edited by amanda alexander and richard pithouse introduction s'bu zikode the third force research

282 Pages·2006·2.27 MB·English

EDITED BY AMANDA ALEXANDER AND RICHARD PITHOUSE
INTRODUCTION
S’BU ZIKODE
THE THIRD FORCE
RESEARCH REPORT NO. 40
RICHARD PITHOUSE
‘OUR STRUGGLE IS THOUGHT, ON THE GROUND, RUNNING’: THE UNIVERSITY OF ABAHLALI BASEMJONDOLO
RESEARCH REPORT NO. 41
JACOB BRYANT
TOWARDS DELIVERY AND DIGNITY: COMMUNITY STRUGGLE FROM KENNEDY ROAD
RESEARCH REPORT NO. 42
RAJ PATEL
A SHORT COURSE IN POLITICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ABAHLALI BASEMJONDOLO
RESEARCH REPORT NO. 43
ALEX LOFTUS & FIONA LUMSDEN
REWORKING HEGEMONY IN THE URBAN WATERSCAPE
PHOTOGRAPHY BY WOMEN OF KENNEDY ROAD, FOREMAN ROAD & JADHU PLACE, DURBAN
IZIMPILO ZETHU / OUR LIVES
RESEARCH REPORT NO. 44
MARK HUNTER
INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS AS SPACES OF HEALTH INEQUALITY: THE CHANGING ECONOMIC AND SPATIAL ROOTS
OF THE AIDS PANDEMIC, FROM APARTHEID TO NEOLIBERALISM
RESEARCH REPORT NO. 45
STEPHEN SPARKS
A LONG HISTORY: CIVIL SOCIETY, POLLUTION AND THE WENTWORTH OIL REFINERY
RESEARCH REPORT NO. 46
BARUTI AMISI
AN EXPLORATION OF THE LIVELIHOOD STRATEGIES OF DURBAN CONGOLESE REFUGEES
RESEARCH REPORT NO. 47
ARI SITAS
30 YEARS SINCE THE DURBAN STRIKES: BLACK WORKING CLASS LEADERSHIP AND THE SOUTH AFRICAN TRANSITION
RESEARCH REPORT NO. 48
DOROTHEE HÖLSCHER & VISHANTHIE SEWPAUL
ETHICS AS A SITE OF RESISTANCE: THE TENSION BETWEEN SOCIAL CONTROL AND CRITICAL REFLECTION
COVER PHOTOGRAPH:
by ZANELE TSWANINGE
IZIMPILO ZETHU / OUR LIVES
2006, Photographic print
WWW. UKZN. AC. ZA/ CCS

CONTENTS PG
INTRODUCTION v
THE THIRD FORCE 1
S’bu Zikode
RESEARCH REPORT NO. 40 5
Richard Pithouse
‘Our struggle is thought, on the ground, running’: The University of Abahlali
baseMjondolo
RESEARCH REPORT NO. 41 49
Jacob Bryant
Towards delivery and dignity: Community struggle from Kennedy Road
RESEARCH REPORT NO. 42 81
Raj Patel
A short course in politics at the University of Abahlali baseMjondolo
RESEARCH REPORT NO. 43 101
Alex Loftus & Fiona Lumsden
Reworking hegemony in the urban waterscape
IZIMPILO ZETHU / OUR LIVES 127
Photography by women of Kennedy Road, Foreman Road &
Jadhu Place, Durban
RESEARCH REPORT NO. 44 145
Mark Hunter
Informal settlements as spaces of health inequality: The changing
economic and spatial roots of the Aids pandemic, from apartheid to
neoliberalism
RESEARCH REPORT NO. 45 169
Stephen Sparks
A long history: Civil society, pollution and the Wentworth oil refinery
RESEARCH REPORT NO. 46 197
Baruti Amisi
An exploration of the livelihood strategies of Durban Congolese refugees
RESEARCH REPORT NO. 47 233
Ari Sitas
30 years since the Durban strikes: Black working class leadership and the
South African transition
RESEARCH REPORT NO. 48 251
Dorothee Hölscher & Vishanthie Sewpaul
Ethics as a site of resistance: The tension between social control and critical
reflection
CENTRE FOR CIVIL SOCIETY
RESEARCH REPORTS, 2006, VOLUME 1
Introduction
The March 2006 local government elections in Durban were neither free nor fair.
There were two primary challenges to the ANC from within the poor and working
class African constituencies that it claims as its own. In the shack settlements nestled
into the valleys in the suburbs of Clare Estate and Reservoir Hills, longstanding
ANC supporters were unhappy with their councillors Yakoob Baig and Jayraj Bachu
and decided to boycott the election under the slogan ‘No Land, No House, No Vote’.
