S'bu Zikode gave a talk at Harvard University about the struggle of urban shack settlements in South Africa. He discussed how the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement organizes poor, black South Africans living in shack settlements to fight for their right to adequate housing and participation in city planning. They do this through direct actions like land occupations and road blockades, despite facing severe and violent repression from the state, including police killings and assassinations of movement leaders. Zikode emphasized that through self-organization and mobilization, the movement has grown to over 50,000 members across five provinces and continues to advance their agenda for urban land reform and inclusive democracy.

1. Urban Shack Settlements as a Site of Struggle
A talk given at the ‘Urban activism: Staking Claims in the 21
Century City’ conference at Harvard University on 13
September 2019.
S’bu Zikode
I am very honoured and humbled to be invited here at Harvard
University to speak on Urban Activism. I take this opportunity to
express my sincere gratitude to the Centre for Middle Eastern
Studies who have invited me, and made it possible for
organised shack dwellers in South Africa to be represented at
this prestigious platform. I am also grateful to Abahlali
baseMjondolo for entrusting me to speak here, and with this
excellent opportunity for our movement.
When we take our place in our society we take it humble but
firm. Today we take it here at Harvard. Just as we occupy land
we also try to occupy our place in all discussions that are
relevant to us and our lives.
We take our place here because we matter. We take our place
here because we are ordinary people. We take it here because
now, after years of organisation and struggle, we count
because of the strength that we have built from below, and our
voice is now counting. But many of us have terrible scars for
insisting that impoverished people can think too.
Our cities are built and shaped by impoverished people and the
working class. We are the majority in the cities. But many of the
elites, in government, business and civil society, want us to
remain in silence, in dark corners, while they talk for us and

2. decide for us. When we insist on our dignity as human beings,
on our equal capacity to think, and our equal right to participate
in decisions that affect us, this insistence is often treated as a
form of dangerous criminality or conspiracy.
We have also been treated as if we are beneath the law. In fact
we live with the death penalty, and under an effective state of
emergency. We can be slandered, beaten, have our homes
and possessions destroyed and murdered with impunity.
There is a lot of joy and togetherness in our movement. We
occupy land, build creches, halls and vegetable gardens. We
celebrate victories. Our assemblies and rallies bring thousands
of people together and include music, poetry and dance.
But we have also become experts in organising funerals. We
have lost many leaders to assassinations and murder by the
state and the ruling party. Since 2019 we have lost 18 militants.
Many of our leaders have spent long periods under the threat of
death.
The price for land is paid in blood.
We must also live with constant fires and floods. These are not
natural disasters. They are a result of the contempt in which we
are held by the elites.
Abahlali baseMjondolo
The organisation that I am mandated to represent here today
has created a home, a space for political discussion, a voice
and a political instrument for oppressed people for more than
fourteen years. We began to organise ourselves outside of the

3. ruling party because our hope for a better, more equal and
more just society after apartheid was betrayed. The dreams
and aspirations of well-known leaders like Nelson Mandela,
Oliver Tambo, Emma Mashinini, Steve Biko and Robert
Sobukwe were lost. Even more importantly the dreams and
aspirations of millions more people, most of them ordinary
impoverished and working class people whose names are not
known to history, had been lost.
We found ourselves completely on our own, violently
oppressed by a government that told the world that it had freed
us. When we organised ourselves and politely asked them to
talk to us they responded with violent repression. We had to
rebuild the power of the impoverished through self-
organisation, and we had to rebuild a vision of freedom and
dignity from below.
Movement to the cities
In South Africa, like elsewhere in the world, millions of us
impoverished people have migrated to cities for better
possibilities for our lives in terms jobs, schools and universities,
health care and the other opportunities that come with urban
life. We have also moved to cities because our small towns and
villages have not earned the same respect that cities have. Our
small towns and villages are in decline. Factories are closing
and services are collapsing. Small towns and villages have
become areas of neglect and despair. There is no political will
from the authorities to upset the economic system that has
made us poor, and that keeps us poor. We call that system

4. racial capitalism.
But while many people find more possibilities for their lives in
the cities millions remain without any work. When there is work
it is often precarious and highly exploited. You can work and
remain poor. There are serious problems with addiction,
depression, anxiety and violence.
Our children go to schools that are dangerous places where the
level of education is shockingly bad.
The question of land, rural and urban, remains a crisis. We do
have rural branches and we work closely with rural struggles,
for instance the struggle to protect land against mining
companies. Many of our members are involved in struggle in
the cities and in their rural homes. In the cities the housing
question is also a land question. When the government has
built houses they have often built them far outside of the cities,
in peripheral wastelands that we call ‘human dumping grounds’.
We have had to insist on well located urban land for housing,
and that the social value of urban land must be placed before
its commercial value. But we don’t only have to confront the
market and the power of capital. We also have to confront the
politicians who always put their own interests before those of
the people. Our impoverishment is an opportunity for them to
get rich through tenders. Our struggle is against capital, the
politicians and the state.
Cities are becoming more exclusionary places rather than more
democratic and inclusionary places. It is very important to
repeat and to stress that attempts by people who are

5. impoverished and mostly black to be included in decision-
making have been seen as a conspiracy and met with hostility,
including slander and violence. Surveillance, intimidation,
assassination and torture are being used to control
impoverished people.
For many impoverished people access to job opportunities and
development requires that one must be ready to pay a bribe or
that one must be a member of the ruling party. To really
advance one must be somehow connected to those in high
authorities or structures of the ruling party. Some NGOs
operate in the same way. This is not the world we have
imagined.
It is estimated that more than 60% of our world population live
in cities. This number is still growing. On the one hand our
cities are unable to keep up with the movement of people
coming to cities. Our cities’ infrastructure is so bad, and so
commodified, that it is unable to accommodate this movement
of people migrating to cities in search of a better life. It is most
unfortunate that the working class and poorest of the poor who
have actually built our cities have no right to these cities. When
we say that we support the right to the city we don’t just mean
the right to live in the cities. We also mean that we should be
able to participate in planning the cities, in making them more
democratic places.
Land occupations
Abahlali unapologetically occupy vacant and unused land in our
cities. We occupy land to build homes for our families because

