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Major acts of unrest tend to follow a pattern. A spark, such as an arrest, a death, a sudden price increase, a rumour, or an act of incitement, does little on its own, but becomes dangerous when it falls into a community already strained by unemployment, hunger, overcrowding, failing services, and distrust.

The spark draws the attention and the blame because it is visible, immediate, and easy to name, but the deeper danger lies in the powder keg, the slow accumulation of pressure that makes an ordinary shock capable of spreading into something much larger.

Winter brings colder weather, and colder weather does two things to people. It draws heat out of the body, and it makes them feel cold. Both add stress to communities that are already strained, and that stress works first on the body, then on the mind, and then on the home.

Start with heat loss. When the body sheds warmth, the nervous system shifts towards its fight-or-flight setting. The body releases adrenaline and noradrenaline, the chemicals that prime it for exertion. The heart speeds up. Blood vessels near the skin tighten to conserve core body temperature, which raises blood pressure and forces the heart to work harder. The body is under stress, and in poor communities this is often a repeated daily condition.

Now consider the feeling of cold. A study conducted in February this year placed 24 healthy volunteers, warmly dressed in jackets, in a chamber at minus ten degrees for fifteen minutes and then asked them to do a series of cognitive tests. Their core body temperature was monitored and did not fall, meaning they were not becoming hypothermic. They simply felt cold, and that was enough to change how they performed.

Their attention faltered. Reaction times slowed, lapses in concentration increased, heart rate climbed, and reported stress rose. The researchers call this the distraction theory, meaning that the sensation of cold competes for a person’s mental attention and adds to the load required to complete a task.

The study did not measure irritability and does not claim to. But it shows the conditions in which irritability becomes more likely. A person who is cold, stressed, distracted, and uncomfortable has less patience to spare, less capacity to absorb the next provocation, and less room for calm judgement.

That experiment ran for fifteen minutes, in warm clothing, in healthy bodies, with a hot meal waiting for the subjects at the end. Now picture similarly cold conditions in a shack on the Highveld: corrugated iron walls, damp rooms, weak insulation, disrupted sleep, children kept indoors, adults leaving before dawn, and families crowded into the same small space for longer periods. Picture it not for fifteen minutes but for the length of a winter, and not by choice.

This is where energy poverty becomes important. Energy poverty describes a household that cannot afford the energy it needs for basic living, including heating, lighting, and cooking. In South Africa, electricity is expensive and many poorer households fall back on paraffin, on a single heater, or on nothing.

A 2021 study in Australia found that energy poverty raised the probability of a person experiencing violence by 1.9 to 3.2 percentage points. That looks small until it is set against the sample average of 1.5%. (This means that the average person has a 1.5% chance of experiencing violence on any given day, whereas an individual in energy poverty has a 3.4% to 4.7% chance of experiencing violence on any given day.) It more than doubles the risk, and at the upper estimate nearly triples it. The study traced this through three channels: psychological distress, the mental wear of sustained pressure; harmful coping such as alcohol and substance use, which shortens tempers and clouds judgement; and the erosion of social capital, the trust and support that help neighbourhoods defuse conflict.

Cold endured day after day, and not by choice, multiplies stress and lowers the margin for patience. Where people are warm, fed, secure, and able to retreat into stable homes, cold is an inconvenience. Where people are hungry, crowded, unemployed, and exposed to incitement, cold can become one more force pushing a tense community closer to violent unrest.

The Common Sense has noted that a confluence of rising food and transport prices, together with cold weather, and incitement has traditionally aligned to spark such violence.