Under pressure: South Africa’s middle classes and the ‘rebellion of the poor’

In this article, I explore the relationship of South Africa’s middle classes to popular protests. Dubbed ‘the rebellion of the poor’ in scholarly debates, these protests target access to public infrastructures such as electricity, water, education and housing. I argue that the relationship of South Africa’s middle classes to these ‘service delivery protests’ is highly ambivalent, charged with political tensions and structural contradictions. The main reason is that class positionalities strongly shape people’s perceptions of their interests and their inclinations to support certain kinds of protest. At the same time, there are movements that transcend this scenario of class-based interests. Student protests such as #Feesmustfall and #Rhodesmustfall that began in 2015 signal how material interests in widening the access to tertiary education and ideological interests in decolonial education can coalesce, amalgamizing new collective subjects into being and galvanising them into new forms of politics.