How the reports into the July 2021 unrest let South Africa down

An SANDF Oryx helicopter lands at Alex Mall. Chief of the South African National Defence Force Lieutenant General Rudzani Maphwanya visited the mall after violent protests and looting on 16 July 2021 in AlexandraJohannesburg. The violence began in in KwaZulu-Natal and spread to Gauteng. (Photo: Gallo Images / Alet Pretorius)

By Rebecca Davis

30 Jan 2024

The July 2021 unrest was one of the most traumatic episodes in post-apartheid South Africa. New reports on it from the South African Human Rights Commission and the Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Rights Commission take us almost no closer to understanding what happened and why.

More than 350 people died in the terrifying maelstrom of events in mid-July 2021 in South Africa that we now gloss over as the “July 2021 unrest”. Most of those people died in just three days, between the start of Monday, 12 July and the end of Wednesday, 14 July.

They were, we suggested at the time in Daily Maverick, possibly the three bloodiest days in South Africa’s democratic history.

How did those hundreds of people die, and why?

How did damage estimated at R50-billion come to be inflicted on South Africa’s economy, and to what end?

report july 2021 unrest The aftermath of protests and looting at Ndofaya Mall in Soweto on 13 July 2021. (Photo: Gallo Images / Papi Morake)

Anyone relying for answers on reports released this week by the SA Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) and the Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Rights Commission will find themselves almost none the wiser. Indeed, the quality of these reports should raise serious questions about the continued viability of these publicly funded Chapter Nine institutions.

The SAHRC held eight months of public hearings to investigate the July 2021 unrest, from November 2021 to June 2022. Its panel, consisting of commissioners Andre Gaum, Chris Nissen and Philile Ntuli, heard 54 oral testimonies and considered more than 120 written submissions.

The 252-page report it has produced cannot be faulted on one particular front: its eagerness to find literary parallels for the shocking events of July 2021. It cites Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People — the title of which is doing a lot of the interpretive heavy lifting here — as well as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

What it does not do is join the necessary dots in any meaningful way.

An extremely odd finding

“The commission finds that while the timing of the events of the July unrest coincided with the incarceration of former President Jacob Zuma, it could not find evidence to link the two events,” the report concludes.

This is extremely odd, to say the least, given that the report contains no fewer than 112 references to Zuma — almost one every two pages.

report july 2021 unrest Alexandra township residents embark on a clean-up campaign at Pan Africa Shopping Mall on 18 July 2021 after the looting and vandalism during the violent protests that spread from KwaZulu-Natal after the incarceration of former president Jacob Zuma. (Photo: Gallo Images / City Press / Tebogo Letsie)

It is undoubtedly true that not everyone participating in the looting or violence of this period was motivated by support for Zuma; indeed, when Daily Maverick was on the ground investigating what had happened in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng shortly afterwards, almost nobody mentioned Zuma’s name to us.

But to say that no evidence exists to link the incarceration of Zuma to the outbreak of violence is simply ludicrous, even by the evidentiary standards of the report itself. There are lengthy accounts within it of the build-up of tensions around Nkandla and the mobilising of pro-Zuma forces on social media, as well as testimonies about the appearance of graffiti calling for Zuma’s release and exhorting President Cyril Ramaphosa to “go back to Venda”.

The report even quotes the opinion of former police commissioner Khehla Sitole, that “the unrest started at a high level … triggered by the Zuma judgment by the Constitutional Court”.

It is also frankly inexplicable that although the report spends some time handwringing over misinformation and instigation via social media, not once does it mention the role played by Zuma’s daughter Dudu Zuma-Sambudla on what was then Twitter — or the fact that a year later, Zuma-Sambudla took to the same platform to suggest “another unrest” might be in order.

This is doubly weird given that the report does single out another Zuma child, noting that “former President Jacob Zuma’s son, Mr Edward Zuma, was reported to have threatened bloodshed if his father was incarcerated”.

Edward Zuma’s comments, made in what appeared to be an inebriated state during a live TV crossing to Nkandla, were arguably far less significant than his half-sibling’s repeated invocation of violence on social media.

report july 2021 unrest An SANDF Oryx helicopter lands at Alex Mall. Chief of the South African National Defence Force Lieutenant General Rudzani Maphwanya visited the mall after violent protests and looting on 16 July 2021 in Alexandra, Johannesburg. The violence began in KwaZulu-Natal after the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma and spread to Gauteng. (Photo: Gallo Images / Alet Pretorius)

Then again, the report’s discussion of social media suggests that the panellists might not be quite sure what it is.

“The retrieval of social media evidence has been the main challenge in prosecuting these matters,” it states. “Even where evidence has been retrieved, language barriers have been an issue, or code words in the form of emojis have been used.” (Their italics.)

This elicits a vision of the SAHRC panellists, as well as the relevant prosecutors, peering at Twitter in the manner of Bletchley Park cryptographers deciphering gnomic Nazi telegraphs. Perhaps the relevant authorities could simply get some Gen Zs on board.

Having ruled out Zuma’s arrest as the cause of the unrest, the report proceeds to rule out pretty much everything else too.

“The socio-economic conditions of the majority of South Africans were a major factor in the spread, extent, and scale of the unrest. However, it [sic] was not the cause,” the report states.

An unsatisfactory conclusion

In this respect the report is somewhat reminiscent of the climax of a Hercule Poirot novel — there’s one literary reference they missed — in which the Belgian detective proceeds to implicate and then exonerate each suspect in turn. Except that here, we are ultimately left with no suspects at all.

“It is probable that the unrest was undertaken to destabilise the economy. However, it will ultimately be within the purview of the South African Police Service (SAPS) and the National Prosecutions Authority to make a conclusive finding regarding the orchestration of the unrest,” the report helpfully concludes.

Similarly: “The Commission recommends that SAPS compile a full and comprehensive report on all unrest-related deaths and submit same to the Commission. A clear explanation of the circumstances in which these occurred must be included.”

When that happens, perhaps the SAHRC can release a kind of PS report with the actual answers.

But if the SAHRC report leaves one frustrated, it’s hard to explain the emotional impact of the report released on the same day by the Cultural, Religious and Linguistic (CRL) Rights Commission. This commission’s mandate was more limited: to look into what happened in the Durban suburb of Phoenix in particular, where racial tensions exploded during the period in question.

The 25-page report contains no specific details of any evidence collected, blithely skipping from its rationale to its findings.

Perhaps it will suffice to simply present, without comment, two of its recommendations in terms of healing the wounds between black and Indian residents of Phoenix.

“We recommend Inter sports activities like soccer, swimming, netball etc., to be held frequently as a way of encouraging an interaction between the two communities,” it states.

“CRL Rights Commission recommends that government should build a statue in remembrance of people who lost their lives during the 2021 Unrest”.

In reality, they deserve so much more than either of these dismal reports. DM

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An extremely odd finding

An unsatisfactory conclusion