Category Archives: CUNY

To Be Betrayed By Your Brother

http://www.journalism.cuny.edu/capstones/to-be-betrayed-by-your-brother/

To Be Betrayed By Your Brother

Hannah Rappleye, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism

Only weeks before the 2010 World Cup, 33-year-old Terrance Mbuleo lay bleeding under a street lamp, on a narrow strip of dirt separating thousands of shacks from a handful of brick houses.

That afternoon, men set shacks ablaze and slashed wires that diverted electricity from their houses, subsidized by the South African government, to a sprawling network of tin-and-cardboard dwellings called Protea South, a shantytown about a 45-minute drive from Johannesburg. Like the estimated 2.1 million South Africans who live in slums, Protea South’s residents lack basic services such as electricity and clean water. But they knew how to take electricity from the houses, leaving the homeowners to foot the bill for thousands of people.

After the men disappeared back into their homes, a group of shack dwellers set fire to the transformer that stood between the houses and the shacks. They did it to send a message: if everyone can’t have electricity, then no one will.

The embers of the transformer fire were still glowing red in the blue dusk of that Sunday in late May, when a smaller group of homeowners left their houses and stood across from the street lamp where Mbuleo would die. They seemed to be planning something. People watched from inside their shacks, nervous about what the men would do.

And then, as Mbuleo began to walk across the path to a small, makeshift store that sold basic goods like cigarettes and soap to the shack dwellers, one of the homeowners pulled a gun from his pocket.

It was then, at a time when the South African government was desperate to prove to the international community that South Africa had both the infrastructural and civil capability to host the world’s largest sporting event, that
Mbuleo fell to the ground.

He was dead because his community was forced to fight each other for the most basic of services.

While South Africa’s impressive economic growth has pushed some out of poverty, and brought homes, shopping malls and middle-class tastes—like wine-tasting festivals and swimming pools—to formerly impoverished black townships, millions of people are being left behind. Today, over 2.1 million South Africans live in shacks. They live in cramped, sprawling slums without basic services, like electricity or clean water. South Africa recently surpassed Brazil as the most unequal society in the world, with 1.6 percent of the population earning a quarter of all personal income. Life expectancy is 52, the lowest it has been since 1970. Only 41 percent of the population has a job.

In Protea South, and many other communities across South Africa, there is often a very thin line between the haves and the have-nots—a narrow patch of dirt separates the poor from the houses of the emerging black middle class, houses with wrought iron and brick gates that safeguard satellite dishes and brand-new cars. When the poor live pressed against the middle class and a government hesitates to implement policies that promote equality, the turning of ordinary men into vigilantes and innocents into murder victims seems explicable, but no less tragic. What happened in Protea South, and to Terrance Mbuleo and his family, is just one example of a recent spate of violence between the poor and the middle class—and sometimes, the South African government.

“They are the working class,” one resident told me as he stood near the spot where Mbuelo died, across the path from a brick house. A teenager leaned against the house’s gate, nodding his head to the music on his iPod. “They have houses. We have nothing.”

2.

By the 1950s, control of how and where blacks—and other South Africans of color—lived formed the linchpin of apartheid ideology. The Group Areas Act of 1950 and 1966 made it illegal for blacks to live in cities, and by the end of the 1950s the regime had begun demolishing black neighborhoods and forcibly relocating blacks to rural “homelands,” situated on uncultivable, desolate land, that were often far away from urban areas. By the end of the 1960s, the government slowed housing construction in many black townships or stopped it altogether, while simultaneously enforcing anti-squatting laws, thus forcing thousands of displaced blacks to find refuge in the homelands.

But the regime had to allow some blacks to live near the cities, which depended on cheap, black labor. Many of the homelands were close enough for their inhabitants to commute daily to the cities, but black men also lived in mining hostels or slums outside of the cities while they worked to support their families in the homelands. Massive shack towns bloomed in townships outside cities like Johannesburg, Capetown, and Durban. Homeownership in the townships was a rarity: by the 1980s, at the height of resistance to apartheid, banks and other lending institutions regularly practiced redlining in the townships, where residents participated in rent strikes and violence occurred on
a daily basis.

Once apartheid finally fell in 1994, the new government, led by Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, had inherited a staggering housing crisis. Over 10 million South Africans lived in shacks. Housing was at the top of the new nation’s agenda. The party campaigned on the slogan “Houses for All,” and promised to build one million houses in its first five years.

3.

In October that year, Joe Slovo, formerly the leader of the South African Communist Party and the new democracy’s first Housing Minister, traveled to Botshabelo, a former “homeland,” to make official the first non-discriminatory housing policy in South African history.

Botshabelo, which means “place of refuge” in the Sotho language, was established as a homeland in 1979. The government gave each relocated family a 15×30 meter plot of ground, a tent, three days worth of food and told the families to build a shack as quickly as they could. The tents would be needed for the other families who were arriving on a daily basis. Infectious diseases ran rampant in the desolate homelands, and infant mortality was high. During a typhoid outbreak in Botshabelo in July 1980, researchers found 258 adult graves in the homeland cemetery and 269 children’s graves.

By 1985, over 148,000 migrant workers and their families lived in Botshabelo. Workers commuted daily to Bloemfontein, the judicial capital of South Africa, about 55 kilometers away. For six years, Straun Roberston, a South African photographer and writer, traveled with the aid group Operation Hunger through rural South Africa. His subsequent book, titled The Cold Choice: Pictures of a South African Reality, paints a brutal and accurate picture of Botshabelo, which he saw with the daughter-in-law of a former ANC leader, Dr. J.S. Moroka:

“She guided us over the hills to Botshabelo. I was aghast as each new fold of ground disclosed more and more of it. Tin shanties and sod huts, each with its brown tin outhouse, stretched on and on. Every ridge showed us yet another vista. In the bleak grey light under the low clouds, with rain veils sweeping across it, the township seemed to go on forever. Mrs. Moroka told us that 80 per cent of the people were unemployed, living on remittances from working relatives or on government pensions which are too low for subsistence…Ine [Moroka] said: ‘This whole place is an obscenity.”

At the ceremony, surrounded by activists, ANC leaders and citizens, Slovo outlined South Africa’s new housing policy. It was important that the document was going to be signed near the shacks of Botshabelo and not in one of South Africa’s “many fine conference centers with a golf course attached,” Slovo said. “We were determined that the most significant gathering of people involved in the South African housing process should take place in an area which makes clear the size and importance of the task we face. Botshabelo allows us to see and to experience the disastrous legacy of apartheid’s botched attempt to manipulate housing and the people.Botshabelo tells us about shortages—not only of housing but of work and of many of the social amenities which form the basis of community life.”

Long before Slovo signed the Housing Accord, various activist groups, trade unions and financial and construction groups had been working on crafting a sustainable housing policy for the country. They called it the Reconstruction and Development Programme, a program that blended free-market principles with government intervention. The program encouraged private home ownership, rather than public housing: the poor would buy their own homes, built by private developers, and would be assisted by a government subsidy of up to 15,000 rand, or about $3,200. By 1996, however, the most basic house cost around 45,000 rand. The remaining cost to the prospective homeowners— 30,000 rand—was over three times what the poorest two-fifths of South African families made in a year.

While the ANC made big promises of “Houses for All” during their election campaign, in the years after the first democratic election in South Africa’s history, in meetings and in statements to the press, the new officials took a more realistic, if wary, stance. “Let us be quite frank,” Slovo’s successor, Sanki Mthembi- Nkondo, told the South African paper The Mail & Guardian in 1995. “The maximum subsidy of R15 000 will seldom, if ever, buy outright the kind of house people imagine when they turn to daydreaming. But it will do something South Africa has never seen before. It will provide the poorest people in our country with a tangible and workable housing opportunity.”

