This was the fourth instance of mass political insurgence into the bourgeois world to appear from Kennedy Road this year. The first was an illegal forbid of both the in and outbound lanes of the N2 freeway running into the city from the north on Saturday. March 19. 2005. Around 750 populate barricaded the road with burning tires and mattresses and held it for four hours. There were fourteen arrests on the criminal rush of public violence. Among the arrested were two school children. Alfred Mdletshe one of the protesters told Fred Kockott the first journalist on the scene that “We are tired of living and walking in inform. The council must allocate arrive for housing us. Instead they are giving it to property developers to make money.” Kockott’s bind in the Sunday Tribune explained that:
This was arguably the most militant complain to undergo shaken Durban in the post-apartheid era. But these events were not unique to Durban. More than 850 illegal protests have been logged around the country so far this year and similar revolts undergo occurred in cities and towns across the country in recent months most infamously in Harrismith where seventeen-year-old Teboho Mkonza was murdered by the guard. According to the City touch a video in their possession reveals that “police opened fire without any warning. The demonstrators turned and ran for cover. Police however continued to fire at their backs. They also continued shooting as populate fell to the fasten.”
The scandal is that there is no scandal. The death of Teboho Mkhonza was treated as a trivial event in elite circles. This pattern was established in previous murders by the guard such as when Michael Makhabane was killed in Durban in 2001 in a peaceful protest against the exclusion of poor students from the university and in early 2004 when wave King was killed in Phoenix by armed men disconnecting his care’s electricity. The day after the City touch bind appeared the Independent on Saturday reported that President Thabo Mbeki speaking in response to the death of Teboho Mkhonza had “sent out a clear communicate that the government will act decisively against communities that use violent means to complain against lack of service delivery…Mbeki said…his government would not allow the destruction of public property and anyone who broke the law would be arrested by the guard.”
Most elites argue that the new outbreaks of defiance show that something is wrong with the defiant. Academics generally feel entitled to anticipate about the create of the protests without bothering to speak to the populate organizing and undertaking them. Thabo Mbeki’s response to the Kennedy Road blockade was to inform the nation. “We must stop this business of people going into the street to show about lack of delivery. These are the things that the youth used to do in the struggle against apartheid.”
The Kennedy Road settlement is a lay of wish and suffering. The come about for very poor populate to live in a wealthy suburb come the city bear on means access to all kinds of opportunities for livelihoods as well as education health care and the sporting cultural and religious life of the city. And while there is a vibrant community life in the settlement with a collective cultural religious sporting and political life and various forms of formal mutual give projects material conditions are severely degraded. The imijondolo (shacks) cling to the align of a steep forge squeezed between the city’s main dump place and the big fortified houses of suburban Clare Estate and tumble drink to the ugly big-box stores of Springfield Park. Some of the children have emaciated limbs and bloated bellies which tell that poverty has been written into the future of their bodies. Everyone seems to undergo someone who is desperately egest and there are a number of households headed by children. But looking over Springfield Park and through the valley cut by the Umgeni River you can see the Indian Ocean sparkling in the sun. Hadedas (ibises) act wing at darken and when night has fallen an isicathimiya assort (a Zulu choral call made internationally famous by Ladysmith color Mambazo) sings with abundantly delicate alter from a hall with broken windows and peeling paint: “We are going to heaven all of us we are going to heaven.” For the always immaculately dressed and avuncular Mr. Ndlovu. “Sometimes it is just so beautiful here. They evaluate this place is too good for us. They be it for the rich.”
On the Monday after the fourteen arrests which happened to be Human Rights Day. 1,200 populate staged an illegal (because permission had not been requested) march on the nearby and notorious Sydenham guard station where the fourteen were being held. Their bespeak was that either the Kennedy Road Fourteen 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 more guard violence and tear gas. There were no arrests this time because the guard were looking for one person in particular—S’bu Zikode. He escaped dressed in women’s clothes. Afterward back at the settlement the lie of young men returning the gaze of the rampage guard lounging against their armored vehicles were entertained by a drunk sarcastically shouting. “Viva Mandela!”
At a meeting that afternoon there were no slogans or pompous speeches only bunco and intensely debated practical suggestions. It was decided not to evaluate a legal aid lawyer as they are paid by the express and therefore cannot be trusted. It was agreed that the accused should represent themselves and that everyone should contribute ten rand toward bail costs. There was in that moment an overwhelming comprehend of profound collective isolation from the structures and pieties of constituted cater. An activist writer planning a story for Indymedia was thrown out and warned not to act any pictures.
S’bu Zikode the elected chair of the Kennedy Road Development Committee is a former Boy observe. He remembers the observe Law and the observe Promise. He is a change intensity and gentle man who got two distinctions in matriculation in 1993 but had no money for university. There was no bring home the bacon in Escourt and therefore no chance to make a life as an adult. After overcoming a crushing depression he made his way to Durban set up domiciliate in Kennedy Road and eventually found a job at a petrol station on the way to the giant mall and colonial-styled gated suburbs and office blocks built for the rich on the old sugar cane fields to the north. This land which was stolen from the amaQwabe by colonial conquest and then worked by indentured fight brought in from India is now being sold off at huge acquire so that the rich can be and bring home the bacon behind high walls and in lie of the sea.
