Download a pdf version of this paper here and the final version published in Socialism & Democracy here.
Zabalaza, Unfinished struggles against apartheid: the shackdwellers’ movement in Durban
Talk to us … not about us.
Abahlali T Shirt
“We are on our own”: The Birth of a new movement
The struggle that started in Kennedy Road was the beginning
of a new era.
S’bu Zikode
On March 19th 2005, in a scene reminiscent of the anti-apartheid struggle, 750 Black shackdwellers barricaded a major ring road in Durban, fighting the police for four hours. By this time the shackdwellers had been waiting patiently for Nelson Mandela’s historic 1994 election promise of housing to be realized. These promised houses were to be built on a nearby piece of land.
Sacrificed to the economics of real estate and commercial development, the promise was reneged. Instead of housing, people found themselves facing bulldozers as well as removal outside the city (more than 12 miles and a ten dollar cab ride each way away) and thus far from work opportunities, schools and hospitals. Reminiscent of the apartheid practice of treating people as “surplus population,” the politics of market forces, put into relief the human reality of post-apartheid South Africa and all its broken promises.
Most of the Kennedy Road informal settlement is not “on” Kennedy Road, but is accessible through numerous paths that crisscross the hills. The people there are desperately poor. Forgotten in “booming” post-apartheid South Africa, they live without basic services like sanitation, water or electricity in shacks dug into the side of the hills built with advertising boards, corrugated iron, and mud, their temporary shelter having become more or less permanent. There was no garbage pickup, even though the perimeter wall of the Bisasar Road dump (the largest in Africa) abuts the settlement where many make a living sifting through the detritus collecting cardboard, plastic or metal to sell to recyclers in the “informal economy.”
Kennedy Road itself is on the Clare Estate, a mainly Indian middle and upper middle class residential area that is experiencing, like much of urban South Africa, sky-rocketing real estate prices. In the interstices of the estate—in the valleys and along riverbanks and against the municipal dump—there are eight different settlements, each with different histories and organization. Whereas the Kennedy Road settlement has a radically democratic political culture that took years to develop, other settlements have different forms of government with some based on political patronage. Each settlement is configured by different material realities, often limited by physical space, size and geography, which affect the possibility of such things as common meeting spaces necessary to popular democracy. But, despite these constraints, looking down from the hilltops, there is something special about the area. The real estate developers understand it, and it is a fact not lost on the shackdwellers either: they want it for the rich, opines one of the shackdwellers, Alfred Ndlovu. And according to a member of the Kwa-Zulu Natal cabinet, he is right; “we can’t build matchboxes next to 3 million rand houses.”
On March 19, 2005, despite Mandela’s promise, the developers moved in. Seeing their Promised Land being leveled, the shackdwellers acted. They brought traffic and businesses to a halt. The police, taken by surprise, called for support. They attacked with dogs and punched protestors. Fourteen were arrested, including two school-going teenagers. Still, 750 people from the Kennedy Road informal settlement in the Claire Estate, Durban, had blockaded Umgeni Road with burning tires and mattresses for four hours. Two days later, on March 21st—“Human Rights day” (that day in 1960 when apartheid police fired on a crowd of demonstrators, killing 61 in Sharpeville)—1,200 people demonstrated, demanding that the local police release the fourteen or arrest the whole community. The people had begun to press the state to be accountable; the people themselves had begun to self-consciously mobilize for their own rights.
Having been patient for more than a decade, the people’s anger had been steadily rising. Many of these hardworking people had given up hope of formal employment to follow their “entrepreneurial” aspirations (collecting cardboard, plastic or metal from the stinking dump, gardening or cleaning for residents on the Clare estate), as the World Bank suggests, in the “informal economy.” They accepted that “delivery” will be slow and that they must take responsibility for their own welfare. But they had grown “tired of living and walking in shit.” Their patience ran out as soon as they saw the bulldozers on the land that had been promised to them.
Is it any surprise then that, on that March day, the people from the Kennedy Road settlement organized quickly and staged their protest? They revolted because they felt betrayed. And although they themselves might not have seen it in these terms, their action took the form of a social movement. They saw themselves on their own against the local government, the police, business, the rich, the media and the courts—them alone. And, like the beginnings of many movements, they did not wait for the media or for professional political activists to arrive. The people already had a democratic organization, the Kennedy Road Development Committee, a forum in which to make a decision. So while they felt on their own, their social demands and dialogical and participatory democratic meetings at Kennedy Road quickly caught the imagination of adjacent communities. At the welcome-home party for the arrested, the chair of the Kennedy Road Development Committee, S’bu Zikode, who would become the chair of the shackdweller’s movement, affirmed the actions of the crowd in a memorable speech: “The first Nelson Mandela was Jesus Christ. The second was Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. The third Nelson Mandela is the poor people of the world.” The statement resonated throughout the settlements. The poor weren’t Christs, but Christ was the first Mandela, the first liberator, who articulated a new heaven on earth. Mandela is Christ reborn, grounding liberation firmly on South African soil, and his long imprisonment during apartheid is a metaphor for the nation, just as his release is identified with the birth of a new South Africa. Yet the failure of the historical Mandela, the leader, to liberate South Africa was now demanding the birth of a new Mandela: The poor themselves. Acting against the contempt and dismissal they felt from the local government, the poor were challenging post-apartheid South Africa, its vision of human dignity and participatory democracy. They had waited and decided no longer to wait. After many promises, all of them broken, they saw through the empty rhetoric of the local authorities. Enough was enough—sekwanele, sekwanele!—truth emanated from their own experiences: “the poors” have become the “reality of the nation,” declaring the shackdwellers’ movement a university because they “think their own struggles” and “are not poor in mind.” Subtly critiquing Mandela’s leadership, the poor were taking issues into their own hands, seeing themselves as the force and reason for their own liberation; they had become their own Mandelas.
Unfreedom in the dawn of Freedom
Our brothers say we born free because we born after Freedom … As teenagers we are saying there is no freedom in our life.
