South African Shack Dwellers' UK Speaking Tour

[Richard Goodgroome]

Something went wrong in the list and this message bounced back...
here it is , a bit late, but worth reading and meet them.
(I still think we should migrate the diggers list from Yahoo thou...)

Here is what still remain to attend of the speaking tour :

Benefit night at the Belgrade Road Social Centre, Dalston with Jally Kebba
Susso, Kodjovi Kush, Jah Warrior and Bubble-Wap ft Isa GT:
When: Friday 4 September 18.00-02.00
Where: The Belgrade Road Social Centre, Dalston
Info:  http://belgraderoad.wordpress.com/
Contact: 2abelgraderoad [@] riseup.net

Public meeting hosted by the London Coalition Against Poverty
When: Saturday 5 September 3.00-5.30
Where: Navarino Mansions Community Hall, Dalston Lane
Info:  http://www.lcap.org.uk/ 07932 241737
Contact: londoncoalitionagainstpoverty [@] gmail.com



-------- Original Message --------
Subject: South African Shack Dwellers' UK Speaking Tour
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009 09:57:06 +0100
From: <mark at tlio.org.uk>
To: <diggers350 at yahoogroups.com>

Abahlali baseMjondolo UK speaking tour - between 28 August and 5 September
2009

Who are Abahlali baseMjondolo?
Fifteen years after the end of apartheid, poverty and inequality in South
Africa have increased. The heritage of the liberation struggle means that
today many communities are taking action to challenge this injustice.
Durban’s shack dwellers started to build a movement in 2005 and Abahlali
baseMjondolo is now the largest social movement of the poor in
post-apartheid South Africa. The movement’s key demand is for ‘Land &
Housing in the City’ but it has also successfully politicized and fought
for an end to forced removals and for access to education and the provision
of water, electricity, sanitation, health care and refuse removal as well
as bottom up popular democracy. Amongst other victories the Abahlali have
democratized the governance of many settlements, stopped evictions in a
number of settlements, won access to schools and forced numerous government
officials to ‘come down to the people’.


Speaking tour - Talk to us not about us’:

Abahlali baseMjondolo spokesperson Mnikelo Ndabankulu; General Secretary of
the Abahlali Youth League, Zodwa Nsibande; and David Ntseng from the Church
Land Programme, will be at the following events between 28 August and 5
September 2009:

Manchester
Session On The Right to Stay Put with the Participatory Geographies Working
Group at the Royal Geography Society Annual Conference
When: Friday 28 and Saturday 29 August, 10.00-17.00
Where: University of Manchester
Info: 
http://autonomousgeographies.org/news/100/the-right-to-stay-put-aug-09
Contact: autonomousgeographies [at] gmail.com

London
Climate Camp workshop with Corporate Watch - Olympics and World Cup:
When: Sunday 30 August 16.30-18.00
Where: To be announced later due to security reasons
Info:  http://www.climatecamp.org.uk/actions/london-2009
Contact: info[at]climatecamp.org.uk

Talk and discussion on the New Wave of Popular Protest in South Africa at
the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) hosted by the Royal
Africa Society and War on Want
When: Wednesday 2 September 18.00-20.00
Where: Khalili lecture theatre, SOAS
Info:  http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=124319588628
Contact: WWillems [@] waronwant.org

Benefit night at the Belgrade Road Social Centre, Dalston with Jally Kebba
Susso, Kodjovi Kush, Jah Warrior and Bubble-Wap ft Isa GT:
When: Friday 4 September 18.00-02.00
Where: The Belgrade Road Social Centre, Dalston
Info:  http://belgraderoad.wordpress.com/
Contact: 2abelgraderoad [@] riseup.net

Public meeting hosted by the London Coalition Against Poverty
When: Saturday 5 September 3.00-5.30
Where: Navarino Mansions Community Hall, Dalston Lane
Info:  http://www.lcap.org.uk/ 07932 241737
Contact: londoncoalitionagainstpoverty [@] gmail.com

For general information about this visit by Abahlali baseMjondolo to
England please contact Matt Birkinshaw at matt.birkinshaw[@]googlemail.com.
The schedule of meetings outside of these public events is already very
tight but if you wish to arrange an interview or meeting with Abahlali
baseMjondolo this may still be possible. Please contact Matt if you wish to
try and set up a meeting or an interview.



