Anna Selmeczi

Department of International Relations and European Studies

Central European University

Challenging abandonment: The South African shack-dwellers’ “living

politics” as counter-conduct

Paper for presentation at the Reading Foucault in the Postcolonial Present: A Symposium,

University of Bologna, March 3-4, 2011.

Introduction

In late October 2009, following members’ reports on the workshops or conferences

that they attended or the journeys to which they were delegated, a middle-aged woman took

the floor of Abahlali baseMjondolo’s general meeting held in the fully packed ‘Board Room’

of the office building where the movement now has its headquarters. She said she lived in

Richmond Farm1 where years ago she bought a plot to build her shack on but for the past few

months she had been threatened with eviction and the demolition of her home because the

landowner sold the same piece of land to someone else; this time with a title deed. When she

resisted the orders of the new owner to move out, people affiliated with the local party

committee started to threaten her. Detailing the manifold and humiliating ways they are trying

to chase her away – such as throwing human feces at her shack – she soon burst into tears and

could not stop crying for several minutes. In their efforts to comfort her, other women in the

room chanted a song and someone went out to refill an empty bottle to get her some water.2

While it did not occur at every meeting I had the chance to attend, such scenes are by

far not uncommon in the normal conduct of Abahlali, South Africa’s largest shantytown

movement. In fact, with or without reference to this particular event, conversations with

members seem to solidly confirm chairperson S’bu Zikode’s claim: “that experience […] was

actually the core call of the movement” (interview, 25/10/2010). Almost all accounts of the

movement and its ‘living politics’ emphasize the role of speaking about and listening to shack

dwellers’ sufferings. Indeed, experiences of their sufferings make up the stuff of Abahlali’s

living politics. Equally importantly, stemming from their (re-)conceiving of the miseries that

1 Richmond Farm is located in the Greater Durban area, cc. 20km West of Durban, KwaZulu-Natal Province.

2 As Zodwa Nsibande recently informed me, since the meeting took place the woman suffered a heart attack and

was admitted to hospital (email correspondence, 28/01/2011).

2

living in informal settlements entails as a wrong done to them and from the correlate feelings

of betrayal, through these narratives the shack-dwellers simultaneously emerge as political

subjects. Thus, at once soothing and politically subjectifying, the act of voicing grievances

effectively disrupts the biopolitical order that casts “poorest of the poor” into mute spaces of

vegetation on the margins of visibility. Often presenting their politics as a “reminder” of the

promises about a dignified life for the citizens of the “new” South Africa formulated by the

ANC throughout its struggle against white minority rule and reiterated by the consecutive

post-apartheid governments,3 Abahlali challenge the kind of freedom that has been allotted to

the masses of formerly disadvantaged people since liberation. Piercing through the fantasies

of “world-class” cities, theirs is a cry of lives out of place; of forced mobility as opposed to

seamless circulation. In posing its interlocutors against the form of disposable lives that

current technologies of neoliberal urban governance impose on them, the movement’s

insistence to preserve a close-up perspective on and a perpetual communication of the

individual experiences of shack-dwellers emerges as a counter-conduct that contests the

material and discursive elimination of the poor from the realms of prime biopolitical

circulation. Constructed as “the politics of the present tense”,4 that is, of a temporality

corresponding to the immediacy that the shack-dwellers’ daily struggles demand, living

politics not only contests the hollowed out developmentalism of a “Better life for all!” never

to come. In providing center stage to narrating the singular experiences of life under

circumstances no one can be accustomed to, it represents a resistant practice of putting

“everyday life” into discourse and thus reveals the political stakes in the biopolitical

massification of the same.

In line with the interpretation of living politics as a politics that resists biopolitics and

its function of abandonment through a manifold insistence on proximity, the discussion below

aims to point to the ways staying close to the daily experiences of its members drives and

defines the movement. Following the first section that centers on the Abahlali’s political

subjectification, I concentrate on the ways constructing living politics as a space for speaking

suffering add up to a counter-conduct that challenges the eliminatory effects of biopolitical

development. Finally, in the last section I discuss the conception of knowledge that is inherent

to living politics and is directly linked to the process of the shack-dwellers’ political

subjectification.

3 See e.g. accounts of former vice-president Mashumi Figlan (interviews 30/06/2009 and 05/10/2010). Cf.

Bryant (2007). 4 Philani Zungu (interview, 02/11/2010).

3

4

“We are Abahlali baseMjondolo for a good reason: we are suffering!”5 – Speaking

suffering as political subjectification

Asked to talk about the beginnings of the movement, former vice-president Philani

Zungu (interview, 02/11/2010) responded: “I don’t remember the beginnings of Abahlali.

Besides, I will say, and I have always said it: when the organization was formed, it was

automatically formed. I was forced to be formed.” In setting out to discuss the way Abahlali

baseMjondolo emerged as a political subject that challenges biopolitical abandonment, it is

this hardly definable force that we have to be after. Thus, to understand how biopolitics is

politically contested, we have to inquire into what “[t]he necessity for struggle” has been for

the shack-dwellers of Durban and how this necessity was (and is constantly being) articulated

through the movement’s formation and politics (Foucault 1991, 135). The claim of the present

paper is that speaking suffering is crucially tied to both of these aspects of resistance.

Schematically put, both speaking and suffering are elemental in Abahlali’s political struggle.

How exactly?

An evident shortcut to the answer is provided to us in one of the central texts of the

movement: S’bu Zikode’s “Third Force” article from 2005, the year of Abahlali’s formation.

