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. 9 On the one hand, such a reading gives due significance to the act of speaking in Abahlali’s formation and resistant
7 See Pithouse (2005, 12–16) for a detailed account of the blockade and the events of the following days. 8 Many times when the event of the first blockade is recounted, the land in question is referred to, doubtless with the intention to revoke the religious connotations of the phrase, as the “promised land”. E.g.: “It was due to those rumors that we heard. At that time the structures were not there but we heard about some negotiations between the municipality and the councilor about this land which was the promised land of this area” (Zodwa Nsibande, interview 27/05/09). 9 Consider also Richard Pithouse’s (2005, 16) related and pertinent concern about the experience of suffering and thinking radical politics: “The suffering of the dominated as a foundation for the theorization of resistance by the dominated is far from fashionable in contemporary white metropolitan theory. This is not surprising. But it is very necessary to take the reality of suffering seriously because a radical politics must understand that it is a truth of this world, minister to it by acknowledging it and sharing it, and learn from it”. Consider further the possible relations between this silence and what Julian Reid (2010, 394) says about the liberal treatment of suffering: “The perception of not just who suffers, but worthy versus unworthy suffering, has been thoroughly reshaped by a liberalism which refuses to recognize the suffering of lives which fail to live up to biohuman criteria.” Even further, citing Simon Pernick’s study of the history of anesthesia, Elizabeth V. Spelman (2008, 143) notes about Dennis Hastert’s and Barbara Bush’s comments on the post-Katrina evacuation: “Though it was not only African Americans about whose homes and belongings they spoke with such arrogant facility, one can hear in such remarks echoes of nineteenth-century attitudes among slavery’s apologists and their abettors in the medical world about the harsh conditions of labor and the routine breaking up of families – that some people just don’t suffer as much as others, are barely susceptible to physical or emotional pain, aren’t really affected by the rupture of ties to people or place or things”. 6 practice, when conceiving of them as disruptive of the prevailing order (in Rancière’s terminology the police ) on account of their effect to disturb the distribution of noise and voice. On the other, Rancière’s conception of the political ( politics ) as the performative mobilization of relations of inclusion and exclusion appears to aid our efforts to comprehend the ways the shack-dwellers challenge the biopolitical reality of the South African metropolis. Both of these aspects can be approached through further elaborating the notion of betrayal that is central to Abahlali’s resistance. The generalization of the experience of betrayal through the recognition of collective suffering marks the political subjectification of the shack-dwellers because it implies that they reconstruct themselves as parties to the post- apartheid promise of the “better life for all”. It is through this reconstruction that their sufferings are recognized as unjust and their inclusion in the “new South Africa” is problematized: if they are included in the democratic order when they vote the local councilor and the government into power, why are they denied the dignified living conditions promised by the same democracy and the same politicians? “We started to march after 10 years of empty promises from the government. […] The ANC said ‘a better life for all’, but I don’t know, it’s not a better life for all, especially if you live in the shacks” (Mnikelo Ndabankulu, interviewed by Bryant in November 2005).10 To put it in Rancière’s terms, the shack- dwellers construct a dissensus when, creating a space of appearance through their first protests, they assert themselves as rightful parties to the promise of a “better life”; as equal parts of the “all”, whose needs are yet ignored: “[…] we felt that over so many years living in such conditions, but we are not known. If we are, we are not being taken seriously (Philani Zungu, interview 02/11/2010). Exactly this dissensus is summed up in the sentence: “We have shown the world that we know that we are not supposed to be living the way we do” (Abahlali 2006a, 7). They know that they are not supposed to live the way they do because they recognize themselves as part of the universal subject of the promise as human beings: “The power of the poor starts when we as the poor recognize our own humanity ; when we recognize that, in fact, we are created in the image of God and are therefore equal to all other
10 S’bu Zikode (2005, 3) reaffirms the connection between betrayal and suffering as a politically subjectifying force: “It was this betrayal [i.e. the municipality’s selling the promised land] that mobilized the people. The people who betrayed us are responsible for the movement. Those people are the second force”. To be sure, betrayal is a central notion in Abahlali’s account of political mobilization well beyond the formation of the movement: “It’s anger, betrayal, and lies that makes people to go to the street. Because you’ll find that next year we are going to the local government elections. You’ll find politicians going to each and every towns and streets, and making promises to the people and after elections when people are waiting… people will wait and wait and wait for those promises to be fulfilled, and nothing happens. Then, that’s when people will have to go to the street and demand the implementation of those promises that were made by the politicians to them” (Zodwa Nsibande, interview, 02/11/2010). C.f. Bryant (2008). 7 human beings” (Zikode 2010, 02:14’’). 11 Crucially, this recognition implies an awareness of the association between their assumed ability to dwell among inhuman conditions and the incapability of human speech, and thus the shack-dwellers perceive not being treated as parties to the promise of a better life as doubly being denied of humanity. 12 This perception is emphatically expressed by a long-time member of the movement who continued to live in Kennedy road after the violent attacks in September 2009: 13
