SOUTH AFRICA: Shack Dwellers Movement

Paragraph framing our approach to this site. Links to OER resources on the context of land and housing in this place, as well as OER resources on other movements / squatting that are not annotated.

Struggle is a School: The Rise of a Shack Dwellers Movement in South Africa

• Tells the story of the 2005 blockade of Kennedy Road which kicked off the shack dwellers movement
• Intimate details of what organizing looked like
• Clearly more of a permanent settlement

Time Period: 2005 - present

“This land, which was stolen from the amaQwabe by colonial conquest and then worked by indentured labor brought by India, is now being sold off, so that the rich can live and work behind high wall and in front of the sea”

“They say we committed public violence but against which public? If we are not the public then who is the public and who are we?” - S’bu Zikode, elected chair of the Kennedy Road Development Committee

“They were the model poor - straight out of the World Bank textbooks. They revolted not because they believed and done everything asked of them and they were still poor. They revolted because the moment when they asked their faith not be spurned was the moment their aspirations became criminal. On the day of that road blockade, they entered the tunnel of the discovery of their betrayal. Nothing has been the same.”

“The first Nelson Mandela was Jesus Christ. The second was Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. The third are the poor people of the world.” - Zikode

“Part of what has been created in common is a community of struggle. Since May, thirty or forty committed activists have emerged in Kennedy Road. They have gotten to know people in other settlements and formed unmediated, ongoing relationship with communities struggling elsewhere…”

‘Imali Nolwazi’ (‘we need money and knowledge)’ – a rallying cry from the South African Homeless Peoples Federation

“In the period between 1992 and 1998 the optimism of a new democracy combined with a state ideology of Masakhane (self-help), and PD’s own versions of self-help provided the political opportunity to mobilise women.”

“VM women learned from many exchanges within South Africa, and from the networks in India and Brazil. For these women there was a qualitative difference between learning from peers and formal training. As one member of the collective said, ‘When you see ideas being put into practice by people as poor as you, it’s powerful; you see possibilities that did not come from a textbook or an expert’”