The article that was at the time widely publicized both nationally and internationally was

written in response to the accusations of the government-affiliated media – reminiscent of the

apartheid era – that the political mobilization of the shack-dwellers was due to the “Third

Force”, i.e. (white/) intellectuals’ manipulation.6 It is in reaction to this accusation, prevalent

in various forms ever since, that the suffering involved in living in informal settlements is

conceptually connected to the shack-dwellers’ emergence as political subjects:

Well, I am the Third Force myself. The Third Force is all the pain and the suffering

that the poor are subjected to every second in our lives. The shack dwellers have many

things to say about the Third Force. It is time for us to speak out and to say this is who

we are, this is where we are, and this is how we live. The life that we are living makes

our communities the Third Force (Zikode 2005, 1).

Formulated against the accusation that Abahlali were driven by an outside agency in their

militant action, the quote emphatically presents this connection between suffering and

political appearance in terms of the shack-dwellers’ appearance as speaking subjects. The

“Third Force” is thus defined as the shack-dwellers’ suffering that, reaching a tipping point –

5 Mashumi Figlan (interview, 30/06/2009).

6 “The term Third Force became part of the national imagination in South Africa after it was used to describe the

apartheid security agents who offered military support to Zulu nationalists waging a war against the ANC in last

years of apartheid. It is highly pejorative and implies covert white manipulation towards evil ends” (editor’s note

to Zikode (2005, 1)).

5

“We have said enough is enough” (Ibid., 3) – takes the form of a demonstrative speech event.

To spell out this claim in terms of the movement’s origins: the road blockade that inhabitants

of the Kennedy Road settlement spontaneously formed after the news spread that the

municipality sold the piece of land earlier promised to the community marks the political

subjectification of the shack-dwellers,7 where the shared experience of suffering transformed

the betrayal of the municipality (the tipping point) into the collective and general experience

of betrayal of the post-apartheid regime that lets them live and die the way they do.

The movement grew out of a spontaneous blockade; of our radical anger and

frustration. It was not preceded by intellectual work but afterwards the movement was

formed because we realized that we are not on our own. We are suffering from the lies

of the democracy and others suffer too (S’bu Zikode, notes 06/05/2009).

Hence, the municipality’s decision to sell the “promised land”8 to a brick factory one month

after agreeing with the Kennedy Road Development Committee to grant it to the community,

became generalized in the event of the blockade and the subsequent organization of the

surrounding settlements’ marches (eventually leading to the naming and the formation of the

movement) – and did so based on the recognition that the experience of “all the pain and

suffering” was shared much beyond Kennedy road. Taking into consideration that in the

classical tradition of political philosophy the association of corporeal suffering and (political)

speech is by far not straightforward, and the role that this traditional dissociation occupies in

Jacques Rancière’s conceptualization of the political, it seems to me productive to think about

Abahlali’s political subjectification in the framework of his thought.9 On the one hand, such a

reading gives due significance to the act of speaking in Abahlali’s formation and resistant

7 See Pithouse (2005, 12–16) for a detailed account of the blockade and the events of the following days.

8 Many times when the event of the first blockade is recounted, the land in question is referred to, doubtless with

the intention to revoke the religious connotations of the phrase, as the “promised land”. E.g.: “It was due to those

rumors that we heard. At that time the structures were not there but we heard about some negotiations between

the municipality and the councilor about this land which was the promised land of this area” (Zodwa Nsibande,

interview 27/05/09). 9 Consider also Richard Pithouse’s (2005, 16) related and pertinent concern about the experience of suffering and

thinking radical politics: “The suffering of the dominated as a foundation for the theorization of resistance by the

dominated is far from fashionable in contemporary white metropolitan theory. This is not surprising. But it is

very necessary to take the reality of suffering seriously because a radical politics must understand that it is a truth

of this world, minister to it by acknowledging it and sharing it, and learn from it”. Consider further the possible

relations between this silence and what Julian Reid (2010, 394) says about the liberal treatment of suffering:

“The perception of not just who suffers, but worthy versus unworthy suffering, has been thoroughly reshaped by

a liberalism which refuses to recognize the suffering of lives which fail to live up to biohuman criteria.” Even

further, citing Simon Pernick’s study of the history of anesthesia, Elizabeth V. Spelman (2008, 143) notes about

Dennis Hastert’s and Barbara Bush’s comments on the post-Katrina evacuation: “Though it was not only African

Americans about whose homes and belongings they spoke with such arrogant facility, one can hear in such

remarks echoes of nineteenth-century attitudes among slavery’s apologists and their abettors in the medical

world about the harsh conditions of labor and the routine breaking up of families – that some people just don’t

suffer as much as others, are barely susceptible to physical or emotional pain, aren’t really affected by the

rupture of ties to people or place or things”.

6

practice, when conceiving of them as disruptive of the prevailing order (in Rancière’s

terminology the police) on account of their effect to disturb the distribution of noise and

voice. On the other, Rancière’s conception of the political (politics) as the performative

mobilization of relations of inclusion and exclusion appears to aid our efforts to comprehend

the ways the shack-dwellers challenge the biopolitical reality of the South African metropolis.

Both of these aspects can be approached through further elaborating the notion of

betrayal that is central to Abahlali’s resistance. The generalization of the experience of

betrayal through the recognition of collective suffering marks the political subjectification of

the shack-dwellers because it implies that they reconstruct themselves as parties to the post-

apartheid promise of the “better life for all”. It is through this reconstruction that their

sufferings are recognized as unjust and their inclusion in the “new South Africa” is

problematized: if they are included in the democratic order when they vote the local councilor

and the government into power, why are they denied the dignified living conditions promised

by the same democracy and the same politicians? “We started to march after 10 years of

empty promises from the government. […] The ANC said ‘a better life for all’, but I don’t

know, it’s not a better life for all, especially if you live in the shacks” (Mnikelo Ndabankulu,

interviewed by Bryant in November 2005).10

To put it in Rancière’s terms, the shack-

dwellers construct a dissensus when, creating a space of appearance through their first

protests, they assert themselves as rightful parties to the promise of a “better life”; as equal

parts of the “all”, whose needs are yet ignored: “[…] we felt that over so many years living in

such conditions, but we are not known. If we are, we are not being taken seriously (Philani