‘Cause after the September attacks they came, they [local ANC officials] promised so many things, which included that Kennedy road is going to be moved ‘cause there are houses that are built for Kennedy Road. […] Guess what: they’d never come back, ever since. […] They should have come back at least to lie again and at least to say, “okay, we have a problem there and there but we know, we’re not forgetting about your project”. They just… they went like that. It’s like we’re not existing to them. ‘Cause you can’t lie to a human being and not come back to make an apology even if you’re, okay, you are not considering yourself lying. You cannot tell me something that you’re gonna to this for me and then you just like… what the hell, you don’t even come to tell me what happened, what went wrong, if there is anything that went wrong, or if you’re still doing it? No, you don’t come back: just like that. So, to me, it’s like… I felt like, okay, we are not recognized as human beings, we’re just like, you know, the animals, not just any… or, like, the wild animals ‘cause you can’t bother yourself as a human being to talk to the wild animals ‘cause at the end of the day the animal can’t understand your language! (Zama Ndlovu, interview 12/10/2010)
Here, then, is the political significance of the declaration that “[i]t is time for us to speak out and say this is who we are, this is where we are, and this is how we live” (Zikode 2005, 1). It is exactly in exposing their suffering – “we are tired of living and walking in shit” (Alfred Mdletshe quoted in Abahlali 2006a, 1) 14 – that shack-dwellers prove that “they truly communicate with all in a common space; that they are not merely creatures of need, of
11 See Rancière (2007, 48): “…a struggle for equality […] can never be merely a demand upon the other, nor a pressure put on him, but always simultaneously a proof given to oneself. This is what ‘emancipation’ means.” 12 See note 9 above for the selective assumptions about the degrees of suffering. Cf. a scene from the forthcoming documentary, Dear Mandela , shot after a protest in Siyanda has been dissolved by the police shooting rubber bullets: 01:25’’ MaMkize to Bongi Hlengwa (A C Municipal Official who is standing in the middle of a circle formed by Siyanda residents) : “Many of us have been living here for more than 21 years. The people of Siyanda have pain in their hearts. The houses that are being built… the people who are getting them are not even from around here. We are not animals, we are human beings. We would like the City of Durban to think about the people of Siyanda.” (The protest occurred because the official from the municipality cancelled his visit to the settlement scheduled for that day.) Cf. “We are not animals. We are human beings that feel and want nice things. We think. People must understand that we think” (Nonhlanhla Mzobe quoted in Pithouse 2005, 21). 13 On 26 th September, 2009 the all-night camp of the Youth League of Abahlali at the Kennedy road settlement suffered an armed attack that continued in a hunt for the movement’s leaders. Thousands of people fled the settlement fearing their lives; leaders of Abahlali were forced into hiding and the movement’s activities underground for months. Their office was destroyed, as well as the shacks of the movement’s prominents and many members. For a thoroughly researched account of the attack and its circumstances, see Chance (2010). 14 This quote is from the first newspaper interview with the shack-dwellers after their spontaneous blockade (Cf. Bryant 2007). 8 complaint and protest, but creatures of discourse and reason” (Rancière 2007, 48). 15 Disrupting the distribution of phônè and logos : “The victims have spoken” (Zikode 2005, 3). 16
“Abahlali provides that ear…”17 – Speaking suffering as counter-conduct
Whereas the previous section aimed to show how speaking suffering is constitutive of Abahlali’s political subjectification, in order to see how it functions as a counter-conduct within the practice of the movement’s living politics, we need to approach the experience and the contestation of betrayal from another perspective. In fact, we need to return to the shack- dwellers’ perceptions of the contradictory state of their inclusion into and exclusion from the post-apartheid biopolitical order. In his discussion of similar contradictions in India, Partha Chatterjee (2004) offers an interesting account of the dynamics of negotiating service provision between the governed and those who govern. Arguing that despite universally granted equal citizenship, most inhabitants of India “are only tenuously, and even then ambiguously and contextually, rights-bearing citizens in the sense imagined by the constitution” (Ibid., 38) and that therefore they are not “proper members of the civil society”, he posits a different kind of political relation, the terrain of which is the “political society”. According to Chatterjee (Ibid.), the “political society” emerges between the state and those beyond the civil society upon the recognized necessity to govern these people: “As populations within the territorial jurisdiction of the state, they have to be both looked after and controlled by various governmental agencies”. Thus, in the space formed by the interplay between the state’s assumed obligation to care for the poor and the electoral needs of the political elite, the demands of the poor who often secure their survival in illegal ways (e.g. squatting or illegal electrification) are eventually (but certainly not always) met.
