Hit the Tire: The Strike Mutates into a New Form

Abstract

Along with an intense red flame and a distinctive and acrid stench, burning tires emit high, billowing clouds of thick black smoke. They can rapidly give an otherwise ordinary scene an extraordinary dramatic intensity with the look of a warzone in an action film. This gives the used tire, an otherwise quotidian object in the general detritus of urban life, significant utility as a tool to stage political drama from below.

Road blockades, often constructed or marked out with burning tires, are common features of the politics of the oppressed across the cities of the Global South, and occasionally in parts of the North too. From Gaza to Johannesburg, Port-au-Prince, La Paz, and beyond, road blockades mark out, via organized and dramatic disruption of the flow of everyday life, the politics of refusal and demand. In some cases, road blockades have come to play a central role in decisive forms of political contestation. In South Africa Abahlali baseMjondolo, the largest popular movement to have emerged after apartheid, developed from a rupture with local political authority in a neighborhood in the port city of Durban—a rupture expressed in the form of a road blockade.

Along with the symbolic potency of burning tires—their easily unlocked dramatic power—there are also obvious material reasons for their widespread use on road blockades that pertain to accessibility. As well as being easy to burn, used tires are easy to come by, easy to move, and easy to store. Their ubiquity means that is not difficult to justify their possession when the police come.

A hundred years ago, the sickle was the symbol of peasant struggles and the hammer the symbol of the struggles of industrial workers. Today it is difficult to imagine any tool used for production that could take on a similarly generalized symbolic function for the struggles of impoverished people across the cities of the Global South, people who mostly make their lives without formal work and live in shacks or other forms of self-constructed habitation. If there is an object that could come to symbolize the potential for a politics that enables the imagination of shared forms of experience and modes of resistance across these cities, it would pertain to a mode of habitation, to social reproduction in the home, or to the politics of disruption organized by the oppressed outside the home. There is no object that would be a more appropriate symbol of the politics of disruption from below than the burning tire—detritus reconfigured as weapon.

In South Africa, youth unemployment is just under 75 percent, hunger is endemic, and millions are without decent housing. The struggle for urban land has become the most intense site of conflict between the state and the people it aims to govern. In some parts of the country, such as Durban, a city that has become notorious for political violence, the duopoly on the distribution of urban land that is formally held by the state and the market is increasingly supplemented with violence by the gangsterized elements in the ruling party and the state.

This violence can be aimed at seizing control of urban land in order to rent or sell land and shacks, as well as accumulation via the capture of state spending carried out in the name of “development.” There is a widespread and rapidly deepening skepticism about electoral politics, and participation via the vote is in steep decline, particularly among young people. For millions of people, South Africa is, to borrow a phrase from Frantz Fanon, “a non-viable society, a society that needs to be replaced.”¹

The worsening social crisis has led to escalating levels of protest. Road blockades are generally said to have become common across South Africa from 2004, which is also the year given for the beginning of what some in the academy have called “the rebellion of the poor.” Within the best organized politics of the oppressed, this moment has sometimes been said to have inaugurated the emergence of a “politics of the poor,” understood to have affirmed its specificity and autonomy in relation to the politics of national liberation.

Within a few years, road blockades became ubiquitous. They have been met with routine forms of state violence, frequently resulting in the death of protestors. In most instances, these deaths are not taken as being newsworthy, let alone as any kind of scandal. If they are reported, the names of the dead are often not given.

These road blockades are mostly, although not exclusively, organized from what official discourse terms “informal settlements.” This designation has the political function of masking the degree to which a mode of habitation, sometimes organized via very formal forms of popular agency, always begins as a land occupation. Within the very well-organized struggles to occupy and hold land in Durban, it is now often said that “for the poor the price of land is paid in blood.” In meetings it is common to hear women, usually mothers with family responsibilities, say, speaking quietly but firmly, and in a tone of resignation rather than defiance, that they have committed themselves to “umhlaba noma ukufa” (land or death).