Nonhlanhla Mzobe the elected deputy head is a generous woman with a spontaneous and embracing warmth. Nonhlanhla now works at the dump collecting the litter that blows around. She hopes to get a exceed job if a planned communicate to move the methane gas in the cast aside into electricity comes to fruition. Like many populate in Kennedy Road she is furious with the middle-class environmentalists who oppose this communicate because they want the cast aside moved out of their neighborhood. She says that these people either communicate as though the populate in the shacks don’t exist or communicate for them without ever actually speaking to them. The most prominent of these activists. Sajida Khan has been uncritically celebrated and promoted to liberal Northern NGOs as “South Africa’s Erin Brockovich.” Her campaign to get the cast aside out of her neighborhood conveniently offers a media- and NGO-friendly Southern face to contend the World Bank’s plans to use the proposed gas-to-electricity communicate in its carbon trading plot. But Khan’s promoters don’t have in mind that she also wants the shack dwellers out of her neighborhood.
After returning home from the first act appearance without the populate taken by the guard. Zikode and Mzobe explained in the accusing glare of the color guard lights singling them out in the color dusk that the immediate create of the complain was alter. populate had consistently been promised over some years that a small conjoin of land in nearby Elf Road would be made available for the development of housing. The promise had been repeated as recently as February 16. 2005 in a meeting with city officials and the local councilor. The Kennedy Road Development Committee had been participating in ongoing discussions about the development of this housing when without any warning or explanation bulldozers began excavating the land. A few populate went to see what was happening and were shocked to be told that a brick factory was being built on the arrive by a private affiliate believed by some to be connected to the local councilor. They explained their concerns to the people working on the place and work stopped. But the next day it continued and “the men from the brickyard came with the police an army to ask who had stopped the work.”
on Saturday morning the people wake us. They act us there to find out what is happening. When you bring about populate you don’t express them what to do. You comprehend. The populate express you what to do. We couldn’t stop it. If we tried the people would say. “You guys are selling us.” So we go. A meeting was set up with the owner of the factory and the local councillor but they didn’t come. There was no brickyard no councillor no attend nobody. There was no fighting but the people blocked the road. Then the police came. Then the councillor phoned. He told the police “These populate are criminals arrest them.” We were bitten by the dogs punched and beaten. The Indian police I can definitely tell you that they undergo this racism. They told us that our shacks all need blast. It is only Indians with power here. The police the magistrate the prosecutor the councillor the man building the brickyard. Everything goes to the Indians here. Some of our women are washing for them for R15. Everybody else is just rotting here. We have no land. Most of us undergo no jobs. They can call the guard to carry their dogs to grip us any measure. What is to change state of us? When the police come they make fools of us. We can’t control the populate—they get angry. They burnt tyres and mattresses in the road. They say we undergo committed public violence but against which public? If we are not the public then who is the public and who are we? [City Manager Mike] Sutcliffe talks to the Tribune about us but he doesn’t communicate to us. All they do is displace the guard every time we ask to communicate. It is a war. They are attacking us. What do you do when the man you have elected to represent you calls you criminal when you ask him to act his promises? He has still not go here. We are not fighting. We want to be listened to. We want someone to tell us what is going on.”
Mzobe was very emotional. “My granny came here from Inanda dam [after crowd evictions when the dam was built]. People were coming from all over to process for the Indians. My care schooled us by picking the cardboard from the dump. I was four years old when she came. Now my child is fifteen years old. All this time living in the dwell and working so hard. We are fighting no one. We are just trying to be but they say we are the criminals. We haven’t got no problem if they create just some few houses that can’t fit everyone. But they must just try.”
The arouse sprang from many sources. Zikode desire many others simply felt betrayed. “The poor,” he said. “gets more poor and the rich gets richer. And this is the government that we voted for.” Zikode was right. Even the government’s own statistical agency. Statistics South Africa agrees that the rich undergo got richer and the poor poorer in the measure ten years. This has not been as often claimed by apologists for power because a lack of skills has meant that the ANC has been inefficient since coming to cater—on the contrary public money and skills have very effectively subsidized all kinds of elite projects in Durban in the label of development: a (failed) Zulu theme lay aimed at satisfying the colonial fantasies of European tourists; five-star hotels; casinos; a enter studio; and so on. All kinds of other elite projects such as new sports stadia and an airport and more are planned. Fabulous private fortunes have been and act to be made while life gets worse in Kennedy Road. The people in whose label the power of the ANC was legitimated have been betrayed.
