Category Archives: SACSIS
SACSIS: There Will Be Blood
http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1794
There Will be Blood
Richard Pithouse
Nkosinathi Mngomezulu was shot in the stomach on Saturday morning. He was shot at the Marikana land occupation at Stop 1, Cato Crest in Durban during an eviction. He's currently in the Intensive Care Unit of King Edward Hospital. His comrades fear that he may be attacked in the hospital. They've not been allowed to post their own guard but they're making sure that he's always surrounded by a large group during visiting hours.
Mngomezulu's comrades are not paranoid. He's been threatened with death if he recovers and returns home to the occupation. On the 26th of June Nkululeko Gwala, like Mngomezulu a member of Abahlali baseMjondolo, was assassinated in Cato Crest. Just over three months earlier another activist, Thembinkosi Qumbelo was gunned down in similar circumstances.
And hospital is not necessarily a safe place for someone who has crossed the ANC in Durban. On the 30th of June last year Bhekimuzi Ndlovu was shot in the Zakheleni shack settlement in Umlazi after a series of protests against the local councillor and for land and housing. The Unemployed People's Movement reported that the next day he was visited in hospital by a delegation from the local ANC. They said that they wanted to pray for him. Shortly after they left he became violently ill. The doctor diagnosed poisoning.
Murder has been part of the repertoire of political containment in post-apartheid Durban since Michael Makhabane was shot in the chest at point blank range by a police officer on a university campus in May 2000. Political killings have been undertaken by shadowy assassins since at least April 2006 when two former SACP activists were assassinated in Umlazi after supporting an independent candidate against the ANC in the local government elections. And the armed mobilisation of ANC supporters against people organised outside of the party has been given de facto sanction from the police and senior politicians in the city and the province since at least September 2009 when Abahlali baseMjondolo were attacked in the Kennedy Road shack settlement in Clare Estate.
The attack on Abahlali baseMjondolo in 2009 was also the moment when the language of ethnicity began to be openly used by the local ANC, including senior figures in the Municipality like Nigel Gumede, to legitimate exclusion and violence. Abahlali baseMjondolo, an ethnically diverse organisation, was misrepresented as an Mpondo organisation and it was made clear that this designation rendered it illegitimate. Ethnic claims were mobilised in a similar way when people were burnt out of the kwaShembe shack settlement in Clermont in March 2010 and in the repression that followed sustained organisation by the Unemployed People's Movement in the Zakheleni settlement in Umlazi last year.
Death threats are now a routine feature of political discourse in Durban. They are not only part of the arsenal of increasingly heavily armed local councillors and their committees. In September 2007 politically connected businessman Ricky Govender, a man who has often been described as a gangster, was reported to have threatened to have a journalist at the Mercury killed. He had previously been reported to have threatened to have local Abahlali baseMjondolo activist Shamitha Naidoo killed. Nigel Gumede, who chairs the housing committee in the eThekwini Municipality, has never denied the claim that he threatened S'bu Zikode from Abahlali baseMjondolo in a meeting in the City Hall in October 2011. On a number of occasions ANC members bused in to court appearances have openly issued death threats against independently organised activists.
Witnesses say that Mngomezulu was shot by a manager of the Land Invasions Unit. The police are claiming that he was shot after he stabbed one of the unit's members. Witnesses emphatically deny this. The police in Durban have been so habitually dishonest for so long when it comes to giving accounts of their own violence, and to violence against people organised outside of the ANC, that nothing that they say should be taken seriously in the absence of credible evidence. But even if Mngomezulu did put up some resistance to the Land Invasions Unit he would have been within his right to do so. We all have a clear right, in law, to defend our homes against illegal attack.
The land at Stop 1 in Cato Crest was occupied, and the occupation named Marikana, in March this year after a large number of people were made homeless as their shacks were destroyed to make way for a housing development. As has been typical for years, tenants were left homeless if they couldn't pay a bribe to get a house or didn't have solid connections to local party structures. In this case the eviction of the tenants was also given an overt ethnic inflection with politicians from the local councillor to Nigel Gumede and the mayor, James Nxumalo, openly mobilising a discourse that presents people from the Eastern Cape as alien intruders in Durban.
Some of the people that were illegally rendered homeless earlier this year had lived in the area since as far back at 1995. They had work in the area, their children were in local schools and Durban was where they were making their lives. The local ANC had told them to 'go back to Lusikisiki'. They decided, instead, to occupy an adjacent piece of land. Their shacks have been demolished on eight separate occasions, often violently, and they have rebuilt them each time. They have been to the High Court five times to request the Court's intervention against these patently unlawful evictions. The Municipality has brazenly violated all of the assurances it has given the court, as well as three court orders.
People who have tried to defend their homes have been beaten and shot with rubber bullets. When they have gone to the streets they have been arrested and beaten in the local police station. When the court ordered lawyers from both sides to meet at the Marikana land occupation on Tuesday last week to identify which shacks were protected by its orders, local ANC members were mobilised by the local councillor to disrupt the process. Intimidation, including death threats, made the process mandated by the court impossible.
This drama is not simply about the state using violence to try and sustain the duopoly that it shares with the market with regard to the allocation of land. It's also about protecting the interests of the ruling party. Party supporters have built shacks in the same area without consequence. These are political evictions. And politics is being openly mediated through ethnicity. Mpondo people are being presented as having no right to this city and the Zulus amongst them as disloyal. S'bu Zikode from Abahlali baseMjondolo has concluded, “To the smug politicians in their suits in the City Hall, and their thugs hunting us in the shacks, you are not a proper human being if you are not Zulu and if you are a Zulu living and organising with Mpondo people then you are not a proper Zulu.”
