Many people who are critical about the legacy of Nelson Mandela have beeb outraged by the South African Reserve Bank's decision to place his iconic image on the South African paper currency. Some say Madiba is being appropriated by capitalists and government officials.

For much of this winter, communities in shack settlements across Cape Town have taken to the streets in some of the most active civil disobedience protests since 1994.

'With the ANC's attempt to legalise this regime, are we making a return to apartheid or could it be just as true that for rural South Africans as well as shackdwellers, history was never left behind?'

‘While as a young movement we try to build radically new forms of direct democracy within by challenging the old guard, we will also be able to strengthen accountability and the authority of the decisions we make as a collective.’

By taking back the commons, thousands of poor and working-class people, together with many middle-class allies, are saying that they no longer want to live in a city which remains segregated.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/559/capetown_occupy3_tmb.jpgJared Sacks gives an update on the Occupy Cape Town movement, suggesting that it is also becoming 'about decolonising this city; about reversing the dispossession of Cape Town from its inhabitants and making visible those that become hidden between the skyscrapers'.

Jared Sacks attended an Occupy Cape Town event on 15 October and found 'a huge theoretical gulf between the lived experience of those whose voices are invisible and the liberal white activists who proclaim that we are all, in fact, the same'.? He writes that: 'It is about time that white male activists who sincerely want to dismantle oppression, begin to take seriously the voices of the oppressed from within the 99 per cent.'

Stressing the need to turn the publishing sector and the concept of freedom of speech on their head, Jared Sacks discusses the ideas behind ‘No Land! No House! No Vote!’, a book produced by the Symphony Way Pavement Dwellers in South Africa. With the group seeking support to bring their story and struggle to the wider world, readers are invited to make donations at:

Ashwin Desai’s recent ‘backhanded swipe’ at South African shackdwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo in his eulogy to Fatima Meer is ‘not only uncalled for, it is also completely inaccurate’, writes Jared Sacks.