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A ‘Political War of Words and Bullets’: Defining and Defying Sides of Struggle for Housing in Crossroads, South Africa
Abstract
This article looks at contemporary activism in Crossroads, South Africa – a famous symbol of women's defiance as one of the longest-surviving squatter camps under apartheid. In 1998 the Women's Power Group staged a four-month sit-in at City Council offices, demanding accountability for undelivered housing and public services. This was one of the first and most prolonged of what have become known as the post-apartheid or neoliberal period ‘new social movements’. The occupation unravelled into a year of violent conflict in the township and a subsequent Commission of Enquiry into the events. Official documents – even those that revolve around actions taken by women – focus on men acting violently. However, life histories of Women's Power Group (WPG) members tell a very different story about what women were thinking and doing. I first piece together the unfolding events through archival and oral history research. I then turn from looking at the history of struggle to looking at the struggle over history, where women's struggles were reframed in an official discourse of naive pawns of shacklords at best, and undeserving, impatient troublemakers at worst. Women's leadership was demobilised, depoliticised, and dislocated from the issues they stood up for and from the celebrated history of women's mobilising in Crossroads. The case of the Women's Power Group history points to how silences around complex processes of the demobilisation of women's movements – the reconfiguration of power that is not named or acknowledged – plays out in subsequent attempts to mobilise. The article aims to document and extend an important piece of post-apartheid history, and to spark discussion on processes of demobilisation, the significance of the gaps between multiple versions of women's protest over time, and the implications for ongoing struggles today.
... In the colonial era, African women refused to stay contained within their impoverished homelands and rural areas. They openly defied spatial segregation by setting up shacks in urban peripheries, which later morphed into what is now known as informal settlements on the African continent (see Cole (2017Cole ( [1987) and Benson (2015) for heroic spatial practices of defiance by Black women). Just as in apartheid Bantustans, women's defiance gave rise to their move to the "forbidden cities" and formation of peripheral settlements; in global Bantustans, the comfortable divisions are constantly shaken up and challenged by populations on the move who disrupt the capital arrangement of and relations between sender and receiver communities. ...
Feminist social reproduction scholarship has shown how reproductive labor is critical in understanding the evolving dynamics of global capitalism. However, more work is needed to explicate the spatial dimension of this relationship to understand the various modalities through which social reproduction is enrolled in capitalist city-making processes and how these modalities are contested. Drawing on observations from multiple sites ranging from cities in the US to Mexico, we offer three examples to highlight strategies capitalist urban development uses to make care work invisible and marginal: bantustanization, gentrification, and informalization. In light of these spatial strategies that co-opt social reproduction in capitalist accumulation projects, we aspire to rethink the work of care in urban development and the possibilities to decouple it from the drive for profits through cross-sectoral coalition building and solidarity.
... These perspectives agree with both Gumedes' conceptualisation of thought liberation as well as the women's movement, both as a philosophy and as political ideology. Lessons from South Africa indicate that women stood their ground to fight apartheid, yet when they resisted some of the male figures in authority, they were vilified (Koni, 2015). ...
Efforts have been made by African women and other gender-based movements to keep alive the spirit of African Unity and to make the women’s agenda truly Pan-African. This thinking motivated the early Pan-Africanists in diaspora, such as George Padmore, Aime Cesaire, CLR James and the post-colonial Africa leaders at the fifth Pan-African Conference held in Manchester, United Kingdom, 15–21 October 1945. The ingenuity of this thinking was to promote the formation of a cadre of transformative leaders, particularly women, who would then contribute to Africa’s socio-economic and political development. However, Marcus Garvey’s vision of a platform for black empowerment lost impetus as post-colonial manipulation and personal gain compromised the dream of independence, the very basis for dignity and empowerment of the African people. In the post-independence Africa, although the core of the Beijing Declaration was to empower women and create space for their participation, the need to pitch this aspiration on solid principles of ‘thought leadership’, ‘thought liberation’ and ‘critical consciousness’, as espoused by Vusi Gumede, is unavoidable.
... These perspectives agree with both Gumedes' conceptualisation of thought liberation as well as the women's movement, both as a philosophy and as political ideology. Lessons from South Africa indicate that women stood their ground to fight apartheid, yet when they resisted some of the male figures in authority, they were vilified (Koni 2015). ...
