“Violence is not just a matter of brutal acts; it is also the invisible background that makes such acts appear normal.” — Slavoj Žižek
Abstract
This essay offers a political, historical and psychoanalytic interpretation of the killings that occurred in Phoenix during the July 2021 unrest in South Africa. It argues that the violence cannot be understood adequately as an incidental consequence of looting, state collapse or community panic. Although the unrest created the immediate conditions for vigilantism, the selection of Black African people as objects of suspicion emerged from a longer history of apartheid spatial engineering, colonial racial hierarchy and the positioning of Indian communities as an intermediary population between the white minority and the African majority.
Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the racial gaze, Steve Biko’s critique of apartheid’s racial buffer formations, and scholarship on collective memory, kinship and communal respectability, the essay examines how historically produced ideas about African criminality and minority respectability shaped both the violence and its subsequent public interpretation. It also considers the political memory of the 1949 Durban violence and the manner in which inherited trauma can become a racial framework through which contemporary African people are perceived.
The essay concludes that the continuing minimisation of Phoenix reflects a broader inequality within South African public discourse. Black African political anger is readily pathologised, while violence committed against Black Africans is subjected to extensive contextualisation. The annual circulation of footage from Phoenix is therefore presented as an act of counter-memory through which the victims are returned to the centre of the historical record.
Introduction
Every July, I release four minutes of footage from the Phoenix massacre. Every August, I release memorial footage concerning the Marikana massacre. I return to these images because neither event has been granted an adequate place within South Africa’s public memory.
The Phoenix killings remain enclosed within the general narrative of the July 2021 unrest. Public discussion repeatedly returns to the fear experienced by Phoenix residents, the extensive looting in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, the collapse of policing, and the dangers of generalising about Indian South Africans. Although these considerations form part of the historical context, they have often displaced the experiences of those who were stopped, assaulted, humiliated and killed. The dead are remembered through the anxieties of the community in which they died rather than through the violence inflicted upon them.
In 2026, I released the footage amid controversy surrounding March & March, a movement organised around undocumented migration, border enforcement, employment and access to public services. The movement presents itself as a grassroots response to undocumented immigration, employment competition and pressure on public services. Its opponents have characterised its mobilisation as anti-migrant or xenophobic.
My decision to return to Phoenix within this context was deliberate. The term xenophobia does not circulate evenly within South African political discourse. When Black South Africans organise around migration, their political claims are frequently condensed into a moral diagnosis. Arguments concerning borders, wages, employment, municipal services and the township economy disappear behind the accusation of xenophobia. When Indigenous Black South Africans are racialised as intruders and attacked within their own country, however, public discourse becomes considerably more attentive to fear, uncertainty, historical injury and mitigating circumstances.
This difference does not require an uncritical defence of anti-migrant politics. It requires an examination of the racial distribution of political interpretation. The question is not only which forms of violence are condemned, but also whose grievances are recognised as political and whose anger is treated primarily as pathology.
The Phoenix footage interrupts this unequal distribution of explanation.
For approximately four minutes, Indian vigilantes pursue and assault Black Africans in the streets of Phoenix. The recorded voices communicate explicitly violent intentions. No looting is visible in the streets shown, and the men under attack do not appear to be carrying stolen goods. Their racial appearance functions as a substitute for evidence.
Within the consciousness of the crowd, the African person has already been transformed into the figure of the looter, the invader and the criminal. His individual conduct no longer determines how he is perceived. His body has been made to carry the accumulated accusations that colonial and apartheid society attached to African Blackness.
The footage also demonstrates that the violence was social rather than individual. The attackers encouraged one another, issued instructions and derived collective confidence from the participation of the group. The fear of the victims did not restrain the crowd. Instead, it confirmed the attackers’ power and strengthened the sense that their conduct enjoyed communal permission.
The footage thus records more than physical assault. It documents a social process through which racial violence became mutually authorised.
Those who circulate this evidence are accused of inciting hostility against Indian South Africans. This accusation reverses the relationship between documentation and violence. The recording does not manufacture the conduct it preserves. It provides evidence of conduct that must be confronted if reconciliation is to mean more than the protection of communal reputations.
The central argument of this essay is that Phoenix cannot be understood as a spontaneous eruption produced solely by the July unrest. The unrest created the immediate conditions for vigilantism, but the racial selection of the victims emerged from a much longer political history.
