The plight of the poor is forgotten and the great powers are engaged in world conflict.
International relations & co-operation minister Naledi Pandor
The gathering of Brics foreign ministers in SA, coming hot on the heels of the Lady R brouhaha, has brought the long-buried notion of nonalignment to the forefront of the discourse on international relations. For all the attention this concept has received in SA, it has remained intentionally vague. The media, taking its cue from the politicians, has equated the nonalignment strategy with national sovereignty and economic independence alone. While completely in line with the purpose and outcome of the 1955 conference in Bandung, Indonesia, where 29 leaders of decolonised countries in the “Third World” gave unequivocal expression to the notion of nonalignment, one is left with the feeling that this analysis has been superficial and that the wrong assertions have been made.
What was striking about the Bandung conference was that it created a voice for the voiceless, and forged a common purpose and unity for countries which had been marginalised, ridiculed and vilified by centuries of Western domination and were now politically free and independent. Having emerged out of the ransacked landscape of colonial oppression, nonalignment was as much about the voiceless finding their voice as it was about the escape of new nation states from the entanglement of domination.
Of course, the voices that were heard at that conference were those of emerging new elites. There may have been a greater proximity in those days between the leaders of these new national entities and the people they claimed to represent. But it was short-lived, with the impoverishment and exploitation of the indigenous masses continuing almost without interruption as the native-born elites adapted to the task of perpetuating the political, economic, and even cultural oppression from which they had now escaped but under which their subjects continued and still continue to labour.
If nonalignment is still lauded as a success worth celebrating and protecting, it is because the plaudits come from those elites who have been its benefactors — including the very ones whose present-day descendants in SA are championing its virtue in the aftermath of some recent, curious international policy decisions. The irony is that the elites of all these countries, west, south or east, have one fundamental thing in common. They may have different transnational allegiances but have mutual respect for systems in which they monopolise power and where there is a gaping chasm between them and their citizens, especially those who are poor and voiceless.
Informal settlements give us a glimpse of our future: consistent power outages, potholed roads, blocked drains, food shortages, piles of garbage and pervasive criminality.
This transnational allegiance in SA is complex and fragmented. Generally speaking the old elite, still in control of the economy, is culturally and financially bonded to the US and the West. The new elite, drawing its wealth and power from the state, feels an equally strong affiliation to the Global South and to the nonaligned bloc, or at least to Russia and to China.
In spite of all the rhetoric flying about at the moment, these supposed opponents actually promote the seeds of their coexistence. Unresolved antagonisms certainly fester, sometimes to explosion point, such as opinions on the war in Ukraine, to say nothing about war itself, but more significantly they hide real contradictions that are perpetuated as long as the different power blocs can share in the control of their respective underclasses.
For this reason, the core principles championed at Bandung — freedom from domination and a voice for the voiceless — are more resonant today than ever before, but we need to look beyond the politicians and the narrative that has been articulated in SA these past weeks. We need to look to where powerlessness and voicelessness are actually located.
We have to question the proposition that in the middle of the previous century, when the nonaligned movement emerged, the primary site of contestation and inequality was the global conflict between nation states when it was actually the plantation, the factory and the mine. Today it is the neighbourhood.
There is no better place to find powerlessness and voicelessness than in the informal settlements of SA. Invisible to most of us they represent one of humanity’s biggest challenges and opportunities. It is they, more than any other sector of our society, who face the everyday consequences of colonial oppression and postcolonial state capture. The consequences could not be more profound.
About 15-million shack dwellers in SA alone live in places with a near absence of public amenities such as clinics, libraries or sports fields, and the bare minimum when it comes to basic necessities such as water, sanitation, garbage collection or access to jobs or transportation. Their settlements are also places of danger — from runaway fires to guns and gangs. Every single day the residents have to find space in their already overcrowded settlements to accommodate a steady stream of rural in-migrants gravitating to the cities.
In spite of these enormous challenges informal settlements are highly effective localities of survival. Inhabitants overcome enormous obstacles by pooling natural and social resources. There is an exquisite irony here and also perhaps the stirrings of a new normal. Urbanisation has occurred, or so say many respected urbanists, as a result of dispossession caused by capitalist accumulation. The outcome is the “city”, where capitalism thrives, privatisation rules and the majority are condemned to wage labour and to poverty. These structural realities are indeed pushing us to oblivion. But in the informal settlements we see the dogged survival of an alternative reality — a commons approach rather than an individualistic one to urban survival.
The Bandung conference was a major inflection point in modern human history — the beginning of the end of Western colonialism. We are now on the edge of an even greater inflection point. Climate collapse is going to turn the lives of each and every one of us upside down. And as ecological disruption starts to amplify at near exponential rates, so too will the social and economic consequences, not least relations of wealth and poverty, power and exclusion.
Of course, climate collapse is not an overnight cataclysm that will affect us in a single moment. It may not be sudden death by firing squad, rather by a thousand papercuts, but we already have a pretty good idea of what harm awaits us as extreme climate events begin to affect our daily lives.
