Months after being imprisoned on a murder charge, three leaders of the eKhenana Commune of Abahlali baseMjondolo have been finally granted bail. Their arrests are part of a lengthy history of violent persecution of the shack dwellers’ movement
Abahlali baseMjondolo leaders Maphiwe Gasela, Siniko Miya and Landu Tshazi, welcomed by the movement after being released on bail. (Photo: Abahlali baseMjondolo)On November 17, a photo exhibition titled ‘Socialism or Death: Abahlali baseMjondolo on the Frontlines of Struggle’ opened at The Forge in Johannesburg. The work displayed chronicles the years-long struggle of South Africa’s shack dwellers movement to secure land and housing for the urban poor
South Africa is set to implement an $8.5bn plan funded by western countries to transition from coal-based energy to renewables. The country’s biggest union NUMSA has warned this plan will only intensify privatization while burdening South Africans with debt and poverty.
President Cyril Ramaphosa and the International Partners Group at the JET Investment Plan meeting on the sidelines of COP27. Photo: @PresidencyZA/Twitter
AbM members carry the coffin of slain leader Nokuthula Mabaso. Photo: Siya Mbhele
PRESS STATEMENT
14 SEPTEMBER 2022
CIVIL SOCIETY CALLS FOR URGENT NATIONAL INTERVENTION TO PROTECT ABAHLALI BASEMJONDOLO
On Friday, 9 September 2022, the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI) sent a letter concerning the ongoing attacks on Abahlali baseMjondolo to various members of the South African executive and legislature, as well as commissioners of regional and international human rights organisations. The letter received the endorsement of over 140 civil society organisations and individuals and called for urgent intervention to protect these activists from further harm.
Chairperson of the eKhenana commune of Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), who was out of prison on bail, was gunned down at his home two days before he was to appear in court. This is the third murder of AbM leaders in eKhenana commune in Cato Crest this year.
Lindokuhle Mnguni, chairperson of eKhenana commune of Abahlali baseMjondolo. Photo: Siya Mbhele10 years after the brutal massacre of striking mine workers in Marikana in South Africa, Mbuso Ngubane, Deputy General Secretary of NUMSA, talks about questions of justice and the close ties between mining giants and the state
Communist Party of India (Marxist) protest in Khila Warangal, 10 May 2022.Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
It all started with a survey. In April 2022, members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), went door to door in the town of Warangal in Telangana state. The party was already aware of challenges in the community but wanted to collect data before working on a plan of action. Thirty-five teams of three to four CPI(M) members and supporters went to 45,000 homes and learned how people were suffering from a range of issues, such as the lack of pensions and subsidised food. Many expressed anxieties around the absence of permanent housing, with a third saying that they were not homeowners and could not pay their rents. The government had promised to build two-bedroom apartments for the poor, but these promises evaporated. With inflation eating into their meagre incomes and serious unemployment due to the collapse of the local bidi (cigarette) industry, desperation marked the people the communists met.
With no national force with the vision and power to offer an emancipatory alternative to politics that turns neighbors against each other, the country is on a knife edge.
Members and supporters of a coalition of organizations under the banner of Kopanang Africa march against xenophobia in Johannesburg in March 2022. Photo: Gopolang LedwabaXenophobia is a global crisis, but in South Africa, it takes a particularly violent form. The day-to-day accumulation of insult and harassment from within the state and society periodically mutates into open-street violence in which people are beaten, hacked and burned to death. If there is a useful point of global comparison, it may be with the communal riots that rip Indian cities apart from time to time.
The uprisings of 1976 and the Fees Must Fall protests of 2015, almost 40 years later, were important turns in the continuing fight for the true emancipation of a majority of South Africans.
Even though the 1994 settlement was an important political moment, it did not do much to dismantle the systems that propped up both colonialism and apartheid. The security apparatus, for example, still exists to exert control, to protect power, to protect capital. And the path to a better life for many of the country’s people is full of obstacles, many of which are structural. These are systems that were designed to benefit a few. That pattern remains. Until such systems are removed, South Africa will know no progress or equity.
The struggle photojournalist, activist and jazz photographer has given UWC custody of his archive, with plans to digitise it and start an accessible photography centre.
By: Atiyyah Khan
Rashid Lombard’s home feels like a photo gallery. Images of all sizes line the passages and bedrooms as moments of history stare at you from the walls. The legendary photographer sits in his lounge with his wife Colleen and daughter Yana, in their home in Athlone, Cape Town. The family presence is important to him as they are central to ensuring his legacy endures.
