Richard Pithouse
Resisting degradations and divisions: an interview with S'bu Zikode
S’bu Zikode is the elected president of Abahlali baseMjondolo, a radical and radically democratic shackdwellers’ movement in South Africa that has committed itself to waging its struggles independently from party-political and NGO control.[1] This is an excerpt from a longer interview.
Richard Pithouse: What is your understanding of a living politics?
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.
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
