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M&G: Apolitical truth about civil disobedience

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http://mg.co.za/article/2012-09-20-apolitical-truth-about-civil-disobedience

Apolitical truth about civil disobedience

Cape Town shack dwellers’ anger is about a lack of service delivery and is not politically motivated.

Over much of this past winter, communities in shack settlements across Cape Town took to the streets in some of South Africa’s most active civil-disobedience protests since 1994.

The protests gave rise to a great deal of commentary and finger-pointing. I was disturbed by the double standard of the political rhetoric of politicians and some nongovernmental organisations in the way they expected the protesters to react in response to the violence the state and police subjects them to on a daily basis.

I was also concerned about the way these bigger political players moralised the debate, which shifted the focus from the perfectly legitimate issues of service delivery and meaningful engagement raised by the protesters to a soap opera in which analysis was replaced by empty electoral hyperbole.

Three weeks ago, I met community members from one of the protesting shack settlements, one of those that politicians were holding up as a key example on the issue. Talking to the committee members of Sweet Home Farm, an informal settlement of 15 000 people in the Philippi area, revealed a yawning chasm between what the official players are saying about Sweet Home and the realities on the ground.

I began to research Sweet Home, visiting the settlement a number of times and talking to committee members, ordinary residents, members of a rival committee and anyone who knew anything about the social and political make-up of the area.

My findings were shocking. Not least because it showed that Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille was wrong when she insinuated that the ANC Youth League was involved in co-ordinating the protests at the settlement. They were also surprising because they showed that neither the youth league nor any other organisation affiliated to the ANC was a participant in the protests. In fact, community members were not only protesting against the City of Cape Town and its Democratic Alliance (DA) representative, they were also taking to the streets because they were angry with their ANC councillor and his relationship with a local henchman.

Indignation

My discussions with people on the ground quickly revealed that the protests were not instigated or organised by any political parties but, rather, were the result of the shack dwellers’ indignation at the way in which their dignity was routinely affronted by politicians and government officials. Even the residents who vote for the DA in elections were protesting and they were doing so with full knowledge of the political contradiction of such actions.

As Nobanazi, a single mother of three, made clear to me when I interviewed her: “We are not fighting because we want to mess things. We are fighting because we are struggling. Inside our hearts there is no peace.”

Nobanzi is not a politician, a revolutionary, an “anarchist” or even a “hooligan”. She also does not condone the destruction of property. And yet she participated in the mass civil disobedience, which blockaded roads and destroyed traffic lights, because she felt that this was the only way she and others could get the attention of government.

Here is a list of some of the reasons why Sweet Home residents believe they have been forced to protest in a manner that seeks to cause disruption by, for example, blockading roads and destroying property:

  • Their garbage is not taken away every week as it is in other parts of the city, leaving the settlement extremely dirty, unattractive and unhygienic;
  • Most of their toilets are broken, leaking or otherwise unsanitary;
  • The homes of only some residents have been connected to electricity;
  • The open-air sewage canals built by the city are unsanitary and unsafe for children to play in. A nearby business has blocked the canal, with the result that raw sewage floods into homes when it rains;
  • The unsanitary conditions are a threat to the health of residents, particularly children and the elderly;
  • They are angry at Ward 80 councillor Thembinkosi Pupa for not working with them to meet their needs and for ignoring residents when they attempt to engage on issues; and
  • They are angry at the mayor and other City of Cape Town officials for ignoring them and failing to engage meaningfully with the community on urgent development issues.

    It is clear that the protesters are responding to the structural violence of the state, to the structural violence of a society that hates the poor, that denies them livelihoods and leaves them landless, homeless and living in appalling conditions.

    South African society shoots protesters already damaged by poverty, massacres workers already victimised by their bosses and is so unabashedly violent that it calls for yet further militarisation in our workplaces and in our communities.

    Shack dwellers

    As they did at Marikana, the police have surrounded Sweet Home and other shack settlements such as Barcelona, Europe and BM Section to deter future road blockades.

    Yet they cannot stop all shack dwellers from taking to the streets all the time. In fact, just last week, shack dwellers from the small railway town of Touws River took to the streets and blockaded the N1 freeway for much of the day.