By 2010, the South African government had built about 2.7 million houses, an impressive feat considering what the ANC had inherited. But development has not kept pace with demand. According to the South African Department of Human Settlements, in August 2010 the housing backlog was estimated at more than two million. Currently, more than 12 million South Africans need homes. Most development experts and academics say that corruption at the local level has prevented houses from reaching many South Africans. The recession has also slowed housing delivery and forced many families into slums. In 2010, 12 percent of South African households lived in RDP houses, but in places like Gauteng Province, home to Protea South, over 22 percent of residents lived in “informal dwellings,” or shacks.

And sometimes, initiatives simply never take off. A new, mixed-income housing strategy called Breaking New Ground, intended to integrate poor black communities and rich white communities—who live in suburbs close to city centers, in gated compounds with swimming pools and black gardeners—has failed to get off the ground. The debate about the Breaking New Ground strategy inevitably hung on the question that is always posed by the upper and middle- class residents of upper and middle-class neighborhoods of South Africa, the majority of whom are white, whenever such strategies are proposed: does the movement of black residents into their neighborhoods mean higher crime rates and lower property values, and thus an end to a particular way of life?

4.

In 2009, a mob of men attacked Kennedy Road, a large slum outside of Durban. The men chanted ANC slogans while they forced people out of their shacks, looted their belongings and tore down walls and smashed roofs. The men
beat anyone who resisted. Over 1,000 residents fled Kennedy Road with their meager belongings—clothes, baskets, shoes, sometimes mattresses—atop their heads. By the morning, helicopters circled over the slum and paramedics loaded people into waiting ambulances. Many were injured, two were killed.

The incident made headlines around South Africa. Reports circulated that local ANC politicians instigated the mob, because the party felt threatened by an organization called Abahlali baseMjondolo, which had been growing in the Kennedy Road settlement since the mid-2000s. Abahlali baseMjondolo, which means the Shack Dweller’s Movement, had initially been formed by shack dwellers as a “development committee,” a way to organize the community for better sanitation and safety, but quickly grew throughout Kennedy Road and surrounding slums into an outspoken grassroots movement of the poor, agitating for service delivery and safe, affordable housing.

S’bu Zikode, a short, soft-spoken man who had moved into the shacks in 1997, emerged as the leader of the movement. Zikode grew up in rural Kwa-Zulu Natal with a single mother who worked as a domestic worker for a white family. He entered law school in 1997, only to quit months later because he could not afford the fees. He moved into a shack in Kennedy Road later that year.

“It was hard to accept that any human being could live like that,” Zikode said in early November. He was sitting at a kitchen table in an activist’s house in Astoria, Queens, wearing a white polo shirt with the words “Land and Dignity” ironed on to it. He had been invited to the United States by a number of progressive housing organizations and asked to speak about the movement he spearheaded, which had grown into a network that reached into most major cities in South Africa, including Johannesburg and Capetown. “People there, they don’t have water, they don’t have toilets, they don’t have lights.”

“As a result,” he went on, “we have had to create our own space. We had to acknowledge that the government is not for us, and is not with us.”

After he moved into Kennedy Road, Zikode joined the ANC and was elected chairperson of his local branch. He tried, he said, to bring up issues of housing and development. But he soon grew frustrated by the other members, who drove fancy cars and, in his eyes, did not care about the poor. “What disturbed me most was the top-down system that was there,” he said. “You go to a meeting, you have issues, and you have mandates from the shack settlements. But when you get into the meeting, suddenly an agenda is already there. There is no window to discuss anything. I believe in a bottom-up system. This is a democratic country. People mandate you. People elect you because they trust
you.”

Zikode left the ANC soon after. By 2006, he was invited to speak on local radio stations and was interviewed for news reports about service delivery and housing. That same year, Zikode was arrested and tortured by a local white police superintendent and began to receive threats against his life. Shacks had spread like wildfire across the country, and it was becoming common to hear of township and slum residents holding marches and other demonstrations to protest against the ANC and the fact that they had no electricity or safe water. The ANC retaliated by evicting residents from slums, without court orders, and sending police to break up peaceful protests. Residents of the slums, many of which sat next to dangerous mine runoffs or other hazardous areas, were often evicted from the land by the government, without notice, and placed into dingy “transit camps.” The camps were meant to be temporary stopovers until the residents were given better land or placed in housing. But the temporary camps were, more
often than not, permanent.

Some believe that what happened on Kennedy Road represented a turning point in the ANC’s history. While the party was once considered to be the party of the poor, many academics and other South Africans regarded the incident as the first organized attempt to stifle dissent amongst the poor.

“It’s important to see this in the wider context because this turn towards supporting vigilante ways of doing things hearkens back to apartheid, when the government would arm paramilitary groups or try to prevent unrest in the townships to try to undermine the fight against apartheid,” Jared Sacks, Executive Director of Children of South Africa, told me. “At the local level, in South Africa, there is very little democracy going on. The councilors are very authoritarian and they often instigate violence. What happened has a lot of side effects for poor people because now, there is this fear of reprisals when you speak out. That prevents a whole lot of communities saying things that need to be said.”

Zikode was out of town when the attacks on Kennedy Road occurred, but his wife and four children were there. They fled to a family member’s house and, when Zikode came back, neighbors told him that men had been looking for him and his family. With the help of Amnesty International, Zikode moved underground for six months. Now, he considers himself a political refugee.

“The ANC is in power now,” Zikode said as he folded his hands on the table. “If you are opposing them, they will say you are anti-revolutionary, and they will call you thugs who are being funded by foreign agencies to destabilize the country. Our hard-won democracy. That’s what they often say. Our hard-won democracy.”

5.

In early July, while soccer fans flocked to Soweto’s Soccer City stadium—a few minutes drive from Protea South—to catch the last games of the World Cup, I talked with Soloman Mdakane, Mbuleo’s father, while he sat with his wife in their shack and cried.

“Even now we can’t cope,” he said. Mdakane, a rail-thin man with a goatee, looked up at his wife. She sat across from him and looked down at the floor, as her shaking fingers pulled at the end of her shawl. Tears streamed down her face. A group of women, her neighbors, huddled around her and laid their hands on her shoulder. It had been months, Mdakane said, and still, she couldn’t talk about it.

The homeowners had shot another young man from the settlement, but he survived, and the day I arrived in Protea South, he refused to come out of his shack. His neighbors said that he had been afraid to leave his home ever since he was shot in the leg. But Mdakane wanted to talk about his son’s death because, he said, nobody—not the police or the media—seemed to be paying attention.

As Mbuleo lay dying and his father knelt by his side, shack dwellers called the police and an ambulance. Mbuleo was dead before they arrived. The ambulance carted him off to the hospital, and the police stayed behind. But, shack dwellers say, they refused to take down statements from the many who witnessed the shooting. They arrested a few homeowners but released them soon after, without any charges. Mbuleo left behind four children and a wife.

“We know those people were arrested but now released,” Mdakane said. “The police don’t come. I ask myself, ‘Why he was killed?’ He was just going to buy cigarettes. I should have been killed.”

In Protea South it is crowded. Like in any slum in any part of the world, people live pushed up against each other. The United Nations estimates that throughout the world, over 827 million people currently live in slums; the number stands to grow to 889 million by 2020. In Protea South, the government estimates that over 6,000 families live in the shacks.

There, where between cardboard and corrugated iron shacks, rats traverse tiny, trickling rivers of urine and old dishwater, people were less than thrilled about the development possibilities of the World Cup.

“They say we should ‘Feel it, it is here,’” Maureen Mnisi said, scoffing at one of the slogans of the World Cup. Mnisi is a well-respected housing organizer who lives in Protea South. “But how can we feel it when we live like this?”

Mnisi, a black woman with bobbed hair and strong arms, stood in front of her home in the slum and pointed out where a group of marauding homeowners tried to set fires the same night that Mbuleo died. They were trying to force her out of her home, she said, because they knew she was an activist and a symbol of power: she encouraged the shack dwellers to organize and agitate for services.

