Rebecca Burns is an M.A. Candidate at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame. She is currently living and researching in Cape Town, South Africa.
Articles by Rebecca Burns
South Africa’s rebellion of the poor
Motorists in Cape Town were warned last week to avoid segments of the city’s highway where road blockades had been constructed and trash and tires set alight. Local newspapers reported only that the blockades were part of protests staged in the shanty towns lying along the dusty, windswept flats of the city’s outskirts.
The blockades were in fact part of a month-long “strike” of informal settlement-dwellers organized by Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape. Centered in Khayelitsha, a black township area of about 1.3 million, the movement mobilizes those who have erected basic shelters without the state’s permission and who are sometimes subject to violent removals by local police. The informal strike campaign was an effort to protest this repression and demand accelerated efforts to provide housing to the nearly one in four South Africans who live in shacks.
Sixteen years into democracy, South Africa remains a place of dire poverty and alarming inequality. In Cape Town, apartheid’s continued legacy of social segregation means that such conditions in the city’s townships may go almost unnoticed by the eyes of the media and middle class. Referred to as the “dumping ground of apartheid,” the settlements along the city’s highway continue to house black and colored communities in poverty conditions with few opportunities for employment.
Aside from the inconveniences caused to motorists, Abahlali’s strike campaign thus came to a close with few signs of it having registered in Cape Town’s commercial center and wealthy suburbs. The muted public reaction to the movement’s appeals reveals much about the politics of protest and visibility in contemporary South Africa, where new movements of the poor are still struggling for recognition as they contest a government credited with ending apartheid.
Since 2004, a wave of mass mobilization has been taking place in South Africa’s townships and informal settlements. Referred to collectively as “service delivery protests,” these demonstrations bode poorly for the country’s democratic institutions, which hold less and less legitimacy among communities for whom democracy has brought little change.
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