Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

A HOMEMADE POLITICS
Abahlali baseMjondolo was formed in 2005
in a group of nearby shack settlements,
all on well-established land occupations,
some reaching back to the 1980s or even
the late 1970s. The people who formed
the movement drew on a rich repertoire
of political experience that included
participation in the ANC, trade unions and
the popular struggles of the 1980s. There
were also familial connections reaching
back to key moments in the history of
popular struggle like the Durban strikes
in 1973, the Mpondo Revolt in 1961,
resistance to evictions in Durban in 1959
and the Bambatha Rebellion in 1906.
The movement was also shaped by practices
and ideas developed in African-initiated
churches and adapted from rural life. From
the beginning ideas about a pre-colonial
world in which personhood was respected
and understood to be attained in relation
to others were significant. But elements
of the new liberal order, like rights-based
conceptions of gender equality, as well as
political traditions that claim descent from
Marx, were also present. These were largely
derived from trade unions and the alliance
between the South African Communist Party
and the ANC.
This new politics was often described as
a “homemade politics” and as a “living
politics”. The idea of a “homemade
politics” carried some sense of bricolage, a
general feature of life in a shack settlement,
and both of these phrases marked a
commitment to a mode of politics that
emerges from everyday life, is fully within
reach of the oppressed, and is fully owned
by the oppressed.
The settlements where the movement was
formed had all been dominated by the
ANC. At the time the ANC, as Idea, was still
entwined with the nation and the struggle
that had bought it into being. As a result the
break from the authority of the party, which
resulted in autonomous elected structures
being set up in each affiliated settlement,
was often understood as a challenge to
local party structures, rather than a rejection
of the party altogether.
It was frequently assumed that the
fundamental problem was that
impoverished people living in shack
settlements had somehow been forgotten
in the new order. It was often thought that
if they, like the industrial working class,
could develop an organizational form to
successfully assert themselves as a particular
category of people, with a particular set of
interests – as the poor – the sympathetic
attention of leading figures in the party, and
elsewhere in society, could be won, and that
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June 2016