Pinky Zulu
Thus, even if they had not heard the term “social movement,” the shackdwellers had become a “social movement” by virtue of their self-organization and by developing their own linkages with other shackdwellers. For it was the universality of the Kennedy Road shackdwellers experience and their demand for land housing and dignity that was immediately understood by neighboring settlements. And the development of such horizontal links among shack settlements suggested a new kind of movement in the making. Two months later, in May, the people from Kennedy Road and five other shack settlements (as well as residents from local municipal flats) organized a march of over 3000 people. With banners expressing their collective will (“We Want our Land”) and homegrown political education (“The University of Kennedy Road” ), the marchers presented a memorandum of ten demands that had been drawn-up through a series of meetings and community discussions. Written by the shackdwellers and flatdwellers after careful discussion, this memorandum, which included the need for housing, jobs, sanitation, medical care, education and safety from police brutality and environmental toxins, became a people’s charter —one that referred not only to the 900,000 shackdwellers in Durban, but to the poor across South Africa, where an estimated 2.4 million households live in shacks:
We, the people of Ward 25, loyal citizens of the Republic of South Africa, unite behind the following demands:
•• For too long have our communities survived in substandard and informal housing, and for too long have we been promised land, only to be betrayed. Therefore, we demand adequate land and housing to live in dignity.
•• Our communities are ravaged by poverty, and we demand that the government create the jobs that we so desperately need. Therefore, we demand the creation of well-paying and dignified jobs.
•• In addition to providing substandard housing, the council charges rents way in excess of our communities’ ability to pay. Therefore, we demand the writing-off of all rental arrears.
•• The government treats us with contempt, believing that because we are not rich, we have not earned their respect. Therefore, we demand participation in genuinely democratic processes of consultation and citizenship.
•• Our communities are affected by crime, police racism and environmental hazards. Therefore, we demand safe and secure environments in which we can work, play and live without intimidation from the authorities.
•• Many in our communities suffer from illness, and the scourge of HIV/AIDS affects us all. Therefore, we demand well-resourced and staffed health facilities.
•• Our young people are the future of our community, yet they have very few choices. Therefore, we demand attention to the needs of our communities’ youth.
•• The council charges unaffordable rates in our flats. Therefore, we demand lower rates in flat buildings.
•• We are entitled to decent social services in our communities. Therefore we demand these services, including proper sanitation, a community garden for our poor, and free education to our communities’ orphans. Finally, for his failure to deliver these needs to his constituents, and for putting local business interests ahead of those of the poor, we therefore demand that Councillor Yacoob Baig, a career-politician since apartheid, submit his resignation.
The march ended at the offices of the local ANC councilor. There, the marchers declared that if Baig did not resign, they, his constituents, would declare that Ward 25 had no councilor. They brought along a coffin to act out Baig’s political death.
The point here is clear, but what is also worth noting is the marchers’ self-consciousness, both as a class pitted against the interest of property and as a collective pressing the government to not only deliver on their promises, but include them in their deliberations. The marchers, in other words, were self-consciously challenging the elite character of the local government and by implication the class character of the “elite transition.”
Some months later the shackdwellers movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, was launched after a meeting of 12 settlements was held at Kennedy Road. Consistently ignored by the local council and often treated as criminal and lied to, shackdwellers across Durban began to join the movement. “The only language they understand is getting us into the street” proclaimed Zikode, and throughout the following year, mass marches and demonstrations brought the plight of the Shackdwellers to local, national and even international attention with stories being featured in The Economist and other international and local media, including a full page story in The New York Times. With few resources and on a quick learning curve, the movement has been able to represent itself and also respond to misrepresentations in the media.
It soon became clear that the shackdwellers weren’t going away, and daily demonstrations and actions in all of South Africa’s major cities began occurring alongside Abahlali’s growing reputation and media presence. President Mbeki’s response to the countrywide revolts was to call for them to stop. “These are the things the youth used to do in the struggle against apartheid” and were no longer applicable, he declared, reminding the country, “we must stop this business of people going into the street to demonstrate about lack of delivery.” But there is continuity between this current struggle and the struggles against apartheid. In fact, shackdweller conditions were viewed as a consequence of apartheid. Addressed as such by Mandela and the ANC in 1993, it was widely believed that the end of apartheid would see the development of the shantytown.
The new South African constitution declares that “everyone has the right to adequate housing” and that the state must take measures to progressively realize this right. The post-apartheid government embarked on a massive new housing program. Though the attempt to deliver on its promises fell short, the reality was more than a failure of imagination. Sent out to tender, the houses became smaller, cheaper and badly built—“rush job houses” as many residents call them—much worse than some of the older apartheid township housing—that was beginning to fall apart. Moreover most of these cheap one-room toilet-sized houses had been built far off from the urban centers and were thus economically non-viable for many people for whom living close to economic opportunities, as well as to educational opportunities for their children, are central. In this context a shack in the city was a much better option. Thus when the metro Durban government’s plan for a “city without slums” is described as moving shackdwellers “to the periphery,” it is correctly understood by the shackdwellers as the return of the apartheid policy of removing “black spots” and that black people were being “pushed out of the city and dumped in the rural ghettoes.”
The reality is that shantytowns have continued to grow and have become recognized settlements, and the local government plans for housing cannot keep up. Even the practice of providing electricity connections to shack dwellers who could afford a fairly steep deposit was stopped in 2001, and other promises of toilets and taps have remained unrealized. The reality of daily life—the lack of water, the problems of sewage, the lack of electricity and the danger of fires—create dismal situations. Arguing that death from shack fires are a direct result of the municipality’s non-electrification policy, “One would have to ask,” declares Shantel Vachani in the Sunday Tribune, “What those living in informal settlements during Apartheid, supporting the ANC government throughout, have gained from years of struggle and rendered support. Where are the promises of service delivery and progressive realization of housing rights? How many Mhlengi Khumalo and Zithulele [Dhlomo] cases [a one-year old and seventy year old killed by shack fires at Kennedy Road] must occur before justice is served?”
