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