Abahlali baseMjondolo
The ANC Has Invaded Kennedy Road
S'bu Zikode's first hurried notes on the ANC atrocities in the Kennedy Road settlement.
The ANC has invaded Kennedy Road. We have been arrested, beaten, killed, jailed and made homeless by their armed wing. This is what it took for Yakoob Baig and Jackson Gumede to finally take back the settlement.
This was a very well organised crime. It is not just an attack on the KRDC. It is not just an attack on AbM. It is an attack on our politic.
Abahlali baseMjondolo: ‘a homemade politics’
Matt Birkinshaw, an anarchist from London, spent three months living in Abahlali baseMjondolo communities in Durban and Cape Town in 2008. This paper, prepared for a conference in Manchester, gives a brief but useful overview of the movement.
Abahlali baseMjondolo: ‘a homemade politics’
Rights, democracy and social movements in South Africa
Matt Birkinshaw – Alternative Futures and Popular Protest, Manchester Metropolitan University, 15-17 March 2009
Abstract
Martin Legassick on the Macassar Village Land Occupation in Cape Town
The Macassar Village Land Occupation, organised by Abahlali baseMjondolo, has rocked Cape Town. In a context where all political parties support the criminalisation of land invasions and the violent 'eradication' of shacks Martin Legassick has publicly defended the invasion.
Macassar: if the state can't provide, people must be allowed to build themselves
Too few houses, too many people to house
May 26, 2009
Martin Legassick
Sekwanele! Social movement struggles for land and housing in post-apartheid South Africa
This article, published in the current issue of Left Turn magazine in the USA, gives a useful overview of the militant grassroots movements in South Africa.
Sekwanele! [Enough is Enough!]: Social Movement Struggles for Land and Housing in Post-Apartheid South Africa
By Toussaint Losier
Amabhulu anyama
Asenzeli iworry
[The black capitalists]
[Are making us worry]
- Chorus of a contemporary protest song, sung in Xhosa
'Be a visitor, not a spy' - QQ Section, Site B, Khayelitsha
.jpg "Khayelitsha Township - Cape Town, SA")
Matt Birkinshaw, a London anarchist, gives an account of his visit to the QQ shack settlement in Cape Town in diary form. QQ has recently joined the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement that began in Durban but now has a national presence.
'Be a visitor, not a spy' - QQ Section, Site B, Khayelitsha
Matt Birkinshaw, October 2008
Introduction
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)
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.