    In Cape Town alone, there are hundreds of shack settlements whose residents are fed up with the conditions in which they live. Any one of them could rise up in protest at any moment.

    A state that treats the most oppressed people in society as if they were some sort of internal enemy, funded by a mysterious third force, is a state that is completely failing to address the gross inequalities in our society. Such an approach to governance shows that South Africa is engaging in a new kind of colonialism.

    The conspiracy theories that NGOs and politicians peddle to try to explain away the rising tide of protest in Cape Town have little to do with reality and are a further affront to the dignity of the city’s poorest residents.

    Neocolonial policing methods may contain protest here and there, but they are not capable of stopping it altogether.

    Only a response by government that acknowledges the dignity of poor black South Africans and actually attempts to work with them to address their grievances can possibly stem the tide of these protests. Until then, De Lille will merely be using the police to play musical chairs with protesting shack dwellers.

    Click here to read the full report.

    • Churches & the Organised Poor

    Churches & the Organised Poor

    By Thina Khanyile, IUM-SiCiLi Barefoot Consultation, Pretoria, 28 August 2012

    Abahlali baseMjondolo is an egalitarian and democratic organisation of the poor. It is dedicated to the self-improvement and self-education of people who have been made poor by an unjust economic system. We organise ourselves to be able to discuss and understand our situation better and to be able to struggle for justice.

    AbM is not a political party. We are a an independent poor people's organisation. We accept people regardless of the political parties that they are coming from but we keep party politics out of the movement and all our leaders must agree to remain independent from all political parties.

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    M&G Deep Read: The politics of protest

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    http://mg.co.za/article/2012-08-21-the-politics-of-protests-in-cape-town

    The politics of protest

    by Jared Sacks, The Mail & Guardian (There is a longer version of this piece at the Amandla Blog).

    Protests have plagued Cape Town for years, but now they’ve begun to bleed out of township boundaries and into spaces that affect the middle class.

    The City of Cape Town is currently being rocked by a spate of road blockades and other significant protests. Certain liberal NGOs have joined the Democratic Alliance in condemning the protests claiming that they are violent and “politically motivated”.

    Protests in the form of marches, the burning of tyres, and road blockades, have been happening every week throughout the city for years. Most go unreported.

    What seems to be different about recent protests, however, is that they’ve begun to bleed out of township boundaries and into spaces that affect Cape Town’s middle class. The blocking of Duinefontein, Vanguard and Landsdowne roads a couple of weeks ago and the recent closure of the N2 freeway by shackdwellers in Gugulethu are important examples of this shift.

    On Monday last week, protesters succeeded again in blocking key arterial roads in the City: Duinefontein, Landsdowne and Mew Way, as well as attempting to repeat last Friday’s closure of the N2 – this time near Khayelitsha and by Sir Lowry’s Pass. More shack settlements seem to be joining in each day.

    Seeing little change since 1994, many activists who have begun to take civil disobedience into middle class spaces argue that it is better to be vilified and taken notice of than to be given “lip service delivery” from the government.

    Over the years community activists have repeatedly found that following the “correct” channels gets them nowhere. The escalation of protests and the turn to more disruptive tactics is a response to complete lack of substantive democracy for anyone who can’t afford to purchase it.

    A number of actors are entering into the politics of popular protest in Cape Town. These include the country’s key political parties and their affiliates in the youth leagues, the South African National Civic Organisation (Sanco), ward committees and development forums. These organisations, while they may have some popular support in protesting communities, are generally seeking to leverage attention off the protests’ legitimate grievances.

    Civil disobedience

    The closing of roads, burning of tyres and destruction of government property (all by themselves constituting non-violent acts of civil disobedience) almost always have the tacit support of the settlement where the protest originates – even if sometimes only a small portion of the settlement is actively engaging in such acts of civil disobedience.

    These protests, especially when they are coordinated to have a maximum disruptive effect on the socio-economic life of the middle class and elite, can have a profoundly positive effect in the long run. Even when some of these actions lead to a certain amount of violence (such as self-defence against routinely vicious actions of the police), there can be favourable outcomes for society.