The class character of the situation is plain. Access to “sufficient water” is guaranteed in the South African constitution, but the increasing price of water has seen water consumption drop. In the shacks, the situation is worse because lack of access results in deplorable conditions: a few taps and toilets serving thousands of people. It is not simply that those in the shacks can’t afford sufficient water and electricity—some can—but shacks burn because there is insufficient water and no electricity, and yet no fire engines arrive. As S’bu Zikode puts it, “We have seen that when the wild forests and plantations of the rich are on fire there are often large helicopters with hundreds of tons of water to extinguish the fires. But when our shacks are on fire the helicopters and ambulances are nowhere to be found …Helicopters only come for us when we march. The state comes for us when we try to say what we think.”
The booming economy has put extra threat on the land occupied by the shackdwellers. What was marginal land is now becoming prime real estate in the booming city. The local government housing officials are simply the paid hacks of the developers (schooled in the bootstrap discourse of World Bank seminars) insisting that the shackdwellers have just got to understand that it is far too expensive to build in the city and that new developments would create economic “opportunities” on the city’s margins. As each of South Africa’s big cities, Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town vie to become “world class,” namely a city without shantytowns, the government discourse about “informal settlements” has becoming increasingly reactionary: as the Africana philosopher-activist, Frantz Fanon, had described in The Wretched of the Earth forty five years ago, the existence and growth of shantytowns is seen as a sign of a constitutional depravity that must be eradicated. Sounding much like the colonial public health official of the early twentieth century, who had spoken of “the odors of the native quarters … the hordes, the stink, the swarming, the seething,” the post-apartheid government views the growth of shantytowns as “unacceptable,” using “terminology otherwise applied to life-threatening epidemics … eradication.”
This term, “Eradication,” at one at the same time, expresses the necessity of psycho-social segregation from the threat of contagion, as well as the economic segregation expressed as a protection of property value. Eradication, as Marie Huchzermeyer’s points out, aligns with the government’s “continued fixation with orderly and segregated development in South African cities” (my emphasis). Just as Fanon famously described the division of the colonial city between the European quarter—full of light and space—and the “native town”—hungry and airless—and made plain the unjust and exploitative character of the system, the post-apartheid division between the well-lit gated communities, with their gardens and paved roads, and the crowded settlements, with no amenities, expresses with brutal clarity the exploitative character of post-apartheid society.
Twelve years after the birth of a new South Africa generated by the first full and free election on April 21, 1994, 5000 South African shackdwellers from the 14 informal settlements that had joined Abahlali the preceding year came out not to celebrate freedom, but mourn “Unfreedom day.” How can “we celebrate freedom when we only hear tales of freedom or see people’s lives changed for the better in other parts of the country, but never in our communities”? S’bu Zikode asked, questioning, in effect, the state of freedom in the whole of the country. Indeed how could the country celebrate when “We cannot celebrate; we have nothing to be cheerful about,” he added, “We are the forgotten people who are expected to be content with sharing five toilets among 5000 people. How can a community of 5000 people celebrate when it is expected to make do with six taps?” Indeed, how could the country celebrate? And what can be done so the country can celebrate?
Who is S’bu Zikode?
I started to see S’bu Zikode and I thought, “this is man who knows what he is talking about, I can fight [together] with this guy” … S’bu opened our eyes.
Anton Zamisa
Government officials, politicians and intellectuals … have no idea what they are talking about. They are too high to really feel what we feel.
S’bu Zikode
The President of the Shackdweller’s movement, Abahlali’s baseMjondolo’s, is a 30-year-old former gas station worker S’bu Zikode. A father of four who has lived in the shacks for over 10 years, he is a former boy scout from a small rural town who gained distinction at school but had no money for university. In 1993 he came to Durban and rented a shack in Kennedy Road. He got a job at a gas station and was able to attend the University at Durban-Westville for a semester during the very short period of reduced student fees after the end of apartheid. In 2001 he was elected chair of the Kennedy Road Development Committee and before that the chair of the Claire Estate Slum Clearance Project. He speaks of having tried “so-called diplomacy” and recounts how he approached high profile members of the ruling party and tried to make deals about access to basic human necessities. Now he says it was “all in vain.”
Over the past year Zikode has gained national prominence, appearing on TV shows, radio and in the national and local print media with his words being reprinted in pop-culture magazines with a combined circulation of 5 million. S’bu Zikode might be the Abahlali philosopher—indeed he articulates the struggle as “thought on the ground, running”—but he has rigorously resisted calls to run for local government or be the single spokesperson of the movement. He maintains that the problems are more systemic and sees himself only as the people’s servant, elected on their behalf and subject to recall. Inviting Zikode to speak at one or another workshop, NGOs are often shocked to be told that the movement will first discuss whether or not to attend the workshop and then, if they decide to attend, will elect a representative or representatives to attend. This is no one-man show.
Nevertheless Zikode has developed a knack of talking over the head of the government to the whole country, and his message is a challenge to the nation. He reminds people what the struggle has been about in the most profound and basic terms.
In response to the shackdwellers’ threat not to vote in the 2005 local election, ANC politicians accused Abahlali of being a “Third Force.” The charge was picked up in the popular press and gained a life of its own. The accusation is as outrageous as it is threatening since it associates the shackdwellers’ movement with the murderous apartheid-sponsored violence of the early 1990s. But Zikode didn’t deny it. Instead, he cleverly turned it around, linking the struggle against apartheid not only to the struggle for basic necessities, but also to the post-apartheid government’s indifference to life in the shacks: “Government officials, politicians and intellectuals who speak about the Third Force have no idea what they are talking about. They are too high to really feel what we feel.” Quite literally, high up in their offices, they couldn’t see the people “down here” – physically, conceptually, experientially—and quite possibly the reality was that the Third Force was something the politicians could not understand: “We are driven by the Third Force, the suffering of the poor. Our betrayers are the Second Force. The First Force was our struggle against apartheid. The Third Force will stop when the Fourth Force comes. The Fourth Force is land, housing, water, electricity, health care, education, and work.” The “second force,” the ANC, had betrayed the struggle and produced not liberation but a “third force,” namely the suffering of the poor. In this logic, the as-yet unrealized fourth force was, of course, none other than a vision of the future.
