Africa

Politics at stake: a note on stakeholder analysis

In what Partha Chatterjee calls 'most of the world' the state and capital have two defences against grassroots political society - the police and civil society (especially NGOs and the academy). The first protect oppression with violent repression, the second does the same by throwing up a spongy wall around it in which grassroots political society is absorbed via individualising technocratic 'public participation' processes and educated to accept domination via all kinds of workshops and training that teach people to know their place. This article is an important attempt to think with grassroots militancy against civil society.

Mark Butler and David Ntseng, July 2008

Resistance from the other South Africa

Neha Nimmagudda, a student from NYC, spent a few months working as a full time volunteer with the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement in South Africa. In this essay she reflects one of the movement's quarterly all night meetings in which critical issues are discussed.

The topic of this particular meeting was 'leadership'. While Abahlali has never stated that it is an anarchist movement many have drawn parallels between 'Abahlalism' and 'anarchism'. Certainly the movement considers both the state and the vanguardist left to be oppressors.

Neha Nimmagudda (2008-07-17)

Cape Town: two anti-eviction campaigners jailed for a year

On Wednesday, July 2nd at the Bellville Magistrates Court courtroom E, two members of the Delft Anti-Eviction Campaign, Jerome Daniels and Ridwaan Isaacs, were each sentenced twelve months in prison - simply for being community leaders at Delft-Symphony Way settlement.

The movement, and other militant movements in South Africa considers Daniels and Isaacs to be political prisoners and is mobilising support on this basis.

Strikes and riots at 2010 World Cup building site

Workers have still not resumed work at Mpumalanga's 2010 World Cup stadium after workers downed tools in a wage protest.

The workers picketing the Mbombela Stadium site outside Nelspruit include 500 dismissed last Monday, after appealing directly to President Thabo Mbeki to intervene when he visited the site. The Mbombela Stadium Joint Venture fired the workers for an unprotected strike in defiance of earlier agreements.

We are not all like that: the monster bares its fangs

Black consciousness militant and activist in the Landless Peoples' Movement Andile Mngxitama responds to the May 2008 pogroms in South Africa.

The sms’s came fast and furious. As furious as the fiery images we were subjected to by our television and our daily newspapers. The front pages are a festival of beastly pictures of the victims of the negrophobic blood letting which has gripped South Africa in the past weeks.

Mansoura-Espana Garments Company workers on strike

Tuesday 24th June 2008 – Workers at the Mansoura-Espana Garments Company in Talkha are on strike.

Tuesday 24th June 2008 – Workers at the Mansoura-Espana Garments Company in Talkha are on strike. Via Twitter, Arabawy reports that central security forces and trucks have surrounded the factory, and that water cannons have been used on the strikers.

On the pogroms in South Africa

An essay on the May 2008 pogroms in South Africa by Richard Pithouse.

The industrial and mining towns on the Eastern outskirts of Johannesburg are unlovely places. They’re set on flat windswept plains amidst the dumps of sterile sand left over from old mines. In winter the wind bites, the sky is a very pale blue and it seems to be all coal braziers, starved dogs, faded strip malls, gun shops and rusting factories and mine headgear.

Wildcat strike in South African mines

Workers at the Everest mine in South Africa have gone on wildcat strike about health and safety issues.

On 28 May, 42 load-haul-dumper operators stopped unprotected work at the Everest mine, and the rest of the underground workforce, numbering around 1,300 employees, stopped work in sympathy the following day.

The Pogroms in South Africa: The Politics of Fear and the Fear of Politics

A response to the recent pogroms in South Africa from the anti-authoritarian militant intellectual Michael Neocosmos.

by Michael Neocosmos, 5 June 2008

Textile strike in Alexandria

26th May: Reports of an outbreak wildcat strike in Al-Amiriya Company for Spinning and Weaving in Alexandria. Could this be the start of a new wave of strikes?

According to reports from bloggers a wildcat strike has started at the state-owned Al-Amiriya Company for Spinning and Weaving. The workers are demanding one full month of bonuses.

Egypt cracks down post-strike

Rob Ray reports for Freedom Newspaper on continuing crackdowns on civil liberties in Egypt

Following a period of upheavals in Egypt, the state is attempting to reassert control with a series of measures aimed at curbing both the labour movement and the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s largest radical Islamic group.