“They can build a stadium for billions of rand,” she said. “But they can’t build homes for the people.”

She paused for a moment, and then she said something that many other residents of Protea South told me: “This government has failed its people.” For the thousands in Protea South, there are only a hundred or so portable toilets. For many women in the settlement, the toilets are symbols of rape and sexual assault—too many times, they said, they have met a drunk or violent man inside one of the toilets at night.

Many of the men are unemployed here, residents told me, and are often forced into petty crime to support their families—or they simply wash their pain away with home-brewed beer. Women, as they did under apartheid, often travel hours to work as domestics in mostly-white suburbs or, barring that, take in sewing or laundry to make ends meet.

In the face of all this, the residents of Protea South struggle to maintain normalcy. They plant tight rows of vegetables in front of their shacks and do their laundry and send their children to school. Women collect dirty water from a
nearby creek for their families to drink. And they try to get electricity in whatever way they can.

Above the shacks, tall wooden poles thrust into the air, their tops bound with wires that give electricity to some of the shacks. The wires, residents said, mean that their children can study at night without inhaling smoke from the paraffin lamps. Electricity also means they won’t have to worry that their shacks will burn down—paraffin oil tends to spit and jump from the lamps, causing fires. But the homeowners object to the stealing of their electricity, and that is
understandable—they end up footing the bill for the entire settlement.

But none of this would be a problem, most shack dwellers say, if the ANC fulfilled their promises.

“We haven’t got toilets, we haven’t got water, we haven’t got electricity,” Busisiwe Tawala, a 22-year-old resident of the settlement, said. “We need houses. And we keep being promised that in such and such day and in such and such year the government will build houses. But nothing is done.”

What she said next is illuminative of the massive shift in thought for thousands of South Africa’s poor, many of whom organized or rallied for the ANC during apartheid or grew up under the transition: that the party of liberation had become the party of the status quo.

“The poor people should stop voting the rich in,” she said. “It was better under apartheid.”

Throughout the slums, it is a common refrain: life was better under apartheid. How could anyone say this?

“We feel that we have been betrayed by our brothers and sisters that we trusted the most,” Zikode had told me that morning in Astoria. “Most people were voting for the ANC. Most people were part of the struggle to end apartheid. A lot of people worked hard within the ANC to end old rule. But it has become clear that the government has turned on us. It is clear to us that even the apartheid we fought against, yes, it was there. But it’s not the race question anymore.”

“Some people talk about the farmers, the Boers,” or the Afrikaaners, Zikode continued. “That stole our land. But today, we have black Boers. We have black elites that have enriched themselves. This government has turned into a business. There are government ministers that are now multi-millionaires. You have a situation in South Africa where you cannot differentiate between the private business sector and the government. The gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Those that are in power have become blind to our suffering. They pretend not to see, but they were once with us. They should know how it is to be in the shacks.”

“It is better to be betrayed by your enemy, than your brother,” he said.

6.

Later that month, a few miles away from the shacks in Protea South, a hundred or so people danced and sang anti-apartheid protest songs on the side of a highway. The blinding afternoon sun hung high over the dancing people as they kicked up dust over the black tarmac and women ululated. A man stood in front of the crowd and shouted into a bullhorn. A police car was parked in front of the man and two policemen stood leaning against its open doors, watching.

Across the road, a handful of private security guards and an ANC councilor were also watching the crowd. They stood on a corner where the highway intersected with a long, dusty road that receded far into the distance. On that road, between the security guards and the horizon line, was a patch of newly constructed affordable housing units. From the other side of the highway, one could make out the dinosaur-like neck of a yellow bulldozer moving between the squat, red-roofed homes.

The people in the crowd gathered that day to protest. They said that the houses rightfully belonged to them, but their local ANC councilors told them the houses had already been allocated to new owners. The man with the bullhorn, a housing activist from Soweto named Sipho Nhlapo, told the crowd that they would not move from the highway. They would appoint “security guards,” he said, to wait on the corner from morning until night, waiting to see the families who had been given the homes.

The people cheered. Old women moved to the front and shuffled their feet back and forth as the crowd of swaying bodies morphed to form a semi-circle. The old women held up laminated copies of their applications for subsidized housing. Most of the applications dated back to 1996. Nhlapo moved in front of the women and pumped his fist in the air. The crowd kept singing. The police leaned against the open doors of their car, and the security guards across the street crossed their arms at their chests.

But nothing happened.

Eventually the crowd stopped dancing and the hundred or so people without homes stood and craned their necks over the police car to catch a glimpse of the security guards and the houses behind them.

Women began to crowd around, desperate to tell their stories. “I have been living in a shack since 1996,” one of them told me. “I have no job. There are no jobs.” “We all live in one room together,” said another. “My mother, my sister, her children, and my children. There is not enough room.” “I have been waiting so long,” said another woman. She wore a kerchief on her head and she shut her eyes and clenched her fists in frustration. “How much longer can I wait? I have no money to build a house, and no land.”

Many of the women did not live in shacks, but in rented rooms or one- room houses, stuffed full of children and extended family members.

“I feel like crying, or killing myself,” Emily Moleane, a 50-year old who lives with her sister and large extended family in a small room in Soweto, said. She began to cry. “How can you wait 14 years for a place to live? Even with the previous government it was not like this.”

Nhlapo, the housing activist, and a tall, dark man named Samson Nembudani stood near a stop sign, next to a handful of women resting their round bodies on a patch of yellow grass. Nhlapo clutched the bullhorn in his hand.

They suspected, Nhlapo said, that the government was giving away the houses not to South Africans, but to “rich foreigners.”

“They are taking foreigners and putting them in these houses,” he said. “We are not promoting xenophobia, we just want everyone who applied for housing in this country to get it.”

Citizens in any country suffering from a scarcity of housing, jobs and other resources tend to search for someone, or something, to blame. South Africa is no different. A diplomat once told me that some of South Africa’s problems lie in the fact that it was an “island of prosperity in a sea of suffering.” South Africa’s cities have long been a promised land for migrants desperate for jobs and a better life for their families. Some migrants are highly skilled and come to the country legally to work. Most, however, cross the South African border in secret, smuggled in the back of trucks or simply on foot in the middle of the night.

The neighborhoods of Johannesburg’s inner city teem with immigrants from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Botswana, Nigeria, Mozambique, Central African Republic and, perhaps most controversially, Zimbabwe. Zimbabweans share a border with South Africa and have always migrated back and forth between the two states, but as the political and economic situation in Zimbabwe began to deteriorate in 2007 Zimbabweans flocked to South Africa in droves. Migration to South Africa increased even more in 2008, after Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party launched a brutal campaign of torture and political repression against ordinary Zimbabweans. Today, South Africa has the largest population of Zimbabweans outside of Zimbabwe, and most of them live in abject poverty.

For those fleeing violence, war and economic insecurity, life in South Africa is much better than the alternative. But both successful immigrants— Somali or Pakistani shop owners, for example—and poor immigrants, like many Zimbabweans, face harassment from native South Africans. Sometimes the harassment turns violent. The narrative goes, much like it does in the United States, that these immigrants lower wages for native South Africans with their willingness to do any job at any price. Locals make jokes about Zimbabweans being as common as cockroaches and hold rallies accusing immigrants of spreading HIV/AIDS and crime. In the years since apartheid ended, acts of violence against foreigners, including murder, rape and beatings, although not common, have occurred with enough regularity to make some worry that the seams of the “Rainbow Nation” were coming apart.

In May 2008, South Africans’ distrust of immigrants and their frustration with the high unemployment rate hit a fever pitch. Across the country, local ANC councilors up for re-election roused anger in the townships and shantytowns by publicly blaming immigrants for poor service delivery and scarcity of employment. Riots spread across the country, and soon news outlets around the world carried photos of a man, a suspected foreigner, being burned alive in a slum.