Across town in Umlazi township, a group of longstanding ANC and SACP activists
were unhappy with their councillor, Bhekisasa Xulu, and claimed that he had
withheld ANC membership cards to engineer his re-nomination despite widespread
unhappiness with his conduct. They decided to put up an independent candidate,
Zamani Mthethwa, to oppose Xulu. In both instances the response to these refusals
to toe the party line was brutal and illegal action.
In the lead up to the election, armed shacklords in settlements including
Lacey Road, Foreman Road and Burnwood sought to ban organising outside of
party control on the threat of death. Systematic threats from the state reinforced the
shack dwellers’ originary slogan of ‘we are on our own’. City Manager Mike
Sutcliffe first banned a shack dwellers’ march on 14 November 2005, and while he
continued to ban marches shack dwellers were subject to various incidents of illegal
police assault and detention. Shack dwellers were able to garner the resources to
take Sutcliffe to the Durban High Court on 27 February 2005. The Freedom of
Expression Institute had repeatedly described Sutcliffe’s march bans as ‘illegal and
unconstitutional’ and the judge quickly issued an interdict against the City and the
police preventing them from interfering with the shack dwellers’ right to march.
After their dramatic court victory, thousands of waiting shack dwellers left their
settlements, into which they had been barricaded by police, and marched into the
city in triumph.
In Umlazi, supporters of the Mthethwa campaign claimed that there was
widespread intimidation in the lead up to the election including death threats,
assaults and whippings. They also alleged that there had been blatant fraud during
the election.
On the day after the election, Umlazi residents staged a small protest against
the alleged electoral fraud. The Public Order Policing Unit shot dead a young
woman, Monica Ngcobo, near the protest and shot and seriously wounded S’busiso
RESEARCH REPORTS 2006: VOLUME 1 v
Mthethwa in his home. The police claimed that Ngcobo had been shot in the
stomach with a rubber bullet but the autopsy showed that she had been shot in the
back with live ammunition.
A new organisation called Women of Umlazi was formed and as its first act
organised a large march on 31 March in protest against these police shootings. Komi
Zulu and Sinethembe Myeni, SACP activists who worked closely with the organisers
of the march, were later assassinated in separate carefully planned attacks. Others
survived assassination attempts. MEC for Safety and Security Bheki Cele insisted
that, aside from the police shooting of Ngcobo, none of the attacks were in any way
political. Women of Umlazi responded by organising weekly mass meetings,
attended by hundreds of residents, to which the Umlazi SAPS were invited. On 1
June, the Umlazi SAPS entered Councillor Xulu’s fortified house and arrested two of
Xulu’s employees for the murder of Komi Zulu. Thousands of residents of E-Section
are now organising to ensure that there is a fair trail and to push for the arrest and
prosecution of Xulu.
The police beatings of shack dwellers, and the drama of their court victory
over Sutcliffe and triumphant march into the city, received considerable press
coverage. This was probably because the drama began in an elite suburb, moved to
the High Court and ended with the powerful spectacle of a sea of red shirts outside
the City Hall. But there has been no sustained reflection on what this blatant
suppression of basic constitutional rights means for democracy. There has been no
action against Sutcliffe or the police.
The shootings and murders in Umlazi happened in a working class
township far from elite eyes and have received limited media attention. Human
rights NGOs and academics have been largely silent. Aside from Bheki Cele’s now
infamous comment, there has been no statement on the Umlazi shootings from any
politician. The scandal is that there is no scandal. Imagine the outcry if these political
assassinations had happened in a rich white or Indian suburb like Westville or
Reservoir Hills. Imagine the outcry if senior members of the ANC or business elite
were being shot on a regular basis. It is clear that in South Africa the lives of
ordinary people continue to count for very little in elite circles. It is equally clear that
thirty years after the Soweto Uprising attempts are still made by those in power to
resolve some political disputes, and in particular those in which ordinary people
have a real stake, by men with guns. For as long as we remain collectively complicit
in the general failure to take these facts seriously we fail to take our democracy
seriously.
However, thousands of people are struggling, with renewed vigour, to
redeem the promises of democracy. On 27 April 2006, thousands of Durban
residents mourned South Africa’s first UnFreedom Day. In the weeks leading up to
Freedom Day – the holiday commemorating South Africa’s first democratic elections
on 27 April 1994 – a burgeoning coalition of Durban’s poorest residents had spirited
vi CENTRE FOR CIVIL SOCIETY
discussions about the irony of celebrating twelve years of ‘freedom’. Without decent
houses, basic services, rights for informal workers, and unconditional access to all
the resources of this land, these residents agreed that it would be more apt to mourn
their ‘unfreedom’.