15 This is also the context within which the Abahlali reject accusations of violence: that their marches or road blockades, which on occasion include burning tires, etc., are acts of violence. Characteristically, they refer to such public demonstrations as discourse, as “the only language that they [the government] understand” (Zikode 2005, 2). Also: “I have lost count of how many times we went to (municipal offices in) Cape Town, to put forward the people's complaints, who are, by the way, living like animals in this township" […] The only way the government notices us is when we express our anger and rage, then they understand how we feel” (Poni quoted in Saturday Argus , 25/06/2009). Most recently (in October 2010), the Month of Informal Settlements’ Strike sparked a heated debate about labeling poor people’s demonstrations violent; see Abahlali WC (2010) and Pithouse (2010). Consider also the movement’s puzzlement about arresting marching members on charges of public violence: “[…] we marched the next day to demand that those who were arrested be released or all of us be arrested because they were charged for public violence. Now, which public, because we are the public” (Zikode 2010, 02:12’’). 16 Cf. Rancière (1999). This point is impossible to pursue here, but the quoted statement perfectly illustrates the controversial relation of thinking resistance to biopolitical abandonment and Agamben’s (1998) notion of the homo sacer as the object of abandonment. For accounts that rhyme with Zikode’s statement from the context of Haitian domination and poverty, see Bell (2005). 17 Zodwa Nsibande (interview, 02/11/2010) 9
To be sure, such dynamics of negotiation are frequently at play on the fringes of the biopolitics of infrastructure and they surely have to be taken account of, not least in order to remain alert to the ways governmental rationality occasionally becomes diverted at its end- points. Furthermore, as the Abahlali often warn of it, “party politics”, can indeed determine the pattern of service provision or the allocation of housing at the local level where party affiliation of those desperately in need of services is easily exposed.18 Nevertheless, I would argue that there is more to the asymmetry of the state’s assumed obligation to take care of its population and the limits to its means to deliver than what Chatterjee diagnoses by way of his notion of the political society. That is, although he points to a crucial space of struggle where the justiciability of poor people’s claims to be cared for is negotiated, in the context of biopolitical governance the reference to the limitedness of the means to provide also needs to be assessed.19 Doubtless, there are material boundaries to the abilities of a state or a local government to implement welfare programs, however, Foucault’s (2007, 2008) account of liberalism as a governmentality defined by self-limitation centers on conceiving of the limits of government as inherent to its rationality. In turn, with its terms set by the needs of a massified subject constructed as the population, arguably, it is the self-limitation of governmental reason that disjoins or, rather, renders incompatible the subject of right and the subject of biopolitical development. 20 In the gap so necessarily emerging, there certainly is space for the dynamics of claims and provision Chatterjee attributes to the political society, but there is also space for radically redefining the meaning of the obligation to care for the population and thus for biopolitical abandonment. That is, in targeting the “entire population of the country”, the biopolitical imperative of development eventually turns into its own denial and takes the form of disallowing life (Chatterjee 2004, 40). 21 At least, this seems to be the case of neoliberal urban governmentality in the form it takes in Durban. This is the governmental rationality that translates the UN-HABITAT’s program of the “Cities without Slums” into the infamous “Slum Clearance Project” of the eThekwini Municipality (introduced in 2001), with the latter implying the legal prohibition of electrifying shack settlements, forced relocation into “transit camps”, or the demolition of
18 The Abahlali have innumerable stories about the allocation of housing or employment opportunities based on ANC-membership or other types of relation to the local party elite. 19 Chatterjee (2004, 40) writes: “The state agencies recognize that these population groups do have some claim on the welfare programs of the government, but these claims could not be regarded as justiciable rights since the state did not have the means to deliver those benefits to the entire population of the country”. 20 On the subject of right, see Foucault (primarily 2008, 274–275 and 294–295). 21 I elaborate this argument in Selmeczi (2009, 529–530). Cf. the biopolitical logic of “killing to make life live” at play in the liberal way of war (Dillon and Reid 2009). 10 shacks without providing alternative accommodation.22 This is also the rationality according to which illegal self-electrification is deemed “unfair” for forcing the municipality to pay for the funerals of those who die due to the dangers of the forged connections (City of Durban 21/01/2011). 23 Proving that these examples are not isolated, the Abahlali’s yearly mourning of UnFreedom links back this phenomenon of governmental translation to the experience of betrayal generalized through their political subjectification. 24 Organized first in 2006, the event of the UnFreedom Day is the movement’s deconstruction of the official Freedom Day: the national holiday commemorating the first democratic elections on April 27 th , 1994. On these days, while the ANC rallies nationwide, mobilizing thousands of poor people to form the celebratory masses, the Abahlali mourn the loss of their freedom:
We cannot fool ourselves and celebrate and say we are free while we die in the shacks. […] Every year we have a big rally where we mourn the loss of our freedom. And we feel shame when some of us, who are as poor as we are, are used by the politicians when they have to escort the politicians because there are free buses, free T-shirt, free food for only that day. That freedom comes in one day, on the 27 th of April. For us, we talk of a freedom that comes every second, every minute, every hour (Zikode 2010, 50:51’’).