During the riots, 62 people died. Refugee camps built by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees sprung up on the outskirts of Johannesburg to house those fleeing the violence.

As the world waited for the 2010 World Cup, South African papers began to publish rumors that xenophobic violence would return after the games ended. And when they did, immigrants began to leave the cities en masse, armed with bus tickets back home. But aside from a few beatings around the country, predictions of violence on a massive scale were largely unfounded.

So it was, perhaps, not surprising that Nhlapo and his associate, Samson Nembudani, were standing on the side of the highway that day in late July, with no doubt in their minds that the problem here was not only the corrupt ANC councilors standing between them and a safe, clean place to live, but also foreigners, who had jobs, money and, therefore, a chance at being placed in a government-subsidized home.

But it was frightening, nonetheless.

Nembudani said that the group would appoint “guards” to watch who went in and out of the houses. “And then we will ask to see their papers, to see if they are citizens or not,” he said.

I asked him if he thought that might encourage violence.

He shrugged. “Violence is a thing you cannot guarantee. We cannot guarantee nothing will happen. If you’ve applied for housing since 1996 and you don’t get it, how do you feel?”

Nhlapo nodded and looked across the road.

“We will go into the houses and drag them out by force,” he said.

Presentation by S’bu Zikode at the CUNY Graduate Center for Place, Culture and Politics, New York

S’bu Zikode – presentation at CUNY Graduate Center for Place, Culture and Politics
NOVEMBER 16, 2010

Rush Transcript

00:00 I feel like calling “Amandla”, but I thought I should be disciplined, at least the last night I am here. I am happy to be here tonight, especially to be meeting an audience like yourself. I am honored and humbled to be speaking at this university. I just thought I should share some of the sharings I have shared with some folks here in the United States. But I thought it was also important to bring the life context in which I would be able to speak and make sense of the conditions in South Africa. It gives me great pleasure to be invited here into the United States of America to speak not only my mind but a collective mind of many Abahlali members. I only get this invitation because of the movement I am part of, so I thank Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Shack Dwellers’ movement. I also thank the National Economic and Social Right Initiative. I thank the Poverty Initiative, I thank Picture the Homeless, Take the Land Back. I thank the Media in Mobilizing projects. I thank the Taxi Workers United, the Domestic Workers United. I thank Abahlali friends that are based here in the United States. I also wish to extend my sincere gratitude to the Center here, the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and all other associate departments that have made this moment special.

02:14 I thought I should just speak about the question as to what happens when the poor organize, mobilize—take their own charge outside the state control; when the poor become powerful outside the state control. Some of the clip you may have seen speaks volumes, speaks to that, what happens when the unorganized becomes organized; when those who are not meant to speak, speak. The power of the poor starts when we as the poor recognize our own humanity; when we recognize that, in fact, we are created in the image of God and are therefore equal to all other human beings. But the recognition of our humanity without action to defend our humanity is meaningless. It is very important that we as the poor people begin to define ourselves before someone else from somewhere else define us. It is very important for the poor to say, “This is who we are, this is where we are, this is what we want, this is how we want what we want.” We say that we are being excluded and disrespected. We say that we want our full humanity, that we want justice, that we want dignity and full participation in the planning of our communities, in the planning of our cities, our states, our countries, our world.

3:59 The more of us stand together, the more of our humanity is filled. The power of the poor becomes evident when the poor are able to organize ourselves for ourselves. When we begin to achieve this, it is always a moment of great promise, a moment of great danger. Frederick Douglass, the great hero of one of the greatest American struggles, the struggles against slavery, said “Power concedes nothing without demands”. This is why a collective demand – a demand backed by organization, determination, and courage – is a moment of great promise. But it is also a moment of great danger, because the power of the rich and the politicians always take the legitimate demand of the oppressed to be criminal and illegitimate. This is one of reason why we need to be standing together across the sea, across color lines, borders, genders, religion, creeds, you name them – to redeem the promise of our struggle, if we can survive its dangers (and none of us can do so on our own).

I have been sent here by the movement to build a living solidarity with the movements here in the United States. We want to look for ways in which we can support each other to realize the promise of our struggle. There is also a real danger for the organized poor if we do not define ourselves, if we allow others to define us and define our struggle—we risk being defined as people who are not able to struggle for ourselves, as people who need leaders and not comrades, as people who must be spoken for and not to.

06:05 But when we succeed in defining ourselves and escaping the danger of not defining ourselves, we have to face a new danger. There is another kind of danger for the organized poor when we do define ourselves. Our movement is going through a tough time after successfully defending ourselves. We are under attack from the state, from the rich, from a few individual leftists, few individual academics—you name them – who are all divided in their politics, but united in their belief that it is their duty to speak for and to represent the poor. It has always been an insult to think that the poor cannot speak for themselves. It has always been an inhuman and brutal attack that the rich and the landowners should employ themselves or must be hired from somewhere else to think, represent, and take decision for the poor. As a movement of the Shack Dwellers, we have successfully represented our struggle both nationally and internationally. It is one of the reasons why I am here to represent our struggle before those who have the rights, the money and the power to represent us. This has been a crisis for some of those who have employed themselves to speak, write and decide for the poor. The refusal of our movement [to accept that others should speak for us] has been met with huge campaign to discredit and rubbish our movement’s efforts to build a just society where everyone matters, where everyone is equal, where everyone is treated with respect and dignity.

08:16 We have learned that there is a very big difference between those forces in civil society and the left that are looking for followers and those who are looking for comrades. We have learned there is a very big difference between those forces in civil society and the left who think that they are the only one who can liberate the poor and those who are willing to work with the poor as we liberate ourselves. The state has many strategies to silence the poor as do the big corporates and the rich. Leaders are offered money and jobs. There is a quiet diplomacy through which the movement is given some acknowledgement. There are meetings that lead into all kinds of technical debates and away from the simple politics of our demands for land and housing. There is intimidation. But when all these efforts by the state to silence the poor fail, they send in the police. The police do not come as we have asked to protect the poor—but to beat us, arrest us and even shoot us. We have braved all that and survived brutality and all kinds of attack by the state and the rich. Our popularism and action has made our movement to grow rapidly despite the conditions that you may have seen. Our movement has faced many challenges. When we started to become a popular force in the society, the state went to try its diplomatic means of attacking the Shack Dwellers and the poor.

10:03 The state came out with a new legislation in Kwa-Zulu Natal which is called the Kwa-Zulu Natal Elimination and Prevention of Re-emergence of Slums Act in 2007. The new legislation was created to legitimize this attack and to legitimize evictions. To be poor and homeless meant to be criminal and that you could be imprisoned from up to 25 years for resisting an eviction. Abahlali mobilized all kinds of resource people, including lawyers, to challenge the constitutionality of this legislation. The poor South Africans were represented by our movement, who were represented by the Center for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand and we won a historic victory against the constitutionality of the Slums Act. This victory against the Slums Act was not our first victory. Before that, we had stopped evictions, forced interim services in some of the informal settlements, and won some kind of recognition. But after this big victory in the constitutional court, a victory for the entire country, a victory for our future generation, there was a moment of silence as the state was humiliated after a serious defeat by the Shack Dwellers. We continued to feed our orphans, we continued to look after our sick, we continued to build preschools, vegetable gardens, as project of self-help. All these good efforts of trying to build an equal society become a major threat to the authorities. Some state institutions have good people who we kept engaging while being very careful to always keep our autonomy.

