July 06 2015
Abahlali baseMjondolo Responses to the Fraudulent Article Published in Politikon
In 2006 Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign walked out of a NGO controlled meeting [The Social Movements Indaba – SMI] hosted by the Centre for Civil Society, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The two grassroots movements were excluded from planning and formulating the agenda of the meeting, something that had been very common among the NGOs for a long time. Instead we were just bussed in as nothing more than spectators to meetings organised in the name of our lives and struggles. We decided to walk out of the meeting because we wanted to be in control of our own struggles as autonomous movements. The response from the NGOs and academics linked to the SMI was very similar to how the state responds when poor people want to think and organize for ourselves. For instance Mondli Hlatshwayo, the boss of the SMI who was working at an NGO known as Khanya College at the time, publicly referred to us as criminals. In the nine years since our walk-out there has been ongoing defamation and slander against Abahlali baseMjondolo, and people who have supported our movement, from within and around the Centre for Civil Society. There have also been incidents of intimidation, harassment, and attempts at censorship.
Grassroots activists in other organisations that have also challenged NGO control over their struggles and movements have been subject to similar attacks (e.g. Lynn Munusamy, Ayanda Kota). It is clear to us that class prejudice and racism are major factors in this.
This slander and defamation against our movement was mainly circulated on Patrick Bond’s email list. Nobody that we took seriously ever took it seriously. However at the end of last year an article appeared in an academic journal entitled “The Rise and Fall of Abahlali baseMjondolo” written in the name of Bandile Mdlalose. Ms. Mdlalose joined the movement in 2010, and was expelled in 2014 for serious impropriety relating to membership fees.
Residents in the Mandela Complex in Newlands West had publicly claimed that Ms Mdlalose took money from them to fly to Johannesburg to meet with lawyers from Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI). No such meetings occurred and therefore the community felt that they had been betrayed. Eventually the community of Mandela Complex was evicted from their flats and rendered homeless in part as a result of what they termed her dishonesty. Activists in the community stated that Ms Mdlalose failed to secure a lawyer and told the court that she represented the community but failed to share any documents pertaining to the matter with the community.
Immediately after her expulsion, Ms Mdlalose began working closely with Patrick Bond and the Centre for Civil Society, where she is currently employed. She founded her own movement called the Community Justice Movement. She told many people that Patrick Bond was her funder and that Ashwin Desai, an academic close to Patrick Bond, was writing her statements.
At the same time numerous emails were sent from Ms. Mdlalose’s address to a long list of academics around the world making brazenly untrue and plainly defamatory statements about our movement and various individuals. These emails made very similar statements to those that have circulated on Patrick Bond’s email list over the last 9 years.
When the article appeared in Politikon, and was widely circulated from Ms. Mdlalose’s email address – along with a totally untrue and defamatory implication that we had murdered a security guard in Durban – we issued a statement that explained some of the context for this attack, that the murder in question was a criminal matter entirely unrelated to our movement and indicated that we would prepare a reply to the article.
We asked for the right to reply and this was granted in principle but later denied in practice. First of all we were not given enough time to respond since we had to, as a movement, arrange a collective process to develop a response. Additionally we were not given enough space to respond as we were limited to 3,000 words. Despite these constraints we were able to hold an all day meeting and draft a collective response. However, the reviews from the journal were hostile, and we were not allowed to say anything about the context of this attack, or to point to clear evidence of deliberate dishonesty in the piece. Furthermore while the original piece provided no evidence for its claims we had to provide evidence, in the form of academic citations for every claim that we made. We were even told that we must provide evidence that our members had been assassinated and that we were attacked in Kennedy Road in 2009. Despite the clear double standard, and the fact that we were not given enough time to develop a new draft, we still managed to submit a second draft. This draft was longer because we were trying to provide evidence for what we were saying as requested by the editors but it was rejected on the grounds that it was too long. The editor made changes which prevented us from pointing to documented evidence of dishonesty in the original piece.
We were not allowed to state that Ms Mdlalose was expelled from our movement on the 6th of April. It was said that because Ms. Mdlalose took us to the CCMA to demand reinstatement (she was not successful) we could only state that she “left our movement on the 6th of April in contentious circumstances”.
Once again we were not given enough time for the third draft, but we were still able to find a way to submit a 3rd draft. The editor made changes to this draft without our permission and when we received it from the publisher (Taylor & Francis) we could not accept it as it was no longer a truthful account of events. For instance we were still not allowed to state that Ms Mdlalose was expelled from our movement, even though this is a documented fact.
We don’t know whether the journal is trying to protect itself, Mrs. Mdlalose, Patrick Bond, or the Centre for Civil Society but while we were given the right to respond in principle it was denied in practice. We have therefore decided to publish all three drafts of our response on our website.
[To read the three drafts of our response to Politikon please click on the attachments below]
Attachments
Politikon Draft 1
Politikon Draft 2
Politikon Draft 3