There are numerous critiques of Western liberal democracy and its unfair application to African contexts. Non-Western and Western scholars in social sciences and communication are challenging the Euro-American ethnocentric concepts in attempts to de-Westernise the established Western-centric theorisations that have characterised research around social phenomena, journalism and development communication in Africa. This study attempts to explore the ways in which development communication practices in a named state government in Nigeria are fanning the flames of a clarion call for the de-westernisation of Western ideals of democracy and good governance. The specific goal is to highlight the particular and dynamic ways that development is being communicated in a local context, as a way of leading assumptions that the idea of evolving African-centric, context-specific development communication strategies is key in enriching the lives of ordinary citizens. The study is qualitative as the authors examined government policy documents, speeches, government events, programs, artefacts such as emblems and logos, and official signifiers such as anthems.The authors applied a qualitative analytical methodology to the texts and material and thus could provide a scholarly evaluation of the significant practices embedded in these, whilst incorporating their own implications for governance and development communication in Africa.
... Put simply, there may be strategies that go above and beyond the broadest understanding of Bexchange^and therefore power and resistance may not always be two sides of the same coin. Feminist scholarship is again instructive; it catalogs acts that reject any and all shared ground with patriarchy on which exchange can occur (Benson 2015;Lev and Hertzog 2017;Wright 2008). Social movement scholarship likewise records acts that are inassimilable to the power/resistance paradigm-some social movements, lacking the resources necessary for a seat at the bargaining table, do not negotiate; their challenges to power thus do not reproduce that power at a deeper level (e.g. ...
This article asks what strategies are available to dominated actors in fields of cultural production. Using archival and biographical materials on Ottoman/Turkish women intellectuals, we show that they effectively used, depending on their social and cultural capital and their past practices, at least four strategies. Apart from the well-theorized strategy of subversion, they could also deploy acquiescence, collaboration, and defiance. These four strategies, we argue, constitute a two-dimensional space defined by loyalty vs. resistance on one hand and the overtness vs. covertness of loyalty or resistance on the other. While much of this space is best understood in terms of reciprocal social exchange, the assumptions of exchange break down in the case of overt resistance, showing that strategy goes beyond negotiation and that the understanding of power as always-already implicated with resistance has limits.
... These perspectives agree with both Gumedes' conceptualisation of thought liberation as well as the women's movement, both as a philosophy and as political ideology. Lessons from South Africa indicate that women stood their ground to fight apartheid, yet when they resisted some of the male figures in authority, they were vilified (Koni 2015). ...
The study attempts to critically examine how the African economic crisis/challenges and related growth and poverty reduction policies are understood and formulated by mainstream neoclassical (orthodox) economics in the last four decades. This is contrasted with an alternative way of looking at the same crisis from another angel of the economic profession which can loosely be termed as structuralist (heterodox). These two approaches are different not only in the application of economic tools to understand the African economic crisis and policy formulation, but more importantly by the methodological basis of how to conduct economic research and their political economy implications. The neoclassical 'positivist' method and its ideology has been the basis for economic research and resulting policy such as the SAPs of the World Bank and the IMF in Africa. The latter dominated the continent for the last four decades. The paper critically review this approach and outline an alternative approach deployed by economists with structuralist persuasion in other developing countries and argues for their relevance in Africa.
... These perspectives agree with both Gumedes' conceptualisation of thought liberation as well as the women's movement, both as a philosophy and as political ideology. Lessons from South Africa indicate that women stood their ground to fight apartheid, yet when they resisted some of the male figures in authority, they were vilified (Koni 2015). ...
The study attempts to critically examine how the African economic crisis/challenges and related growth and poverty reduction policies are understood and formulated by mainstream neoclassical (orthodox) economics in the last four decades. This is contrasted with an alternative way of looking at the same crisis from another angel of the economic profession which can loosely be termed as structuralist (heterodox). These two approaches are different not only in the application of economic tools to understand the African economic crisis and policy formulation, but more importantly by the methodological basis of how to conduct economic research and their political economy implications. The neoclassical 'positivist' method and its ideology has been the basis for economic research and resulting policy such as the SAPs of the World Bank and the IMF in Africa. The latter dominated the continent for the last four decades. The paper critically review this approach and outline an alternative approach deployed by economists with structuralist persuasion in other developing countries and argues for their relevance in Africa.
... This is the remarkable politicization of sanitation in Cape Town in recent years. We argue that this politicization, a new moment in the longer histories of protest across the city (Benson 2015;McDonald 2012;Thompson 2014), entails not just the jostling of different political claims and tactics, but the stretching and reconfiguring of the urban political itself. In particular, we highlight the crucial role of four "poolitical tactics" in forging this urban political: spectacle, auditing, sabotage, and blockage. ...