12:00 We carefully managed negotiations without being co-opted into the system so that we could claim victories from the state while continuing to build power outside the state control. But as we kept building a strong movement, the state was busy preparing itself to destroy our movement. This brought us to the 26th -27th of September 2009 when a group of about 40 men violently attacked our headquarters at the Kennedy Road Informal Settlement. The homes of our leaders, their families, their friends and the general membership of the movement were destroyed and we were driven out of the settlement and forced out to hiding. The attack was endorsed by the provincial leadership of the ruling party and the provincial government. Two people were left dead, as you may have seen, in that violence [that came with the] attack that night. Our attackers were never made to answer into these entire crimes committed on the day of the attack up until today. Abahlali called for an independent commission of inquiry into the attack, but this call has fell into deaf ears. This is the sort of heavy price that a movement of the poor may have to pay for the prize of a human world, a world of equality and dignity. This sort of attack happens when a movement continues to organize, to think, to grow outside the state control. A living politic is not build in one day, it is built in prayer, humility, sacrifice and courage. Our struggle is a class struggle, it is a struggle of the poor, those living in the shacks, selling on the streets, doing domestic and secretary works.

14:00 To build a fair world where everyone matter, we need allies among those in similar class and amongst those with better resources and opportunities. The time will come when the poor and the uneducated—but human—will be required to play a human role in our society. A time will come when the humanity of everyone, of every human being is recognized in our society. This time may or may not be on judgment day. When this time comes will depend on our commitment and courage. It will also depend on how well we can support each other. History will judge us all.

Ladies and gentlemen, I thought I should just share this story because many or probably some of you have been following the story of our movement and I am here to affirm, confirm, and also remind you that what you’ve just seen is not just a movie, it’s life, it’s the lives of the people. People are born in these conditions; people are killed in these conditions. And they are killed by those who are meant to govern us, who are meant to lead by example, to build a society. So I thought tonight it would also be an opportunity for me to remind, especially an audience of this caliber, of our role and probably the expectation that each one of us would really expect in terms of support and solidarity.

16:05 And also remind you that we have great minds, great intellectuals who have decided to also use their degrees to also rubbish the little efforts we can contribute to life. Not to impress ourselves, but at least to try and make the Earth a better place than we have found it. As Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, suggested that we should try. While our movement is under attack from the state, it is also being attacked by some academics. Some of them have studied in this beautiful university. They have obtained their degree and they have fought to serve the society, to do justice. But they have chosen to use their wisdom, their skills, their profession, to rubbish –not only rubbish—but destroy the basic struggle of surviving. There is a campaign that is going on, some of you probably will have received some of the big documents, claim to be well researched, because our movement is one of those researched movements. Where writers come and go. They leave us in those conditions. And then what they write, they do not account to us—they want to impress other people.

18:02 So we are facing a double repression from the state, from some of the famous professors, who think it is their job, obviously, to think for us, to represent us, to talk about us and to take decisions for us. So, I am here also to warn and plead for your just minds [so] that at least our wisdom and profession should be used rather to advance the interest of justice, not to impress though, [but for] the movement but for the greater society. So our society needs you, your country needs you, maybe I am speaking too big, your family needs you, your neighbor needs you, your city needs you, your country, your world needs you. We have not claimed to be clever; we have always been humble. We take our place in our cities, humble, but we take it very firm when it comes to injustices. We have made a lot of sacrifice, we have committed ourselves. We have taken an oath that we cannot live in peace while there are people who are living under these conditions. So South Africa is one of the well-known country which have successfully hosted the FIFA World Cup. And we were reminded in South Africa during the World Cup that we should be very smiling in welcoming the international dignitaries and international communities.

20:00 Again, we were reminded to be human being, because you guys were coming to South Africa. But when you left, things have suddenly changed. And obviously leading up to the World Cup, there was a campaign to sweep the cities, to hide poverty, to hide our shack settlements. We had to deal with that. So in conclusion, I think it would be good for a dialogue, obviously, to exchange, and you know, welcome those great ideas. We should not use this space only for question but also for inputs, feedbacks. We are all learning. I’m here to learn. But I’ve also been sent by those old Mamas, those old gogos who have entrusted me to stand here before you to bring South Africa to you through the video, through myself. So I am welcoming some lessons, obviously [also] questions of clarity, especially around the issues of justice. So the movement that I come from, again, it’s Abahlali baseMjondolo. Abahlali means “the residence—living in the shacks”, it started in Kennedy Road in 2005 to fight, protect, promote and advance the movement of the Shack Dwellers and the poor. This is our call. This is what we do. Though in doing it, outside the state control, it has been a crime.

21:57 On the night of the attack, when our movement was attacked, the very same victims whose home was destroyed, burned down, were also arrested. They are yet to be tried on the 29th of November on many charges, including: murder, armed robbery, criminal injury, there’s more than seven charges that were labeled. And again the very same acts that violence attack, the state has been very smart in making sure that it becomes a criminal matter, a criminal question—to take away the politics of it. A propaganda has been spread. Lot of misleading information has been written because we do not control the media. So the information that is portrayed outside is that obviously these poor folks, you know, are thugs. They don’t know what they’re doing. Party politic has become the only license for democracy. To participate in decision-making, you are forced to join a particular political party it is your only token to citizenship. So social movements have been an alternative space outside of party politics and that becomes crime to those who are in power. So the victims of the attacks, people whose homes were burned down, are yet to be tried from the 29th of November.

23:59 So again, the state makes it as if it is a criminal trial. Yet, we know it is a political trial. There were poor folks that you may have seen demonstrating against their own fellow brother and sisters, because the system and the state is so smart enough to turn the poor to fight amongst one another. And we’ve also been warning, it is our own movement that has warned, even during the 2008 attack on foreign nationals, we have warned that the anger of the poor can go in many directions. Unfortunately, that anger is turned to one another when the poor have to vent that anger to one another. We have to deal with that at the movement level, at individual levels. It is a task that we have really have to deal with. If I were to share some of the successes of the movement, the numbers of challenges, difficulties – the movement is not perfect; not at all—but to share some of the successes besides the constitutional court victory [I would start by saying] that the movement has managed to create its own space, a very precious space where we have come together as the organized poor. We have used this space to be able to share, to learn in this space. We have used this space also to cry when we have to face the repression and the attack.

25:57 We have used this space to laugh and to enjoy life. We have not received housing in our cities, and it’s even worse now that we don’t even have the shelter that you saw. Those shacks were broken down, burned down, without any alternative accommodation. Yet there is a constitution, there is a housing act that says you should provide at least an alternative accommodation should an eviction order be granted. But then, after the attacks, there are hundreds of us, I’m talking about the new South Africa, the rainbow nation. Something that has just happened, thirteen months ago, we‘ve been forced into exile, we’ve been forced into hiding, we’ve become refugees in our own country, in our own province, in our own city, in our own settlement, in our own families. It’s the story that I thought I should share to those of us who are serious and working on the issues of social justice – that any one victory may come at a considerable price. It will also test our commitment to a better life in our own small ways. But again the space that we use is a space that we protect so much. People have tried to invade that space, and we have managed to run away with the space! And we continue underground to organize, we continue to cry together and to make sure those tears fall into a fertile ground. They don’t fall inside, because none of us know the damage of the tears that fall inside.

28:02 So, we have to create a basin to collect all these tears. What a wonderful space. And that on its own, it’s a crime. I would not be surprised if I return to South Africa few weeks time – the first call I have always received if I were to leave the country, it would be a call coming from the National Intelligence Agency. “Where do you come from? Who did you meet? We’ve been missing you in the country.” See how other people can remote other people’s life? You know, when I lost my first job because my boss was the president of the Durban Chamber of Commerce, when he said “no, I cannot have you anymore” because as president of the Durban Chamber of Commerce, he would issue a statement and I would have different view. He would call me for discipline. I would go for protest, and the next day he would call me and discipline me. You know what, you don’t own my time. You should be grateful that I work for you from 8 to 5. After 5 you don’t own my time. And I had to lose that job. It is a price that we have to face wherever we are, in our own working environments. It’s a test, again, to our democracy.

