http://westerncapeantieviction.wordpress.com/2008/02/19/background-to-delft-evictions/

Thoughts provoked by being interviewed by Keketso Sechane, Heart 104.9 radio, 19/2/2008

Today people have been evicted from houses in Delft at police gunpoint – despite their non-violence. But this situation, arising from illegal occupation of N2 Gateway Houses, was not caused, as the Housing DG said on your programme earlier, by DA councillor Frank Martin. It is a product of a contradiction between two things: on the one hand a desperate and worsening housing crisis in the Western Cape; and, on the other, the inflexible bureaucratic attitude of the tops of the national and provincial Housing Departments and the management of Thubelisha Homes in the N2 Gateway project.

Click here to download this report in pdf.

Lessons from eThekwini: Pariahs Hold Their Ground Against a State that is Both Criminal and Democratic

Richard Pithouse & Mark Butler
March, 2007

When the evictions happened…The South African law and the constitution didn’t work for us. They were pointing guns at us, threatening us, meantime we were fighting for our rights [as guaranteed in the law]. One comrade came asking them ‘What about section 26?’ but they didn’t say anything…When our chairperson came to ask ‘By what right and by what law can you this?’ Teargas just got thrown in his face.

Filippo Mondini spent time over Christmas building and living in a shack in the Ash Road settlement in Pietermaritzburg. These are his thoughts:

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Temple University
Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought,
Nov. 28, 2006

Is Fanon Relevant? Translations, the postcolonial imagination and the second stage of total liberation
Nigel Gibson

Download full version with notes here.

The state of emergency is also always a state of emergence. (Bhabha)
The rich speak about us as we get poorer. (Zikode)

At the conclusion of my article “Relative Opacity: A New Translation of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth—Mission Betrayed of Fulfilled” I wrote the following:

Rethinking Public Participation from Below
Published in Critical Dialogue (2006)

Download full version with footnotes here

The invitation from Imran Buccus at the Centre for Public Participation to attempt some reflections on public participation in the light of recent experiences is appreciated. It may be useful to begin by noting that much of the power of concepts like public participation, civil society, democratic consolidation, social capital and others inheres in the fact that they have donor money behind them. Attaching oneself to these concepts can produce jobs, contracts, legitimation and acceptance into local, national and transnational networks. Often the spaces and projects created by the donor money invested in these concepts are uncritically assumed to be the incubators of values and even practices that will be able to generate some kind of challenge to technocratic managerial despotism. This is a mistake. It is true that resistance often forces imperial power to make certain concessions to legitimate its domination. And these concessions often take the form of appropriating some of the discourses produced within resistances. At times this results in the creation of institutions that have some potential to be used for critical thinking and action in the service of constituent power. But the actualisation of this potential is far from inevitable and in many instances will only be possible when work is done covertly.

Living in shack settlements sometimes has its disadvantages. Some take you like you are not a living human being, just because of the shack area you are living in. Others take you like a short-minded person, someone who is always doing wrong. Some people try to get the attention of the eye of the world through shack settlements. For an example the Ethekwini municipality is trying to evict all people from all shack settlements for the 2010 World Cup. Juba Place is one settlement that has already been attacked. What happened to Juba Place shack settlements hurts so badly. Juba Place is a small shack settlement, which was situated down the hill at Reservoir Hills opposite Newlands East.

This weekend, Abahlali baseMjondolo held its annual general meeting. A full report will follow, but photos of the celebration of democracy are available here.

From Party Politics to Service Delivery to the Politics of the Poor

Philani Zungu

I hope that one day it will be realised by our government officials how much betrayal they have served to the floors on which they stand and where they belong. It is very sad that our politicians forget that their power started with people like us, people like the red shirts. Their silk suits come from older struggles, from other people struggling then like we do now, in the yellow shirts of the UDF and the unions.

When they were coming into power they told us that the only colour that mattered was the colour of the skin. But the black men in silk suits do not work for us. They work for the rich – black and white. They say that they are working to give us service delivery. They are really working to deliver us to the rich – to smash our informal shacks and either leave us homeless or dump us in formal jondolos in the bush. It is the colour of the heart that matters. In our struggle we have learnt that people of different skin colours have red hearts. It is the colour of the heart that matters.

Published in the Voice of the Turtle and the Mail & Guardian

Friday, 20-May-2005

The Third Nelson Mandela

On Saturday 19 March 750 people from the Kennedy Road settlement in Clare Estate, Durban, blockaded Kennedy Road with burning tires and mattresses for four hours. Fourteen people, including two juveniles, were arrested. On the following Monday, Human Rights Day, 1 200 people tried to march to the Sydenham police station to demand that that either the Kennedy Road 14 be released or else the entire community be arrested because "If they are criminal then we are all criminal". The march was dispersed with dogs and tear gas.