and as a response the #RhodesMustFall movement earlier this year galvanised everyone around the problem of racism and transformation in our country. Some of the protests turned violent, but we do not know everything there is to know about why protests turn violent.

Social psychologists should very well be on the edge of their seats testing mob psychology hypotheses on why crowds or protests turn violent. The Don Fosters of this world have been trying to find factors that enable and prevent violence for decades. Gustave Le Bon believed that “isolated, a human may be a cultured individual but in a crowd s/he is a barbarian”. Why and when does our behaviour in groups change or degenerate into crowd and mob behaviour?

Crowd behaviour is heavily influenced by the loss of responsibility of the individual, which increases with the size of the crowd. A recent study illustrates that people display a shared identity in protesting crowds, which has an indirect effect on their positive experience and increases the sense of intimacy with other crowd members. This 2015 study compels us to review this data in a way that describes how crowd emotion should be conceptualised. This is important because as a united front, students succeeded to protest against a fee increase for 2016 and are finding new ways to continue the #FeesMustFall campaign until tertiary education is free for all.

In thebook, Positive Psychology on the College Campus, it is argued that young people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play. That protest is not meant to be violent because it is a human right to object to the inequalities of this world. We should be glad that young people care fiercely enough about justice, equality, or other societal issues and their voices are powerful agents to bring about social justice.

And the 2015 book Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change painstakingly outlines the various kinds of protest over the last few decades that speak about waves of protests globally. They further contend that protest occurs in an already convoluted and tension-ridden social reality and is comprised of forces whose politics are themselves complex, fraught with antagonisms and limited by contradictions. Even as protest challenges state power, it is structured by that power and so reveals both political possibilities and political limitations.

The student demonstrations remind us of 1985 when the then banned ANC, through its leader Oliver Tambo, said the people should make South Africa ungovernable. Is this what makes protests violent? Tambo’s instruction led to state-owned properties (hospitals, rent offices, schools) being bombed and burnt. In the last two years protesting communities across South Africa have turned to violence to get noticed by the authorities. Is this what makes violence cleansing?

Service-delivery protests have become a common feature in post–apartheid South Africa and have often led to violence. A mass protest strategy has evolved from the 1980s, which is symptomatic of what Fanon argued in his publications because he believed that eventually one had to turn to violence to rid oneself of being oppressed as a slave or colonised.

Anti-apartheid freedom fighters were often forbidden to read, write or speak freely against the regime, so they sang. Songs were where their dreams took flight, where they expressed faith, love, fear and unimaginable loss. Songs were also how political activists conveyed information like sharing locations for comrades on the run, or directions for a path towards freedom all buried in decoded language of deific lyrics. Freedom fighters sang songs of liberation, if not for their bodies in this world then for their spirits in the next.

Their songs still have a power and strike a chord in all of us. Their songs were songs of hope. Hope that in lifting our voices together we might one day witness our children access better education and better opportunities.

Humming to the tunes of Bruce Springsteen’s How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live? and as the semblance of normality returns and students get back to writing their final exams, we need to reflect on what is yet to come.

Is violence the only solution to the decolonising cleansing process?

Liezille Jacobs is a senior scientist at the SA Medical Research Council’s Violence Injury and Peace Research Unit and a part-time psychology lecturer at the University of the Western Cape. Julian Jacobs is the director of communications and stakeholder relations at the Human Sciences Research Council. They write in their personal capacities.