The July Unrest and the Racial Organisation of Vigilantism
The Phoenix killings occurred during the unrest that followed the imprisonment of former president Jacob Zuma in July 2021. KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng experienced extensive looting, arson, infrastructure destruction and a severe breakdown in policing and intelligence. More than 350 people died across the country.
Residents in Phoenix erected barricades and formed patrol groups. From 12 July onwards, a number of these roadblocks became sites of racial profiling, assault and killing. Official accounts recorded 36 deaths in Phoenix, including 29 murder cases and seven inquests. Parliament documented racial stereotyping, killings and the destruction of vehicles belonging to people believed to have entered from surrounding African areas.
The South African Human Rights Commission subsequently examined testimony concerning vigilantism, abuse and racial discrimination. Its findings recognised that racial prejudice shaped a significant proportion of the violence directed at Black Africans in Phoenix and surrounding areas.
The wider unrest explains why residents feared looting and why neighbourhood patrols were established. It does not explain why African identity became a sufficient basis for suspicion.
Zuma’s imprisonment could not determine who would be stopped at a roadblock. Looting in other parts of KwaZulu-Natal had not placed stolen property into the possession of every Black motorist travelling through Phoenix. The absence of effective policing created an opportunity for vigilantism, but a historically formed racial consciousness influenced how the vigilantes identified danger.
In effect, African skin became an evidentiary category.
This distinction is important because the language of community defence often obscures the transition from protection to racial rule. A neighbourhood patrol may begin as a response to an identifiable threat. It becomes a racialised vigilante formation when membership of a racial group is treated as evidence of criminal intention and when private citizens claim the authority to restrict movement, conduct searches, administer punishment or determine who may enter a public area.
The violence in Phoenix was not simply excessive self-defence. It involved the assumption of unauthorised power over African movement and African life.
Institutional investigations have acknowledged the racial character of the violence. Nevertheless, official recognition can itself become a form of closure when the production of a report is treated as the completion of the political and moral process. The classification of the violence as racially motivated cannot resolve the social conditions that produced it. Nor does it end the grief of the families and communities whose dead have not received sustained national commemoration.
African people should not be expected to conclude their mourning because the massacre has been administratively recorded.
Apartheid Geography and the Ownership of Space
Phoenix was established as an Indian township through the racial planning of the apartheid period. Its development formed part of a wider housing system in which urban populations were classified, removed and resettled according to legislated racial categories. Indian families displaced through the Group Areas system were settled in areas including Phoenix and Chatsworth.
The Group Areas Act not only separated residential populations. It reorganised property ownership, commercial opportunity, transport, employment and access to urban resources. It produced racially bounded environments within which belonging became attached to administrative classification.
Nearby African communities, including Inanda and KwaMashu, occupied a different position within the apartheid political economy. African people had been subjected to conquest, land dispossession, influx control, forced removal, overcrowding and incorporation into the urban economy as a source of cheap labour.
Both African and Indian communities were oppressed by white rule, but they were not oppressed in identical ways or placed in equivalent structural positions.
The boundary between Phoenix and the surrounding African settlements contained a history of unequal racial development. On one side stood a township designed for Indian occupation and associated with municipal housing, commerce and forms of property accumulation. On the other stood African communities shaped by an even longer history of territorial dispossession and labour exploitation.
Apartheid produced these compartments and encouraged their inhabitants to interpret conflict through racial difference rather than through the state-designed distribution of scarcity.
This history is essential to understanding the roadblocks of July 2021. When armed residents claimed control over roads leading into Phoenix, they were not operating within a historically neutral landscape. They were reactivating a boundary created through apartheid’s racial organisation of space.
The African motorist and pedestrians entered Phoenix with a name, a family, a destination and an individual reason for travelling. The vigilante did not necessarily recognise any of these particulars. The person was apprehended through a racial category that had already been associated with disorder, criminality and invasion. Testimony shows that some of the victims were well-known to the vigilantes
The individual disappeared beneath the accusation imposed upon his body.
Frantz Fanon’s analysis in Black Skin, White Masks provides a language for this process. His formulation, “Look, a Negro!”, describes the moment in which the Black subject is captured by an external racial meaning that precedes any knowledge of his conduct or character. The racial gaze transforms the individual into an object carrying the fears and fantasies of the observing society.
Fanon’s concept of epidermalisation explains how history becomes attached to the skin. The Black person is not merely seen as an individual who may or may not have committed an offence. He is perceived through a racial history in which Blackness has already been made to signify danger.
