Xenophobia,'stakeholders' and human rights in Grahamstown

Paddy O'Halloran, The Daily Maverick

Grahamstown’s month-long unresolved xenophobic crisis has finally gained international attention. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) will convene a meeting in Grahamstown on Monday morning to address the needs of displaced spaza shop owners and their families. They have been in limbo since looting on 21 October, receiving insufficient support, with many unable to go back to their shops in town.

Xenophobia in Grahamstown: A historical view

Paddy O'Halloran, The Con

Almost three weeks have passed since the start of xenophobic looting in Grahamstown that left 500 “foreign” shop owners and family members—most of them South African citizens—with nothing, and more than half of them displaced from their homes. Although looting sputtered out a week ago, and shops in and near the centre of town have opened again, most of the affected people remain displaced, and most shops remain shut. There is no viable plan for the people”s reintegration into the community.

#RHODESSOWHITE - Director's Cut

Living Politics in Grahamstown

Sanele Ntshingana and Paddy O’ Halloran, The Con

The room is walled with grey, cracking plaster, and the ceiling is sagging. Its only adornments are angular burglar bars over the single window and a tilted picture on the wall. A dozen women, maybe more, sit or stand, shoulder to shoulder. They are shouting: not to be heard, but because what they have to say can only be said in a shout. They are some of the women whose shops and homes have been emptied in five days of xenophobic looting in Grahamstown, whose families are left with nothing.

Xenophobia in Grahamstown: 'We are not leaving!'

Kate Janse an Rensburg, Mikaela Erskog & Fezokuhle Mthonti, Daily Maverick

Picture by Kate Janse van Rensburg

At Masifunde, a local nongovernmental organisation in Bathurst Street, Grahamstown, six women are sitting on and around the staircase. Two women talk urgently on the phone as they relay information to various stakeholders. This concerns the bedlam that has descended upon the city since Wednesday 21 October. One week has passed since a xenophobic outbreak, fuelled by the rumour mill, began in the City of Saints.

Xenophobia in Grahamstown: Police Fail the Community

Paddy O'Halloran, Daily Maverick

On Monday 19 October 2015, Grahamstown police reinforced by officers and equipment from East London twice dispersed protesting students at Eastcape Midlands College (EMC). Students at the college were protesting corruption by their institution’s administration. They had been joined by students from Rhodes University, down the hill, who had shut down their institution early in the morning as part of the national protest against unaffordable tertiary education. The police threw stun grenades and, in the second dispersal, chased students with a water cannon using chemical water that caused severe itching. When the students retreated to the Rhodes University campus, the police gathered in force at the campus entrance until the vice-chancellor went to the police station to officially request that they stand down. Elsewhere in South Africa so far this week — in Cape Town, Stellenbosch, and Port Elizabeth — protesting students and academics have been met with arrest, tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets. With the exception of Rhodes, the reaction by state and universities has been to break the protests using force.

Urgent Request for Intervention in the Crisis in Grahamstown

26 October 2015

Press Statement from Voices of the Foreigners’ Wives

Urgent Request for Intervention in the Crisis in Grahamstown

We are all wives of men who came to South Africa from other countries. There are more than a hundred of us. Our husbands come from Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, Senegal, Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Most of us are Muslims. We pray at the Mosque on the university campus. People call us ‘the kwarra wives’.

“They Will Not Take the Street”: Ferguson and Colonial Histories

Paddy O'Halloran, CounterPunch

Last week, activists staged protests in Ferguson, Missouri to memorialize the death of unarmed, black teenager Michael Brown at the hands of an armed policeman a year ago. The protesters marched and shouted, publicly challenging the legitimacy of the police department. The police response shows continuity with a longstanding logic and practice of colonialism in regard to protest and space.

Grahamstown (We Are All Marikana)

The Fingo Festival Revolution in South Africa’s Eastern Cape

Ts'eliso Monaheng, Africa is a Country

“You’ve got a car? It’s less than two hours from here” says a Rasta woman I’ve known for a total of ten minutes. In that time, she’s managed to convince me to travel with her to a town nearby (or was it me trying to convince her?) on a hunt for medicinal herbs.

The ganja in these here parts is strong. Mango, I’m told, is this season’s flavour. It can be found in Port Alfred, the town in question.