The scale, frequency, and intensity of state violence, and the degree to which it operates outside of the law, vary considerably across the country. In Durban it is not unusual for an occupation to have to endure more than twenty, or even sometimes thirty, armed attacks by the state before its permanence is accepted in practice, although seldom in principle. Until a few years ago the force of the state was generally met with flight and then, after the departure of the police and private security guards, quick regrouping and, if there had been disconnections or evictions, the work of reconnecting electricity and rebuilding homes. Now it is common for road blockades to be thrown up, shields against rubber bullets to be made from scrap metal, and force to be met with a refusal to flee occupied land. It is no longer unusual for the police to fire live rounds, and a police officer or security guard captured in the melee during an attempt at eviction may well be seriously assaulted.

The association of the road blockade with burning tires is so strong that people planning a blockade will often say that they intend to “Shaya i-Dunlop” (hit the tire). The police, politicians, middle-class residents of suburbs, and some journalists will often refer to a road blockade by impoverished people by saying, often contemptuously and sometimes fearfully, “They are burning tires.”

While the action of organizing a road blockade is often referred to as “hitting the tire,” it is also referred to by its protagonists as a strike. The word strike has made a long passage from the moment, so well described by Marcus Rediker, when English sailors struck their sails in demand for better wages in 1768.² In contemporary South Africa, many of the older meanings of the term—to refer to the organized withdrawal of labor, custom, or rent—endure, but the new meaning—to organize a road blockade—is well entrenched in the speech of the oppressed. The road blockade has become the strike of the unemployed, with the city rather than the factory as its key site.

Meaning and Function

The strike in the form of the road blockade usually has two simultaneous functions that share some of the long and international history of the barricade. One is to impose a physical barrier across a road in order to block access to a specific site or to achieve more general disruption to the flow of traffic. This can be motivated by the desire to put material weight behind some sort of refusal or demand, or to prevent state access to sites where land has been appropriated, homes constructed, and services such as electricity, water, and, less often, sanitation organized outside of the authority of the state, capital, and local political elites. A second primary function of the road blockade is to turn the road into a temporary stage for political theater, publicly demonstrating refusal or demand.

The repertoire of popular disobedience and collective action outside of the official order can take emancipatory, contradictory, or reactionary forms. Access to land, housing, and services outside of the channels formally approved by the state and capital can take forms of noncommodified access, sometimes in democratizing movements. It can also take largely disorganized and sometimes chaotic forms as well as forms of authoritarian accumulation from below. When it takes the latter forms, there will often be a temporary and tactical alliance between landlords, people with local business interests, and local gangsters with tenants and other residents when disconnections and evictions are threatened.

Popular protest can include an entanglement with often violent, horizontally organized expressions of hostility against impoverished and working-class African and Asian migrants and ethnically constituted claims to rights, welfare, and opportunity. The politics that seeks to tie rights and entitlements to the “legitimate” occupation of place is often fully developed in the mostly rural areas under traditional authority, a phenomenon well explained by Mahmood Mamdani,³ but it exists in other forms too. In urban neighborhoods politicians often actively cultivate the idea that residents from “outside the province”—a formulation that often masks ethnic claims—have no legitimate claims to residence and rights. There are often divisions between communities based on which families are seen as the original residents of a particular area and which are seen as newcomers. In some cases, the “newcomers” are people whose families arrived in an area to escape the political violence of the 1980s. In the context of mass impoverishment and the desperation that it creates, the routine way in which rights and entitlements are, in practice, tied to identity and place of origin is an extremely dangerous situation, a situation in which exclusionary desires from above and below can meet in forms of violence carried out with impunity.