Zungu, interview 02/11/2010). Exactly this dissensus is summed up in the sentence: “We have

shown the world that we know that we are not supposed to be living the way we do” (Abahlali

2006a, 7). They know that they are not supposed to live the way they do because they

recognize themselves as part of the universal subject of the promise as human beings: “The

power of the poor starts when we as the poor recognize our own humanity; when we

recognize that, in fact, we are created in the image of God and are therefore equal to all other

10

S’bu Zikode (2005, 3) reaffirms the connection between betrayal and suffering as a politically subjectifying

force: “It was this betrayal [i.e. the municipality’s selling the promised land] that mobilized the people. The

people who betrayed us are responsible for the movement. Those people are the second force”. To be sure,

betrayal is a central notion in Abahlali’s account of political mobilization well beyond the formation of the

movement: “It’s anger, betrayal, and lies that makes people to go to the street. Because you’ll find that next year

we are going to the local government elections. You’ll find politicians going to each and every towns and streets,

and making promises to the people and after elections when people are waiting… people will wait and wait and

wait for those promises to be fulfilled, and nothing happens. Then, that’s when people will have to go to the

street and demand the implementation of those promises that were made by the politicians to them” (Zodwa

Nsibande, interview, 02/11/2010). C.f. Bryant (2008).

7

human beings” (Zikode 2010, 02:14’’).11

Crucially, this recognition implies an awareness of

the association between their assumed ability to dwell among inhuman conditions and the

incapability of human speech, and thus the shack-dwellers perceive not being treated as

parties to the promise of a better life as doubly being denied of humanity.12

This perception is

emphatically expressed by a long-time member of the movement who continued to live in

Kennedy road after the violent attacks in September 2009:13

‘Cause after the September attacks they came, they [local ANC officials] promised so

many things, which included that Kennedy road is going to be moved ‘cause there are

houses that are built for Kennedy Road. […] Guess what: they’d never come back,

ever since. […] They should have come back at least to lie again and at least to say,

“okay, we have a problem there and there but we know, we’re not forgetting about

your project”. They just… they went like that. It’s like we’re not existing to them.

‘Cause you can’t lie to a human being and not come back to make an apology even if

you’re, okay, you are not considering yourself lying. You cannot tell me something

that you’re gonna to this for me and then you just like… what the hell, you don’t even

come to tell me what happened, what went wrong, if there is anything that went

wrong, or if you’re still doing it? No, you don’t come back: just like that. So, to me,

it’s like… I felt like, okay, we are not recognized as human beings, we’re just like, you

know, the animals, not just any… or, like, the wild animals ‘cause you can’t bother

yourself as a human being to talk to the wild animals ‘cause at the end of the day the

animal can’t understand your language! (Zama Ndlovu, interview 12/10/2010)

Here, then, is the political significance of the declaration that “[i]t is time for us to speak out

and say this is who we are, this is where we are, and this is how we live” (Zikode 2005, 1). It

is exactly in exposing their suffering – “we are tired of living and walking in shit” (Alfred

Mdletshe quoted in Abahlali 2006a, 1)14

– that shack-dwellers prove that “they truly

communicate with all in a common space; that they are not merely creatures of need, of

11

See Rancière (2007, 48): “…a struggle for equality […] can never be merely a demand upon the other, nor a

pressure put on him, but always simultaneously a proof given to oneself. This is what ‘emancipation’ means.” 12

See note 9 above for the selective assumptions about the degrees of suffering. Cf. a scene from the

forthcoming documentary, Dear Mandela, shot after a protest in Siyanda has been dissolved by the police

shooting rubber bullets: 01:25’’ MaMkize to Bongi Hlengwa (A�C Municipal Official who is standing in the

middle of a circle formed by Siyanda residents): “Many of us have been living here for more than 21 years. The

people of Siyanda have pain in their hearts. The houses that are being built… the people who are getting them

are not even from around here. We are not animals, we are human beings. We would like the City of Durban to

think about the people of Siyanda.” (The protest occurred because the official from the municipality cancelled

his visit to the settlement scheduled for that day.) Cf. “We are not animals. We are human beings that feel and

want nice things. We think. People must understand that we think” (Nonhlanhla Mzobe quoted in Pithouse 2005,

21). 13

On 26th September, 2009 the all-night camp of the Youth League of Abahlali at the Kennedy road settlement

suffered an armed attack that continued in a hunt for the movement’s leaders. Thousands of people fled the

settlement fearing their lives; leaders of Abahlali were forced into hiding and the movement’s activities

underground for months. Their office was destroyed, as well as the shacks of the movement’s prominents and

many members. For a thoroughly researched account of the attack and its circumstances, see Chance (2010). 14

This quote is from the first newspaper interview with the shack-dwellers after their spontaneous blockade (Cf.

Bryant 2007).

8

complaint and protest, but creatures of discourse and reason” (Rancière 2007, 48).15

Disrupting the distribution of phônè and logos: “The victims have spoken” (Zikode 2005, 3).16

“Abahlali provides that ear…”17 – Speaking suffering as counter-conduct

Whereas the previous section aimed to show how speaking suffering is constitutive of

Abahlali’s political subjectification, in order to see how it functions as a counter-conduct

within the practice of the movement’s living politics, we need to approach the experience and

the contestation of betrayal from another perspective. In fact, we need to return to the shack-

dwellers’ perceptions of the contradictory state of their inclusion into and exclusion from the

post-apartheid biopolitical order. In his discussion of similar contradictions in India, Partha

Chatterjee (2004) offers an interesting account of the dynamics of negotiating service

provision between the governed and those who govern. Arguing that despite universally

granted equal citizenship, most inhabitants of India “are only tenuously, and even then

ambiguously and contextually, rights-bearing citizens in the sense imagined by the

constitution” (Ibid., 38) and that therefore they are not “proper members of the civil society”,

he posits a different kind of political relation, the terrain of which is the “political society”.