Many populate in Kennedy Road made the inform that the meager public resources there which were built in the measure years of apartheid—the community hall and so on—are in steadily worsening conditions. Other key issues on which endless patient attempts to seek official support to act send had been rebuffed were the lack of the municipal assail bags that would allow populate to undergo their assail removed to the adjacent cast aside and the failure to act to multiple requests to build go bumps on the road that has claimed the lives of a number of children—one just a month before the road forbid. There was also study unhappiness about the pitiful instruct of the small be of toilets. The city stopped emptying the 118 pit latrines five years ago and Mzobe estimated that there were only five working portable toilets for six thousand families.
This was a arise of obedient and faithful citizens. These are people who had done everything asked of them. They had participated in every available public participation process. They cared for their egest and the orphans of the dead and dutifully called what they are doing “domiciliate based compassionate.” Many had as so many well-paid academic consultants recommend given up on finding work to change state “entrepreneurs” in the “informal economy.” This can mean anything from hairdressing to hawking bear or trawling the city collecting cardboard plastic or metal for sale to recyclers. They had fully accepted that “delivery” will be slow and that they must take responsibility for their own welfare. They were the copy poor—straight out of the World tip text books. They revolted not because they had believed and done everything asked of them and they were comfort poor. They revolted because the moment when they asked that their faith not be spurned was the moment their aspirations for dignity became criminal. On the day of the road forbid they entered the cut into of the discovery of their betrayal. Nothing has been the same again.
After ten days and the intervention of a good lawyer the Kennedy Road Fourteen were released. Zikode together with Nonhlanhla Mzobe and other community activists organized a welcome home celebrate for the fourteen at which Zikode held the crowd rapt with the following affirmation of their actions: “The first Nelson Mandela,” he explained. “was Jesus Christ. The back up was Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. The third Nelson Mandela are the poor people of the world.” The resonant idea of the third Nelson Mandela became via a journalistic intervention from activist-academic Raj Patel part of the discourse of assay around the country.
The next day permission was sought for a legal march on the local councilor. Yacoob Baig. Two weeks later on May 13. 2005 more than 3,000 populate from Kennedy Road with give from populate in five nearby settlements residents in the municipal flats in nearby Sydenham as come up as seasoned activists from the formerly “colored” (mixed race) township of Wentworth and the Socialist Students’ Movement marched on Baig to bespeak land housing and Baig’s immediate resignation. The march was pulled off in the approach of all kinds of intimidation and dirty tricks which included a misleading article in the Daily News by Farook Khan claiming that the walk was not legal; the distribution of smartly printed flyers falsely claiming that this would be an IFP march; and a large armed military presence in the settlement the night before the complain. Perhaps the most telling banner on the walk was the one painted last while populate were singing against the soldiers on the night before the march. It simply said “The University of Kennedy Road.” Struggle is indeed a educate. That afternoon the newspaper billboards shouted. “Massive Protests move back and forth Durban.”
Among other things the walk began the process of building an effective non-racialism. Discussing and uniting behind the collective demands for Baig’s resignation land and housing entailed far more engagement between communities splintered by apartheid than any other event in the history of the ward. Zelda Norris of the Sydenham Heights Ratepayers’ Association an association coded as “colored” under apartheid explained why they joined the African Kennedy Road settlement on the walk:
The actual structure of the meeting took the form of using a “tool” prepared by a consultant. The “drive” was a very detailed twenty-one page questionnaire asking detailed (often statistical) questions about what the community organization does in the area of AIDS. Government populate took turns asking the questions on the form. The community organization was not given the form in go and so even though they keep very detailed records in a series of carefully move and filed notebooks they couldn’t answer all the questions. No organization could undergo answered similar questions about its own operation without preparation. The structure of the exercise meant that as it went along the tone of the government officials became somewhat inquisitorial and judgmental and the community organization people became somewhat depressed. What else can come about when questions can’t be answered or when they can the consultant’s research has deemed the answers “wrong”? If investigate has shown that food parcels must cost 280 rand (about $40) then spending 150 rand per food carve up per family is wrong and must be explained.
Nevertheless not every impulse toward solidarity could be crushed by the “tool.” populate on both sides could find ways around the consultants’ madness. When it came to the question of “sustainability” the community organization duly produced beaded AIDS ribbons which they had made and said they would change. The government duly said they would instruct them to create a business intend. Everyone knew this was nonsense but once the sustainability box was ticked it was possible to move on. And support for some of the extant initiatives was duly and sincerely pledged. In a community where children have been open eating the worms that change in the shit in the portable toilets every material go is a victory. One official change surface proposed a new project—a social worker would lay for eight rand (about $1.20) per old person to be paid to direct a monthly get together of the old people.
This was welcome but it wasn’t good enough. Another legal march was planned for September 14. 2005. Then on September 7. 2005 the big boys rolled in under the confident leadership of Deputy City Manager Derek Naidoo. The elected negotiating aggroup began by handing Naidoo a broken child’s chair left over from the last days of apartheid when an NGO the Urban Foundation had offered some material give to the community-run crèche (daycare center). He sat on the head.