29:59 A democracy that serves the interest of the few. So, South Africa right now is under this so-called Black-led majority. And what has been noted is the escalation of fraud, corruption, favoritism, nepotism, political intolerance, politicization of services. So if you are not my comrades, if you are not in my party ‘you get nothing, forget it’. If you are in the Shack Dwellers movement ‘S’bu will give you a house’. If you belong to DA, Democratic Alliance, ‘Helen Zille will provide’. A society that was once proclaimed by Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi and all of those who have fought to end apartheid, and some of you who have contributed so much to the South African politics, to realize the democracy that has been undermined. I want to thank you and allow some questions and feedback. Thank you.

31:28 DARA S’bu will take one or two questions at a time and then we’ll give S’bu a chance to respond.

31:36 Q1: Can you talk about the leading up to and the aftermath of the World Cup a little bit more? And also I’m curious how you continue your organization when so many people have been displaced. How do you continue bringing people into the organization?

32:00 Q2: I just wanted to get a better picture of the organization, how many people there are, and where they are located, what they do after their shacks have been destroyed, where do they go, and if they have access to other facilities that are necessary for us to survive?

32:18 S’bu: Sure, uh, maybe it’s good to start with the last one. The movement has been formed in the shanty town of Kennedy Road which is in Durban. It was formed by the Shack Dwellers themselves, its lead by the Shack Dwellers. It has spread to the neighboring cities, Jo’burg, northern part of Kwa-Zulu Natal in the Western Cape, in Gauteng. So it has become a national movement. We are working with fully paid membership with 64 communities around the country. And then, those who are supporting the organization and our alliance partners, we also work with the Landless Peoples’ Movement, we work with Cape Anti-Eviction campaign, the Networking from Natal to form what is called as the Poor Peoples’ Alliance, PPA, as the national alliance of movements. So we have at least a minimum of 25,000 memberships [across the alliance]. [Membership] is fully paid because, to get membership you subscribe. You pay. So others are supporting without that, but we also monitor to members—you pay at least one and a half dollar to become a member and you accept responsibility of being part of the struggle from the onset. It’s not easy to organize under this situation. There was a period in which we all had to go underground. There was a moment of silence when the hit men were hired and paid and were hunting for us up and down. And because of your courage, and your organizing here in the states, that has also saved our life to campaign and create awareness. Some of the folks here have protested in the South African embassy here and have written letters of support. Some of you have also written petitions raising concerns and solidarity for our movement.

35:00 S’bu: A lot of support has really come from here. We salute you for that. It has really made a difference that we are able to organize secretly and managed to continue our space. We had to relocate obviously from Kennedy Road where our offices were based and found a space in town. So, interesting enough that the organization has grown up since the attack. It has been joined by not only Shack Dwellers but Flat Dwellers, people living in the Flats in the municipal owned Flats, people who are living in the rural communities, and under the traditional leadership of the chiefs. And again, it’s becoming a threat. So, after well, we are still living in hiding. In other words, we are no longer in Kennedy Road. We have to live in safe homes and have to continue our work. We run that risk. We don’t have any VIP protection, no bodyguards. We have to go to town when we need to, but there was a window in which we were hunted. But because of the support that we received internationally, then the state became aware that anything that happens to us it will not only be a national scandal, but international. So, hence we extend our deepest gratitude to all of you and to some of you who are also being criticized for supporting the thugs. We thank you for that. At least a thug that is able to breathe like you is a better thug. It’s worth supporting. Help us come out of that thuggish situation.

37:11 S’bu: Well, leading to the World Cup, obviously, South Africa was excited. And those living in the shack settlements were being threatened with evictions. We had to go through a lot in trying to defend our land, our communities. Because the World Cup has also been used as a license to displace people so that they can attract investments, but also for the international communities not to see that poverty. We had to work so hard, you know, to save people’s home through action. In fact we came up with the Upside Down World Cup, not because we’re not patriotic, but our citizenship, well what would it mean if we didn’t participate as citizens? We had to go to court in defending some of the communities who were facing eviction not only from the state but also private landowners who saw the World Cup as an opportunity to displace people. I think we’ve done well in that. Then obviously, after the World Cup the state is building new shacks. That’s very interesting. People are living in the shacks and the government is building another shacks. The difference with those shacks is that they are government-approved shacks. So you will be moved from those shantytowns that you saw to government approved shanty towns, which we call transit camps, Lindela, temporary relocation areas, decant camps—and in those transit camps, again, outside the legislation. The very same Slums Act, was trying to legislate that, make it legal that before you get a subsidy that is assisted by government, you’ve got to move to another government-approved shacks. And in those transit camps there is no specification as whether or not you’ll be getting basic services like water and sanitation. The duration of stay is not clear. You can leave as long as you can leave. You can rot in those transit camps waiting. So a new politic in South Africa has been created, a politic of patience. “Order, comrades!”. We’ve been under apartheid for more than 400 years. So, a politic of patience is now the movement of the day.

39:59 Q3: My wife and I have been working with schools in South Africa for a while now and I intend to continue to do that and we were particularly impressed with some of the schools right outside some of the townships. One was Soweto and the other one was right outside of Stellenbosch. I wonder, are you working with the school children? And I was, I guess, awed by how well the schools were run and the spirit of the children from the townships while they were in school. Do you see those schools as a vehicle for your work?

40:39 Dara: Let’s take one more question.

40:42 Q4: Yes, I wanted to ask what the recent public workers’ strikes a couple months ago. Was there any sort of cross-unity between the public workers who also had gotten into confrontations with the governments and they see your situation previously in conflicts with the government reflected in their own? Is there any sort of attempts unity or some sort of cross-solidarity thing? Second question I would like to ask is since Zuma was elected have you seen things get better, get worse or stay the same in terms of government attitudes to you?

41:28 S’bu: The honorable president Jacob Zuma has also been once a hope. Looking at his background from the rural communities in the northern province of KwaZulu Natal, Zululand. And again, like many, when he got to power we also thought that he should have learned so much outside, not really outside government, but [having an] observational view without being a state president. But, we have already lost a hope. He is a very silent man. He doesn’t seem to be taking a decision. I’m not too sure if [it] is teaching of democracy. Sometimes you’ve got to be a leader. You’ve got to be a man. Not dictate. I was just sharing with some folks that we have invited the president to the shack settlement but because of the structures and the systems that are there, he cannot listen to us unless the ANC structures says listen to those folks. If our relationship is not good with the ANC local branch, for instance, mind you, its party politics now. If the premiere of the province is not happy with us, automatically the state president will not be happy with us. We have made calls now for him to visit the informal settlements.

43:25 S’bu: What appeared as a response, he was seen discovering a new white shack settlement somewhere in Pretoria, where the SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) made a picture of him visiting the new white shack settlement that we didn’t know that there are white folks living in the shack settlement. So he kind of want to pretend that he is going to the shacks, but he will not go to those who are making noise. So that is the strategy so that you blame yourself for speaking out, you pay a price for speaking out. He would rather go to those who have not asked him. I mean what we see is obviously a failure of taking decision and have to follow the structures, the systems that are already there. The public servant strikes have really been a turning point in the history of South Africa. It is very interesting how the labor movement, Cosatu, can bring the economy of the country to a standstill. That’s the power of the people, the power of organizing. And again, Zuma was not here. [He had] to take the flight to somewhere in China. But unfortunately[for Zuma] the workers will not back down, you have to come back and confront it. And make some compromises, private deals.

