South Africa

Land and Housing
Thursday 28 August, 2008

I have been asked to speak on the burning issues of land and housing. I only get these invitations because of the strength of the movement of which I am part and so, on behalf of Abahlali baseMjondolo, I thank Diakonia for this platform.

The Communication Workers Union (CWU) and the South African Communications Union (Sacu) have received a certificate of non-resolution from the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA). The certificate allows union members working at Telkom to go on strike from Friday to Tuesday. This amounts to three days where more than half the company’s employees will be on strike.

Mark Butler and David Ntseng, July 2008

The topic of this particular meeting was 'leadership'. While Abahlali has never stated that it is an anarchist movement many have drawn parallels between 'Abahlalism' and 'anarchism'. Certainly the movement considers both the state and the vanguardist left to be oppressors.

Neha Nimmagudda (2008-07-17)

The movement, and other militant movements in South Africa considers Daniels and Isaacs to be political prisoners and is mobilising support on this basis.

The workers picketing the Mbombela Stadium site outside Nelspruit include 500 dismissed last Monday, after appealing directly to President Thabo Mbeki to intervene when he visited the site. The Mbombela Stadium Joint Venture fired the workers for an unprotected strike in defiance of earlier agreements.

The sms’s came fast and furious. As furious as the fiery images we were subjected to by our television and our daily newspapers. The front pages are a festival of beastly pictures of the victims of the negrophobic blood letting which has gripped South Africa in the past weeks.

The industrial and mining towns on the Eastern outskirts of Johannesburg are unlovely places. They’re set on flat windswept plains amidst the dumps of sterile sand left over from old mines. In winter the wind bites, the sky is a very pale blue and it seems to be all coal braziers, starved dogs, faded strip malls, gun shops and rusting factories and mine headgear.

On 28 May, 42 load-haul-dumper operators stopped unprotected work at the Everest mine, and the rest of the underground workforce, numbering around 1,300 employees, stopped work in sympathy the following day.

by Michael Neocosmos, 5 June 2008