According to Chatterjee (Ibid.), the “political society” emerges between the state and those

beyond the civil society upon the recognized necessity to govern these people: “As

populations within the territorial jurisdiction of the state, they have to be both looked after and

controlled by various governmental agencies”. Thus, in the space formed by the interplay

between the state’s assumed obligation to care for the poor and the electoral needs of the

political elite, the demands of the poor who often secure their survival in illegal ways (e.g.

squatting or illegal electrification) are eventually (but certainly not always) met.

15

This is also the context within which the Abahlali reject accusations of violence: that their marches or road

blockades, which on occasion include burning tires, etc., are acts of violence. Characteristically, they refer to

such public demonstrations as discourse, as “the only language that they [the government] understand” (Zikode

2005, 2). Also: “I have lost count of how many times we went to (municipal offices in) Cape Town, to put

forward the people's complaints, who are, by the way, living like animals in this township" […] The only way

the government notices us is when we express our anger and rage, then they understand how we feel” (Poni

quoted in Saturday Argus, 25/06/2009). Most recently (in October 2010), the Month of Informal Settlements’

Strike sparked a heated debate about labeling poor people’s demonstrations violent; see Abahlali WC (2010) and

Pithouse (2010). Consider also the movement’s puzzlement about arresting marching members on charges of

public violence: “[…] we marched the next day to demand that those who were arrested be released or all of us

be arrested because they were charged for public violence. Now, which public, because we are the public”

(Zikode 2010, 02:12’’). 16

Cf. Rancière (1999). This point is impossible to pursue here, but the quoted statement perfectly illustrates the

controversial relation of thinking resistance to biopolitical abandonment and Agamben’s (1998) notion of the

homo sacer as the object of abandonment. For accounts that rhyme with Zikode’s statement from the context of

Haitian domination and poverty, see Bell (2005). 17

Zodwa Nsibande (interview, 02/11/2010)

9

To be sure, such dynamics of negotiation are frequently at play on the fringes of the

biopolitics of infrastructure and they surely have to be taken account of, not least in order to

remain alert to the ways governmental rationality occasionally becomes diverted at its end-

points. Furthermore, as the Abahlali often warn of it, “party politics”, can indeed determine

the pattern of service provision or the allocation of housing at the local level where party

affiliation of those desperately in need of services is easily exposed.18

Nevertheless, I would

argue that there is more to the asymmetry of the state’s assumed obligation to take care of its

population and the limits to its means to deliver than what Chatterjee diagnoses by way of his

notion of the political society. That is, although he points to a crucial space of struggle where

the justiciability of poor people’s claims to be cared for is negotiated, in the context of

biopolitical governance the reference to the limitedness of the means to provide also needs to

be assessed.19

Doubtless, there are material boundaries to the abilities of a state or a local

government to implement welfare programs, however, Foucault’s (2007, 2008) account of

liberalism as a governmentality defined by self-limitation centers on conceiving of the limits

of government as inherent to its rationality. In turn, with its terms set by the needs of a

massified subject constructed as the population, arguably, it is the self-limitation of

governmental reason that disjoins or, rather, renders incompatible the subject of right and the

subject of biopolitical development.20

In the gap so necessarily emerging, there certainly is

space for the dynamics of claims and provision Chatterjee attributes to the political society,

but there is also space for radically redefining the meaning of the obligation to care for the

population and thus for biopolitical abandonment. That is, in targeting the “entire population

of the country”, the biopolitical imperative of development eventually turns into its own

denial and takes the form of disallowing life (Chatterjee 2004, 40).21

At least, this seems to be the case of neoliberal urban governmentality in the form it

takes in Durban. This is the governmental rationality that translates the UN-HABITAT’s

program of the “Cities without Slums” into the infamous “Slum Clearance Project” of the

eThekwini Municipality (introduced in 2001), with the latter implying the legal prohibition of

electrifying shack settlements, forced relocation into “transit camps”, or the demolition of

18

The Abahlali have innumerable stories about the allocation of housing or employment opportunities based on

ANC-membership or other types of relation to the local party elite. 19

Chatterjee (2004, 40) writes: “The state agencies recognize that these population groups do have some claim

on the welfare programs of the government, but these claims could not be regarded as justiciable rights since the

state did not have the means to deliver those benefits to the entire population of the country”. 20

On the subject of right, see Foucault (primarily 2008, 274–275 and 294–295). 21

I elaborate this argument in Selmeczi (2009, 529–530). Cf. the biopolitical logic of “killing to make life live”

at play in the liberal way of war (Dillon and Reid 2009).

10

shacks without providing alternative accommodation.22

This is also the rationality according

to which illegal self-electrification is deemed “unfair” for forcing the municipality to pay for

the funerals of those who die due to the dangers of the forged connections (City of Durban

21/01/2011).23

Proving that these examples are not isolated, the Abahlali’s yearly mourning of

UnFreedom links back this phenomenon of governmental translation to the experience of

betrayal generalized through their political subjectification.24

Organized first in 2006, the

event of the UnFreedom Day is the movement’s deconstruction of the official Freedom Day:

the national holiday commemorating the first democratic elections on April 27th, 1994. On

these days, while the ANC rallies nationwide, mobilizing thousands of poor people to form

the celebratory masses, the Abahlali mourn the loss of their freedom:

We cannot fool ourselves and celebrate and say we are free while we die in the shacks.

[…] Every year we have a big rally where we mourn the loss of our freedom. And we

feel shame when some of us, who are as poor as we are, are used by the politicians

when they have to escort the politicians because there are free buses, free T-shirt, free

food for only that day. That freedom comes in one day, on the 27th of April. For us, we

talk of a freedom that comes every second, every minute, every hour (Zikode 2010,

50:51’’).

