Category Archives: Mail and Guardian

Shack dwellers food strike day 11

Leave a reply

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=304570&area=/insight/insight__national/

Niren Tolsi

13 April 2007 07:30

Lying on beds, the Kennedy Five smile weakly and raise their fists as Anglican Bishop Rubin Phillip enters their hospital dormitory in Durban’s Westville Prison. It is day 11 of their hunger strike.

S’thembiso Bhengu, S’bongiseni Gwala, Cosmos Nkwanyane, Thina Khanyile and M’du Ngqulunga, of the Kennedy Road shack settlement, were arrested in connection with the death of a suspected criminal, Mzwakhe Sithole.

Insisting that the murder charge against them was orchestrated by police at Sydenham police station to destabilise the shack-dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, and its affiliate, the Kennedy Road Development Committee, they are refusing to eat. They are demanding their immediate release and an investigation into Sithole’s death by policemen unconnected with the Sydenham police station. The men are adamant that if bail is not granted on Friday and the investigation continues unchanged, their fast will continue.

Kennedy Road residents handed a memorandum to Sydenham station Chief Superintendent Glen Nayagar on Tuesday accusing him of racism, “criminalising the poor” and colluding with criminals to destabilise shack settlements. It said Abahlali intended opening a civil case — backed by Amnesty International — against Nayagar, and demanded his resignation.

Sithole allegedly attacked Kennedy Road resident Khanyile on February 15, stabbing him 18 times before stealing his shoes and watch. Kennedy Road residents say community members arrested Sithole on February 18, forcibly restraining him before handing him over to the Sydenham police.

However, Nayagar said his officers “were alerted to an incident where someone was being terribly assaulted” at Kennedy Road. “The police … found [Sithole] terribly injured and moved him to the police station for his own safety and to open a case docket … While he was seated outside [the police station] waiting for an ambulance, he crossed the road and died.

“We can’t have … kangaroo courts and vigilante-style attacks in the area. We are confident of making more arrests in the settlement,” Nayagar said.

To see ‘I was punched & beaten’, Niren Tolsi’s eyewitness account of a previous instance of the racist, criminal thuggery of the Sydenham Police, click here.

Human Beings are Living There, May 2006

Leave a reply

Mail & Guardian, 19 May 2006
Human Beings are Living There

Every great city in this world, from ancient Rome to New York, was, at some point, ringed with shacks. Today around one billion people live in shacks and the numbers are growingly rapidly. In South Africa it is often confidently asserted that shack settlements are an apartheid hangover which will soon pass. In fact the number of people living in shacks has almost doubled in the last 12 years. Despite this politicians like KZN Housing MEC Mike Mabuyakhulu insist that shack settlements will be eradicated in time for the 2010 World Cup. While houses are being built they are certainly not being built at anything remotely like the rate to enable Mabuyakhulu to eradicate the 250 000 settlements identified by his department in his lifetime. His plan is to pass new legislation enabling municipalities to set up their own Red Ants units to destroy shack settlements. He is planning a legislated version of Operation Murambatsvina.

In Durban the eThekwini Municipality has already destroyed settlements illegally leaving people homeless. The Municipality has acted with equal contempt for the law when the shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo have attempted to express their concerns. City Manager Mike Sutcliffe banned his first shack dwellers’ march on 14 November last year. The Freedom of Expression Institute issued a statement condemning Sutcliffe’s ban as “a flagrant violation of the Constitution and the Regulation of Gatherings Act.” When shack dwellers tried to protest against Sutcliffe’s illegal ban they were shot at and savagely beaten by the police. Journalists were threatened with violence if they reported what they had seen and photographic evidence was stolen at gun point.

The Abahlali were eventually able to garner the connections to challenge their ongoing de facto banning. Sutcliffe had banned a march of 20 000 people into the city planned for 27th February 2006. Early that morning the police occupied the largest settlements in a military style operation using armoured vehicles and helicopters. All exits were blocked and key people were arrested, sometimes while still asleep, and later assaulted in the Sydenham police station. But this time Abahlali were able to go to the high court with the backing of the Foundation for Human Rights. They won a court order interdicting the city and the police from interfering with their right to protest. With the interdict in their hands they were able to leave the settlements and march into the city in triumph.

