housing

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.

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.

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.

Greenlake "Motel" attempted eviction - Seattle

Residents and SeaSol members outside apartments

Residents of Seattle motel left suddenly homeless

On Friday May 16, tenants at twelve apartments behind the Green Lake Motel on Aurora Ave got a surprise visit from their landlords - who also own the motel and a few others - saying they had two days to move out, or they'd be arrested. The motel's license was being suspended due to unsafe conditions, and the apartments had been operating (possibly wrongly) under the same license.

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.

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.

Civil society, citizenship and the politics of the (im)possible: rethinking militancy in Africa today

A major and widely influential new theoretical statement on the rising tide of anti-state politics by a major radical African intellectual.

by Michael Neocosmos

Abstract

Taking Poverty Seriously: What the poor are saying and why it matters

Article based on interviews with South African shack dwellers about their views of what constitutes 'democracy', stressing the need for those in struggle to set their own agenda rather than have it set by professional activists.

A commitment to justice and democratic governance requires that we listen carefully as much as we speak loudly and act decisively.

Shelter charity workers to strike again

Workers at homelessness charity Shelter will be striking on 24 April alongside tens of thousands of other workers against attacks on pay and conditions.

The strike will continue on 25 April, and will be the second two-day stoppage.

The University of Abahlali baseMjondolo

This is a longer version of an article by Richard Pithouse first published in Voices of Resistance from Occupied London in October 2007. It gives a useful basic overview of Abahlali baseMjondolo from its founding in early 2005 to late 2007.

Since 2004 South African cities have been convulsed by a series of municipal revolts organised from shack settlements. They have most often taken the form of blockading roads with burning barricades and have generally targeted municipal party councillors. Across the country many of the more militant settlements have refused electoral politics and declared 'No Land, No House, No Vote'.

Neither the march nor the money are ours

Abahlali baseMjondolo press release in response to media confusion between Abahlali and the World Bank sponsored NGO Slum Dwellers International (SDI), critiquing mainstream development discourse. A press release from SDI is also provided.

[b]Slum Dwellers International (SDI) is a global NGO strongly supported by the World Bank, USAid and the Gates Foundation. In South Africa the state, which is highly repressive to shack dwellers and their organisations, has a formal partnership with SDI.

All charges dropped against Kennedy 6

Six activists from the Abahlali baseMjondolo in court on murder charges have been released with all charges dropped.

Abahlali baseMjondolo began in the 7000 strong Kennedy Road shack settlement and it is here were the state has concentrated repression. One year and one week ago six key activists in the settlement were arrested on a trumped up murder charge (the same tactic was used against the Landless People's Movement in Johannesburg the year before).

Democracy in my experience

Philani Zungu offers a brief but powerful account of the lived experience of life as a shack dweller under democracy in South Africa.

People have different definitions of democracy.

Some people say that democracy means freeing everyone to do whatever they want, regardless of rule or controls, with no instructions or boundaries, no importance to whether what is done is wrong or right.

When choices can no longer be choices - S'bu Zikode

S'bu Zikode speaking at the University of KwaZulu Natal, Durban

S'bu Zikode wrote this article in early 2007 when he was finally forced out of his job at a petrol station as punishment for his political activities with Abahlali baseMjondolo. As of March 2008 he remains unemployed.

When Choices Can No Longer Be Choices

by S'bu Zikode

The 'No Land, No House, No Vote' campaign still on for 2009

Article restating Abahlali baseMjondolo's anti-statist, anti-electoral politics seen as more or less treasonable by the state and 'ignorant' by the NGO left, some of whom suggested that Abahlali militants should be given 'voter education' so that they could be taught to 'understand democracy'.

The No Land, No House, No Vote Campaign Still on for 2009

by M'du Hlongwa

We are the restless majority - S'bu Zikode

S'bu Zikode's article after Abahlali baseMjondolo's successful anti-electoral campaign in 2006.

[i]This article by S'bu Zikode appeared in Durban's elite bourgeois newspaper, the Mercury, in July 2006. After Abahlali baseMjondolo put twenty thousand people on the streets in support of a boycott of the February 2006 local government elections in the face of major militarised state intimidation the middle classes began to concede some space to the voices of the militant poor.

The police and Abahlali baseMjondolo

Police attack demonstrators at the Foreman Road settlement in Clare Estate, Durban.

This list of police abuses suffered by Abahlali baseMjondolo between 19 March 2005 and 13 November 2007 is an important document of record.

The Police & Abahlali baseMjondolo

A List of Key Incidents of Police Harassment Suffered by Abahlali baseMjondolo
- compiled by Stephanie Lynch and Zodwa Nsibande

Struggle is a school: the rise of a shack dwellers movement in Durban, South Africa

This article by Richard Pithouse, first published in Monthly Review, charts the rise of the militant South African shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo which first emerged in 1995 and has gone from strength to strength since then despite severe state repression.

Broken Promises
On November 9, 1993, the African National Congress (ANC) issued a press statement condemning the housing crisis in South Africa as “a matter which falls squarely at the door of the National Party regime and its surrogates.” It went on to describe conditions in the informal settlements as “indecent” and announced that