In a tradition of liberation theology, Zikode was quoted in an article in the Mail & Guardian on Christmas Day 2005, reminding people that there was no holiday in the shacks: “When the evening comes, it is always a challenge. The night is supposed to be for relaxing and getting rest. But not in the jondolos. People stay awake worrying about their lives. You must see how big the rats are that run across the babies.” The point is, something had to get done. Abahlali has made its voice heard, but apart from a small grant to help clean portable toilets, little had in fact been won. Giving notice to the ANC that their vote could not be taken for granted, the shackdwellers decided to boycott the municipal elections.
Based on the equation “No Land, no home, no vote,” the shackdweller’s decision was not simply a critique of local government policy. It also spoke to the form and content of democracy in post-apartheid South Africa, which had—following the script of the elite pact “transition to democracy” program —successfully become a polyarchy based on the exclusion of the voices of the masses of poor and working people and legitimized by periodic elections. Abahlali therefore declared that it was no longer going to government offices to sit on “comfortable chairs” and listen to “crooks and liars.” In the future, “they must come and sit with us where we live.”
In Clare Estate, the ANC, unsure of the Indian middle class vote, has traditionally relied on the African shackdwellers at election time. Now, though, in response to Abahlali, it had decided to substitute class for ethnic solidarity, shifting its focus to the Indian middle class home-owners on the Clare Estate, arguing that only the ANC could save their property values, from, in other words, the shackdwellers who were claiming land and housing in the area.
Moreover the city officials’ technicist response to the concrete problems articulated by Abahlali was almost Kafkaesque. They simply stated that they were going to develop a “business plan” to “improve delivery in an integrated manner.” After years of being ignored the shackdwellers weren’t going to be fobbed off with such verbiage. Boycotting the vote was not taken lightly, but for the shackdwellers democracy meant much more than a periodic vote. The decision to boycott represented a real shift in thinking about the core values of society of post-apartheid society. For them, democracy was not reducible to a vote every five years, it was a moral concept that included reciprocity, caring, and inclusion. Thus “politics” was “too high.” Associated with the city administration and elite-decision making, the shackdwellers were speaking a different language that emanated from below and was thus grounded in the struggle of the everyday. They were concerned not with political negotiations but with principles that would emanate from an open and egalitarian moral discourse and democratic practice: “Our struggle is for moral questions, as compared to the political questions as such. It is more about justice,” declares Zikode. “Is it good for shackdwellers’ to live in mud like pigs, as they are living? Why do I live in a cardboard house if there are people who are able to live in a decent house? So it is a moral question.”
Just as the struggle against apartheid brought the vote, the shackdwellers’ struggle has challenged the meaning of the vote and given a voice to the poorest of the poor: “Now the tide has turned,” says Zikode, “you are hearing from the horses’ mouth…we have come out to say this is who we are, this is where we are and this is what they want.”
Thinking in the Communities
It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that is understood by graduates in law and economics, you can easily provide that the masses have to be managed from above. But if you speak the language of the everyday… then you will realize that the masses are quick to seize every shade of meaning… Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand…The more people understand, the more watchful they become and the more they come to realize that everything depends on them.
Fanon
Fazel Khan [an academic at the University involved with Abahlali] has already indicated that he has seven taps and a number of toilets. He also has a vehicle to move around. Therefore he cannot be compared to a person who has nothing…. We from Abahlali are living at the grass root level. There is no one below us…. Some of our people are doing cleaning at this university. They also have important things to say.
Zikode
In a paper presented at the Centre for Civil Society at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in March 2005, Zikode explained that the shackdweller’s conception of politics is not about political office; it is a politics of the poor in the language of the people. And participation is based on a shared experience and the political practice dependent on democratic meetings in the settlements: “Our politics is a traditional home politics which is understood very well by all the old mamas and gogos [grannies] because it affects their lives and gives them a home.” It is a language which all can speak and understand and thus creates a situation which is consciously collective. In Zikode’s words, “we look after each other and think about the situation and plan our fight together.” Zikode’s notion is a challenge to the elite politics that has characterized the post-apartheid transition and its technicist aftermath. It is not a question of empowerment, or inclusion in terms of having a seat at the policy table, but a challenge to alienation inherent in the attitudes and proposals of the housing policy experts. And it is an alienation that is a result of the elite attitude toward the poor, as well as the poor’s systemic exclusion from any policy decisions made about them.
Thus, at first, the Kennedy Road movement saw itself as a movement unto itself. It was utterly divorced from social movement or NGO left discourses. A year later, in a presentation at the Centre for Civil Society, Zikode directly linked the self-activity of the shackdwellers, not only to housing politics, but also to national politics:
We believe that the housing policy does not only require housing specialists, rich consultants and government. We believe that housing policy requires most importantly, the people who need the houses. But [my emphasis] we also know, as poor communities and as Shackdwellers that the broader poor have no choice but to play a role in shaping and reshaping this country into an anti-capitalist system.
And this alternative, he added, comes out of the “thinking that we do in communities”.
The challenge to the academics and intellectuals in the setting of the university was quite clear; it required listening to and taking seriously the thinking that is done in the communities. In other words, it is about challenging the preconceived idea of who does the thinking and where it is done. This is not simply about entitlement or asserting ownership over a meeting, but to appreciate that the people who know a situation should do the thinking so they can demand a “more reality based, and a more scientific and effective mode of operation.” Rather than an application of dialectics to a situation, the demand for concreteness in the Marxian sense involves tracing the dialectic that arises out of the struggle, and thus is a challenge to theory and theoreticians.
Historical antecedents: where did this come from
The kind of thinking that thinks about “alternatives” in a radically open way doesn’t come from the ANC tradition, which has always been an elite and often dogmatic organization, but it certainly was part of the anti-apartheid “civic” struggle and incipient trade union organizations of the late 1970s and 1980s.
Today people come to Abahlali with different political histories and traditions. There are people who consider themselves ANC, and there are those who were part of the United Democratic Front and other anti-apartheid organizations during the late apartheid period, and there are those with no political identification. Yet these traditions had little resonance at the birth of the Kennedy Road movement. Even though they supported the ANC, the struggle language still used by the ANC to legitimate its policies had no resonance with life in the settlements. What was important instead was the autonomous democratic culture that had developed in the settlement, and it is indeed this that remains central as the movement has grown and incorporated and re-appropriated other struggle languages, even anti-capitalist discourses. And as Abahlali has developed, its discontinuity with the earlier struggle has morphed into a sense of continuity with the earlier struggle’s unfinished character. As Sibusiso Mzimela put it, “The struggle against apartheid has been a little achieved …. That’s why we’re still in the struggle, to make sure things are done right. We’re still on the road; we’re still … struggling.”
