Speaking at Curries Fountain this weekend, twenty years after Abahlali baseMjondolo emerged from the shack settlements of Durban, I was reminded of what genuine popular democracy looks like when it refuses co-option.
It has been twenty years since a meeting brought together leaders from fourteen shack settlements at Kennedy Road in Durban, and they decided to call their unified group Abahlali baseMjondolo. Revisiting my blog from those early days—entries like “Fucker shot my mates and stole my camera“—brought back the visceral reality of state violence deployed against the poor who dare to organize themselves.
Commander Glen Nayager, that notorious inheritor of apartheid’s torture apparatus, beat countless Abahlali members in custody before dying of a heart attack as sexual assault charges closed in on him. His career embodied the continuity between the old regime and the new—a continuity the ANC has never cared to sever. Yet here we are. The movement counts 180,000 members across 100 branches in four provinces. Not despite the repression, but through it—refined by it, sharpened by it.
The roll call of survivors speaks volumes. Louisa Motha. Zandile Nsibande. Fazel Khan. Richard Pithouse. Mqapheli ‘George’ Bonono. S’bu Zikode, sustained through unemployment and death threats by his partner Sindi’s resolve. I’ve had it easiest—no professional sabotage from academic gatekeepers like Patrick Bond, no police beatings, no midnight flights from assassins, no trauma of being first to arrive at a comrade’s murder scene. S’bu, Thapelo, George bear the scars literally inscribed on their bodies by the state.
The academic establishment’s relentless assault on the movement required us to build our own archive, our own counter-narrative. Now a proper history exists, filling the void left by those who sought to control social movements through donor funding and theoretical gatekeeping.
Even the evolution of the movement’s t-shirts tells the story. Fazel’s first blue ones demanded “Councillor Baig must go!”—a local grievance. The second generation, red by popular decision, proclaimed “Land! Housing!” Soon the slogans reflected deeper understanding: not just services, but decommodification; not just participation, but autonomy; not just democracy, but a different way of living altogether. And then ‘Dignity’ was added. That dignity that comes from both a material improvement, but from the recognition that the intellectual and emotional labour of resistance deserves recognition too.
Under George Bonono and later Thapelo Mohapi, this became genuinely national. The ‘University of Abahlali baseMjondolo’ banner captured something essential: the seriousness of political education drawn from Brazil’s MST, the line-by-line reading of texts, the political schools and communal kitchens spreading across settlements. Here was social reproduction reimagined, new vocabularies of liberation forged in practice.
Compare this to Operation Dudula’s fascist poison—the lie that poverty can be solved through xenophobic purification, that national belonging requires the violent expulsion of foreigners. Abahlali’s philosophy offers the antithesis: if you’re in the shacks, you’re of the shacks, and that’s what solidarity means. “A person is a person wherever they find themselves.” This internationalism isn’t rhetoric but lived principle.
Twenty years on, the movement’s reach is global. At the anniversary, SAFTU’s leadership acknowledged their debt to Abahlali, even speaking of factory occupations—a remarkable shift. But more significant was S’bu’s analysis connecting climate crisis, xenophobia, and land politics, speaking freely of the movement’s mistakes because members were free to make them, learn from them, recover. He condemned Operation Dudula with a clarity even trade union leaders couldn’t match, precisely because the movement doesn’t answer to anyone but its assemblies.
Solidarity messages arrived from across the world, including Jeremy Corbyn, thick in the process of forming Your Party in Britain—a new formation grounded in deliberative democracy explicitly inspired by the MST and Abahlali. As Corbyn wrote:
“Your movement has shown the world that democracy extends beyond elections to a way of living together—through open assemblies and collective decision making. In doing so, you have advanced a vision grounded in humanity, solidarity, and courage. Your struggle has always been internationalist, and your solidarity with the people of Palestine, Swaziland, and the Congo, and the warm relations you have built with movements around the world, are exemplary.”
Whether Your Party succeeds won’t depend on holding meetings, but on whether it can link process to material transformation, deliberation to joy, democracy to the concrete improvement of daily life. That’s what Abahlali understood from the beginning: political form without social content is performance. The communes, the land occupations defended at the cost of blood, the decommodification of housing practiced in defiance of market and state—this is where theory becomes flesh.
The assassination list grows longer. The repression continues. The lies and misinformation about the movement still contaminate the academic left in the US. But there are antidotes. Daraja Press’ history of Abahlali’s first 20 years torches some of the rumour that substitutes for analysis. The movement continues to grow, discovering that more and more settlements function better not when they function as an association of residents but as a commune. Agroecology is cropping up in more and more settlements thanks to exchanges with the MST. It’s a demonstration that when the wretched of the earth organize themselves without mediation, without NGO managers or academic gatekeepers, they can survive what would destroy any formation dependent on elite patronage.
This is the lesson Abahlali offers the world: genuine democracy is possible, but only when everyone thinks, everyone counts, everyone cares, and everyone acts.