Recently the road blockade has been appropriated by elites seeking to mask the most cynical forms of reaction—authoritarian, kleptocratic, and violently repressive forms of politics—in the guise of the popular. In July 2021, Durban was engulfed by staggeringly massive food riots that then developed into general looting and well-organized attacks on infrastructure carried out by small groups of people acting with specific purpose within the wider tumult. Sometimes referred to as the winter riots or the July riots, these events were sparked by the sense that the impunity granted by the state to various forms of violence undertaken by the supporters of former president Jacob Zuma in the wake of his imprisonment signaled a breakdown in the enforcement of a massively exclusionary order. That violence took the form of men claiming to be veterans of the armed struggle against apartheid openly attacking migrants in the streets and masked men attacking and burning trucks on the highways, and sometimes murdering the drivers. Migrant drivers were at particular risk. The men claiming to be military veterans expressed clear support for the faction of the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), organized around Zuma. It was widely assumed that the masked men attacking trucks had similar allegiances.

A minor component of the initial moments of the disorder, driven by the faction of the ruling party allied to Zuma and his repressive and kleptocratic politics, was the organization of small road blockades—with the usual burning tires—by local leaders of the ANC, people who have been the primary targets of these kinds of blockades since 2004. Although these blockades attracted no popular support and were generally desultory, they were spatially proximate to the oppressed and did show that local political elites were in rebellion, creating the opportunity for the mass appropriation of food by people who were mostly not in support of Zuma and were often entirely contemptuous of him and the politics around him. In this moment, the road blockade was briefly appropriated by a ruthlessly predatory political elite.

But although popular disobedience carries a range of politics, some deeply reactionary, and although the road blockade has an unstable function and meaning, it is also true that popular protest often carries a clear affirmation of a politics that contains an emancipatory kernel. This is often marked by a defiant humanism that reaches way beyond both the gangsterization of local politics and the wider logic of the liberal elements of the political order.

The demand to be recognized as fully and equally human has been present in road blockades, in other forms of popular protest across the country, and in all languages. In a context in which politics mutates at a significant velocity, it is striking that this demand has endured year after year. It often takes the form of the affirmative statement that ‘We are human beings, not dogs’ or, in denunciatory terms, the statement that “we are treated like dogs.” This is often accompanied by a demand for the dignity of the oppressed to be recognized and respected. This can take the form of material demands as well as demands for agency in local forms of decision making. Defiant expressions of popular humanism are so tightly braided into the politicization of dignity that they cannot be conceptually disentangled.

From the moment when the road blockade first began to become a routine backdrop to everyday life, elites from across NGOs, the academy, the media, and electoral politics generally imposed a clearly delineated, singular, and consistent meaning onto these protests. They were, in the language of the World Bank, “service delivery protests”—protests demanding the state provision of electricity, water, and housing, along with sanitation, roads, and so on. This term has become so ubiquitous in South Africa that it has very effectively erased much of the once widely shared memory of the aspirations for the far deeper forms of democratization and social progress that were developed in the struggles against colonialism and apartheid.

Of course, demands are made for access to services like electricity and sanitation. But the blanket imposition of the “service delivery” label onto popular protest often obscures and limits the range and depth of people's actual concerns, desires, and demands—which, in terms of immediate, concrete aims, can include the defense of forms of life and habitation outside of the control of the state and the market, attempts to establish and defend land occupations, opposition to evictions and disconnections, opposition to local political elites, the insistence on a right to participate in decision making and planning, and much more.

The ideological utility of describing a huge number of events across space and time as “service delivery protests” is clear. For a start, because meaning is already ascribed from above, no case-by-case inquiries are necessary. It is also not necessary that people speak for themselves. And because it has already been decided that people are only asking for the limited and formally stated objectives of the current system to be realized—for the system to be managed more efficiently—this kind of protest poses no questions about the legitimacy of the current system's stated intentions.

