Transitory Citizens: Contentious Housing Practices in Contemporary South Africa

Kerry Chance, Social Analysis

This article examines the informal housing practices that the urban poor use to construct, transform, and access citizenship in contemporary South Africa. Following the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, the provision of formalized housing for the urban poor has become a key metric for ‘non-racial’ political inclusion and the desegregation of apartheid cities. Yet, shack settlements—commemorated in liberation histories as apartheid-era battlegrounds—have been reclassified as ‘slums’, zones that are earmarked for clearance or development. Evictions from shack settlements to government emergency camps have been justified under the liberal logic of expanding housing rights tied to citizenship. I argue that the informal housing practices make visible the methods of managing ‘slum’ populations, as well as an emerging living politics in South African cities.

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Transitory Citizens

ENCA: ANC councillors face Durban High Court in Thuli Ndlovu murder trial

Tuesday 26 January 2016

DURBAN – Two ANC councillors are expected back in the High Court in Durban on Tuesday.

They’re accused of the murder of activist, Thuli Ndlovu, of the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement in 2014.

On Monday Mduduzi Ngcobo and Velile Lutsheku were joined in the dock by the suspected hitman.

Several community members have died since 2012 as a result of political squabbles in KwaNdengezi. Continue reading →

The Conversation: Voices of the poor are missing from South Africa’s media

by Herman Wasserman, Tanja Bosch & Wallace Chuma, The Conversation

Poor communities in South Africa feel that their voices are not heard and their issues not taken seriously by the media.

This is clear in the findings of an international research project on the role of media in conflicts arising from transitions from authoritarian rule to democratic government. It focused on four countries – South Africa, Egypt, Kenya and Serbia.

The study shows that in all four countries, citizenship conflicts are frequently reduced to judicial factors. The media’s approach to conflicts is to look at them from the perspective of rights rather than cultural factors.

In South Africa, rather than wilful distortion or neglect on the part of journalists, the findings expose systemic problems underpinning news agendas and coverage. Continue reading →

Sacrifice After Mandela: Liberation and Liberalization Among South Africa’s First Post-Apartheid Generation

Kerry Chance, Anthropological Quarterly

This article examines sacrifice in a post-Mandela South Africa. Twenty years since the fall of apartheid, South Africa remains one of the world’s most unequal societies. From street protests to labor strikes to xenophobic pogroms, dissatisfaction with current socio-economic conditions is being expressed through urban unrest, particularly in townships and shack settlements. This article analyzes an emerging idiom of “sacrifice” among youth activists in response to deaths and injuries sustained during recent street protests. I argue that this idiom draws from understandings of liberation and liberalization, popular imaginaries of the anti-apartheid struggle, and processes associated with the country’s transition to democracy. Broadly, I suggest that sacrifice under liberalization reveals the blurring boundaries between “the gift” and “the market” in political life. [Keywords: Sacrifice, politics, violence, poverty, liberalization]

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Sacrifice After Mandela: Liberation and Liberalization Among South Africa’s First Post-Apartheid Generation

Haunted by the Rebellion of the Poor: Civil Society and the Racialized Problem of the (Non-)economic Subject

by Anna Selmeczi, Foucault Studies

Intrigued by the so-called “rebellion of the poor,” this paper traces back the current South African concern with popular protest to its reconfiguration during the last years of the apartheid order. Focusing on the discourse around grassroots resistance in the mid- to late-1980s, I begin by showing how, in juxtaposition to an ideal notion of civil society, popular mobilization had been largely delegitimized and the emancipatory politics of ungovernability recast as antidemocratic by the first few years of the post-apartheid regime. In deploying particular notions of violence and culture, this discursive shift, I suggest, fed into reconstructing the ungovernable subject as the racial other of the new South Africa’s citizenry. The second part of the paper mobilizes Foucault’s genealogy of liberalism to draw parallels between this process and the liberal effort to resolve the potentially conflicting principles of governing the economic subject and the subject of rights within the realm of civil society. Finally, via the postcolonial critique of liberal notions of civility and their rootedness in racial thinking, I suggest that civil society secures the governability of the population through rendering the potentially disruptive freedom of the people as the excess freedom of the racialized other.

 

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Selmeczi

News 24: Cape Town fires kill 9, displace thousands on Christmas weekend

2015-12-28 06:22

Kaveel Singh, News24

Cape Town – Several fires in Cape Town over the weekend have left nine people dead and
thousands displaced.
The most heavily affected areas included Elsies River, Delft, Mfuleni, Vrygrond, Imizamo Yethu Informal Settlement as well as Cape Town Station.

On Saturday alone, eight people were killed after shack fires engulfed various parts of Cape Town in the morning.

A total of three men, three women and two girls were killed in four different areas, spokesperson Theo Layne had said. Continue reading →

Occupy, Resist, Develop

18 December 2015
Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Statement

Occupy, Resist, Develop

The year 2015, the tenth year of the existence of our movement, has almost come and gone. On the 3rd of October we gathered at the Curries Fountain Stadium to celebrate ten years of struggle. More than four thousand comrades participated in the celebration. We have survived years of serious repression – including arrests, assaults, torture, imprisonment, the destruction of our homes, slander and assassination. In these ten years we have won many victories in the struggle for land and dignity. Continue reading →

The Transit Camp is a Form of Social Control

Published in The Mercury as ‘The Dynamics of Informal Housing’ on 12 December 2015.

The Transit Camp is a Form of Social Control

Richard Pithouse

Development is often held up as the answer to some of our most pressing social problems. Corruption is often seen as a key threat to attaining the efficient ‘delivery’ of developmental gains. But development and corruption are often – although of course not always – phenomena best understood as strategies for securing political containment. Continue reading →

The Mercury: R31m ‘insult’ has residents fuming

Sihle Manda, The Mercury

Durban – Large families crammed into a controversial temporary housing project in Durban have reacted with disbelief that their tiny 2m x 2m shacks cost R35 000 each, describing living conditions there as “inhumane”.

Speaking to The Mercury at the weekend, several residents at the Kennedy Road informal settlement said the price tag on their homes was “a lie” and an insult.

The city built the transit camp last year after hundreds of shacks were gutted in a fire that left thousands homeless. Continue reading →