South Africa
Simon Saunders Interviews Abahlali baseMjondolo in London
Interview with a South African housing activist about recent struggles in Durban.
Many activists in South Africa's largest shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) have been fighting over the issue of housing rights for 15 years now.
After the fall of apartheid in 1994, the new ANC government wrote into the constitution that the shack dwellers, living four or five to a room in hovels at the centre of South Africa's wealthiest cities, should have homes.
Striking South African soldiers sacked
Nearly 700 soldiers from the South African defence force have been sent letters of dismissal following last week's strike action.
Up to 3,000 military personal clashed with the police on the streets of Pretoria during demonstrations over pay and conditions. The action was condemned by both the defence minister and the secretary general of the ruling party, the ANC. The soldiers' union says the sackings are illegal and will inflame tensions.
The elite and community protests in South Africa
Shawn Hattingh gives an anarchist view on the community and workers revolt sweeping South Africa.
Municipal workers strike across South Africa
Over 150,000 municipal workers in South Africa have gone on strike in a dispute over paltry pay offers in the face of massive inflation.
In an overwhelming display of unity, over 150,000 workers employed by municipalities and belonging to both South African Municipal Workers' Union (SAMWU) and Independent Municipal and Allied Trade Union (IMATU) across the country rejected the latest wage offer of the employer body, South African Local Government Association-SALGA.
Detention without trial - Thames Valley Class Struggle Group
Leaflet distributed at an anti-apartheid demonstration, in an attempt to put across an anti-capitalist and anti-democratic position, in contrast to the liberal politics of most of the anti-apartheid movement.
Detention without trial, judicial executions, mass evictions and demolitions of homes, murder on the street. This is the daily reality for the working class of the South African townships. But the repression of our class is not dependent on Apartheid alone.
Mass rebellion in South Africa
In South Africa the state is being confronted by an eruption of self organised popular protest on a scale not seen since the 1980s. This article, from the mainstream press there, gives a much better overview than the articles in the British press that miss the politics of the rebellion.
Burning message to the state in the fire of poor’s rebellion
Richard Pithouse
Nationwide strike at South African World Cup building sites
Some 70,000 construction workers in South Africa have gone on strike, halting work on stadiums being built for the 2010 World Cup.
Unions are threatening to continue the strike as long as necessary if their demands for a 13% wage increase are not met. Organisers say they are confident the grounds will still be ready, unless the strike continues for months.
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
Zabalaza, Unfinished Struggles against Apartheid: The Shackdwellers’ Movement in Durban
This article by Nigel Gibson gives an overview of the emergence of Abahlali baseMjondolo in 2005. Much has changed since then - the movement has grown enormously and the early ambivalence about the ANC on the part of some militants was decisively broken in 2006 - but this is a classic account of the early days of the movement.
By Nigel C. Gibson in Socialism and Democracy
Talk to us … not about us.
-- Abahlali T Shirt
If as a theoretician, one’s ears are attuned to new impulses from the workers, new “categories” will be created, a new way of thinking, a step forward in philosophic cognition.
-- Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom
“We are on our own”: The Birth of a New Movement
South Africa: Now and Then
A collection of texts beginning with the post-apartheid class struggle up till February 2005, but going back to texts on the movements of the 70s and 80s written at that time, which critique the ANC, the Black Consciousness Movement and other organisational forms.
[center] 3 texts on aspects of the South African Revolution 1976 - 1985:
"South Africa 1985: The organisation of power in black and white" (Aug. 1985)
The movement in 1980: extract from "The Poverty Of Berkeley Life" (May 1983)
"Reflections On The Black Consciousness Movement and the South African Revolution" (Aug. 1979)
plus a long INTRODUCTION on the situation up until February 2005