In Phoenix, this process was enforced through barricades and weapons. The vigilante projected aggression onto the African person and then interpreted his own violence as a defensive response. This inversion preserved the attacker’s image of innocence. His aggression could be described as vigilance, while the victim’s racial presence was made to represent the original threat.
The political importance of the roadblock lies in this reversal. The victim had to remain dangerous because the legitimacy of the vigilante depended upon that danger.
The Colonial Intermediary and the Psychological Wage of Distance
Indian South Africans possess a substantial history of racial humiliation and political exclusion. Indentured workers were brought from India to colonial Natal from 1860 onwards. They were followed by traders and other migrants who encountered discriminatory legislation, restrictions on residence and commerce, and sustained white hostility. Under apartheid, Indian families were displaced through racial zoning and denied equality with white South Africans.
This history must be acknowledged without allowing it to function as proof that anti-African racism could not develop within Indian communities.
Colonial Natal placed Indian people in an intermediary economic and political position. White settlers retained control over the state, major economic institutions and the ownership of land. Indian communities became strongly associated with trade, small commerce and selected forms of urban opportunity. African people remained the principal source of dispossessed labour and were subjected to more extensive restrictions on land, movement and political participation.
The intermediary position combined subordination with relative advantage. Indian people were denied full entry into white society, but they could also be offered forms of social and economic distance from African Blackness.
This distance operated as a psychological wage. It offered a limited sense of elevation within a racial system that continued to degrade Indian people. The person denied equality by white society could nevertheless seek status by distinguishing himself from those whom colonial society had positioned beneath him.
Fanon’s work is useful here because it examines how the colonised subject can seek recognition through the values of the coloniser. A person degraded by a racial hierarchy does not automatically reject that hierarchy. He may instead attempt to improve his location within it.
Under such conditions, ideas about discipline, education, family order, commercial success and hard work can acquire a racial content. These virtues are presented as cultural achievements in contrast to an imagined African condition characterised by dependency, laziness, disorder and violence.
The assertion that “we worked hard” can then contain an unspoken historical accusation. It can imply that those who remain poor have failed to exercise the same discipline, rather than recognising that poverty and advancement were produced within different relationships to land, labour, capital and the state.
African poverty is detached from conquest, land theft, migrant labour and urban exclusion. Minority advancement is similarly detached from the political and economic arrangements that made particular forms of accumulation possible.
Structural history is converted into racial character.
At the Phoenix barricade, this intermediary consciousness acquired coercive form. Men whose communities had inherited a history of subordination could stop African motorists, interrogate them, search them and decide whether they would be permitted to proceed. Their temporary authority depended upon the public vulnerability of the African person.
The colonial hierarchy was reproduced through the conduct of people who had themselves been oppressed by it.
Biko and the Political Function of the Buffer Zone
Steve Biko analysed the political function of intermediary racial categories under apartheid. He argued that white minority rule depended upon more than a binary separation between whites and Blacks. The system established graded forms of subordination through which Coloured and Indian communities could be offered limited recognition, conditional political participation and relative proximity to white society.
Biko wrote:
“Coloured people harbour secret hopes of being classified as ‘brown Afrikaners’ … while Indian people might be given a vote to swell the buffer zone.”
His argument concerned the political architecture of apartheid. By granting selected concessions to Coloured and Indian communities, the state could increase the social and political distance between these groups and the African majority. Separate representative structures encouraged each classified population to negotiate for limited improvement within its assigned racial compartment.
The state could then present restricted participation as political advancement while retaining white control over land, capital and national power.
Biko applied this critique directly to debates within Indian politics in Durban. When some Indian leaders considered participating in apartheid-created institutions, he described the direction as “dangerous retrogressive thinking”. His objection was not to Indian political organisation as such, but to participation in structures designed to fragment the Black struggle.
Apartheid-created councils absorbed political leadership into racially separate institutions and encouraged oppressed communities to pursue sectional concessions. They converted collective liberation into competition over relative position.
Biko did not identify every Indian person as an opponent of African liberation. He recognised figures including Ahmed Kathrada and M. D. Naidoo as participants in the broader Black struggle. His distinction was political rather than biological. It separated those who accepted the intermediary position offered by apartheid from those who rejected racial compartmentalisation in favour of collective emancipation.
Phoenix demonstrates the continuing relevance of this analysis.
