The Centre for Culture and Languages at the University of Johannesburg, a new interdisciplinery centre in the Faculty of Humanities, has just advertised the
the post of Researcher. Please send a comprehensive cv, including current
remuneration, date of last increase, and the telephone numbers and email addresses of at least three referees to: [email][email protected] or fax: +27-11=5593173. Closing date: end February.

Police have started shooting people at close range in Delft. There is pandemonium and brutality. Following yesterday's ruling in the High Court which upholds Thubelisha Homes and the state's eviction order against the community, the residents decided to appeal at the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein. The lawyers worked through the night doing the paperwork for this appeal.

South Africa's elite crime-fighting unit, the Scorpions, is to be disbanded in what comes as a blow to Thabo Mbeki, the country's president, who defended the FBI-style organisation. Charles Nqakula, South Africa's safety and security minister, told parliament on Tuesday that the organisation would be dissolved and a new unit set up.

The South African Department of Health this week published new guidelines for prevention of mother to child transmission in South Africa. However activists and doctors say they still leave South Africa out of step with poorer and less well resourced nations. South Africa will not adopt the regimen described as `more efficacious` by World Health Organization guidelines issued in August 2006 - seven days of AZT and 3TC for mothers after single dose nevirapine at the time of delivery – but instead use AZT alone for the infant - but not the mother - in the week after delivery.

The One Man Can Campaign supports men and boys to take action to end domestic and sexual violence and to promote healthy, equitable relationships that men and women can enjoy - passionately, respectfully and fully. The One Man Can Campaign promotes the idea that each one of us has a role to play, that each one of us can create a better, more equitable and more just world. At the same time, the campaign encourages men to work together with other men and with women to take action - to build a movement, to demand justice, to claim our rights and to change the world.

Abahlali baseMjondolo Take the Provincial Government to Court Over the Notorious Slums Act
 
On Tuesday we lodged papers in the High Court requesting the Court to declare the notorious KwaZulu-Natal Slums Act unconstitutional. Today we can announce that the sheriff has just served those papers on the provincial government. They and our appeal to the court are now in the public domain.
 
The Slums Act is an attack on the poor that has been celebrated by estate agents and lamented by the poor. It is a clear return to the thinking and laws of colonialism (e.g. the 1934 Slums Act) and apartheid (e.g. the 1951 Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act). Today we are calling for a Housing Summit at which all democratic shack dwellers' organisations can negotiate a new partnership and a new Act with government. After years of protests around the country it is clear that we can not go on with failed policies.
 
We need an Act like the City Statute in Brazil or the Kaantabay sa Kauswagan Ordinance in Naga City in Thailand. We need an Act that will guarantee the Right to the City for the poor. We need an Act that will ensure that land in our cities is distributed according to human need and not the greed of the rich. We need an Act that will ensure that no shack dweller must face another year at constant risk of death from life without fire protection, toilets, refuse removal and floods as it is the case in Ash Road settlement in Pietermaritzburg. We need an Act that will ban government expenditure on theme parks and stadiums and newspaper adverts in which politicians promote themselves using the excuse of wishing us happy this and happy that while our children are being killed by rats and diarrhoea and fire. It is an insult to our humanity when money is wasted while people are dying from poverty. We need an Act that will ensure that our cities are safe for women – that the police will serve the people, that there will be lighting, safe toilets and proper public transport. We need an Act that will ensure that there is proper support for community run crèches in each settlement. We need an Act that will make it clear that putting three generations of a family in one room 30 kilometers out of the city is oppression and not a housing programme. We need an Act that will immediately provide subsidised transport, sports fields, clinics and libraries for all the innocent people who have already been forcibly removed out of the cities and sentenced to life in terrible places like Park Gate in Durban and France in Pietermartizburg. We need an Act that will end the top down system of government and NGO planning that has terrorized our people – an Act that will ensure that in each settlement development is planned by the people of that settlement through their organisations in partnership with the government. We need an Act that puts real power in the hands of the people.
 
On 28 September 2007 we marched against the Slums Act in our thousands. We were beaten and 14 of us were arrested.
 
On 21 June 2007 we sent a delegation to the provincial parliament to oppose the Slums Act there. We were denied the right to speak.
 
On 4 May 2007 hundreds of us crowded into the Kennedy Road Hall to tell the government that we are absolutely opposed to the Slums Act. We were ignored.
 