Ashwin Desai caught one expression of this new post-apartheid identity in his book, We are the Poors, about the housing struggle at Chatsworth, Durban that took place in the late 1990s. The title of the book came from a response by an “elderly aunty,” Girlie Amod, to an ethnic slur by a local ANC councillor. Amod’s declaration, “we are not Indians, we are the poors,” which was immediately echoed “we are not Africans, we are the poors,” was not simply a announcement that class trumped ethnicity but a critique of elite multiculturalism, as well as post-apartheid ethnic politics, and new statement of consciousness where the very localized and marginalized struggles for survival of poor people were beginning to have national reverberations. It was not the poor as the object of sociological study, but the poors as a self-identification—perhaps also with new biblical undertones: the poors shall inherit the world.
Though the Chatsworth movement petered out, it was a turning point that was caught by Desai. The shackdwellers had no knowledge of the Chatsworth struggles when they began their struggle, but the rapid growth of the shackdweller’s movement indicates that Girlie Amod’s pronouncement was no mere local phrase lost in the day-to-day struggle for survival. Indeed the concreteness of this new self-consciousness is also expressed by Abahlali’s expansion beyond the shack settlements, coming to include formal housing estates and street traders among its members. Abahlali now also has a good number of Indian members.
The Laziness of the intellectuals?
It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness …will give rise to tragic mishaps.
Fanon
Labor produces marvels for the rich … it produces palaces, but hovels for the worker… The worker feels himself to be freely active only in his animal functions—eating drinking and procreating, or at most also in his dwelling and personal adornment—while in his human functions he is reduced to an animal.
Marx
The shantytown sanctions the native’s biological decision to invade the enemy fortress.
Fanon
Shackdwellers’ revolts are often considered as necessarily spontaneous, fragmented and disorganized. According to some Marxists, shackdwellers are individualistic and reactionary, living in a world of scarcity, a Hobbesian “natural” world of all against all, and their revolts are highly combustive, energetic, violent and short.
Because shackdwellers are poor, they spend an inordinate amount of time taking care of “animal” needs, which many, who don’t count the number of taps in their house, take for granted. Consequently, it is argued that there is no time for building organizations. The point is not to primitivize or romanticize shack life: Certainly, in the settlements, there are thieves and charlatans, gangs, drugs and rape; there are those who struggle and those who are tired; there are those who stay and those who leave. In other words, the “informal communities” of the shacks often take on a formal life of their own; they have become formal structures that stay up for years, and life and life’s struggles are much like those in any other poor working class community. But from these generalizations, it is difficult to see how a common clarity can emerge from such contradictory everyday experiences and how a shackdwellers’ organization has developed in and around Durban.
Mike Davis’ popular Planet of the Slums is one such narrative that paints a depressing account of the exponential growth of informal settlements as devoid of human subjectivity. Those who live in the slums are uniformly defined as either a “lumpen” or reactionary mass produced by an economics of survival. What lies behind Davis’ position is his theoretical claim that the slum is the solution, “warehousing the twenty-first century’s surplus humanity,” where life is a social Darwinian struggle of the survival of the fittest and a “self-consuming violence.” While we might debate whether this warehousing allows for the development of a social community or only produces a violent struggle of all against all for the scraps, there should also be no doubt that rather than simply warehousing the “surplus population,” many of those who live in the “informal” settlements, whether they work in the formal economy or not, are very much part of the working class. But Davis doubts that such a diverse dispossessed population has access to “the culture of collective labor or large scale class struggle.” Consequently the left is absent from the slums, where Marx has given way to Mohammed.
If Davis’s theoretical pessimism is built on a narrow conception of class struggle, Slavoj Zizek’s theoretical, perhaps romantic optimism is based on another series of generalizations. Zizek argues that the slum dwellers like Marx’s proletariat are free in a double sense; they have nothing and they have a degree of autonomy outside the state. Yet he celebrates, rather than investigates, the contradictory conditions of this “autonomy.” For Marx, the proletariat’s freedom is ironic and negative. They are free to starve, or sell their labor power “freely.” The slumdwellers are autonomous in this sense too, since they are also products of the absolute law of capitalist accumulation, the increasing concentration of wealth at one pole and the accumulation of misery, agony and brutality at another. The increasing migration to the urban areas is part of the same process, the production of an industrial reserve army who are forced to rely on their wits for day-to-day survival in the “informal economy.” The growing number of shackdwellers and urban slumdwellers can be considered a product of the double processes of primitive accumulation and concentration and centralization of capital—inclusion and exclusion. Davis’ idea of warehousing and Zizek’s notion of autonomy are rooted in privileging this exclusionary moment. The logical end of Marx’s “absolute law” is that the unemployed army wrecks capitalism. For Marx, the conscious, subjective side of the equation is produced by the increasing socialization of labor and the cooperative form the of labor process. Zizek’s argument gestures to Marx’s absolute law. In place of Marx’s cooperative form, he contends that being thrown into this situation “they have to invent some mode of being together.” Framed this way, perhaps we can schematically think about autonomy in two ways, a negative autonomy with the need to set up settlements outside the gaze of the state, and a positive autonomy, which, in defiance of the state, can blossom in daily life within these interstitial spaces and include the development of systems of governance based on collective democratic practices.
To be sure, many squatter settlements develop under the radar, in marginal spaces, and thus outside the gaze of the authorities. These settlements develop by necessity, and over time become permanent, with established working rules. And one cannot be cavalier about necessity, the existence of a settlement does not guarantee the development of a democratic self-governing structures. At the same time, autonomy from the state is not necessarily a threat to the state’s legitimacy, as Zizek might think. Since the shack settlements are illegal occupations, their continued existence depends on remaining subterranean and in effect outside the state. Thus one cannot understress the reality that such autonomous practices develop out of necessity, in dire situations, but it is also precisely in these autonomous spaces that both potentially radical and reactionary social and cultural practices, as well as various systems of governance, can develop and are contested.