45:20 S’bu: So, again, the class struggle, the working class also has its own challenges that the Congress of Trade Unions, for instance, would invite social movements to their protests to add into masses that are necessary to shake ad change. But when we march and invite Cosatu to support us, suddenly COSATU is nowhere to be found. All the leadership of Cosatu, suddenly they are too high to be reached: “Who the hell are you?” That’s their game. But we believe the labor movement could bring about change because of their numbers and their masses. But what has been very problematic is when Cosatu had to come into an alliance partnership with the ruling party. Now the trouble is that alliance, the Africa National Congress, the South African Communist Party and Cosatu are married. So the Communist Party is no longer a Communist Party because they are also part of government. Their language has suddenly changed. The same communists are buying big cars and obviously Cosatu, obviously with the exception of its General Secretary, who sometimes shows that he is their leader, he will speak his mind, he will always be called into order to be disciplined. So, that is the unfortunate part that the labor movements have all been co-opted into one government. So their voice outside government is not that powerful.

47:22 S’bu: Obviously schools have a role to play and are playing a role, especially the tertiary institutions. We have a good working relationship with students from the University of Cape Town, for instance, the University of KwaZulu Natal, Rhodes University, through student’s movements, like students who are doing law—the student for law and social justice and student from the University of South Africa. Also, there are community outreach programs. It’s with the high schools that we have not had any relationship. But I do think it will really work. And obviously, we work with churches, particularly the Anglican churches. They have supported us, they have suffered with us, they have been subjected to all sorts of criticism.

48:32 Q5: I just wanted to ask whether you felt that your movement has been successfully in its beginning days allowed for a sense of security and support in either the new members or people that (unclear). A lot of organizations (unclear) and what you would advise people that would like to start a social movement or a young social movement to do to create that sense of (unclear).

49:06 Q6 It looked like from a scene in the video that there was a certain amount of education that was going on as members of the movement were helping other people when their shacks were torn down and I wondered whether you could talk a little bit about what kind of self-education is being done within your movement and where you see the value of that education, in terms of building a movement.

49:41 S’bu: Thank you. Our strategy starts from the ground, it starts in action. Through meetings we learn. In our leadership meetings, a lot of learning takes place. There are mass meetings of this nature. There are also camps where the movement sits the whole night, from 6 pm to 6 am, because in these usual meetings sometimes they don’t have enough time. One or two hours time is nothing when you are suffering. So a committed movement, part of its program, is that it will have these camps in the whole night. It’s not only a question of land and housing in the city that gets discussed but the broader political ideas of what makes us poor. What are the systems that keep us in this poverty?

50:51 S’bu: And again, we call this popular education. Abahlali has come up with the University of Abahlali BaseMjondolo, our own home-made university. What a wonderful space, where there are no teachers, there are no lectures, but leaders and facilitators. Through the University of Abahlali, also, its not only politics but also learning of computer literacy, trainings. The University of Abahlali also serves as a referral where we send shack dwellers into the formal universities through the universities’ community outreach program. Universities have a responsibility as well. If there are organized (unclear) it’s easy for that to happen. So a lot of learning takes place but also we have a year calendar where we align ourselves with the national events like the Freedom Day, which we have turned into the UnFreedom Day. We cannot fool ourselves and celebrate and say we are free while we die in the shacks. We host our big events on the 27th of April. Every year we have a big rally where we mourn the loss of our freedom. And we feel shame when some of us, who are as poor as we are, are used by the politicians when they have to escort the politicians because there are free buses, free t-shirt, free food only for that day. That freedom comes in one day, on the 27th of April. For us we talk of a freedom that comes every second, every minute, every hour. That’s the permanent freedom we are looking at, not a once off because someone has been impressed with something.

52:59 S’bu: So, and obviously June month is the youth month in South Africa…to commemorate the Soweto uprising. So again, leading to a youth month, youth also have their own activities, so we have Abahlali Youth League, a separate space to build youth leadership and involvement. The youth should also take responsibility. It takes a very strong and courageous youth not to sit back when their parents are being made to suffer. That political consciousness happens in action, through protest we learn. Obviously, something to learn bro(unclear), the first day you take a membership of our movement, we educate you so that if you’ve made a mistake you better don’t join us. When you take a card, you take a membership card, you have a responsibility to check your neighbors or your families, if they are not going through the same difficulties that you face. We consider your humanity and personality not complete when you’re alone, in isolation to others. Your humanity becomes complete when you have others surrounding you. So then you have a responsibility to recruit. We only consider a community to be member or a branch of Abahlali when there is, at least, about 50 members. When there is a minimum of 50 members, then we consider you as a branch. That’s how our membership is able to grow that quick. And then we talk to communities when they join Abahlali, that they are taking a risk of all sorts. But what is important when you join, around education, we also stress to people that we are not going to struggle for you but that we struggle with you. We’re not going to stop any eviction for you but we will stop some eviction with you. We’re not going to do anything for you but we will do things with you.

55:31 S’bu: So you are not going to take membership card and relax at home and our leadership in our office does not save, as in, some kind of consultants when people are threatened with evictions they run to the office. The strategy is not in the office. So you better wake up from today, you are going to defend yourself. Your neighbors will help you to defend yourself. I think building from that, really helps people to be aware of the risk they take from the very same day they join, the responsibility that goes with that, the commitment that goes with that.

56:20 Q7: You talk about shack dwellers and people in the rural areas and I think what you said is that those groups are somewhat new to the movement. And so I was wondering if you could talk about what kind of historical social divisions there are (unclear), I’m assuming there are, between the rural communities (unclear) and the shack dwellers and how you build a movement to have those different groups of people aligning with each other

57:00 Q8: Given the emphasis on allowing the poor speak for themselves, can you comment on negotiating your relationship with documentary filmmakers, photographers, journalists, people that want to…portray a picture of what your movement is all about, what you’re doing (unclear)

57:19 S’bu: Thank you. I think that’s a very important question. I mean, just to add on that, our relationship also with middle class people, you know, with academics, with NGOs for instance. We’ve also been very clear that we will not be co-opted and we want to speak for ourselves. To people that are joining us and people that are supporting us with all kinds of resources, even the lawyers, just to make a typical example of the Slums Act, of how we instruct our lawyers. When the Bill was presented to us, not because we were smart but because, I mean the state is required by the law that the Bill should go for public comments, public hearing. Then they brought it to us, then we had to, within the movement, task individuals from the movement to read through the bill. It was the very same young folks, the Mazwis the Mnikelos, those that were on video, that were tasked, you know the special task team, that will read through the Slums Act, the Slums Bill. And they read it, sentence by sentence, made sense and presented their analysis to us, to the movement and we’ve discussed it and we’ve discovered that it was not only an attack on our movement but an attack on the poor. It’s only then when we had requested this support of resource people, you know lawyers for instance, to have a second thoughts and eventually instructed the lawyer to add for us.

59:22 S’be: But all the way to the constitutional court, we’ve been giving the back up to our legal team. I think they were very courageous also to have these kinds of clients who give them back up all the way. And they could easily point out in the court, Pierre (unclear names), this is what this Bill will do to my clients, here they are. And again, when we ask people to be…to support us, all resourced people, we ask people not to use or to abuse that opportunity. Often, resourced people for instance, will hijack the struggles of people. You will find them commenting, on the radio for instance, on behalf of the people. In the name of help, they often disempower. They want to do things for us, without us, and not with us. So again, we encourage people to be careful how they kind of support, especially if they are not comrades but friends of resourced people. So we say people should talk with us, not for us. They should help us to fish ourselves, not to fish for us because they will come and they will go, they will leave us suffering. So in the process of empowering, we ask people to support us side by side, not behind us, not to lead us, because that often disempowers and it imposes. So that’s how we work, you know, with resourced people.

01:01:15 S’bu: Filmmakers, we all, I mean, they are open, we discuss these issues with them. They don’t take decision for us or think they are too smart for us. It’s good to work with humble people who will always ask, ‘but how can I help?’, ‘this is what I can offer’, ‘how can we do this?’ But if they come as masters, then often it becomes problematic, in the name of help. You know, some do it unintentionally, they just want to help. But the way they help, they disempower in the process, or they hijack those struggles. And the very same voice is undermined and it collapses. It’s a fragile situation to maintain. That’s why it must be clear when people want to join whether they want to be comrades, they want to be friends, or they want to fund us, for instance, it must be clear.

