14 © Unisa Press Africanus 50 (1) 2011 ISSN: 0304-615X pp 14-29 Reconsidering the origins of protest in South africa: some lessons from Cape Town and Pietermaritzburg Ndodana Nleya, Lisa Thompson, Chris Tapscott, Laurence Piper and Michele Esau 1 ABSTRACT Protest politics in South Africa has a long history and has been deployed differentially in different historical moments. Whereas protests formed an important vehicle during the fght against apartheid, their rebirth and propulsion to the centre of the struggles in the post-apartheid dispensation have come as a surprise to many. A majority of these protests, so-called ‘service delivery protests’, are reported as emanating from communities’ dissatisfaction with municipal service delivery as well as problems relating to lack of communication between council and councillors on the one hand and citizens on the other. In this article, we interrogate data from fve study sites located in Cape Town and Pietermaritzburg. While we found support for the importance of service delivery, our data contradicts many widely held assertions as regards what causes these protests. We were able to show, for example, that these so-called ‘service delivery protests’ may actually emanate from reasons that extend beyond service delivery. Since our data indicates that levels of participation in Cape Town are higher than in Pietermaritzburg on the one hand, illustrating perhaps the different provincial contexts, there is also variation between the relatively high participation rates of the ‘black African’ sites of Langa and Khayelitsha, on the one hand, and the lower rates of the ‘coloured’ site of Bonteheuwel, on the other, which we ascribe to the disengagement of the community in Cape Town, from both local and national politics. Keywords: participation, protest, service delivery, local government, ward councils, councillors 1 INTRODUCTION Hart points to an intractable link between what she refers to as the national question and the so-called service delivery protests: The capacity of the ruling bloc to tap into deep veins of popular understandings of ‘the national question’ has been simultaneously the lynchpin of its hegemonic power and a key source of