We are going to court because we know that in court we will not be beaten, arrested, denied the right to speak or ignored. 
 
When the Bill was first circulated we read it in small groups line by line. We developed a critique. It is on our website at We discussed the Bill and our critique in meetings across all our affiliated settlements and branches in Durban, Pinetown and Pietermartizburg. Eventually it was decided to issue a call for all people and organisations opposed to this return to apartheid to join us to plan a campaign against the Bill. By the time the Bill became an Act we had created a task team with one job to do – to eliminate the Slums Act. The Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) in Johannesburg was one of the organisations that responded to our call for solidarity against this Act. They took instruction from our movement at various meetings in the shacks and have developed the papers served today in constant discussion with us. They report to our Elimination of the Slums Act Task Team. The Task Team reports to the movement secretariat and the secretariat reports to all the thousands of Abahlali members across Durban, Pinetown and Pietermartizburg. When our lawyers step into court they will not only be carrying the hopes of thousands of people but they will also be guided by the thinking done in our communities. They have acted with us, not for us. We salute CALS for solidarity in action.
 
Despite all the arrests that we have suffered since 2005 not one of our members has ever been found guilty in a court. But we have never lost when we have taken the government to court. We have won many crucial court victories since 2005. We overturned Sutcliffe's illegal ban on our marches in 2006 and working with the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) and other pro bono lawyers we have won interdicts against illegal evictions every year since 2006. We also salute the LRC and the pro bono lawyers for solidarity in action.
 
This is a day of hope for our movement and on this day we note that we are not alone.
 
We reaffirm our full support for all shack dwellers struggling against the destruction of their communities in the name of 'slum clearance' across South Africa and especially the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign and their brave struggle against forced removal. They have been warned that their own Western Cape Slums Act is on the way. We also reaffirm our full support for their struggle for the right to think and lead their own struggle. We reaffirm our full support for all street traders struggling against harassment and eviction across the country. We reaffirm our full support for all families struggling against the eviction of poor children from schools. We reaffirm our full support for all rural people batting evictions from farms and the resilience of the Rural Network to be in solidarity with those families. In this instance, we will stand firm with our comrades from eNkwalini (between Eshowe and Melmoth) when we march together on Friday. We reaffirm our full support for our comrades in the Combined Harare Residents' Association and all the other organisations and people in Zimbabwe still reeling from Operation Murambatsvina. We reaffirm our full support for our comrades battling evictions and other forms of oppression in Turkey and in Haiti. We will be in support of Lavalas, the movement of the Haitian poor that became a flood that had to be dammed and damned by the rich, on the global day of action for Haiti on 29 February 2008.
 
Every person is a person. Every person is important and deserves safety and dignity. One billion of the six billion people in the world live in shacks. Another billion live in housing that is not much better than shacks. Let us no longer accept the unacceptable. Let us build a university of the poor in every city. Let us stop all evictions. Let us move forward to land and housing in the cities.
 
Our settlements are communities to be supported not 'slums' to be eliminated.
 
To hell with the Slums Act.
 
For further information and comment please contact:
 
Sibusiso Zikode, Abahlali baseMjondolo President: 0835470474
Lousia Motha, Abahlali baseMjondolo Co-ordinator: 0781760088

*The full court papers will be loaded onto to our website http://www.abahlali.org shortly.

**Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

In commemoration of the second anniversary of Zoliswa Nkonyane’s brutal murder in February 2005, Triangle Project and its Western Cape alliances launched the end hate 07-07-07 campaign on 3 February in Cape Town at Saartjie Baartman Center. Women, the HIV/Aids sector and individual human rights activists gathered with a common goal, to put an end to all forms of hate crimes.

Women'sNet, a feminist NGO based in Johannesburg, which promotes the strategic use of ICTs for social action and women's empowerment is seeking to fill the position of Project Officer. the deadline for applications in 15 February 2008.

Women'sNet, a feminist NGO based in Johannesburg, which promotes the strategic use of ICTs for social action and women's empowerment is seeking to fill the position of Intern. the deadline for applications is 15 February 2008.

The Gender and Media Southern Africa (GEMSA) Network is a Southern African NGO based in Johannesburg that has chapters in 13 southern African countries. The GEMSA secretariat seeks the services of an experienced, highly motivated and committed individual to fill the position of Chief Executive Officer (CEO). The successful candidate will come from Southern Africa.