01:02:10 S’bu: In terms of different groups, you know, from the shacks, from the flats, from the traditional communities, I mean it’s been very clear that there is one struggle. Again, South Africa has a history of this segregation. There’s poor black townships there, coloreds there, whites there. And it’s taking the country so long to integrate and the country talks so much about an integrated society. The demarcations that are there have made it clear for us that it’s not going to go away today. But what has happened really is that, as much as the country talks so much about inclusive cities, what has become clear is that it is no more a color question. I’m not saying it’s no more there but it has become a question of how much do you have. For instance, I mean, government will build these homes and will expect all sort of people, the rich and the poor, that’s what they’re trying to do, build an integrated society, not around color but around socio-economic backgrounds. But again, you know, people who earn differently are unable to live together because some people tend to see that those who are poor are devaluating the value of their property. And it’s always a clash that sometimes I cannot pay services and someone else has to pay services and it’s not fair. So there’s so much that gets said about this integration but it’s not working. And slowly, slowly, the poor are getting pushed out of cities for number of reasons. Not in terms of color now, I’m not saying that has been sorted out, it’s not yet sorted out. But at least that has helped us to understand the need to define ourselves, to know the people in the same class in which we are. Therefore, living in the municipal owned flats, for instance, and living in the old traditional homes, it really doesn’t make any difference with us.

01:04:36 S’bu: They’re in our movements, they’re our own comrades while we suffer evictions, they are also complaining about water cut-off, no electricity, evictions, they cannot afford to pay this rent because sometimes with this public housing of subsidy scheme they are sweet when people have to enter but when people are inside, then suddenly the rent goes up. You know, it’s a very smart system of chasing those who cannot pay. They’ll have their water shut down, their electricity cut off. We faced the similar situation. It’s not only a question of shelter, but other necessities surrounding that.

01:05:27 Q9: You talked a little bit about…continuing to build your organization with people committing in hard (unclear), organizing with your neighbor and your comrades but I guess I wanted to bring it back to the gentleman’s question who asked about some of the, like in the beginning, when you referred to (unclear) your whole reason (unclear)

01:05:52 Q10: Are there people who live in your shack community or other shack communities who oppose maybe (unclear) movements and object to some of the things you do?
01:06:02 S’bu: Who?…oppose
01:06:05 Q10: – people who live within the shack communities who oppose the movement and how you handle that.

01:06:12 S’bu: Yes…for simple reasons. For party, political…the party politics. So I think in our movement we make a very clear distinction between a party politic, which is an electoral system, and the living politics. You know, a living politics is a politics that everyone understands, you know. Simple politics that I have no water, no light, yet my life need water. I don’t need light but my life needs light. So we call that a living politics that does not need any big boss in theory to understand. A politics that says I am poor but my neighbor is living in a 1.5 million house [and it is] clear that [the same] system puts us together. Party politic really has, you know, been a popular license to participate in any future development…So, again, a concept of a social movement is not a new concept in South Africa. During the struggle for liberation, the way the United Democratic Front that united outside apartheid politics was in our social movement it was in the civics. But again, it was of the new teaching, people have been taught that to become active citizen, you got to have, you got to join a certain political party. It is your only license to participation, to any development that affects you. It is their only license, through party politics.

01:08:12 S’bu: So as a result, when we started the movement, obviously it was not easy for people to understand. They thought it was another new political party that was trying to oppose the current government, and so on. But again, it takes a very strong courageous leadership to keep this kind of education so that people become aware that, in fact, what divides us is this party political affiliations. So South Africa is a very interesting typical example of a country where people think that if I am this party A and you are this party B, then, automatically, this makes us enemies. And people have been killed for that, that you are not in my party, people have died for that, and people are still dying in South Africa, just for being in a different political party. Then our teaching in our movement, which has really not been appreciated, is being able to also integrate and to do away with that kind of mentality. Again, part of our recruiting strategy is to say to people, leave your party politics at home. We don’t need it here. You are entering a different terrain. So in our movement you will have people from all different party political backgrounds but they are able to speak in one voice because now they can understand what brings them together. And they are the witnesses that my party didn’t help me. My party is not building homes for me. My party, even if it is in government, it cannot even provide electricity. So why should I continue with that? So I think that suffering is also able to bring people together to do away with party political thinking, as if that is the only license for your voice to be heard or to participate in the economy of the country, or political situation.

01:10:28 S’bu: So I think it’s not been easy to…to deal with that. But at the same time, the teachings of the party political systems still insists that if you are not in my party, then you are my enemy. As a result, the party political systems are able to say to some of the shack dwellers that are in the same location, neighbors, that the movement is actually trying to oppose us. So that’s why you may have seen some folks from the shack settlements protesting against the shack dwellers. But we know the game. Some of them were paid to do so, local drug lords and shebeen owners are the main culprits that serve as a vehicle to pretend that people can turn anger against one another. I think the system is very smart to use the very same poor to tend their anger. Also that this community can be seen to be unruly, then, a mediator is needed. And they are smart to maneuver and deal with that so that you are looked as stupid, fighting against one another when there is no need. To start a movement obviously is not an easy thing and I’m saying that in our movement there were no cleaver individuals that sat down and thought of building a movement.

01:12:08 S’bu: It was through anger, hunger, and frustration. A piece of land was promised to the residents of Kennedy Road and a meeting was set up in the same piece of land. The Department of Housing officials were excited to come in and arrest people after it was discovered that that piece of land was sold to a business, a local businessman, yet it was promised for housing. And instead of officials coming, they send the police. And then the community jumped into the street and the road was blockaded. Through that road blockade, and again, many of us were not aware that by blockading a road, that on its own was a political act. Up until, 14 people were arrested, beaten, and tortured in prison. It’s only when we realized that we were playing this dirty game politic, it’s only when we realized that in fact, we are playing with fire. But again, through courage and strength of the people, we marched the next day to demand that those who were arrested be released or all of us be arrested because they were charged for public violence.

01:13:34 S’bu: Now, which public, because we are the public. (unclear) charged for us then it doesn’t make sense to us. Rather, take them out because we are the public that should have been the victims of their act. But if you cannot release them then arrest us. And again, the protest in the next day was also dispersed with… guns and so on. The movement grew up like that. It was not easy. It’s only when we started seeing that, in fact, we were entering a different terrain. Obviously other neighboring settlements who felt the same, they did not come to support us because they were living in similar conditions, they [came because they] thought that the struggle was theirs. So we are not here to support you but our fight is the same, we are here for ourselves. That’s how the struggle grew up. Many settlements joined and I remember 2005 was declared as the year of action. It was fulfilled all over the country. That’s how the movement was formed. We had to coordinate that and then sit down now and the movement was born. So I think that, in the way that we already do, it may be easy to connect, collaborate and (unclear), making tonight that these different organizations that are struggling their own isolated dark corners, their struggle is so hard, it will not be won by individualism. S’bu: Down individualism, down. (audience: down). Down capitalism, down. (audience: down). (audience laughter)
01:15:32 Dara: Unfortunately, we are out of time (applause) thank you so much (applause continues)… Any last closing statement you want to make?

01:15:55 S’bu: Thank you so much. I am humbled, again, when I occupy the space I take it very humbly but firmly. My message obviously would be that we all have a role to play as brothers and sisters in our own small ways and I invite you to create the very same precious space I have spoken about. Some of you are already busy building that space. And my discoveries here have been an excitement and a passion, the willingness to build this precious space, a space where everyone counts, where everyone is treated with respect and dignity. Again, it is our duty to go out and do our duty to our country…to build a fair society. Let’s again try to leave this Earth a better place than we found it. Thank you.