    All over the world, mass civil disobedience (whether violent or non-violent) has significantly altered the course of history, toppling dictators, changing economic policies, and turning public opinion. The Egyptian revolution is a case in point. Hap protesters not physically battled the paramilitary police, thrown rocks, engaged in thousands of road blockades, and burned down government buildings which were key symbols of the dictatorship, Mubarak would have likely remained in power for the rest of his life.

    It is quite concerning, therefore, that a collection of Cape Town-based activist oriented NGOs have been making a significant effort to vilify certain forms of protest that do no fit within its directors’ and funders’ view of what constitute ‘acceptable’ forms of protest.

    To be sure, many of these NGOs can claim important victories. The Treatment Action Campaign, for instance, has had a significant impact in helping turn the tide away from Aids denialism. However, just as often, well-funded protests led by NGOs have gone nowhere. Despite bringing more than 10 000 people into the streets of Cape Town last year, Equal Education has not been able to compel the government to build more libraries. Instead, the Western Cape is now closing down 27 schools in the province.

    Of course, this is not to say that legal and well funded mass protests are worthless. They definitely have the ability to have a significant effect. Yet, when poor black communities cannot afford to hire 100 buses to bring enough people to Parliament to make a difference, then other protest tactics must also be considered. When the “proper” channels of protest (including legal challenges, petitions, marches, etc.) are tried year after year to no avail, oppressed communities have every right to engage in other more disruptive acts of civil disobedience.

    Langa

    One of the best examples of real immediate success from illegal protest tactics was the 2007 blockade of the N2 by thousands of residents of the Joe Slovo shack settlement in Langa. The community was resisting the then Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu’s attempting to evict 20 000 Joe Slovo residents to the bleak, underdeveloped township of Delft. After authorities ignored all of their various legal protests and attempts to negotiate, the residents’ blockade of the N2 became the key turning point in their struggle. The blockade, a statement that reverberated through public opinion, eventual destroyed the state’s political will to actually carry out the evictions.

    Yet in 2010, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and its allied NGOs, together with the South African Communist Party, issued a startling attack on Abahlali baseMjondolo’s non-violent but disruptive informal settlement strike which they recklessly caricatured, in a manner that drew heavily from the negative stereotypes that are frequently held against poor people. During the recent protests, Vuyiseka Dubula, general secretary of the TAC, penned an article in which she called for protests “built on alliances, strategy, clear realistic demands and the genuine intent to improve the lives of people”.

    The concern with this assertion is not that alliances, strategy, demands or intent to improve people’s lives are wrong. Instead, the problem here is the self-righteous assumption that large numbers of shackdwellers who are protesting are somehow incapable of thinking for themselves, lack “genuine intent” to improve people’s lives and are in fact actively trying to destroy their their communities.

    Whether or not the ANC Youth League is involved in diluting the authentic grievances of the community, the truth is that people are protesting as a strategy to improve their lives.

    Thus, what Vuyiseka, TAC and its affiliated NGOs are really saying is that communities should protest their way, should build alliances under their umbrella, and should make only “realistic” (reformist) demands that are acceptable to their vein of sectarian liberal politics. Yet their approach to donor-funded activism often does not work or is unaffordable to shackdwellers – thereby dictating who can afford to protest.

    Of course, we must still oppose authoritarianism, recklessness and political opportunism when it emerges within popular struggles. Violence for the sake of violence is nothing but dangerous and regressive. Stoning buses that try to cross through the erected barricades is reckless and does not help protesters’ cause. But to oppose a key protest tactic of the poor such as road blockades, on principle, is to condemn a genuine mass demand for social inclusion and relegate social change to donor funded NGOs.

    The anti-apartheid struggle took a multitude of different strategies and organisations to overthrow the Nats. Likewise, in the post-1994 era where neo-apartheid remains a defining feature of South African society, a truly united democratic front will also have to be open to many different ways of struggling for change.

