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. All that seems new are the police cars and, round the corner from the Harry Gwala shack settlement, a double story facebrick strip club.

But even here the battle for land continues. The poor are loosing their grip on the scattered bits of land which they took in defiance of apartheid more than twenty years ago. The state is, again, sending in bulldozers and men with guns to move the poor from central shack settlements to peripheral townships. In every relocation many are simply left homeless. It is very difficult to resist the armed force of the state but people do what they can. Officials are often stoned. In principle the courts should provide relief from evictions that are not just illegal but are in fact criminal acts under South African law. There have been notable successes but it is often difficult to get pro bono legal support, legal processes are slow and the evictions continue.

In the Harry Gwala settlement the poorest women are on their hands and knees searching for bits of coal to bake into lumps of clay to keep the braziers burning. S’bu Zikode from Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban and Ashraf Cassiem from the Anti-Eviction Campaign in Cape Town are here to meet with the Harry Gwala branch of the Landless People’s Movement. These are all poor people’s movements that have been criminalised and violently attacked by the state. The meeting is to discuss strategies for holding onto the urban land that keeps people close to work, schools, libraries and all the other benefits of city life. This is what it has come down to. Militancy is about holding onto what was taken from apartheid.

“Leaders are meant to lead and to be led [by those who elected them]” - Lindela Figlan, Abahlali baseMjondolo movement

Fourteen years since the transition to democracy, leadership in South Africa is in a state of flux—and South Africans know a thing or two about leaders. For every Mandela, after all, there is an Mbeki. In his seven years of presidency, Mbeki has mistaken denialism for leadership and appeasement for diplomacy. The liberation victors in the ANC have tied up the ruling party in its own historical mythologizing, determined to hold its grasp on the state. Now, for every Mbeki, there is the possibility of a Zuma.

In May, immigrants living in the townships and shack settlements of South Africa woke to find that they no longer had a place in their adopted homeland, as their neighbors chased them out of their houses and shops. Yet for ten days while pogroms burned, their country’s leader was nowhere to be found. Even afterwards, Mbeki and other leaders, in failing to acknowledge the profoundly xenophobic nature of the state, and blaming the violence on the poor themselves, did little to calm the storm. Thousands have since left in mass exodus.

Of course, turning to neighboring Zimbabwe to provide a shining example of good leadership in this dearth finds none as Robert Mugabe and his military junta continue their absurdist drama: struggle heroes turned autocrats, fighting their own people instead of fighting for them. For South Africans, whose roster of liberation fighters reads off names like Tambo, Sisulu, Biko, First and Hani, the present situation is somewhat of an anomaly.

But in midst of this crisis, hope for a new kind of leadership can be found in an unlikely place: the Kennedy Road shack settlement , in Clare Estate, Durban. In the middle of a Saturday night in June, a group of thirty odd women and men , some as young as 17, has gathered in a small room that serves as a community-driven crèche during the week. They are here to induct newly elected leaders of their organization of shack-dwellers who collectively call themselves Abahlali baseMjondolo. The Abahlali, since emerging in 2005, has grown to become the largest social movement in the country, with members in more than 40 settlements and over 30,000 active supporters in the province of KwaZulu-Natal.

Mandela is, in some ways the perfect embodiment of post colonial Africa, a continent blessed with so many possibilities but consistently producing so much disappointment. The African dream of liberation has become a long nightmare. As Mandela turns 90 the country he helped found some 14 years ago is in a mighty mess. Its hatred of black people has reached the apex with the mass slaughtering and displacement of black Africans (apparently a good 20 or more of the more than 60 dead are South Africans). Post 1994, has been much celebrated for the benefits it bestowed upon a few, silence has befallen the fate of the black majority which has been bequeathed a bestial existence.

Mandela’s 85th birth day was a Coca Cola affair. The multinational corporation was given full rights to throw a party for our founding father. Coke milked his name dry, everything was branded, serviettes to programme - the whole affair was televised live. This forced a friend to remark that we need another “Free Nelson Mandela Campaign." At 90 Mandela must be allowed his well deserved rest. But it’s hard to think of this likable man of the 20th century Africa outside politics. He is resistance, Robben Island, freedom, magnanimity, compromise and hope for many, but what is his real legacy?