In an urbanizing world, the inequalities of infrastructure are increasingly politicized in ways that reconstitute the urban political. A key site here is the politicization of human waste. The centrality of sanitation to urban life means that its politicization is always more than just service delivery. It is vital to the production of the urban political itself. The ways in which sanitation is seen by different actors is a basis for understanding its relation to the political. We chart Cape Town's contemporary sanitation syndrome, its condition of crisis, and the remarkable politicization of toilets and human waste in the city's townships and informal settlements in recent years. We identify four tactics—poolitical tactics—that politicize not just sanitation but Cape Town itself: poo protests, auditing, sabotage, and blockages. We evaluate these tactics, consider what is at stake, and chart possibilities for a more just urban future.
Squatting and the State offers a new theoretical and methodological approach for analyzing state response to squatting, homelessness, empty land, and housing. Embedded in local, national, and transnational contexts, and reaching beyond conventional property theories, this important work sets out a fresh analytical paradigm for understanding the deep, interlocking problems facing not just the traditional 'victims' of narratives about homelessness and squatting but also a variety of other participants in these conflicts. Against the backdrop of economic, social, and political crises, Squatting and the State offers readers important insights about the changing natures of property, investment, housing, communities, and the multi-level state, and describes the implications of these changes for how we think and talk about property in law.
Alternative urban spaces across civic, private, and public spheres emerge in response to the great challenges that urban actors are currently confronted with. Labour markets are changing rapidly, the availability of affordable housing is under intensifying pressure, and public spaces have become battlegrounds of urban politics. This edited collection brings together contributors in order to spark an international dialogue about the production of alternative urban spaces through a threefold exploration of alternative spaces of work, dwelling, and public life. Seeking out and examining existing alternative urban spaces, the authors identify the elements that provide opportunities to create radically different futures for the world's urban spaces. This volume is the culmination of an international search for alternative practices to dominant modes of capitalist urbanisation, bringing together interdisciplinary, empirically grounded chapters from hot spots in disparate cities around the world. Offering a multidisciplinary perspective, The Production of Alternative Urban Spaces will be of great interest to academics working across the fields of urban sociology, human geography, anthropology, political science, and urban planning. It will also be indispensable to any postgraduate students engaged in urban and regional studies. Jens Kaae Fisker is a postdoctoral researcher in the Danish Centre for Rural Research at the University of Southern Denmark. Working at the intersection of rural and urban studies, his research is rooted in political geography with a particular emphasis on the spatial dimensions of contentious politics and the material and political pursuit of post-capitalist futures. Letizia Chiappini is a PhD candidate in urban studies at the University of Milano-Bicocca and in the Geographies of Globalization group at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests revolve around urban transformations and the generation of societal change under late capitalism. In particular, she attends to the relations between urban policy making and hyped phenomena such as the sharing economy and the maker movement. Lee Pugalis is chair of urban studies at the Institute for Public Policy and Governance, University of Technology Sydney, and a visiting professor at Leeds Beckett University. He is an international urban scholar, whose research traverses local and regional economic development, urban regeneration, and strategic planning. He has a particular interest in metropolitan governance and urban entrepreneurship. Antonella Bruzzese is associate professor at the Politecnico di Milano in the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies. She teaches urban planning and her research interests cover urban design and transformation strategies. She is particularly interested in the relationships between urban policies and practices 'on the other side', including participa-tory processes, communication strategies, and temporary artistic interventions.
This article argues for the importance of including the construction of informal housing in histories of the African built environment. It examines the proliferation of illegally built masonry houses in the unplanned, predominately African neighborhoods of Lourenço Marques (today's Maputo) during the last years of Portuguese rule. Officials tolerated reed construction in these neighborhoods, but they saw unauthorized permanent construction there as an obstacle to the expansion of the formalized, predominately European city core. These ‘modern’ masonry houses, however, embodied some of the highest aspirations of their builders – aspirations that increasingly overlapped with those of lower-income whites that lived in such close proximity. Racial politics was manifested as material politics as clandestine construction challenged the divisions that had long defined the city. Informal housing thus helps to illuminate some of the peculiarities of race in urban lusophone Africa during the last years of colonial rule, a period usually understood in terms of wars for independence, but that in cities were also years of surging economies and the rising expectations of many African workers.