Shack dwellers have won major access to voice which now enables them to comment on the policies affecting them everywhere from community radio stations to the New York Times. At their core of their struggle is a demand to be able to live close to the city where there are opportunities for work and decent education. They are also demanding housing, basic services and genuinely participatory policy making. The Municipality’s response has largely followed a two prong strategy: send out the police to deal with the shack dwellers and tell middle class citizens that everything is all right because houses are being built and the UN organisation Habitat endorses the housing programme. But most of the houses that are being built are tiny, badly made dwellings in bleak apartheid style rural ghettos far from opportunities for work, decent education and health care. The fact that Habitat endorses this provides no comfort. Habitat has a dismal record of failure to engage with shack dwellers and its attempt at developing a model pilot project in Nairobi, where it has its plush headquarters, has been a complete failure. Habitat functions largely to offer legitimation to governments with similar failings. This is unsurprising. The UN is, after all, an organisation of governments.

The return to colonial style rhetoric about ‘clearing the slums’ means that shack settlements are seen as temporary aberrations. This enables the municipality to justify halting service provision to shack dwellers. This goes back to 2001 when the municipality announced that “In past (1990s) electrification was rolled out to all and sundry…electrification of the informal settlements has now been discontinued.” The consequence of this is that the ominous glow of shack fires lights up the winter sky. People live in terror of fire. Electrification could halt the deaths, burns and suffering caused by these fires. The provision of even a few more taps could prevent women from spending huge portions of their lives queuing for water.

With budget and policy priorities as they are the only way that KZN shack settlements will be gone in four years time is if the state wages a massive militarised assault on the poor. If they choose or are forced to step back from the madness of the war Mabuyakhulu is planning the shacks will still be there. And the women will still be discussing the latest fire in the water queue.

“No Vote” Campaigns are not a Rejection of Democracy, November 2005

Leave a reply

Mail and Guardian
“No Vote” Campaigns are not a Rejection of Democracy

The Landless Peoples’ Movement (LPM) in Gauteng and Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Durban shack dwellers’ movement have both mobilised shack dwellers. And, at different times, both movements have, through democratic processes, arrived at a ‘no vote slogan’. The national LPM organised under the banner of ‘No Land, No Vote’ at the time of the 2004 national elections. More recently Abahlali baseMjondolo has organised under the banner of ‘No Land, No House, No Vote’ in the lead up to the forthcoming municipal elections.

These two movements arrived at very similar processes through independent democratic processes. But the response of the state has been the same – immediate repression. More than 60 LPM activists were arrested as they got off a bus and detained in Protea North Police Station on 14 April 2004. More than a dozen activists alleged assault and teargasing in custody and four activists alleged torture and laid civil and criminal charges against Crime Intelligence officers. In Durban the shack dwellers’ movement has organised a number of very large and completely peaceful marches on local councillors during this year under the banner of ‘Land & Housing!’.But recently the Foreman Road Development Committee, which represents the Foreman Road settlement which is affiliated to Abahlali baseMjondolo, tried to organise a march on Durban Mayor Obed Mlaba under the banner “No Land, No House, No Vote”. Suddenly the movement faced severe repression.

The Foreman Road march was planned for Monday 14 November. The Committee completed all the paper work necessary to apply for a permit to stage a legal march in good time. But three days before the scheduled march a terse fax was received from the Municipality stating that the march was “prohibited”. Two reasons were given for banning the march. The first was that “Officials from the Mayor’s Office have advised us that they have no feedback for your organisation”. The second was that “The Mayor’s Office labour is unable to assist you and there will be no representative there to meet you.” City Manager Mike Sutcliffe is responsible for administering requests to hold legal marches.

The Freedom of Expression Institute issued a statement condemning Sutcliffe’s ban as “a flagrant violation of the Constitution and the Regulation of Gatherings Act”. The statement went on to explain that the reasons given by the Municipality for banning the march were “absurd” and without any legal basis.