Freedom in the latter sense, arguably, refers to the liberatory inclusion of the poor black and colored people: the ANC’s promise to redress the vast injustice of state racism through adopting the demands of the Freedom Charter and the slogan of the “better life for all”. 25 As the party’s iconic program of government, the Reconstruction and Development Program underlines, this freedom comprised both the provision of political rights and the conditions of “an improved standard of living” (RDP §1.2.10). Overall, the RDP was the programmatic equivalent of the ANC’s universalistic biopolitical project aiming to deliver the sort of social citizenship that characterizes the “insured lives” of the developed North (Duffield 2007). As such, nevertheless, in opening up for liberal (in fact, neoliberal) governmental rationality, it instantaneously displaced its own promise and so, in forging liberation and development, it
22 Cf. Huchzermeyer (2010). 23 According to councilor Nomvuzo Shabalala (ANC), who chairs the Safety, Health and Social Services Committee of the City of Durban “Illegal connections have a bad impact on the Municipality because we have to pay for the funeral costs if people die because of these connections” (City of Durban 21/01/2011). 24 For an account of the way biopolitical abandonment materializes in (mostly the denial of) service provision, see Selmeczi (2010). 25 The Freedom Charter was compiled based on the “freedom demands” of the oppressed black and colored peoples of apartheid South Africa (collected by fifty thousand volunteers) and was adopted by the Congress of the People in Kliptown (near Johannesburg) in 1955. 11 paradoxically inscribed the disjointedness of the political subject of liberation and the population to be developed.26 Through staging the yearly events of the UnFreedom Day that call attention to “the contradictions in our country”, the Abahlali (May 2008, 1) enact this very disjointedness.27 On the one hand and in line with the discussion above, the public mourning unFreedom is a demonstrative event of speaking suffering that reiterates their experience of betrayal: “We are the living truth of broken promises and betrayals of the last 12 years…” (Abahlali 2006b). 28 Beyond this performative act, however, in counterposing the “official” notion of freedom and their living conditions, the Abahlali target the kind of life that the government of freedom implies for the masses of the poor or, better put, the link between this mode of government and the fact that their lives are (yet again) rendered disposable, and their sufferings are ignored.29
[Q]uestioning of the authorities will be crucial. What causes them to turn a blind eye on the poor who voted for them? Why is there an obvious consistency in terms of failure to deliver once they are elected to power? Who really distracts them from recognizing shack-dwellers? Will they continue to think that shackdwellers are to be wiped out had they knew the PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE OF SHACKDWELLING? Would they not revisit their unrealistic policies afterwards? Until when will these policies be used as government propaganda? One day they announce the budget to build RDP houses, the next day they announce the Slums Act as a way of addressing the housing backlock [sic] (Abahlali May 2008, 1). Now it seems that most of our politicians have degrees in free-market economics. They put the economic issues first and they don’t care about the people because they
26 A few sentences from Nelson Mandela’s (ANC 1994) Preface to the program: “In preparing the [RDP], and in taking it forward, we are building on the tradition of the Freedom Charter . In 1955, we actively involved people and their organizations in articulating their needs and aspirations. Once again we have consulted widely. However, in 1994 we are about to assume the responsibilities of government and must go beyond the Charter to an actual program of government. This RDP document is a vital step in that process. It represents a framework that is coherent, viable and has widespread support. […] Democracy will have little content, and indeed, will be short lived if we cannot address our socioeconomic problems within an expanding and growing economy.” 27 “When we have unFreedom Day as well as a new law like the Slums Act being pushed at the people by the same politicians, and all in the name and language of ‘freedom’, we see the contradictions in our country. It is true that we are told in SA that there is this freedom but there also evictions – they say we are free but it cannot be true when evictions and hunger continue” (Abahlali May 2008, 1). 28 Cf. the Press Release of the 2008 UnFreedom Day (Abahlali, April 21, 2008): “On Sunday it will be Freedom Day again. Once again we will be asked to go into stadiums to be told that we are free. Once again we will not be going to the stadiums. We will, for the third time, be mourning UnFreedom Day. Since the last UnFreedom Day we have been beaten, shot at and arrested on false charges by the police; evicted by the land invasions unit; disconnected from electricity by Municipal Security; forcibly removed to rural human dumping grounds by the Municipalities; banned from marching by the eThekwini City Manager; slandered by all those who want followers not comrades; intimidated by all kinds of people who demand the silence of the poor; threatened by new anti-poor laws; burnt in the fires; sick in the dirt and raped in the dark nights looking for a safe place to go the toilet.” 29 Compare, in this context, the silencing of the shack-dwellers’ sufferings and the anti-apartheid discourse mobilizing the notion of the “discarded” or “surplus” people referring to the victims of forced removals by the apartheid regime. Cf. Desmond (1969) and Platzky and Walker (1985). 12
are looking after their own pockets and focus on issues like economic growth, profits and so on. We realize that the politicians wanted to distribute the resources – but now they seem to govern the resources and not care for the people (Abahlali and Rural Network 2009, 22; my emphasis).
In a way distinct from the dynamics of struggle described by Chatterjee (2004), what these quotes problematize is exactly the apparent lack of a sense of obligation on the part of the government to care for the shack-dwellers. 30 As the remainder of this section will show, well beyond the once-off events of the UnFreedom Day, it is in providing space for this problematization that the living politics of Abahlali baseMjondolo calls into question the various techniques of government they perceive as distancing: the negligence of the responsible local politicians or the spatiotemporal ordering that neoliberal urban development entails for those living in shack settlements. It is in this respect that speaking suffering emerges as a counter-conduct; 31 as a militant way of putting everyday life into discourse. Constructed as a space where everyone can recount her grievances, living politics works against the shack-dwellers’ discursive and material elimination from the realm of fostered urban circulation. Referred to as the ‘people’s politics’, the ‘politics of the poor’, their ‘homemade politics’, but most often as the ‘living politics’, and defined as being “about what really hurts the people”, the Abahlali’s politics is built on the imperative to maintain a direct connection, a close-up perspective on the experiences of living in informal settlements (Mnikelo Ndabankulu interviewed by Bryant, 05/08/2006). As such, it not only contests the lack of sympathy on the part of the politicians (evidenced e.g. by the above quote from the councilor complaining about the municipal costs of burying people who die to illegal electricity connections), it also targets the governmental perspective of developmental biopolitics, from which the singular experiences of suffering are indeed invisible. To be sure, the former is conditioned upon the latter: after all, it was through the modern forms of knowledge correlate to biopolitics that the tragic modality lent to the everyday by the ubiquitous attention of sovereign power was massified and flattened (Foucault 2000, Revel 2009). Importantly, however, living politics as the space for speaking suffering is not exactly set against the bureaucratic senselessness of the way biopower takes
30 Although it cannot be elaborated here, I am making this claim based on my belief that the individualizing and responsibilitizing technologies of neoliberalism are not generally deployed in the shantytown, even though their traces appear from time to time. The lack of services and the extreme poverty of the shack-dwellers render these attempts not only futile on their own terms but also sadly paradoxical. Cf. Abahlali’s reactions to the municipality’s talk about the need for “fire safety education” instead of legalizing electrification: “Why is this the thing they think must be taught when we have said clearly the problem is that we are excluded from getting electricity?”(Abahlali and Rural Network 2009, 45). 31 On the notion of counter-conduct, see Foucault (2007, 201–202). 13 account of everyday lives: filling in the governmental gap of abandonment, it is rather set against not being accounted for at all. 32 Perhaps it is the verb attend to that best describes how this occurs. On the one hand and as just mentioned, the space of living politics is attentive in entailing an ethical praxis where everyone is listened to, where everyone’s cry can be voiced and is taken seriously.33 Recalling how S’bu Zikode (interview 25/10/2010) commented on the cries of the woman form Richmond Farm further underlines this ethical mandate: “that [experience] was actually the core call of the movement; to take care of these tears, worries…”. On the other hand, and beyond the healing effects of “providing that ear”; “something that people are craving” (Zodwa Nsibande, interview 02/11/2010), living politics as the space for speaking suffering attends to in formulating a responsibility to effectively deal with the problem that the cry is about.
