A Life of Its Own: Authority, Power and the Looting Crowd of 9-16 July 2021 in Kwazulu-Natal (and Gauteng), South Africa.

Comment rapidly followed unprecedented arson, destruction and loss of life in two provinces under democracy during the ‘July Days’ of 2021 in South Africa. The first ‘structuralist’ approaches referred to the continuing threefold South African social crisis of endemic poverty, chronic unemployment and gross inequality, to explain why thousands of people looted shops, schools, malls, warehouses and factories. The second ‘agency-oriented’ perspectives focused on the triggering cause of the events, namely the incarceration of former President Jacob Zuma. A third approach sought to integrate aspects of structure and agency. A fuller explanation of these events must, however, go beyond these initial perspectives. To do so, this paper first turns to the sparse scholarly work published regarding these events and the literature on collective violence. Elias Canetti’s classical concept of the crowd sheds light on the intersection of the looting crowd and the subjective experience and perspectives of looters. His collective unit of analysis of the looting crowd perhaps begins to explain, it is argued, the actions and self-understandings of individuals who participated in the July Days. How did looters in this particular crowd relate to its authority and power? The paper concludes that a globally constituted research programme needs to explore the looting crowd.