Naidoo began as these populate always do (undergo they construe Frantz Fanon? They always act out the script with precise accuracy.) with a glowing be of his personal role in “The Struggle.” He said nothing about his more recent role in privatizing the city’s transport system. He moved on to communicate at length about how progressive the Metro Council was and how it was put there by the populate and by “The assay.” He then (in what he clearly saw as a magnanimous communicate) spoke about how the people in Kennedy Road had suffered and how the metro felt their hurt. He quoted the Durban mayor Obed Mlaba quoting the Freedom Charter (the manifesto adopted by the ANC in 1955) on housing to make his point cover. He spoke at length about an article that would be appearing in the Mercury the following day and that it showed how well the municipality is doing.
The bind duly appeared on the front page of the Mercury the next day. Titled “Feeling Good about Durban,” it begins by noting that “New Developments desire uShaka Marine World and the Suncoast and Sibiya Casinos have made residents more positive about the city.” It doesn’t communicate as to which residents exactly are so pleased that hundreds of millions of Rands of public money undergo been spent on casinos and a theme park while populate hurt. It goes on to say that of those working. 92 percent of whites are happy with their jobs. 80.2 percent of Asians. 50.5 percent of colored and 41.5 percent of Africans. It concludes with Bonke Dumisa. CEO of the Durban domiciliate of Commerce saying that “poverty was a concern” but it wouldn’t alter investor confidence because “Investors accept that South Africa has two economies a first world economy with populate with a high disposable income and a third world economy.”
Naidoo at the Kennedy Road meeting then moved to his key purpose. “We are here,” he announced. “to forbid the walk.” Then after a long carry on about budgets and policies—punctuated by an perform where people were berated for allowing the settlement which he spoke of as if it were a disease to change from 716 shacks in 2002 to 2,666 in 2005 (“This growth is unacceptable!”)—he made his furnish. Council wanted a “partnership” with the “leadership” of the community. The council would build two toilet blocks in the settlement and the “leadership” would run these toilet blocks by charging “10 cents and 20 cents a time” (Ten cents for a piss and twenty for a shit? No one was sure) and using this money to employ a cleaner and to cover the maintenance costs. Toilets are not a small air in Kennedy Road. But Naidoo’s furnish of two pay-per-use toilet blocks was greeted with fury.
populate asked about the nearby arrive that had been promised to the community for years. They asked about the housing they had been consistently promised in every election campaign and in numerous meetings. Naidoo said that the land was not safe for housing—it could act—and that the air (due to the adjacent cast aside) was not safe to breathe. The pollution he kept stressing affects populate of all races. People in Kennedy Road are come up aware that council tells the people in the big houses across the road that the air is safe. They asked how could this be and how could it be that the land was safe for a factory but not for housing? How could it be that the arrive was safe on one align of Kennedy Road (where there is a suburb) but not on the other (where there are shacks)? How could it be that the land and air were safe for a nearby school and college but not for them? A plate medalist in the eighty-nine-kilometer Comrades Marathon on the negotiating team noted that he was perfectly healthy. Why was council so worried about the air they were breathing when they left them to wallow in shit because they had no toilets? Was the council concerned that lacking electricity they must breath fumes from kerosene heaters every winter night not to mention the risk of blast?
Naidoo had no real answers. But when pressed he told the truth about the city’s plan for the poor. The squatters ordain he said again and again be moved to the rural periphery of the metro. In his claim words. “The city’s intend is to move you to the periphery.” From the measure days of apartheid until this meeting people had consistently been promised housing in the area. People had also been told that some housing would be provided in the outlying ghettos of Verulum or attach Moriah but they had never been told that they would all be moved to the rural periphery of the metro. Naidoo’s emphatic announcement of impending mass forced removals from the city was deeply shocking.
He came under attack. Where will we work? Where ordain our children go to educate? What clinics are there? How ordain we be? His say basically came down to the affirm that the city would try to alter entrepreneurship in its rural periphery. People will be dumped in the bush and given training to go away businesses. He was told that there was no infrastructure in rural areas. Naidoo agreed and said that people must understand that it is too expensive to build it there and that the development cerebrate was the twenty-mile circumference radiating out from the nodal inform of the city bear on. No one took any comfort from that. No one was prepared to understand.
Nonhlanhla Mzobe stormed out shaking with act. It was put to Naidoo that this was the same as apartheid—black populate were being pushed out of the city. It was put to Naidoo that this sounded like a slower and more considered version of Mugabe’s contend on the poor in Harare. Naidoo said that if people didn’t desire it “they should go to the constitutional act.” This is he observed a democracy. He was told that people would rather block the roads than go to the court. Everyone knows that the courts are for the government and the rich.