Abahlali baseMjondolo statement on the xenophobic attacks in Johannesburg, 2008

In recent days the shack settlements around Johannesburg have been torn apart by appalling violence against foreign born squatters. More than 20 people have been killed and many more raped, wounded and left homeless. This press statement from Abahlali baseMjondolo, the militant shack dwellers movement with more 30 affiliated settlements in the cities of Durban, Pietermaritzburg and Pinetown, responds to the horrific outbreak of anti-foreigner violence and notes the culpability of the state.

Wednesday, 21 May 2008
Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Statement

Unyawo Alunampumulo

Abahlali baseMjondolo Statement on the Xenophobic Attacks in Johannesburg

There is only one human race.

Our struggle and every real struggle is to put the human being at the centre of society, starting with the worst off.

South Africa: Gangster landlord continues campaign of intimidation with police support

The poor of Motala Heights, affiliated to Abahlali baseMjondolo since 2006, are fighting a bitter battle against eviction against a local gangster business man and the local state. There have recently been death threats and threats of arson and the local cops are acting as the gangsters' enforcers.

[i]London anarchist, Antonios Vradis lived in the community for a while in late 2006 from and it was here that the anarchist magazine Voices of Resistance from Occupied London was conceived.

African health worker gap catastrophic

Rob Ray looks at claims that a brain drain to West is crippling healthcare across the African continent, for Freedom Press

It has been revealed that the global shortfall in healthcare professionals has reached four million people – with one million needed in Africa alone. The figures were voiced at the Global Forum on Human Resources for Health, which opened in the Ugandan capital of Kampala on March 3rd.

Damaging uranium mines restart

The new nuclear boom will hit Africa as advocacy groups warn poorly regulated mining of radioactive materials risks poisoning land and water, finds Rob Ray.

With 349 new nuclear reactors now either under construction, on order or in the early planning stages around the world, the uranium mining industry has been kicking into high gear with a glut of new extractions underway.

Coca Cola plant goes up in flames

Three persons died and several others were injured when the multi-million naira Coca Cola plant at Eyean, near Benin City, Edo State, on Tuesday went up in flames during an explosion that causes extensive damage to the facility.

The development had prompted the management of the Nigerian Bottling Company (NBC) to suspend operations at the plant.

The dead workers were said to have been taken to the University of Benin Teaching Hospital (UBTH) morgue while the injured were reportedly receiving treatment.

Abahlali baseMjondolo to host National UnFreedom Day

Freedom Day, 27 April, is the major national holiday in the civic religion of post-apartheid South Africa. The poor are usually herded into stadiums to be lectured on their good fortune by their leaders while the rich head for the malls. This year, for the 3rd time, Abahlali baseMjondolo will be hosting an UnFreedom Day. Heresy is alive & well....

Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Release
Monday 21 April 2008

Abahlali baseMjondolo to Mourn UnFreedom Day Once Again

Time: 9:00 a.m., Sunday 27 April 2008
Venue: Community Hall, Kennedy Road Shack Settlement, Clare Estate, Durban

The Politics of Fire

A shack burnt in the aftermath of the electricity disconnections in the Kennedy Road settlement

Abahlali baseMjondolo has long sought to politicise fire & shit: to show that people suffer fires because electricity is refused, to show that people suffer diarrhoea because clean water is refused. This press release responds to the active and of course armed withdrawal of electricity from the Kennedy Road settlement in February 2008.

Friday, 15 February 2008
Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Release

City Escalates Its War on the Poor
Mass Disconnections from Electricity at Gun Point in the Kennedy Road Settlement

Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Release for the March on Mlaba, 28 September 2007

Abahlali baseMjondolo March on (Mayor) Mlaba 28 September 2008

Press release of Abahlali baseMjondolo in the run up to a march on the mayor of Durban to protest his refusal to supply electricity to the shack dwellers' settlements.

[b]On 28 September 2007 around 3 000 Abahlali baseMjondolo members marched on the mayor of Durban, Obed Mlaba. In previous Abahlali baseMjondolo marches mock coffins were carried and local councillors symbolically buried as a rejection of their top down party authority over bottom up people's power.

South African workers refuse to move arms bound for Zimbabwe

South African Transport Union members have announced they will not offload Chinese arms that are being shipped to crisis-torn Zimbabwe.

A boat carrying an arms shipment destined for Zimbabwe is anchored at the South African port of Durban. However the South African Transport Workers' Union has already announced that their members will not offload any of the cargo, nor will any of their truckers transport it.