Richard Pithouse

Kennedy Road Burns Again

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Two weeks ago hundreds were left homeless and robbed of all their possessions by a fire at the Kennedy Road settlement. There was another fire at the Kennedy Road settlement today – the 6th this year.

No one was hurt and people managed to bring it under control quite quickly. The fire brigade, as they always do these days, arrived quickly and put out the remaining blaze. They worked with the community and worked effectively and bravely (fighting shack fires is quite dangerous as gas cylinders blow up unexpectedly in large balls of flame).

Hunger Strike Ends with Release from Prison at the Cost of Massive Bail and a Banning Order

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Click here for photo essay.

The court was flooded with supporters including a Bishop, a monk and a priest - not the usual company of what the prosecutor had called 'dangerous criminals' last time (meaning, of course, 'dangerous [poor] criminals' rather than habitual law breakers like Sutcliffe, Nayger and co.) which really helps to get more people to take a second look at Nayager's lies.

There were even more people there than when Nayager had arrested and beaten S'bu Zikode and Philani Zungu on trumped up and soon dropped charges in September last year. The I.O. had been pushing a hard no bail line until yesterday but the pressure from the protests, the media, the church support and the red river running through the corridors of the court clearly started to tell. By 10 this morning they were ready to make a deal and Mark Serfontein, the pro bono lawyer, and S'bu Zikode negotiated with the prosecutor moving up and down from the court to the holding cells below.

Most of Kennedy Road Committee Under Arrest - March on Sydenham Police Station Now

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Wednesday, 21 March 2007, Human Rights Day
12:47:02

Most of the Kennedy Road Development Committee Spend Human Rights Day Being Assaulted in the Sydenham Police Station

Kennedy Road and Other Settlements Are Currently Mobilising to March on the Sydenham Police Station

*******updates are being added below as they come in*******

At 3:00 a.m. this morning 9 residents of the Kennedy Road shack settlement were arrested by the notoriously racist and violent Sydenham Police who have not been shy to make very clear the political nature of their sustained violent persecution of Abahlali activists overtly. At 11:00 a.m. this morning two of the nine, Sindi Maluleka and Zonke Mxele, were released. They reported that they had been punched and subject to verbal abuse that specifically targeted their membership of the 'red shirts' i.e. the shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo. They also reported that on their release they had been told that they would be re-arrested if they did not swiftly contact Detective Inspector Luthuli on 073 232 0022 to inform him of the whereabouts of another 10 Kennedy Road residents, all of whom who have leadership positions in the community, who are being sought by the Sydenham Police.

SACSIS: The Solution to Shack Fires is Electrification, Not More Training

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http://sacsis.org.za/site/news/detail.asp?iData=149&iCat=253&iChannel=1&nChannel=News

The Solution to Shack Fires is Electrification, Not More Training

Despite all the confident government talk about ‘eradicating slums by 2014’ the fact is that the number of people living in shacks is growing. Recent statistics show that the percentage of the population living in shacks has now increased to 15.4 percent from 12.7 percent in 2002.

South Africa is not the first country where the government has simply announced a date by which shacks will be ‘eradicated’. In 1968 the military dictatorship in Brazil declared that shacks would be ‘eradicated’ by 1976. When attempts to achieve this goal by forcibly relocating people to peripheral housing developments were resisted the dictatorship resorted to trying to burn people out of their shacks. Things have not degenerated to this level in South Africa. But many municipalities, with eThekwini and Erkhuleni being amongst the worst, are trying to reduce the number of people living in shacks by way of unlawful and in fact criminal mass evictions that are often accompanied by state violence.

SACSIS: Time for Grassroots Urban Planning

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http://sacsis.org.za/site/News/detail.asp?iData=144&iCat=253&iChannel=1&nChannel=News

Time for Grassroots Urban Planning

The crisis of social exclusion in our cities is a key factor in the ferment in grassroots political society. It has been central to much popular protest in recent years, to the emergence of well organised grassroots movements to the left of the ANC and, also, the catastrophic pogroms in May.

Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma both support a coercive response to this crisis. Their support for legislation to eradicate shack settlements is, ultimately, support for the state to send in men with guns to drive the poor out of the cities. None of the major shack dwellers' organisations have shown any inclination to rally behind the broader Zuma project. If he leads the ANC in the 2009 elections on his current platform of outright hostility to the urban poor he is certain to confront the same 'No Land, No House, No Vote' campaign that resulted in major clashes between police and shack dwellers during the 2006 local government elections.

Pogroms: A Crisis of Citizenship

Click here to read this essay in Turkish.

A Crisis of Citizenship

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. All that seems new are the police cars and, round the corner from the Harry Gwala shack settlement, a double story facebrick strip club.

The University of Abahlali baseMjondolo

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The University of Abahlali baseMjondolo

This is a longer version of an article first published in Voices of Resistance from Occupied London

Since 2004 South African cities have been convulsed by a series of municipal revolts organised from shack settlements. They have most often taken the form of blockading roads with burning barricades and have generally targeted municipal party councillors. Across the country many of the more militant settlements have refused electoral politics and declared 'No Land, No House, No Vote'. Despite rapidly increasing repression resulting in regular arrests and police violence, a violence that has occasionally been fatal, these protests continue to gather intensity.

City Sees Red Over Protests

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(For the archive)
http://www.sundaytribune.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3440988

September 17, 2006

Abahlali baseMjondolo is the shackdwellers' movement that grew out of a protest organised from the Kennedy Road settlement in Clare Estate on Saturday, March 19, 2005. The protest was organised after a piece of nearby land, long-promised for housing, was suddenly sold off to a developer.

On that day Alfred Mdletshe told the Sunday Tribune's Fred Kockott, the first journalist on the scene, "We are tired of living and walking in shit. The council must allocate land for housing us. Instead, they are giving it to developers to make money."

Lessons from eThekwini: Pariahs Hold Their Ground Against a State that is Both Criminal and Democratic

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Click here to download this report in pdf.

Lessons from eThekwini: Pariahs Hold Their Ground Against a State that is Both Criminal and Democratic

Richard Pithouse & Mark Butler
March, 2007

When the evictions happened…The South African law and the constitution didn’t work for us. They were pointing guns at us, threatening us, meantime we were fighting for our rights [as guaranteed in the law]. One comrade came asking them ‘What about section 26?’ but they didn’t say anything…When our chairperson came to ask ‘By what right and by what law can you this?’ Teargas just got thrown in his face.

A left in our slums

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A left in our slums

The waves of destruction visited on human communities and nature by the increasing subordination of society to capital are ripping through the world with an ever more frenetic relentlessness. Everything sacred is profaned – destroyed, plundered and sold, and then simulated and resold. Nothing is safe: music, architecture, medicine, journalism, sport, spiritual yearning, community, the academy, resistance – nothing. Everywhere the poor are becoming poorer and the rich richer. But the left is generally failing to develop thinking about viable routes towards meaningful confrontations with domination. With the possible exception of Venezuela Third World nationalism has degenerated to an alibi for local relations of domination or, as in the case of NEPAD, an alibi for the rule of global capital. The old faith in ‘the party’ is, especially after the failure of the Brazilian Workers’ Party to use Lula’s victory to good effect, generally in tatters. The situation is such that most ‘left’ intellectuals are working for domination. This most commonly takes the forms of occupying a niche market in the business of mopping up scattered resistances and turning them into ‘civil society’ or seeking to mask their singularity, which is the original source of their power, via symbolic subjection to theoretical abstractions.

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