ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the notion of protest triage by looking at how protests compete for resources, attention and concessions in a world characterised by apartheid disproportion. Borrowing from the medical concept of triage, it shows how #ZimbabweanLivesMatter (#ZLM), an online campaign which went viral in August 2020, inadvertently came into collision with #BlackLivesMatter and #IStandWithLasizwe, campaigns which had roots in the United States and South Africa, respectively. This collision resulted in expressions of triage, with protest actors demonstrating an acute awareness of how different lives were subject to disproportionate values. When multiple protests arise simultaneously or close to each other around different causes, as was the case with the three campaigns, they unintentionally fragment protest discourse and enable apartheid to persist. This protest triage undermines protest by forcing it to reckon with the fact of other causes and, thus, becomes fragmentary.
