About 500 striking municipal workers, many of them fired up by cheap wine and brandy, threw rocks, lumps of concrete and bottles at police and dumped mounds of rubbish in Cape Town’s Adderley Street during a march on Wednesday.
Outside the Civic Centre, where the strikers’ leaders handed over a memorandum of demands to a city official, police threw a stun grenade as the stone-throwing continued.
The workers, wielding sticks, iron bars and pickaxe handles, strewed rubbish in the street and tipped the entire load of a Wasteman private rubbish-collection truck on to a road outside the United States consulate.
A photographer for Die Burger, Yunus Mohamed, was hit in the eye by a stone meant for the police, but carried on taking photographs after receiving a dressing over the eye.
He said later that though he could still see out of the eye, he had a severe headache and was going to see a doctor.
Strikers also repeatedly kicked a South African Press Association (Sapa) journalist in the back after he took photographs of their colleagues beating traffic signs with their iron bars, and tried to seize his camera.
Strikers were drinking from papsakke, or foil bags of cheap wine, which they carried with them; others shared a bottle of brandy outside the Civic Centre.
A drunk man carrying a lump of concrete had to be discouraged by marshals when he tried repeatedly to climb on to the truck carrying the sound equipment for the march.
”Those people who are throwing stones from behind others, that doesn’t help our struggle,” Cosatu provincial secretary Tony Ehrenreich told the strikers from the truck.
But he also warned that if any South African Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu) member was injured as a result of police action, workers would not vote in the coming municipal elections.
Samwu provincial secretary Andre Adams told the strikers that the police were being used ”more and more to crush our strike. This is reminiscent of apartheid.”
Asked by Sapa about the strikers’ violence, he said: ”The point that we need to make is that workers have been witnessing in the past couple of days how police have been shooting at fellow strikers not only in Cape Town but across the country. The workers are angry.
”But at the same time, the union does not condone any unprovoked damage to property or attacks on persons.” — Sapa