But in as far as autonomy is contingent on a settlement’s marginalization, Zizek’s conception of the settlement’s freedom from the state may seem like freedom only from a distance, from on “high,” where shackdwellers remain an abstraction, willfully ignored on the part of the state. Indeed the shackdwellers’ movement is not a struggle to maintain this kind of negative autonomy, nor is it a struggle for wholesale inclusion. In fact their struggle is potentially risky because it endangers an element of their thriving “positive autonomy” of being outside the gaze of the state. Once shackdwellers make demands on the state, they not only become subject to the state’s administration, but also to its increasing scrutiny. Since services have not been delivered, nor promises honored, the shackdwellers’ movement has experienced the state’s force, but only negatively. Once the movement used extra-parliamentary means to pressure the state—mass mobilizations, the courts, and the media, and so on—the movement became subject to the state’s scrutiny and violence. And carrying out their threat to boycott the local election has now resulted in the further political banishment and criminalization of Abahlali, yet at the same time it allowed the shackdwellers to move from being on their own to becoming a political movement, challenging the political business as usual. They have developed the political autonomy of “being of their own” to becoming a grassroots poor peoples’ organization based on transparent democratic principles that demand such principles from the state as well.
As a consciously organized democratic struggle, the movement is an attempt to extend control over day-to-day life in the shacks. In that sense, the material struggle for toilets, taps and running water would give them more control over their lives. But the content of the demands are inseparable from their form. They don’t simply want things to be administered from above, nor do they want political power, which would subject them to such administrative power from above. They are not merely struggling for “delivery” but for a vision of a different kind of politics.
One theoretical problem is navigating the culture of the day-to-day and the development of politically conscious individuals in democratic organization over time. Post-apartheid social movements are often considered “popcorn” movements, spontaneous eruptions that quickly organize and tap into resources from NGOs and other organizations that lend support and communication. But as they erupt quickly, they also die off quickly. While they are celebrated by the far-left for having qualities of autonomy, they are criticized by the orthodox left for not being explicitly socialist and often viewed as led by lumpenproletarian elements, rather than what they consider the working class.
Abahlali has suffered from this critique, as well as from the charges from the ANC that they represent a counter-revolutionary “Third force.” But Abahlali has proved to be more than a popcorn movement. Where other movements die off after the first wave of collective euphoria wanes and difficulties emerge, Abahlali has created a democratic organization and weathered a storm of attacks. It has most vigilantly insisted that the voices of the poor not only be heard but that the poor be respected as thinking and actional human beings. This has helped engender a profoundly democratic spirit in the Abahali branches and settlements. Despite all the maneuverings against it, attempts at division, the criminalization and smearing of the movement as a third force, a counter-revolutionary force, and so on, Abahlali has now existed for two years and has grown in stature and in numbers. It is clearly a movement whose time has come. And my argument here is that the importance of shackdwellers as a challenge to the post-apartheid elite, local government functionaries, NGO paternalism, as well as the strongmen in the shantytowns, is based on their self-organization.
What is the meaning of the shackdwellers’ movement?
As mentioned, the movement began with an understanding that the shackdwellers were on their own. Fragmented, alienated and cut off, they have discovered a tremendous solidarity among themselves, across Durban and beyond. They have discovered a larger struggle. They have seen footage of shantytown struggles in Haiti and Latin America; they have spoken with activists across the country and the African continent. They are still on their own, but it is also understood as positively constructive; their “autonomy” is grounded in a belief in the idea that change will come from their own actions, that they are their own agent of liberation. The shackdwellers’ struggle is not simply a fight for inclusion, but a struggle to the change terms of inclusion. The autonomy that is in part a product of their marginalization and in part a product of the struggles against apartheid was used by the shackdwellers to create their own political organization indicates that they are neither powerless, nor without ideas. They resist being moved out to peri-urban areas because they understand that it is better to live in the shacks in the urban areas than to live on the periphery, even further from employment opportunities, schools and hospitals. They want ambulances and fire-engines to serve their communities and criticize the class character of a state that serves rich people but lets the shacks burn without a fire engine in sight. And while they are continually forced to protect themselves and rely on their own collective endeavors for survival, they have created autonomous democratic spaces where they make working decisions over their own rules and structures of governances. And Abahlali has developed a culture of democracy that has spread among the settlements; indeed it has made democratic governance a condition of settlement affiliation. Thus they are quite able to decide policies over their future and are used to governing themselves.
Yet, as I have been suggesting, the situation is ambiguous. Abahlali demand services and insist on being subject to no one. They want taps and police protection, but they also understand that the police have and will harass them. In other words they want inclusion in the post-apartheid liberal democratic state, but they want to democratize the state and change the meaning of politics on their own terms.
In short, the shackdwellers’ movement is built on the reason of the poor who, as Fanon puts it, “cannot conceive of life otherwise than in the form of a battle against exploitation, misery, and hunger,” and through that struggle that a fighting culture and principle emerge. Their idea of politics is thus not focused on the state, which, with its bureaucratic and technicist language and administrative mentality, acts to depoliticize politics. By encouraging their own and other poor people’s voices, voices currently silenced in the official politics of South Africa, to speak, to be heard, to be part of the discussion, they have opened up new spaces for alternative political thinking.
