Download a pdf version of this paper here and the final version published in Socialism & Democracy here.

Zabalaza, Unfinished struggles against apartheid: the shackdwellers' movement in Durban

Talk to us … not about us.
Abahlali T Shirt

“We are on our own”: The Birth of a new movement

The struggle that started in Kennedy Road was the beginning
of a new era.
S’bu Zikode

On March 19th 2005, in a scene reminiscent of the anti-apartheid struggle, 750 Black shackdwellers barricaded a major ring road in Durban, fighting the police for four hours. By this time the shackdwellers had been waiting patiently for Nelson Mandela’s historic 1994 election promise of housing to be realized. These promised houses were to be built on a nearby piece of land.

Facing Uncertainty with Unity
Lives and livelihoods of shack dwellers in Motala Farm

Lisa Fry
Advisor: Richard Ballard, UKZN
School for International Training
2006

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Richard Ballard for advising me during this project. He was instrumental in providing contacts and gave me direction when I got lost in the overwhelming amount of information. I would also like to thank the community of Motala Farm for allowing me to visit, and thanks to all who were surveyed. Special thanks go to Mrs. Shamitha Naidoo, Miss. Lewisa Motha, and Mr. Bekhi Ngcobo; this project would not have been possible without their guidance and insights. A final thank you is to Emily, the intern at Legal Resources, who kept me updated with information about changing court dates.

Internal & External Activism: Working Together at Kennedy Road

by Laura Huss
Spring 2006

I prepared a study to look deeper into the community of Kennedy Road and what is being done by those who live there. Be it the red, spray-painted numbers on the doors of the shacks or the growing numbers of people having to dwell in Kennedy Road, what can often be overlooked is the truth and reality of the situations of the humans, the individuals, who live in these shacks and who are labeled by the numbers and statistics. In an attempt to look into the lives of some of these individuals, it is necessary to see what it is they are doing for themselves to better the lives of their selves and their neighbors. So while the government is not providing houses for its citizens, the communities are raising awareness, and simultaneously furthering their daily needs.

Temple University
Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought,
Nov. 28, 2006

Is Fanon Relevant? Translations, the postcolonial imagination and the second stage of total liberation
Nigel Gibson

Download full version with notes here.

The state of emergency is also always a state of emergence. (Bhabha)
The rich speak about us as we get poorer. (Zikode)

At the conclusion of my article “Relative Opacity: A New Translation of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth—Mission Betrayed of Fulfilled” I wrote the following:

Rethinking Public Participation from Below
Published in Critical Dialogue (2006)

Download full version with footnotes here

The invitation from Imran Buccus at the Centre for Public Participation to attempt some reflections on public participation in the light of recent experiences is appreciated. It may be useful to begin by noting that much of the power of concepts like public participation, civil society, democratic consolidation, social capital and others inheres in the fact that they have donor money behind them. Attaching oneself to these concepts can produce jobs, contracts, legitimation and acceptance into local, national and transnational networks. Often the spaces and projects created by the donor money invested in these concepts are uncritically assumed to be the incubators of values and even practices that will be able to generate some kind of challenge to technocratic managerial despotism. This is a mistake. It is true that resistance often forces imperial power to make certain concessions to legitimate its domination. And these concessions often take the form of appropriating some of the discourses produced within resistances. At times this results in the creation of institutions that have some potential to be used for critical thinking and action in the service of constituent power. But the actualisation of this potential is far from inevitable and in many instances will only be possible when work is done covertly.

A variety of potentially useful documents are archived on this page. They include policy and legal documents, academic articles and writings from struggles in other times and places. These documents are archived here because they (1) happen to be accessible in digital format and (2) have or could be, in various ways, a useful resource for some aspect of the work of some part of the University of Abahlali baseMjondolo. Fact (1) accounts for the fact that almost all the documents here are in English and that this collection has not escaped the limits of Eurocentricism. With regard to (2) that value can be in better understanding what needs to be faced, contested, defended or strived for. In other words some of the documents archived here are here so that we can better understand what we are opposing or so that we can better understand the contesting claims and values on the terrain in which we struggle to assert humanistic reason over the proclivity to violence, destruction and theft that is typical of both the profit calculus that drives capital and the simple hatred that drives the wider will of elites to expel the poor from the cities materially and intellectually. It is necessary to understand profit and hatred as well when they appear masked by apparently technocratic rationality as we do when they appear as the brute force of men with guns and bulldozers and dogs and teargas and stun grenades and sunglasses and water cannons and razor wire.

Xin Wei Ngiam, a student and migrant hotel worker organiser in Boston, recently spent a month in Durban. While here she wrote an article based on interviews with Bahlali. The key theme that emerges in her beautifully written essay in which she weaves together insights gleaned from interviews is a problematisation of orthodox ideas of what constitutes 'democracy'. This very political question, rather than the economic questions that have often dominated left thought, is at the heart of the continually developing thinking that has driven this movement.

Taking Poverty Seriously: What the poor are saying and why it matters