On the day scheduled for the march around 3 000 people gathered in the Foreman Road settlement. People were told that the march had been banned and it was suggested that a rally be held in the settlement instead. But the majority of people decided that they could not accept this attack on their basic democratic rights and that they would stage a peaceful march in protest. This act of peaceful civil disobedience against repression posed no threat to any person or property. The marchers, mostly women, set off singing up the steep dirt road that leads out of the settlement. They had just got onto Loon Road when they were met by the police. Without the mandatory warning the police charged the protestors and began arresting and beating people at random resulting in some serious injuries. Numerous eyewitnesses report that live rounds were fired. Moreover academics and journalists were threatened with violence if they reported what they had seen. Carvin Goldstone from The Mercury was threatened by Superintendent Glen Nayagar from the Sydenham Police Station and Raj Patel, a University of KwaZulu-Natal academic, had his camera confiscated by Nayagar.

The Freedom of Expression Institute issued a statement condemning “the eThekwini Muncipality’s blatant disregard for the rights of marginalized communities to exercise their freedom of expression” The statement described the police action as illegal on two grounds. The first was that no warning was given to disperse before the police attacked and the second was that there was no legal justification for the degree of force used in the police attack. The intimidation of the media and confiscation of cameras was also clearly illegal.

After the march there were extremely authoritarian statements from a number of officials, including the mayor, and Crime Intelligence officers were all over the settlements and certain individuals. There are alarming signs that Abahlali base Mjondolo activists may face further repression.

Hence it is necessary to contest the claim that choosing not to vote is an attack on democracy that legitimates state repression. It is usually possible to discern three logical errors behind this claim.

The first is the assumption that democracy is merely about elections to state office. This is not so. Democracy is a day to day practice that includes the right to express dissent in multiple ways and to constitute multiple associations for collective discussion and action. A collective decision not to vote in an election is in no way a renunciation of democratic values. Indeed it is striking how deeply democratic the Abahlali base Mjondolo movement is.

Secondly, there is an assumption that a decision not to vote somehow undermines the democratic process. This is not so. When individuals decide not to vote their choice is generally just read as apathy. But when people in a particular area take a collective decision not to vote they will be clearly understood to have made a collective political statement. The panicked reaction of local councillors and officials to collective decisions not to vote in some Durban settlements indicates the rationality and power of this strategy.

Thirdly, there is often an assumption that a collective choice not to vote indicates an irrational anarchism. In fact it is often a perfectly logical decision. If people are ANC supporters but feel betrayed by the party the choice not to vote allows them to express their dissatisfaction without having to vote for another party. Given that there is no progressive alternative to the ANC it is easy to understand why ANC supporting shack dwellers do not want to support other parties. And standing as independents can be inadvisable or impossible. It can be inadvisable because social movement activists are always stigmatised as having designs on power or as being manipulated by people with designs on power. The refusal of electoral politics is often an important way of avoiding this slur and keeping the focus on the issues at hand. Standing as an independent can be impossible when people are very poor and simply don’t have the resources or when they feel, as people often do, that they will be at physical risk should they attempt an electoral challenge to local elites.

Whether or not one thinks that collective declarations that there will be no vote if there is no delivery are wise the fact is that they are not anti-democratic. People are as entitled to decide not to vote as they are to vote for the party of their choice. There is no justification for the repression of poor people who choose to withhold their vote in protest against broken promises and a general lack of delivery. It is the people who illegally ban their marches, beat them up in the streets and threaten journalists and academics with assault if they report what they have seen who are a threat to our democracy. It is people like Mike Sutcliffe and Glen Nayagar who are a threat to our democracy.

‘I eat with robbed money’

Leave a reply

Here’s a story which mentions another ‘no vote’ campaign, this time in Khayelitsha, organised from within the shacks. Sadly, the article reproduces precisely the standard narratives of criminality in shacks against which Abahlali have consistently railed, in reports such as Make Crime History or The Strong Poor and the Police. Yet the existence of another no-vote campaign, mentioned even in passing in a national newspaper, points to a widespread understanding by poor people about their only recourse in getting elected officials to listen to them – other mechanisms of democracy having failed.