The declaration that “we are human beings” is echoed in the Abahlali shackdwellers’ outrage at the politicians for taking no notice of the conditions in which they live. In interviews and on the Giles and Khan’s film, “Breyani for the councillor,” we hear the shackdwellers speaking of the conditions they have been enduring and asking, “should anyone have to live like this”? There is no abstract discussion of ethics, no discourses on points of view; the discussion of what kind of home human beings should live in is grounded in concrete conditions revolving around taps, sanitation, light, and warmth. But at the same time, this is not simply a technical issue about the redistribution of resources (though it includes that); it is a most concrete reflection on being human, about the fact that human beings should live in a home fit for human beings. The shackdwellers don’t only demand things—they don’t only want redistribution—they also demand recognition. By arguing that they want inclusion in the decision-making process about policies that effect them, they hold out a conception of politics as one in which all the excluded and poor in South Africa should be included in a different kind of politics, politics from the ground up. In other words, theirs is a demand for recognition, but not simply in terms of a politics of recognition in the liberal tradition of “inclusion” in a political or even legal system; theirs is a demand for recognition based on a simple premise: the people who live in the shacks are the most knowledgeable about them. They take the freedom, newly won in the struggles against apartheid, seriously and want this freedom to be truly equal. . And while fighting for what is guaranteed by the South African constitution is an important strategy, what is at stake is the need to address deep-rooted structures of economic inequality that are legacies of apartheid and colonialism. In that sense the demand for “redistribution” is a real and urgent one, but I want to argue that it is moreover a critique of elite-driven politics, be that right wing, top down, technocracy or “left wing technocraticism,” NGO paternalism and vanguardism. The shackdwellers are stakeholders in housing policy and moreover seek to be an essential part of decision-making.
No longer on their own: A movement whose time has come
The people stagnate deplorably in unbearable poverty; slowly they awaken to the unutterable treason of their leaders.
Fanon
Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs.
Marx
The emergence of the shackdwellers’ movement has not been simply a product of mechanical forces. The movement appears spontaneous, local and specific, but is in fact something that has been long thought about and expresses something much more universal. What allowed the Kennedy Road actions to develop from a demonstration into a mass movement was the democratic organization that had already existed. In contrast to other shackdweller revolts occurring at the same time, the revolt at Kennedy Road was a product of an organized community that was able, for example, to support those who were arrested and, in being able to do so, had articulated the beginnings of a new movement. The shackdwellers movement is also unlike the movements against eviction (such as in Chatsworth and in the Western Cape) because they were not fighting to defend what they had, but for what they should have—indeed what had been promised to them (which goes to explain the moral dimension of their argument). Indeed the Kennedy Road settlement’s initial demand that the council not renege on its promises did not even threaten the interests of commercial banks. What made them effective was the settlement’s degree of autonomy, which allowed them the space to develop a culture of democracy.
Of course the movement is defined by more than its “founding” event, but the founding event has now become a story oft repeated. Indeed that event is the nodal point, but here I am interested in how it has become a moment, philosophically speaking— how it has transcended the particular event., The movement cannot be explained by issues of resource mobilization or the aid of outside forces or even necessarily to the event’s material success. What was expressed through the settlement’s self-mobilization and heard was its insistence on open meetings where all could speak and hash out issues, coupled with the straightforwardness of their demands and its moral suasion. The rest was word-of-mouth and personal communication so that by the end of the year, a new organization, Abahlali baseMjondolo, had been born. And if Abahlali’s will to growth (it now represents 30,000 people living in shack, flats and tin houses) is tempered, it is only because it stresses the importance of its principle. Each shack settlement that joins, each new branch that forms, has to follow the democratic principles of Abahlali. Each march requires a number of meetings and meeting of subcommittees, as well as communication between settlements. Press releases are written, discussed and distributed. Each settlement and branch has its own autonomous committees that then send delegates to Abahlali. The Abahlali meetings rotate between all the affiliated settlements and are usually attended by about thirty to forty elected representatives from the various committees and are open to all residents from the local settlements. It is worth noting that thought the democratic culture of the organization has spread across the settlements that it doesn’t always overcome authoritarianism. Even where settlements have strong Abahlali activists it has been difficult to get beyond the armed authoritarianism of ‘leaders’ who trade votes for private deals with the state.
Governed on such a grass roots democratic basis, with meetings open to all adults (regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, origin and length of time in residence), each settlement has at least one weekly meeting, and representatives from each of the settlements elected each week meet as Abahlali baseMjondolo every Saturday. Every day there are a number of meetings of various sub-committees. The meetings are very formal, with decisions arrived at by consensus and with an emphasis on the inclusive process of “listening to others’ ideas” and of “being together.”
Thus the movement has remained very suspicious of outsiders who try to speak for it or take over. But it has also come to understand who its real friends and enemies are. At its birth, three activist academics at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, who believed that the poor should speak for themselves, helped put the shackdwellers get in touch with lawyers and typed up press releases. These people became trusted through their acts of support and connectivity.
When Fanon wrote in the Wretched that intellectuals needed to put themselves in the school of the people, he had in mind a grounding of new concepts in what Zikode calls “thinking that is done in the communities.” This thinking, which emerges from experience, is at one and same time pragmatic and critical. Ideas and formulas repeated at meeting help generate new ways of knowing in the communities. In the case of Abahlali, the movement’s intellectuals and its leaders are truly organic to it. They live in the settlements, and this goes a long way to address the problematic of separation of the intellectuals from the masses that preoccupied Fanon. The shackdwellers movement has recognized this and demands that university and NGO activists work with them rather than speak about or for them. Yet it is when activist academics make such a commitment that they run directly into university administrations and state security forces. This is exactly what has happened at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. All three of the academics that worked closely with Abahlali in the first year of the struggle have come under enormous pressure from the University, resulting in two of them leaving and the third fighting to keep his job. This should not come as a surprise since the University’s mission is grounded in the idea of becoming an exclusive world-class public institution, which means, of course, looking to the Northern donors for legitimation. The thinking and action of the shackdwellers is most definitely excluded from such lofty plans. Hence the praxis of academics, who work with Abahlali, is seen as a threat to its world-class, elite, goals.
Richard Pithouse, a philosopher by training who taught at the University of Durban Westville in the late 1990s before becoming a research fellow at the Centre for Civil Society, has played an important part in the development of Abahlali. Since there have been absurd accusations that he is the white man behind the movement, one needs to be careful that in reaction to such provocations the actual role of this committed middle class activist is not understated. It is crucial to avoid the pitfalls of social movement “resource mobilization” literature that overstates the role of “outsiders.” Such a position is exemplified by the vanguardist left but also among paternalistic liberals and leads (especially in the South African situation) to racist and classist thinking that poor and marginalized people can’t organize and think for themselves. The situation is complex and complicated and I am not going to be able to do it justice here, but since the issue is important it must be addressed.