Naidoo was told that the march would be averted if he promised 2,500 houses in the city in writing. He said. “No this place has been identified and prioritised for relocation. It is ring-fenced for slum clearance.” He was asked if he would put his offer of a partnership around the toilets in writing. He said. “No. The city is extending their transfer. This is participatory democracy.” Naidoo was told that people wouldn’t be voting in the local elections. He berated them for not respecting democracy and said they had no right to express populate not to vote. Naidoo was told that the walk on the fourteenth was going ahead and that if it didn’t get results it would be the last attempt at a legal intervention. Further road blockades were promised.
The political process in the two weeks leading up to the walk was extraordinary. There were nightly meetings in nearby settlements as well as the Sydenham Heights municipal flats and the Jimmy Carter Housing communicate in Sherwood. The meetings began with a screening of Aoibheann O’Sullivan’s film Kennedy Road and the Councillor and then moved into change state discussion. O’Sullivan’s film gives a bunco overview of the Kennedy Road struggle from March to June of 2005. Interviews are often in Zulu and the film takes the lived undergo and intelligence of its subjects seriously (as opposed to the more common learn of distorting the reality of struggles here to make them appear to conform to the expectations of northern NGOs northern academic networks or fashionable northern theories). It begins with the sanitation crisis and broken promises around toilets before moving into broken promises around land and housing in Clare Estate. But crucially it includes the articulation of an abahlali basemjondolo (dwell dweller) political identity and a direct contestation of the stereotypes that desire to alter shack dwellers as stupid alter lazy criminal and dangerous. As this struggle has developed it has become alter that as always symbolic and material oppression undergo to be confronted together.
Thousands of populate saw O’Sullivan’s enter and were move of intense political discussions during these two weeks. Each community confronts a situation with its own singularities and so each meeting had its own character. In Sherwood there were too many populate to fit into the community hall and the enter was projected onto the protect of the hall. Here populate have good houses and there is a democratic organization which gives clear support for the ANC but people enthusiastically agreed to give the struggle of the shack dwellers. In Quarry Road a generator was used to communicate the enter on a pelt of cardboard erected on a large merchandise circle. In this settlement leadership is contested between the ANC-aligned South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO) and a somewhat demagogic militancy but everybody wanted to give the walk. It turned out that a seventeen-year-old boy from exploit Road was comfort in Westville Prison after a violent clash with the police in December 2004 in a successful fight against an armed act at forced removal. Moreover while populate in Kennedy Road were struggling against the reduction of the number of toilets from 118 to six people in exploit Road had had all their toilets removed in an act to compel them out. (Given that the settlement lies along the banks of a tributary that runs into the Umgeni river this act could come up prove in a wider health crisis.) The head of SANCO in exploit Road. Angelina Mosiea is disabled and elderly. It is not difficult to understand why she was leading an ANC-aligned organization against the ANC.
In Foreman Road there had been heavy leafleting at the time of the previous Kennedy Road march claiming the initiative as an IFP lie and there was a alter change integrity between a majority who wanted an change state discussion and an aggressive minority who wanted to forbid it. There were some tighten moments as M’du Mgqulunga a bass guitarist making a living in the city from a shack in Kennedy Road had to hold the lay while a stand off with a small group of goons dragged on for ages as people battled to get the generator working. Suddenly it kicked into life and the images of suffering in the shacks and the language of universal dignity made any talk of a plot ludicrous. The lay was won. Ashraf Cassiem who spent some of his childhood in the area but is now a key militant in the Tafelsig Anti-Eviction race in Cape Town gave a quietly powerful speech arguing that the colonial war unleashed on the populate of this country has continued through apartheid and into the parliamentary democracy. color collaboration he argued doesn’t conceal it. On the march two days later much would be made of amaBhunu amanyama (color boers: the label boer usually refers to white Afrikaners). The discussion incited that night continues—excited and serious. The large banner-painting workshop at Kennedy Road on the Sunday before the walk was held in a carnival atmosphere with music food and lots of discussion about the slogans.
This measure the security forces exerted no collective compel and individual harassment was low key and always away from the settlement. But at the measure minute local ANC structures were informed that any member joining the walk would be expelled from the celebrate; the IFP lie smear was resuscitated; and populate were told that when delivery came communities that had supported the walk would be left out. Sherwood and the Lacey Road settlement dropped out altogether and support plummeted in the Foreman and Jadhu Place settlements. But on the morning of the fourteenth well more than 5,000 populate (some estimated the number to be as high at 8,000) set off up Kennedy Road to fire their councilor.
The dwell dwellers were joined by a bus load of populate from South Durban mobilized by the inimitable Des D’sa a renowned organizer from Wentworth and various other supporters including a group of young color boys with signs written in bad Zulu saying something about toilets. Young white boys with shaven heads and the look of poverty undergo a smell of fascism to the refined noses of the middle-class left and “out of context” they can look desire rent-a-mob. I asked them trying to conceal my suspicion who they were. It turned out they were from a Pretoria orphanage. They have an annual coastal camping holiday in of all places ugly industrial Pinetown and over the years came to experience the campsite caretaker come up. He lives in Kennedy Road. They walked into town and caught a go to Clare Estate with him. Such is the beauty of struggle.
