Richard Pithouse
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Fri, 2008-08-01 16:55.
email | fire | Richard Pithouse 
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).
Submitted by abahlali on Fri, 2007-04-13 16:40.
press_update | Richard Pithouse 
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.
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Wed, 2007-03-21 12:34.
Cindy Mkhize | Human Rights Day Arrests in Durban | M'du Hlongwa | press release | Richard Pithouse | S'bu Zikode | T.N. Lembede | Thoko Zikode 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.
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Tue, 2008-10-21 09:48.
haiti | Mute Magazine | Richard Pithouse http://www.metamute.org/en/content/damning_the_flood
Damning the Flood
By supporting NGOs instead of popular movements, is the left suppressing a radical politics in Haiti and elsewhere? And is it possible to defend a popular movement without deifying its leader? Richard Pithouse reviews Peter Hallward's new book on the containment of popular politics in Haiti.
The inequality of class, first universalised into a global Manicheanism in The Communist Manifesto, is not just complicated by gender, race and sexuality. There is also the fact that the globalisation of capital has always been accompanied by the violent division of the world into different kinds of spaces meant to be inhabited by different kinds of people. The unequal allocation of rights and resources across these spaces has always been held to match unequal capacities for thought, speech and action. Attempts at building solidarity across these divisions have often been insufficiently attentive to their objective material differences or too willing to treat claims about subjective difference as objective.
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Tue, 2008-10-21 09:43.
fire | Richard Pithouse | SACSIS http://sacsis.org.za/site/news/detail.asp?iData=182&iCat=253&iChannel=1&nChannel=News
A State of Emergency for the Poor
Shack fires burn hot and fast. It’s not always easy to predict their speed and direction because as paraffin stoves explode in large balls of flame fires can suddenly jump ahead or to the side.
In most settlements the number of taps is entirely inadequate for people to be able to try and put the flames out on their own. Usually the only viable strategy to fight shack fires is to demolish a ring of shacks around the fire and let it burn itself out. But when the wind is blowing the fires often move too fast and whole settlements can be lost.
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Mon, 2008-09-01 11:00.
Richard Pithouse | The Times http://www.thetimes.co.za/Entertainment/Article.aspx?id=832956
Published:Sep 01, 2008
Housing ‘delivery’ doesn’t work without grassroots’ urban planning, writes Richard Pithouse
Social exclusion in our cities is a key cause of the ferment in society at the grassroots. It has been central to much popular protest in recent years, to the emergence of well-organised movements to the left of the ANC and also, the catastrophic pogroms in May.
President Thabo Mbeki and ANC leader 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 cities.
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Fri, 2008-08-15 08:44.
fire | Richard Pithouse | The South African Civil Society Information Service 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.
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Tue, 2008-07-22 15:55.
Richard Pithouse | South African Civil Society Information Service 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.
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Sat, 2008-06-21 14:00.
Richard Pithouse 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.
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Wed, 2007-10-24 12:35.
newspaper_story | Richard Pithouse | Voices of Resistance from Occupied London 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.
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