The formal institutions of apartheid have disappeared, but the social consequences of the buffer position remain. They are visible in accumulated economic advantage, territorial consciousness, commercial relations and assumptions that African presence introduces danger into minority-controlled space.
This does not mean that every Indian resident of Phoenix occupies the same class position or shares a unified racial ideology. Phoenix is internally differentiated by class, gender, generation and political history. Many Indian South Africans have actively opposed racism and apartheid.
A structural argument cannot be reduced to a claim about the moral character of every individual within a population.
The relevant question is whether historically produced forms of relative advantage and racial socialisation shaped the interpretation of African people during the unrest. The findings of the South African Human Rights Commission, together with the conduct visible in the footage, support the conclusion that race influenced who was regarded as dangerous and how violence was justified.
In July 2021, the buffer position ceased to function only as a political metaphor. It became territorial and coercive. Vigilantes claimed the authority to determine which Black bodies could cross a boundary originally produced through apartheid planning.
The Political Memory of 1949
Indian collective memory in Durban is also shaped by the violence of January 1949. The immediate catalyst was an altercation in which an Indian shopkeeper assaulted an African youth. The incident was followed by extensive violence in which Indian families suffered death, injury, displacement and the destruction of property. Tens of thousands of Indian residents sought refuge in camps.
This suffering must be acknowledged without qualification. Historical analysis should not require the minimisation of Indian victims.
It does, however, require an examination of the colonial conditions within which the violence occurred. Durban was marked by overcrowding, severe economic inequality, commercial competition and a racial state that allocated different rights and opportunities to Africans, Indians and whites. African people faced exclusion from urban trade, housing and political citizenship, together with routine racial contempt.
The violence of 1949 did not emerge outside this political economy. African and Indian leaders argued that responsibility could not be understood without reference to the wider structure of white supremacy and the conditions imposed upon African urban life.
In dominant communal retellings, however, this context disappears. The event becomes a narrative in which an irrational African mob descended upon an otherwise peaceful Indian population. African violence is enlarged into evidence of an enduring racial danger, while colonial policy, material competition and prior patterns of anti-African discrimination are removed from view.
Memory never remains confined to the past. It supplies categories through which the present is interpreted.
When the colonial context surrounding 1949 is erased, the contemporary African person is made to carry the image of the ancestral mob. Indian descendants inherit a legitimate memory of trauma, while African descendants inherit the presumption of aggression.
The African man approaching a Phoenix roadblock in 2021 was already vulnerable to a history that did not belong to his individual conduct. He could be treated as the representative of violence committed more than seventy years earlier.
His personal identity was displaced by an inherited racial narrative.
Historical trauma ma explain the intensity of fear, but it cannot establish collective guilt across generations. Trauma does not provide a moral warrant for racial profiling. When inherited wounds are protected from critical examination, they can become frameworks through which innocent people are misrecognised and punished.
The colonial state produced antagonism between African and Indian communities and then cited that antagonism as evidence of natural racial difference. An interpretation of 1949 that excludes the colonial political economy preserves the coloniser’s explanation. It converts a conflict produced within structural conditions into a story about permanent racial character.
Secrecy, Respectability and the Management of Communal Reputation
Years before the massacre, I worked on an SABC documentary with schoolgirls from Phoenix and KwaMashu. Some of the Phoenix participants described families in which the protection of the family name shaped responses to violence, abuse and conflict. The preservation of public respectability could require the person carrying the consequences of violence to remain silent.
This observation should not be treated as a generalisation about every Indian family or as evidence of a timeless cultural defect. It must be situated within scholarship on kinship, gender, colonialism and social reputation.
Veena Das has examined how violence can become incorporated into everyday and domestic life rather than being resolved publicly. Leela Dube and Patricia Uberoi have explored kinship structures in which family cohesion, gendered obligation and social standing influence who is permitted to speak and which forms of suffering can be acknowledged publicly.
Partha Chatterjee’s analysis of the protected inner domain of culture provides a further historical context. Under colonial rule, the domestic sphere could become a space in which cultural dignity and collective identity were defended against the judgement of the colonial state.
Respectability was therefore not merely conservative. It could serve as a defence against racial humiliation.
The same defensive structure can, however, conceal internal violence. When the family’s moral standing becomes inseparable from secrecy, the person who discloses abuse may be treated as the source of shame. Responsibility is transferred from the perpetrator to the person whose speech makes the violence publicly knowable.
