Abahlali baseMjondolo is an autonomous, democratic, membership-based movement of the poor – ibutho labampofu – of more than 180 000 members across four provinces, KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, the Eastern Cape, and Mpumalanga.

Our movement was formed in 2005. In March that year around 750 residents from the Kennedy Road shack settlement in Durban blockaded a major road in protest against inhuman living conditions and broken promises and lies by the government. After the road blockade residents of nearby settlements, such as Foreman Road, began their own processes of discussion and organised their own protests. There was intense repression as the protests spread but other settlements followed and the movement emerged from a process of discussion between comrades in twelve different settlements.

KwaZulu-Natal is notorious for its long history of violent politics and we have experienced threats, arrests, assaults, torture, police killings and assassinations. Twenty-five lives have been lost during the course of our struggle.

Our politics is rooted in a universal commitment to affirming and defending human dignity. We insist that everyone has the right to participate in all discussions and decision-making relevant to them, and that no one should think or decide for us. We are clear that our movement belongs to our members and not to any NGO, donor, political party, organisation, or network that thinks that it has a right to rule the organised poor.

We struggle for land and housing, and to develop occupations in which there is no selling or renting of land and shacks into communes. We oppose xenophobia and all other attempts to divide the oppressed. We work to build a movement of communes and an international movement of movements and to struggle for a living communism – a world in which land, wealth and power are shared fairly.