In a 21 March meeting in Wentworth, flat dwellers and shack dwellers from
over a dozen areas across Durban came together to discuss how the city’s clearance
plans will affect them all. Those present lamented being chastised by officials for not
‘taking ownership’ over their residences and neighborhoods. ‘How can people take
ownership over rotten things?’, Des D’sa of the South Durban Community
Environmental Alliance asked, explaining that the city council will not replace burst,
rotten water pipes in poor areas, only patching them instead. Orlean Naidoo of
Chatsworth argued that poor flat dwellers do not exist in the eyes of the
municipality: ‘We are known to the city not as people but as ‘rental stock’. The
‘rental stock’ exists, we don’t’. S’bu Zikode of Abahlali baseMjondolo (the ‘shack
dwellers movement’) stressed that the struggle of those across the city is about
numbers, and echoed calls for city-wide mobilisation. ‘To impress the city council is
nothing. We must impress those who we lead’, Zikode argued. And so the
discussion of a city-wide coalition began, and with it talk of a pro-active event to
mark ‘UnFreedom Day’.
Thus five weeks of intensive planning resulted in a vibrant four-hour
programme at St John’s church in Clare Estate. The day drew Abahlali baseMjondolo
members from 16 nearby shack settlements as well as settlements in Pinetown,
Lamontville and KwaMashu along with Women of Umlazi, members of the
Landless People’s Movement from rural KwaZulu-Natal, people from the flatlands
of South Durban, Chatsworth, Marianridge, Merebank, Sydenham, Newlands,
Albert Park and many other areas. Communities put forward a range of dance,
music, theatre and oratory contributions. In a final performance, 20 children from
Chatsworth crammed on the stage to re-enact a failed police attempt to evict one of
their neighbours a few years earlier. The children seemed thrilled to be playing the
parts of their parents, families and neighbours who had forcefully repelled the
eviction.
The new work from Durban collected in this volume is not, in any way, claimed to
be a comprehensive or authoritative description of the growing popular ferment in
the city. But it does, we are confident, provide some stimulating lines of enquiry into
some aspects of an expanding and developing set of resistances.
Given the widespread attention focused on the young Abahlali baseMjondolo
movement, it is particularly important to stress that the articles in the volume’s first
section should not be read as definitive narratives of the movement; many other
narratives could and should be told along with them. Just as the movement itself has
faced various forces and contested certain terrain, the authors have, wittingly or not,
RESEARCH REPORTS 2006: VOLUME 1 vii
written against similar forces and contested ideas within related terrains.
Commentators make choices, for instance, about whether to narrate the struggles in
Durban’s shack settlements as: a local case of the situation facing over 1-billion shack
dwellers who live in cities across the globe; fights stemming from the failure to
recognize and redress historical land theft; resistance against conditions perpetuated
by corrupt local politicians; or as any combination of these and other forces. These
interpretations, in turn, may affect perceptions of the movement (from within and
without) and shift the broader terrain on which it wages its struggles.
Each article in the volume, as well as the section of photographs and
captions, provides insight into particular economic, political and social aspects of
Durban and other parts of KwaZulu-Natal. In their paper on the reworking of
hegemony around access to water in Inanda, Alex Loftus and Fiona Lumsden
explicitly explore ‘how dominant ideas come to be established in particular places at
particular times’ (page 101). Each offering in the volume carries out similar
explorations, enriched by historical analyses. Various terrains – and the contestations
over them – are traced through recent history: civil society engagement around
pollution and the Wentworth oil refinery, the livelihood strategies of Congolese
refugees in Durban, black working class leadership and the Durban strikes, the
shifting economic and spatial roots of the Aids pandemic, and the challenge of
practicing social work as resistance to social control. Similarly, women from
Kennedy Road, Foreman Road and Jadhu Place, Durban have documented scenes
from their lives, narrating situations and challenges which are often left out of the
terrain of social movements.
We are grateful for core funding from the Mott and Ford Foundations in
support of the Centre’s publishing and information dissemination programme. We
also wish to thank Atlantic Philanthropies for their sustained support for
undertaking, publishing and disseminating research on civil society. And, of course,
we are grateful to all our authors and to the generosity of the communities and
movements that have invested so much time and energy in the production of this
work. The value of this project will be determined by the degree to which they feel
that this investment is being rewarded.
Amanda Alexander & Richard Pithouse
Durban, July
2006
viii CENTRE FOR CIVIL SOCIETY