Raj Patel Speaks in Grahamstown - 5:00 p.m., 31 March 2014

Open Letter to James Nxumalo, Senzo Mchunu & Jacob Zuma on the Repression in Cato Crest, Durban

To:

James Nxumalo, Mayor, eThekwini Municipality, Durban, South Africa
Senzo Mchunu, Premier, KwaZulu-Natal
Jacob Zuma, President, Republic of South Africa

We are writing to you to express our grave concern at events unfolding in the Cato Crest shack settlement in Durban.

After an illegal eviction in Cato Crest by the eThekwini Municipality in March this year, shackdwellers occupied an adjacent piece of land. They named the settlement “Marikana”. Since then, two activists have been assassinated -Thembinkosi Qumbelo and Nkululeko Gwala. A third, Nkosinathi Mngomezulu, is in critical condition after being shot by the Land Invasions Unit. A number of activists have been seriously beaten by the police. Other activists, including Bandile Mdlalose and S’bu Zikode of the shack dweller movement Abahlali baseMjondolo who have been supporting the residents, have been threatened with death. 

Third Worldism and the lineages of global fascism: the regrouping of the global South in the neoliberal era

Third Worldism and the lineages ofglobal fascism: the regrouping of theglobal South in the neoliberal era by TigersEye99

Crystal Bartolovich: A Natural History of 'Food Riots'

bartolovich food riots pdf

Found at ebookbrowse.com

The Politics of Starving: An Interview with Raj Patel

Chandra Kumar, Upping the Anti

In Stuffed and Starved you write about the international system of food production and distribution. You argue that this system results in starvation and obesity. Can you elaborate?

These problems are an inevitable outcome of the way capitalism controls and distributes food. When you distribute food through a capitalist market, you’re guaranteed two outcomes: people who have money get to eat, and people who don’t have money don’t get to eat. The original imperial idea behind the creation of world food markets was that they would allow people around the world to eat. But under this model people who don’t have money go hungry, and it’s no accident that these people live in the countries where food is grown.

A Short Course in Politics at the University of Abahlali baseMjondolo

by Raj Patel, 2006

It’s late November 2005 in Durban. It’s hot. There are 40 people cramped into a wooden structure of the type used as a tool shed on the better sort of construction site. But this shed is in the Pemary Ridge shack settlement in the elite Reservoir Hills suburb in Durban. On the wall are posters of birds, and vehicles– ‘the train comes down the hill’, ‘the people are in the bus’, ‘the crates are on the truck’. The most durable building in the settlement, this shed is a multi-purpose space: classroom, crèche, community centre and, this evening, meeting room. The only social purpose it seems not to serve is a place of worship. And yet, with the lights flickering, and amid the intense concentration, we are party to an important moment of political ritual.

Electing Land Questions: A Methodological Discussion with Reference to Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Durban Shackdweller Movement

by Raj Patel, 2007

Narratives about the land question in South Africa often have a similar structure. They will begin by observing that the distribution of land in South Africa is, by any measure, vastly unequal. There will often then be a suggestive statistic, one that notes the skew of land ownership, the 13 million people crowded onto the homelands (Lahiff 2001: 1), contrasted with 87% of being appropriated by white colonial farmers (Thwala 2003).This will often be accompanied by some gesture towards the colonial origins of thisdistribution, often pointing to 1913, the date of the South African Native Lands Act, a moment that consecrated the geography of apartheid. Some narratives will note, often critically, that in its post-apartheid hearings on the land reform process, the South African government’s key point of insistence was that the 1913 date for the beginning of consideration for restitution was non-negotiable despite the fact that a great deal of dispossession predates the Native Lands Act.

Global Fascism, Revolutionary Humanism and the Ethics of Food Sovereignty

by Raj Patel, Development, 2005, 48(2), (79–83)

Social movements struggles against neo-liberalism are always both global and local. Resources to fight this ‘global fascism’ on the ground can be found in a mix of the anti-colonial humanist writing of Frantz Fanon, and in the ethical thinking of Alain Badiou. Rajeev Patel argues that both thinkers ask activists to undertake a critical self-reflective engagement as part of the broader political struggle struggle. He looks at how a framework for this kind of global and local reconstruction has been applied in the fight for Food Sovereignty declared by the international peasant organization Via Campesina. 

Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (London: The Women's Press, 1988; reprinted 1997)

a review by Raj Patel, Voice of the Turtle

Word has spread about Tsitsi Dangarembga's first novel. Its popularity in, and pertinence to, discussions of poscolonial fiction have led to its recent fourth printing. Dangarembga (which, curiously, means 'doghouse' in Shona) in her semi-autobiographical debut novel has fused an adolescent coming-of-age tale with an awakening to the full consequences of colonialism. Nervous conditions follows the first fifteen years in the life of Tambudzai, a young girl who grows up in a village near Umtali (now Mutare), near Zimababwe's Eastern Mozambique border. In its sensitive treatment of sexism, of the pain of hybridity, of the dark comedy of childhood and the bitter violence of colonialism, Nervous Conditions is an exemplary novel.