Call me crass, but protests in the global South just ain't protests without some identifying moniker. In South Africa, my homeland, you'd be hard-pressed to find a demonstration without appropriate protest gear. It's gotten so, I'm convinced you're not a real dyed-in-the-wool trade unionist, HIV-activist or gay rights activist if you don't have a t-shirt proudly declaring your membership, along with shouts of ‘amandla, awethu!’ – 'power to the people!'

In India, anti-corruption activists like Rajgopal and Hazare are clearly identified by the slender frames that accompany prolonged hunger strikes, while the fearless women of Manipur, in the north-east of India, have torched government buildings and marched naked to protest the rape and murder of their people by the state army. Trivial as it sounds, identifying monikers are important, since they allow comrades to recognise each other, communicate, rally, plan and organise.

The mass political protests that have swept the African continent over the last year would not have been possible without visible faces and clear signage. Despite often brutal police retaliation, protestors planned and gathered openly from Senegal to Malawi, from Egypt to Swaziland. They found the courage to do so, I believe, because their aims can only be met through mass collective action. Similarly, the 1.5 million people who make up MST, the Landless People's Movement in Brazil, use transparent, public means to fight for land and the construction of a social contract that allows the rural poor to lead lives of dignity and meaning. It has been a long and bitter struggle, but it is finally paying off. For the first time in recent history, inequality in Brazil is decreasing.

So I have been thoroughly bemused by young, working-class Britons and their expressions of social discontent. If you hide your identity, then you cannot communicate with each other. If you cannot communicate, then you cannot act collectively. This means you cannot articulate your demands clearly, nor can you direct your energy effectively against the root causes of your dispossession. It is a fundamental error to pillage working-class shops along with the local Tesco or Sony warehouse. It is an even graver error to murder fellow working-class men who try to stop the destruction of their very tenuous livelihoods. They could have been your comrades. Instead, you treated them as the enemy. Whatever the causes behind this profound lack of disciplined collective action, it has surely been exacerbated by secrecy and concealment.

I arrived in London during the riots. I stayed in Kilburn, which experienced significant social unrest. Yet not one person I spoke to was willing to acknowledge that they knew anyone involved in the riots. Not a single person I met was willing to express solidarity with the rioters. To me, an ignorant outsider, it seems that the fallout from these riots will make life much harder for young working-class Britons, particularly black Britons. It will create tensions between different shades of brown people, and it will alienate the increasingly marginal trade unions and pro-working class organisations from those who are most deeply dispossessed. They will be unable, or unwilling, to help you fight against state-sanctioned police brutality or against greater cuts to social safety nets and public goods. You will struggle to find a voice in the media to protest the casualisation of labour by global corporates, or the pervasive class and race prejudices of many fellow Britons.

Since the media has successfully directed public sentiment against you, your only strategy is to mobilise publicly. Like your sisters and brothers in the South, come out openly and articulate your fears and anger collectively. Learn from the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People in Nigeria and build, slowly, patiently and carefully, organisational capability and political consciousness in each neighbourhood, in each borough, in each city. Like Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shackdwellers movement in South Africa, establish ties of solidarity with like-minded academics, organisations and media houses. Like MST in Brazil, fight for a space to talk to each other, in your own language, about your own concerns. Look South and learn – you cannot act alone, fragmented, alienated. It will take courage and sacrifice, but you must act together, proudly, democratically and for a clear purpose. Your future depends on it.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Nimi Hoffmann is a young South African and pan-Africanist. She is a member of the Eastern Cape Water Caucus, an organisation of rural activists and small-scale farmers who fight for environmental justice in South Africa.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.