Abahlali baseMjondlo Youth League Event 16 June 2014
Induction Workshop for the Newly Elected Committees from Two New Branches – Shallcross and Briardene – 15 June 2014
Induction Workshop for the Newly Elected Committees from Two New Branches – Shallcross and Briardene – 15 June 2014
Business Day: Eviction delays sought while laws are tightened
http://www.bdlive.co.za/national/2014/06/17/eviction-delays-sought-while-laws-are-tightened
Eviction delays sought while laws are tightened
CAPE TOWN — Human Settlements Minister Lindiwe Sisulu wants to tighten the law on evictions and has asked private and state landowners to hold off on any "until there is a clear understanding of the laws and basic human rights requirements that must be met".
She is also seeking an engagement with the Constitutional Court and the judiciary on how the law governing evictions is applied.
However, her appeal for a suspension of evictions does not have legal force.
Celebrating the Beauty of Our Youth
15 June 2014
Abahlali baseMjondolo Youth League Press Statement
Celebrating the Beauty of our Youth
HECTOR PETERSON was murdered by the apartheid police on 16 June 1976. He was 13. NQOBILE NZUZA was murdered by the ANC’s police on 30 September 2013. She was 17.
We’ve spent many years in pain and frustration about what happened to HECTOR. We will have to spend many years in pain and frustration about what happened to NQOBILE. We all know that more of us will die in this struggle.
Our youth are serving their life sentences in the shacks or the transit camps. Most of us cannot find work, we cannot study and when we are older we will not be able to get married. We are treated like the rubbish of this society when we should be treated as its promise for the future.
The pedagogy of road blockades
Anne Harley, Interface
Road blockades have long since been a tool of struggle, and in recent months have featured in protests in South Africa, Guinea, Mozambique, Nigeria, Palestine, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, India, Canada, Turkey, and probably in most other countries in the world. Whilst some road blockades might be considered spontaneous eruptions of anger, with little reflective thought involved, others are clearly part of conscious praxis, a tactic reflecting Gramsci’s ‘war of manoeuvre’. However, I argue, road blockades are also used as a counter-hegemonic pedagogical tool in a ‘war of position’, as one of the associated pedagogies within the “multi-faceted praxis and political strategy” of Subaltern Social Movements (Kapoor, 2011). The article uses two such movements, Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa, and the piqueteros in Argentina, to explore this claim.
Dis/placing political illiteracy: the politics of intellectual equality in a South African shack-dwellers’ movement
Anna Selmeczi, Interface
This paper starts out with the claim that the contemporary spatio-political order of the South African “world class” city is conditional upon constructing many lives as superfluous and disposable. This construction partly rests on the inherited topography of apartheid displacement which continues to push the poor black majority into zones of invisibility and inaudibility. Beyond this physical distancing, the production and abandonment of surplus people also depends on rendering them as improper political subjects. In the prevailing political discourse, poor people’s struggles are deemed less than political through notions such as the idea that all protest is related to the pace of “service delivery” or accusations of violence, as well as often explicit characterizations of dissenting people as ignorant. Such discursive moves imply and reinforce a conception of the poor black majority as unable to think and practice their own politics; that is, as a politically illiterate group of people.
Attachments
Dis/placing political illiteracy
Knowledge practices in Abahlali baseMjondolo
Gerard Gill, Interface
Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) are a South African shack dwellers’ movement that struggles for land, housing, basic services and the dignity of the poor. This article explores the movement’s ideology and knowledge practices. It then relates these to broader ideas in the activist and academic world in order to suggest what these knowledge practices might contribute to that world. AbM is based around a ‘living politics’ – a politics based on the concrete experiences of the people in the movement. As such, the movement does not subscribe to any outside model or ideology, it has its own. ‘Abahlalism’ is described as a new concept to form a new ideology for the movement. It draws some of its ideas from the southern African philosophy of Ubuntu. The relationship between community and individual described in Ubuntu and the living politics of the movement greatly influence its structure and activities. While emphasis is placed on concrete lived experience, I argue that as similar ideas can be found elsewhere in social movement practices and literature, some of the lessons of the movement are broadly applicable to social movement struggles and research practices in regards to them.
Attachments
Knowledge practices in Abahlali baseMjondolo
Professors of our own poverty: intellectual practices of a poor people’s movement in post-apartheid South Africa
Cerianne Robertson, Interface
This paper addresses how a poor people’s movement contests dominant portrayals of ‘the poor’ as a violent mass in contemporary South African public discourse. To explore how Abahlali baseMjondolo, a leading poor people’s movement, articulates its own representation of ‘the poor,’ I examine two primary intellectual and pedagogical practices identified by movement members: first, discussion sessions in which members reflect on their experiences of mobilizing as Abahlali, and second, the website through which the movement archives a library of its own homegrown knowledge. I argue that these intellectual practices open new spaces for the poor to represent themselves to movement members and to publics beyond shack settlements. Through these spaces, Abahlali demonstrates and asserts the intelligence which exists in the shack settlements, and demands that its publics rethink dominant portrayals of ‘the poor.’
Attachments
Professors of our own poverty: intellectual practices of a poor people’s movement in post-apartheid South Africa
Foreman Road AbM Branch Relaunch 8 June 2014
Daily News: ConCourt hands victory to evicted 390
http://www.iol.co.za/news/crime-courts/concourt-hands-victory-to-evicted-390-1.1700788#.U6AviJSSxps
ConCourt hands victory to evicted 390
Nolene Barbeau
Durban – Shack dwellers in Lamontville, south of Durban, whose homes were allegedly demolished by the eThekwini Municipality a total of 24 times after being rebuilt, may finally have their day in court after a series of setbacks.
On Friday the Constitutional Court granted the 390 appellants leave to intervene in court proceedings initiated by the KwaZulu-Natal MEC for human settlements and public works. Residents of the Madlala village in Lamontville had gone all the way to the highest court after the Durban High Court initially ruled against their application.
In March last year, KZN Human Settlements MEC Ravi Pillay was granted an interim order that allowed the council to demolish structures and evict people who occupy or attempt to invade land earmarked for 37 provincial low-cost housing projects in Lamontville.