There is also a broader culture of secrecy and respectability that operates within many Indian communities. This culture is expressed through an instinct to protect the community’s image, avoid public shame and close ranks when criticism emerges. It is not unique to Indian communities, but it remains politically powerful because it shapes how violence is discussed, displaced or left undiscussed.
After Phoenix, this instinct was visible throughout the public response. The conversation moved rapidly away from what had been done to Black bodies and towards concern about how Indian communities were being perceived. The dead were recast as looters, while the violence was reframed as a form of community defence. The naming of anti-Black racism was increasingly presented as the primary social problem.
Respectability consequently became a shield behind which responsibility could be displaced.
It cannot, however, erase what is visible in the footage. It cannot undo the findings of the South African Human Rights Commission or provide an adequate explanation for men being profiled, pursued and assaulted on public roads.
The bodies of the victims could not be concealed, but their political meaning could be managed. The dead were described as attackers or members of an advancing crowd. Their alleged aggression was used to absorb and excuse the aggression of the vigilantes.
The public was repeatedly warned not to generalise about Indian South Africans, not to isolate Phoenix from the wider unrest and not to damage the reputation of a minority community that had also suffered under apartheid.
Each warning contained a legitimate consideration. No community should be reduced to the actions of individual perpetrators. The July unrest must be understood within its broader context, and the oppression of Indian South Africans must not be erased.
The problem arises when these qualifications become substitutes for examining the violence itself.
The person who names anti-African racism can then be accused of threatening social cohesion, while those who enacted racial violence are displaced from the centre of discussion. The disturbance is relocated from the massacre to the speech that exposes it.
A serious public accounting requires an examination of the ideas that preceded the roadblocks. The vigilantes did not encounter anti-African stereotypes for the first time during the unrest. Their conduct drew upon assumptions concerning African criminality, dependency, sexuality, marriage, territory and disorder that circulate through ordinary social life.
These assumptions may be transmitted through family instruction, popular humour, commercial interaction, residential boundaries and everyday language. Their apparent normality allows them to remain socially available until a crisis provides the opportunity for coercive expression.
The violence at the barricades gave public form to racial ideas that had long been familiar.
The African Majority as an Object of Social Projection
Phoenix forms part of a broader political problem concerning the position of the Indigenous African majority within South African society.
Indian, Coloured and other minority communities possess distinct histories and cannot be treated as unified political subjects. Nevertheless, colonial and apartheid rule created incentives through which subordinated groups could seek security and social recognition by distinguishing themselves from African Blackness.
The African body consequently became a site onto which different institutions projected the qualities they refused to recognise within their own structures. White political culture historically represented African resistance as evidence of savagery and political incapacity. Minority claims to respectability sometimes relied upon depictions of African people as disorderly, irresponsible or culturally deficient. Liberal institutions have frequently translated African political grievances into questions of emotional excess, criminality or prejudice. Sections of the academy have similarly approached Black political anger primarily as an object requiring diagnosis rather than as a form of political knowledge.
Although these processes emerge from different institutions and histories, they converge in their effects. They make African suffering appear explicable before it appears intolerable. Public attention is directed towards the conduct, location and presumed intentions of the victim before the racial assumptions of the perpetrator are examined.
When an African person is brutalised, public discussion frequently begins by asking whether he stole, whether he threatened somebody, whether he belonged in the area or whether his behaviour might have provoked the violence. His humanity becomes conditional upon proof of innocence.
Biko’s observation that “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed” is relevant because colonial power persists when its categories continue to organise social aspiration, political fear and collective self-understanding after the formal system has ended.
The buffer position therefore survives as both a material relationship and a form of consciousness.
This history helps to explain why the Phoenix victims could remain morally suspect even after they had been assaulted or killed. The violence was followed by demands that African communities demonstrate the innocence of their dead before their suffering could be recognised without qualification.
Xenophobia and the Unequal Diagnosis of Black Politics
The controversy surrounding March & March makes this unequal interpretive structure particularly visible.
Anti-migrant mobilisation has produced legitimate fear among migrants and has, in some instances, been accompanied by intimidation and violence. The protection of migrants from collective punishment remains a democratic and moral obligation. Economic hardship cannot justify attacks on people because of their nationality or documentation status.