Available at http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=298538&area=/insight/insight__national/

09 February 2007 11:59
Patrick Magadla inside his spaza shop. (Photograph: David Harrison)
“You whites will never understand anything about living in the sand in a hok big enough for a dog. And you will never understand crime. What’s crime? Am I a criminal because I eat with robbed money? I don’t want to know how my two sons earn the R20, R30 or R100 they bring home most evenings. Of course they’ve stolen it; or maybe they’ve mugged somebody; maybe somebody was stabbed with a knife or screwdriver. Maybe somebody is dead now and their money paid for my pap tonight.”

Nomsa is 40 years old. She looks older than 50 and she and her four children live in a shack the size of a single garage. (Nomsa is not her real name and she didn’t want pictures taken of her, her kids or their shack.) Her two boys are 15 and 17 years old. Sullen or shy — a white wouldn’t know. The younger ones are snot-nosed toddlers.

Nomsa and an estimated half a million other people live in Enkanini, which means “by force” in Xhosa. Part of Khayelitsha, Enkanini is sprawled across kilometres of sand dunes from the Cape Flats to Monwabisi beach in False Bay. Because of massive overcrowding in Nyanga, Guguletu and Emfuleni, backyarders — people who rent and squat in backyard-shacks — moved on to these bush-covered sand dunes shortly before the April 2004 general election.

Initially the council tried to stop the influx, but when the people threatened not to vote, local councillors backed down. Three years later the council has tarred one or two roads and supplied communal taps and mobile toilets along the main tar road. But there is still no electricity. Enkanini is on no map and no roads signs point to this area, which is home mainly to hundreds of thousands of Xhosa-speaking people from the Eastern Cape.

Nameless streets criss-cross the sand dunes, which are covered in wooden or plastic shacks. Once you’re off the tar road, it’s almost impossible to drive a car on the loose sand. There’s not a single tree here. Some people live more than an hours’ walk away from a toilet and use the bushes around their homes instead.

Residents say they survive on crime, adding that only about 5% of people living in Enkanini are formally employed. “I know a lot of people who do crime. They sell alcohol and cigarettes, they buy stolen cellphones, they’re prostitutes, they have kids so that they can get the child grant. They send their children in the mornings and in the evenings to the taxi-ranks and train stations to mug and steal. I’m not sure whether those things are wrong because how else will we eat?” said 26-year-old Nandipa Sasa.

Nandipa came here a year ago after she heard about land opening up in Cape Town. “I left Umtata the next day and rushed here. In the Eastern Cape we’re told there’s land in Cape Town and everybody runs here because, once you have a place to put up a shack, you can start looking for a job. I worked for six months in a sandwich shop earning R1 200 per month and managed to build myself this two-room shack. Since the shop closed down five months ago, I’ve been to every shop, café and restaurant from Wynberg to Sea Point — there’s no work.”

Nandipa gets fed by a friend who receives the R190-a-month child grant. This R190 feeds two adults and three children. “We eat once a day. If there’s no money to go to town looking for work, we play with the babies. It’s better to be hungry here than in the Eastern Cape — at least here I can eat once a day,” Nandipa said.

Crime in Enkanini is rampant, says Nandipa: “I’ve been mugged at gunpoint three times; at night skollies have kicked down my shack’s door twice. I don’t know anybody living here who has not been robbed or mugged or raped or shot or stabbed. But it’s my home.”

Other residents describe Enkanini as a particularly lawless place, where the absence of the police means that anything goes. “This place is worse than other places because the criminals here aren’t scared. They know the cops can’t get to them because there are no roads. People don’t have phones. At night you see nothing because it’s so dark,” says Beauty, a 24-year-old mother of two small children who lives in a shack on her own. The father of her children has “disappeared with another woman, but luckily left us with the one-room shack,” Beauty says.

“The men here are bad to women. You always get robbed with guns. They don’t say ‘give me your phone or your purse’. They make you squat down and then they stick their fingers into your vagina to feel whether you’re hiding your money there. They hurt you and nobody helps you because they have guns,” she said.

Baden-Powell Drive is the beautiful road that links Muizenberg to the N2 and brings those with cars and money to this otherwise inaccessible area. “I come to Baden-Powell or the beach twice a week to have sex or suck men — I only do three men a day. They pay me R100 and if they want me to suck them without a condom, I charge R150,” says Jennifer (not her real name).

