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.

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.

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

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.

(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."

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

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.