At the same time, the use of xenophobia as a complete explanation for Black mobilisation can obscure the political conditions within which that mobilisation arises. South Africa’s crises of unemployment, wage suppression, state incapacity, housing scarcity, municipal collapse and border administration require political analysis, even when movements responding to them adopt exclusionary or dangerous forms.
To examine these conditions is not to endorse racial or national scapegoating. It is to resist the substitution of moral labelling for political explanation.
Phoenix reveals a related but differently interpreted process of foreignisation. Indigenous African people were treated as alien bodies within a racially bounded South African township. Their presence was interpreted as evidence of invasion, and they were required to justify their movement through public space.
The concept of xenophobia is therefore relevant to Phoenix in a broader political sense. The victims were not necessarily foreign nationals, but they were constructed as foreign to the area they had entered. They were transformed into internal outsiders despite their legal, historical and political claim to the country.
The contrast is significant. Black mobilisation around migration is readily interpreted through the language of xenophobia, while the construction of African citizens as intruders within Phoenix has received less sustained analysis through the same conceptual framework.
This inconsistency suggests that the term sometimes functions not only as a description of hostility towards outsiders, but also as a means of regulating Black political speech.
Footage as Counter-Memory
I release the Phoenix footage every July because denial depends upon exhaustion. It relies upon the expectation that the dead will gradually disappear from public discussion, that the images will remain in private archives and that those who continue to invoke the massacre will eventually be dismissed as divisive.
The footage functions as a counter-archive. It preserves evidence that official language and communal memory may attempt to soften. It also returns the conduct of the attackers and the experiences of the victims to the centre of public discussion.
The images are not self-explanatory. They cannot independently account for apartheid geography, colonial racial hierarchy, the political memory of 1949 or the intermediary position described by Biko. These histories are necessary to explain how African people became the objects of suspicion.
The footage nevertheless establishes important limits on interpretation. It records racial threats, collective encouragement and violence against African people in streets where no looting is visible. It therefore challenges the claim that the attacks amounted only to proportionate community defence.
The victims were assaulted on public roads in a country to which they possessed an equal legal and historical claim. They were treated as foreigners within a space that had itself been produced through apartheid’s racial division of land and urban life.
Releasing the footage is therefore an act of commemoration and historical preservation. It prevents explanations centred on the fears of the attackers from entirely displacing what was done to the victims.
Conclusion
The Phoenix massacre cannot be understood as an isolated eruption of spontaneous violence. The collapse of public order in July 2021 created the immediate conditions for vigilantism, but it did not determine the racial identity of those who would be stopped and attacked. That selection drew upon a longer history in which African Blackness had been associated with criminality, disorder and invasion.
Biko’s analysis of the buffer zone explains how white supremacy reproduced itself through differentiated forms of subordination. Indian communities were oppressed by white rule while also being positioned at a relative distance from the African majority. This arrangement encouraged sectional identification and allowed structural inequality to be interpreted as racial difference.
Fanon’s work demonstrates how these political relations became attached to the body. The Black person was apprehended through meanings that preceded his individual conduct and was required to carry fears and accusations generated through colonial history.
The memory of the 1949 Durban violence contributed another layer to this perception. Historical trauma could shape communal fear, but it could not establish the guilt of those who approached Phoenix roadblocks more than seventy years later. When inherited trauma is separated from its colonial context, it can become a means of transferring suspicion across generations.
The public response to Phoenix was also shaped by the protection of communal respectability. Legitimate warnings against generalisation frequently displaced sustained examination of anti-African racism. Concern for the reputation of Indian South Africans began to overshadow the experiences of the people who had been profiled, pursued and killed.
A scholarly account of Phoenix must therefore resist both racial essentialism and political evasion. Indian South Africans do not constitute a single moral or political subject, and their histories of oppression, resistance and solidarity remain integral to South African liberation history. Those histories do not invalidate the evidence of anti-African racism or remove the obligation to confront the conditions under which it became violent.
The continued circulation of the footage resists the disappearance of the victims from national memory. It insists that the Phoenix massacre be examined not as an unfortunate excess of the July unrest, but as a racial and political event whose historical foundations remain present in South African society.
Selected References
Biko, Steve. I Write What I Like.
Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories.
Das, Veena. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary.
Dube, Leela. Women and Kinship: Comparative Perspectives on Gender in South and South-East Asia.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks.
South African Human Rights Commission. National Investigative Hearing into the July 2021 Unrest.
Uberoi, Patricia, ed. Family, Kinship and Marriage in India.
Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections.
