rsa296@nyu.edu

Robert Ascherman
Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack Dwellers) Movement South Africa
South Africa

The following post comes from a Facebook post by Richard Pithouse, a university professor and true partner of Abahlali. Richard has been fired from his position at a University in Durban where his family lives, arrested alongside AbM members, and continues to fight alongside them, especially against academics who are developing their careers by spreading slanderous information about AbM.

There are two simultaneous shifts happening in the discourse coming from the ANC that articulate together in a dangerous manner. The first, which began with Lindiwe Sisulu and has been around for a while (and is making Frans Cronje very happy), is the argument that people cannot, as the story goes, continue to be ‘dependent’ on the government and must learn to do things for themselves. SACP spokesperson Alex Mashilo recently said that people should not “wait for the government truck to arrive, or for services to come”, but that they must “take charge of their own development”. At the same time there is an escalating language of criminalisation directed at vulnerable groups, like sex workers, migrants and impoverished people occupying land and appropriating services in cities, accompanied by a government agenda that is increasingly driven by security discourses (i.e. intelligence and men with guns) rather than development issues.

This photograph is of a self organised and communal water tap in a land occupation in Durban (which is near to opportunities for work and a good school). It is clearly a case of people taking charge of their own development. But in the eyes of the state the land occupation and self organised access to services is criminality (and nefarious conspiracy) and has frequently been responded to with serious (and illegal) state violence.

Robert Ascherman
Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack Dwellers) Movement South Africa
South Africa

When did you join AbM?

I joined in 2005, but wasn’t very involved until 2007.

What were you doing before joining AbM?

I was a construction worker and just a member of AbM because it started where I was living, in Kennedy Road. I bought a membership card and attended meetings but was not very much involved.

Before you joined AbM were you in a political party? Were you voting?

Before I joined had no political affiliation but I was voting if it came for a voting period. [I voted for] the ANC, of course.

Did you stop voting in 2005 or was it later?

What made me get fed up with voting was those local elections where we voted for Ward Councilors. We had so many engagements with our Ward Councilors but they weren’t fruitful, so I realized this thing of voting does not make any sense for us. We keep on voting but there’s nothing in it for us. We just keep uplifting people’s status. Since 2005 I have not been eager to vote anymore.

Why did you decide to get more involved in 2007?

You will be surprised. You know, when I’m telling this story I can feel tears in my eyes. What happened is on February 15 I was actually a training for a marathon, after work and I got stabbed by two guys who were in the bushes alongside Kennedy Road. I ran away but they stabbed me in such a way that I couldn’t even see, but I managed to get out of the bush and back to Kennedy. When I got back the committee members asked who stabbed me, and later the guys were caught. One of them was supposedly beaten and we heard that he died in the police van. After he died the first person that was arrested was me and some of the committee members and we were put together in the Westville Prison, where we talked about Abahlali. I had no idea what Abahlali really was, I just knew it was for my community so I had joined it. I didn’t have a clear picture of what Abahlali stood for though. While in jail they convinced me to get more involved and be closer to the community so I could have a role in the committee. We spent about three weeks in prison and then decided to engage in a hunger strike since we believed we had been wrongfully arrested. After we were released on bail, 30,000 rand since there were six of us, I decided since  these people had helped me so much while in prison – constantly visiting us, writing articles for us, paying my bail and explaining to me what Abhali was all about – I decided to get more involved. I came to the Kennedy Road Development Committee and became the secretary for the committee for a year and then was voted general secretary the next year for about two terms.* Then in 2012 I was called by the now deputy president  to assist here in the office, since I had some skills even though I didn’t do administration in university. I agreed because this is our movement and I want to help take it further.

*Author’s note: Terms were one year then; they’re now two years.

Did you have any leadership experience before joining AbM?

The answer is a big no. I never used to be in any leadership structure… But I used to be a shop steward at the construction company I was at because I understood a bit about rights and a lot of my coworkers didn’t know what their rights were. But no, I didn’t have any leadership skills.

Where you trained when you became shop steward?

No I was just elected, because in our team I was the only person who finished metric and who spoke English best, not that it was 100%. I could communicate with the employers and they chose to communicate with me as a relay to the other guys.

How much schooling did you receive?

I received a two year certificate from university in Participatory Management, around like community development.

What do you see as AbM’s current strategy?

We recently had a workshop where we were planning our strategy from this year forward. It was like a five year plan from now to 2020. We have so many things we are willing to do to put this movement forward and see more changes in our communities. One of them is to mobilize, and we know if we do that we won’t be glad to just see numbers without changes in people’s daily lives. Our plan is to civilize more of our programs, and introduce more programs that will educate people about their rights. People will not sit there not knowing what their rights are. We have to mobilize and educate people.

