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Coffin
for the Councillor (or The Left in the Slum)
Richard Pithouse
September
27, 2005
http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?2,40,5,841
On the morning
of Wednesday, 14 September 2005 well over 5 000 people from the
Kennedy Road settlement and nearby settlements in Clare Estate,
Durban, marched on their local councillor to demand toilets, land,
housing, an end to the threat of forced removals and the councillor’s
resignation. This was the fourth instance of mass political insurgence
into the bourgeois world to emerge from Kennedy Road this year.
The first was a road
blockade which resulted in police violence and 14 arrests, the
second a march on the police station where the 14 where held and
the third a previous
legal march on the councillor. Each of these four events has
been noticeably larger than the previous mass insurgency and more
and more nearby settlements, and groups in nearby settlements, are
joining the movement that has begun in Kennedy Road.
Capital is thrusting us into a world in which an increasingly massive
portion of humanity lives in Third World slums, in what we call
emijondolo. Mike Davis’ New
Left Review article Planet
of Slums (2004) has recently confronted the left literati
with the magnitude of this fact. The global 2001 numbers are staggering
– 921 million slum dwellers, 100 million street children, two million
children lost to diarrhoea a year and the fact that Lagos "is
simply the biggest node in the shanty-town corridor of 70 million
people that stretches from Abidjan to Ibadan".
Many will know
Chris Abani’s beautiful and searing novel Graceland
(2004) which develops a profound account of just one life made in
the underside of Lagos. The scale of suffering is incomprehensible.
Davis’ article gets a lot right – he is clear that structural adjustment
is a key factor in the recent explosive growth of squatter settlements;
that residential themeparks are the antipodes to the slum; that
valorisation of the ‘informal sector’ is perverse as "the real
macroeconomic trend of informal labour…is the reproduction of absolute
poverty"; that the urban poor "are everywhere forced to
settle on hazardous and otherwise unbuildable terrains – over-steep
hillslopes, river banks and floodplains. Likewise they squat in
the deadly shadows of refineries, chemical factories, toxic dumps,
or in the margins of railroads and highways"; and that "chronic
diarrhoeal diseases" are the most immediate threat to the lives
of millions of people. "The UN" he tells us "considers
that two out of five African slum-dwellers live in a poverty that
is literally ‘life-threatening’".
The left has
been quick to acknowledge that the ravages of capital have created
the slum and to try to use this to strengthen its case. But seeing
the slum, and its billion inhabitants, as a potential site of struggle,
and especially as a site of struggle in-itself and for-itself rather
than merely tacked on behind some elite left project is another
thing. There is still a racist left that can’t see historical agency
coming from outside of the white world and so heralds the Seattle
movement as the new global vanguard. And there is still an old left
that can’t see beyond the factory worker. At time these prejudices
(often with others in the mix) take the form of basic contempt for
the struggles of the most destitute. A left academic casually refers
to people in Kennedy Road as ‘lumpens’ (The OED gives the meaning
for ‘lumpen’ as "Ignorantly contented, boorish, stupid; uninterested
in revolutionary advancement"). An independent left councillor
casually and publicly ascribes a decision by people in Kennedy Road,
arrived at by wide debate and very careful consideration, to refrain
from electoral politics in order to preserve the integrity and autonomy
of their political project as consequent to ‘illiteracy’. So it
goes. One wonders what Fanon would say to these people….
For Davis "for the moment at least, Marx has yielded the historical
stage to Mohammed and the Holy Ghost" and "with the Left
still largely missing from the slum, the eschatology of Pentecostalism
admirably refuses the inhuman destiny of the inhuman city"
and "sanctifies those who, in every structural and existential
sense, truly live in exile." Davis’ Manichean split between
religion and resistance is historically uninformed. Davis is well
aware that most slum dwellers come to the city from rural towns
and villages because they have been deliberately forced off their
land or can no longer survive on it. And he writes about how a similar
process in Europe was contained by emigration to the colonies. But
he doesn’t consider the fact that European rebellions against the
rise of capital via processes of primitive accumulation which forced
people off land were, as described so powerfully in Silvia Federici’s
Caliban
and the Witch, invariably fuelled by millennial religion.
