Living Politics in Grahamstown

Sanele Ntshingana and Paddy O’ Halloran, The Con

The room is walled with grey, cracking plaster, and the ceiling is sagging. Its only adornments are angular burglar bars over the single window and a tilted picture on the wall. A dozen women, maybe more, sit or stand, shoulder to shoulder. They are shouting: not to be heard, but because what they have to say can only be said in a shout. They are some of the women whose shops and homes have been emptied in five days of xenophobic looting in Grahamstown, whose families are left with nothing.

Running with Biko: Exploring the relationship between the world of the mind and the current social crisis in South Africa

Makana Municipality Bans another March

Tuesday, 18 March 2014

Unemployed People's Movement Press Statement

Makana Municipality Bans another March

Municipalities around the country are banning marches and supressing the right to protest. The Makana Municipality in Grahamstown is one of the worst offenders.

The year before last they illegally banned one of our marches on the grounds that one of our comrades was on a list provided by intelligence of people who are not allowed to address public gatherings unless the riot police are present. We had to go to court to march and when we did march riot police came from all over the Eastern Cape to monitor our comrade.

South Africa’s water wars

by Mandy de Waal, GroundUp

Ma Gladys Mphepho hovers over a pot on a two plate cooker in her shack in Papamani, an informal settlement outside of Grahamstown. “We do not have dignity,” she says, stirring the rice, flavoured with beef stock, that is her family’s Sunday lunch. “We do not know what it means to have dignity. Forget about any question of dignity,” says Mphepho.

It is a sweltering day in the heat of summer and Mphepho is talking about her daily struggle to live, which is exacerbated by the crisis that the people of Papamani, and greater Grahamstown, have with water. There are two taps in the whole of Papamani which serve close on 30 homes. Each home houses some five or six people. Do the maths, and that’s over 150 people who get water from two taps. That’s to drink, make food with, to wash with and to do anything else that requires water.

Unemployed People's Movement march at Grahamstown cathedral in protest at political repression in Durban

Remembering Black Wednesday

18/10/2013: Public meeting: the relevance of Black Wednesday

The Unemployed Peoples’ Movement; School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University; Daily Dispatch and Grocott’s Mail invite you to a public meeting to commemorate Black Wednesday, the day in 1977 when newspapers were banned and activists and journalists jailed for their opposition to the apartheid regime and for speaking truth to power.

Black Wednesday is commemorated every year, to remind South Africa of the heroic efforts of those who struggled to bring about a more just society, including respect for the rights to freedom of expression and media freedom. Thirty-six years later, what is the relevance of Black Wednesday? To what extent have these rights been achieved, and where are we going?

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

Marx, Fanon & Biko: Touchstones in a Time of Crisis?

Unemployed People’s Movement

Marx, Fanon & Biko: Touchstones in a Time of Crisis?

Arts Major, 5:00p.m., Tuesday 16 September

Our country is slipping into serious crisis. The state has been captured by a ruthless and predatory elite bent on plunder. The people’s struggles are being seriously repressed. From Ficksburg to Marikana and Durban activists are being murdered.

Last week we marked the anniversary of the assassination of Steven Bantu Biko. This week we are hosting a public discussion on the light that Biko, and other radical humanists like Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon, can shine into our darkening present.

South African Municipal Workers' Union (SAMWU) & the Unemployed People's Movement (UPM) protest in Grahamstown

Is a commitment to human rights sufficient for an emancipatory theoretical praxis?

by Kayla Hazell

“They didn’t ask us why we are washing cars. They didn’t ask us anything.”

This essay adopts the position that formal human rights, such as those encoded in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (hereafter, the Constitution), are potentially emancipatory in the sense that they embody our society’s commitments and aspirations with regard to the treatment of individuals and groups. That said, it will be argued that a formal commitment to human rights does not automatically translate into practice and that this has largely been the South African experience. Human rights are subject to constant balancing, particularly where interests conflict, and such balancing occurs according to a particular rationality. It will be contended that, if rights are to become a reality for all, the rationality governing our commitment to human rights in South Africa, currently largely economistic, will need to be renegotiated in light of the fact that our formal rights have stood watch while extreme inequality continues.

Is Black Consciousness Still Relevant?

by Mandisi Majavu, SACSIS

Although recent newspaper reports that the Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo) and the Socialist Party of Azania (Sopa) are to merge ought to be welcomed by those of Black Consciousness (BC) tradition, the fact of the matter is that the BC tradition in South Africa is intellectually stuck in the 20th century. According to the Unemployed People’s Movement (UPM), proponents of the BC tradition have not been able to rethink BC politics for a new situation. The new situation being the 21st century, which requires this tradition to articulate a coherent alternative political and economic vision for a better South Africa, a challenge that the BC tradition is yet to take up.

