Author Archives: Abahlali_3

Gezi Park: Rage, Life, Joy

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Chapuling in the Streets

Taksim Tahrir Sintagma Puerta del Sol Plaza de Mayo Zuccotti Square St. Paul’s. Everywhere around the world we are dancing in the streets. Dancing with rage, dancing with joy, dancing gravediggers on the graves of our masters. We are all Turks, all Greeks, all Cypriots. And now we are all chapuling, chapuling as we sing out loud our refusal to accept any more, our refusal to watch them destroy parks to make way for shopping malls, our refusal to accept their obscene injustices, refusal to sit by and let them destroy the planet, refusal to let them take our world from us, refusal to accept their stupid arrogance. So dance Istanbul, dance Ankara, dance Izmir, and the world dances with you. Cairo, Athens, Istanbul, Madrid, New York, London, Buenos Aires, Frankfurt, Cochabamba, Stockholm, and more and more and more and more and more.

John Holloway

The Times: Service delivery protest flares up in Durban

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There have been six arrests.

http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2013/06/13/service-delivery-protest-flares-up-in-durban

Service delivery protest flares up in Durban

About 200 people were protesting on Alpine Road in Durban on Thursday morning, eThekwini metro police said.

The protesters were burning rubbish and tyres, spokesman Eugene Msomi said.

It was believed the protest was about service delivery.

Nabantu Zulu, a resident of the Jadhu Place squatter camp which borders Alpine Road, said residents had been protesting since 3.30am.

Zulu said he had been a resident at the squatter camp since 1991.

Residents were demanding to speak to eThekwini mayor James Nxumalo and would not stop blocking Alpine Road until their demands had been addressed.

“We are living in tins. They [eThekwini metro] gave us these as temporary [accommodation], but how long must we wait?” asked Zulu.

He said residents were demanding land, housing, electricity, water, and speed humps in Alpine Road.

The Jadhu Place squatter camp is believed to have between 1000 and 2000 residents.

Alpine Road is a major road linking the suburb of Overport with the Springfield industrial area.

Protesters, carrying bottles and vuvuzelas, were singing, dancing, and chanting on a hill overlooking Alpine Road.

About three kilometres of Alpine Road was closed.

“We demand housing, electricity, and land,” stated a placard.

The protesters claim they were promised housing in 2007 by a former eThekwini mayor and they had been forgotten.

One of the protesters, a woman, was lying in the street waiting for paramedics after she collapsed during the protest.

The SA Police Service and the metro police were monitoring the protest.

Police had to use teargas at various stages to disperse the group.

Alpine Road was littered with debris, bricks, tyres, and a tree.

Residents of Overport were looking nervously at the protesters from their houses.

Employees of Durban Solid Waste were waiting to clear the road.

Daily News: Attention on informal settlements

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http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/kwazulu-natal/attention-on-informal-settlements-1.1531295#.UbmahecyZvJ

Attention on informal settlements

By BHEKI MBANJWA

Durban – The Kennedy Road and Madiba Bottlebrush informal settlements in eThekwini Municipality have been designated priority projects by the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Human Settlements.

MEC Ravi Pillay announced yesterday that the two settlements, one in Clare Estate and the other in Chatsworth, had been designated ministerial projects, but the city would be involved in the development.

“Of course this intervention will be in full partnership with eThekwini Municipality.”

Although Pillay did not divulge many details, his undertaking means that the provision of housing for those living in these settlements could be fast-tracked.

The Kennedy Road informal settlement in Clare Estate has been a thorn in the side of the government. Last month, residents at the settlement embarked on a protest demanding to be relocated to the new Cornubia housing development, north of the city.

The chairman of the shack dwellers association, Abahlali BaseMjondolo, Sbu Zikode, was not impressed, saying many promises had been made of fast-tracking development at Kennedy Road.

“We would only welcome the practical implementation of these promises by the MEC. The MEC needs to tell us when and how this would be fast-tracked. The people of Kennedy Road are sick and tired of these empty promises,” he said.

There is concern that at the Kennedy Road site, with some of the land being a landfill, there may not be sufficient space to house all the people living there.

The options may include putting up high-rise, high-density residential buildings.

Pillay, delivering his department’s budget speech at the legislature yesterday, said the existence of slums remained the government’s Achilles heel, especially in eThekwini.

The 2011 census revealed that there were 635 informal settlements across KZN, with 494 of these being in eThekwini.

While there have been concerns about the slow pace of delivery housing in eThekwini, Pillay said he was satisfied the municipality had turned the corner on the matter.

The Department of Human Settlements and the provincial infrastructure team have been working with eThekwini to try to unlock the bottlenecks in the delivery of houses.

“I expect that eThekwini in their new financial year will deliver at least 10 000 units and begin a concerted effort to remove transit camps,” Pillay said.

“In addition, they will have an aggressive programme in respect of interim services such as water, electricity and sanitation.”

Pillay warned that proper planning was needed for cities such as eThekwini because of rapid urbanisation.

Deliver

“Our NDP (National Development Plan) points out that another 7.8 million people will be living in South African cities in 2030 and a further 6 million by 2050, putting pressure on municipalities to deliver services.

“A large portion of new urban residents will be poor, reflecting a phenomenon referred to as the urbanisation of poverty.”

Pillay said that – with its budget of R2.9bn – his department had built more than 26 000 houses in the 2012/13 financial year, the highest number of units built by any province.

Gauteng, with the biggest housing budget of R4bn, had built only 22 000 units.

“Proportionally to budget, we were among the best and far better than Gauteng and the Western Cape.”

Finding Fanon, Looking for second liberations

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Presentation at the Algiers conference on Fanon and Africa, June 2013

by Nigel Gibson

I was introduced to Fanon via Steve Biko, and it was in 1981 that I first met Black Consciousness émigrés from South Africa in London. 1981 was the year of the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland. Bobby Sands and other prisoners were also reading Fanon finding the measure of national culture as a “combat culture” essential as, in the hellholes of the H blocks, they taught each other the Irish language as a conscious anticolonial activity.