If circumstances are unusual for some reason and people are granted space to speak into the elite public sphere, it is understood that the microphone or camera needs to be switched on only when they are saying something comprehensible, something that relates to the question of services. If someone is recorded as speaking about, say, the ways in which not everyone is, in practice, counted as fully and equally human, this is just noise, something to be edited out, something that requires no thought let alone further discussion. In this context, the speech of the oppressed is understood to be about services before it is heard.

There is another significant dimension to the “service delivery” discourse: it is generally assumed that protest occurs when frustrations at the failure to provide services “boil over.” In other words, protest is held to be a spontaneous response to “a lack of service delivery,” much like the manner in which E. P. Thompson noted that popular action outside of or against the order of domination has frequently been assumed to have been “spasmodic” in English historiography.⁴ The ideological function of the imputation of “spontaneity” is to erase popular political processes and to present protest as an unthought and almost biological response to deprivation.

The assumption that impoverished Black people only demand “service delivery” is not only empirically wrong. It also carries a deeply prejudicial assumption, ultimately congruent with aspects of the logic of enslavement, that some people, the most oppressed and dishonored people in society, have no aspirations beyond the provision of access to the most basic means to sustain bare life. In this case it is the personal and collective desire for the material infrastructure of dignity rather than political action that is subject to what Michel-Rolph Trouillot describes as “formulas of erasure.”⁵

Although the assumption among elites that popular protest can, without any investigation into particular instances, be universally understood as a demand for more effective “service delivery” is largely dominant, it is not uniform or permanent. The same elites who predetermine that road blockades are “service delivery protests” often make different assumptions when a protest inserts itself in the sort of location, or acquires the sort of scale and intensity, that poses a threat to elites—be they middle-class motorists or local party bosses. In these cases, it is widely assumed that protest must be conceived as and driven by external conspiracy and manipulation.

Different factions of the elite generally hallucinate different sites of conspiracy. For some, conspiracy is usually deemed to be located in the contestation between factions of the ruling party. This interpretation took on wildly overblown forms during the recent 2021 riots with the actions of many of thousands of people, many of whom clearly stated their indifference to or disgust with Zuma, regularly being ascribed to a single political conspiracy organized in defense of Zuma. For others—notably, some people in the state and the ruling party—the locus of conspiracy is assumed to lie with foreign governments or white people in South Africa with what are often termed “sinister” motivations. The history of Black protest being deemed as consequent to white agency is, of course, long, and as Trouillot has shown, it reaches back at least as far as the Haitian Revolution.⁶

There are no cases in which road blockades are due to the external agency of foreign governments or whites acting with or without “sinister” intentions. There are cases in which people have made tactical decisions, frequently astute but sometimes naive and sometimes aimed at nothing more than very limited short-term gains, to ally themselves to a political party or faction of the ruling party. But, of course, this does not imply a lack of agency.

The ideological function of asserting and, indeed, believing that popular disobedience is inevitably due to external conspiracy is to render it a wholly illegitimate intervention marked by bogus claims about its motivation. This enables what Fanon called a Manichean logic, predicated on a fantasy of racial or national unanimity.⁷

Protagonists in these kinds of strikes are well aware of the rules that govern their reception. The political process leading up to a road blockade may have played out over months or years. It may be that, for instance, the ruling party has imposed a ward councilor from above, that this person is acting to contain dissent and reward obedience, and that there is an ethnic dimension to this. This may be carefully discussed in a series of meetings leading up to the night when the blockade is thrown up. But if the disruption is achieved at scale sufficient to attract the media, a person who suddenly finds herself randomly confronted with a microphone for a short moment, a moment that is unlikely to return, may, now switching to English, say that “there is no service delivery here.” She may make this choice because she wishes to make an intervention that will be comprehensible and deemed legitimate, one that can effectively weaken her antagonist.

When other kinds of statements find their way into the elite public sphere they often do so as accidental marginalia. This could take the form of a handwritten poster on a torn-off piece of a cardboard box in the corner of a photographic or video frame, only legible through a squint. It could take the form of a snatch of song in the background as a journalist offers a breathless report from behind the police lines beyond which the people are rallied behind burning tires.

