On 2 April 1936, a ‘Monster Meeting’ of the South African National Socialist Party, better known as the Greyshirts, was held on Cape Town’s Grand Parade. About two thousand people attended the meeting, which descended into a chaotic brawl between Greyshirt supporters and their opponents. This article explores the circumstances that lead up to the meeting, the event itself, and its aftermath, as a means of grappling with broader developments within South Africa’s social history in the decades preceding the outbreak of the Second World War. It traces the evolution of different forms of resistance to the rise of the radical right, from judicial and polemical resistance, to more direct and robust forms of resistance – including that of physical violence. In relation to changes in South African demography and the effects of new ideologies on the polity, I explore how the Grand Parade served as a microcosm for the political conflicts playing out in South Africa at this time. I show how the struggle for the control of this public space was thus part of the broader struggle for ideological supremacy and control in relation to the issues of race, gender and ethnicity at the centre of national political struggles at this time