What about the issue of people joining AbM but then leaving once the immediate threat of an eviction passes?

Yes people join us because they’re being chased away by bulldozers, but we have to explain to them that we are not a law firm. Here we are a group-based struggle. If you come to AbM you have to know you’re coming to a bigger family where you can fight with your communities, whatever challenges you may be facing. The other thing that will happen is AbM will never fight for you, we will fight with you. The best thing to do is tell people of their rights when they come here so that they can see how much power they have.

What’s the ANC’s  strategy against AbM right now? How are they trying to beat you?

It’s very bad, before they used to label us with all these names. They used to call us rapists, they used to call us thieves, they used to say we were misleading people. Currently they are quiet and we’re not too sure what strategy they will come up with, but I think they are quiet because here in the city there is a completion between Zamdela and the City Mayor. They’re fighting for the top position of being the regional chairperson. Maybe they’re still quite because they’re still focusing on that completion. We don’t know what their strategy will be when they come back.

One thing they do is that in each and every community when we organize a meeting they mobilize another one at the same time so that people won’t come to the Abahlali meeting. That’s how they used to disturb our links to the communities. And when they call those meetings they’re not discussing anything serious, it’s just the same empty promises as always.

Before we used to receive a lot of threats but fortunately there were not a lot of leaders that died. Unfortunately we lost Thuli, she received threats, several, but we were anywhere they were going to kill her. Those are the strategies they used to put fear in us. It’s surprising in a lot of communities people still believe the ANC has a lot to do for them.

If you come out as against the ANC or their corruption they declare you a rebel and make sure you will not get service deliveries. In our branches they’ve made sure to sanction them. If there are service deliveries they pull them off, like water, sanitation, electricity. They just stop it. Maybe this is their way of cutting down the number of people who are willing to join Abahlali.

Do you think their tactics to stop delivering services is effective, or ineffective in preventing AbM from growing and retaining members since people know how to tap into the water and electricity lines?

When they cut off services it just makes people more angry and more people will join AbM. But we are getting worried because those basic services are provided by our own money, by our tax payer money. It’s not any political party’s money, but the party that’s voted into government is given the power to utilize our money and the state money to give us services. But ANC, the way they do it now, they treat it like it’s from their own money. Their tactics are effective but people are also encouraged to fight all those things by the only way possible: joining Abahlali.

My next question is around Xenophobia: have there been outbreaks recently?

It happened in 2009 or 2008, when they were beating up the foreigners. They stopped it and it did not happen for a long time, it was really just  a week. But the recent outbreak was the worst case I’ve ever heard off. I wonder if these Xenophobia attacks are still happening, and if so who are they being perpetuated by. It seems here we are fighting amongst each other for a white bull. The government that’s supposed to take initiative to fight this Xenophobia it seems like they’re the ones who are introducing it. They pretend like they protect these people.

How does Xenophobia hurt AbM?

First off all we believe justice has no rest. As you are here in South Africa, I believe you should be treated with great respect and enjoy the benefit of every right here in South Africa. So I as well if I go to America. Abahlali is organizing everywhere and we accept in the movement people from whichever political party. So we do not discriminate against people based on their color and we believe everyone has rights. There are reasons why these people from other foreign countries are here from South Africa. It is not true that they are here to take our jobs. It is not true. There is a particular reason. And the other thing is that our own government, if they don’t want people to flock into this country, they can do something about it, but they allow them to come in and then they are the ones persuading us to beat them up. Why? We must focus on fighting while on the other side they focus on corruption and making money from our suffering? We believe those people are allowed by our own government to come in so that we will fight them instead of the government, if we have to fight someone.

Something that worries me is these people are black like us. Why should we fight them? If we talk about foreigners, who’s a foreigner exactly? Is the foreigner a black person from another country, or any person from another country? Here in South Africa there are Indians, there are Chinese, there are Somalians, there are other blacks from North Africa, there are even whites. So if we say we are fighting against the foreigners who are the foreigners we’re fighting against and why should we fight in the first place? Why should we fight, instead of concentrating on what we’re doing at the particular time?

How is AbM responding to Xenophobia?

Our response to Xenophobia is to alert communities  to this problem and make them aware that Xenophobic attacks are a government strategy to make us fight each other so we won’t focus. We have to explain to people that there are other bigger issues and people perpetuating these attacks. It is not for us or our communities to fight against one another. We have to look carefully against it. Our stand is to talk about it in our communities and explain these are our brothers and sisters. If they are foreign we have to be clear who they are and who we’re fighting .

