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These marches do more than deliver demands; they generate a collective affective charge, moments where anger, grief, solidarity, and hope coalesce in public space.
By PROFESSOR ASLAM FATAAR
There is an urgent need to expand the smaller acts of local resistance outward, across the city, beyond limited spaces, and into a wider, more inclusive solidarity politics.
In Cape Town, determined efforts are pushing forward anti-Zionist and anti-empire solidarity. These efforts represent years of important steps by Palestinian solidarity movements that aim to expand neighbourhood by neighbourhood, street by street, across the country.
Central to this work is what can be called a ‘politics of affect’, which is the recognition that political movements are not built only on policies or programmes, but on the emotional, cultural, and relational energies that bind people together. Affect refers to how people feel, connect, and respond to the world around them; it shapes their sense of shared struggle, capacity to empathise, anger at injustice, and hope for change. Without a politics of affect, even the most carefully crafted campaigns can fall flat, lacking the human force that gives political action its meaning and momentum.
The machinery of distraction and numbness
We live today inside a planetary web increasingly controlled by neo-imperialist machinery. This is no longer simply a system of armies, governments, and corporations; it is a shifting network of power that shapes not only material conditions but also human perception, attention, and feeling. Images of bombs falling on Gaza or the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank, though shocking, are filtered through a digital system that often produces selective numbness.
Social media platforms, powered by algorithmic systems, do not merely pass along information. They help spread fake news, trigger emotions, and push divisive stories designed to stir outrage, fear, despair, or disgust. But these reactions rarely lead to real political action; instead, people are flooded with so much stimulation that they become exhausted, unable to respond meaningfully. What should provoke deep moral engagement becomes just one more scroll in the feed.
This manipulation of affect, the deliberate shaping of what people care about, fear, or ignore, is not abstract; it has very concrete consequences. It clears the way for imperial expansion, land grabs, resource extraction, and the deepening of global inequality, particularly across Africa. This is how today’s imperial projects advance. Rather than relying solely on military power, neo-imperialism uses digital and emotional channels to shape what people see, believe, and care about. This clears the way for the physical extraction of land, minerals, and labour.
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After centuries of colonial theft, the continent now faces renewed extraction to support AI-driven capitalism and so-called ‘green’ industries. Minerals like cobalt, lithium, nickel, and rare earth elements, many sourced from African soil, are in high demand. However, extraction is not just physical; it involves data, attention, and local social systems being pulled into global profit networks.
In this global landscape, South Africa has become a key site of imperial targeting and organised resistance. Public protests and legal challenges are increasingly intertwined, and the politics of affect can become a decisive force in rallying popular movements.
South Africa’s resistance and the streets of Cape Town
This past weekend, South Africa saw heroic acts of public resistance: thousands gathered outside the Western Cape Parliament in a mass march against the genocide in Gaza on Saturday May 3. It was led by the Al-Quds Foundation (SA) and involved a coalition of social movements, unions, political parties, faith groups, student organisations, and activist networks. Across South Africa, from Johannesburg to Durban to smaller towns, similar marches, protests, community meetings, and digital campaigns are working to challenge Zionist violence in Palestine and link it to wider anti-imperialist struggles.
These marches do more than deliver demands; they generate a collective affective charge, moments where anger, grief, solidarity, and hope coalesce in public space. Yet beneath these public mobilisations lie tensions and challenges that must be faced honestly. For these efforts to truly expand and deepen, they must engage with the critical questions raised by those who stand at the heart of South Africa’s working-class struggles.
Beyond elitist protest culture
One such critical voice is my friend Omar, a proud son of Ottery and Lotus River, from where I hail, and one of the most ardent anti-apartheid and pro-Palestinian voices I know. His AfriKaaps poetry is raw, rousing, and deeply reflective of Cape Flats life: the struggle, survival, humour, daily foibles, and relentless presence of death that shape so much of his community’s experience.
When I interacted with Omar last week, he expressed himself with biting wit and wounded pride about what he calls the ‘elitist folly of pro-Palestine protest culture in Cape Town’. While his critique may be somewhat overstated, I came to understand his concern: although marches, such as the recent one in the Cape Town CBD, are undeniably necessary for drawing attention to Zionist brutality and, in this case, exposing the complicity of political parties like the Democratic Alliance and Patriotic Alliance, who recently returned from Israel declaring ‘no genocide’ in Gaza, these actions largely remain confined to privileged spaces: Bloubergstrand, Sea Point, Tokai.
