Category Archives: Jeff Guy

Our Deepest Condolences to Jeff Guy’s Family

Our Deepest Condolences to Jeff Guy’s Family

Jeff Guy was a comrade to us as Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement SA. He has been one of the very few academics who stood with us during the difficult time of our movement. When our movement was under attack by both the state and regressive forces in 2009 and ‘friends’ disappeared Guy availed himself and offered Abahlali his support and solidarity through documenting the circumstances surrounding the attack. Jeff was principled, humbled and stood by the truth he lived for.

Abahlali has lost a friend and a real comrade, May his soul rest in peace.

We extend our deepest condolences to his children and entire family. We believe he has fulfilled his mandate on earth.

S’bu Zikode

CLP Padkos No 25: The Traditional Courts Bill

http://churchland.org.za/padkos%20articles/Padkos%20022.php

PADKOS
Wednesday 20 June 2012

The Traditional Courts Bill

There’s a widespread expectation that CLP, being an NGO, should ‘engage’ government policy a lot. Regular readers of CLP’s Padkos will not be surprised that we tend to ignore this instruction. It’s not as if we think policy “doesn’t matter” and nor do we “ignore the government” (both of these being recurrent accusations from civil society). As we put it in a statement last year clarifying our position on ‘the land question’ (full version attached): “good government policy is better than bad policy, but the policy terrain and process itself reinforces:

· the idea that a small group of clever experts (including those in ‘civil society’) decide things on behalf of the people;
· the dominance of powerful and rich elite interests;
· the power of the state over the people;
· silencing and ignorance of the real struggles, insights, practices, lives and issues of the masses of the people.

Learning from, and supporting the struggles of, those who tend not to be counted in the dominant systems:

· gives better insight into what it is that actually needs to be dealt with and how,
· strengthens the forces for effective and just transformation, and
· enables us to subject our social and political life to the will of the people

In conclusion: the land, and the ‘land question’, is best resolved in the hands and the minds of the people” (CLP, 2011).

North American activist scholar, David Graeber, nails it in his “tiny manifesto against policy:

The notion of ‘policy’ presumes a state or governing apparatus which imposes its will on others. ‘Policy’ is the negation of politics; policy is by definition something concocted by some form of elite, which presumes it knows better than others how their affairs are to be conducted. By participating in policy debates the very best one can achieve is to limit the damage, since the very premise is inimical to the idea of people managing their own affairs” (Graeber, 2004. Fragments of an anarchist anthropology, Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago.)

Even so, in this edition of Padkos we are sharing two pieces, written by good friends of CLP – Richard Pithouse and Jeff Guy – that pick up aspects of debate sparked by the current government policy process on a “Traditional Courts Bill”. But neither Pithouse nor Guy think and write under the deadening thrall of a state politics – not even a ‘civil society’ politics. What is common to both pieces is the clear and respectful engagement with the reality of the life and history of actual people. So much of the critique of the Traditional Courts Bill, especially from the NGOs/civil society, presents ‘tradition’ as the problem and (either explicitly or implicitly) nominates liberal democracy as the answer. Make no mistake, this Bill is terrible and deserves criticism – at their AGM this year, the Unemployed People’s Movement (UPM, Grahamstown) described it as “the next blow to the rural poor” (UPM, Brief Report on the UPM AGM, 3 April 2012). But the thinking of the state (including that part of the state in society called ‘civil society’) gets us nowhere, except to hint at the size of the gap between the state and the life of the people. By contrast, Pithouse’s piece, “Locusts on the Horizon”, explores some of the nuances of what the Bill reveals about the state we’re in and Guy’s piece, “A chief rules by people power”, demonstrates its utter failure to tap into emancipatory strands in that ever-vibrant, always-contested thing called ‘tradition’.