Jennifer claims that she is 18 years old — her friends, who earn money the same way, say she is 14. She hangs around Monwabisi beach with her little brother who acts as her chaperone or substitute. If the white male customers prefer young boys, her brother stands in for her.

“I came here last year for the first time. The men are white. The first time I was very scared because you have to get into this man’s car and they drive off with you to places among bushes that I don’t know. I’ve only been to Enkanini and Harare [part of Khayelitsha]. Then you have sex in the car or you give them blowjobs or they want to do funny stuff with you. Afterwards you don’t know if they will take you back or leave you somewhere,” says Jennifer.

Jennifer and her brother live with their aunt. Their mother died of Aids and they don’t know where their father is. “My aunty don’t ask me how I get money; how I can buy white shorts and nice sandals. I buy bread and pap and meat for the house and she says I’m a good child. My brother still goes to school sometimes, but I don’t. If we go to school, we’re hungry all the time and it’s better not to be hungry.”

‘A dangerous place to work’
“It’s a hell of a place to work because we can’t do ordinary policing. We can’t drive around and patrol because there are no roads; our vehicles get stuck in the sand; at night you can’t see your hand in front of your eyes because it’s so dark. People don’t have addresses, but have guns; it takes a long time to respond to calls and people move in and out all the time. Criminals hide among the community and nobody knows that they’re there,” says Senior Superintendent Pumzile Cetyana, the man charged with policing Enkanini.

“When the cops in the Western Cape are looking for murderers or rapists, chances are that they’re hiding here in Enkanini. Overnight people move in, clear some bushes and put up a shack. Nobody asks them who they are or where they’re from. By the time our intelligence people and community informers tell us where they’re staying, they’re gone. They simply move the shack a couple of metres away on to another dune and we wouldn’t find them.”

Enkanini made it into the newspapers for the first time because of crime — two years ago four people were beaten to death and set alight after irate residents caught them stealing, raping and mugging.

Recently a Swiss citizen was found murdered and stuffed into a suitcase on a sandy road in Enkanini. Although the police are not allowed to release any official statistics, they reckon that somebody is murdered in Enkanini every two to three weeks. Domestic violence and contact crimes such as assault are the most frequently reported crimes here.

Despite overwhelming anecdotal evidence to the contrary, Cetyana and his cops are adamant that crime in Enkanini is declining. “We’re winning this crime war because we’re spending a lot of time just getting the community to trust us and report crime to us. We’ve received quad-bikes to patrol the area and it’s already making a big difference.”

Pretty Burger, who lives with her four children in Enkanini and survives on the child grants, says that she knows nobody who reports crime. “If somebody reports a crime, they have to meet the police on the tar-road and then take the police to the scene of the crime. People are scared to phone the cops because they’re seen arriving with the cops. Who wants to be an impimpi [informer]?”

Cetyana’s cops do foot patrols through thick beach sand in groups of four, wearing bullet-proof vests and carrying heavy artillery weapons. “It’s a dangerous place to work,” Cetyana says.

On the SMI, from the Anti-Eviction Campaign

7 Replies

Following this article in the M&G the following letter was sent to the Mail and Guardian but, despite their publishing three letters attacking Abahlali baseMjondolo in a specially dedicated extension of the letters page, it was not published. (Scroll down to read What Happened at or to the SMI)

Letter from the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign to the Mail and Guardian

The Western Cape Anti Eviction Campaign (WCAEC) was, together with the Anti-Privatisation Forum, Jubilee South Africa and the Landless People’s Movement, a founder of the Social Movement Indaba (SMI) in 2002. That is why it is incorrect for your reporter Niren Tolsi (“On the far side of left”, December 8-14) to echo the claim of SMI secretariat member Mondi Hlatshwayo that the WCAEC “invaded” the December 2006 SMI in Durban. The SMI was set up as a platform for social movements and we regarded its space as our space. Yet some SMI ‘leaders’ attempted to deny us and Abahlali baseMjondolo access to the meeting!