For Zikode the democratic pretensions of the Durban ANC are bogus: “The City Hall is red with blood.” But on Monday last week Abahlali baseMjondolo brought its own tide of red shirted resolve to the City Hall in an impressive march. The movement has 1 560 members in good standing in Cato Crest and its members from across the city are holding meetings at the Marikana occupation, cooking together and rebuilding the shacks after each demolition.
Zuma's increasingly violent and predatory state has its firmest urban base in Durban. But despite the authority that the ANC wields in this city its power is not exercised with patrician assurance. On the contrary the scale and intensity of political violence here far exceeds that of any of the other major cities. The law remains an important terrain of struggle in Durban but neither it nor the Constitution offer any guarantees. The local state and the local party are both willing to crush dissent, perfectly lawful dissent, with violence. The silence of higher authority has served to sanction this violence. Nonetheless it is here in Durban that the most sustained popular resistance to the brutality and venality that has seized hold of the ANC has been organised. There has been remarkable innovation, tenacity and courage from below. The future remains unwritten but it seems certain that there will be blood.
SACSIS: The Right to the City
http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/217.1
The Right to the City
by Richard Pithouse
Governments around the world tend to force poor people off well located and therefore valuable urban land and into peripheral ghettoes. From New Orleans to Bombay and Johannesburg the story is the same.
One motivation for this is to transfer valuable land from the poor to the rich to create a subsidy for elite development at the direct expense of the poor. A useful secondary consequence of this for many governments is that people living outside of state control can be forced to pay for housing and services in the peripheral relocation developments. Another common motivation for forcing the poor off well located urban land is to fragment and weaken popular movements by dispersing the classes that are potentially dangerous to elite interests into fragmented ghettos. Here people are isolated from each other, kept at a safe distance from the spaces of elite power and often housed in developments under strict state management. In many countries government housing projects have the feel of a carceral space and are closely monitored by the police, various kinds of government officials and local party structures.
When governments have much more power than the people they rule the expulsion of the poor from the cities is, as in Zimbabwe, often unlawful and violent. When governments face some sort of popular counter-power, as in some cities in Brazil, the preferred tactic is to displace the poor more gradually by bringing their housing into the market. Once housing is brought into the market poor people living on well located land are inevitably displaced by the rich without the state having to send in the men with guns.
In South Africa, we all know that the regulation of space was central to apartheid. Certain places were reserved for certain kinds of people. This was part of the strategy for creating different kinds of people and it was enforced by a dedicated bureaucracy backed up by armed force. What is less well remembered is that the forced removals that created apartheid cities were often justified by the state in the name of ‘hygiene’, ‘development’ and ‘eradicating slums’. It is also important to remember that apartheid spatial division was undone to a significant extent before the end of apartheid by the actions of ordinary people. Sometimes people had organised themselves politically to claim and hold land in or close to the cities and sometimes people were just trying to make their own individual way in the world. But in both cases apartheid was being undone from below.
In post-apartheid South Africa racism is proscribed and everyone enjoys freedom of movement in principle. But in practice the post-apartheid state has pursued a development agenda that is both elite and authoritarian with the result that violent forced removals have returned with a vengeance. The state’s developmental agenda is an elite driven agenda because it is organised around the assumption that allowing the rich to become richer at the direct expense of the poor is ultimately in the interests of society as a whole. This is the assumption that lay behind the attempt to evict the poor from flats in inner city Johannesburg and attempts to evict shack dwellers from well located land in places like Joe Slovo in Cape Town, Lusaka in Durban and Makause in Johannesburg. This is the assumption that lies behind the Slums Act in KwaZulu-Natal, an act that is a full fledged assault on the right of poor people to hold urban land appropriated in the popular struggles against apartheid.
The state’s developmental agenda is authoritarian because there is very seldom anything remotely approaching open and honest discussion with poor communities before development projects are imposed on them. In many cases forced removals are carried out in violation of the law and with considerable state violence.
The return to forced removals in post-apartheid South Africa has often been obscured in the elite public sphere, including much of civil society, by the preponderance of an overwhelmingly technocratic concept of development. This technocratic approach tends to assume that development is something that can be measured by an auditing firm when in fact it is something that should be negotiated between communities and the state. So the crisis of the post-apartheid city is reduced to a housing crisis and a service delivery crisis with the result that it is assumed that progress can be measured by counting the ‘delivery’ of ‘housing units’ and ‘service connections’ to ‘beneficiaries.
But the fact is that while the ‘delivery’ of a government house can sometimes be a major step forward for the ‘beneficiary’ at other times it can be a disaster. If a person in a well located shack is moved to a house far out of the city and away from work, schools and friends and family she may experience this as a major and sometimes even catastrophic set back.
The idea of ‘The Right to the City’ is a useful concept that can help us to think outside of the technocratic logic of ‘delivery’. It is an idea that emerged from popular struggles in France in the late 1960s and has since been taken up with particular vigour and effectiveness by popular movements in South America.
The essential idea is that cities are places of opportunity and possibility which shape us and are shaped by us. The idea of the right to the city asserts a collective right to the city. This means that everyone has the right to live in the city, to access the city and to change the city. The right of everyone to an urban life means that the social value of land has to be prioritised over its commercial value if this right is to be realised for the poor. The right of women to be safe in the city, the right for safe, convenient and affordable transport, the right to public space with public toilets, drinking fountains and benches, the right to pursue a livelihood in the city and so on all need to be similarly protected. The right to shape the city means that ordinary people have the right to organise and to challenge the power that state and capital exercise over the development of cities.
The idea of the right to the city is a vision that replaces the always exclusionary and always brutal vision of the world class city competing with others to attract capital with a democratic vision of the city that fully belongs to all who live in it. It is an idea that could enrich our public conversation considerably.