Notes on Gentrification for the Manchester Conference
August 2009

Defining ourselves:
We are here as elected delegates of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the South
African shackdwellers' movement. We approach each challenge and opportunity
from within our own 'living politics' which the President of our movement,
S'bu Zikode has described as a politics that:

- starts from the places we have taken. We call it a living politics
because it comes from the people and stays with the people. It is ours and
it is part of our lives. ... It is the politics of our lives. It is made at
home with what we have and it is made for us and by us.
Zikode, 2008.

Throughout our struggles, we have found that others want to define us and
they want to understand our struggle according their own definitions and
projects. It is always necessary to resist this and to insist that we think
and speak for ourselves. Without this discipline, our living politics would
die.

Clarifying our thought and struggle in relation to 'gentrification':
We have discussed the issue that this conference will confront in a number
of meetings and, last Saturday, in a camp (an all night meeting). We have
concluded that the idea of 'gentrification' is not one that can really be
said to be part of the living politics of Abahlali baseMjondolo. It is not
a word that you will hear shackdwellers in South Africa using a lot (or at
all really!) to describe their lives or to analyse their situation. This is
not surprising since the term was developed in the 1960s by Northern
analysts trying to explain certain patterns in the historical development
of mostly Northern cities. We know that the word continues to be used, and
that it is used quite widely by now. We know that the patterns and issues
it deals with are definitely important for all of us who are thinking about
cities and who are committed to people's struggles for justice in cities
all over the world. We are very clear that we fully support the struggle of
the poor against the rich every where in the world – in Zimbabwe, in
Haiti and also in England. But, from the perspective of the living politics
of the shackdwellers of South Africa, we want to suggest that it might be
more important to clarify some of the ways in which our struggle is not
about gentrification – rather than trying to fit our story to match the
theories and ideas developed elsewhere by others who do not know our story.
This why we can really get to know each other and our struggles that are
different in some ways and the same in other ways.

Pointing up the differences:
Although there are lots of debates about it, 'gentrification' usually
describes the process where richer people move into neighbourhoods that had
been settled by poorer people but which, for various reasons, have become
attractive neighbourhoods for these new groups of richer people. On the
surface, the results of this can look quite good - if you prefer the
aesthetics of wealthy people and their neighbourhoods to those of poor
people! Buildings get done up and repaired, new businesses spring up to
service these interesting new elites with money to spend lounging about in
coffee shops, art galleries or whatever. But below the surface, the results
are usually disastrous for the poor. They may have lived in, and helped
shape, the 'edgy' atmosphere so attractive to some of these new elites, and
their inner-city housing may have quaint and historical appeal too – but
the rising land, housing and rental costs invariably squeeze them out. So
people are evicted by the market.

What we must be clear on is that this is not the pattern that affects
shackdwellers in South Africa. Our shack settlements, our homes and
neighbourhoods, are under active threat of being demolished and destroyed
by the state, and we are being forcibly removed. We are violently evicted
by the police, anti-land invasion units and private security – including
Group 4 Securicor from England. Rich people do not move in and renovate and
refurbish our settlements! On the contrary they want to eradicate rather
than upgrade our places. They want to make it look as though our
settlements were never there. So it is perfectly clear that elites in our
part of the world do not view our settlements as places that are somehow
quaint, if a little run down. Their view is one of utter contempt, and that
contempt extends beyond the way they talk about the places we live in –
which they repeatedly describe as 'slums' and 'hotbeds of criminality' –
to a hateful contempt for the people themselves. This is the dehumanising
hatred and contempt we fight against. What we have demanded again and again
is to be treated as human beings and citizens who can work with government
to make improvements to our settlements on our own terms, so that we can
remain in the places we live and make a decent life for the people who are
there now.