Then Abahlali, […] they used to give their times to go to that settlement or that area, to hear the views of the people: what [is] their problem? And they used to advice them not to take their problem as theirs; they used to advice how to deal with the problem. 34 So, when someone is coming to your problem and listen, at least it’s a better relief even to you that “at least this person is willing to help me”. So, it’s working like that. They doesn’t choose which place to go – they [go] anywhere… (Nozuko Hulushe, interview 11/10/2010)
Thus, living politics in this function aims to makes up for the negligence of the politicians who are seen to be “distancing [themselves] from the people” (Nozuko Hulushe, Ibid.). The singular importance of human life that this practice presumes is therefore opposed to the mute existence of “forgotten citizens”.35 “So it’s [i.e. the politicians’ behavior] just being ignorant of the poor. It’s like as if you have to sit, close your mouth, just be deaf and dumb, and wait for them to come whenever they feel like” (Shamitha Naidoo, interview 30/09/2010).
32 While this point would deserve a more elaborate discussion, beyond citing the Abahlali’s experience of being ignored throughout this paper, here I can only support it with noting that their being both superfluous to the economy and relatively easily isolated by policing the urban space, knowing the lives of shack-dwellers the way it was imperative in e.g. the early-apartheid era South Africa or 19 th century London is not in the interest of contemporary neoliberal governmentality. Cf. Swansson (1977) and Joyce (2003). 33 “[Living politics is] a very-very important space for any human being that is oppressed in the manner that our members are oppressed. It’s a space where they can cough out all their frustrations. In many aspects, it’s a space where their dignity is restored. Their thoughts are respected, their views are listened to” (S’bu Zikode, interview 02/06/2009). 34 Nozuko Hulushe here refers to Abahlali’s principle according to which “Abahlali baseMjondolo is not the office, it is the member” (notes 09/10/2010): “…which is why we are saying, when people are joining Abahlali, we always tell them ‘we are not here to struggle for you but we are here to struggle with you; the only thing you must know when you’re joining Abahlali is that you are having brothers and sisters who will able to support you in a struggle but they will not do anything for you, but they will do it with you’” (Zodwa Nsibande, interview 02/11/2010). 35 Mazwi Nzimande (interview, 08/07/09): “We are forgotten, we are treated invisible. The government is hundred percent aware that we are existing but he would just like treat us invisible. So, we are the forgotten citizens of this country – for now.” 14
Nevertheless, when placed into the context of the promise of “a better life for all”, living politics also appears in stark contrast to the biopolitical utopia: “A living politics is whereby our difficulties are always next to us, so we need to challenge it, we need to face them, we need to accomplish one day, in order to live a better life” (Mzwake Mdlalose, interview 24/10/2010). Such definitions of the shack-dwellers’ political practice disclose a challenge to the temporality of the developmental promise. When crying “We are dying while we wait!” (Philani Zungu quoted in Abahlali August 13, 2006), the Abahlali (May 2008) point not only at the “obvious consistency in terms of failure to deliver”, they also target the rationality that is by default blind to the temporality of the singular suffering life. Beautifully defined as “the politics of the present tense”, that is, as attentive to exactly these individual temporalities, living politics hence exposes the sensible order that materializes the biopolitical discrepancy between the people and the population. 36
Ya, living politics… living politics is politics that one speaks in order to reveal what’s real. In order to say the present tense. Yes! Ya! I think that’s the right word: living politics, it’s an engagement to present the present tense, especially the poor’s tenses, our tenses: the shack-dwellers. […] So, speaking that tense or addressing that problem, I have to expose it that this is me and this is what I want and how I want it. Or this is how I’m suffering and these are the ideas, at least, that should help me. It’s all about me, the people, and the present tense: living politics (Philani Zungu, interview 02/11/2010).
