Road Blockade in Defense of the Marikana Land Occupation, Cato Crest, 22 June 2014
Pictuure by Rumana Akood, The Daily Maverick.
Road Blockade in Defense of the Marikana Land Occupation, Cato Crest, 22 June 2014
Pictuure by Rumana Akood, The Daily Maverick.
Aftermath of a road blockade organised in defence of the Marikana Land Occupation, Cato Crest, 22 June 2014
Anne Harley, Interface
Road blockades have long since been a tool of struggle, and in recent months have featured in protests in South Africa, Guinea, Mozambique, Nigeria, Palestine, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, India, Canada, Turkey, and probably in most other countries in the world. Whilst some road blockades might be considered spontaneous eruptions of anger, with little reflective thought involved, others are clearly part of conscious praxis, a tactic reflecting Gramsci’s ‘war of manoeuvre’. However, I argue, road blockades are also used as a counter-hegemonic pedagogical tool in a ‘war of position’, as one of the associated pedagogies within the “multi-faceted praxis and political strategy” of Subaltern Social Movements (Kapoor, 2011). The article uses two such movements, Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa, and the piqueteros in Argentina, to explore this claim.
7 March 2014
Abahlali baseMjondolo Statement
Road Blockade now on in iSiphingo
Residents of the iSiphingo transit camps are currently engaged in a road blockade. Transit camps are never acceptable. We are human beings not animals. Recently this camp has been flooded again after the rains. Residents have diseases like TB and asthma due to the living conditions.
In September the MEC promised, in public, that they would be moved to Cornubia. Yet they are still in the transit camp and have heard nothing more about the MEC's promise.
This is a protest at broken promises and it is a protest at living conditions that no human being can accept.
Khanyi 083 874 4853
Mnikelo 081 263 3462
Jared Sacks
For much of the winter of 2012, communities in shack settlements across Cape Town took to the streets in some of the most active civil disobedience protests since 1994. Knowing that the mainstream political terrain often seeks to obfuscate and mislead the public about the true nature of these protests, this paper investigates claims by politicians from the Democratic Alliance (DA) that these protests were being coordinated by the Youth League of the African National Congress (ANCYL). These big political players moralize the debate, shifting the focus from the perfectly legitimate issues of service delivery and demands for meaningful engagement. Speaking directly to community members of Sweet Home Farm, an informal settlement of 15,000 people in the Philippi area, revealed a yawning chasm between what official players are saying about Sweet Home and the actual realities on the ground.