Sbongile Tabhethe works in the food garden at eKhenana land occupation in Cato Manor, Durban, 9 June 2020. Credit: New Frame / Mlungisi MbeleDear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
In March 2022, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres warned of a ‘hurricane of hunger’ due to the war in Ukraine. Forty-five developing countries, most of them on the African continent, he said, ‘import at least a third of their wheat from Ukraine or Russia, with 18 of those import[ing] at least 50 percent’. Russia and Ukraine export 33% of global barley stocks, 29% of wheat, 17% of corn, and nearly 80% of the world’s supply of sunflower oil. Farmers outside of Russia and Ukraine, trying to make up for the lack of exports, are now struggling with higher fuel prices also caused by the war. Fuel prices impact both the cost of chemical fertilisers and farmers’ ability to grow their own crops. Maximo Torero Cullen, chief economist at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, said that ‘one of every five calories people eat have crossed at least one international border, up more than 50 percent from 40 years ago’. This turbulence in the global food trade will certainly create a problem for nutrition and food intake, particularly amongst the poorest people on the planet.
The ANC is so out of touch with reality that it is now firmly ensconced in the realm of farce. The need for credible alternatives could hardly be more urgent.
The ANC has destroyed or severely damaged the post office, the national airline, the railways, the electricity system and some of our most crucial hospitals. It was recently announced that the deterioration of the country’s network of weather stations has reached a critical point. Many public buildings, as well as other infrastructure, have been abandoned and then taken apart, sometimes brick by brick, by people who have no stake in the established order – such as it is – and take what they can, when they can, to get by.
by New Frame
October 1 2021: Slain activist Nokuthula Mabaso, centre, at the eKhenana Commune in Cato Manor, Durban. (Photograph by Nomfundo Xolo)Last night, just before 8pm, Nokuthula Mabaso was assassinated at the eKhenana Commune in Cato Manor, Durban. She was shot six times, four times in the back, and died in the arms of her comrades. She is the second leader in the commune to be assassinated. Ayanda Ngila’s life was taken on 8 March.
Pianist Sibu Mashiloane’s new album enacts the collective dance of South African jazz. It is his sixth album in six years, and a work of many trusted hands.
9 January 2022: A portrait of pianist Sibu Mashiloane. His new album, Music From My People, is his sixth in six years. (Photograph by Hugh Mdlalose)Setting goals is one thing; meeting them sometimes another. But pianist Sibusiso “Mash” Mashiloane vowed in 2017 he would release an album a year until 2023 – and number six, Music From My People, has just landed. Conceived on a much grander scale than its predecessors, it involves 17 other musicians and brings together his music praxis and the theoretical insights his academic research into the identity of South African jazz is mining.
South African jazz artists tend to immerse themselves in art spaces other than music. It is a visual and musical communing across forms that meet not only in artistry, but also in politics.
Mandla Langa and Mphuthumi Ntabeni’s new novels, The Lost Language of the Soul and The Wanderers, intersect in their reflections on the lives of Umkhonto weSizwe freedom fighters.
(Photograph by Thabang Malatji)Novelist, poet and short story writer Mandla Langa’s latest book, The Lost Language of the Soul, is a coming-of-age tale set largely in Zambia and apartheid South Africa in the late 1980s. The novel chronicles the odyssey of Joseph Mabaso, the son of an Umkhonto weSizwe soldier who goes in search of his mother after her sudden disappearance from their home in Lusaka. The search takes Langa’s teenage protagonist through various towns and borders until he ends up in South Africa.
by
Clinton Nzala
13 December 2021
When I read this poem by Dimakatso Sedite, it just blew me away, so much so that I’ve given it a page all on its own! To my mind, this is what poetry is all about. I think I’m in love with Dimakatso. B
I love Adhip, mama, his hair drips of Maghreb sands.
I’m happiness on fire. My madness is trapped on his tongue.
He does not break me like bread or fling me open like scissors.
His chest — a cocoon of hairs — not that stone that sawed my bones,
Not slippery like Galela’s gumboots.
My eyes claw on him as if sesame seeds on a bunny chow.
My love sweats the kind of madness you smell
In dogs on the run;
‘My child, when you love in seconds like that,
your heart will be charcoal within an hour,
twisting in the oven to die like soot,
like boulder Galela who got weary of the yellow
you burnt on his chest. Fires like yours flare
up everywhere, in these shacks,
in Adchip’s Atchar, in men so icy they slide
to the next house with rods writhing
bleeding feelings like yours.
Your blasted heart
will hover over pages of this township
like the hunger we breathe to fill our guts.’
Taken from: Yellow Shade by Dimakatso Sedite, Deep South Publishing
Buy the book here (for South Africans) and here for everyone else
Dimakatso Sedite was born in Bloemfontein in 1969. She trained as a research psychologist and has worked in the areas of child rights, livelihoods and HIV/AIDS. Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in several anthologies, journals and writer blogs. She was a joint winner of the 2019 Dalro poetry prize. Yellow Shade is her first collection of poems.
The New Dark Age 