Dignity

Around the world, dignity—in the form of an affirmation, an aspiration, or a demand—has frequently been central to the political common sense of popular protest. It is sometimes articulated as an insistence that the count of the human should be universal, that every person should be counted as a person.

The popular appeal of the affirmation of dignity has often been taken seriously in the Latin American academy—Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar offers a particularly compelling example⁸—but seldom in South Africa, where forms of popular political expression that don't fit into the categories with which academics and other university-trained intellectuals have been trained to make sense of the world often appear as “prepolitical,” as noise rather than speech, or even as simple ignorance.

The longstanding political potency of the idea of dignity took on a new international significance after the Zapatista rebellion in the mountains of Chiapas on New Year's Day in 1994, a rebellion announced and legitimated in the name of dignity. In the words of Subcomandante Marcos, “Our dead . . . called us again, to dignity, to struggle,” a struggle that carried “a hope, the hope of the conversion of dignity and rebellion into freedom and dignity.”⁹

But dignity had a powerful post–Cold War political valence before the Zapatista rebellion. On August 15, 1990, Indigenous activists in Bolivia began a long march across the country, which they called the March for Territory and Dignity, to La Paz, the capital.

In the same year, bell hooks argued that, historically, “black women resisted by making homes where all black people could strive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world.”¹⁰

In many instances, forms of popular politics that affirm dignity as central to their struggles are accompanied by an explicit demand that people be recognized as fully or equally human. This is far from being a new affirmation. The Mandé Charter of 1222, a set of political axioms developed in parts of modern Mali, Senegal, and Guinea, declared that “Every human life is a life.”

More recently in Haiti, “Tout moun se moun” (Every person is a person), often articulated as a politics in which the idea of dignity is central, was a common declaration in the struggles waged by Lavalas. This statement has striking resemblances to a set of African ideas, and clear echoes with the axiom developed by Abahlali baseMjondolo in their opposition to xenophobic violence: “A person is a person wherever they may find themselves.” The movement's politics have evolved in various ways since it was founded in 2005, but it has always organized under the name of dignity, affirmed in speech and emblazoned on red shirts, head wraps, posters, banners, and flags. The banners placed on the coffins of the members who have been murdered in the course of struggle carry the words “Umhlaba Izindlu neSithunzi” (Land, Housing, and Dignity).

The affirmation of a shared and equal humanity, and the refusal of animal status (“We are not dogs!”), is far from unique to South Africa or to this historical moment. Consider, among many examples, Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. She writes of the Black ghetto in Philadelphia, the subject of W. E. B. Du Bois's first book, published in 1899, “as a reserve for the dispossessed and those relegated as fungible, disposable, surplus, and not quite human.”¹¹ A few pages on, an imagined resident of the part of town that would become the ghetto tells Du Bois of people being treated “like dogs.”¹²

The modern world was founded on a split in who is counted as fully human—first legitimated by religious ideas and then by the invention of the idea of race. This split in the count of the human enabled the enslavement and genocide of Indigenous people in the Americas, African enslavement, and the colonization of much of the planet. A strong argument could be made for the position that the fundamental ethical and political question of modernity is the question of the human—a question that is yet to be resolved in concrete political terms.

This question sits at the heart of the work of a number of Caribbean thinkers, including, of course, Sylvia Wynter. Katherine McKittrick, referencing a famous phrase from Aimé Césaire, writes that Wynter's “overall project can be identified as a counterhumanism—one now ecumenically ‘made to the measure of the world.’”¹³

In certain respects, Wynter continues the work of Fanon, who brings the affirmation of a counterhumanism into contact with the question of praxis in the shattered hopes of the postcolony: “A prospect is human because conscious and sovereign persons dwell therein.”¹⁴ From this axiom Fanon developed clear ideas about the need to affirm struggle as a site of equality, mutuality, and ongoing collective learning and change.