Mondi Hlatshwayo’s description of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the biggest social movement in Durban, and the WCAEC as a “mob” merely shows the degeneration of the SMI secretariat. It is the kind of description used by apartheid agents against the mass movement of the 1980s.

Our joint grievances were twofold. One was what your reporter calls the “familiar complaint” that the SMI has been taken over from community-based social movements by NGOs and academics. If it is familiar, that is maybe because it is correct. Unaccountable NGO’s are using their access to financial resources to dominate the SMI and to marginalise social movements in it. We believe that the role of NGOs is to be the servants and not the masters of communities, and we called for the SMI to return to its founding idea of being owned by community-based social movements.

Our second grievance was that Abahlali baseMjondolo had been mandated by the 2005 SMI to host the 2006 SMI in Durban, but had been so marginalised by Durban NGOs on the organising committee that they had been forced to walk out of it. This took place not “a week” before the SMI, as Des D’Sa is quoted in your article as saying, but more than a month before. Yet the organising committee did nothing to remedy the situation.

We also firmly deny that we chanted down fellow-activists or, as Hlatshwayo claims, that we insulted them or used abusive language. We regard it as monstrous that he should also state that “we didn’t want a situation where people were going to get injured” as our aims were entirely non-violent. We appealed to the rank and file of the SMI to take responsibility for owning and controlling the process and agenda of the SMI – and we still appeal to them, up and down the country, from Limpopo through Orange Farm to Cape Town, to do so.

We also deny Hlatshwayo’s claim that we did not give the secretariat a platform to reply. We specifically asked them to respond to our grievances — but when we had finished there was complete silence from them.

After our intervention ‘leaders’ of the SMI, including Hlatshwayo, Virginia Sethsedi and Roy Chetty, to their eternal shame, attempted to evict WCAEC members from our rooms on UKZN campus which we resisted, as we always resist evictions by council, banks, agents, and the mayor in Cape Town. The SMI secretariat also refused meals to the WCAEC delegation.

We reaffirm our solidarity with academics Faizel Khan, Richard Pithouse, Richard Ballard and Raj Patel, all marginalised or persecuted because of their links with Abahlali baseMjondolo.

For the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign

Ashraf Cassiem, 082-480-5489

aec_ash@yahoo.com.br
____________________________

This document was written and circulated around Durban and ‘Martizburg for signatures last year but in the end it wasn’t published at the time due to the heavily intimidatory climate that included appalling public slander (often emailed under faked identities) and various kinds of threats and intimidation, including threats of people being sold out to their bosses and threats of violence against people that spoke up about what was happening. It is now published here anonymously.

What happened at or to the SMI national meeting?

The SMI has been quite important. One of its key actual functions is to occupy the political space claiming to represent social movements in South Africa. Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), the only organisation of the poor large enough to be considered as a social movement in KZN, were part of planning the national event until they pulled out.

Our understanding is they felt they decided to pull out because they were not being taken seriously, and that those driving the agenda for the national meeting would not make it responsive to the actual needs, priorities or issues that AbM were raising. If the agenda for the SMI was not being defined by actual movements of poor people, then who’s agenda was it?, and why should AbM give legitimacy to a process that while carried out in the name of popular movements of the poor in their experience was in fact undemocratic? – but the SMI carried on.

It seems clear that key parts of the de facto leadership of the SMI ‘brand’ began to speak about AbM’s withdrawal as the result of AbM being manipulated by one white academic activist as part of what they claimed was that individual’s fight with other activists and academics who have a lot invested in the political space associated with the representation of social movement politics. Interestingly the very odd claim that one white man was somehow ‘behind’ a democratic movement of thousands was exactly how the state initially responded to the emergence of AbM…

On Sunday, AbM, joined by members of the Anti Eviction Campaign (AEC) from the Western Cape, went to the SMI meeting in their numbers to make their position known, to put forward the agenda they would have wanted, and to ask for an apology for the way they had been treated in the build-up to the meeting. When this intervention failed, they walked out and were joined in this by some others too, including the Socialist Students’ Movement) – but the SMI carried on.