We just have to look to the informal settlements to see an image of our future. And for those of us who have managed to escape life in a shack, the SA government has unintentionally given us a taste of what it is like: consistent power outages, potholed roads, blocked drains, food shortages, piles of rubbish everywhere and pervasive criminality. In a ham-fisted fashion we are being prepared for our apocalyptic climate future in which the revival of the commons is perhaps our only hope. While many of us living in middle-class neighbourhoods may not recognise it, our future may compel us to make common cause with shack dwellers and not with the well-heeled and well-connected who are trying to escape increasing crises of plummeting service delivery and escalating crime by paying their way into gated climates, not too dissimilar to whites-only suburbs in the days of apartheid.
This alignment with the poor is not nearly as terrifying a possibility as it may seem to the chattering classes crowding about the weekend braai, the After Tears tables or the home affairs queues where they try to get their passports renewed. Our fellow South Africans (and a sizeable minority of black foreigners) who make their homes in the informal settlements have long since learnt to live in the midst of scarcity and uncertainty. They have become master innovators and find unconventional solutions to their problems daily.
For example, they produce compact neighbourhoods that have much lower carbon footprints than cement-addicted formal neighbourhoods. They are pedestrian-, not vehicle-, friendly. They rely less than better-off parts of the city on expensive, ecologically disruptive big infrastructure such as wide roads and coal-powered electricity. All in all they are not nearly as environmentally impactful as other parts of the city.
This generation of nonaligned leaders have none of the mystique of those who led their countries out of colonialism. It is more difficult for them ... to deflect attention from their failings by means of populist fanfare and by withdrawing into the mystique of a living god.
What is more, these physical innovations are complemented by exceptional socioeconomic technologies such as stokvels and other community-based revolving funds that provide much-needed credit in environments where formal banking systems are absent. They have also perfected job rotational “churn” and “black taxes” — creative responses to pervasive unemployment and mind-numbing, physically burdensome, grossly underpaid labour.
Richard Wright, an African-American journalist who covered the Bandung conference, famously wrote: “The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed — in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting.” In the idiom of the day and emulating none other than Frantz Fanon, the great third-world radical of that age, Wright was referring to the leaders of the 29 nonaligned countries who were present — the likes of Kwame Nkrumah, Gamal Nasser, Jawarlal Nehru and Zhou en Lai.
It is unimaginable that any credible journalist covering last week’s meeting of Brics foreign ministers in Cape Town would describe the likes of Naledi Pandor, Mauro Vieira (Brazil), Sergei Lavrov (Russia), Subrahmanyam Jaishankar (India) and Ma Zhaoxu (China) in terms that characterise the lived experience of their subjects.
The general awareness that there is a palpable distance between Brics leaders and their 3.2-billion subjects, most of whom are indeed dispossessed and most probably despised, insulted and hurt as well, is arguably a step in the right direction. This generation of nonaligned leaders have none of the mystique of those who led their countries out of colonialism. It is more difficult for them than it was for their predecessors to deflect attention from their failings by means of populist fanfare and by withdrawing into the mystique of a living god.
Corruption, clientelism, poor governance, arrogance and greed are by no means defining characteristics of all Brics leaders but there has been enough scandal and abuse of power over the past seven decades for many of the citizens of the South to hold them in suspicion and to see greater similarities between their leaders and the leaders in the developed world than between their leaders and themselves.
The truth is that our leaders do not really have to be like us, but they do need to be with us — and we, the citizens, especially the citizens in the slums, need to feel it and experience it through undertakings, ideally codified and institutionalised, that our voices will be heard and our autonomy respected. Without that, a tangible improvement in the material conditions and the lived experience of the majority is unlikely to happen.
This is because solving the dual problems of poverty and climate collapse requires more than a policy framework and pro-poor institutional arrangements — as essential as they may be. Poverty and vulnerability are also problems of agency or lack thereof. They are problems of voice. A silent population is a dependent one, its occasional utterances wholly inauthentic and merely a miming of the words of those who are in power.
This is something that the inheritors of Bandung, with its focus on the resurrection of identity and autonomy, once overrun by colonialism, ought to appreciate. By the same token, the poor — the despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed — cannot create change on their own. In addition to allies from formal neighbourhoods whose services, amenities, safety and health are beginning to approximate those experienced by the shack dwellers themselves, they need the recognition and support of the state.
Here in SA this is not as tall an ask as it appears at first. Governments are huge institutions and they are never homogeneous. Within the state at all levels there are extremely competent officials, including those who recognise that the primary constituency of a postcolonial state must be those who remain marginalised and dispossessed. Those who struggle for social justice and transformation, especially those who do so in the course of their everyday lives, need to seek out such officials and bureaucrats and recognise them as important allies. In addition to their commitment to the same struggle they have laws and policies at their disposal that have been carefully designed for those lofty purposes.
But neither the middle classes who are in a spiral of economic decline nor the progressive officials who for the most part are constrained by the malaise that surrounds them, are going to show us the way out of this mess. That demanding role falls to their unlikely partners — the inhabitants of our informal settlements. As the climate apocalypse approaches, we must turn to shack dweller communities. It is their collective identity and experience that embodies the struggle of the voiceless and powerless and makes insistent demands for inclusion. It is they, not the leaders of a multipolar world, who provide us all with an identity that can be traced to a conference in Bandung all those decades ago.
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