Top left, above the fold, in today’s Mercury is a fascinating wee article. Blood tests for shack dwellers, we’re told. Shack dwellers in Cato Manor had blood drawn last year, to test for diseases which they might have caught through contact with vermin. Keep Reading »
Yes indeedy. This weekend the ANC tried to campaign in the shack settlements. The police were on hand to make the ground safe for democracy, but even then, the KwaZulu-Natal Premier couldn’t get into the settlements safely.
I know I’m stealing the title from this article in the Mail and Guardian, but it’s hard to resist describing this weekend’s confrontation between the ANC and the Kennedy Road shackdwellers in any other terms. ANC vs ANC captures it nicely. As does this quote from Mnikelo Ndabankulu of the Abahlali Base Mjondolo in the Foreman Road settlement: “The thing I want to clarify is that we are the ANC. We reject the current ANC nominee for our ward and we therefore have a policy of no vote for this election. We will vote in 2009 when we are happy with the nominee.”
Goodness. The National Executive Committee of the African National Congress has a lot of free time. Their Statement on the Occasion of the 94th Anniversary of the ANC is a fine example of the sort of bureaucratese that aims to convince through stamina, rather than force of argument. The best bits are at the end where, among the salutes for the Royal dead, and an outline for women’s transformation (scheduled between July and September) the ANC Salutes its best cadres, and declares 2006 The Year of Mobilisation for People’s Power through Democratic Local Government. Luckily there’s an election this year, and the ANC has arranged ballot boxes for everyone’s convience. Otherwise, the masses would have to think of creative ways of mobilising for accountable government.
The struggle against the WTO has become the struggle against the Hong Kong administrators. Fourteen people protesting against the WTO, mostly Korean, are now political prisoners in Hong Kong. Read more here.
I’ve often seen the line, attributed to Frederick Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. “. These good folk have done their homework, sourcing the quote, and its context.
Keep Reading »
If there’s one struggle that’s looking on the up at the moment, it’s the fight to get Ashwin Desai’s job back at the Centre for Civil Society, where I work. Ashwin’s one of few veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle who has neither self-destructed nor self-enriched. Click here for a fine interview with him in Z Magazine, and here for an excerpt from his excellent We are the Poors. The uncompromising honesty of his analysis might explain why, now, he’s being banned from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, as the University refashions itself as a credentialing institution for the middle classes.
News from Retort
you can’t even mention the words “socialist” or “socialism” in comments on Salon blogs any more. For why? It’s the Scunthorpe problem: the words contain the brand name for a Viagra-type medication — Cialis. So the unresticted global capitalism of the spammers’ economy has finally made it impossible even to mention an alternative.
The Independent carries news of how Geldof, Bono et al hijacked the Make Poverty History campaign. Seasoned Class Worriers will, of course, have seen this coming a mile off (the hijack, not the audit). A better sense of what’s happening in poverty this Christmas can be found through
this article, from two women in the Kennedy Road Informal Settlement in Clare Estate. Endemic structural violence, poverty and sexism aren’t anything that our fading pop-star heroes have yet addressed. And we know better than to give them time.
Birjinder Anant is dead. Hear him here, read him here, see him here. 
I can’t help feeling that if Birj is gone, nothing now can ever come to any good.
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