“I am the professor of my own suffering” – Living politics as a form of knowledge
Focusing on its role in political subjectification and in constituting an attentive counter-conduct, the previous sections discussed the ways speaking suffering renders the Abahlali’s living politics disruptive. In presenting an intellectual practice correlate to this disruptive speech, the present section aims to outline how experiences of suffering are conceived of as knowledge and how this knowledge, in turn, manifests in resistant practice. Responding to the accusation that someone does the thinking for the mobilizing shack- dwellers, S’bu Zikode’s (2005, 2; 4) already cited “Third Force” article makes a clear connection between suffering, knowledge, and the politics of the poor:
Those in power are blind to our suffering. This is because they have not seen what we see, they have not felt what we are feeling every second, every day. My appeal is that leaders who are concerned about peoples’ lives must come and stay at least one week in the jondolos [shacks]. They must feel the mud. They must share 6 toilets with 6 000
36 The resonance of living politics as a counter-conduct with Foucault’s (2007) account of pastoral care would be worth pursuing. 15
people. […] For us time has been a very good teacher. People have realized so many things. We have learnt from the past – we have suffered alone. That pain and suffering has taught us a lot. We have begun to realize that we are not supposed to be living under these conditions. There has been a dawn of democracy for the poor. 37
The call for people higher up in the social hierarchy to directly experience life in the informal settlements was present already from the Abahlali’s first organized march on, in the form of the banner that read: “University of Kennedy Road”, which then was followed by the “University of Foreman Road”, etc., until – with the movement’s naming – the University of Abahlali baseMjondolo was “founded”.38 As Bryant (2007, 25) shows, these banners are equivalent to “declaring the settlements to be places of learning even as they are places of suffering, and their residents to be people worth listening to”. As such – and in line with understanding emancipation with Rancière (2007) as conditioned upon proving equality to oneself – they designate the Abahlali’s self-construction as resistant subjects. That is, the recognition “that we are not supposed to be living under these conditions” entails an active reflection on suffering as cognition, which then transforms into the power to resist (Zikode, Ibid.). This transformation is also apparent in descriptions of living politics as a space for people “to say what they want, how they want to govern to do it”; or as “a certain corner […] where the poor people on the ground define themselves” (Mashumi Figlan, interview 05/10/2010). According to Thembani “TJ” Ngongoma’s account of this self-definition, when entering this space – that is, again, created through the recognition that their sufferings are not meant to be – shack-dwellers assume the power of “that normal resistance”; the power to “use verbal resistance without any backing” (interview 03/10/2010).
I’ll put it this way: once a certain community joins Abahlali, they automatically claim their political space in the society. […] You know what happens? We are living with this inferiority complex that we have inherited from the past. It is quite difficult for an African male or female these days to come out of that shell. […] Now when you join Abahlali as a community, Abahlali educate you and remind you that look: you are a law abiding citizen of South Africa! Then you automatically… that “uummff” comes up within you and you automatically reclaim that space, that political space and you become somebody, out of nowhere! And that is why the government is also being intimidated by Abahlali because they do not know what drives Abahlali behind them –
37 Again, this comparison would require more elaboration, but it has to be noted here that – despite the affectivity of its public utterances such as this quote – the primary function speaking suffering is not, in my view, triggering public compassion. For an opposing approach, see Nayar’s (2009) account of “victim life narratives”. 38 “[The University of Abahlali is] also part of the idea of passing on the message and grievances or exposing the life-conditions. Because what was happening: Abahlali was inviting the senior to come to shacks and live the life and experience the same conditions that we are experiencing. And then tell us that how long can he or she live in that conditions. So, one night, it is obvious that he will get up with one big lesson…” (Philani Zungu, interview 02/11/2010). Cf. the special section of the Abahlali website under the same title: http://abahlali.org/node/237 . 16
for them to be… to stand so bold and say what they have to say without being shy in the face of danger, despite the intimidations. That’s what Abahlali is (Ibid.).
Beyond this “normal resistance” that is deployed against attempted evictions and that displays that almost inexplicable courage that comes with political subjectification,39 their experiences rendered as knowledge also lend authority to the shack-dwellers for altering the material patterns of urban biopolitics. Under the banner of another often sounded motto of theirs: “Those who feel it, should lead it!”, they demand to be parties to every decision or plan that affects their homes. By way of appropriating the discourse of “participatory development”, 40 they insist on the responsible authorities to engage with them – often with success. 41 However, conceptions such as the University of Abahlali, that is, the construction of informal settlements as places of reflection on suffering, or the imperative to maintain living politics as a discourse that everyone must understand functions to guarantee that participation in planning development does not imply distancing from the perspective of their everyday struggles.42 Importantly, the principle that living politics must be accessible for everyone does not refer to translating it into a sort of “Development for Dummies”. Rather, in demanding that the focus of living politics remains on “what really hurts the people”, it is another formulation of suffering rendered as knowledge and as such, it aims to maintain thinking development at proximity (Mnikelo Ndabankulu, interviewed by Bryant 05/08/2006). This aim is clearly expressed in the way S’bu Zikode talks about the risks of their participation in planning (interview 26/10/2010; my emphasis):