    The Indypendent: The Climate Change Revolution Will Not Be Funded

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    http://www.indypendent.org/2011/12/09/the-climate-change-revolution-will-not-be-funded/

    The Climate Change Revolution Will Not Be Funded

    Jared Sacks

    This past week, world leaders, technocrats, and NGOs descended upon Durban for the 17th Conference of Parties (dubbed Conference of Polluters by its critics). After 17 years of meetings to address climate change, the lack of action from world leaders clearly shows that the biggest polluting nations not only lack the political will to address the issue, but also seem to be actively carrying out the anti-environmental agenda of the largest corporations on this planet.

    The sizeable NGOs who have made their name fighting climate change are surely correct when they link the Obama and Harper governments, and indeed the entire COP process, to the likes of Royal Dutch Shell, Eskom and Koch Industries. Some great slogans have come out of this opposition to the conference. Earthlife Africa’s catchphrase on their t-shirts tells us to “never trust a COP” playing off of the duplicity and corruption of both the police and the COP process.

    Yet the opposition front of civil society that came together to form C17 and organized this past Saturday’s Global Day of Action, tells only part of the story. The issue that is glossed over relates to the definitions of who is ‘civil society’ and therefore who was really speaking at the myriad events organized by C17 NGOs, such as the International Climate Jobs Conference, the People’s Space at UKZN, Greenpeace’s Solar Tent, and even the 10,000 strong Global Day of Action.

    On the Climate Bus Part 1

    On the 1st of December, we embarked on a grueling 27 hour trip from Cape Town to Durban. The C17 Climate Bus Caravan was populated mostly by poor activists and lower level NGO workers. The conditions in our two buses coming from Cape Town were less than ideal, especially the hourly pit-stops that resulted from the lack of a toilet on-board. The organizing was also less than ideal; we got lost on the way and did not know where we were staying once we arrived in Durban.

    But these were hardcore activists, many who live in shacks or council homes and some who have been shot at and jailed for their activism. Conditions were not the issue. The overriding complaint I heard over and over from fellow travelers was the unfairness of the situation: why were the actual NGO directors who paid for the trip not on the bus with us?

    Slumming it at the Refugee Camp

    Upon arrival in Durban, we eventually found our accommodation for the next three days: C17’s Climate Change Refugee Camp. As activists, we were willing to make a political statement by living in huge communal tents with sub-par ablution facilities, dirty blankets and conditions mirroring a refugee camp.

    As Mzonke Poni from Abahlali baseMjondolo told me: “The camp was a true reflection of a people’s space. The actual People’s Space at UKZN was more of an intellectual space…I enjoyed the experience at the camp.” Indeed, communal spaces where the poor are dumped are often much more open and accessible spaces than the rigidly organized initiatives built to include the poor.

    Once again, the underlying grievance behind the majority of participants was that the executives of the C17 social justice NGOs who organized the camp to make a political statement, were sleeping comfortably in beach-front hotels.

    Leading silent sheep

    What became clear throughout the trip was that we (the thousands of activists brought in from all over the country) were a crowd whose primary purpose was to provide legitimacy to the C17 NGO’s claims that their agendas had popular support. This was why free t-shirts were handed out advertising NGOs and their environmental justice campaigns.

    Furthermore, activists’ trips sponsored by C17 NGOs were told to wear Earthlife Africa or Million Climate Jobs shirts instead of those of their own organizations. Activists whose trip was sponsored by the Democratic Left Front (DLF) were encouraged to wear only DLF t-shirts. What this meant is, as Mzonke Poni put it, “the role of community-based organizations (CBOs) have been undermined…the crowd was rented to top up the numbers.”

    Indeed, there was effectively no space for CBOs and movements to talk about what climate change actually means to their lived experience. Their anti-climate change agenda was defined on their behalf. Even at the massive march on the 3rd of December, only a couple of high-powered speakers such as COSATU’s Zwelinzima Vavi were given a space to speak.

    As Charles Adams from Mitchell’s Plain explained: “They [NGOs] should have involved the community people and given them a space to speak, not just the organisers.”

    This was evident not only at the NGO controlled march, but also at all other C17 events. It seems that at times even the Occupy COP17 General Assembly was itself occupied by NGOs, and its agenda set from the top-down by these organizations’ directors.