6. we know that we deserve a place in our cities too. It is
unfortunate that we are compelled to build our homes whether
we have jobs or no jobs. That is how shack settlements are
built. Often they are built from the waste of the city – pallets,
advertising boards, even election posters.
Our occupations give us well located land for housing, and we
can build other community infrastructure like creches, halls and
gardens. They also give us a space from which we can build
self-managed and democratic communities. In our occupations
we insist that no distinction is made between people on the
basis of which province or country they come from, or which
language they speak. A neighbour is a neighbour, and a
comrade is a comrade.
The politicians try as hard as they can to turn us against each
other in order to weaken us. They always try and create the
idea that we are impoverished because of other poor people.
Our unity is our strength and we have to do all that we can to
build unity. We work, from a base in the occupations, to build
democratic popular power from below.
The majority of the residents in our occupations are women,
and the majority of the members of our movement are women.
Our society has been convulsed by terrible violence against
women, as well as migrants. We work as hard as we can to
oppose this and to ensure that we build women’s power in our
movement and in our society. We are also fully committed to
the equality, respect and safety of all LGBTIQ+ comrades. Full
and equal human dignity is non-negotiable.

7. However, each time we occupy land and build our homes we
are confronted with state violence. The state has gone so far as
to militarise itself against the organisation of the impoverished
whose struggle is to build our homes and our cities. In the case
of Durban the Anti-Land Invasion Unit has been created to
maintain the apartheid urban planning patterns where
impoverished black people have no right to the city. Military
armoured vehicles, first designed for the colonial war in Angola,
and then used by the American military in Iraq, have been
purchased to be used against us. In Johannesburg the “Red
Ants” have become a death squad. In Cape Town the so called
Law Enforcement Agencies are defending huge land for the
rich. The impoverished are squashed into small pieces of land
with no water and sanitation.
The Road Ahead
What kind of democracy are we living in when the oppressed
are governed with military force and day to day state violence?
This is an important question, and one which most of the media
and civil society are not seriously interested in. We insist on a
democracy for everyone, not just on paper but also in reality.
Constant state violence has encouraged us to organise the
unorganised and resist all forms of degradation. Poverty,
unemployment, injustice and inequality have compelled us to
struggle for cities for all. In 2018 our audited membership, all in
good standing, passed 50 000 people. We have continued to
grow since then, and now organise in five provinces. Joining
our movement takes time. It is a slow and careful process. This
is what is required when you are serious about building

8. organisation.
Building this movement has not been easy. We have faced
many sites of resistance across the elite - not only from the
state but from regressive civil society, academia, the media,
etc. Many of these forces believed that impoverished people
cannot think for themselves. We have encountered severe
class and race prejudices from people who say that they are
progressive, and who had built personal empires around the
representation of the struggles of the oppressed in South Africa
to NGOs and academics in North America and Western
Europe. Some of these people saw our self-organisation as a
direct threat to their own power.
However we have won that argument by building and
sustaining a movement, despite severe repression, and
becoming the largest popular movement in post-apartheid
South Africa. Today no one can seriously deny the scale and
power of our movement. We are constantly in the streets, in the
courts, organising rallies of thousands in football grounds, and
in the national media, including radio and television.
We won that argument when we insisted on the living politic
and the politic of dignity. Today our struggle has fought many
battles and won many victories in the courts, in the streets, in
the land occupations and in the battle of ideas.
After many years of having to struggle on our own at home we
are also now building alliances with trade unions outside of the
ANC as well a street traders, flat dwellers, migrants groups and
other progressive movements of the oppressed. We always

9. work to build as much living solidarity as we can between the
oppressed and to support others to organise themselves. We
have also built alliances with radical movements elsewhere in
the world, especially the MTST and MST in Brazil but also with
comrades in many other countries including Ghana, Kenya,
Zimbabwe, Turkey, Mexico and elsewhere. We work, at home,
and internationally, to build an alliance of progressive
movements.
Today as global economic apartheid intensifies much of our
hope for a better future lies with the urban poor. In many
countries around the world the most vibrant struggles, often
with women in the majority, are being organised from the cities.
The land occupation, the road blockade and democratic self-
organisation and management have become important tactics
around the world.
Our hope for the future lies with the democratic self-
organisation of the very people who are disrespected and
treated with indignity.
However, I must repeat that the struggle of shack dwellers in
urban spaces has not been easy. We face violent evictions at a
gun point, without court orders or any regard for the law. We
have rebuilt after each every eviction. It is not unusual for a
settlement to have to be rebuilt more than thirty times before
the land is won. We have been beaten, arrested, tortured in
police custody, slandered in the media and killed by the police,
the land invasion units, Metro police, local councillors and their
izinkabi (hitmen). Many of these cases have not been
investigated and therefore there are no arrests or justice.

10. Despite severe repression the movement has continued to
grow dramatically in recent years. Land occupations, road
blockades, the strategic use of media, strategic use of the
courts, regular assemblies and discussions, and democratic
mass mobilisation have become the key tools for the movement
to advance its agenda. Although the price of land in urban
centres continues to be paid in blood many victories have been
won by popular organisation and mobilisation.
We don’t know what the future holds. But we do know that for
our children we have no choice but to remain committed to the
struggle for a world in which land, wealth and power are fairly
shared, a world in which the dignity of every person is
respected.