This article explores local struggles and social solidarity among women farmers at a small farming cooperative: Hleketani Community Garden, in Limpopo Province, South Africa. Such farmers are rarely discussed when exploring sites of resistance to neo-liberal capitalism. These women have had success in reducing poverty and increasing positive health outcomes for their families and community, in an era dominated by agricultural forms (industrial and commercial) that have generally failed to benefit small communities and farmers. The research demonstrates the potential of small-scale collaborative food farming to support personal and broader social resilience, and draws attention to the kinds of structural barriers that continue to militate against small-scale farmers – especially women – achieving a decent life. Poverty reduction, improvements in health, and community building are among the benefits delivered by this community initiative. Lack of access to resources, policy frameworks antithetical to small-scale agriculture, and worsening climate change are among the greatest challenges.
Graphic Novel Histories: Women’s Organized Resistance to Slum Clearance in Crossroads, South Africa, 1975–2015 - Volume 59 Issue 1 - Koni Benson
Drawing on the experience of the author as an activist working within the Mandela Park Anti-Eviction Campaign (MPAEC), this article considers the way that the representation of a ‘social movement’ serves as a contested space of power. Six aspects of the operation of the MPAEC - gender roles, structure, the question of insiders and outsiders, the question of spies within the movement, the use of money and ‘individual agendas’ - are examined to highlight how power operates through the representation of these terrains. Finally, some of the implications of the representation of ‘social movements’ for the struggle against domination are teased out.
Post-apartheid South Africa has seen the emergence of new social and community movements making demands on the African National Congress government to deliver on its promise of 'a better life for all'. In these struggles, the identity of 'the poor' has been increasingly mobilised, both by movements reminding the state of its obligations to its people, and in official policy discourse seeking to introduce neoliberal macro-economic changes. This paper explores how the category of 'the poor' is mobilised in struggles for basic services in urban areas in South Africa, and in state policy that seeks to draw poor people into agreements to pay for services. In doing this, it explores the possibilities inherent in capitalist society for change and the building of relations that challenge or subvert the dominant logic of commodification and, in turn, of capital.
The article argues that while certain recent planning theories have attempted to take account of social difference and multiculturalism, there is not yet sufficient recognition of just how deep difference can be, and how planners can frequently find themselves in situations characterized by conflicting rationalities. The article draws on a case of an attempted informal settlement upgrade in Cape Town, South Africa, to illustrate the gap between the notion of 'proper citizens' and 'proper living environments' espoused by the municipality, and the nature of the rationality guiding the actions of certain of the other parties involved. This understanding, it is suggested, has important implications for both planning theory and ethics.
Like the reports of Mark Twain's death, the claims of a wave of democratization sweeping Latin America may be exaggerated. Yet the resurgence of electoral politics and the receding of military rule since the 1980s are trends that hold significance both for the future of Latin America and for inter-American relations. The transitions from bureaucratic-authoritarian rule in South America, and from the oligarchy-military alliances in Central America, have been a major focus of recent US policy attention. From the human rights approach of the Carter administration to the Reagan rollback doctrine, US policy became more actively engaged in controversial attempts to define and impose “democracy” in the region. After the end of the Cold War, US action or inaction remained key factors in the events surrounding the 1989 elections in Panama and the 1990 elections in Haiti and Nicaragua.
* This article is based on research conducted as part on the UNRISD Program on Gender and Social Policy in Developing Countries. A version of this paper will appear in Shahra Razavi and Shireen Hassim, eds., Gender and Social Policy in Developing Countries (2006). I would like to thank Beth Goldblatt and Francie Lund for helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper.
1. For an extensive discussion of these political processes, see Hassim (2002).
2. For a more extensive discussion of the women’s movement, see Hassim (2004).
3. The emphasis on the “primary caregiver” rather than the mother or even guardian was a small but important shift. As Sainsbury and others have shown, the basis of welfare entitlements is a crucial aspect of welfare states. Entitlements that privilege the head of household tend to undermine women’s independent access to benefits. On the other hand, emphasis on motherhood can equally narrow women’s access to benefits by imposing moral regulation on women. In the South African case, the emphasis on the primaiy caregiver recognizes the work of childcare regardless of who performs it-an important factor in a context in which care giving is the responsibility of aunts and grandparents. See Sainsbury (1996). See also Fraser and Gordon (1994).
4. Paradoxically, the Democratic Party, which in many respects can be seen as the party of business, has supported the introduction of BIG.
Application of the Slums Act of 1934 is shown to have significantly eroded residential opportunities of black people in Johannesburg. Three case studies of suburbs where extensive removals were implemented highlight the diverse mechanisms of urban segregation under slum provisions. The pre-apartheid importance of the Slums Act in securing commercial expansion, controlling the location of coloured and Indian housing and entrenching separate residential areas for poor whites is identified. Finally, the crucial role of the local state in implementing land use changes in the city is uncovered.