Jeff Guy makes the point that the Maphumulo Uprising of 1906, also
in part a response to pressures exerted on rural life by capital,
was animated by religious feeling to a significant degree. But a
key weakness of Davis’s paper is that it is written as though the
left is entirely missing from the academy – as though we are all
politically neutral scientists. Indeed he draws almost exclusively,
and without any reflection on this, on colonial (anthropology) and
neo-colonial (World Bank and UN studies) modes of ‘knowing’ the
slum that are uniformly objectifying. To say, as he does, that World
Bank policies are a primary cause of slums and then to write respectfully
about World Bank researcher Branko Milanvoic is perverse.
Slavoj Zizek never succumbs to the self-objectification of the mask
of the scientists or to that key dogma of academic complicity with
evil – ‘collegiality’ - and would, one feels happily confident,
assault Milanvoic with the intent to do serious damage if given
the chance. Moreover he has no interest in anthropological modes
of knowing. In the London
Review of Books Zizek argues that the explosive growth of
the slum "is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our times".
He writes that what we have is:
"The rapid growth of a population outside the law, in terrible need
of minimal forms of self organisation…One should resist the easy
temptation to elevate and idealise slum-dwellers into a new revolutionary
class. It is nonetheless surprising that how far they confirm to
the old Marxist definition of the proletarian revolutionary subject:
they are ‘free’ in the double meaning of the word, even more than
the classical proletariat (‘free’ from all substantial ties; dwelling
in a fee space, outside the regulation of the state); they are a
large collective, forcibly thrown into a situation where they have
to invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously deprived
of support for their traditional ways of life…The new forms of social
awareness that emerge from slum collectives will be the germ of
the future…."
The political process in the two weeks leading up to the recent
march in Kennedy Road was extraordinary. There had been nightly
meetings in nearby settlements as well as the Sydenham Heights municipal
flats and the Jimmy Carter Housing Project in Sherwood. The meetings
began with a screening of Aoibheann o’Sullivan’s film Kennedy
Road and the Councillor and then moved into open discussion.
O’Sullivan’s film gives a short overview of the Kennedy Road struggle
from March to June this year. The film is not designed for the consumption
of left activists in the North. Interviews are often in Zulu and
the film takes the lived experience and intelligence of its subjects
seriously (as oppose to the more common practice of distorting the
reality of struggles here to make them appear to conform to the
expectation of Northern NGOs, academic networks or fashionable 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 abantu abahlala emijondolo (shack dweller) political identity
and a direct contestation with the stereotypes that seek to objectify
shack dwellers as stupid, dirty, mad, criminal and dangerous. As
this struggle has developed it has become clear that symbolic and
material oppression have to be confronted together.
