They Die Out There: It Matters Not Where, Nor How

Richard Pithouse, CounterPunch

On Monday morning there was a protest, in the form of a road blockade, organised from a shack settlement in Durban, South Africa. The settlement, officially known as Quarry Road but popularly known as KwaMam’Suthu, is on a sliver of land that runs along a river bank squeezed between two busy roads. It is in the suburbs to the North of the city. The current sequence of open contestation between people occupying land in the interstices of this part of the city and the local state stretches back to the ‘80s. It has a prior history that, before the mass evictions of the ‘50s and ‘60s, came to a head in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s. Over the last decade it has ebbed and flowed as the state has alternated between offering material and political concessions and responding to struggle with increasingly violent repression. Recently things have been getting hot again. Last month residents from the nearby Kennedy Road settlement burnt a municipal truck during two days of protest.

Mandla Langa interviewed by Azania Mosaka

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.

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.

Raymond Suttner on State Repression and Illegality in Durban

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

'The Lethal Segmentation of the Urban Order': Kennedy Road shack fire, seen from Puntan's Hill (4 June 2014)

Durban Graffiti: I Am Scared of the Police

Dear Mandela (full documentary now online)

"There is Marikana everyday in South Africa" - an interview with Abahlali baseMjondolo

Tongaat Mall Collapse: The Boomerang Effect

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

In 1961 Frantz Fanon described the colonial world as “cut in two”, divided into “compartments .... inhabited by different species”. For Fanon the creation of different kinds of spaces was central to the creation of different types of people and their ordering in a hierarchy of value. He concluded that the ordering of the colonial world must be examined to “reveal the lines of force it implies”, lines of force that “will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be reorganized”.

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.

HAVE YOU HEARD FROM DURBAN?? MARIKANA CONTINUES!!!

• Three people have been assassinated and others have been shot with live ammunition by state police

• There have been daily evictions and on-going police brutality

• The state has declared war on its poor citizens

Sbu Zikode to Speak at Rhodes University on Thursday 10 October

The Unemployed People’s Movement (UPM) in Grahamstown has contacted S’bu Zikode, Chairperson of Abahlali baseMjondolo. He has agreed to speak at Rhodes about state repression and the situation in Durban.

On Wednesday, Dear Mandela will be screened at Rhodes to provide those interested with an over-view of Abm’s struggles. The Multi-award winning documentary produced by Rhodes Graduate, Dara Kell in 2011 follows the story of how Abm was able to take legal action against the state resulting in a court ruling the KZN Slums Act unconstitutional.

When: Wednesday, 9th October 2013

Where: Arts Major

Time: 18:30

Durban, 16 September 2013 (Abahlali baseMjondolo protest)

Cato Manor - July, 2013

Land & Housing

The Antimonies of Democracy

A Murder in Durban, CounterPunch

by RICHARD PITHOUSE

Durban, South Africa.

In the last days of June Nkululeko Gwala was assassinated in Cato Crest – a shack settlement in Durban that is in the process of being upgraded with formal housing. Just over three months ago Thembinkosi Qumbelo was gunned down in the same streets. Both men had been prominent figures in the increasingly bitter struggles around housing that have convulsed Cato Crest in recent months. There have been road blockades, a land occupation – named, as they often are these days, ‘Marikana’ – and the offices of two municipal councillors have been burnt down.

Nkululeko Gwala Murdered in Cato Crest

27 June 2013

Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Statement

Nkululeko Gwala Murdered in Cato Crest

Last night Nkululeko Gwala, an Abahlali baseMjondolo member, and a well known and respected housing activist, was murdered in Cato Crest. Twelve shots were fired. The style of this assassination is very similar to the assassination of Thembinkosi Qumbelo, also a well known housing activist (but not an AbM member) who was killed in the same area on the 15th of March this year. There are also strong similarities to the attack on our movement in Kennedy Road in 2009.

Nkululeko Gwala

'Unlearning' hegemony : an exploration of the applicability of Alain Badiou's theory of the event to informal learning through an examination of the life histories of South African social movement activists.

Anne Harley, 2012

This thesis argues that it is both necessary and possible to change the world. Changing the world requires engaging with, to try to understand it from the basis of lived reality, and then acting. Our ability to do this is, however, affected by hegemony, which attempts to convince us that the way things are is either normal and natural and the only possible way they could be, or that it is impossible to change them. Nevertheless, there is always resistance to this and I suggest that we might learn something useful by examining how this happens. The thesis thus explores Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, and its applicability to our current world; and also considers resistance to this. I argue that the nature of capitalism has shifted, and discuss how this shift has impacted on hegemony, identifying three current interlocking hegemonic ideologies. I consider current resistance to this hegemony, including the role of social movements. Much resistance, and many social movements, I argued, cannot properly be called counter-hegemonic in that, although it/they may critique the dominant economic system, it/they remain trapped within hegemonic logic. However, it is clear that there is existing truly counter-hegemonic resistance, including some social movements, and I argue that Abahlali baseMjondolo is one such counter-hegemonic movement. Thus it is possible that those who join/align themselves with this movement might be considered to have ‘unlearned’ hegemony and be useful subjects for this study. I thus consider the life stories of seven people who have aligned themselves to this movement, in order to determine whether they have indeed ‘unlearned’ hegemony, and if so, how.

The Durban strikes of 1973: Political identities and themanagement of protest

The Durban strikes of 1973: Political identities and the management of protest by TigersEye99