Meanwhile, communities in Mitchells Plain, Hanover Park, Khayelitsha, Gugulethu, and across the Flats — places where people instinctively understand the pain of dispossession, occupation, and state violence — are left on the margins of activist mobilisation. Omar argues that these are the very spaces where solidarity should be deeply rooted, yet they remain excluded from the main circuits of protest and resistance.
Omar’s critique does not aim to dismiss current efforts but to remind us of what is at stake. Resistance will remain fragile and superficial without grounding solidarity in communities’ lived realities and affective worlds.
A counter-politics of affect that grows from below
Omar’s challenge strengthens the larger project of building what can become a localised counter-politics of affect. Community gatherings, mosque and church discussions, street protests, WhatsApp networks, and activist workshops can create the emotional commitment and political scaffolding for solidarity beyond spectacle and symbolism. But this solidarity must stretch further: into every neighbourhood, across every divide, making the call for justice part of everyday political life, not just the preserve of the elite or the privileged.
The starting point for this solidarity politics is a full acknowledgement of, and engagement with, the backgrounds, identifications, and lived realities of hitherto disparate groups. It means rooting action in the everyday concerns of ordinary people: those who live, survive and make their way through hardship and uncertainty.
While the discourses and ways of being in these communities seem locked into their own local identities, a transformative politics of affect can emerge from the shared commonness of struggle, culture, and survival. This is the fertile ground for expanding solidarities, reaching outward from the heart of communities, beyond differences, while leaving space for group and religious expression, forming a beautiful mosaic or quilt of many colours.
The shared struggle: Palestine, Africa, and beyond
South Africa’s legal action at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) adds critical weight to this moment. Last week, the South African government presented fresh evidence at The Hague, exposing the scale of Israel’s genocide in Gaza — mass killings, starvation, and the destruction of hospitals, homes, and schools. But even the most exemplary state actions need popular backing. Without strong, active, expanding community solidarities, they risk becoming symbolic gestures.
Importantly, the cause of Palestine is not an isolated struggle. The same imperial systems fuelling genocide in Gaza also extract cobalt from Congolese mines, destroy indigenous lands in the Amazon, and harvest personal data from African populations. All these struggles are connected, and resisting them requires a shared political vision anchored in ordinary people’s everyday lives, emotions, and material struggles.
Returning to the senses: The politics of affect
At its core, this expanding resistance must be understood as a politics of affect: the ability to connect across pain, across anger, across shared humanity, and to turn collective feeling into collective power. This is not only about demands or slogans — it is about stirring and sustaining the emotional, cultural, and relational energies that bind people together, creating new circuits of solidarity that push outward from the Cape Flats to the city, the nation, and the world. Affect shapes how people see one another, how they recognise their shared struggle, and how they come to believe that a better future is possible, not just for themselves but for others across divides.
To grow this politics of affect, movements must attend to the big moments — the mass marches, the public statements — and the quiet, local, and continuous work of building trust, listening, and forging ties between communities. Solidarity must be woven into the fabric of daily life: in schools, mosques, churches, markets, workplaces, street corners, and digital networks. It must be able to carry grief and rage but also hope, humour, resilience, and creativity. It must make space for difference — religious, cultural, racial — while holding onto what unites us: a refusal of imperial injustice, a commitment to dignity, and a desire to build a world where life can flourish.
If these local efforts are strengthened, they can help shape a powerful South African contribution to the global anti-imperialist movement. The energy shown on the streets of Cape Town, the critiques and insights from voices like Omar’s, and the quiet but determined organising across townships, schools, religious spaces, civic groups, and digital communities all hold the potential to push solidarity politics far beyond today’s limitations.
The challenge and the opportunity is to turn this scattered resistance into a sustained, organised, and growing movement that reshapes the politics of affect and puts the struggle for planetary humanity at its heart. In doing so, we will not only stand against the forces of destruction but help create a living, breathing politics built on care, interconnection, and shared purpose — a politics that grows from local roots but reaches for global transformation.
This is the work of weaving together a beautiful mosaic or quilt of many colours, where each thread matters and where the collective fabric becomes stronger than the violence, greed, and despair we are determined to overcome.
Aslam Fataar is Research Professor in Higher Education Transformation, in the Department of Education Policy Studies, Stellenbosch University.