Thousands of people saw o’Sullivan’s film and were part 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 people to fit into
the community hall and the film was projected onto the wall of the
hall. Here there is a democratic organisation which gives clear
support for the ANC but people enthusiastically agreed to support
the struggle of the shack dwellers. In Quarry Road a generator was
used to show the film on a sheet of cardboard erected on a large
traffic circle. In this settlement leadership is contested between
SANCO and a somewhat demagogic militancy but everybody wanted to
support the march. It turned out that a 17 year old boy from Quarry
Road was still in Westville Prison after a violent clash with the
police in December in a successful fight back against a armed attempt
at forced removal. Moreover while people in Kennedy Road were struggling
for toilets people in Quarry Road had had their toilets removed
in an attempt to force them out. (Given that the settlement lies
along the banks of a tributary that runs into the Umgeni this act
could well result in a wider health crisis.) In Foreman Road there
had been heavy pamphleteering at the time of the previous Kennedy
Road march claiming the initiative as an IFP front and there was
a clear split between a majority who wanted an open discussion and
an aggressive minority who wanted to stop it. There were some tense
moments as M’du Mgqulunga had to hold the space 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 space was won. Ashraf
Cassiem, who spent some of his childhood in the area but is now
a key militant in the Taflesig Anti-Eviction Campaign in Cape Town,
gave a quietly powerful speech arguing that the colonial war unleashed
on the people of this country has continued through apartheid and
into the parliamentary democracy. Black collaboration, he argued,
doesn’t disguise it. On the march two days later much would be made
of amaBhunu amanyama (black boers). The discussion incited that
night continues - excited and serious. The large banner painting
workshop at Kennedy Road on the Sunday before the march was held
in a carnival atmosphere with music (Zola – Bhambhata Namhlanje),
food and lots of discussion about the slogans. (Land & Housing!;
Sikhalela Izindlu!; Phansi NgoBaig!; ‘Moreland’ Give Back Our Land!’;
Fight Forced Removals!; Sifuna Umsebenzi!; University of Kennedy
Road; etc, etc)
There was heavy police intimidation leading up to the last legal
march on 13 May and the army occupied the settlement the night before
the march. With the searchlights, men with machine guns and armoured
vehicles it looked like Palestine. This time the security forces
exerted no collective pressure and individual harassment was low
key and always away from the settlement. A few days before the march
the City Council attempted to, in their own words, ‘avert this march’
with a promise of pay-for-use toilets now and later relocation to
rural housing developments. This was rejected with contempt. Then,
at the last minute, local ANC structures were informed that participants
would be expelled from the party, the IFP front smear was resuscitated
and people were told that when delivery came communities that had
supported the march would be left out. Sherwood and the Lacey Road
settlement dropped out altogether and support dropped in the Foreman
and Jadhu Place settlements. But on the morning of the 14th well
more than 5 000 people set off up Kennedy Road to fire their councillor.
The shack dwellers were joined by a bus load of people from South
Durban mobilised by the inimitable Des D’sa and various other supporters
including a group of young white boys with signs saying something
about toilets in bad Zulu. Young white boys with shaven heads and
the look of poverty have a whiff of fascism to the refined noses
of the middle class left and ‘out of context’ can look like rent-a-mob.
I asked them, trying to disguise my suspicion, who they were. Turns
out they were from a Pretoria orphanage. They have an annual camping
holiday in, of all places, ugly Pinetown and have got to know the
campsite caretaker well over the years. He lives in Kennedy Road.
So they walked into town and caught the taxi to Clare Estate with
him. Such is the beauty of struggle. Such are the ways in which
we learn how fucked up we are.
The councillor came to meet ‘his people’ in an armoured car from
which he, at times visibly shaking, watched a performance of his
funeral. The sombre priest (Danger Dlamini) and wailing mother (Nonhlanhla
Mzobe) asked the impassive heavens who would replace the late Councillor
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 switch off his phone when they pleaded with him to intercede
with the fire brigade when their homes were burning? When the carnival
was over Yacoob Baig was forced out of the armoured car to receive
a memorandum from a gentle man who works at a petrol station and
lives in a house made of mud and sticks. Back in Kennedy Road the
march was celebrated as a triumph.
The next day
the national tabloid, The Citizen, led with a banner headline
screaming "6 THOUSAND PEOPLE HAVE TO USE 6 TOILETS" and
the Durban morning newspaper, "The
Mercury, led with the march and reported that the chair
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 people would begin taking services by force, beginning with
operation Khanyisa which was taking electricity by force".
