Category Archives: Road Blockades

The pedagogy of road blockades

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. 

Road Blockade now on in iSiphingo

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

Sweet Home: A Preliminary Investigation into the Socio-Political Character of Recent Road Blockades by Protesting Shack Dwellers in South Africa

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.

Attachments


Road Blockades in Sweet Home Farm