Sending troops to townships a haunting return to colonial logic

As both a son of Soweto and an academic deeply engaged with decolonial thought informed by organic intellectualism, my memories are engraved with the heavy rumble of the Casspir and the sight of young men in camouflage patrolling our streets. I lived through apartheid’s states of emergency, when the “rule of law” was a euphemism for suspending black humanity. Today, as I analyse the president’s 2026 state of the nation address and the deployment of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) to combat zama zama activity and gang violence, I see not a “new” solution but a haunting return to colonial logic, treating black spaces as zones of death.

My critique comes from lived experience, not the detached perspective of academia. In his speech, the president presented a “theatre of power,” using the language of “war” on crime to reassure people in wealthy suburbs and investors that the state maintains control. We face a complex tragedy.

While transnational mafias run illegal mining operations, terrorising townships, the state targets marginalised individuals, those desperate zama zama foot soldiers and innocent youth, labelling them as “pathological threats” rather than addressing the despair that drives their actions. As I highlighted in my work, “The Unfinished Business: A Decolonial Reflection on the State of Emergency Song by Simphiwe Dana,” we are caught in a cycle where the “emergency” is an ongoing state. Dana’s powerful words resonate: “Black bodies strewn in the streets, fires burning, brothers lost/Where are the youth of 1976?/Sellout black leaders, forgotten memories festering in the youth …” She exposes a fundamental betrayal, indicating that the present leadership continues the same “emergency” measures that characterised apartheid, now justified through militarised operations. The 2026 deployment reflects the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown, when the army was sent to “save us”, but instead enacted brutal enforcement reminiscent of the old SADF.