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This article intends to make sense of community protests in South African municipalities. This is important because municipalities have been characterised by persistent community protests in recent years. Scholars, policymakers and commentators have advanced various reasons for contextualising the ‘root causesʼ of such protests. Such reasons include, but are not restricted to, governance failures, poor service delivery, and unresponsive local governance. Although the author is mindful of all these causes, this article moves from this apparent simplistic analysis, which often is not aware of the root causes of such protests. Analysis of community protests from such perspective, although important, may not result in holistic sustainable solutions, as the root cause remains resilient. Community protest is a complex phenomenon that is still poorly understood in South Africa, at least in terms of its root causes. This is evident in