http://allafrica.com/stories/200903290006.html

South Africa: Women Farmworkers Threaten Election Boycott

Davison Makanga

Cape Town — Women from South Africa's three Cape provinces have marched to parliament in Cape Town to denounce the country's "slow and unbalanced" land redistribution programme. The protesters said if they are not given greater access to land, they will not vote in the country's Apr. 22 general elections.

Placard-waving women at the Mar. 26 protest criticised the country's Minister of Land Affairs, Lulu Xingwana, for failing them.

The comments below are from workshops on evictions and the law with residents of Motala Heights (Pinetown) who were able to halt an in-progress eviction and and former residents of Juba Place (Reservoir Hills) who were left homeless after the complete destruction of their settlement. The attacks on Motala Heights and Juba Place happened in December 2006. The workshops in which the comments below were made were held in March 2007.

In both workshops it was quite clear that all the participants feel very strongly that they have been excluded from citizenship and the legal protection that it offers and that this feeling of exclusion and abandonment was experienced with great pain. It is widely assumed that the law in a democratic state embodies ideals of equality and justice and provides protections and rights to everyone without fear or favour. But it is clear that participants in both of these workshops understood the law very differently on the basis of their lived experience of oppression. For most participants the law was understood as a tool that the rich deploy against the poor. The quote below, made in the Motala Heights workshop, gives a good sense of the lived experience that has led people to feel excluded from the legal protection of citizenship: