On February 27 2006, Abahlali were scheduled to march on the eThekwini municipality. The municipality illegally authorised the use of force to prevent the marchers from assembling. An urgent high court interdict was filed, and Abahlali prevailed, with the eThekwini municipality being fined punitive costs. A copy of the interdict is attached below.

A number of Bahlali are facing intimidation at work consequent to their open commitment to Abahlali baseMjondolo.

abm-work intimidation press release.DOC 30.5K

For updates on Abahlali and other shack dweller struggles in South Africa and around the world watch:

Abahlali.org

IndyMedia South Africa: http://southafrica.indymedia.org/news/2005/11/9191.php

Left NGOs pose a serious threat to the politics of the poor when they seek to exploit this politics to legitimate their own projects, projects that often involve them being junior partners to Northern NGOs, donors and academics requiring the simulation of political credability and which seldom get beyond meetings about meetings. It is not uninteresting to note that the police remain entirely uninterested in these meetings... Key techniques for this kind of exploitation are to use access to funding to overtly and covertly set agendas, to work with simulated movements or co-opted individuals in movements rather than with the democratic structures of actually existing mass movements, to run meetings in a language not confidently held by most movement members, to make effective participation in decision making dependent on resources that movements of the poor do not have (email, transport, knowledge of certain jargon, knowledge of the terrain on which NGO activists operate etc), to engage in outright misrepresentation and so on. At times some of this is highly racialised but this is not necessarily the case. Class is well able to do the damage on its own. The Freedom of Expression Institute is a noble exception. The Institute consistently provides excellent support to movements battling repression but fights only for movements of the poor to defend or win access to voice. See their very good press statement on the increase in repression in South Africa below. Abahlali has received similar principled solidarity in the form of practical support for particular projects conceived and run under the direction of the movement from the Open Democracy Advice Centre, the Legal Resources Centre, the Centre for Housing Rights & Evictions, the Foundation for Human Rights, the Church Land Programme, Bishop Reuben Phillip, Lawyer Shanta Reddy, Freirean David Ntseng, geographer Richard Ballard, filmmakers Sally Gilles & Fazel Khan and a growing network of others. Abahlali has also worked very well with local community movements like the Westcliff Flat Residents’ Association and the Wentworth Development Forum as well as important regional and national social movements like the Anti-Eviction Campaign and the Treatment Action Campaign. Bahlali have travelled to Harare, Cape Town and various places in rural KwaZulu-Natal to share experiences with others confronting evictions from land and from shanty towns. This movement began with S’bu Zikode asserting that ‘We are on Our Own’. But that is no longer the case.

On Monday 2 October New eMouse became the 34th settlement to join Abahlali. It was the first area built as a formal housing development but now predominantly a shack settlement to join the movement. It has an interesting history in that the formal housing was built by the Catholic Church after people were evicted from Church land to make way for factories. There are some pictures available here.

eMouse Press Release: http://southafrica.indymedia.org/news/2006/10/11342.php

In August this year Abahlali used the Promotion of Access to Information Legislation to compel the city to make public its plans for shack dwellers. This audacious use of progressive legislation won the movement major media attention. The state didn’t like this. Abahlali were called in by the office of the Provincial Minister of Housing and instructed, in the most contemptuous manner, to cease speaking to the media. They noted their defiance in a press statement and proceeded to humiliate officials from the ministers’ office in two major radio debates. Then, working with community groups from Municipal flats in Chatsworth and Wentworth, they staged an impressive protest outside the International Convention Centre where various ‘stakeholders’ (government, business, the World Bank etc) were discussing housing for the poor. The t-shirts made for the occasion read ‘Talk to Us, Not For US!’ A few days later, on 12 September 2006, S’bu Zikode and Philani Zungu were arrested on trumped up charges and severely assaulted while on the way to a radio interview. Bahlali attempting to march on the police station were shot at with rubber bullets and live ammunition and defended themselves with bricks and stones.

27 April, the anniversary of the first democratic parliamentary elections in South Africa, is a national public holiday. Every year politicians deploy their portly patriarchal authority and heritage budgets to herd the poor into stadiums to be lectured on their leaders’ heroic role in the struggle and to be reminded ‘how far we have come’. This year Abahlali, working with various other organisations decided on something different. They hosted an UnFreedom Day celebration at which different communities came together to avoid pompous speeches and instead share music, dance, theatre and poetry. A booklet produced for this carnival of heresy included submissions from many of the community organisations that came together for UnFreedom Day. It became an important moment in the development of the movement’s self consciousness and is very well worth looking at. UnFreedom Day also marked the entrance of various settlements and a militant organisation of street traders from the nearby town of Pinetown into Abahlali. This event was also the first, and second last, time in which an NGO (CCS); was able to use its resources to buy influence in the movement with various damaging consequences including the bizarre fact that a simulated but easily malleable "movement" (made up of 3 middle class people) got the same billing on the press release (and a large allocation of the treasured red t-shirts that were still sitting in a university office months later) as a mass democratic movement of, at that time, more than 20 000 people. So it goes. Obedience is well rewarded when NGOs are looking to buy credibility via the production of fakes spectacles for their digitized transnational networks at the price of doing casual damage to the ecology of actually existing popular struggle. Struggle is a school. The lesson was learned.

Abahlali continue to win excellent press coverage locally and nationally in English and Zulu media. The press releases below, from the Motala Heights settlements, the first settlement in the nearby industrial town of Pinetown to join Abahlali, are about threatened evictions. The community there is very well organised and have twice forced off the officials, accompanied by police and private security, who have come to mark their homes slated for eviction. Their pistol wielding cowboy councillor is in league with a local tycoon who wants to develop gated housing for the middle class on their land. They got good media coverage too and there is currently a stalemate. The state has promised to 'clear the slums in time for the 2010 Football World Cup and is now looking to set up a paramilitary force to control shack dwellers. An article from the Mail & Guardian newspaper reflects on this development. There is also a press release and article about another person taken by the fire in Kennedy Road, this time an old man.

Two Motala Heights Press Releases (and pictures on IndyMedia):
motala_heights.doc  510.5 KB
Motala_Heights_Press_Release4.doc  1.09 MB
http://southafrica.indymedia.org/news/2006/08/10972.php

'Human Beings are Living There' - article from the Mail & Guardian:
M&G_edit1.DOC  29 KB

Press Release for the Memorial for Baba Dhlomo:
Dhlomo_Memorial.DOC  26 KB

'Shack Fire Takes Life, eThekwini Municipality Electrification Policy Takes Soul' by Shantel Vachani:
shantal_article.DOC  34 KB

The reduction in political pressure after the elections created some space for less pressured reflection. Here is a short article from The Witness newspaper reflecting on the high cost to local democracy of the March 2005 local government elections. There are also two longer articles that reflect on the struggle to this point. The first article gives an overview of the first year of the Abahlali struggle situating it with in the rich history of shack dwellers resistance in Durban and some of the debates about resistance from the shanty town. It is followed by an article by Alex Beresford which is based on careful interviews with Bahlali and trade union officials and which explores the prospect for a worker shack dwellers alliance. It's conclusions are not exactly positive but the paper provides important unsight into the thinking in Abahlali and some of the bigger unions (and it has the enormous merit of being based on what the people being written about think rather than, as with so much work, being entirel speculative). This section ends with a transcipt of the remarks made in English by S'bu Zikode during his Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture. The Lecture used to be held every month in Durban. Usually important intellectuals spoke about the poor. Zikode’s lecture was the first time that some one living in a shack had access to this kind of platform.

By late February 2005 the movement was strong enough to organise a march of 20 000 on the Provincial Minister of Housing. The repression leading up to the 2 March 2006 election had been intense. The ban on marching had remained in place since November 2005 and they had even been physically prevented by the police from taking up an invitation to appear on a TV talk show. But they had the critical intellectual and material mass to be able to withstand this repression. A march was scheduled for 20 February and banned. It was rescheduled for 27 February and then rebanned. But in the interim Abahlali had secured pro bono legal support and went to the high court where the ban was overturned and they marched into the city in triumph. Below are some press releases and pamphlets about these events. The triumphant march into the City was followed by a successful boycott of the local government elections two days later.

The movement was growing rapidly in the political ferment leading up to the March 2006 local government elections. But most new areas faced very serious intimidation at the micro-local level as they tried to build a politics autonomous from the party/state.  Below is an article about threats made to militants in the Joe Slovo settlement, the first settlement in the Southern part of the city to join Abahlali, and press releases from E-Section, Umlazi, where assasination became a form of political control. Joe Slovo had a tought time but have stood their ground recently staging a successful occupation of the local police station. In Umlazi weekly protests eventually led to the prosecution of two of the local councillor's employees on charges of murder. Fazel Khan, who co-wrote the Joe Slovo story with Steph Lane, is now himself under threat from the management of the University where he works. See http://southafrica.indymedia.org/news/2006/10/11357.php and http://www.metamute.org/files/cafa.letter.doc In her other life Steph Lane is a housing activist in Chicago. As Abahlali got better and better known they got more and more platforms in the media and other forums. They have resisted, with admirably resolve, the pressure to have S'bu Zikode substitute for the mass movement. They scrupulously elect, mandate and rotate representatives to take platforms and attend meetings. But the media interest in Zikode does mean that there is more record in her comments. Here is a transcription of an impromtu talk he gave at an NGO meeting.