For Fanon, the intellectual who enrolls in the “school of the people”—marvelously articulated on the banners at marches, as the “University Of Kennedy Road” or the “University of Abahlali”—does not come empty handed. Fanon’s point is that to appreciate the creativity of the wretched of the earth does not mean transferring the responsibility for the working out of principles and concepts onto the backs of the people. Indeed intellectuals from outside must come to the school having cleared their heads of conceptions of the “backwardness” of the masses. But this does not mean that they must come with an empty head. Indeed this would be an expression of their bad faith. Conscious of their own thinking, they bring ideas, concepts, and learning that can aid the people’s own self-understanding and thereby in a sense work to make themselves redundant. This is exactly where the problematic begins. The danger is underestimating the role of the outside activist, who can put their expertise to the service of the people. Pithouse himself insisted on this Fanonian position that the militant’s work was to destroy the spirit of discouragement marginal people feel and to help them build their confidence in their own right to resist through discussions that explore viable modes of resistance. Having worked with and written about social movements in post-apartheid South Africa, Pithouse brought a practical knowledge of the kind of movements that had been successful and those which had not. Turning the anthropological gaze on its head he became an informant on how to engage with the state, how to express opposition and helped to explain the problematics of the donor and NGO terrain. But he stresses that while he was an active participant in the discussions that gave rise to, and sustained the development of Abahlali baseMjondolo, he was one of many each of whom bought particular experiences and skills to the table. Thus, following Fanon, he, together with Raj Patel and Fazel Khan, put himself in the school of the people and became part of the ongoing discussions about the creation of Abahlali baseMjondolo. His actions exemplify those of Fanon’s committed intellectual, who uses knowledge snatched from the elite university to help the “wretched’s” self-government. From the perspective of the institutional elite university, this is really incendiary since universities (accredited through technical language and designed in Fanon’s terms to “cheat the people” ) consider this knowledge part of their intellectual property and are not particularly happy when researchers share their knowledge with poor people who will use it to challenge the establishment, which includes the university itself. For these universities, knowledge, and therefore power, flow the other way: Rather than sharing knowledge with the subalterns to empower the subalterns, the researchers’ role is to bring back the knowledge snatched from the subalterns to the university to reinforce its walls, build it ever higher.
The point, in other words, is not to praise Abahlali but to engage with it. Fanon argues that one of the most important challenges facing the nation after independence is the work that is needed to overcome the “spirit of discouragement” and promote the confidence in the masses of their own self-understanding. The challenge to take the thinking of the poor seriously, as Zikode has insistently pointed out, and taking the thinking of the poor seriously is just the starting point to working out, as Fanon puts it in the conclusion to the Wretched of the Earth, “new concepts.”
Zikode’s challenge to radical academics to bring “our university” (of Abahlali baseMjondolo) to “your university” (i.e. UKZN) reflects the importance the movement puts on the power of thought and on theory that elucidates the “objective situation.” As Marx put it, “minds are always connected by invisible threads with the body of the people,” and when the movement from practice is a form of theory it is not limited to developing solidarity; it is to make a meeting of the minds. This idea, articulated also by Fanon, was taken seriously by the three activists who initially started working with the Kennedy Road movement.
Abahlali’s deputy President, Philani Zungu, understands the class politics and simple materiality of the university’s actions against sympathetic academics in a series of rhetorical questions: “Why are we not allowed to work with academics at the university? Why are academics at the university not allowed to work with the poor? The answer is clear. This democracy is not for us. We must stay silent so that this truth can be kept hidden. This democracy is for the rich who will build and then enjoy themselves at uShaka, King Senzagakhona Stadium and King Shaka Airport. We will only go to these places to protect and clean up for the rich.” Zungu understands that the University’s actions against academics who work with the poor is not a conspiracy, but the result of what Marx called the hallmark of class society, the division between mental and manual labor. Indeed Zungu adds, “Fazel Khan, a sociologist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), is facing charges for speaking to the media…. With other academics, academics who are already gone from the University, he has spoken to the poor instead of for the poor. He has worked with the poor instead of with the rich in the name of the poor.”
The birth of the movement resulted in a nuancing of attitudes. Voices are being heard that were once silent, and voices of the poor are being heard in spaces where they do not usually speak, such as newspapers, radio and television, on the internet and in academic journals. The feeling of isolation and the feeling of struggling alone have been offset by concrete experiences and new connections. Abahlali developed because other shack settlements saw an affinity with the Kennedy Road struggle, and through this development, the Kennedy Road movement made connections that allowed them access to people across the city and country. A struggle that began locally, with people seeing the councillor as the major problem, is now seeing a more systematic problem. And there has been a radical mutation of ideas. In May 2005, the shackdwellers’ experiences of working in and living next to a middle class and upper class Indian community on the Clare Estate could have easily led to the belief that the source of suffering was directly linked to Indian anti-African racism. Yet, by September 2005, shackdwellers were collecting hard -earned cash to pay for a taxi to support people in the predominantly Indian working class suburb of Bayview. Over time some NGOs and other individuals have given practical support, but Abahlali is not dependent on any external funds. In fact, from the first day, the wealth of the movement has been measured by the energy, commitment and enthusiasm of its members and its self-organization. Still, Abahlali remain particularly concerned about their ability to maintain their political autonomy within the democratic structure of the organization. “It’s quite interesting because sometimes we are aware that these organisations have got money but they don’t have constituents, you know, people,” says Zikode, “Abahlali is the poor struggle – struggle of the poor – therefore money will not tempt us…. we cannot therefore be bought.” In other words, Abahlali is aware of the potentially disastrous effects of external funding on a poor people’s movement, that it may not only broker a movement but also potentially destroy it. Again Zikode reminds us that human beings do not live on bread alone. They are poor, he says, they know that, and they might be poor in life, but they are not poor in mind. One cannot but appreciate the dignity and “the nobility which burst forth from these toil-worn” people, for it is among these “wretched” shackdwellers that the practical and ethical challenge to post-apartheid South Africa has most profoundly emerged.