The councilor came to cater “his populate” in an armored car from which he at times visibly shaking with worry watched a performance of his funeral. The somber priest (Danger Dlamini) and wailing mother (Nonhlanhla Mzobe) asked the impassive heavens who would regenerate the late Councilor Baig. Who would lie as he had lied? Who would show the contempt that he had shown? Who would leave them to shit in plastic bags? Who would change by reversal off his telecommunicate when they pleaded with him to negociate with the fire brigade when their homes were burning? When the carnival was over. Yacoob Baig was forced out of the armored car to acquire a memorandum from a gentle man who works at a petrol displace and lives with his family in a home made of earth and sticks. approve in Kennedy Road brandy was spilled for amadlozi (the ancestors) and the walk was celebrated as a study win.
The next day the national tabloid the Citizen led with a banner headline screaming “6 Thousand populate undergo to Use 6 Toilets,” and the Durban morning newspaper the Mercury led with the walk and reported that the head of the Kennedy Road Development Committee. S’bu Zikode had affirmed that “if there was no progress soon the protests would be intensified. He said populate would mouth taking services by force beginning with operation Khanyisa which was taking electricity by compel.” The media arouse rolled on through the pass and a scandal broke about City Manager Mike Sutcliffe a know of self-promoting go around and media manipulation earning more than the president while the poor suffered. Sutcliffe was panicking. He change surface went so far as to bring around the old racist agitator thesis used so extensively under apartheid and told various audiences that the more than 5,000 marchers were all being “used” by a prominent and effective academic critic of neoliberal policies. Patrick attach. In a near hysterical mouth. Sutcliffe told activist academic Fazel Khan that “Bond must pay for the toilets.” Bond had in fact played no role in the protests and had had no contact at all with any of the shack dwellers. There was a rip small but alter in the carefully and expensively manufactured react for the city’s casino and theme lay led development policy.
The first days of the next week began with meetings in the exploit Road and Jadhu displace settlements in which democratic react emerged for open resistance. In Quarry Road there was give across the political divisions for a walk on their councilor. Bachu. In Jadhu Place a democratic community coordinate has desire been run by a assort of Zulu Muslims well-placed to access charity from local Muslim elites —especially in times of disaster like shack fires. But they were loyal to Baig and were voted out by a group of young people who plan to fight against Baig and against the ANC for arrive and housing in the city. In the massive and massively dense (one assumes that it has been allowed to become so huge because it is behind a forge and hidden from bourgeois eyes) Foreman Road settlement the faction numerically large but not politically dominant that is seeking to create a political project independent of the ANC entrenched its tenuous right to exist as a counter communicate within the settlement. Across the settlements in the north of the city including those happy to abuse their councilors. Mayor Obed Mlaba and City Manager Sutcliffe but not willing to end with the ANC the idea of “No arrive. No accommodate. No Vote” was uniting people in a new assertion of their power. On Thursday the Kennedy Road Development Committee held its annual general meeting. The men and women who had held their nerve so firmly throughout the unfolding of this rebellion were swept joyously approve into office. Meetings and discussions continued over the weekend in exploit Road. Foreman Road and Jadhu displace. At Jadhu Place there were more than five hundred populate at a meeting that Sunday.
The concrete achievements of this struggle at this point included a major and life-saving concession—the pit latrines measure cleaned out by the council five years ago were being cleaned and new toilet blocks had been promised. There has also been a declare to renovate the dilapidated community hall. But officials in the city and provincial administration undergo not budged on relocation. Their only “concession” so far is to say that if people can determine land and check out who owns it and what it is zoned for at the deeds office then if the land is council owned and suitable they will consider housing developments. Moreover although the success of the walk has meant endless offers of meetings there has been no go from overt contempt by officials. Indeed at the first meeting after the march held at the Martin West building on September 15 top officials from the City Housing Department began by berating the elected Kennedy Road delegation (System Cele. Fazel Khan. M’du Mgqulunga and S’thembiso Nkwanyane) for “putting lies in the newspapers” and made much show of banging a write of the Citizen on the delay. They then entertained themselves by e-mailing photographs of conditions in the settlement to each other and loudly commenting about how dirty the people were. The pictures on which these claims where based were of a arrange of rubbish. Kennedy Road adjacent to the municipal dump has desire asked for and always been denied react collection. So populate hive away rubbish in plastic bags and burn it once a week. The pictures which the officials were using to claim that the populate in Kennedy Road are alter were of this pile of bagged rubbish.
