"We Will Not Be Moving To Your Transit Camp Today": Development Futures in Democratic South Africa

The Centre for Indian Studies in Africa Invites you to a talk by Dr. Kerry Chance. ACLS New Faculty Fellow, Anthropology Department, Harvard University

"We Will Not Be Moving To Your Transit Camp Today": Development Futures in Democratic South Africa

This talk examines shifting political meanings of housing evictions in democratic South Africa.  Since the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, townships and shack settlements – commemorated in liberation histories as heroic battlegrounds and shameful testaments to apartheid – have been recast in public discourse as ‘slums,’ zones of de facto criminality, earmarked for clearance or development.  In recent years, residents have been moved en masse away from public spaces to ‘transit camps,’ the latest technology of slum elimination that is reshaping the urban periphery. Street protests against these evictions have been officially condemned and met with brutality by police and private security forces. While state agents justify evictions under a liberal logic of progressively realized rights and inclusive citizenship, residents see continuities with apartheid-era removals and new forms of exclusion at the intersections of race and class. I argue, by studying these interactions between residents and state agents, governmental modes of managing slum populations and relations of force become visible, and with them, emerging political practices of a collectively self-identified ‘poor.’

"Governing ‘the Poor’: Development Futures in Democratic South Africa"

Theory - north south and between

Kerry Chance, from Harvard University, attended the 2012 Session of the JWTC. She speaks to The Blog.
 

What in your view distinguishes ‘theory’ from Harvard and ‘theory’ from Johannesburg?

As I understand it, the proposition of the Johannesburg Workshop, among other things, is to read and produce contemporary theory from ‘the South,’ and thereby also to make visible the potential parochialisms of ‘the North.’ Having lived and worked in South Africa for over a decade, my approach to theory has been profoundly shaped by life and thought emanating from here. As anthropologists and scholars of Post-colonial and African Studies have argued for some time, our vantage in the world has a bearing on the kinds of questions we ask of theory, and how we think theory vis-à-vis the Western canon. So, while it is important not to lose sight of this proposition, the lines between ‘North’ and ‘South’ often are not so easily drawn. With regard to recent housing evictions in Johannesburg and Chicago, for instance, we might see more connections between Soweto and Chicago’s Cabrini Green than Sandton or Chicago’s Northside. In other words, we should not overlook emerging global relations and processes that suggest how ‘North’ and ‘South’ can be seen as multiple and beyond any simple dichotomy. In this vein, having spent the last year at Harvard, I can say that it is a place where African Studies is being taken seriously. There also are many academics, students, research projects, initiatives and student organizations that are ‘thinking from the South’ in important ways.

The Work of Violence:a timeline of armed attacks at Kennedy Road

by Kerry Chance, School of Development Studies Research Report, 83, July 2010.

On 26 September 2009, violent attacks by an armed group left two men dead and an estimated thousand displaced at the Kennedy Road shack settlement in the South African city of Durban. This timeline, centered on the night the attacks began to unfold, and upon the Community Hall, proposes three meaningful dimensions: (1) the mobilization of political party affiliation and the specter of an ethnic-other tied to material relations, especially employment and state resources; (2) new modes of policing in an ensuing social drama over a state-backed crackdown on criminal gangs and shebeens; (3) contested claims to political sovereignty articulated through election-time “development” projects. In proposing these three dimensions, this timeline, amid happenings of that day, sketches in broad strokes, shifts in relevant interactions between Abahlali baseMjondolo, a poor peoples’ social movement, and officials, between 2008 and 2009, at the local, municipal, and provincial level. These dimensions, entailing both articulations during the attacks by armed men, as well as post-facto in public statements by officials, coalesced to displace members of Abahlali from their homes and national headquarters in the Kennedy Road settlement.