28 July 2040

Ubuhlali and the Generational Challenge of University Students

Closing Address for the Annual Canon Collins Trust Conference, Sandton, by S’bu Zikode

Thank you programme director, organizers of this conference, comrades and everyone. I must express my gratitude to the Canon Collins Trust management and leadership for inviting me here to participate in this important conference, themed “Power of Us” emphasizing connection and solidarity.

Like many people around the world, I was born into a poor rural family and made my way to the city looking for opportunity. Like many South Africans and Africans of my age I grew up in a war. In the city I found that the opportunity to study was denied to me, and to others like me, because we did not have money. I had to move into a shack and find work as a petrol attendant.

When I arrived in Durban in 1997 we still believed in the promise of the new South Africa as it was called then. We believed in peace, development and democracy.

There were thousands of people living in terrible conditions in the Kennedy Road shack settlement where I found a home. We urgently needed toilets, electricity and water, and then, of course, decent homes. To build homes for everyone we needed land.

The ANC promised all these things but it soon became clear that the party had been captured by people who wanted to pursue their own interests. When, in 2005, we organised a road blockade to demand that our councillor engage us we were called criminals and attacked. This is when we began to understand that insisting on our human dignity and asking to participate in discussions about our own lives would be taken and treated as criminal, that we were meant to remain poor and hidden in the dark corners.

Later that year people from twelve settlements united to form a movement, which we called Abahlali baseMjondolo. The ANC took our decision to form an autonomous and democratic movement committed to defending and advancing our human dignity as treason. They claimed that there must be someone else, a white man, remoting us, and that the white man must be remoted by a foreign government. They could not believe that we as poor black people could think for ourselves. They called us ‘the third force’.

The ANC tried to ban us from exercising basic democratic rights such as the right to peaceful protest, to engage in debates via the media and so on. When we went ahead with exercising these rights in defiance of their illegal bans and threats we were violently attacked. Many comrades were injured, and Philani Zungu and I were arrested and tortured by the police after we tried to travel to a radio station to participate in a discussion after the ANC had instructed us not to speak to the media. 

We had thought that the ANC were our only oppressors but we were surprised to find that a small group of academics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal who had an NGO thought that they should be the leaders of the left in Durban. At first they offered us money to accept their leadership. When we declined their money they went on an all-out attack presenting us as criminals, as people who could not think for ourselves and as people who had no political ideas of our own. They repeatedly concocted outright fraud, much of it deeply racist, to try and destroy our movement. Fraud is not critique. Fraud is outright lies. This would continue from 2005 until 2014. They even went so far as to deny us the right to respond to the fraud that they published to defame us. They have never been held accountable for this. 

We found that while some NGOs, such as the Socio-Economic Rights Institute, are able to work with oppressed people on the basis of a deep mutual respect many want to control the organisations of the oppressed and are willing to try and destroy them if they cannot control them.

In 2009 we were attacked by ANC supporters, acting with the clear support of the police, in the Kennedy Road settlement. Our leaders’ homes were destroyed, including mine, and our movement had to go underground. 

We were able to regroup and to begin organising openly. We continued our struggle for better conditions in the shack settlements, for decent housing, for land, for the right to participate in all discussions about us and relevant to us and for our human dignity to be recognised and respected. We also struggled against corruption.

In 2013 the ANC began to assassinate us. The assassinations stopped in 2014 but then continued in 2017. In 2022 we lost four comrades to assassination. In total we have lost 14 comrades to assassination and another 11 people have been killed in the course of our struggle, mostly at the hands of the police, the anti-land invasion unit and private security. 

Our members have also been jailed on trumped up charges, assaulted, had their homes destroyed and been tortured in police stations.

A number of our leaders have had to live under close protection and some people have had to go underground. I myself have had to go completely underground for two periods, something that is very difficult. You feel lost to the world.

The price for land, freedom and dignity has been paid in all kinds of suffering, and in blood.

Colonialism took the land and cattle of African people. It also took our right to decide for ourselves. It made most of us poor and most of us remain poor today. Freedom, real freedom, will restore the land to the people. It will share the wealth of the country fairly. It will deepen democracy until everyone has the same right to think, discuss and decide on the important issues that affect them.

Today we have 120 000 members in 87 branches in four provinces. We have won many, many victories for our members including access to land, water, sanitation and electricity. We have occupied land for living and worked to ensure that new settlements are carefully designed via processes of grassroots urban planning. We have ensured that all our branches are run democratically and that there is no buying and renting of land and shacks in our branches. We have defended our right to organise and taken our place in conversations about development, as well as national and international conversations. We have built many amazing leaders. 