The media interest rolled on through the weekend and a scandal broke
about City Manager Mike Sutcliffe, a master of self promoting spin
and media manipulation, earning more than the president while the
poor suffered. There was a rip, small but clear, in the carefully
and expensively manufactured consent for the city’s casino and themepark
led development policy. The first days of the next week began with
meetings in the Quarry Road and Jadhu Place settlements in which
democratic consent emerged for open resistance. In Quarry Road there
was support across the political divisions for a march on their
councillor, Bachu. In Jadhu Place a democratic community structure
has long been run by a group of Zulu Muslims well placed to access
charity from local 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 intend to fight against Baig and against
the ANC, for land and housing in the city. In the massive and massively
dense (it has been allowed to become so huge because it is behind
a hill and hidden from bourgeois eyes) Foreman Road settlement the
faction, numerically large but not politically dominant, that is
seeking to built a political project independent of the ANC entrenched
itself more firmly. Across the settlements in the North of the city,
including those happy to vilify their councillors, Mayor Obed Mlaba
and City Manager Sutcliffe but not willing to break with the ANC,
the idea of "No House No Vote" was uniting people in a
new assertion of their power. On the Thursday the Kennedy Road Development
Committee held its Annual General Meeting. The men and women who
had had held their nerve so firmly throughout the unfolding of this
rebellion were swept, joyously, back into office. Meetings and discussions
continued over the weekend in Quarry Road, Foreman Road and Jadhu
Place. At Jadhu Place there were more than 500 people at a meeting
on the Sunday.
The concrete achievements of this struggle include a major and life
saving concession – the pit latrines last cleaned out by the council
5 years ago are being cleaned and toilet blocks are promised. There
has also been a promise to renovate the dilapidated community hall.
But officials in the city and provincial administration have not
budged on relocation. Their only ‘concession’ so far is to say that
if people can identify land, 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. The success
of the march has meant endless offers of meetings but no retreat
from overt contempt by officials. At the first meeting after the
march, held at the Martin West building on 15 September, top officials
from the Metro Housing Department began by berating the elected
Kennedy Road delegation (System Cele, Fazel Khan, Mdu Mgqulunga
& S’thembiso Nkwanyane) for ‘putting lies in the newspapers’
and made much show of banging a copy of The Citizen on the
table. They then entertained themselves by emailing 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 pile of rubbish. Kennedy Road has long asked
for and always been denied refused collection. So people collect
rubbish in plastic bags and burn it once a week. The pictures which
the officials were using to claim that the people in Kennedy Road
are dirty were of this pile of rubbish. These officials are scum
whose power must be decisively broken. Any politics that won’t fact
up to that fact is either wilfully complicit with oppression or
delusional. It has been decided that there will be no more meetings
in government offices. As S’bu Zikode explains: "Why must we
go and sit on those comfortable chairs to listen to the crooks and
liars. They must come and sit with us where we live. The battle
is on. We will use all tactics." I am writing this on Monday
26 September. Tonight the negotiating team will meet Faizel Seedat,
S’bu Gumede and other officials from the Metro in the Kennedy Road
hall. It has been decided that hundreds of people will stand in
a circle that runs around the hall and sing in low voices as the
talks go on. If necessary they will enter the hall and collectively
call the officials to account.
And then there is all that has been created in common to be held
in common. The crèche which runs every week day; the office
with the only telephone line in the settlement where all kinds of
things like grant applications and links to and negotiations with
schools, hospitals and hospices and so on can be facilitated; the
monthly food parcels and weekly cooked meals for the destitute;
regular and very well organised care for childheaded households
and people with AIDS; security and fire watch patrols at night and
so on. Much, although not all of this, was present before the break
with obedience following the road blockade, the racialised attacks
from Indian police on the command of the councillor and the arrests.
But struggle 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 room under the hall. That room now looks as
bright and safe as any crèche in Glenwood. As Fanon has taught
us struggle is, amongst other things, a movement out of the places
to which we are meant to keep. Amongst other things new relationships
emerge out of this movement and so there has been better access
to resources. Most resources are still generated from within the
community but a man from a local ashram has provided a gas stove
which makes the weekly communal meals possible. John Devenish from
CCS has provided a reconditioned computer for the office so that
typed letters and press releases can be produced in the community.
So it goes. Movement within produces movement out and movement forward.
Part of what has been created in common is a community of struggle.
Since May 20 or 30 committed activists have emerged in Kennedy Road.
They have got to know people in other settlements and formed unmediated
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 transport and in each
case detailed report backs and discussions have been held. People
in Kennedy Road have 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 struggle
seeking at every point to share their skills and networks via workshops.
For example instead of just producing a press release in accordance
with what is decided at a meeting a press workshop was held at which
people learnt the skill and discussed the politics of the skill.