39 See e.g. “That’s why, even when we applied for marches and the marches were denied, the so-called permits were not granted, we said ‘no, it’s fine, we’ll still go out to the street; if they brutalize us: it’s fine, but the message will still go across’!” (Philani Zungu, interview 02/11/2010). Cf. Pithouse (2005) and Bryant (2008). 40 As an illustration of their often critical stance on developmental discourse: “So this domestication can be seen also in how language and words are used and abused – even the ideas that came originally from genuine struggles. For example, at one time, the idea of ‘sustainable development’ seemed like quite a good idea that could accommodate some of the protests against bad development that different struggles have raised – but by now, even the World Bank can use the words ‘sustainable development’ for their own projects” (Abahlali and Rural Network 2009, 37). At other times, as e.g. in the case of “owning development”, this reflection does not seem to be at work: “It is important [for] the people to participate on their development because, even if you see the house, already build that house, you see that house, you know that, “hey, I put all my effort on that house”. Somebody will feel proud and is going to protect it, make sure that he maintained. But if somebody was not there…” (Mashumi Figlan, interview 05/10/2010). 41 A recent example of such success is the ongoing project to provide basic services (water, sanitation, roads, and electricity) to the inhabitants of the informal settlement in Siyanda B. Another one was the agreement signed between Abahlali baseMjondolo and the eThekwini Municipality to upgrade fourteen settlements, among them Kennedy Road. At least with regards to this particular settlement that was the target of the violent attack on Abahlali in September 2009, this project appears to be at a standstill. 42 “Yeah, so I think the university is about that: in fact, it’s about factualizing the grievances that in the actual fact, what we’re talking to you, it’s real. If you don’t believe it, come and experience it and then tomorrow you’ll talk a better language, because you know exactly what you’re talking about. Rather than strategizing from the office and impose something that you think – that you think it’s better or is going to improve our lives” (Philani Zungu, interview 02/11/2010). 17
[I]t’s very dangerous in the sense that you seem to be co-opted, and you seem to be understanding this protocol; then you may be co-opted in this politics of patience . Then you begin to say: “comrades, no, hang on, be patient” because you tend to understand this technicality. “This thing is complicated, you know, we have to go and find another architect or an engineer”. […] So, you’ll be the first one to say: “but hang on, this thing is really complicated…”
Similarly but even more defiantly contesting the distancing effect of expert or academic knowledge through rendering suffering as knowledge, the Abahlali declare to be “the professors of their own suffering”. This principle – that indeed establishes equivalence between the suffering person as the subject and the object of knowledge – defines the movement’s critical attitude to all those intending to help or study them.
We know that our country is rich. We know that it is the suffering of the poor that makes it rich. We know how we suffer and we know why we suffer. But in Abahlali we have found that even though we are a democratic organization that gets its power from the trust of our members and have never hurt one person, the government and even some NGOs call us criminal when we speak for ourselves. We are supposed to suffer silently so that some rich people can get rich from our work and others can get rich having conferences about having more conferences about our suffering. […] I want to say clearly that I am a Professor of my suffering. We are all Professors of our suffering. But in this South Africa the poor must always be invisible. We must be invisible where we live and where we work. We must even be invisible when people are getting paid to talk about us in government or in NGOs! Everything is done in our name (Hlongwa 2007).
Paralleling the above discussed effects of speaking suffering, their self-representation as the professors of their suffering or their demands of direct engagement (“Speak to us, not for us!”) are further forms of the shack-dwellers’ attack on the distribution of intellectual capacities correlative to a police order that treats shantytowns as diffusing only incomprehensible groans of animality. So deploying a form of knowledge that seems to overlap with the experiences of suffering and the political subjectivity that stems from those experiences, the Abahlali take their resistance against the biopolitical government of the post- apartheid urban space appears to the epistemological level as well.
Conclusion
Taking as my point of departure one of the signature texts of Abahlali baseMjondolo and the account it gives of the forces culminating in the movement’s emergence, in this paper I approached the shack-dwellers’ political subjectification and resistant practice as defined and driven by speaking suffering. Focusing first on how the collective experience of pain and suffering that characterizes life in informal settlements generalized the shack-dwellers’ 18 feeling of betrayal over a particular municipal decision, I interpreted the movement’s formation as a demonstrative speech event. Filtered through Rancière’s conception of politics as disruptive of the police order, here I presented the Abahlali’s political subjectification as the event of simultaneously recognizing themselves as parties to the post-apartheid promise of the “better life for all” and of conceiving of their suffering as unjust. Second, I looked at the ways the shack-dwellers’ living politics is constructed as a space that attends to suffering and is so set against the silencing and distancing technologies of neoliberal urban governmentality. In this respect, I argued, living politics counterposes the temporality of singular suffering lives to that inherent to the liberal government of development. Finally, I turned to discussing the University of Abahlali baseMjondolo, that is, the movement’s intellectual practice that is co-constitutive of their political subjectivity in gaining power from making knowledge and suffering completely overlap. By creating themselves as professors of their own suffering, the shack-dwellers operate a form of knowledge that stays in proximity to the utmost concerns of their lives, and thus challenge the distribution of intellectual capacities which supports the urban biopolitics that abandons them. While in isolation from the particular governmental rationality that materializes in disallowing their lives or from other facets of the Abahlali’s resistance this discussion is necessarily incomplete, inquiring into the ways suffering features in the shack-dwellers’ emancipation is nevertheless important. Especially so in view of the very technologies of silencing that the movement persistently contests. Efforts to comprehend the operation of a biopolitics that pushes masses of people to the threshold of livable life potentially plays into reversing these technologies. Accordingly, while it is essential to seek answers to “What causes them to turn a blind eye to the poor who voted for them?”, it is equally important to account for the political significance of the question’s emergence.
