RICHARD PITHOUSE | From state, to party, to the mob

Abahlali baseMjondolo has more than 180,000 members in good standing, mostly people who live in shacks in cities and smaller towns, though there are a few rural branches in the Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga.

It has always explained itself to itself as ibutho labampofu, the movement of the poor, but increasingly also describes itself as an organisation of abantu abahluphekayo, people who suffer.

The movement was formed in 2005 and its trajectory over the past 20 years illuminates the changing nature of the challenges for grassroots organisations and our wider condition. Its formation followed the protests that swept the country in 2004. At the time they were more or less uniformly deemed to be “service delivery protests” by the media, universities and NGOs. Today there is an ongoing academic debate about whether they were a “rebellion of the poor” or a tactic used in the competition for power within local ANC structures.

When, on a Saturday morning in March 2005, the wave of protest reached Durban in the form of a huge road blockade, it was neither a demand for service delivery nor a move in a battle within the ANC. The immediate trigger for the protest was that a plot of land promised for housing for people in the Kennedy Road shack settlement had been sold to a local businessman.

The wider context that led to the local conflict sparking protest across nearby shack settlements was that in 2001 the new eThekwini municipality had launched a Slum Clearance Project with the aim of turning Durban into a “shack-free city”. As a result the state’s housing programme was taking the form of violently destroying shack settlements, leaving renters, single men and people without children homeless, and forcibly removing shack owners to new housing developments far outside the city. For many people a well-located shack was a more viable prospect than a tiny, badly constructed house far beyond the urban periphery.

When the state’s housing programme moved from PowerPoint and spreadsheets to the point of implementation it was chaotic and corrupt and, at times, carried out at gunpoint. People’s futures could be decided in a moment and on a whim, or because they had a chicken to hand over to the person deciding who got onto a truck. But the state had a plan and was driving it forward. It was the state making decisions about land use, and in the 10 years from the end of apartheid to the beginning of regular popular protest in 2004 it had built 1.6-million houses.

There were striking resonances with Frantz Fanon’s blistering critique of former liberation movements taken over by people whose ‘innermost vocation seems to be to keep in the running and to be part of the racket’

The people who formed Abahlali baseMjondolo proposed a clear alternative — they wanted existing shack settlements to be upgraded via a consultative process and nobody to be forced to accept relocation to what they called “the human dumping grounds” beyond the urban periphery.

The state was never the only dramatis personae. In its early years the movement also fought an intense battle against a gangster in Pinetown who, with the support of local police and politicians, was evicting people, appropriating land and building homes to rent and sell. The ANC could only understand the growing protest via conspiracy theories about “sinister forces” — imagined to be white — working for “foreign governments”.

However, the movement’s primary antagonist was clearly the state, and it soon found itself in direct conflict with the city manager Mike Sutcliffe. He sought to prevent the growing movement from exercising its legal right to protest and repression was mercilessly meted out by the police, who harassed, beat and arrested people. People were left with life-changing injuries, but nobody was killed. Some of the repression, including the torture of the movement’s two senior leaders in a police station, followed slander and direct threats from senior people in the ANC, but the primary focus of the movement’s struggle was against the state’s housing programme.

At this point the situation could be usefully understood by the work of James C Scott, who argued modernising states seek to render society legible by simplifying complex social practices into administratively manageable categories that ignore the practical, lived knowledge embedded in everyday social life. “Authoritarian high-modernist states in the grip of a self-evident (and usually half-baked) social theory” have, he concluded, “done irreparable damage to human communities and individual livelihoods”.

A new kind of politics — ethnic, authoritarian and predatory — had begun to emerge in Durban during Jacob Zuma’s rape trial in 2006. It moved to the centre of the city’s politics after Zuma became president and the movement entered a new period when, in September 2009, a group of men, armed, primed with alcohol and identifying themselves as ANC and Zulu, attacked the leaders of the multi-ethnic movement in the Kennedy Road settlement.

The attack was preceded by threatening statements from John Mchunu, then chairperson of the ANC in Durban, and later endorsed by senior figures in the provincial ANC. Willies Mchunu, at the time a provincial MEC, declared Kennedy Road had been “liberated”.

The attempts to seize land by the gangster in Pinetown had been repulsed, and though there were still battles with the state the movement’s primary antagonist was the ANC. The feeling was mutual, as the party’s local leaders were increasingly more concerned with who exercised political control over shack settlements rather than working to implement official state policy. Money was being allocated to build houses, but much of it was being looted, with some returned to the ANC.

In 2013 the movement lost its first leader to assassination when Nkulukelo Gwala was murdered hours after being publicly threatened by Sibongiseni Dhlomo, then chairperson of the ANC in Durban. For the next decade or so the killings that followed emerged from the intersection of local party politics and local networks aimed at seizing land for private profit. In this period there were striking resonances with Frantz Fanon’s blistering critique of former liberation movements taken over by people whose “innermost vocation seems to be to keep in the running and to be part of the racket”.

Residents report five different mafias were competing to sell land in the occupation, with the two most powerful linked to the taxi industry and men calling themselves izinduna and linked to the hostels. No political party is involved

The state did intervene against growing repression on two occasions. When Nqobile Nzuza, a 19-year-old member of the movement, was murdered by a police officer, an arrest was made and a conviction secured. After Thuli Ndlovu, a movement leader, was assassinated in 2014, two ANC ward councillors were arrested and convicted for her murder.

At the same time a new antagonist emerged on the North Coast, where there were attempts to evict people from shack settlements that had formed around the gated enclaves that have been rapidly growing as the wealthy move ever further from the city. The ANC backed the wealthy residents but was not the driving forced in trying to evict.

Now the movement has suffered its first assassination in three years, and its first in Johannesburg. Zweli Mkhize, known as Khabazela, was assassinated in the eNkanini occupation, on the edge of Thembisa near Midrand, on February 12.

Residents report five different mafias were competing to sell land in the occupation, with the two most powerful linked to the taxi industry and men calling themselves izinduna and linked to the hostels. No political party is involved. The state is only mentioned as an episodic and violent actor that occasionally sends in armed men to evict.

Here the movement is dealing with what Achille Mbembe calls “private indirect government”. For Mbembe, sovereignty in postcolonial societies fragments rather than collapsing as authority disperses across informal brokers, party structures, businessmen, militias and rackets.

Looking at the past 20 years from the perspective of Abahlali baseMjondolo there is a clear and alarming trajectory. The state, once an ambitiously modernising project, has steadily abandoned those ambitious to predatory forces in the ANC which are now, in some parts of what we could call the zones of abandonment, being displaced by well-armed mafias.

At the same time the rich are barricading themselves into well-armed enclaves. This is not a neat trajectory — and these forces are often simultaneously present in different ways and combinations — but it does capture the broad trajectory that is taking us into a future much more like the current realities of some Central and South American countries than the modernising hopes that once animated the South African state.

• Pithouse is a distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies in Dublin and New York, an international research scholar at the University of Connecticut, and an extraordinary professor at the University of the Western Cape.