Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

44
Across South Africa, urban land has
become a key site of popular contestation
with the state and the liberal property
regime. In Durban the steep terrain also
enables opportunities for new occupations
within the zones of privilege, nodes of
spatially concentrated, racialized power.
But, again as in much of the world,
dissident elites have often been skeptical
about the political capacities of the
urban poor. The worker or peasant has
often been imagined as the subject of a
“proper” politics, a politics to come in which
industrial production or rural land would be
the key site of struggle.
Abahlali baseMjondolo has, affirming
what it has called “a politics of the poor”,
disobeyed the various custodians of a
“proper politics”, affirmed the value of
an “out of order” politics and taken the
situation, the strivings and the struggles of
its members seriously. It has affirmed the
city as a site of struggle and impoverished
people seeking to occupy, hold and develop
land in the city as subjects of struggle. It has
constructed a political imagination in which
the neighborhood is seen as the primary
site for both organization, through direct
face-to-face deliberation and democratic
decision-making, and the broader practices
that sustain resilience.
A conception of political identity rooted in
residence in a land occupation, whether
established or new, has enabled the
affirmation of a form of politics that
exceeds the central categories through
which impoverished people are more
usually divided. This includes an ethnic
conception of belonging that, in Durban,
has increasingly been asserted by the
ruling party, the African National Congress
(ANC), as well as a national conception of
belonging, undergirded by a paranoid and
vicious xenophobia, asserted by the ruling
party, the state and much of wider society.
The movement has been able to successfully
resist these forms of division and has
consistently taken a multi-ethnic form.
People more ordinarily described as
foreigners rather than comrades have often
held important leadership positions, while
the movement has been able to occupy and
hold land and to sustain impressive popular
support. But there are significant limits to
its reach, it has been subject to serious
repression, and it has not been able to
sustain the political autonomy of its larger
occupations over the long-term.
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER ELEVEN