Background
Abahlali baseMjondolo is a rigorously democratic and entirely volunteer run organisation of shackdwellers. Our constitution and other information about the organisation, and its history, is online at http://www.abahlali.org We have members in almost 40 settlements in KwaZulu-Natal including Durban, Pinetown, Pietermaritzburg and Port Shepstone.
We began to organise ourselves in 2005 after more than a decade of broken promises. We are struggling for land & housing in the cities, for the urgent provision of services to settlements while we wait for land & housing, for genuinely democratic consultation and for an end to evictions, demolitions, forced removals, march bans and police and landlord violence and intimidation.
We organised a number of very big marches in 2005 and 2006. Some of these marches made international news and were covered in the New York Times, the Economist and so on. Pictures, press coverage and video footage from these marches are all available on our website.
It has been a year and a half since we last organised a big march. In that time our movement has grown rapidly and we have concentrated on building the branches and taking on the local struggles against illegal evictions and harassment from certain police officers and landlords. We have also carried forward the general struggle on the legal front using the PIE Act to oppose evictions and using PAIA to force local government to disclose its plans for us to us. We have begun the process of suing the Minister of Safety & Security for Supt. Glen Nayager’s violent attacks on our members and we are about to begin litigation in the Constitutional Court to oppose the new and clearly illegal Elimination of Slums Bill.
The last time we marched was 27 February 2006. Twenty thousand people had gathered to march on the Housing MEC. Mike Sutcliffe, the eThekwini City Manager, illegally banned that march and sent in the police to repress us. But we went to court to defend our right to march and we marched into the city. We thought that we had made a powerful statement. But it is now clear that, as usual, our memorandum was just thrown into the bin. The government remained deaf. We have had some successes using the law but the government continues to evict us in blatant violation of the law, some police officers and landlords continue to intimidate and assault people in violation of the law and the government has now passed a clearly unconstitutional law to give it more power to evict us from the cities and dump us in ‘transit camps’. We cannot rely only on the law. We need to show our power. We need to show that we demand to be heard.
Therefore we have resolved to march on the Mayor and the Provincial Premier on 28 September 2007. We will march in Clare Estate where most of our members are concentrated in the huge settlements like Kennedy Road, Foreman Road and Jadhu Place. This will keep down transport costs. However our members will also be coming from across Durban as well as Pinetown, Pietermaritzburg and Port Shepstone. People from allied organisations, like the Rural Network, will be coming from all over the province.
Support for the March
So far people from the following settlements have confirmed that they will attend this march:
Durban: Kennedy Road, Foreman Road, Jadhu Place, Puntan’s Hill, Burnwood Road, Banana City 1 & 2, Joe Slovo, Crossmore, Arnett Drive, Pemary Ridge, Shannon Drive, Kenville, eMgudule
Pinetown: Motala Heights, New eMmaus, Mpola
Pietermaritzburg: Ash Road, Eastwood
Port Shepstone: eGamalakhe
Rural Network: Newcastle, Pongola, Utrecht, Richmond, Greytown and eNkwalini.
Operation Vuselele (Reawakening)
We have elected a team of march organisers who have been setting up and attending and addressing meetings in settlements everywhere. We have a large number of mass meetings scheduled in other settlements this week at which support for this march will be discussed. Therefore is likely that support for the march will continue to grow. We will also invite representatives from the Anti-Eviction Campaign and the Joe Slovo settlement in Cape Town to attend this march. We face forced removal to the rural human dumping ground of Park Gate, they face forced removal to the rural human dumping ground of Delft. Our struggle is their struggle and their struggle is our struggle.
At all of the Operation Vuselele meetings we are also showing video footage of the famous 14 November 2005 Foreman Road march and the films Breyani & the Councillor and The Right to Know. We are inviting every community or group of people that decide to join the march to carefully discuss their own demands and to write these up and to bring them to the march committee.
On Wednesday next week we will also be meeting Bishop Reuben Phillip and the KwaZulu-Natal Council of Churches. They have always stood firm with us when we have asked for support and we are confident that high profile clergy will agree to support this march.
We will also be seeking the support of street traders.