A few years ago Chinweizu wondered loudly about the icon of liberation who voluntarily builds his house as a replica of the prison house he was kept him during the last days towards his release. Who build a prison for a house? Our Mandela is a symbol, like his country, of things shiny and good and things horrendous.

Prof Wole Soyinka was moved to comment on the “soulless truly horrendous” sculpture of Mandela which presides over the Mandela Square in Sandton our Mecca of consumption, which lives cheek by jowl with the sprawling Alexandra township. Sandton feeds on the blood of Alexandra, the place from which the recent spade of Negrophobic attacks emanates. Cornel West, firstly praised Mandela as a the Socratic spirit of “going against the grain” then on reflection from the distance of the USA he warned against the “Santa Clausification of Mandela - Big smile, domesticated, tamed, defanged with toys in a bag."

At 90 Mandela is all these things, but more, he is the African dream that never became. His 90th bash will be held in London, what the official website says is his second home, images of Toussaint Louverture perishing in the loving embrace of his friend Napoleon Bonaparte flashes by. Now we wait for Barak Obama to conclude a circle started in 1994 in South Africa, White Supremacy today needs a little melanin too. Black suicide is endemic, 1803 it was Haiti, 1994 South Africa, and maybe 2008 December the USA. Happy 90 Tata!

*Andile Mngxitama is a Johannesburg based land rights activist and member of the We write editorial collective.

*Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

A pregnant Congolese woman was beaten by private security guards hired by the eThekwini municipality on Thursday evening as foreign nationals displaced by xenophobia staged a sit-in on the steps of Durban's City Hall.

Metro Police on Firday arrested and forcibly removed more than 190 foreign refugees who had camped at the back entrance of Durban City Hall for two days. The group, which was made up predominantly of children with their mothers, had been trying to get some sort of assistance from the council but after a last warning to disperse, some began handing themselves over to police. Others were forcibly removed and all were taken away in Metro Police vans.

Somewhere in the dark in Albert Park are about 120 refugees, mostly women and young children. These are not young jobseekers from Mozambique and Malawi, doing the African renaissance equivalent of a post-degree work holiday in London. These are documented refugees from the worst civil war of the last decade - a war that has already claimed 4 million lives. A war, as Human Rights Watch has already documented, funded in part by South African mining companies paying warlords in the Congo for the right to plunder the local mineral wealth.

The lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) supporters of Khwezi*, slammed the recent call by the African National Congress (ANC) leadership, requesting Khwezi to apologise for her rape allegations against the ruling party president, Jacob Zuma.

South Africa’s more standardized HIV treatment approach in the public sector is as effective as the more individualized approach in Switzerland a comparative study has shown. However, the study, published in Plos Medicine this week, did find that more patients died in South Africa than in Switzerland, particularly during the first three months of therapy. This is mainly due to HIV patients not being able to access treatment when needed or trying to access help when they are already desperately ill.

On Wednesday, July 2nd at the Bellville Magistrates Court courtroom E, two members of the Delft Anti-Eviction Campaign, Jerome Daniels and Ridwaan Isaacs, were each sentenced twelve months in prison - simply for being community leaders at Delft-Symphony Way settlement. Both maintained their innocence on charges of malicious destruction of property brought by Elmory Isaacs, a former resident of the same settlement, who presented no evidence beyond her own testimony.

Fundamentalist forces have gained ground around the world, exerting an increased control on women’s lives. The Millennium Development Goals alongside the new aid architecture have restructured development assistance with women’s rights taking a back seat. From November 14–17, 2008, up to 1,500 women’s rights activists from around the world will gather in Cape Town, South Africa to debate and strategize about how to build stronger movements to advance women’s rights and gender equality globally.

Black business and professional organisations have expressed their dissatisfaction with the Pretoria High Court judgement characterising Chinese South Africans as ‘coloured’, thus qualifying them as beneficiaries in terms of black economic-empowerment, and called on the State “to appeal this irrational decision”.