This can’t be achieved in every instance – access to the (hired)
equipment to make and screen films is not something that can easily
be put in common but as a general rule the middle class activists
have worked to put their class based skills and networks in common.
Four men and women from Kennedy Road have now been elected to travel
to Cape Town and have spent time with the Anti-Eviction Campaign
and Max Ntanyana and Ashraf Cassiem from the Campaign spent a few
days in the settlement in the lead up to the march. Although the
Campaign is currently not able to mobilise on the same scale as
Kennedy Road it has a far longer history of open resistance, is
currently working with shack dwellers in QQ section in Khayalitsha
and has taken the strategy of road blockades further 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 struggle that started with many people seeing
a local councillor 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 experience of struggle continually
advances the understanding of what has to be fought and how it has
to be fought. This is one reason why struggle cannot be adequately
understood by the (objectifying) tendency in some autonomist currents
to seek to establish the radicalism of a project by diagnosing the
degree and character of the ‘desire’ that animates it.
Autonomism
may be an important antidote for people in the process of escaping
the dogmatism and teleology of Stalinist and Trotskyite socialism.
But replacing the activist as bureaucrat with the activist as psychoanalyst
doesn’t break with vanguardism both in the sense of leadership of
a guru with deeper insight and in terms of the subordination of
experience to theory. The movement of the struggle in Kennedy Road,
like the movement of any actually existing mass struggle, has to
be understood in terms of the entirely non-teleological and democratic
conceptions of the dialectic developed by philosophers like Fanon,
Holloway and Badiou. In a recent article in Radical
Philosophy (2005) Badiou argues that by dialectic
"we understand the deployment of a critique of all critique."
But permanent critique is dialectical because it is driven by reflection
in the experience of struggle. Badiou argues that the materialistic
dialectic is "centred on the exception that truths inflict
on what there is." For Badiou truths "become and remain
suspended, like the poet’s consciousness, ‘between the void and
the pure event’" and a "truth affirms the right of its
consequences, with no regard to what opposes them." In May
2005 your experience may have led you to believe that your suffering
was directly linked to Indian racism. In September 2005 you may
be paying your part of the R350 to send a taxi to Chatsworth to
show solidarity with the struggle of the people there because you
have come to understand their experience of suffering. And you may
have elected Fazel Khan, a man you have come to know, respect and
trust in the praxis of struggle, to be on the Kennedy Road negotiating
team in a crucial face-off with the Metro. In other words the critical
question to ask before committing oneself to solidarity is neither
the autonomist question - ‘what is the character of these people’s
desire?’ – or the socialist question - ‘what ideological line is
dominant here?’ - but rather the Fanonian question ‘what process
is underway here?’. Of course once one is involved in a community
of struggle then it becomes personal and you fight to win for different
reasons. But that is another story.
And there is the shift in power consequent to the constitution of
counter-power. State and corporate power can now only make non-coercive
interventions into Kennedy Road with the permission and on terms
negotiated by the Development Committee. For example on the Thursday
in the week following the march an Italian company arrived at the
settlement and began shooting for a film about the last Pope. They
needed, they said, lots of shots of children. They were stopped,
asked to make a formal proposal, negotiations were held and filming
will now go ahead after R19 000 worth of equipment for the crèche
has been bought at Makro. In the same way the state can no longer
act unilaterally in the area.
But the threat of relocation to the ‘rural periphery’ still looms.
This story of how these events came to pass can begin almost anywhere.
Perhaps we should start with the series of events unleashed when
Chelmsford’s army rode into Zululand in1879, the Maphumulo Uprising
of 1906 or the community struggles against apartheid in the 1980s.
Elements of all these histories of resistance remain present. A
sizeable number of people in Kennedy Road fix the beginning of this
struggle with the altogether more recent shock of finding that a
piece of nearby land, long promised for housing, had been suddenly
sold off for the development of a factory. But most people in Kennedy
Road have fixed it with the discovery earlier this year that children
in the settlement, desperate for food, were eating the worms growing
in the pit latrines which had to be abandoned after the council
stopped emptying them. At that point 2005 was declared the ‘year
of action’ and that is what it has been. But why Kennedy Road?
