By Michael Schmidt
The Golden Highway runs from the empty promise of Joburg's south-eastern mine-dumps, past the sweatshop factories of Devland on Soweto's border, then swings past the racially defined ghettoes of Eldorado Park, Zakariyya Park and the sprawl of Orange Farm.
Its scenery alternates between cyanide-poisoned reed bogs and the huddled shackland dumping-grounds of post-apartheid forced removals like Vlakfontein, poorly screened from the winter wind by scraggly bluegum trees.
From the gutted remains of a Shackleton bomber used as an advertising hoarding at its northern end to the decrepit bulk of hostels like KwaMasiza in Sebokeng, backlit by the eerie flaming of Vereeniging's distant factories at its terminus, it is hardly a highway to fortune.
Over recent weeks it has rather become a highway to hell, with police shotguns barking at stone-throwing protesters, the two sides appearing to be locked in some medieval conflict.
Time and again, poor communities along the Golden Highway have blockaded its lanes with rubble and burning tyres.
This may seem like what has over the past three years become a familiar scene of South African-style service-delivery revolt. But look closer, and there is something new afoot: this time it is organised.
Social protest almost disappeared from the landscape after the ANC's landslide victory in 1994 under the impetus of the social compact it was able to enforce through both its strategic alliances with the likes of Cosatu and the sheer weight of the prestige of its national democratic revolution.
But by 2000 dormant old concerned residents associations in the formal townships of Joburg, Cape Town and Durban were on the move again, now joined by new formations in challenging that revolution's tardy delivery on its promise of "a better life for all".
In Joburg, the umbrella body that was formed to express the wishes of this new force was the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF).
It is this body which has been going door to door, wearing out its shoe leather, to mobilise communities along the Golden Highway.
Its progressive intellectuals might look to the international insurgent best practice of road blockades in countries such as Argentina as a politically conscious means of hobbling the capitalist movement of goods, but, says APF organiser Silumko Radebe, any decision to blockade the road was merely practical.
"These communities have gone through all the processes it is possible to go through to get attention to their plight and still they are ignored. So they take to the busiest road and block it to get attention."
Clearly, for the poor huddled on the verge of an arterial route serving Africa's wealthiest enclave, there is a feeling that the highway merely serves to ship past them the necessities they have been denied. There is a keen sense that the good life is literally passing them by.
The APF's original social base was township dwellers who lived in proper brick houses with electricity and running water.
Many were employed; many remained ANC or liberation movement loyalists; many were old gogos on whose pensions entire families survived.
Their concerns centred on the ANC government's cost-recovery programmes that led to housing evictions, and water and power cut-offs.
Some of the APF's constituent organisations, notably those on the East Rand, are fundamentally conservative in political outlook, merely wanting their fair place in the sun.
But others in the south-west are far more strident, demanding a deeper socio-economic transformation.
Older formations of this ilk include the Working Class Crisis Committee in Sebokeng, whose members - mostly hostel-dwelling, laid-off metalworkers - had been active in the anti-apartheid struggle.
Newer ones, like the Orange Farm Water Crisis Committee, were squatter-campers, newly urbanised, often labour tenants forced off farms.
By 2002, the Social Movements Indaba, a national umbrella of the new force, could claim 200 000 highly active members, half of them urban and half organised by the rural Landless People's Movement.
The APF and its associated organisations went through several advances and retreats, but their basic battle remained the same: a rear-guard defence of what formal township-dwellers already had.
But in September 2004, with violent protests in the Free State town of Harrismith, the pattern shifted towards those who had nothing, with the outbreak of service-delivery revolts in rural areas and in the shantytowns abutting small platteland towns.
Since then, a study by the University of the Free State has shown, the smoke of burning tyres again marred the horizon, with something like 6 000 service-delivery revolts across the country, at least 30 of them described as serious.
These were different to the social-movement protests: spontaneous, driven by local petty politics and jealousy, they were mostly not planned.
The protesters were also different: often young, newly impressed into the peri-urban poor, they were mostly bywoners, renting from shack-dweller landlords.
Their demands were for houses, jobs and services, none of which they had.
But the revolts of the past month along the highway have seen a new dynamic emerge, according to Radebe: the merging of the organisational forces of the formal social movements and of the spontaneous mobilisations of the shackland underclass.
"It's a mixture of people who are taking to the streets. You have those who were involved in the struggle against apartheid - but the youth are quite active also.
"You have quite a few Indians and coloureds, not just blacks, supporting the action.
"You have people who have been living in proper houses for 50 years, and others who come from very disadvantaged areas. There is this new commonality between people fighting against prepaid water meters and those who have nothing."
Radebe emphasises that community decisions to blockade the road were taken at mass meetings at which police were present, so the authorities could not accuse the APF of acting as agents provocateurs.
Still, Gauteng local government spokesperson Themba Sepotokele claimed in July, in the wake of a community blockade in Kliptown, Soweto, that the protests were "aimed at misleading our communities and derailing government plans".
Protesters complain that they have seen more of police rubber bullets - like those that wounded five people in Sebokeng on Tuesday this week - than any concrete government plans.
Part of the problem appears to be that police are illegally assuming magisterial powers to ban protest - and even assembly - outright: APF chair Brickes Mokolo and eight APF leaders were arrested on Tuesday simply for addressing a crowd.
This is despite two landmark court rulings in March 2006 in favour of the shack dwellers' movement: anyone has the absolute right to gather and demonstrate without police permission; police must merely be informed so that traffic arrangements can be worked out. They have no right to ban any gathering or demonstration, unless it turns riotous.
"We get the sense that the police on the ground don't know what they're doing," says APF spokesperson Dale McKinley.
"Someone burns a tyre, then the police overreact and start shooting, then the stones fly and it all spirals out of control."
Local government specialist Professor Greg Ruiters, of Rhodes University, told me in 2005 that the yawning chasm between the promises of the developmental state and the grinding poverty of SA's sprawling shackland would increasingly see people take to direct action.
One of the main reasons for this, Radebe says, is that the poor distrust their councillors: "Wards are run as ANC party branches and there is no representation of the broader community at meetings," he notes.
"In addition, people have come to suspect that their councillors do not have real power because whenever they deliver petitions to them, they are told the councillors don't have the power to implement their needs and demands."
Professor Sheila Meintjes of Wits University's political studies department has warned: "There is a growing sense the councillors don't necessarily hold all the power, that the municipal officials are really, if anything, to blame for a lack of service delivery."
Radebe says the situation is exacerbated because municipal officials who are petitioned, and on whose offices the APF and other poor communities march, pass the buck regarding lights-and-water issues on to City Power and Joburg Water - which in turn pass the buck back to the municipality, claiming they have no decision-making powers.
This is disingenuous on both sides, Radebe says, because everyone knows that these entities are wholly owned subsidiaries of the municipality.
"The key problem for all parties," according to Ruiters, "is that citizens have discovered another, more direct, channel for giving voice to their needs: 'collective bargaining by riot' may become more common than waiting to vote."