    In one instance, community activists eventually fought back. According to participants, the DLF leadership had placed members in accommodation “not fit for a human being” and given “expired food” while they themselves stayed in much better lodging. Members revolted against the DLF leadership by disrupting a public lecture and shamed them into ensuring that their conditions were improved. Still, members remained angry and unsatisfied at the reproduction of inequality by the DLF leadership.

    Sold Out

    The end result was not only that C17 NGO autocrats used the bodies of community activists while silencing their voices, they also undermined the entire anti-climate change agenda. A discussion with Melissa Jaxa from the artistic collective Soundz of the South was instructive: “I think we should be consulted as the masses. As we call ourselves socialists, we should make decisions together about who should speak at our events. They [C17] didn’t take us seriously. We are against COP17 but we ended up working with them”.

    In fact, anyone present at the Global Day of Action would have clearly seen the ANC supporters donning official eThekwini COP17 uniforms, shouting pro-Zuma slogans, and abusing and assaulting other protesters. How could the C17 organizers have allowed them to participate in the same space as a march meant to call Zuma and other world leaders to account? How did the municipality get away with using public funds to rent an ANC crowd of their own?

    In other words, we activists felt that we were sold out by the very NGOs that claim to represent our interests. As INCITE’s The Revolution Will Not Be Funded shows, NGOs have no structural accountability to their so-called beneficiaries. They are externally funded organizations that, like the World Bank, are accountable to outside forces through the power of the purse.

    We who feel that another (more just) world is necessary should then look toward the unfunded revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt or the Occupy Movement for reference. We need to support community self-organizing and accept community driven agendas and philosophies. This does not need millions in funding. But it does need painstaking perseverance and commitment to radical democratic politics. In other words, a commitment to building authentic peoples spaces.

    On the Climate Bus Part 2

    On the road back to Cape Town, the one bus broke down twice while the other’s tire burst. In Colesburg the bus drivers purposely left dozens of activists stranded until those of us still onboard forced the buses to turn back to get them. After spending another 30 hours on the return bus, we finally arrived at the Alternative Information Development Centre (AIDC) in Cape Town at 23h30. However, half of us were stuck once again; someone forgot to organize taxis home.

    Because we could not find the C17 representatives who were in charge of organizing transport, we could not fix the situation.

    Even something as simple as a bus trip becomes a struggle when we as participants have no say.

    Pambazuka: The revolution will not be funded

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    http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/68797

    The revolution will not be funded
    The role of donors in the movement for social justice in Africa
    Hakima Abbas
    2010-11-17, Issue 505

    The recently concluded mid-term elections in the United States, which quite appropriately came on the heels of their Halloween celebrations, scary as they were, starkly highlighted the buckling of western power among the contradictions of liberal democracy and super-capitalism. The reduction of western aid, induced by the ‘global’ financial crisis, will challenge the perceived dependency between the global North and South. And, with the rise of the economic and political clout of so-called ‘emerging’ powers in the South, the globe is expected to see significant, if not permanent, shifts in societal order.

    Within these intriguing and uncertain times, those of us struggling to realise just and equitable alternatives and a new order that can dismantle the dynamics of power and privilege, are confronted with a seemingly insurmountable task: resisting land and water grabbing from foreign ‘investors’; confronting our own (within our society and movements) fundamentalisms that divide the economically oppressed and socially marginalised and insist on freedom for some but not all; protecting our natural resources, biodiversity and the rights of mother earth; dismantling systemic power that seeks to maintain and serve a self-interested, neo-colonial elite, etc.

    These multiple forms of insidious imperialism and democratic veiling of repression have created a semblance of normalcy and reduced revolutionary fervour to resignation to reform at best. Widespread understanding of the inter-connection of struggle, the centrality of power in oppression, the necessity to fight all forms of oppression, the ownership of one’s own contradictions and a desire to transform these, indeed, simply the imagination to develop a vision of full liberation is wanton throughout our movements.