Often we face resistance to our struggle as shackdwellers from more
middle-class people living near to shack settlements. These groups, often
sharing the broad elite attitude to shacks and shackdwellers of fear and
loathing, can mobilise elite and political opinion against what we can
perhaps call the “de-gentrification” that takes place when we as poor
people have occupied land and moved into areas reserved for the rich. It
seems to be that the armed wing of the state, especially the police, as
well as the party-political classes, are often very sympathetic to these
middle-class voices and can join in this struggle to remove us.

Of course, as the movement of shackdwellers, we do not claim to represent
all of the struggles of all the poor. We are aware of the struggles that
have had to be fought by people living in blocks of flats in the inner city
of Johannesburg who face violent and frankly illegal evictions in a process
that might be closer to 'gentrification'. But even there, what is happening
cannot be seen as some sort of 'natural' process arising from the movement
and changes in different social groups of Johannesburg– it is a malicious
and aggressive project of the local state, backed by big business, private
security and the thinking of the World Bank.

Suggesting possible commonalities:
It does not surprise us to learn that, although the poor of other cities
experience different patterns to ours, many of the results look more or
less similar. It comes as no surprise that other cities also experience the
process of elite projects trumping democratic ones; of rich and powerful
people benefiting, and of the poor being pushed aside and right outside the
cities. We, as Abahlali, have seen very clearly how our world is made to
extract land and labour and life from the poor to benefit a small group of
the rich and powerful. We have seen how, in practice, this has turned the
idea of 'development' into a war against the poor; it has fertilised the
elite fantasy idea of the 'world class city' where the poor have no place,
no voice. We reject this in Durban and we reject this everywhere.

We are therefore sure that we can find strength and solidarity with all
other genuine and grassroots movements of poor people in cities all over
the world, including those who organise and fight to resist
gentrification's pernicious effects on them. Where resistance and
contestation of these processes by the poor becomes a common, popular and
political project forged in the minds and hands of poor people themselves,
there we know we will find true comrades in a living politics that asserts
the right of everyone to the city. We will support this politics full
force.

We know too that gentrification is not only a threat against the
long-established neighbourhoods of the poor. It is also a threat against
spaces in the city that have been taken and appropriated by those who are
not counted in the official order of things. Many young people in cities of
the North who are called 'squatters' have already understood the importance
of our own struggles in South Africa, and they have, like the Camberwell
Social Centre, found important ways of being in solidarity with us as
Abahlali. From their own experiences, they know a lot about evictions and
the violence of the state that is unleashed against both them and us. Some
of them have come to live and struggle with us for a while. They have been
there when the police come to evict us, or when the fires race through our
settlements. They are our comrades. We are talking about people like
Antonios Vradis and Matt Birkinshaw.

Our movement is a scandal for the rich and the state. Perhaps the biggest
scandal of a movement like Abahlali baseMjondolo is our refusal to accept
this place of having no place and our insistence that everyone counts –
and that refusal is made every-time and every-where that people resist
being pushed away and aside by the rich and powerful. We like this idea of
the ‘right to say put’. We like it a lot.
resisting gentrification of our struggle

So there are differences and commonalities but we also can't help wondering
whether what we might call “resistance against the gentrification of our
struggle” isn't one of the most interesting conversations to have. What
we mean is something like this:
- though our struggle/s, we create new political spaces for contesting
power;
- this inevitably creates speculative interest from professional
vanguardist 'activists' and 'civil society' looking for constituencies to
populate their imagined fantasies of resistance and revolution; 
- they try by all means to invade and take over (often with offers of
money) the space our struggle opened up and;
- unless we sustain a living politics militantly resisting against this
onslaught, the result looks very much like what the academics describe as
the result of gentrification: namely;
- the poor get moved out once again, but the quaint and edgy appeal of the
spaces they created has a residual value for the professional activist
class who occupy it through their superior access to various international
currencies – sometimes quite literally, greater resources and money, but
also other currencies of organisational and patronage networks, media and
communication technology that can 'represent' people's issues and struggles
with no accountability to or insertion in the actual movements themselves
that are the currency of 'civil society's' claims to legitimacy, and
relevance.

This is why we said at the beginning:
- we have found that others want to define us and they want to understand
our struggle according their own definitions and projects. It is always
necessary to resist this and to insist that we think and speak for
ourselves. Without this discipline, our living politics would die.