Remembering Slavery in South Africa

Gabeda Baderoon, Africa is a Country

“I recognized Cape Town the first time I saw it,” Deborah Thomas revealed at a lecture she gave in the city in July 2014. A sociologist who works in Jamaica, she knew instantly that she was looking at a place shaped by slavery.

What do you see when you recognize slavery?

Walking while black at 9.50am

Nikiwe Bikitsha

Nikiwe Bikitsha, Mail & Guardian

Walking while black has always has its hazards in this country. The most common is that dogs will bark while you walk by; if you are unfortunate they may even try to bite you. It is a phenomenon which I’m sure is unique to South Africa.

My experience in other countries has been that dogs don’t bark randomly at blacks walking down the street. It must be that these dogs are often trained to antagonise black passersby or keep the imagined or real black intruder at bay.

ANC and DA discover common ground

by Jared Sacks, Mail & Guardian

The ANC and the Democratic Alliance always bicker over the cause of land occupations and who promotes them for political gain. Yet looking at their actions more deeply, it becomes clear how similar the two parties really are.

Cape Town: During the first two weeks of August, thousands of backyard dwellers living in dire conditions occupied vacant land near the Marikana settlement in Philippi East. Over the following days, the City of Cape Town’s Anti-Land Invasion Unit (ALIU), with the support of hundreds of labourers and police officers, made illegal attempts to evict all the occupiers.

“We are Humans and Not Dogs”

Zachary Levenson, Berkeley Journal of Sociology

The South African government has delivered well over 3 million formal homes free of charge since the 1994 transition. But in post-apartheid Cape Town, many recipients of these houses are fed up. Rather than the endpoint of the post-apartheid urban crisis, deficient delivery reproduces it anew, accentuating discontent in the process.

Apartheid geography and murder in Cape Town

Zackie Achmat, GroundUp

At approximately 59/100,000 people per year, Cape Town has one of the highest murder rates in the world. What can we do about it?

There is a relationship between gangsterism, drugs, alcoholism, our violent cultures, poverty and murder in our city. But one of the most important factors, often ignored, is spatial injustice: the fact that many people essentially live in ghettos.

Eviction at the Marikana Land Occupation (Cape Town) - 22 August 2014

22 August 2014 Eviction at Marikana from Pablo Pinedo Bóveda on Vimeo.

Cape Town: A City Designed to Forget

 Ilham Rawoot, The Con

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” -      Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

 A few months ago, untroubled, the green signboard at the top of the Searle Street off-ramp used to read “Woodstock: left; Zonnebloem: right”. One morning, something was different. In the night, a ghost of the past had pasted over the sign, and it now read “District Six: right”. A few days later, Zonnebloem was back, only to be replaced again later that week by District Six. People in the area and commuters who were aware of the controversy being played out enjoyed the tit for tat, the back and forth. For many, it was exciting to know that someone was taking note of the fading history and the socioeconomic implications for those who have been left behind. The fight is on – resistant remembrance versus persistent change.

Fok Your Hood

by Zachary Levenson, Africa is a Country

As someone who has lived in the Bay Area in California for over a half decade now, you don’t have to tell me about corny neighborhood renaming schemes spearheaded by property developers. After a year or so of living in an apartment on the border of North and West Oakland, banners began to appear on the lampposts reading “KONO,” apparently short for Koreatown-North Oakland. Aren’t these agents of gentrification supposed to be the creative class? Seriously, that’s the best they could come up with? Then there’s the two or three blocks along Telegraph Avenue downtown renamed “Uptown.” See, former mayor Jerry Brown was involved in the building of an all-inclusive apartment complex, complete with gym and hideously incongruous signage over the past couple of years, and it’s only fair that we reimagine these blocks as a “neighborhood.”

The Toilet Wars of Cape Town

By Sekoetlane Jacob Phamodi, Amandla Magazine

There is a big stink in Cape Town. Literally. For some years, now, the so-called ‘toilet wars’ have been a recurrent feature in the political battles waged in the Western Cape. The first of these was highlighted in 2010, when Khayelitsha residents took to the streets over undignified, uncovered toilet structures the City of Cape Town had erected along the N1 highway, supposedly to service their sanitation needs.

More recently, the serious and still unresolved complaints over toilets resurfaced when Khayelitsha residents, reportedly led by members of the ANC Youth League, emptied buckets of human waste on the steps of the Western Cape Legislature and flung buckets of human waste at Western Cape Premier, Helen Zille, and the City’s mayor, Patricia De Lille. The complaint underlying this protest action was the same: residents were unsatisfied with the unsuitable chemical, container and portable flush toilet (PFT) facilities that the City had provided them.

Abolition from Below: The 1808 Revolt in the Cape Colony

ABOLITION FROM BELOW: THE 1808 REVOLT IN THE CAPE COLONY by TigersEye99

Welcome to Marikana

The Marikana Land Occupation, Cape Town, 17 May 2013

'Shock and awe tactics' used on shack dwellers

by Jared Sacks, Mail & Guardian

On April 27, while political parties were spending fortunes to celebrate freedom, the shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo commemorated – or "mourned" – what it called UnFreedom Day in Sweet Home, the shack settlement in Philippi on the Cape Flats.