    Nevertheless the recent rise in acts of civil resistance across Africa is indicative of an ongoing powerful force and movement building process. Social movements are driven by a shared vision and propelled through collective action. Movements are not one entity, but are made up of several forces: formal organisations, autonomous formations, intellectual spaces and thought, individuals…Movements are important because they create the potential for sustained change, not only institutionalising reform but consolidating transformation (people-ising change)[1].

    A social movement is ‘an organised set of constituents pursuing a common political agenda of change through collective action’.

    The characteristics are:

    1. A visible constituency base or membership
    2. Members collectivised in formal or informal formations
    3. Some continuity over time (i.e., a spontaneous uprising or campaign may not be a movement in itself, though it may lead to one)
    4. Engagement in collective actions and activities in pursuit of the movement’s political goals
    5. Use of a variety of actions and strategies, and
    6. Engagement of clear internal or external targets in the change process.
    (Adapted by framework and definition created by AWID.)

    Meaningful change in Africa has occurred with the active participation of movements in their entirety, with autonomous formations, political parties, organisations etc, working towards a common agenda. Yet, organisations have taken a central stage on the platform for change. The NGO-isation of our movements, accompanied by the pre-requisite ‘professionalisation’ of activism open to the middle-classes with access to formal education and able to operate in Western paradigms of advocacy, has numbed our imagination for transformation. NGOs, somewhat ironically, are registered and legitimised through the State that the movement often seeks to challenge. The requirements and regulations of this legitimacy demand particular structural norms and the desire for ‘sustainability’ demands a relationship with donors (often international) through which further structural norms are institutionalised. In particular, the ever-expanding NGO industrial complex separates and depoliticises service and advocacy while failing to question its own role in weakening African institutions, power and self-determination.

    Often international NGOs have been consumed in service delivery that has meant the effective privatisation (and outsourcing) of African essential services, while local and national NGOs are structurally tied to projects and services without the ability to address need. ‘This has also gradually shifted power away from the constituency that movements organised and into the hands of organisations and organisational leadership that is increasingly less connected and accountable to the constituencies they claim to serve.’[2]

    Similarly, accountability to donors and the funding sector has shifted the power of constituency to the power of capital; reducing the spirit of volunteerism and autonomy. Yet, the autonomous formations of our movements similarly seem to have lost their mass based character in many countries, relying heavily on individual activists, seemingly unwilling to engage and address our own oppressive contradictions, reactionary and populist forces at the expense of principled positions, and unable to create sustained change, be it institutional or perceptive.

    Within our movements we must go beyond the donor driven paradigm of thinking about objectives, projects and programs to thinking about principles of unity and collective action. We must stop believing that a single solution, a silver bullet, will fix all but rather be willing to try and test new approaches and take on the difficult, seemingly intractable issues. A movement needs a political frame or ideology. Though we must study our history and build lessons, it is high time we challenge ourselves to develop new political thought that is grounded in African progressive practice and responds to our needs, putting at the centre the economically, socially and politically oppressed peoples of Africa: farmers, women, workers, informal workers, queers, people living with disabilities, etc.

    A movement also needs networks, identity, a conducive political and socio-economic context as well as resources (financial and non-material) to create change. Funders, at all levels, tend to ignore our organic institutions, the village assemblies, the citizen networks etc., which lead in supporting whole communities though not necessarily within a social justice frame. Funding and access to capital has fragmented movements, with individual funders tending to fund specific organisations rather than a movement as a whole. Similarly, organisations focusing on one area tend not to make links across movements for social justice, thus we remain in silos of struggle, unable and, many times unwilling, to make the connections across diversities and in recognition of intersectionality. Due to our over-reliance on organisational structures, and in turn on international or transnational funding, our social justice work has become vulnerable to funding shifts, the fickleness of funding priorities and the empty promises of the aid architecture.

    We must begin, as movements for social justice, to see the funding sector as a sight of struggle in itself, expose its links with state and multi-national corporate interests and learn to unify around our common agenda in order to reject agendas and short term fixes that reinforce our dependency and privatise our essential services. The way we engage individual donors is political, the extent to which our movements set the agenda of the funding sector is a yardstick for the power we have taken back.

