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The South African Shack-Dwellers

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The South African Shack-Dwellers Anna Selmeczi Department of International Relations and European Studies Central European University Challenging abandonment: The South African shack-dwellers’ “living politics” as counter-conduct Paper for presentation at the Reading Foucault in the Postcolonial Present: A Symposium, University of Bologna, March 3-4, 2011. Introduction In late October 2009, following members’ reports on the workshops or conferences that they attended or the journeys to which they were delegated, a middle-aged woman took the floor of Abahlali baseMjondolo’s general meeting held in the fully packed ‘Board Room’ of the office building where the movement now has its headquarters. She said she lived in Richmond Farm 1 where years ago she bought a plot to build her shack on but for the past few months she had been threatened with eviction and the demolition of her home because the landowner sold the same piece of land to someone else; this time with a title deed. When she resisted the orders of the new owner to move out, people affiliated with the local party committee started to threaten her. Detailing the manifold and humiliating ways they are trying to chase her away – such as throwing human feces at her shack – she soon burst into tears and could not stop crying for several minutes. In their efforts to comfort her, other women in the room chanted a song and someone went out to refill an empty bottle to get her some water. 2 While it did not occur at every meeting I had the chance to attend, such scenes are by far not uncommon in the normal conduct of Abahlali, South Africa’s largest shantytown movement. In fact, with or without reference to this particular event, conversations with members seem to solidly confirm chairperson S’bu Zikode’s claim: “that experience […] was actually the core call of the movement” (interview, 25/10/2010). Almost all accounts of the movement and its ‘living politics’ emphasize the role of speaking about and listening to shack dwellers’ sufferings. Indeed, experiences of their sufferings make up the stuff of Abahlali’s living politics. Equally importantly, stemming from their (re-)conceiving of the miseries that 1 Richmond Farm is located in the Greater Durban area, cc. 20km West of Durban, KwaZulu-Natal Province. 2 As Zodwa Nsibande recently informed me, since the meeting took place the woman suffered a heart attack and was admitted to hospital (email correspondence, 28/01/2011). 2 living in informal settlements entails as a wrong done to them and from the correlate feelings of betrayal, through these narratives the shack-dwellers simultaneously emerge as political subjects. Thus, at once soothing and politically subjectifying, the act of voicing grievances effectively disrupts the biopolitical order that casts “poorest of the poor” into mute spaces of vegetation on the margins of visibility. Often presenting their politics as a “reminder” of the promises about a dignified life for the citizens of the “new” South Africa formulated by the ANC throughout its struggle against white minority rule and reiterated by the consecutive post-apartheid governments, 3 Abahlali challenge the kind of freedom that has been allotted to the masses of formerly disadvantaged people since liberation. Piercing through the fantasies of “world-class” cities, theirs is a cry of lives out of place; of forced mobility as opposed to seamless circulation. In posing its interlocutors against the form of disposable lives that current technologies of neoliberal urban governance impose on them, the movement’s insistence to preserve a close-up perspective on and a perpetual communication of the individual experiences of shack-dwellers emerges as a counter-conduct that contests the material and discursive elimination of the poor from the realms of prime biopolitical circulation. Constructed as “the politics of the present tense”, 4 that is, of a temporality corresponding to the immediacy that the shack-dwellers’ daily struggles demand, living politics not only contests the hollowed out developmentalism of a “Better life for all!” never to come. In providing center stage to narrating the singular experiences of life under circumstances no one can be accustomed to, it represents a resistant practice of putting “everyday life” into discourse and thus reveals the political stakes in the biopolitical massification of the same. In line with the interpretation of living politics as a politics that resists biopolitics and its function of abandonment through a manifold insistence on proximity, the discussion below aims to point to the ways staying close to the daily experiences of its members drives and defines the movement. Following the first section that centers on the Abahlali’s political subjectification, I concentrate on the ways constructing living politics as a space for speaking suffering add up to a counter-conduct that challenges the eliminatory effects of biopolitical development. Finally, in the last section I discuss the conception of knowledge that is inherent to living politics and is directly linked to the process of the shack-dwellers’ political subjectification. 