Freedom in the latter sense, arguably, refers to the liberatory inclusion of the poor black and

colored people: the ANC’s promise to redress the vast injustice of state racism through

adopting the demands of the Freedom Charter and the slogan of the “better life for all”.25

As

the party’s iconic program of government, the Reconstruction and Development Program

underlines, this freedom comprised both the provision of political rights and the conditions of

“an improved standard of living” (RDP §1.2.10). Overall, the RDP was the programmatic

equivalent of the ANC’s universalistic biopolitical project aiming to deliver the sort of social

citizenship that characterizes the “insured lives” of the developed North (Duffield 2007). As

such, nevertheless, in opening up for liberal (in fact, neoliberal) governmental rationality, it

instantaneously displaced its own promise and so, in forging liberation and development, it

22

Cf. Huchzermeyer (2010). 23

According to councilor Nomvuzo Shabalala (ANC), who chairs the Safety, Health and Social Services

Committee of the City of Durban “Illegal connections have a bad impact on the Municipality because we have to

pay for the funeral costs if people die because of these connections” (City of Durban 21/01/2011). 24

For an account of the way biopolitical abandonment materializes in (mostly the denial of) service provision,

see Selmeczi (2010). 25

The Freedom Charter was compiled based on the “freedom demands” of the oppressed black and colored

peoples of apartheid South Africa (collected by fifty thousand volunteers) and was adopted by the Congress of

the People in Kliptown (near Johannesburg) in 1955.

11

paradoxically inscribed the disjointedness of the political subject of liberation and the

population to be developed.26

Through staging the yearly events of the UnFreedom Day that call attention to “the

contradictions in our country”, the Abahlali (May 2008, 1) enact this very disjointedness.27

On the one hand and in line with the discussion above, the public mourning unFreedom is a

demonstrative event of speaking suffering that reiterates their experience of betrayal: “We are

the living truth of broken promises and betrayals of the last 12 years…” (Abahlali 2006b).28

Beyond this performative act, however, in counterposing the “official” notion of freedom and

their living conditions, the Abahlali target the kind of life that the government of freedom

implies for the masses of the poor or, better put, the link between this mode of government

and the fact that their lives are (yet again) rendered disposable, and their sufferings are

ignored.29

[Q]uestioning of the authorities will be crucial. What causes them to turn a blind eye

on the poor who voted for them? Why is there an obvious consistency in terms of

failure to deliver once they are elected to power? Who really distracts them from

recognizing shack-dwellers? Will they continue to think that shackdwellers are to be

wiped out had they knew the PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE OF SHACKDWELLING?

Would they not revisit their unrealistic policies afterwards? Until when will these

policies be used as government propaganda? One day they announce the budget to

build RDP houses, the next day they announce the Slums Act as a way of addressing

the housing backlock [sic] (Abahlali May 2008, 1).

Now it seems that most of our politicians have degrees in free-market economics.

They put the economic issues first and they don’t care about the people because they

26

A few sentences from Nelson Mandela’s (ANC 1994) Preface to the program: “In preparing the [RDP], and in

taking it forward, we are building on the tradition of the Freedom Charter. In 1955, we actively involved people

and their organizations in articulating their needs and aspirations. Once again we have consulted widely.

However, in 1994 we are about to assume the responsibilities of government and must go beyond the Charter to

an actual program of government. This RDP document is a vital step in that process. It represents a framework

that is coherent, viable and has widespread support. […] Democracy will have little content, and indeed, will be

short lived if we cannot address our socioeconomic problems within an expanding and growing economy.” 27

“When we have unFreedom Day as well as a new law like the Slums Act being pushed at the people by the

same politicians, and all in the name and language of ‘freedom’, we see the contradictions in our country. It is

true that we are told in SA that there is this freedom but there also evictions – they say we are free but it cannot

be true when evictions and hunger continue” (Abahlali May 2008, 1). 28

Cf. the Press Release of the 2008 UnFreedom Day (Abahlali, April 21, 2008): “On Sunday it will be Freedom

Day again. Once again we will be asked to go into stadiums to be told that we are free. Once again we will not

be going to the stadiums. We will, for the third time, be mourning UnFreedom Day. Since the last UnFreedom

Day we have been beaten, shot at and arrested on false charges by the police; evicted by the land invasions unit;

disconnected from electricity by Municipal Security; forcibly removed to rural human dumping grounds by the

Municipalities; banned from marching by the eThekwini City Manager; slandered by all those who want

followers not comrades; intimidated by all kinds of people who demand the silence of the poor; threatened by

new anti-poor laws; burnt in the fires; sick in the dirt and raped in the dark nights looking for a safe place to go

the toilet.” 29

Compare, in this context, the silencing of the shack-dwellers’ sufferings and the anti-apartheid discourse

mobilizing the notion of the “discarded” or “surplus” people referring to the victims of forced removals by the

apartheid regime. Cf. Desmond (1969) and Platzky and Walker (1985).

12

are looking after their own pockets and focus on issues like economic growth, profits

and so on. We realize that the politicians wanted to distribute the resources – but now

they seem to govern the resources and not care for the people (Abahlali and Rural

Network 2009, 22; my emphasis).

In a way distinct from the dynamics of struggle described by Chatterjee (2004), what these

quotes problematize is exactly the apparent lack of a sense of obligation on the part of the

government to care for the shack-dwellers.30

As the remainder of this section will show, well

beyond the once-off events of the UnFreedom Day, it is in providing space for this

problematization that the living politics of Abahlali baseMjondolo calls into question the

various techniques of government they perceive as distancing: the negligence of the

responsible local politicians or the spatiotemporal ordering that neoliberal urban development

entails for those living in shack settlements.