One way we’re dealing with this is we’ve partnered with the Democratic Republic of Congo Solidarity Campaign and promised to help them with all the issues in their country. We still have that obligation and thus we can’t move from condemning Xenophobia.

Robert Ascherman
Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack Dwellers) Movement South Africa
South Africa

Back home in Alabama when I explained to people that I was going to spend two months in South Africa to work with Abahali baseMjondolo, the country’s largest social movement, the typical response was, “Oh, like mission work. That’s so great of you. I really want to go on a mission too.” No! This is not mission work. The Shack Dwellers don’t need to be saved, nor preached to, nor my charity or voluntary labor, and it is not so great of me to “give up my time.”

There is an assumption that the poor can not think for themselves, or lead themselves or have knowledge to share with others. It is assumed that all of that is a role to be filled by the wealthy. My time here is in complete defiance of that notion. I came here to learn from the Shack Dwellers.

The first activist campaign I worked on was to force NYU to stop doing business with Chase Bank until it offered principle reduction to home owners. Through predatory and racist loans targeting those who are often the least financially literate, Chase is the leader of evictions in New York State. The interest rate of home loans for poor people before the sub-prime mortgage crisis often started very low, with rates around 3-5%, but in the fine print increased after a few months to 10, 20, or 30%. Principle reduction,  or reducing the amount due on the house to the value of just the home (i.e., the principle) before adding interest, is a more socially responsible practice to keep people in their homes and reverse the effect of gentrification. Moreover, the campaign was a starting point for articulating the fact that there are more vacant homes than homeless people in America, and this point of political education enabled us to stand in solidarity not just with those on the verge of losing their homes but also with those who were already homeless.

During this time I was not only learning about principle reduction and vacant homes but I also first learned about Abahlali basemJondolo by watching the documentary “Dear Mandela,” which features the movement’s struggle against the Slums Act, a bill that would have made evictions of the Shack Dweller’s settlements legal (although they still constantly face illegal evictions). After watching the documentary, I knew that I wanted to apply for NYU Gallatin’s Global Human Rights Fellowship so that I could spend time with Abahlali. I also knew that I wanted to live in a Shack Dwellers’ settlement in order to best integrate myself with Abahlali. I wanted to experience the conditions the Shack Dwellers face both good and bad, happy and sad.

Although I’m not the first student to spend time with Abahlali, this decision to live in the shacks appeared to shock many people. They impressed upon me numerous times that “it is not nice here,” and this statement is objectively true. Many Dwellers have no electricity and for those who do, it is rationed. Candles easily catch shacks on fire and also easily can fall over, as I witnessed last night. (Fortunately no harm occurred, although it landed on top of a curtain that looked very flammable. Likewise the scorch marks of previous shacks are still quite visible.) Queuing for water takes a significant amount of time and although the Shack Dwellers have tapped into the main water line, access is often limited. The two latrines that serve countless people smell unbearably and although it is not mosquito season my hands have more red bite marks than unbitten areas of skin (about 54 bites on one hand after just the first night). Finally, the sound of babies coughing at night is heart rending each time. There is no close hospital; all of them are far away, ambulances can’t enter the settlements, and often ambulance drivers won’t even come to where the settlements meet the road.

Nevertheless, the Dwellers are hopeful because of Abahlali. During my first night one of the Dwellers cautioned me quite strictly that I must not go out alone at night. I inquired if that was true in the Abahlai areas as well. She responded, “Oh yes, this is Abahlali area. I feel very safe here.” Earlier that day at the Youth Day Political Education meeting, my translator and host Ndabo told me that Abahlali is on a path between life and death. But to me as far as I can tell from my conversation that evening, Abahlali is the path from death to life.

Robert Ascherman
Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack Dwellers) Movement South Africa
South Africa

This June to August, I am spending two months with Abahlali baseMjondolo, Zulu for “Residents of the Shacks.” The Shack dwellers Movement is the largest movement in South Africa  and opposes the evictions, legal or illegal of shack dwellers being imposed on them by the ANC. They are demanding land, housing, and human dignity, along with all the benefits that come with it (sanitation, health care, electricity, geographic location near the schools and their places of work, etc.).I first arrived in South Africa on June 16, the country’s  National Youth Day, which commemorates the 1967 Soweto Uprising. During the uprising high school students took to the streets after the Apartheid Government, without consulting students or teachers, passed the Afrikaans Medium Decree, declaring the official languages for education would be English and Afrikaans. Indigenous languages were largely to be ignored and Afikaans was considered the language of the oppressors. When Punt Janson, the Deputy Miniser of Bantu Education, was questioned about whether or not he had consulted the people who were to be affected by the act,  he replied with disdain and vehemence:

Robert Ascherman
Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack Dwellers) Movement South Africa
South Africa

Abahlali baseMjondolo, whose name means “residence of the shacks” in Zulu, is the largest and most powerful movement to arise in the post-legal apartheid years in South Africa. Today their mission is to oppose the de facto  economic and social apartheid being led by the African National Congress—Nelson Mandel’s Party, which itself overthrew legal apartheid.