    ‘Even in Warembo Ni Yes[3] we had several challenges that we didn’t anticipate that we didn’t have before we had raised the resources and then once we had raised the money then we started to deal with power in a different way, we started to deal with transparency, accountability and trust issues in an entirely different way because naturally with money comes a lot of fear, a lot of distrust, because people have been exploited, and you are working with people who are coming from different economic backgrounds as well so have very different relationships to money and what that money means. And so, I think that we do need to be careful. I think what worked about Warembo Ni Yes is that the donors who supported us were willing to take a risk and there are not many donors who are willing to take that kind of risk.’[4]

    In turn, funders must begin to reflect, if they wish to support the growth of such movements, on what funders need to change in their practice to be able to lend support effectively. In practice, the needs of social movements rarely require large amounts of funds. What is needed is trust, solidarity and flexible access to resources. Therefore, if funders want to support movements, there is a need to change the paradigm of funding, to provide flexible funds, to provide solidarity, nurturing and safe environments, and a willingness to engage for the long-term.

    A significant number of African grant-makers are currently surfacing. These grant-makers to varying degree are seeing themselves as part of the movement. However, in their current state, they have done little to go beyond dominant western models and paradigms that reinforce dynamics of power between funder and ‘grantee’ nor have they particularly risen above their role as middle-(wo)men of western funders.

    Yet, some have been more successful in supporting activities that many international donors or foundations would not fund, in enabling experimentation, as well as in supporting political mobilisation and rapid solidarity action. African grant-makers could in fact go further by enabling movements to re-inject politics into our activism by supporting explicitly political actions and themselves explore different models and possibilities to create more autonomous funding.

    Indeed in order for resources to be disbursed through African grant-makers in a manner that would support our progressive movements for change, our grant-makers themselves would need to be self-determined by: holding stocks and investments that would generate interest for grant-making while creating a large reserve for sustained social justice support; tapping into the philanthropic potential of Africa’s Diaspora and bourgeoisie, in particular targeting young Africans that are potentially divorced from the interests of the political elite having generated their wealth through sectors like the information, communication and technology (ICT) sector; establishing participatory processes that go beyond tokenistic parading of ‘community’ but that sincerely convene economically oppressed and socially marginalised communities to enable them to articulate priorities and determine how resources are spent; facilitating the raising of money by the people for the people by, for instance, providing a revolving loan fund for start-up activist-led resource mobilising activities; sustaining activism through programs that don’t remove people from their movements or priorities, but enable activists to access resources throughout their lives; attempting to shift the dynamics of power between donor and ‘grantee’ as well as within their own institutions and sector.

    It is certain that the revolution will not be funded. Transformative progressive change will not be confined or restricted to logframes, results-based programming or project proposals. Our movements will, however, use resources: relying on non-material resources of peoples’ time and energy, contributions and skills, knowledge and experience, thinking and action, while also relying on material resources offered by the community, members and constituency and provided by allies and supporters and even funded by international or African grant-makers.

    But, for these resources to be put to the process of social justice change, we will need to begin to ‘understand that our capacity to bring about major social changes is influenced by our capacity for connecting our strategies, for sharing our dreams, for forging alliances and thus going beyond the survival of our organisations [or formation, or even individual leadership (added by author)] by thinking and acting collectively.’[5]

    BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS ??

    * Hakima Abbas is Fahamu’s executive director.
    * This article is based on a presentation given by the author to the African Grantmakers Network. The presentation was created based on the input of Fahamu staff to whom this article is also credited.
    * Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

    NOTES:

    [1]Modern Latin American Revolutions, Eric Selbin
    [2] Association for Women in Development
    [3] Warembo Ni Yes was a collective of young feminists coming together to create a campaign in support of Kenya’s proposed new constitution based on the gains for women. Kenya’s new constitution was held to referendum in August 2010 and adopted by large majority.
    [4] Zawadi Nyong’o quoted in ‘Young Women Making Waves: Warembo Ni Yes in Conversation’ from the forthcoming The Power is Ours publication by Pambazuka Press
    [5] Lydia Alpízar Durán, Association for Women in Development