What the newspapers are now calling "the national wave of protests"
from informal settlements has generally been characterised by a
sudden eruption of militancy, usually characterised by road blockades,
quick repression, usually including beatings and arrests although
there has, of course, also been the murder in Harrismith, and then
silence. Indeed this has also been the case in Cato Manor on the
other side of Durban. These local mutinies have to confront arrests
and people are generally charged with public violence – even 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 spend
months and months in prison awaiting trial. Access 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
seek it – they were initially determined to represent themselves
but after the shock of Magistrate Asmal’s visceral contempt for
the people in her dock – it was agreed to accept support. Of course
the (lumpen?) bureaucratised, donor funded and globe trotting elements
of the left were not interested but a small group of local militants
put up their personal resources and, when she returned to Durban,
secured the enthusiastic and effective pro bono support of struggle
lawyer Shanta Reddy. But this has happened before, quite often in
fact, without an initial break with obedience developing into a
sustained mass struggle. If legal support is a necessary condition
for the development of these struggles it is not a sufficient condition.
I would like to suggest that the key factor is that Kennedy Road
had, long before the road was blockaded, developed a profoundly
democratic political culture and organisation. It means weekly formal
meetings, detailed record keeping and minutes and all those things.
But because these things don’t occur in a separate and self-legitimating
sphere they are never pompous, boring or self-serving. Because there
are constant report backs to mass meetings and lots of sub-committees
and projects taken on in common the ‘leadership’ is in constant
dialogue with ‘ordinary’ people and, often, under constant pressure
from them. In the struggle that has unfolded since May this year
every important decision has been made in collective decision making
forums and every individual or group to have travelled elsewhere
has been elected and has taken the obligation to report back very
seriously. Opportunities for things like travel – whether across
the city or the country – are scrupulous rotated. Age and gender
balances are excellent in all respects. A nineteen year old women,
System Cele, is on the negotiating team. It was, I think, this highly
democratic nature of the organisation 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 perfect civil society organisation 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 commitment to open resistance. The ‘leadership’ has had no
choice but to accept this. There are people with extraordinary skills
who have been elected onto the committee. There is no doubt about
that. But the work of these people remains a function of the committee
which remains a function of the community. Of course this does not
mean that the committee is in direct connection with the entire
community of Kennedy Road – many people don’t participate in politics
at all – but there is a larger community of struggle within Kennedy
Road made up of around 20 to 30 committed activists, a few hundred
people who come to mass meetings and a few thousand who will be
willing to come to a large event like a march.
The meeting can be a slow enervating nightmare. That certainly describes
most of my experience of it. But Fanon, a man with an indisputably
firm commitment to action, celebrates it as a liturgical act. The
religious language is appropriate not just because the meeting performs
the same function as religion in the slum – to sacralize the denigrated.
It is also appropriate because the meeting, when subordinate to
the life in common, is a space for people and communities to become
something new – in this case historical agents in the material world.
How this praxis developed in Kennedy Road is another story but it
is worth noting that having a hall and an office, no matter how
derelict is an important advantage. Other settlements in the area
just don’t have this. It has been argued that the militancy of the
old University of Durban-Westville was enabled by the presence of
a large open central square. At the University in Accra (Lagon)
the student activists are clear that the reasons why political energies
always came from the oldest and least crowded residence rather than
the new blocks where people sleep 10 to 12 to a room designed for
2 in flats racked together on long corridors is because the old
residence has spaces to meet. In Quarry Road, Jadhu Place and Foreman
Road demanding or developing a place to meet will be a priority.