We have also been able to provide an alternative to the politics of corruption. One example of this is that many political organisations that claim to be progressive were corrupted by the looting of money from VBS bank, a bank that mostly served poor rural people, many of them elderly. Our movement was approached by VBS in 2018 and we declined their offer of money. There are no excuses for corruption. It is a question of integrity and whether or not you are morally serious.

We have also been moving to turn occupations into communes where, along with democratic self-management and the decommodification of land, we have also begun to establish communes in which political schools and collective kitchens are built and run and in which we produce and distribute food on a collective basis, and do the same with money earned from selling the surplus.

All around the world the urban poor play a very important role in progressive struggles. In the lifetime of our movement this has been true in Haiti, Bolivia, Colombia, Brazil and many other places. The commune has emerged as the leading form of the struggles of the urban poor and the most important base for progressive politics. 

We also have strong connections with progressive movements and intellectuals from around the world, such as the MST in Brazil and Comrade Professor Ruthie Wilson Gilmour in the United States, among many others. We have worked with many radical students from all over the world, and have had wonderful experiences with many students. 

Colonialism was a global system. Racism is a global system of oppression. Sexism, xenophobia and homophobia are also global. Capitalism is a global system. The impoverishment of vast numbers of people is a global phenomenon. Organised abandonment is a global form of exclusion and domination. Our struggle is a global struggle, and we work to build a global movement of movements. 

We recognise the equal humanity of all people and welcome all people into our movement without regard for which country they were born in or which language they speak. We oppose all forms of xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, ethnic politics and racism very clearly and directly.

Wherever somebody stands up for justice that person is our comrade. 

People often ask us how we have kept going for 19 years despite so much repression, so much suffering, and so many lives lost. What we call inkani and what Palestinians call samud is an important part of it. It is a stubborn determination. Courage is also important. We sustain inkani and isibindi (courage) through being together. 

We also keep going because dignity is not only something that we struggle for in the future. Our movement is a place where the dignity of everyone is immediately affirmed. And our philosophy of ubuhlali, which is a kind of humanism, is also practiced here and now. Our commitment to a living politics, a living socialism, is rooted in these ideas, which are ideas that give our lives and struggle meaning in the present as well as guiding us into the future.

We do not only struggle for ourselves. We are in solidarity with the struggles and progressive organisations of oppressed people all over the world, from Swaziland to Brazil to Palestine to Turkey and Haiti. We build our humanity in our own organisation and struggle and in our solidarity with other people and their struggles and organisations. 

If we were silent while death crashes down on the people of Palestine and DR Congo, death organised and funded by the same powers that tell the countries of the global south to obey their authority in the name of democracy, our own humanity will be diminished.

As young people with energy and intelligence, and the opportunity to study, and then perhaps to travel, my hope is that you use all of this opportunity to work for a just world in which the humanity and dignity of all is respected. Many students and academics of good faith ask us how they can be solidarity with the poor, with the oppressed. 

The answer that we always give is that humility is essential. It is necessary to humble yourself. Nothing is possible without humility. Once there is humility there can be mutual respect and people who have been to university can think with the oppressed rather than trying to think for the oppressed. We all have much to learn from each other.

Once there is humility students and academics can learn to listen. You cannot respect the equality and the dignity of people if you are not able to really listen to them. There is no emancipatory politics without listening to others. You cannot say that you are on the side of the people, that you are with the people, if you do not take them seriously as people with ideas of their own. We build our humanity through listening.

Humility is also necessary for people who have studied at universities to be able to work with democratic structures in a movement rather than trying to use their access to money, the media and institutions to try and take control of movements or to divide movements. Many people in universities and NGOs operate by giving money to individuals in movements in exchange for these individuals taking forward their programmes and projects. This is always damaging to movements.

For us while all people must be recognised as human beings, and while we are human beings together, and while the dignity of every person must be respected, and while it is necessary to insist and to ensure that every person is a person, people can become more human by deepening their personal integrity and their relationships with others. There are academics who we introduce as abantu, as full persons. We will say that a person who engages the struggles of the oppressed with integrity, dedication, courage and respect is umuntu.

The great revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon said that every generation must discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it. We have tried to discover our generational mission and to fulfil it. You too, as young people, will have to discover your generational mission, to resist the temptation to betray it and to work to fulfil it. You will need humility, you will need inkani, you will need isibindi, and you will need togetherness. Nobody can be alone in a struggle. One must be a person among other people, a comrade among other comrades. 

I wish you success, luck and joy as you move forward with your studies. Remember that the system of oppression often uses education to bring intelligent people into the system of oppression. Remember that you can always choose to not just be on the side of the oppressed but to be in struggle and solidarity with the oppressed as we struggle for a world where the dignity of all human beings is respected, and where land, wealth and power are shared fairly.

I thank you.