Popular Struggles Then and Now - First Panel (27 March 2015)

Camalita Naicker on Marikana as an Event in the Subaltern Sphere of Politics

Thapelo Mohapi (Abahlali baseMjondolo) speaks to issues of anti-xenophobia solidarity

S'bu Zikode on the University of Abahlali baseMjondolo (2007)

Life after Marikana

Stuart Wilson, The Daily Maverick

First the facts. In August 2012, a group of Rock Drill Operators, dissatisfied with their wages, and with the representation available from either of the labour unions with a presence at the Lonmin Marikana Shaft, embarked upon an unprotected strike to push Lonmin for higher wages. The strike, and its attendant protest, soon gained widespread support, and incited a violent response – both from union officials and the police. In the days before 16 August 2012, the striking miners, union officials, Lonmin security guards, and the police themselves, all took a small number of casualties. The striking miners – about 3,000 of them – retreated to the top of a small rocky outcrop just outside the Lonmin shaft compound. There they stayed for four days, demanding that Lonmin management come and address them on their demands.

March Against the Politic of Death - Durban 8 November 2014

Escalating Political Violence in South Africa

Richard Pithouse, Mail & Guardian

On Monday evening, not long after the sun went down, a man with a gun stepped out of the dark and into the everyday domestic routine in Thuli Ndlovu’s home in KwaNdengezi, Durban. He shot Ndlovu seven times, and her neighbour’s teenage son twice. Ndlovu died on the spot. Her neighbour’s son is in a critical condition.

Ndlovu was the chairperson of the KwaNdengezi branch of Abahlali baseMjondolo. Like Nkululeko Gwala, a member of the same organisation, who was assassinated in Cato Crest, also in Durban, in June last year, she had been subject to serious intimidation for some time and had told her family and comrades that she expected to die.

Thuli Ndlovu, the Abahlali baseMjondolo Chairperson in KwaNdengezi, was Assassinated last Night

Tuesday, 30 September 2014

Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Statement

Thuli Ndlovu, the Abahlali baseMjondolo Chairperson in KwaNdengezi, was Assassinated last Night

Between half past six and seven last night an armed man burst into Thuli Ndlovu’s home in KwaNdengezi while she was watching TV. He shot her seven times and she died on the scene. There were two other people in the house at the time. One was Sphe Madlala, an 18 year old neighbour. He finished matric last year and did very well in physics and maths. Our movement has been trying to help him to get into university. He had come to the house to help Thuli’s 17 year old daughter, Sli, with her matric studies in maths and science. Sphe was also shot twice in the stomach but he survived. He underwent surgery at RK Khan Hospital at one this morning and remains in a critical condition. Thuli’s one year old son, Freedom, was also in the house at the time of the shooting. He was not physically harmed. Sli was in a separate outside room with her grandmother at the time of the shooting.

Evictions at the Chris Hani (eNsimbini) and Marikana (Cato Crest) Land Occupations

Martha Chofe & her son with her shack illegally
destroyed by the Land Invasions Unit at the 
Marikana land Occupation
on 10 September 2014

12 September 2014

Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Statement

Evictions at the Chris Hani (eNsimbini) and Marikana (Cato Crest) Land Occupations

At ten o’clock this morning five shacks were demolished by the Land Invasions Unit in the Chris Hani Land Occupation in eNsimbini. This land was occupied in February last year. The shacks that were demolished are new shacks that were built about two weeks ago by people that were renting nearby and decided to join the occupation to avoid having to pay rent. As usual there was no court order authorising these evictions and they were, therefore, an illegal and criminal act on the part of the eThekwini Municipality. The residents of these new shacks were at work when the eviction happened and so there was no confrontation.

Notes on Praxis for the RGS Panel on the Co-Production of Urban Contestation, London, August 2014

Notes on Praxis for the RGS Panel on the Co-Production of Urban Contestation, London, August 2014

Richard Pithouse

Rigorous ongoing reflection on praxis is an essential practice for all participants in any struggle. There can be no effective emancipatory political action on a sustained basis without this reflexivity. It is simultaneously ethical and strategic work. It is necessary to strive to ensure that this is a collective practice within struggles as well as taking it on as an individual obligation.

Abahlali baseMjondolo Meeting, eTafuleni, 7 September 2014

Raymond Suttner on State Repression and Illegality in Durban

The Marikana Land Occupation, Cato Crest, 22 June 2014 - eviction, road blockade, rebuilding

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.

Fanon in South Africa, from Biko to the shackdwellers' movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo)

Dear Mandela (full documentary now online)

Despite the state's violence, our fight to escape the mud and fire of South Africa's slums will continue

S'bu Zikode, UnFreedom Day, Kennedy Road, 27 April 2009

S'bu Zikode, The Guardian

Our movement of shack-dwellers – Abahlali baseMjondolo, representing some of South Africa's poorest people – was formed in 2005 in Durban and now has more than 12,000 members in more than 60 shack settlements. We campaign against evictions, and for public housing: struggling for a world in which human dignity comes before private profit, and land, cities, wealth and power are shared fairly.

When Abahlali baseMjondolo members take our place in cities we take it humbly, but firmly. We have won many important battles in court, including the overturning of the anti-poor Slums Act – but the law has not bought justice. Despite that victory, thousands of shack dwellers were forcibly removed to make way for developments ahead of the 2010 World Cup. Most were dumped in transit camps, left to rot without basic services. Some camps – such as Isipingo, south of Durban – were built on flood plains.

S'bu Zikode's full talk on repression in Durban, Rhodes University, 10 October 2013

Durban Poison

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

On the last day of September Nqobile Nzuza, a seventeen year old girl, was shot dead by the police near Cato Manor in Durban. She was unarmed and she was shot in her back and the back of her head. She was part of a large group of people who were gathering to organise a road blockade in protest at both oppression, in the form of violent and illegal evictions at the hands of the eThekwini Municipality, and the repression of resistance to the evictions in the form of two assassinations. The police claimed that they had fired at the protestors in self-defence. Witnesses vigorously contest this and insist that a police officer, who they have named, fired at the unarmed protestors without provocation or warning.