Category Archives: Patrick Bond

Record of information provided to a journalist taking discredited fraud and slander seriously        

Record of information provided to a journalist taking discredited fraud and slander seriously                                                                                                   

In November 2023 the movement held three long meetings to discuss a podcast by a journalist who took seriously the completely discredited fraud that emanated from within and around the Centre for Civil Society (CCS), an academic NGO previously headed by Patrick Bond, after our movement was formed almost twenty years ago. The bulk of the fabricated slander against our movement was produced by Heinrich Bohmke.

 Our process for preparing a letter to the journalist was to establish a committee to deal with the matter. That committee listened to the podcast together, taking notes and pausing the audio to discuss issues as they arose. We then produced a number of drafts of the letter, reading each draft out aloud line by line, discussing anything that anyone wished to raise and making any changes that were collectively agreed on.  Continue reading →

Abahlali baseMjondolo Responses to the Fraudulent Article Published in Politikon

July 06 2015

Abahlali baseMjondolo Responses to the Fraudulent Article Published in Politikon

In 2006 Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign walked out of a NGO controlled meeting [The Social Movements Indaba – SMI] hosted by the Centre for Civil Society, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The two grassroots movements were excluded from planning and formulating the agenda of the meeting, something that had been very common among the NGOs for a long time. Instead we were just bussed in as nothing more than spectators to meetings organised in the name of our lives and struggles. We decided to walk out of the meeting because we wanted to be in control of our own struggles as autonomous movements. The response from the NGOs and academics linked to the SMI was very similar to how the state responds when poor people want to think and organize for ourselves. For instance Mondli Hlatshwayo, the boss of the SMI who was working at an NGO known as Khanya College at the time, publicly referred to us as criminals. In the nine years since our walk-out there has been ongoing defamation and slander against Abahlali baseMjondolo, and people who have supported our movement, from within and around the Centre for Civil Society. There have also been incidents of intimidation, harassment, and attempts at censorship. Continue reading →

Attachments


Politikon Draft 1
Politikon Draft 2
Politikon Draft 3

An Old Snake in a New Skin – From Raymond Masondo to Heinrich Bohmke and Bandile Mdlalose

6 February 2015

Abahlali baseMjondolo Statement

An Old Snake in a New Skin – From Raymond Masondo to Heinrich Bohmke and Bandile Mdlalose

In 2006, when we made it clear that we would not give up our autonomy to the NGOs and walked out of a meeting at the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) at UKZN, some NGO workers, such as Mondli Hlatswayo, rushed to call us criminals on emails and in the press. At the time we could see no difference between how these NGOs responded to our insistence on our right to organise ourselves, to think for ourselves and to take our own positions and how the state responded. They both declared that we were criminals under the control of a white man.

As everyone who is familiar with the history of our movement knows since then we have been subject to constant defamation from a small group of people, all linked in different ways to CCS. These same people have never said a word when we have faced evictions, arrests, beatings, torture and murder. We continue to see very strong parallels between how the state responds to our movement and how some NGOs respond to our movement. Continue reading →