The affirmation of a counterhumanism or a radical humanism by Black thinkers like Fanon and Wynter is part of a long history within the Black radical tradition. Paul Gilroy calls Fanon “a planetary humanist” and writes of the widely felt “agonistic humanisms of the black Atlantic thinkers.”¹⁵

Of course, radical humanisms rooted in lived realities are not unique to the Black radical tradition. Karl Marx wrote that “communism . . . equals humanism”¹⁶ and insisted, against the purveyors of dogmatic abstractions, that communism is “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”¹⁷—actually existing struggles. But radical humanism has been central to powerful currents within the Black radical tradition in a way that speaks, with a particular concentration of moral and intellectual force, to the most profound line of exclusion and domination in the modern world. In contemporary South Africa, in the emancipatory forms of the politics of the oppressed, it is the affirmation of a radical humanism, with its demand for the recognition of dignity, that, in Cedric Robinson's words, “cements pain to purpose, experience to expectation, consciousness to collective action.”¹⁸

This is a politics in which women are often the most numerous and, in its democratically organized forms, frequently hold positions of leadership. The affirmation of dignity, as an inherent quality or as an aspiration, is not just an aspiration and a demand; it is also a point of leverage from which women can legitimate and sustain rebellious ideas and actions. This is not a uniquely South African phenomenon. In the United States, Sheila Radford-Hill has explained that she has learned that “the soul of grassroots organizing,” the kind of organizing largely led by women, “lies in its insistence on human dignity for all people.”¹⁹

The practical consequences of a popular politics, a politics of the oppressed founded in a radical humanism, are expansive and dynamic. Because the political use of dignity is intimately tied to the idea of a full and equal humanity, its concrete political use cannot, and should not, be contained by a singular definition or project.

Nonetheless it can be noted that a central point of the best organized political mobilization of dignity in contemporary South Africa is that within struggle there should be an immediate recognition of the full and equal humanity of the oppressed. This view is in striking distinction to the paternalism that is common among NGOs and small, dogmatic, and sectarian political organizations or networks. In these kinds of mobilizations of the idea of dignity there are strong resonances with Jacques Rancière's argument for a politics of emancipation grounded in equality as a point of departure—an axiomatic commitment to recognize, affirm, and demonstrate that everyone has an equal capacity to think, engage in discussion, and participate in the political.²⁰

The idea that all people should have the same right to participate in the forms of decision making that pertain to their lives is hardly novel. It is central to the idea of democracy. However, such a right is seldom extended to the most oppressed and is often met with particular hostility by elites when race and class coincide.

Paulo Freire grasped this politics well when he wrote that emancipation requires “the affirmation of men and women as persons.”²¹ He added that “the man or woman who proclaims devotion to the cause of liberation yet is unable to enter into communion with the people, whom he or she continues to regard as totally ignorant, is grievously self-deceived”²² and that “leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people—they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.”²³ Gustavo Gutiérrez held to a similar ethic: “Based on the evidence of the usually frustrated aspirations of the popular classes to participate in decisions which affect all of society the realization emerges that it is the poor who must be the protagonists of their own liberation.”²⁴

For Wynter, an emancipatory project fit for contemporary purpose must include “the vast majority of peoples who inhabit the ‘favela/shantytown’ of the globe and their jobless archipelagos.”²⁵ She writes that the challenge for the university-trained intellectual is how to “marry their thought”²⁶ with that of the residents, the racialized residents, of these jobless archipelagoes who are considered less-than-fully human by dominant modes of thought. One of the many contemporary dimensions of this challenge is to take the politics of the road blockade—a new kind of strike—seriously.

Acknowledgments

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Ayanda Ngila and Nokuthula Mabaso, both leaders in Abahlali baseMjondolo who were assassinated, in separate attacks, while the revisions to this essay were being made.

Notes

Works Cited