A continuation of the #OmaliTaughtMe special series featuring the Mexican liberation organization Union del Barrio! This week, Chairman Omali Yeshitela will be joined by representatives from the African National Women’s Organization, President Yejide Orunmilla, and ANWO’s Occupied Azania (South Africa) Coordinator, Connie Hutchison, as well as the Union del Barrio Women’s Commission: Adriana Simon, Erica…
Category: South Africa
Poverty Criminalized in “Shackland” South Africa
Black Agenda Radio with Nellie Bailey and Glen Ford 21 Jan 2019 Twenty-five years after the end of apartheid, 5.2 million South Africans live in urban shack settlements that are unfit for human habitation, said anthropologist Kerry Chance, author of the new book “Living Politics in South Africa’s Shacklands.” The South African government, under “the…
The Homemade Politics of Abahlali baseMjondolo, South Africa’s Shack Dweller Movement.
Tricontinental An isolated individual may obstinately refuse to understand a problem, but the group or the village understands with disconcerting rapidity. It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that is understood by graduates in law and economics, you can easily prove that the masses have to be managed from…
South Africa: Building Black Working Class Counter-Power Against State, Capital and National Oppression
ZACF Interview with Warren McGregor of the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF),[1] South Africa What is anarchism? Who really rules South Africa? Should we form a “workers party”? How does anarchism address racial and national oppression? How can we build working class counter-power? What is the state of the left? How do we link fights…
South Africa: “The Launch of the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party is a Declaration of War”
Peoples Dispatch The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) is South Africa’s largest trade union and the largest manufacturing union on the African continent. In the past year, it has led struggles and strikes for safer and fairer working conditions in the energy, transport and plastics sector. NUMSA also played a key role…
Steve Biko: ‘The Most Potent Weapon in the Hands of the Oppressor is the Mind of the Oppressed’
Mike Peters You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can’t care anyway. – Steve Biko, Interview with American journalist a few months before his death Mention the name of Steve Biko today and, although a few people might recall the 1980 Peter Gabriel song or the…
Abahlali baseMjondolo March Against State Repression, Threats and Assassinations
Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Statement Today, Abahlali baseMjondolo march against repression in Durban. Solidarity protests are also taking place in Cape Town, Johannesburg and New York. Since our movement was founded in 2005 we have faced waves of repression including assault, arrest, torture in police custody, organised campaigns of slander, the destruction of our homes, death…
Youth Touched by Biko: The Quest for a “More Humane Face”
Veli Mbele This brief input deals with the meaning of Steve Bantu Biko for young people today and whether his vision of bestowing upon South Africa “a more humane face” remains valid. Biko is without doubt one of the most important figures of Black liberation of the past century. Today, 41 years after his murder,…
Abahlali baseMjondolo: Fanonian Practices and the Politics of Space in Postapartheid South Africa
The Challenge of the Shack Dwellers Movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo) “It is one thing if we are beneficiaries who need delivery. It is another thing if we are citizens who want to shape the future of our cities, even our country. It is another thing if we are human beings who have decided that it is…
Decolonizing the Commune
Abahlali baseMjondolo: Fanonian Practices and the Politics of Space in Postapartheid South Africa Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa has sought to structure itself as a confederation of self-managed and democratically organized communities in struggle. By Richard Pithouse Abahlali baseMjondolo is a movement largely based in shantytowns built on land occupations in and around the South…
Steve Biko: Founder of the Black Consciousness Movement
Pan-African News Wire Steve Bantu Biko, a political activist and writer, is regarded as the father of the Black Consciousness movement in the Union of South Africa. Biko’s short 30-year life was consumed with the development of an acute awareness of the evils of apartheid, the social system under which non-whites lived in South Africa….
Steve Biko Speaks on the Black Consciousness Movement
This is a rare interview which took place just before his assassination.