The waves of destruction visited on human communities and nature
by capital are ripping through the world with an ever more frenetic
relentlessness. Everything sacred is profaned – destroyed, plundered
and sold, and then simulated and resold. Nothing is safe. Music,
architecture, medicine, journalism, sport, spiritual yearning, resistance,
the academy – nothing. Most ‘left’ intellectuals occupy a niche
market in the business of mopping up scattered resistances and turning
them into civil society or seeking to mask their singularity via
symbolic subjection to theoretical abstractions. But there are exceptions
– people who, in the spirit of Cabral and Fanon and Lenin and Luxemburg,
refuse partnership, and donors and networking and, above all, the
demand for complicity with barbarism that goes under the name of
‘collegiality’. There are people who are willing to fight back –
not to appear to fight but to actually fight within the local singularity
of actually existing mass struggles. Alain Badiou, an exemplary
instance of contemporary militant philosopher, has some ideas about
politics in his forthcoming new book Metapolitics.
Like Fanon he wants to break with the politics of representation,
sees local politics as the site for this and heralds the meeting
as central to radical process. He proposes no easy formula "To
identify the rare sequence through which a political truth is constructed,
without allowing oneself to be discouraged by capitalist-parliamentary
propaganda, is in itself a stringent discipline." For Badiou,
following Althusser’s reading of Marx, what is at stake is not a
new philosophy but a new practice of philosophy. He argues as follows:
"To say that politics is ‘of the masses’ simply means that,
unlike bourgeois administration, it sets itself the task of involving
the people’s consciousness in its process, and of taking directly
into consideration the real lives of the dominated. In other words,
‘masses’, understood politically, far from gathering homogenous
crowds under some imaginary emblem, designates the infinity of intellectual
and practical singularities demanded by and executed within every
sphere of justice….The essence of mass democracy actually yields
a mass sovereignty, and mass sovereignty is a sovereignty of immediacy,
thus of the gathering itself….The essence of politics is not the
plurality of opinions. It is the prescription of a possibility with
a rupture with what exists."
It might seem that the slum in a city striving to be ‘World Class’
(and that doesn’t mean Lagos or Bombay…) is a good place to think
about rupture. But it is not clear what neo-liberalism as a general
theory and practice makes of the slum. Is it seen as an unexplored
market, a camp where surplus people are kept at the level of bare
life, a prison where dangerous people are contained and forced to
labour or is it, as Zizek wonders, a threatening insurgence of subaltern
autonomy? At the level of pure theory it would appear that neo-liberalism
should be most comfortable with the view that the slum is a place
to keep people too poor to be consumers and that while squatting
should not be allowed to threaten investments, and should therefore
be kept in its place to a degree, the possibilities for huge profits
in building elite business and residential themeparks in response
to slum growth present a massive opportunity. But it also the case
that neo-liberalism wants to reserve primitive accumulation for
the rich – the poor should not be taking land in defiance of property
rights.
Silvia Frederici shows that enclosure and the rise of capitalism
in Europe produced "the ciminalization of the working class,
that is the formation of a vast proletariat either incarcerated
in the newly constructed work-houses and correction-houses, or seeking
its survival outside the law and living in open antagonism to the
state". There is no a priori reason why the contemporary urban
slum can’t be and be seen to be both of these things simultaneously.
Certainly the fact that official discourse terms it the ‘informal
settlement’ indicates an enthusiasm to make ideological claims along
the lines of Hernando de Soto’s view that squatters are potential
entrepreneurs who just need property rights to be able to explode
into action. This seems to have been the view of the Urban Foundation,
an NGO set up by big capital in the 1980s to encourage a market
led approach to development in the coming post-apartheid society.
The Foundation argued that given rights to stay in urban areas squatters
could slowly turn their shacks into houses. In fact the Foundation
built the now dilapidated hall in Kennedy Road and is remembered
fondly because, unlike the post-apartheid government, the Foundation
actually engaged with people in the settlement on an honest and
respectful basis.
But the market never manages to escape the reality of society. In
the real world the rarefied logic of capital has to contest with
the embodied fear and power of ordinarily rich people. And it is
clear that in Durban the rich, white and black, have profound anxieties
about the insurgence and sustained presence of autonomous communities
of poor people within the city. These anxieties are well able to
become a material economic fact. So it seems that the rural slum,
and to a degree the hidden city slum, is ok but the city slum visible
in the heart of the bourgeois world is a disease to be rooted out.