Because of this dynamic, it is impossible to understand the shack dwellers’ struggle without first understanding the history of the struggle against legal apartheid. One of the key components of the struggle was the Black Consciousness Movement, as articulated by Steve Biko. Biko argued that apartheid would never be successfully defeated so long as a mass scale of black Africans—the people who  suffered the most from apartheid—faced a nefarious inferiority complex, which made them defer to the authority of white liberals who wanted to lead the movement, as opposed to following the leadership of black Africans.

Despite concentrating my studies at Gallatin in Liberation Psychology and Social Movements, I had never heard of Biko  when I first decided to spend my summer in South Africa with Abahali. My decision was solely based upon a need to work with an organization that communicates in English. I chose Abahali over the Indian organization, Ekta Parishad, because of what felt like a semi-personal connection to the shack dwellers. My best friend and mentor, Dan Jones, a previous Gallatin Human Rights Fellow, had introduced me to Abahali’s documentary, Dear Mandela.

Throughout my independent study this semester, Biko’s ideas have been quite inspiring, especially when  applied to Abahali baseMjondolo by scholar and Abahali member, N.C. Gibson. This has been quite fortunate for me as a student, helping me clarify my career goal of writing a book or PhD dissertation  about why a liberation psychology movement is needed and how it could be created.

As an organizer, Biko’s works have inspired me in regards to a key question from the fellowship seminar: Should human rights be approached as a strategy or ideology; a practice or a devotion? Biko’s writing—along with the article, “The Power and the Crisis of Human Rights,” by Amnesty International’s former executive director, Larry Cox—has helped me realize that the answer has to be both. Cox shows that uncalculated and unstrategic approaches to human rights only result in co-option. Likewise, Biko shows that Black Consciousness, a strategical articulation of Black Empowerment, gave direction to a new movement struggling against apartheid, and accomplished this because its devotion to the notion that “Black is beautiful.”

Further, Biko shows that Black Consciousness as a model for poor/dispossessed consciousness is a key step in achieving human rights. Shame, stigmatization, and inferiority complexes based on poverty and dispossession prevent social movements from achieving human rights. However, a devotion to human rights, which views the subject not only as a practice but also an ideal, enables the development of committed leaders who can connect people across all lines to achieve justice.

Robert Ascherman
Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack Dwellers) Movement South Africa
South Africa

It’s March 31 at 11:30 PM and I’m staring at a blank white box. I probably should have started this blog much earlier, but organizing and being a student has just been so intense. This summer in South Africa with Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack Dwellers) Movement seems like a far cry from now because of my involvement with several campaigns: Truth for America: How Teach for America is Ruining Public Education; the first ever International Campus Worker Solidarity campaign, organized by United Students Against Sweatshops; the student debt movement, organized by NYU Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM); and Fight for $15.

There is not an immediately clear connection for most folks between climate justice and advocating for $15 and a union. The conversation I had with an organizer from NYU Divest, which demands NYU’s divestment from the fossil fuel industry, presses against my mind like a heavy weight. Using the language of the Black Lives Matter movement, I said, “Let’s have a rally and speak out inside a McDonald’s while protesting, ‘We can’t breathe on $7.25,’ and then go to NYU protesting, ‘We can’t breathe without climate justice.’”

I wanted this first blog post to be about my understanding of human rights and my approach to upholding them, and this sounds like exactly the right thing to say.

Lives matter. Lives matter more than profit. Lives matter here in America for teachers, for students, and for everyone without $15 and a union, just as they do in the Persian Gulf and just as they do in South Africa, where people struggle for housing rights.

Lives matter more than anything, and no one should be poor (the state of living without the material goods necessary to survive), but we are never going to win the global struggle for human rights if we’re all divided into our little single-focus organizations. Justice will only be achieved if we can unite across all lines of divisions and form a broad, mass-based movement to demand the end of all injustices.

Indeed, Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King set the road ahead of us when he stated the following:

“The dispossessed of this nation—the poor, both white and Negro—live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty. The only real revolutionar[ies], people say, [are those] who ha[ve] nothing to lose. There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.”