South Africa: ‘Poverty is political’

Cape Town, hosting the 6th World Congress of Education International, is a city full of contrasts and social polarisation: For years now, beyond the glittering world of the centres of consumption like the waterfront, protests and social conflicts of the poor are on the rise. They concern the supply of common goods, like water, electricity and living space, as well as resistance against forced evictions, reminding of apartheid times. To find out more about these struggles and life in contemporary South Africa beyond Cape Town’s picture postcard scenery and the official political proclamations, we met with activists from various autonomous and community-based movements in Khayelitsha.

Khayelitsha, which lies approximately 35 kilometres away from Cape Town, developed as a part of apartheid-architecture, is one of the biggest townships in South Africa with more than a million inhabitants. In an informal settlement of corrugate-iron huts lies the Container-Office of our host, named Abahlali baseMjondolo, meaning ‘people who live in shacks’. In addition to their spokesperson Mzonke Poni, a number of representatives from the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, the Mitchell's Plain Backyarders Association and the Mandela Park Backyarders were present.

These grassroots-movements share the principle of self-organisation and the notion that the carriers and intellectuals of their struggles is no one but the poor themselves. The movements support the inhabitants of the townships to take the daily and political struggles into their hands, including ‘illegal’ reconnections of electricity and water, or organising social facilities, like kindergartens. Moreover they call for the City of Cape Town to respect the poor and demand that the rights that are guaranteed in the constitution also be realised for the poor.

Unemployment reaches 60 to 70 percent in the townships and many children go to school hungry. Cape Town alone lacks approximately 400,000 houses and about half-a-million people have no access to sanitary facilities. Distribution of housing and infrastructure to the poor are prevented frequently by corruption and self-enrichment of the political and economic elite. Privatisation of electricity and water lead to heightening of prices – prices that, above all, people in the townships cannot afford.

Mzonke tells us that politicians brand the autonomous movements as ‘radicals’, just to avoid having to deal with the concerns of the poor. This is a strategy in dealing with oppositional positions and social protests which isn’t unknown in Germany either and which is aiming at delegitimising social conflicts.

In South Africa land occupation is increasing presently, even more so due to the desperation and discontent with the government’s non-transparent housing distribution system. The government of the City of Cape Town led by the Democratic Alliance reacts with police repression and violent evictions of the homeless and shack dwellers.

Abahlali baseMjondolo Western Cape supports the occupation of land: ‘For the City of Cape Town to condemn people who occupy land is for the City of Cape Town to condemn the poor. Now that the City of Cape Town has admitted that they cannot house the people of Cape Town they have no right to stop us from occupying land, housing ourselves.’

On the contrary, the commercialisation of land and the excessive wealth in South Africa must be questioned, as do the political priorities, which are predominantly oriented towards the interests of the rich and the economy. As Mzonke Poni points out, poverty is a political matter: ‘There's no way that we can depoliticise poverty, otherwise we stand a risk of making privileges seem natural and normal. Poverty is political and need to be politicised.’

The important struggles of the community-based movements for a better life for everyone in South Africa, their sincerity and hospitality impressed us immensely. Seventeed years after the end of apartheid South Africa is one of the most unequal societies in the world. With their protests the autonomous movements demand a South Africa in which the still unfulfilled promise of freedom for the majority of the people becomes reality at last.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS.

* Carmen Ludwig and Jochen Nagel were part of the German Education Union delegation attending the 6th World Congress of Education International from July 22 to 26, 2011.
* This report was published in November 2011 in German in the member's journal of the German Education Union (GEW).
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