19
List of references
Abahlali baseMjondolo. 2006a. Izwi Labampofu –Voice of the Poor: ewspaper of the Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement 1, no. 1. ————. 2006b. Celebrate UnFreedom Day: April 27 th , 2006 . Flyer. Online: http://voiceoftheturtle.org/raj/blog/flyer.pdf . (Accessed: 26/02/2011) ————. 2006 (August 13). “Another person dies in another Durban shack fire”. Online: http://abahlali.org/node/881 . (Accessed: 26/04/2010) ————. May 2008. UnFreedom Day: ews from Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement . Edition 4. Online: http://abahlali.org/files/CLP%20Newsletter%204%20- %20May%202008%20English.pdf . (Accessed: 26/02/2011) ————. 2008. Abahlali to mourn UnFreedom Day once again. Press statement (21/04/2008). Online: http://abahlali.org/node/3896. (Accessed: 26/02/2011) Abahlali baseMjondolo and Rural Network. 2009. Living Learning . Pietermaritzburg: Church Land Programme. Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape. 2010. Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape replies to the Treatment Action Campaign. Press Statement (13/10/2010). Online: http://abahlali.org/node/7364 . (Accessed: 26/02/2011) African National Congress (ANC). 1994. Reconstruction and Development Programme . Online: http://www.anc.org.za/235 . (Accessed: 26/02/2011) Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life . Translated by Daniel Heller Roazen. California: Stanford University Press. Bell, Beverly. 2001. Walking on fire: Haitian women’s stories of survival and resistance . Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Bryant, Jacob. 2007. Abahlali’s narrative. Thesis chapter. Online: http://abahlali.org/node/2458 . (Accessed: 26/02/2011) ————. 2008. Towards delivery and dignity: Community struggle from Kennedy road. Journal of Asian and African Studies 43, no. 4: 41-61. Chance, Kerry. 2010. The work of violence: A timeline of armed attacks at Kennedy Road. School of Development Studies Research Report No. 83. Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal. City of Durban. 2011. Electricity ‘thieves’ arrested. eThekwini Online (21/01/2011). Online: http://www.durban.gov.za/durban/government/city-government-news/electricity- 2018thieves2019-arrested . (Accessed: 26/02/2011) Chatterjee, Partha. 2004. Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World , 27–51. New York: Columbia UP. Desmond, Cosmos. 1969. The Discarded People: An Account of African Resettlement. Johannesburg: The Christian Institute of South Africa. Dillon, Michael and Julian Reid. 2009. The liberal way of war: Killing to make life live . London and New York: Routledge. 20
Duffield, Mark. 2007. Development, security and unending war: Governing the world of peoples . Cambridge: Polity Press. Foucault, Michel. 1991. Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori . Translated by R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito. New York: Semiotext(e). ————. 2000. Lives of infamous men. In Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 3: Power , ed. Faubion, James D., 157–175. New York: New Press. ————. 2007. Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977 78 . Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ————. 2008. The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978 79 . Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hlongwa, M’du. 2007. No land, no house, no vote campaign still on for 2009. Online: http://abahlali.org/node/510 . (Accessed: 26/02/2011) Huchzermeyer, Marie. 2010. Pounding at the tip of the iceberg: The dominant politics of informal settlement eradication in South Africa. Politikon 37, no. 1: 129–148. Joyce, Patrick. 2003. The rule of freedom: Liberalism and the modern city. London and New York: Verso. Nayar, Pramod K. 2009. Postcolonial affects: Victim life narratives and human rights in contemporary India. Postcolonial Text 5, no. 4. Online: http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/1078/1027 . (Accessed: 26/02/2011) Pithouse, Richard. 2005. “Our struggles are thought on the ground, running”: The University of Abahlali baseMjondolo. In Yonk’ Indawo Umzabalazo Uyasimuvela: ew York from Durban . Research Reports 2006, vol. 1. Edited by Amanda Alexander and Richard Pithouse, 1–4. Centre for Civil Society: Durban. Online: http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/files/RReport3a.pdf . ————. 2010. On violence. The South African Civil Society Information Service. Online: http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/568.1 . (Accessed: 26/02/2011) Platzky, Laurine and Cheryl Walker. 1985. Surplus People: Forced Removals in South Africa. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Dis agreement: Politics and philosophy . Translated by Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ————. 2007. On the Shores of Politics . London: Verso. Reid, Julian. 2010. The biopoliticization of humanitarianism: From saving bare life to securing the biohuman in post-inventionary societies. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 4, no. 4: 391–411. Revel, Judith. 2009. Identity, nature, life: Three biopolitical deconstructions. Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 6: 45–54. Selmeczi, Anna. 2009. “…we are left to burn because we do not count”: Biopolitics, abandonment, and resistance. Global Society 23, no. 4: 519–538. ————. 2010. “We are the people who don’t count”: Contesting biopolitical abandonment. Paper presented at the 51 st ISA Convention, 17–20 February, 2010, New Orleans. 21
Spelman, Elizabeth V. 2008. Repair and the scaffold of memory. In What is a city? Rethinking the urban after hurricane Katrina . Edited by Steinberg, Phil and Rob Shields. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 140–153. Swansson, Maynard W. 1977. The sanitation syndrome: Bubonic plague and urban native policy in the Cape Colony, 1900-1909. The Journal of African History 18, no. 3: 387– 410. Zikode, S’bu. 2005. The Third Force. In Yonk’ Indawo Umzabalazo Uyasimuvela: ew York from Durban . Research Reports 2006, vol. 1. Edited by Amanda Alexander and Richard Pithouse, 1–4. Centre for Civil Society: Durban. Online: http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/files/RReport3a.pdf . ————. 2010. Presentation at the CUNY Graduate Center for Place, Culture and Politics, New York, November 16, 2010. Transcription online: http://abahlali.org/node/7677 . (Accessed: 26/02/2011)