I didn’t have a car in any case and had to forego the offer, unfortunately.

Grahamstown Vigil for Children Killed in Gaza

Makana Municipality Bans another March

Tuesday, 18 March 2014

Unemployed People's Movement Press Statement

Makana Municipality Bans another March

Municipalities around the country are banning marches and supressing the right to protest. The Makana Municipality in Grahamstown is one of the worst offenders.

The year before last they illegally banned one of our marches on the grounds that one of our comrades was on a list provided by intelligence of people who are not allowed to address public gatherings unless the riot police are present. We had to go to court to march and when we did march riot police came from all over the Eastern Cape to monitor our comrade.

Bravo Estela

Nelson Mandela & Fidel Castro

Vashna Jagarnath, The Con

Living in Grahamstown, a small settler town that began its life as a fort on the colonial frontier, is often hard work.

On most days it seems that the spirit of John Graham, the British soldier sent to drive the Xhosa across the Fish River in 1811, would feel more at home in this town today than that of Makhanda Nxele, who, seven years later in 1818, led an attack on the colonial fort.

But here and there daily life throws up sometimes surprising moments of inspiration. And every now and then we are richly indulged by visits from remarkable people.

In recent years Tariq Ali, Jacques Depelchin, Lewis Gordon, Silvia Federici, Nomboniso Gasa, John Holloway, Achille Mbembe, VY Mudimbe and Raymond Suttner have all shared their gifts and strength with us.

Enduring Racism in Small Town South Africa

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

The road from Port Elizabeth to Grahamstown winds past one luxury game farm after another. John Graham, a British soldier, drove the Xhosa people off this land, the Zuurveld, between 1811 and 1812. His soldiers burnt their homes, destroyed their crops and killed any man that resisted.

It was John Cradock, the governor of the Cape Colony, who had given Graham his orders. Cradock had some experience in these matters. He had crushed anti-colonial rebellions in Ireland and India before being posted to Cape Town. In 1812 he reported to the British cabinet that the inhabitants of the Zuurveld had been forced across the Fish River with ‘a proper degree of terror’.  Just over two hundred years later, and twenty years after the end of apartheid, neither the degree of inequality in Grahamstown, nor the manner in which it is racialised, can be denied.

Makhanda & the 1819 War

Makhanda & the 1819 War - Written by Raymond Suttner in prison in 1979 by TigersEye99

South Africa’s water wars

by Mandy de Waal, GroundUp

Ma Gladys Mphepho hovers over a pot on a two plate cooker in her shack in Papamani, an informal settlement outside of Grahamstown. “We do not have dignity,” she says, stirring the rice, flavoured with beef stock, that is her family’s Sunday lunch. “We do not know what it means to have dignity. Forget about any question of dignity,” says Mphepho.

It is a sweltering day in the heat of summer and Mphepho is talking about her daily struggle to live, which is exacerbated by the crisis that the people of Papamani, and greater Grahamstown, have with water. There are two taps in the whole of Papamani which serve close on 30 homes. Each home houses some five or six people. Do the maths, and that’s over 150 people who get water from two taps. That’s to drink, make food with, to wash with and to do anything else that requires water.

Unemployed People's Movement march at Grahamstown cathedral in protest at political repression in Durban

South African Municipal Workers' Union (SAMWU) & the Unemployed People's Movement (UPM) protest in Grahamstown

Rhodes University Marches for Water

Is a commitment to human rights sufficient for an emancipatory theoretical praxis?

by Kayla Hazell

“They didn’t ask us why we are washing cars. They didn’t ask us anything.”

This essay adopts the position that formal human rights, such as those encoded in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (hereafter, the Constitution), are potentially emancipatory in the sense that they embody our society’s commitments and aspirations with regard to the treatment of individuals and groups. That said, it will be argued that a formal commitment to human rights does not automatically translate into practice and that this has largely been the South African experience. Human rights are subject to constant balancing, particularly where interests conflict, and such balancing occurs according to a particular rationality. It will be contended that, if rights are to become a reality for all, the rationality governing our commitment to human rights in South Africa, currently largely economistic, will need to be renegotiated in light of the fact that our formal rights have stood watch while extreme inequality continues.