Wednesday, 27 January 2021

The Politic of Home

Presentation by S’bu. Zikode in an online session called In Defence of Home organised by Africans the in the Diaspora Program – Thousand Currents

May I first of all thank Thousand Currents and all organisers of this session, and acknowledge my fellow panellists here.

Dignity is at the centre of the politic of our movement. We insist that the recognition of the full and equal dignity of every human being is non-negotiable. We work to build a movement in which the dignity of the oppressed is respected and communities in which the dignity of the oppressed is respected. We also struggle to force the rest of the society to respect the dignity of oppressed people. People often describe our movement as a home, a place where they belong and feel respected. 

Dignity has many different aspects. The right of every human being to have a safe and decent home is an important part of what we mean when we say that we are struggling for our dignity as human beings to be recognised. In fact, our main slogan is ‘Land, housing & dignity’.

The issue of the home is an urgent and painful one for us. Many of our ancestors were forced off their land by colonial terror. The apartheid system continually destroyed black people’s homes in the cities with the aim of forcing black people to townships outside the cities or to rural ‘homelands’. People resisted these attacks bravely, with women often leading, but the state was able to use violent force to evict millions of people from their homes. Many of us grew up with mothers who were living in other people’s homes while they worked as domestic workers. Many of us had fathers who were away from their family homes working in the mines.

In 1955 the ANC adopted the Freedom Charter after collecting demands from people across the country. It was a vision for life in a liberated South Africa. The Freedom Charter promised that after apartheid:

All people shall have the right to live where they choose, to be decently housed, and to bring up their families in comfort and security;
Unused housing space to be made available to the people;
Rent and prices shall be lowered, food plentiful and no one shall go hungry;

In the 1970s and 1980s people began to occupy land in the cities or near the cities. Huge struggles had to be fought to occupy and keep this land. Again, women were often in the forefront.

After apartheid the ANC promised that there would be decent housing for all. But the houses that they built were much, much smaller than the houses built under apartheid, were very badly built and were usually much further out of the cities than the apartheid townships.

Shack settlements, which had started as land occupations, were attacked by the state. Some people were left homeless and others were forced to what people called ‘human dumping grounds’ far out of the cities to live in houses that people called ‘dog kennels. Many people were evicted or forcibly removed at gunpoint.

Our rulers changed, but the way that the government treated poor black people did not change. We continued to face violence, the destruction of our homes and forced removal. This was a shock to us. It was not something that we expected. Now we know very well that oppressors come in all colours and speak all languages.

Today there are millions more people living in shacks than under apartheid. People continue to live in squalor with no refuse removal or drains, no roads and paths, no toilets or electricity and not enough water for everyone. There are regular fires and floods. These are not conditions that are fit for human beings. In fact, people often say that they are treated like animals and not human beings.

The government is now building some houses where people have chosen to live which is much better than forcing them, often at gunpoint, out to the human dumping grounds. But the system is completely corrupted. Housing budgets are used to make politically connected people very rich and local councillors only allocate houses to their supporters and to people that can pay bribes. Others are left homeless when development comes. Development is often experienced as violent dispossession.

People who have organised to improve the conditions in shack settlements have been beaten, tortured, arrested, jailed and murdered. When new land occupations are organised it is not unusual for them to be violently attacked by the state twenty or thirty times. These attacks are illegal and live ammunition is often used. Our humanity is continually vandalised.

It is taken as a crime for us to organise ourselves, think for ourselves and speak for ourselves. It is not just the state that treats the self-organisation of the oppressed as criminal. Some NGOs and academics have done the same.

The evictions that we face are not aimed at gentrifying our communities. They are aimed at destroying our communities. Sometimes a land occupation will be replaced with something like a shopping mall and everyone can see that capitalism is driving this violence against us. But sometimes the ANC will destroy our occupation with the aim of bringing in their own people so that local councillors can charge rent and make sure that they have control over their wards. Sometimes land will be left empty after an eviction. Some evictions do not happen because there are other plans for the land but because the ANC and the state want to crush our autonomy and any challenges to its authority.

We are still struggling for the right to have safe and decent homes. Before you can have a home you must have land. This is why our struggle is a struggle for land, for land in the cities, before it is a struggle for houses. In fact, most of our members would rather build their own houses than have the government build them because they do not trust the government.

We identify and occupy well located unused land. This is urban planning from below and it is land reform from below. No one is allowed to charge rent in a land occupation and any land occupation affiliated to our movement must be run on a democratic basis. We have built halls, creches, roads, paths, youth centres, political schools and more on our land occupations. We have installed our own water and electricity connections. We are now also seriously working to build collectively organised and run urban farms. We are establishing what some people call communes or self-managed communities.

Women are often in the forefront of this struggle, and many of our leaders are women. Without the courage of women, and their commitment to build and defend homes, our movement would not exist and our families are broken. This is why building women’s power in struggle is one of our most important commitments.

We are winning land. There have been many successful occupations. Thousands of people live on these occupations. But the price for that land has often been paid in blood. It is clear that we are not counted as human beings by the ruling party, the state or other elites in society. Our demand for a home of dignity is taken as criminal.

An important part of building a large movement and keeping it growing through repression is to make sure that the members control the movement and that the leaders are mandated by the members. In a meeting everyone must be encouraged to speak and the role of the leader must be to ensure that everyone’s voice is heard, and that there is a careful collective process to reach decisions. That process must respect everyone’s dignity. The leader’s role is to ensure a democratic and respectful process and not to decide for others.

A movement that gives up its autonomy to a political party or an NGO will quickly collapse. The members of a movement must know that it is their movement.

It is also important that in a movement people care for each other. A movement is not just a political tool. It also needs to be a family and a community.

Something else that is very important is to always encourage and train new leaders. The more good leaders that a movement has the stronger it is.

We call all of this ‘a living politic’, which is a politic that is organised and owned by the oppressed and which speaks directly from and to their conditions and their lives.

We have been struggling for more than 15 years. We have survived hundreds of evictions and repeated violence from the state and the ANC. We have lost 18 comrades to murder by the police, the anti-land invasion unit or the izinkabi (assassins hired by local politicians).

But the ANC is not our only enemy. We were made poor by the system of racial capitalism. Poverty will not be abolished until racism and capitalism are abolished. No organisation can do this on its own, and no country can do this on its own which is why we work to build respectful solidarity with other progressive organisations in South Africa and across the world.

We will not win a secure right to land, and thereby to housing, and thereby to homes, without building the power of the oppressed from below. No small organisation can substitute itself for the organised power of the oppressed.

We will not be able to win the right to participate in all decision making that affects us without building our power from below. We are committed to radical democracy, democracy where people live, work and study, and not just to elections every few years.

We organise with dignity and for dignity. We struggle from the homes that we have built on occupied land for a society in which everyone has a safe and decent home.

I thank you.