“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.

Sisulu’s War of the Ages Begins

Richard Pithouse, The Con

In 2005, early in her in her first term as Minister of Housing, Lindiwe Sisulu announced that the state had resolved to ‘eradicate slums’ by 2014. This was a time when the technocratic ideal had more credibility than it does now and officials and politicians often spoke, with genuine conviction, as if it were an established fact that this aspiration would translate into reality. It was not unusual for people trying to engage the state around questions of urban land and housing to be rebuffed as troublemakers, either ignorant or malicious, on the grounds that it was an established fact that there would be no more shacks by 2014.

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.

Invisible No More

George Ciccariello-Maher, The Jacobin

Geographically, Caracas, Venezuela consists of a relatively short, narrow valley just over twenty miles in length, sheltered from the Caribbean Sea by a mountain range to the north, with population seams radiating southward in a series of smaller valleys.

The old city center lies to the west of the valley, with growth historically moving ever eastward: first in verdant suburbs, then elite urbanizations, and finally — the valley’s easternmost limitations reached — the massive informal barrio settlements that precariously ring the hilltops of nearly the entire city.

New struggle is for ownership of the city

Marie Huchzermeyer, Mail & Guardian

The imprint of apartheid is still evident in South African cities. As acknowledged widely by planning academics and recognised in the National Development Plan and draft Integrated Urban Development Framework, urban expansion has engendered new forms of segregation and exclusion.

Apartheid-divided suburbs have their equivalent today in fortified estates catering to an exclusive moneyed minority – a mere 3% of South Africa’s households. More densely packed, walled townhouse complexes cater to the aspiring middle class, which makes up barely 10% of South African households.

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.

Occupying Space: The Battle for Politics

Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory & Criticism

For more than a decade, the construction of politics has been determined within the logic of exception and sovereignty. Although at the end of the twentieth century the Balkan conflict already heralded a logic of war, following September 11th, the early 2000s were marked by terror, creating a foundation where, following the proposals of Carl Schmitt, the specific difference from which to determine the political was to be found once more in the figure of the enemy.

Footnotes on the off-shore city

Achille Mbembe, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory & Criticism

 

At the start of the 21st century, we witness a renewed interest in the idea of the African future. Gradually, older senses of time and space based on linear notions of development and progress are being replaced by newer senses of time founded on liquidity and flows. Africa's future is increasingly thought of as open, full of possibility and potentiality, even as pliant. This new cultural and political sense of time is constructed in a number of registers, from the economic to the fictional. It acknowledges that things are complex. And yet, in its emphasis on un-actualized possibilities and would-be worlds, it also relies on open narrative models. Critical in this regard is the study of emergent orders, forms of self-organization, small ruptures, "tipping points" that may lead to deep alterations of the direction the Continent takes.

Evictions at the Chris Hani (eNsimbini) and Marikana (Cato Crest) Land Occupations

Martha Chofe & her son with her shack illegally
destroyed by the Land Invasions Unit at the 
Marikana land Occupation
on 10 September 2014

12 September 2014

Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Statement

Evictions at the Chris Hani (eNsimbini) and Marikana (Cato Crest) Land Occupations

At ten o’clock this morning five shacks were demolished by the Land Invasions Unit in the Chris Hani Land Occupation in eNsimbini. This land was occupied in February last year. The shacks that were demolished are new shacks that were built about two weeks ago by people that were renting nearby and decided to join the occupation to avoid having to pay rent. As usual there was no court order authorising these evictions and they were, therefore, an illegal and criminal act on the part of the eThekwini Municipality. The residents of these new shacks were at work when the eviction happened and so there was no confrontation.

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

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

What is an 'outside agitator'?

Richard Seymour, Lenin's Tomb

In Ferguson, Missouri, there are 'outside agitators'.  On this, the reactionaries and liberals agree.  Of course, there are all sorts of racialised rumours flying around in the guise of reporting about what is taking place in Ferguson.  We are well used to this.  We remember Katrina.

There will be time to sift through all that.  For now, I simply want to ask a quick question: what is an 'outside agitator'?  The metaphor of exteriority, of being outside, has two salient connotations.  First, one is transgressing the spatial ordering of the state.  It is states which constitute social spaces like districts, wards, counties, etc - a process that is historically far from racially innocent in the US.  Second, one is 'outside' the polis; one's political being as such is 'outside', one is traitorous and disloyal.  It is not just that one travelled from one city to another - that's fine, provided the political agenda one brings is benign for the system - but that one brought ideas that are not only not native to the destination, but actually foreign to the nation, the free world, civilisation itself.

Where you from Van Damme?

Athambile Masola, Thought Leader

Athambile Masola

“Every black African everywhere is rightly or wrongly perceived to originate — a contentious concept in itself — from somewhere. Almost overwhelmingly that somewhere is consensually assumed, indeed believed, to be an idyllic village perched somewhere far away in rural crevices. Even today, when someone asks you in the city, or at a dinner table somewhere in a little town, where you come from, your heart beats a millisecond faster than before. You break into a cold sweat, the wine and cognac you just consumed quickly evaporates through the pores as you over-contemplate: Does he want to know where I pay my taxes and my children go to school or where my folks, mainly my grandparents, come from? It can be unsettling.”

— Bongani Madondo

Raymond Suttner on State Repression and Illegality in Durban

Rhodes University's Dr. Richard Pithouse on urban spaces and illegal occupations in SA

The World Cup as Pacification

Christopher McMichael, The Con

The 2014 World Cup is not only a jamboree for the world’s premier national football teams, but it is also a showpiece for the repressive power of the state. In conjunction with the deployment of more than 170 000 of the country’s security forces , stadiums will be patrolled by Israeli-made drones, US-manufactured surveillance robots and officers equipped with facial recognition glasses reporting back to surveillance centres. Brazilian forces have also received training from the mercenary firm Blackwater / Academi, notorious for its violence against Iraqis during the US occupation. In April 2013, the Paramount Group, a South African arms manufacturer, announced that it had sold “hand grenade attack protected” armoured vehicles to the state government of Rio de Janeiro for service at the World Cup and 2016 Olympics.

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

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.

The Urban Land Question

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

Urban land is acutely contested in contemporary South Africa. There are regular land occupations, some taking the form of quiet encroachment and some taking the form of overtly political acts. At the same time most municipalities have armed units that, often acting violently, and more or less invariably acting illegally, try to sustain the duopoly of the state and the market over the allocation and zoning of urban land. When land occupations are presented as simple acts of criminality, popular protest as about nothing but ‘service delivery’ and evictions as a simple matter of enforcing the rule of law, the curtain is drawn on this on-going drama.