On the same day, a group of shack dwellers from the Philippi East area increased their occupation of a piece of land just off Symphony Way, between Stock and Govan Mbeki roads. But a day later, the City of Cape Town decided to show them exactly how unfree they still are.

City of Cape Town makes up law to justify eviction of the poor

by Jared Sacks, Daily Maverick

The City of Cape Town has been caught red-handed using a fraudulent legal pretext to justify the eviction of shack dwellers who had occupied a vacant piece of City-owned land, by citing a non-existent law they claim is called the “Protection of the Possession of Property Act”. After speaking with legal experts in the field of property and evictions, I was told that not only was the eviction of the 'Marikana' shack dwellers in Cape Town’s Philippi East illegal according to the PIE Act, but city officials had also lied about the living conditions of the shack dwellers.

Marikana Land Occupation Evicted on Workers' Day: Reports from ENCA & the Daily Maverick

There are also various statements, reports etc on the Abahlali baseMjondolo website.

'Marikana' UnFreedom Day land occupation ends in violent Workers’ Day eviction

I found myself among a community of homeless and backyard-dwellers on Sunday through connections with the shackdwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, which held its controversial UnFreedom Day rally on 27 April in the settlement of Sweet Home Farm in Philippi, Cape Town. What follows is a personal account of the beginnings of the 'Marikana' land occupation. By JARED SACKS. The Daily Maverick

Zowi Zulu berates the police after they threw her and her new born child out of their shack

Colonial Present : Legacies of the Past in Contemporary Urban Practices in Cape Town, South Africa

by Faranak Miraftab, 2012

This article historicizes the contemporary urban development and governance strategies in Cape Town, South Africa, by focusing on two periods: the British colonial era (mid to turn of the nineteenth century) and the neoliberal postapartheid era (early twenty-first century). It reveals the keen affinity between a contemporary urban strategy known as Improvement Districts for the affluent

and the old colonial practice of ‘‘location creation’’ for the native. Discussing the similarities and differences in the material and discursive practices by which urban privilege is produced and maintained in Cape Town across the two eras, the study brings to light the colonial legacies of the neoliberal municipal strategies for governance of urban inequalities. This insight is significant to the

citizens’ resistance against exclusionary redevelopment projects that claim ‘‘innovation’’ in urban management.

Welcome to Hell: A march through the SA townships - Cape Town, 30 March 2013

Shack fires: A devil in the detail of development

According to the City of Cape Town, within the boundaries of the municipality alone, there are more than 100 deaths from shack fires every year. JARED SACKS examines the root causes of the problem and the city’s failure to address it. The Daily Maverick

On New Year’s morning a devastating fire broke out in BM Section shack settlement leaving about 4,000 people homeless and at least five dead.

Residents claim it took almost two hours for fire trucks to arrive, despite the Khayelitsha fire station being only a kilometre away. By then, hundreds of shacks were already ablaze and the single truck that responded to the emergency failed to get close enough to the fire to make a difference. It soon ran out of water and had to leave to find more. Eventually, more fire trucks came and, with the help of hundreds of residents using buckets to draw water from local taps, they were able to slow down the rapidly spreading inferno.

Sweet Home: Behind Shack Doors

Counter Power and Colonial Rule in the Eighteenth Century Cape of Good Hope: Belongings and Protest of the Labouring Poor.

by Nicole Ulrich, 2011

Framed by an anarchist reading of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The

Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the

Revolutionary Atlantic (2000), this study examines the dynamic nature of colonial and

class rule in the eighteenth-century Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa, and the

forms of belonging and traditions of political protest developed by the labouring poor.

This study draws on archival material from national and international repositories,

focusing on government records, criminal court trials, and travellers’ accounts.

Colonial rule, the under-class, and resistance in the Cape are located in a global

context, with special attention being paid to changes associated with the ‘Age of

Revolution and War’ and rise of the modern world. Breaking with the tendency to

treat different sections of the motley (many-hued) labouring poor in the Cape as

discreet, often racially defined, and nationally bounded population groups, segmented

also by legal status, this study provides a comprehensive study of labour in the Cape

that includes an examination of slaves, servants, sailors, and soldiers recruited, or

imported from, Asia, Europe, and other parts of Africa.

Forced Removals in Greater Cape Town, 1948-1970

by Martin Legassick, 2006

During and after the Second World War the African population of the Cape Peninsula grew enormously in number. Until at least the mid-1950s most black Africans lived not in official ‘locations’ such as Langa but in privately-owned and rented high density flats and houses along the docks-Observatory axis, scattered through the predominantly white and Coloured residential areas of Cape Town as plot owners or tenants -- and, mainly, under conditions of extreme squalor, in unregulated ‘pondokkie’ settlements in the peri-urban areas around the fringes of Cape Town. In the 1950s, however, Cape Town “became a test case for influx control and racial segregation”. Government policy, implemented by local authorities, forcibly removed the African population to official ‘locations’ or endorsed them out of the area altogether.