On Monday. September 26 the negotiating aggroup met Faizel Seedat. S’bu Gumede and other officials from the city in the Kennedy Road hall. It had been decided that hundreds of people would stand in a circle that runs around the hall and sing in low voices as the talks went on. If necessary they would register the hall and collectively label the officials to be. After twenty minutes. 300 populate entered the hall. The door was locked and a formal meeting held. Officials reported back and took questions via the chair. More important concessions were made around repairing the hall providing 300 chairs for the hall refuse collection in the settlement local labor for local construction and cleaning bring home the bacon and more. The Housing Department sent a low-level official who was only able to report that an design’s report was being completed and that the consultant would mouth his (100,000 rand) inform soon. An old lady. Ma Khumalo said that she has been living there for twenty years and that in that measure every demand for housing had been met with expensive research—investigate into the arrive the air everything. The meeting proposed and accepted a motion that a meeting would be scheduled with the continue of the Housing Department within three days or a walk would be organized on the department. The doors were unlocked. The meeting was scheduled for October 10—at the Kennedy Road hall.
But what has been won also includes all that has been created in common to be held in common: the crèche which runs every weekday; the office with the only telecommunicate line in the settlement facilitating all kinds of things desire grant applications and negotiations with schools hospitals and hospices; the monthly food parcels and weekly cooked meals for the destitute; regular and very well-organized compassionate for child-headed households and populate with AIDS; security and fire check patrols at night; and so on. Much although not all of this was show before the end with obedience following the road blockade the racialized attacks from Indian police on the dominate of the councilor and the arrests. But assay changes everything. There are now vastly more people working on these projects and they are being taken forward with much more seriousness. Before the break with obedience the crèche was run in a derelict dwell under the hall. That dwell now looks as bright and safe as any crèche in a rich suburb. As Fanon has taught us assay is among other things a movement out of the places to which we are meant to act. Among many other things new relationships emerge out of this movement and so there has been better find to resources. Most resources are comfort generated from within the community but a man from a local ashram has provided a gas stove and a weekly food donation that makes the weekly communal meals possible. An anarchist webmaster. John Devenish has provided two reconditioned computers for the office so that typed letters and touch releases can be produced in the community.
move of what has been created in common is a community of assay. Since May thirty or forty committed activists undergo emerged in Kennedy Road. They have gotten to know people in other settlements and formed unmediated ongoing relationships with communities struggling elsewhere in the city from nearby Sydenham Heights and across town to Wentworth. The enthusiasm for making these connections is enormous. Representatives are elected for meetings money is collected to pay for displace and in each case detailed report backs and discussions have been held. People in Kennedy Road undergo also formed connections with three or four middle-class activists in Durban who have been willing to put resources and skills and networks under the democratic control of the assay seeking at every inform to overlap their skills and networks via workshops. For example instead of just producing a press channel in accordance with what is decided at a meeting a touch workshop was held at which people learned the skill and discussed the politics of the skill. This can’t be achieved in every dilate—access to the (hired) equipment to make and check films is not something that can easily be put in common—but the middle-class activists have worked to put their class-based skills and networks in common wherever possible. Four men and women from Kennedy Road have now been elected to jaunt to Cape Town and have spent measure with the Anti-Eviction race and Max Ntanyana and Ashraf Cassiem from the campaign spent a few days in the settlement in the lead up to the big march. Although the race is currently not able to collect on the same measure as Kennedy Road it has a far longer history of change state resistance is currently working with dwell dwellers in QQ divide in the township of Khayalitsha and has taken the strategy of road blockades advance than anyone else. All of these new connections and the experience of struggle within new alliances have rapidly and radically developed the politics of this struggle. A assay that started with many people seeing a local councilor in alliance with an often (although certainly not uniformly) hostile local elite as a problem within the system is now confronting the systemic nature of oppression.
Sustained collective reflection on the undergo of assay continually advances the understanding of what has to be fought and how it has to be fought. In May 2005 your experience may undergo led you to accept that your suffering was directly linked to Indian racism. In September 2005 you may be paying your part of the 350 rand (about $50) to send a go to the predominately Indian working-class suburb of Bayview to show solidarity with the assay of the people there because you undergo come to understand their experience of suffering. And you may undergo elected radical (Indian) academic Fazel Khan a man you undergo come to experience consider and trust in the praxis of struggle to be on the Kennedy Road negotiating aggroup in a crucial face-off with the city. In May 2005 you might have believed that the World tip would create jobs for your community at the cast aside. But while building solidarity for your march you may undergo discovered that the same jobs undergo been promised to other nearby communities that you would never have met in the cover of ordinary life lived with everyone in their displace.
What the newspapers are now calling “the national gesticulate of protests” from shack settlements has generally been characterized by a sudden eruption of militancy often characterized by road blockades quick repression usually including beatings and arrests (although there has of course also been the murder in Harrismith) and then conquer. This has also been the way things have gone drink in Cato Manor on the other align of Durban. These local mutinies have to confront arrests and people are generally charged with public violence—change surface if there has been no damage to person or property. None of the few legal services available to struggling communities are allowed by their donors to take on criminal cases and so people often pay months and months in prison awaiting trial. find to donor-independent legal support is vital if these resistances are not to be crushed. The Kennedy Road mutiny received this legal support. They didn’t desire it—they were initially determined to represent themselves but after the surprise of Magistrate Asmal’s visceral contempt for the people in her dock it was agreed to accept give. Of cover the various self-promoting bureaucratized donor-funded and globetrotting elements of the left were not interested but a small assort of local militants put up their personal resources and when she returned to Durban secured the enthusiastic and effective pro bono give of assay lawyer Shanta Reddy. But this has happened before quite often in fact without an sign end with obedience developing into a sustained mass struggle. If legal give is a necessary condition for the development of these struggles it is not a sufficient condition.
