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 politically illiterate group of
people. Working with a conception of
intellectual inequality as always fabricated and contingent in nature, this
article elaborates the deployment and disruption of political illiteracy by focusing on the
politics of South African shack-dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo. The
discussion moves through the dis/placement of the legal charge of public
violence, the state violence of illegal evictions, the discourse of service
delivery, and the educative trusteeship of abandonment. The article concludes
with some concerns that emerge through the
movement’s practice and the very attempt to research political illiteracy.
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