Southern Resistance in Critical Perspective by Marcel Paret Carin Runciman Luke Sinwell

Author:Marcel Paret, Carin Runciman, Luke Sinwell [Marcel Paret, Carin Runciman, Luke Sinwell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317127284
Goodreads: 34789343
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

Devolution to the districts

Cape Town–based housing struggles have a long history of federated structures rooted in neighborhood-level branches, from the United Democratic Front of the 1980s21 to the Anti-Eviction Campaign of the early 2000s22 – both of which, incidentally, were launched in Mitchell’s Plain. The Housing Assembly is no different. However, as discussed extensively at Coordinating Committee meetings, previous Cape Town–based post-apartheid social movements faced two major barriers to effectively utilising their federated structures. First and foremost, branches became mired in a parochial localism, unable to transcend neighborhood-level concerns and make use of the organisation as a whole. The Housing Assembly consciously attempted to overcome this limit by holding regular (ranging from weekly to monthly) report-backs to a central Coordinating Committee that included both district-level conveners and organisation-wide elected officials. The sole purpose of these meetings was to ensure that local strategies accorded with the Housing Assembly’s overarching strategy as determined by its membership. This makes the Housing Assembly unique in a period characterised by two notable features: nearly all of the post-2000 urban social movements in South African cities have collapsed, and those militant struggles that have emerged more recently (around service delivery, housing, jobs, and education) have rarely been connected to a coordinating movement organisation.

A second major limit to previous iterations of district-level organising is that despite maintaining the organisational form of a federated structure, previous organisations were frequently dominated by a handful of charismatic personalities. In such cases, directives typically ran from these individuals to local branches instead of vice versa. In some instances, these individuals were able to stand in for branches themselves, creating the appearance of district-level power, but in practice resulting in one or two figures substituting their individual wills for those of the local committee. This critique was the one most frequently voiced in the Housing Assembly’s discussions of previous social movements.

To reinforce branch autonomy, the Housing Assembly divided the Cape Flats into five districts (see Figure 6.1), and each of these into a number of neighborhood committees. The Mitchell’s Plain district, for example, convened meetings in Tafelsig and Beacon Valley, two large, well-established neighborhoods; and in Siqalo, an informal settlement with an estimated 30,000 residents. At the neighborhood committee level, organisers would decide upon the frequency of meetings. I attended a handful of such meetings in four of the five districts, and I attended every district meeting in Mitchell’s Plain’s Beacon Valley and Tafelsig neighborhoods over a four-month period. At their peak, these occurred weekly. This was the strongest district at the time, and so it would be inaccurate to extrapolate from this experience, but by the time I left, Athlone and Khayelitsha were reportedly holding meetings of comparable strength.

A major function of these meetings was to coordinate huisbesoek, Afrikaans for door-to-door campaigning. Every Sunday at 2 pm, Beacon Valley residents would meet at the convener’s front gate, and for two hours they would systemically work through the neighborhood. They would bring petitions with them, which were actually less petitions and more

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