This does not mean that the urban slum doesn’t provide labour for
the city – it does and in abundance: domestic work, casual labour,
service industry jobs, informal traders, people that comb the city
looking for metal, paper and plastic to recycle and more. But the
city is not, in the manor of a factory, dependent on this labour.
This is for the simple reason that when ever there are jobs or opportunities
for income people will come - even if they have to get up at 4:00
a.m. and spend half their earnings on transport.
To adequately understand what is at stake here in Durban we need
some understanding of how the ‘informal’ settlement fits into the
historical trajectory of the city. In the 1980s the apartheid state,
occupying Namibia, at war with the Cubans and the MPLA in Angola
and putting down bitter township rebellions across South Africa
lost the capacity to regulate the movement of Africans. The colonial
and then apartheid city was conceived as a modern space and as a
white space in which Africans had to be carefully contained or from
which Africans had to be removed and barred. When the mania – brutal
and bureaucratic - to sustain this was no longer sustainable people
flooded into the city, seized land in defiance of the state and
founded communities autonomous of the state. But now the state again
has the resources, including, crucially, the symbolic resources,
to do what it wants. And what it wants is to return to the colonial
vision of the modern city. Of course the modern city is no longer
conceived as the white city. But it is conceived as the bourgeois
city. When City Manager Mike Sutcliffe gave a College Lecture at
UKZN last year he showed photographs of shacks in the elite Indian
suburb of Reservoir Hills and said that transformation had to be
pushed hard because Indian suburbs still had informal settlements.
He didn’t mean that he would be encouraging land occupations in
white suburbs. On the contrary his implication was clearly that
justice entailed extending the prerogatives of white privilege to
the Indian elite. And so the phrase "slum clearance" has
returned as the currency of the policy people. We are told, as people
were when Sophiatown and District Six were threatened, that better,
more hygienic etc housing will be built elsewhere. What is actually
being proposed is that the poor be forcibly removed from the city
and dumped in rural ghettoes.
Deputy City Manager Derek Naidoo, at a meeting
held in Kennedy Road on 12 September to try and "avert"
the 14 September march put it bluntly: "This area has been
ring-fenced for slum clearance and prioritised for relocation…The
city's plan is to move people to the periphery". Provincial
Housing Minister Mike Mabuyukula also speaks the language of slum
clearance in the propagandistic article the Department pushed into
the Independent on Saturday (26/9/2005) in an obvious attempt
to contain the damage done by the Kennedy Road march. But the state
has also responded to the march with a different language. Two days
after the march The Mercury, under a heading reading "NOT
ENOUGH STAFF TO CLEAR SLUMS - Land invasion crisis gets worse"
reported that Harvey Mzimela, head of the Metro Police’s Land Invasion
Unit had complained that it lacked sufficient staff to carry out
its work which "involved preventing the erection of illegal
structures on council property. This sometimes entailed the breaking
down of newly erected shacks, which has resulted in shooting and
stoning instances." The deserving poor will, it seems, move
off obediently into the hopelessness rural squalor. They will be
dealt with by development. But the others, those who declare their
right to remain in the city are criminals, and they will be dealt
with as a police matter. The police that deal with squatters dress,
are equipped and conduct themselves like soldiers. They are known
as amaSosha for good reason. It must be noted that it is the state
that has effectively declared this to be a war.
Postscript: As I was completing this article I received word
that three hundred people had entered the hall where the meeting
with the representatives from various council departments (Sanitation,
Parks and Recreation, Housing etc) was being held. 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 labour for local construction and cleaning
work and more. The Housing Department sent a low level official
who was only able to report that an engineer’s report was being
completed and that the consultant would begin his (R100 000) report
soon. An old lady said that she has been living there for twenty
years and that in that time every demand for housing had been met
with expensive research – research into the land, the air, everything.
The meeting proposed and accepted a motion that there would be a
meeting with the head of the Housing Department within three days
or another march against the Department. The doors were unlocked.
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