3 See e.g. accounts of former vice-president Mashumi Figlan (interviews 30/06/2009 and 05/10/2010). Cf. Bryant (2007). 4 Philani Zungu (interview, 02/11/2010). 3 4 “We are Abahlali baseMjondolo for a good reason: we are suffering!” 5 – Speaking suffering as political subjectification Asked to talk about the beginnings of the movement, former vice-president Philani Zungu (interview, 02/11/2010) responded: “I don’t remember the beginnings of Abahlali. Besides, I will say, and I have always said it: when the organization was formed, it was automatically formed. I was forced to be formed.” In setting out to discuss the way Abahlali baseMjondolo emerged as a political subject that challenges biopolitical abandonment, it is this hardly definable force that we have to be after. Thus, to understand how biopolitics is politically contested, we have to inquire into what “[t]he necessity for struggle” has been for the shack-dwellers of Durban and how this necessity was (and is constantly being) articulated through the movement’s formation and politics (Foucault 1991, 135). The claim of the present paper is that speaking suffering is crucially tied to both of these aspects of resistance. Schematically put, both speaking and suffering are elemental in Abahlali’s political struggle. How exactly? An evident shortcut to the answer is provided to us in one of the central texts of the movement: S’bu Zikode’s “Third Force” article from 2005, the year of Abahlali’s formation. The article that was at the time widely publicized both nationally and internationally was written in response to the accusations of the government-affiliated media – reminiscent of the apartheid era – that the political mobilization of the shack-dwellers was due to the “Third Force”, i.e. (white/) intellectuals’ manipulation. 6 It is in reaction to this accusation, prevalent in various forms ever since, that the suffering involved in living in informal settlements is conceptually connected to the shack-dwellers’ emergence as political subjects: Well, I am the Third Force myself. The Third Force is all the pain and the suffering that the poor are subjected to every second in our lives. The shack dwellers have many things to say about the Third Force. It is time for us to speak out and to say this is who we are, this is where we are, and this is how we live. The life that we are living makes our communities the Third Force (Zikode 2005, 1). Formulated against the accusation that Abahlali were driven by an outside agency in their militant action, the quote emphatically presents this connection between suffering and political appearance in terms of the shack-dwellers’ appearance as speaking subjects. The “Third Force” is thus defined as the shack-dwellers’ suffering that, reaching a tipping point – 5 Mashumi Figlan (interview, 30/06/2009). 6 “The term Third Force became part of the national imagination in South Africa after it was used to describe the apartheid security agents who offered military support to Zulu nationalists waging a war against the ANC in last years of apartheid. It is highly pejorative and implies covert white manipulation towards evil ends” (editor’s note to Zikode (2005, 1)). 5 “We have said enough is enough” (Ibid., 3) – takes the form of a demonstrative speech event. To spell out this claim in terms of the movement’s origins: the road blockade that inhabitants of the Kennedy Road settlement spontaneously formed after the news spread that the municipality sold the piece of land earlier promised to the community marks the political subjectification of the shack-dwellers,7 where the shared experience of suffering transformed the betrayal of the municipality (the tipping point) into the collective and general experience of betrayal of the post-apartheid regime that lets them live and die the way they do. The movement grew out of a spontaneous blockade; of our radical anger and frustration. It was not preceded by intellectual work but afterwards the movement was formed because we realized that we are not on our own. We are suffering from the lies of the democracy and others suffer too (S’bu Zikode, notes 06/05/2009). Hence, the municipality’s decision to sell the “promised land” 8 to a brick factory one month after agreeing with the Kennedy Road Development Committee to grant it to the community, became generalized in the event of the blockade and the subsequent organization of the surrounding settlements’ marches (eventually leading to the naming and the formation of the movement) – and did so based on the recognition that the experience of “all the pain and suffering” was shared much beyond Kennedy road. Taking into consideration that in the classical tradition of political philosophy the association of corporeal suffering and (political) speech is by far not straightforward, and the role that this traditional dissociation occupies in Jacques Rancière’s conceptualization of the political, it seems to me productive to think about Abahlali’s political subjectification in the framework of his thought.
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