It is in this respect that speaking suffering emerges as a counter-conduct;31

as a

militant way of putting everyday life into discourse. Constructed as a space where everyone

can recount her grievances, living politics works against the shack-dwellers’ discursive and

material elimination from the realm of fostered urban circulation. Referred to as the ‘people’s

politics’, the ‘politics of the poor’, their ‘homemade politics’, but most often as the ‘living

politics’, and defined as being “about what really hurts the people”, the Abahlali’s politics is

built on the imperative to maintain a direct connection, a close-up perspective on the

experiences of living in informal settlements (Mnikelo Ndabankulu interviewed by Bryant,

05/08/2006). As such, it not only contests the lack of sympathy on the part of the politicians

(evidenced e.g. by the above quote from the councilor complaining about the municipal costs

of burying people who die to illegal electricity connections), it also targets the governmental

perspective of developmental biopolitics, from which the singular experiences of suffering are

indeed invisible. To be sure, the former is conditioned upon the latter: after all, it was through

the modern forms of knowledge correlate to biopolitics that the tragic modality lent to the

everyday by the ubiquitous attention of sovereign power was massified and flattened

(Foucault 2000, Revel 2009). Importantly, however, living politics as the space for speaking

suffering is not exactly set against the bureaucratic senselessness of the way biopower takes

30

Although it cannot be elaborated here, I am making this claim based on my belief that the individualizing and

responsibilitizing technologies of neoliberalism are not generally deployed in the shantytown, even though their

traces appear from time to time. The lack of services and the extreme poverty of the shack-dwellers render these

attempts not only futile on their own terms but also sadly paradoxical. Cf. Abahlali’s reactions to the

municipality’s talk about the need for “fire safety education” instead of legalizing electrification: “Why is this

the thing they think must be taught when we have said clearly the problem is that we are excluded from getting

electricity?”(Abahlali and Rural Network 2009, 45). 31

On the notion of counter-conduct, see Foucault (2007, 201–202).

13

account of everyday lives: filling in the governmental gap of abandonment, it is rather set

against not being accounted for at all.32

Perhaps it is the verb attend to that best describes how this occurs. On the one hand

and as just mentioned, the space of living politics is attentive in entailing an ethical praxis

where everyone is listened to, where everyone’s cry can be voiced and is taken seriously.33

Recalling how S’bu Zikode (interview 25/10/2010) commented on the cries of the woman

form Richmond Farm further underlines this ethical mandate: “that [experience] was actually

the core call of the movement; to take care of these tears, worries…”. On the other hand, and

beyond the healing effects of “providing that ear”; “something that people are craving”

(Zodwa Nsibande, interview 02/11/2010), living politics as the space for speaking suffering

attends to in formulating a responsibility to effectively deal with the problem that the cry is

about.

Then Abahlali, […] they used to give their times to go to that settlement or that area,

to hear the views of the people: what [is] their problem? And they used to advice them

not to take their problem as theirs; they used to advice how to deal with the problem.34

So, when someone is coming to your problem and listen, at least it’s a better relief

even to you that “at least this person is willing to help me”. So, it’s working like that.

They doesn’t choose which place to go – they [go] anywhere… (Nozuko Hulushe,

interview 11/10/2010)

Thus, living politics in this function aims to makes up for the negligence of the politicians

who are seen to be “distancing [themselves] from the people” (Nozuko Hulushe, Ibid.). The

singular importance of human life that this practice presumes is therefore opposed to the mute

existence of “forgotten citizens”.35

“So it’s [i.e. the politicians’ behavior] just being ignorant

of the poor. It’s like as if you have to sit, close your mouth, just be deaf and dumb, and wait

for them to come whenever they feel like” (Shamitha Naidoo, interview 30/09/2010). 32

While this point would deserve a more elaborate discussion, beyond citing the Abahlali’s experience of being

ignored throughout this paper, here I can only support it with noting that their being both superfluous to the

economy and relatively easily isolated by policing the urban space, knowing the lives of shack-dwellers the way

it was imperative in e.g. the early-apartheid era South Africa or 19th century London is not in the interest of

contemporary neoliberal governmentality. Cf. Swansson (1977) and Joyce (2003). 33

“[Living politics is] a very-very important space for any human being that is oppressed in the manner that our

members are oppressed. It’s a space where they can cough out all their frustrations. In many aspects, it’s a space

where their dignity is restored. Their thoughts are respected, their views are listened to” (S’bu Zikode, interview

02/06/2009). 34

Nozuko Hulushe here refers to Abahlali’s principle according to which “Abahlali baseMjondolo is not the

office, it is the member” (notes 09/10/2010): “…which is why we are saying, when people are joining Abahlali,

we always tell them ‘we are not here to struggle for you but we are here to struggle with you; the only thing you

must know when you’re joining Abahlali is that you are having brothers and sisters who will able to support you

in a struggle but they will not do anything for you, but they will do it with you’” (Zodwa Nsibande, interview

02/11/2010). 35

Mazwi Nzimande (interview, 08/07/09): “We are forgotten, we are treated invisible. The government is

hundred percent aware that we are existing but he would just like treat us invisible. So, we are the forgotten

citizens of this country – for now.”

14

Nevertheless, when placed into the context of the promise of “a better life for all”, living

politics also appears in stark contrast to the biopolitical utopia: “A living politics is whereby

our difficulties are always next to us, so we need to challenge it, we need to face them, we

need to accomplish one day, in order to live a better life” (Mzwake Mdlalose, interview

24/10/2010). Such definitions of the shack-dwellers’ political practice disclose a challenge to

the temporality of the developmental promise. When crying “We are dying while we wait!”