On Monday, shack residents from Siyanda settlement in Durban – not organised into, or directly connected with, AbM – protested against the destruction of the homes and their threatened removal to ‘low cost housing’ elsewhere. Police shot them, killing one person and locked up the injured in jail cells – but the SMI carried on, making no comment or intervention about this. However ABM and the AEC were on the scene within minutes and immediately began organising practical solidarity.

In fact the the SMI carried on surrounded by newly erected security barriers, beefed-up security personnel and an emergency plan, just in case their meeting (now let’s remember, this meeting is the Social Movements Indaba meeting) got disrupted again by an actually existing social movement of actually existing poor people, actually speaking for themselves.

That evening, when AEC comrades returned to their accommodation at the University (where the SMI meeting was happening), they were subjected to threatening and insulting jeers and songs, and they were physically evicted by SMI heavyweights. The evictees joined the other AEC comrades who had been staying in jondolos with AbM members all along anyway – but the SMI carried on.

The SMI carried on and vilified the AbM as ‘criminal’ from the podium. In a tragic alignment with the ways in which the authorities have tried to undermine AbM, the SMI’s ‘line’ bought into the idea that AbM are criminals being manipulated – manipulated by a white academic activist. As should be obvious, this is blatantly racist and insulting to the obvious and demonstrated capacity of AbM to think and act all on their own. From our own experiences of some of the events we talk about here, we know that it is also a lie – a vicious, racist lie.

It seems to us that, pretty much from the beginning, AbM have been a rather uncomfortable phenomenon for much of the established South African left. Unlike almost every other ‘social movement’ in the country, AbM emerged, grew, and exists, outside of the initiative and political direction of self-consciously ‘left’ NGO activists. As such, it has never been susceptible to the control that vanguardist activists exert; it has never quite fitted the fantasies of what a social movement ‘should’ be/act/talk/think like. The movement’s origins were within the actual experiences of poor people and that is where it orientated its praxis. Moreover from the beginning it organised without funding and never developed a dependency on donors or people who mediate relations with donors.

If nothing else, it must be clear that the SMI can no longer claim to speak for social movements in South Africa. Hopefully, intelligent and reflective comrades will start to go far beyond this obvious conclusion and begin to think very carefully about what else these events actually mean for all of us.

These notes were written by a couple of people based in KwaZulu-Natal at the time these events were unfolding in December 2006. (For what it’s worth, none of us is called Richard.) Initially we hoped, vainly perhaps, that putting some thoughts down might encourage critical self-reflection before perceptions that were being deliberately created hardened, and before lessons that could be drawn to the benefit of broader processes of movement building were lost. If nothing else, we thought that reflection was essential in the aftermath of a national meeting of a thing called the ‘Social Movements Indaba’ that found it necessary and justifiable to erect security barricades to prevent its deliberations being attended (‘invaded’ and ‘disrupted’ they would say) by an actually existing social movement with an actually existing mass membership joined together through actually existing democratic practices. We thought that reflection was essential when, in the varied justifications from within the SMI after these events, the languages and the lines of attack mirrored completely the attacks on AbM from other hostile elites who also cast AbM as essentially a gang of criminals manipulated a white activist. We never developed these notes beyond these opening comments but the extraordinary stream of emails from within the SMI camp that followed after their national meeting will provide plenty of truly horrible data for careful analysis at some point in the future.

_______________

Abahlali baseMjondolo is not the only grassroots black movement to be subject to appalling racist attacks by the white dominated academic/NGO left who are unable to understand that poor black people think their own struggles themselves. As Ashraf Cassiem famously put it, “We are poor, not stupid”. There is an eerie familiarity with the response of the 1968 obsessed white/institutional Parisian left to the recent Parisian uprising and the appalling attacks on Abahlali following their very polite and well reasoned (see the raw video footage here) declaration of intellectual autonomy from the NGO left at the SMI meeting. See Emilio Quadrelli’s Grassroots Political Militants: Banlieusards and Politics. Alain Badiou’s ‘What is the Left?’ is also rather useful for thinking through the astonishing authoritarianism, ruthlessness, propensity to wild slander and complicity with some of the practices of the state that have typified the response of a section of the NGO left to the emergence of actually existing mass movements of the poor resolved to think and act for themselves.