This article examines the impact of structural adjustment in Peru by asking what seems to be a simple question: did the situation of small producers improve following implementation of structural adjustment measures? Though improvement is seen as economic growth, the criteria used to determine that are not uniform. This study focuses on a comprehensive set of indicators of production, diffusion of the cash economy, and revenue, exploring trends among different types of producers, classified according to what they produce and how the production is organized. It focuses on the period 1980 to 2000 and, whenever possible, presents data from 1970 for comparison purposes. The authors conclude that the key is not so much integrating agricultural producers into the market or opening rural markets but rather improving the conditions under which small producers and subsistence farmers become integrated into the market, which will require a deep understanding of how the production system of the rural poor functions.
Hannah Kudjoe was Ghana's leading woman nationalist in the struggle for independence from British colonial rule in the 1940s and 1950s. As Ghana celebrated a half century of independence in 2007 and the heroes of that struggle were publicly honored by street naming ceremonies, the unveiling of statues, and historical reenactments, Hannah Kudjoe's name was nowhere to be found. Who was Hannah Kudjoe and how could such a high-profile, formidable, and well-connected nationalist leader be forgotten so quickly? Employing an agnotological approach to women's history that interrogates the construction of ignorance and sanctioned forgetting, this article traces the processes by which Hannah Kudjoe "got disappeared," and the ways in which feminist and nationalist histories have conspired in her disappearing.
Official discussion and negotiation on housing policy in South Africa was closed in 1994 with the launch of the new Housing White Paper. Contradictions in this policy between housing procedure and delivery target have limited its relevance to the poorest sector in society. The paper shows how these tensions between product and process are an outcome of negotiated policy-making, in which the attempt was to combine the dominant position of the private sector for the commodification of housing, with people-centred housing procedures advocated by the democratic movement. In the second term of ANC government, the housing ministry, aware of some of the limitations of its policy, stated its intention to review the housing policy. This has led to renewed discussion. The paper traces shifts and continuities in recent positions on housing in South Africa. It traces their emergence from within the democratic movement including labour and community or civic organisation, the more recent Homeless People's Federation/People's Dialogue alliance, and the private sector with its influential Urban Foundation and subsequent policy research institutes. The paper argues that shifts in housing finance have largely ignored the needs of the poorest sector in society. Further, the inadequately integrated location of subsidised development for the poorest remains unchallenged. The perception of local government merely as implementer in a centralised programme limits the ability to address local realities, also imposing bureaucratic constraints on community-based construction. In addition, an evasive discourse on squatting does not lend itself to the formulation of mechanism of intervention oriented around the needs of the poor. These limitations in addressing poverty through housing policy should inform future research on shelter in South Africa.
The waves of popular protest sweeping contemporary South Africa are inadequately explained by anti-globalisation, anti-neoliberal and even anti-government sentiments and analysis. Attention to the gendered dynamics of township life, including the nature of households, gender relations and the critical importance of social welfare provisions to poor women and their households, yields a revised understanding of protests and movements. The Durban-based shack-dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo is used to illustrate these points, as are original quantitative and qualitative data from urban townships in KwaZulu-Natal.
This article concerns itself with home improvements – both as internalised process and externally visible practice – in African households in Cape Town, South Africa, under apartheid (1948–1994). It is argued that a historical analysis of home improvement provides an important portrayal not only of the structural changes to the homes in which urban Africans lived, but also of the underlying processes of settlement they undertook. The collection of trans-generational oral testimonies from 32 respondents across three generations of African women in selected households is central to the analysis, affording an original and nuanced view of both gendered and generational dynamics. This oral evidence is used in conjunction with written chronologies and schematically-drawn floor plans that detail renovations of predominantly City Council housing. The research indicates that Africans, and notably African women, did indeed ‘grow’ and improve their houses in particular ways, which in turn tended to reflect distinct historical trajectories. For example, ‘first-generation’ African women's choice of renovations in the early years of their residence in these council homes reflected both their need to fashion dwellings along very basic standards of comfort and respectability, and their hesitations over the insecurity of their tenure at the height of coercive state legislation. The ambitious scope of the expansion projects they undertook in the waning years of apartheid attested to a growing affirmation of their rootedness in the city, as homes increasingly became markers of first-generation women's urbanising selves. In contrast, in a radically altered political and social environment, younger generations developed differing notions of housing requirement and housing need. More distanced from community-based networks and more attuned to the benefits afforded by mobility in a broader sense, third-generation women freely contemplated and enthusiastically embraced future movement to other parts of the city or even to other urban areas.