http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/features/Relocation-relocation-demonstration

Wednesday 09 September 2009
Simon Saunders

Many activists in South Africa's largest shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) have been fighting over the issue of housing rights for 15 years now.

After the fall of apartheid in 1994, the new ANC government wrote into the constitution that the shack dwellers, living four or five to a room in hovels at the centre of South Africa's wealthiest cities, should have homes.

http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/?page=editorial&id=1237&catID=9

The real 'District 9' - South Africa's shack dwellers

Monday September 7th 2009

Around 12 million South Africans live in shack dwellings or 'informal settlements'. Often these have no electricity, sanitation or refuse collection. In 2007, the KwaZulu-Natal authority, which includes the city of Durban, passed the 'Elimination and Prevention of Re-Emergence of Slums Act', a programme to eradicate all shack dwellings by 2014. Tens of thousands of shack dwellers are at risk of eviction, and being displaced into temporary 'transit areas' far out of town, something satirised in the new film District 9. Abahlali baseMjondolo was established in 2005 and has become the largest social movement in post-apartheid South Africa. Its key demand is for ‘Land & Housing in the City’. In November 2008, ABM applied to the Durban High Court to challenge the Slums Act as unconstitutional, to keep their homes and to fight for decent housing. Mnikelo Ndabankulu, who has lived in the Foreman Road Settlement since 2001, describes what life is like

Abahlali baseMjondolo spokesperson Mnikelo Ndabankulu; General Secretary of the Abahlali Youth League, Zodwa Nsibande; and David Ntseng from the Church Land Programme, will be at the following events between 28 August and 5 September 2009

Manchester

Session On The Right to Stay Put with the Participatory Geographies Working Group at the Royal Geography Society Annual Conference
When: Friday 28 and Saturday 29 August, 10.00-17.00

To see more short films by Elkartasun Bideak click here.

This film shows some of the first meeting between a community in Howick and AbM. Abahlali were invited to a meeting by the community as they are facing eviction and will have to struggle against the local chief and the state.