Abahlali baseMjondolo

Every year the militant South African shack dweller's movement Abahlali baseMjondolo holds 'unFreedom Day' on the national public holiday 'Freedom Day'. This year it went ahead with a police helicopter circling just above the assembly after an initial police attempt to ban the event was seen off.

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.

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.

A statement by the Poor People's Alliance following the shack fire summit called by Abahlali baseMjondolo

Text of a speech by S'bu Zikode at the Diakonia Council of Churches Economic Justice Forum in Durban on 28 August 2008 addressing the housing…

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.

An essay on the May 2008 pogroms in South Africa. First published in Sanhati.

In recent days the shack settlements around Johannesburg have been torn apart by appalling violence…

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.

Freedom Day, 27 April, is the major national holiday in the civic religion of post-apartheid South Africa. The poor are usually herded into…

Abahlali baseMjondolo has long sought to politicise fire & shit: to show that people suffer fires because electricity is refused, to show that…

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.