(Philani Zungu quoted in Abahlali August 13, 2006), the Abahlali (May 2008) point not only

at the “obvious consistency in terms of failure to deliver”, they also target the rationality that

is by default blind to the temporality of the singular suffering life. Beautifully defined as “the

politics of the present tense”, that is, as attentive to exactly these individual temporalities,

living politics hence exposes the sensible order that materializes the biopolitical discrepancy

between the people and the population.36

Ya, living politics… living politics is politics that one speaks in order to reveal what’s

real. In order to say the present tense. Yes! Ya! I think that’s the right word: living

politics, it’s an engagement to present the present tense, especially the poor’s tenses,

our tenses: the shack-dwellers. […] So, speaking that tense or addressing that problem,

I have to expose it that this is me and this is what I want and how I want it. Or this is

how I’m suffering and these are the ideas, at least, that should help me. It’s all about

me, the people, and the present tense: living politics (Philani Zungu, interview

02/11/2010).

“I am the professor of my own suffering” – Living politics as a form of knowledge

Focusing on its role in political subjectification and in constituting an attentive

counter-conduct, the previous sections discussed the ways speaking suffering renders the

Abahlali’s living politics disruptive. In presenting an intellectual practice correlate to this

disruptive speech, the present section aims to outline how experiences of suffering are

conceived of as knowledge and how this knowledge, in turn, manifests in resistant practice.

Responding to the accusation that someone does the thinking for the mobilizing shack-

dwellers, S’bu Zikode’s (2005, 2; 4) already cited “Third Force” article makes a clear

connection between suffering, knowledge, and the politics of the poor:

Those in power are blind to our suffering. This is because they have not seen what we

see, they have not felt what we are feeling every second, every day. My appeal is that

leaders who are concerned about peoples’ lives must come and stay at least one week

in the jondolos [shacks]. They must feel the mud. They must share 6 toilets with 6 000

36

The resonance of living politics as a counter-conduct with Foucault’s (2007) account of pastoral care would be

worth pursuing.

15

people. […] For us time has been a very good teacher. People have realized so many

things. We have learnt from the past – we have suffered alone. That pain and suffering

has taught us a lot. We have begun to realize that we are not supposed to be living

under these conditions. There has been a dawn of democracy for the poor.37

The call for people higher up in the social hierarchy to directly experience life in the informal

settlements was present already from the Abahlali’s first organized march on, in the form of

the banner that read: “University of Kennedy Road”, which then was followed by the

“University of Foreman Road”, etc., until – with the movement’s naming – the University of

Abahlali baseMjondolo was “founded”.38

As Bryant (2007, 25) shows, these banners are

equivalent to “declaring the settlements to be places of learning even as they are places of

suffering, and their residents to be people worth listening to”. As such – and in line with

understanding emancipation with Rancière (2007) as conditioned upon proving equality to

oneself – they designate the Abahlali’s self-construction as resistant subjects. That is, the

recognition “that we are not supposed to be living under these conditions” entails an active

reflection on suffering as cognition, which then transforms into the power to resist (Zikode,

Ibid.). This transformation is also apparent in descriptions of living politics as a space for

people “to say what they want, how they want to govern to do it”; or as “a certain corner […]

where the poor people on the ground define themselves” (Mashumi Figlan, interview

05/10/2010). According to Thembani “TJ” Ngongoma’s account of this self-definition, when

entering this space – that is, again, created through the recognition that their sufferings are not

meant to be – shack-dwellers assume the power of “that normal resistance”; the power to “use

verbal resistance without any backing” (interview 03/10/2010).

I’ll put it this way: once a certain community joins Abahlali, they automatically claim

their political space in the society. […] You know what happens? We are living with

this inferiority complex that we have inherited from the past. It is quite difficult for an

African male or female these days to come out of that shell. […] Now when you join

Abahlali as a community, Abahlali educate you and remind you that look: you are a

law abiding citizen of South Africa! Then you automatically… that “uummff” comes

up within you and you automatically reclaim that space, that political space and you

become somebody, out of nowhere! And that is why the government is also being

intimidated by Abahlali because they do not know what drives Abahlali behind them –

37

Again, this comparison would require more elaboration, but it has to be noted here that – despite the affectivity

of its public utterances such as this quote – the primary function speaking suffering is not, in my view, triggering

public compassion. For an opposing approach, see Nayar’s (2009) account of “victim life narratives”. 38

“[The University of Abahlali is] also part of the idea of passing on the message and grievances or exposing the

life-conditions. Because what was happening: Abahlali was inviting the senior to come to shacks and live the life

and experience the same conditions that we are experiencing. And then tell us that how long can he or she live in

that conditions. So, one night, it is obvious that he will get up with one big lesson…” (Philani Zungu, interview

02/11/2010). Cf. the special section of the Abahlali website under the same title: http://abahlali.org/node/237.

16

for them to be… to stand so bold and say what they have to say without being shy in

the face of danger, despite the intimidations. That’s what Abahlali is (Ibid.).

Beyond this “normal resistance” that is deployed against attempted evictions and that displays

that almost inexplicable courage that comes with political subjectification,39

their experiences

rendered as knowledge also lend authority to the shack-dwellers for altering the material

patterns of urban biopolitics. Under the banner of another often sounded motto of theirs:

“Those who feel it, should lead it!”, they demand to be parties to every decision or plan that

affects their homes. By way of appropriating the discourse of “participatory development”,40

they insist on the responsible authorities to engage with them – often with success.41

However, conceptions such as the University of Abahlali, that is, the construction of informal

settlements as places of reflection on suffering, or the imperative to maintain living politics as

a discourse that everyone must understand functions to guarantee that participation in

planning development does not imply distancing from the perspective of their everyday

struggles.42

Importantly, the principle that living politics must be accessible for everyone does

not refer to translating it into a sort of “Development for Dummies”. Rather, in demanding

that the focus of living politics remains on “what really hurts the people”, it is another

formulation of suffering rendered as knowledge and as such, it aims to maintain thinking

development at proximity (Mnikelo Ndabankulu, interviewed by Bryant 05/08/2006). This

aim is clearly expressed in the way S’bu Zikode talks about the risks of their participation in

planning (interview 26/10/2010; my emphasis):

