Real Troubles – S’bu and Abahlali Attacked

S'bu Zikode at Constitutional Court, May 14th 2009

Luckily work is so very busy, otherwise I’d get a free moment and be forced to dwell on the horrific fate of our friend S’bu and Raj’s Abahlali friends and colleagues.  Abahlali baseMjondolo is a shackdwellers movement in South Africa.  Our relationship with S’bu (who has lead the movement) has certainly broken any stereotypes I might have had about peoples movements, or people who live in shacks.  S’bu is a sophisticated thinker, a brilliant writer – and someone who’s been committed to the cause of the shackdwellers even after severe personal injury – he was picked up and beaten (quite randomly) by the Sydenham police last year.  Now, in this latest raid – apparently instigated by the ANC and supported by the police – they destroyed his house.  I’m hoping he, his wife and children are fine.  The settlement reports several deaths.  Although I speak of him, of course it’s the settlement that’s traumatized.  I think about a beautiful photograph in Raj’s upcoming book.  It’s a picture of Moses Mnewango pouring over council documents by candlelight in a shack, reading, studying, learning to support the fight to gain decent housing.  To move beyond the shack built on the slopes around a waste dump.  

I’ve been reading ‘The Lazarus Project’ by Alexsandaar Hemon.  Three stories intertwine – one from the turn of the 19th to 20th century, a jewish man, Lazarus, arrives at the door of a constable in Chicago and through a kind of misunderstanding is shot.  We learn about the context, the automatic slandering of the man as a ‘jewish anarchist’ and the targeting and harassment of his sister and broader community.  A second thread describes the horrors of the Bosnian/Serbian war, including the random killing of civilians and the more organized violence, as told by a photographer as he journeys back with the protagonist of the novel ‘to the homeland’, back to Sarajevo.  A sub-thread in the protagonists searching through records for the backstory to Lazarus reveals a pogrom in Moldovia.  The details of these take me back to 1984 in India.  And just when I finished the book I got a call from Raj about the Abahlali targeting and violence.  It’s very hard to wrap my head around how the proclivity to this kind of violence persists, how we can do such horrific things to each other. 

S’bu and Abahlali colleagues and friends are in the midst of a struggle.  There’s not much I can do.  Sign this petition if you know enough about the scenario that you feel comfortable in doing so.  The goal is to at least let the local ANC politicians and the police know that there’s a broad international community that knows what’s going down – they cannot keep perpetrating this violence and imagine they will go unnoticed.  It’s not much, but it’s a start.