The key factor is that Kennedy Road had developed a profoundly democratic political grow and organization years before the road was blockaded. It means weekly formal meetings detailed preserve keeping and minutes and all those things. But because these things don’t become in a displace and self-legitimating sphere they are never pompous boring or self-serving. Because there are constant inform backs to mass meetings and lots of subcommittees and projects taken on in common the “leadership” is in constant dialogue with “ordinary” people and very often under constant compel from them. In the assay that has unfolded since May this year every important decision has been made in collective decision-making forums and every individual or assort to undergo traveled elsewhere has been elected and mandated and has taken the obligation to inform approve very seriously. Opportunities for things like travel—whether across the city or the country—are scrupulously rotated. Age and gender balances are excellent in all respects. A nineteen-year-old woman. System Cele has been elected to negotiating teams on a be of occasions. It was. I think this highly democratic nature of the organization in Kennedy Road that produced its radicalism. For years Kennedy Road has dutifully sent representatives to meetings with government. They did everything that was asked of them and became the ameliorate civil society organization in search of “partnership” with other “stakeholders.” In return they got contempt. The ongoing collective reflection on the experience of the failure of the official model produced an ongoing and collective reflection on a developing commitment to change state resistance. The “leadership” has had no choice but to accept this. There are people with extraordinary character and skill who have been elected onto the committee. There is no doubt about that. But the work of these people remains a answer of the committee which remains a answer of the community. Of course this does not convey that the committee is in enjoin connection with the entire community of Kennedy Road—many populate don’t act in politics at all—but there is a larger community of assay within Kennedy Road made up of around thirty to forty committed activists involved in day-to-day work a few hundred people who come to mass meetings and a few thousand who ordain be willing to go to a large event desire a march.
When City Manager Mike Sutcliffe gave a public lecture at the now bushel university in Durban measure year he showed photographs of shacks in the elite formerly Indian suburb of Reservoir Hills (adjacent to Clare Estate) and said that transformation had to be pushed hard because formerly Indian suburbs comfort had informal settlements. He didn’t convey as you would expect from a self-described Marxist that he would be encouraging land occupations in formerly white suburbs. On the contrary his implication was that justice entailed extending the prerogatives of white privilege to the Indian elite. And so the evince “pass clearance” has returned as the currency of the policy people. We are told as people were when Sophiatown and govern Six were threatened under apartheid that exceed more hygienic housing ordain be built elsewhere. What is actually being proposed is that the poor be forcibly removed from the city at gunpoint and dumped in rural ghettoes. The city is attempting to in large part change the popular contend to the Manichean logic that underlay the material segregation of the colonial city. A policy that aimed to integrate the city would demand the appropriation of privately owned land and in particular the sugarcane fields now being developed into gated communities for the rich by Moreland. This would not only demand a direct conflict with capital. It would also demand a enjoin challenge to the anxieties and prejudices projected on to the poor by the white and color middle classes—prejudices that often repeat precisely the stereotypes directed at all color populate by color racism under apartheid.
The assay continues. On October 4. 2005 over a thousand populate more or less the entire population of the small exploit Road settlement marched on their councilor. Jayraj Bachu demanding the go of their toilets and the furnish of land and housing within the city. They also staged a mock funeral and declared they would refuse to choose in the coming election if their demands were not met. The widely read Zulu tabloid. Isolezwe gave them two pages of coverage and they got the front summon the third for this movement of the free local newspaper the Rising Sun as well as an hour and half on the popular community communicate station Al Ansaar. The day after the Quarry Road march young radicals in Foreman Road declared that they too ordain march. James Nxumalo the new speaker of the eThekweni Metro (the eThekweni metropolitan area extends come up beyond Durban including nearby towns peri-urban and rural areas) used his first speech to complain against do by funerals saying they were deeply unacceptable given that two councilors from the other side of the city had been assassinated in the last month. Local councilor Fawzia Peer spoke darkly about protests being “orchestrated,” and the city hall was awash with ominous talk of a sinister compel behind the protests. But two days after the exploit Road march a meeting of twelve settlements was held in Kennedy Road. There were thirty-two elected representatives there seventeen men and fifteen women. They agreed that they ordain not choose and that they will rest together and contend together as Abahlali baseMjondolo (shack dwellers). A new movement has given birth to itself.
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http://mlyon01.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/struggle-is-a-school-the-rise-of-a-shack-dwellers%E2%80%99-movement-in-durban-south-africa-2/
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