Justice delayed and denied for 12 Kennedy Road accused

http://www.themercury.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=5467508

Justice delayed and denied for 12 Kennedy Road accused

May 13, 2010 Edition 1

Jeff Guy

TOMORROW, 12 men are going to appear in court for the 11th time in nearly eight months. They have yet to be informed of the evidence against them.

“Justice delayed is justice denied” is described as a legal cliché, and my dictionary tells me that a cliché is a saying that has lost its impact through overuse. But for those who suffer the impact of justice delayed directly it is no cliché: the effects are devastating – and should be unacceptable to citizens of South Africa.

The crimes took place on the night of September 26-27, 2009, at the Kennedy Road centre of Abahlali baseMjondolo. Abahlali is a social movement of shack dwellers, founded at the Kennedy Road settlement in Durban, but now spread through much of South Africa with thousands of members.

The Kennedy Road Development Committee, which had earlier negotiated a development plan with the eThekwini municipality, and had also restricted the opening hours of shebeens, had just met when they were attacked by men with pangas and knobkieries, shouting pro-Zulu, anti-Mpondo slogans.

Two people died, 30 houses were burnt, property was looted, the occupants chased out, among them S’bu Zikode, the leader of the movement. They remain in hiding after death threats, and Abahlali now exercises its leadership away from the public eye – underground, as they say.

But the authorities reacted immediately and very publicly. Within 48 hours, on September 28, the office of the Department of Community Safety and Liaison announced that the provincial government had “moved swiftly to liberate a Durban community (Kennedy Road) that had been placed on an illegal curfew…” and “Matters came to a head at the weekend when a group of men brandishing an assortment of weapons… killed two people. Scores of others were injured.”

Accompanied by police, the MEC, Willies Mchunu, visited the settlement and a special task team was set up to hunt down the killers, and the promise was made that freedom would be restored to Kennedy Road.

Eight men were already under arrest, and five were arrested later. The charges could not be more serious – public violence, assault and murder. But now, after nearly eight months, they have still not been tried, and neither they, nor their lawyers, nor we the public, know what they did to merit these charges.

The big questions remain unanswered. Who attacked the Abahlali leadership at Kennedy Road, burnt the houses, destroyed property, driving families from their shelters, forcing them to live in hiding? How is it possible that those now under arrest themselves lost their homes in the attack? The provincial authorities publicly announced that Kennedy road had been “liberated”.

By whom and from whom? Could it really be that, as Abahlali believes, their attackers had local ANC support and were under instructions to rid Kennedy Road of an organisation that was providing effective support and services for the poor.

As long as answers to such questions are kept from us then the tensions and the misery and injustice with which the violence of the night of September 26 is surrounded grows and spreads, poisoning the lives of all those touched by it.

Consider what has happened in the courts. Since October, 2009, the accused have appeared in court on 10 occasions. At first bail applications were refused because no evidence had been placed before the court.

Then an identity parade was held after the accused had appeared in court. Seven were released on bail, five remained in prison, but the case was postponed into 2010. Five months, six months, seven months, a long time to be under bail conditions, property destroyed, families homeless, difficult to get a job. And a longer time to be in Westville Prison.

On May 4 the case came before the court again. The accused’s lawyer asked for copies of the statements upon which the charges were based.

After all, without them, the charges were just “bald allegations”. Again no decision was made: the magistrate declared that she was new to the case, had not been provided with information, and postponed proceedings until May 14.

The constitution tells us that the accused have the right “to be informed of the charge with sufficient detail to answer it” (35.3.a) and tried “without unreasonable delay” (35.3.d).

In this case the sufficiently detailed information has not been provided after nearly eight months. As a result, justice has been delayed, and denied, to 12 South Africans who were removed from their homes in September, 2009. Since then they have suffered detention, the loss of liberty, and with their families and dependants, the consequences of deprivation at all levels: jobs, work and income, basic housing, and a safe and secure family life.

And they have as yet only been accused – they wait to be told what they are supposed to have done.

# Jeff Guy is an emeritus professor of history at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.