20 June 2008 was World Refugee Day. The theme for this year was ‘Refugee Protection’. For Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), it was a little ironic. In fact, MSF marked the day by placing public messages in major national and regional newspapers, calling for the South African government and the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) to provide the necessary assistance and legal protection to Zimbabweans guaranteed under international law.

On June 29 three police vans pulled up to Symphony Way dressed in riot gear. Without warning, they began pepper spraying people in the settlement and attempted to arrest an older resident named Auntie Tilla. When it was all over, the road's pastor had been assaulted, beaten and abducted and five residents had been pepper sprayed multiple times.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/385/49180xenophobiaSA.jpgWEEK ONE

The sms’s came fast and furious. As furious as the fiery images we were subjected to by our television and our daily newspapers. I dreaded opening a newspaper for days - afraid of being confronted by yet another grisly product of the negrophobic xenophobic violence, which by the end of week three had claimed the lives of about one hundred people and displaced about 100 000, according to some estimates. The mind spins out of its axis, out of the normal.

As the Alexander Township burnt, I was reading text messages from my cappuccino-loving Tito Mboweni-fearing middle class friends. The messages were generally along these lines; “I’m so embarrassed to be South African right now”, or more engaging: “I’m so tired of feeling angry about this and not being able to do something about it…” . Email lists held similar messages of shame; at least Winnie Madikizela-Mandela went to Alexander and told the terrified victims cramped at the police station; “We are sorry, please forgive us. South Africans are not like this”, before hopping back into her nice car and driving back to her life.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/385/49179SAviolence.jpgSHATTER… MYTHS

On Thursday 22 May, Cape Town changed forever. The xenophobic violence that started 1,200 kilometres away in Gauteng spread to Du Noon township. On Friday the TAC offices began to get reports of violence on trains and Somali shops being looted. The details were scanty, but by Friday evening the consequences became visible even in the affluent city centre. About 150 people sought refuge outside Caledon Square, the city's main police station. Hundreds more gathered at the central train station so they could catch a train to Johannesburg in the morning and then leave the country.

A group of mainly Congolese men at Caledon Square, explained that they had no trust in any South African government institution and demanded to see the UNHCR so they could be repatriated. They said they would not move from Caledon Square until then even if it rained. One of them is a published writer and another lost his computer training school, worth tens of thousands of rands, in the violence. Angry young Burundians screamed at me that they wanted nothing more to do with my country. Malawian youths mournfully described how they felt they had no choice but to return home.

More than 50 people died and tens of thousands of people were displaced as a result of ‘xenophobic’ violence in South Africa during 2008. A number of urgent questions resulted from these attacks: Why are foreign African migrants the targets of violence in informal settlements? What is the explanation for the timing, location and scale of the outbreaks? Was this sudden and unexpected or was it predictable? And, what are the main drivers behind this violence?

One of the legacies of apartheid South Africa and the Bantustan system is the unequal distribution of resources between urban and rural areas, which has created a perpetual divide that even under our democratic dispensation is not being bridged. The ongoing lack of importance given to rural South Africa in the post-apartheid era, has created a rural backwater where poverty is entrenched and where people are simply abandoned and expected to fend for themselves in the face of what can best be described as state apathy.

FLOSSNet is proud to announce a first series of ICT training courses for organisations and individuals which will be conducted in Cape Town at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). FLOSSNet is a social enterprise organisation with the mission to unlock the potential of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) through education, training and consultancy services for the benefit of NGOs, CBOs, and small businesses in Africa.

The School of Public Health is one of the research partners in a four year EU-funded research project (INCO-DEV) being implemented in three Southern African countries (Angola, Mozambique and South Africa). The study aims to understand how the rise of Global Health Initiatives (eg Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, PEPFAR etc) has impacted the architecture of development partnerships and country-level health systems’ functions. Closing date for applications: 20 July 2008.

In 2006, Mimi Cherono Ng'ok, a young Kenyan-born photographer chose to document immigrants from different African countries living in Cape Town, South Africa. Her interest in this project was sparked by the attacks of the Somali community who were living in Cape Town in 2006.