39

See e.g. “That’s why, even when we applied for marches and the marches were denied, the so-called permits

were not granted, we said ‘no, it’s fine, we’ll still go out to the street; if they brutalize us: it’s fine, but the

message will still go across’!” (Philani Zungu, interview 02/11/2010). Cf. Pithouse (2005) and Bryant (2008). 40

As an illustration of their often critical stance on developmental discourse: “So this domestication can be seen

also in how language and words are used and abused – even the ideas that came originally from genuine

struggles. For example, at one time, the idea of ‘sustainable development’ seemed like quite a good idea that

could accommodate some of the protests against bad development that different struggles have raised – but by

now, even the World Bank can use the words ‘sustainable development’ for their own projects” (Abahlali and

Rural Network 2009, 37). At other times, as e.g. in the case of “owning development”, this reflection does not

seem to be at work: “It is important [for] the people to participate on their development because, even if you see

the house, already build that house, you see that house, you know that, “hey, I put all my effort on that house”.

Somebody will feel proud and is going to protect it, make sure that he maintained. But if somebody was not

there…” (Mashumi Figlan, interview 05/10/2010). 41

A recent example of such success is the ongoing project to provide basic services (water, sanitation, roads, and

electricity) to the inhabitants of the informal settlement in Siyanda B. Another one was the agreement signed

between Abahlali baseMjondolo and the eThekwini Municipality to upgrade fourteen settlements, among them

Kennedy Road. At least with regards to this particular settlement that was the target of the violent attack on

Abahlali in September 2009, this project appears to be at a standstill. 42

“Yeah, so I think the university is about that: in fact, it’s about factualizing the grievances that in the actual

fact, what we’re talking to you, it’s real. If you don’t believe it, come and experience it and then tomorrow you’ll

talk a better language, because you know exactly what you’re talking about. Rather than strategizing from the

office and impose something that you think – that you think it’s better or is going to improve our lives” (Philani

Zungu, interview 02/11/2010).

17

[I]t’s very dangerous in the sense that you seem to be co-opted, and you seem to be

understanding this protocol; then you may be co-opted in this politics of patience.

Then you begin to say: “comrades, no, hang on, be patient” because you tend to

understand this technicality. “This thing is complicated, you know, we have to go and

find another architect or an engineer”. […] So, you’ll be the first one to say: “but hang

on, this thing is really complicated…”

Similarly but even more defiantly contesting the distancing effect of expert or academic

knowledge through rendering suffering as knowledge, the Abahlali declare to be “the

professors of their own suffering”. This principle – that indeed establishes equivalence

between the suffering person as the subject and the object of knowledge – defines the

movement’s critical attitude to all those intending to help or study them.

We know that our country is rich. We know that it is the suffering of the poor that

makes it rich. We know how we suffer and we know why we suffer. But in Abahlali

we have found that even though we are a democratic organization that gets its power

from the trust of our members and have never hurt one person, the government and

even some NGOs call us criminal when we speak for ourselves. We are supposed to

suffer silently so that some rich people can get rich from our work and others can get

rich having conferences about having more conferences about our suffering. […] I

want to say clearly that I am a Professor of my suffering. We are all Professors of our

suffering. But in this South Africa the poor must always be invisible. We must be

invisible where we live and where we work. We must even be invisible when people

are getting paid to talk about us in government or in NGOs! Everything is done in our

name (Hlongwa 2007).

Paralleling the above discussed effects of speaking suffering, their self-representation as the

professors of their suffering or their demands of direct engagement (“Speak to us, not for

us!”) are further forms of the shack-dwellers’ attack on the distribution of intellectual

capacities correlative to a police order that treats shantytowns as diffusing only

incomprehensible groans of animality. So deploying a form of knowledge that seems to

overlap with the experiences of suffering and the political subjectivity that stems from those

experiences, the Abahlali take their resistance against the biopolitical government of the post-

apartheid urban space appears to the epistemological level as well.

Conclusion

Taking as my point of departure one of the signature texts of Abahlali baseMjondolo

and the account it gives of the forces culminating in the movement’s emergence, in this paper

I approached the shack-dwellers’ political subjectification and resistant practice as defined

and driven by speaking suffering. Focusing first on how the collective experience of pain and

suffering that characterizes life in informal settlements generalized the shack-dwellers’

18

feeling of betrayal over a particular municipal decision, I interpreted the movement’s

formation as a demonstrative speech event. Filtered through Rancière’s conception of politics

as disruptive of the police order, here I presented the Abahlali’s political subjectification as

the event of simultaneously recognizing themselves as parties to the post-apartheid promise of

the “better life for all” and of conceiving of their suffering as unjust. Second, I looked at the

ways the shack-dwellers’ living politics is constructed as a space that attends to suffering and

is so set against the silencing and distancing technologies of neoliberal urban

governmentality. In this respect, I argued, living politics counterposes the temporality of

singular suffering lives to that inherent to the liberal government of development. Finally, I

turned to discussing the University of Abahlali baseMjondolo, that is, the movement’s

intellectual practice that is co-constitutive of their political subjectivity in gaining power from

making knowledge and suffering completely overlap. By creating themselves as professors of

their own suffering, the shack-dwellers operate a form of knowledge that stays in proximity to

the utmost concerns of their lives, and thus challenge the distribution of intellectual capacities

which supports the urban biopolitics that abandons them.

While in isolation from the particular governmental rationality that materializes in

disallowing their lives or from other facets of the Abahlali’s resistance this discussion is

necessarily incomplete, inquiring into the ways suffering features in the shack-dwellers’

emancipation is nevertheless important. Especially so in view of the very technologies of

silencing that the movement persistently contests. Efforts to comprehend the operation of a

biopolitics that pushes masses of people to the threshold of livable life potentially plays into

reversing these technologies. Accordingly, while it is essential to seek answers to “What

causes them to turn a blind eye to the poor who voted for them?”, it is equally important to

account for the political significance of the question’s emergence.

19

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