Ben Mafani fights for development and dignity

We Need to Move beyond Mngxitama’s Gutter Politics

Tuesday, 26 March 2013

Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement

We Need to Move beyond Mngxitama’s Gutter Politics

Andile Mngxitama has become notorious for trying to privatize the memory of Steve Biko. He is not the only person trying to privatize that legacy, which is a legacy that must be there for all of us. But he is the only one that uses gutter politics to defend his privatization of Biko’s legacy.

The Unemployed People’s Movement will not be Participating in the So-Called ‘People’s Space’ at the BRICS Meeting in Durban

Sunday, 24 March 2013

Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement

The Unemployed People’s Movement will not be Participating in the So-Called ‘People’s Space’ at the BRICS Meeting in Durban

The Unemployed People’s Movement will not be participating in the so-called ‘People’s Space’ at the BRICS meeting in Durban.

Our Umlazi branch received a phone call recently informing us that buses were being provided for us to send our members to the so-called ‘People’s Space’ at the Centre for Civil Society at UKZN. We were instructed to mobilise to fill the buses.

The Dignity of the Poor is Vandalized from Many Quarters

by Abahlali baseMjondolo (KwaZulu-Natal), Rural Network (KwaZulu-Natal) & the Unemployed People's Movement (Eastern Cape, Free State & KwaZulu-Natal), Harvard International Review

When black people rose up against apartheid, the government usually said that they couldn’t have organized themselves and that there must have been a white person making them resist. Some thought that only whites were capable of thinking, speaking, and acting for themselves. But it was not only the government that looked for conspiracies every time black people organized themselves. This also happened within the movement.

Thandiswa Qubuda has Died

1 March 2013

Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement

Thandiswa Qubuda has Died

Dark clouds are not strangers in our patriarchal society. They are gaining momentum. On Thursday night, 28 February 2013, Thandiswa Qubuda passed from this world. She had spent six weeks in hospital, brain dead, after she was savagely raped and beaten.

We ask ourselves why her story, such a painful story, is not getting media coverage and creating an uproar. The lives of poor people count for nothing in this country. There is no democracy for us.

Spatial reorganisation, decentralisation and dignity: Applying a Fanonian lens to a Grahamstown shack settlement

by Sarita Pillay

  “The divided, Manichaean colonial world and its social relations are manifested in space –one Fanonian test of post-apartheid society is to what extent South Africa has been spatially reorganised”  (Gibson, 2011: 187).

  

1.   Introduction

In Grahamstown, East and West are not merely cardinal points. East and West are not unbiased references to directional differences. In Grahamstown, East and West are contemporary manifestations of a colonial world that Frantz Fanon described in The Wretched of the Earth as “a world divided in two” (Fanon, 1963: 3). East and West are representative of the Manichaean (post) colonial town and its social relations.

KPFA Radio Interview by Walter Turner with Richard Pithouse & Ayanda Kota on Marikana

Africa Today - October 1, 2012 at 7:00pm

Click to listen (or download)

Remembering Steve Biko: a Bright & Guiding Light in Dark Times

Address by Bishop Rubin Phillip, Anglican Bishop of Natal (KZN) - at St Philip’s Anglican Church, Fingo Village in Grahamstown, 19^th September, 2012.

Remembering Steve Biko: a Bright & Guiding Light in Dark Times

As the Unemployed People's Movement have noted we gather here in Grahamstown to honour the memory of Steve Biko, a man who was indeed a bright and guiding light, at a moment when a dark night is settling over our country. As the light of our democratic dawn dims we all have to look inward and find our courage, individually and collectively, for the struggles ahead. Make no mistake - the massacre at Marikana was a turning point and the path ahead will be difficult and will require real courage.

Remembering Biko: A bright and guiding light in dark times

Steve Biko on the cover of Drum Magazine

Tuesday, 18 September 2012

Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement

Remembering Biko: A bright and guiding light in dark times

Commemoration from 12 noon on Wednesday 19 September 2012

Steve Biko was murdered by the apartheid state on 12 September 2012. Today state murder stalks our land once again. In these dark times we will gather to honour the memory of Steve Biko – a memory that is a shining light.

We plan to retrace the route that Biko and his comrades took when they walked out of the NUSAS meeting at Rhodes University in 1967. We will walk from the campus to the church where they slept that night. We will carry 36 candles – one for each of the striking miners murdered by the state at Marikana.