The 07-07-07-Campaign to end hate against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered and Intersexed (LGBTI) persons was launched at the Saartjie Baartman Centre, Heideveld in Cape Town on the 2nd anniversary commemorating the violent and brutal death of 19 year old Zoliswa Nkonyana (04/02/06). The provincial campaign is being spearheaded by Cape Town's Triangle Project, the oldest LGBTI service organisation in the country in partnership with the national Joint Working Group (JWG) and the Western Cape 07-07-07 Alliance partners.

On the Night Of January 30, members of the South African Police Service accompanied by officials of the Department of Home Affairs conducted a brutal and violent raid on the premises of the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg at around midnight, reportedly breaking down the doors of the church and violently attacking and beating up many unarmed and defenceless people who were sheltering in the church. The minister of the church, Bishop Paul Verryn, was also assaulted in the attack. Many people reportedly had items of personal property illegally confiscated by their ‘attackers’ in scenes reminiscent of the behaviour of security agents under apartheid.

This Thursday, 7th February 2008, eight Joe Slovo residents charged with public violence last year are due to appear in the Cape Town Regional Court in Parow (Court Number 4). The Joe Slovo Task Team is very disturbed that the case has been moved from the Bishop Lavis Magistrates Court to the Regional Court and that it is set down for trial, whereas they do not even have a lawyer.

Pius Adesanmi comments on the Amakwerekwere syndrome - South Africa's xenophobia.

The letters came within two days of each other. The first was an invitation from Professor Georges Hérault, Director of the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS). Three years after my last visit to South Africa to assess the perception of Francophone African literatures in that country’s Universities, IFAS was again inviting me as visiting scholar. The second was from Chris Dunton, the well-known British Professor of African literatures who is now Chair of the English Department of the National University of Lesotho at Roma. Like Hérault, Dunton was inviting me to Lesotho as visiting scholar to present a Faculty of Arts Guest Lecture. I arranged a few other engagements and braced up for a very engaging psychic reconnection with the African continent.

I needed the return to Africa badly. I had been away from that continent for an uncomfortable stretch, carrying out my scholarly labor in the minefield of North American academe, writing Africa “from a rift”, as Achille Mbembe would put it. I also needed the trip for other reasons. I needed a reprieve from the oppression of the image: the North American media image of Africa. The African living here is in constant danger of accepting whatever image of Africa s/he is presented by the media as gospel truth. In North America, I have been consistently assailed, assaulted, and oppressed with images of Africa traceable to the colonial library: Africa-as-AIDS, Africa-as-hunger, Africa-as-civil war, Africa-as-corruption, Africa-as-the-antithesis-of-democracy, Africa-as-everything-we-are-glad-not-to-be. You get tired of the ritual of explaining to charmingly ignorant interlocutors that there is a fundamental distinction between the Africa they see on CNN and the real Africa.

I also wanted a break from Occidentalism. Fernando Coronil, the scholar who coined this term takes great pains to explain that it is not the reverse of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Coronil uses the newer concept to account for those discursive, usually innocuous processes through which the West turns difference into hierarchy and reproduces existing asymmetrical power relations. Occidentalism covers all the mundane quotidian events through which the West constantly reminds the immigrant of his otherness, strangeness, and difference:

“Oh, I love your accent. It’s awesome. Where is that from?”

“Nigeria.”

“Nigeria? You mean Nicaragua?”

This often-repeated, seemingly innocent “compliment” is usually the beginning of encounters that inevitably remind the immigrant that he does not belong… Departure date finally came around. “Be careful. Urban violence is rife in South Africa”, the Nigerian friends who drove me to the airport warned. I shrugged and dismissed their anxiety. There may be violence in South Africa; I certainly was not going to be scared of returning to Africa. I wasn’t going to be afraid of Black people in Africa. I arrived Johannesburg on a cold July morning. A delighted Georges Hérault was on hand at the airport to welcome me. We drove straight to the offices of IFAS located in the downtown area of Johannesburg. After signing my research contract papers and meeting some of the new members of the IFAS Research team, I announced to Hérault that I was going to take a stroll in the busy streets around IFAS. I was eager to get a feel of the same streets I had seen two years earlier. Hérault’s countenance changed. “Be careful. Don’t go out there with your wallet. You could get mugged.” I assured Hérault I would be all right but took the precaution of leaving my valuables in his office.

I started my walk, my reconnection with African soil, on the busy Bree street. For someone who had walked the same street three years earlier, I could not help but observe the heavy Black presence. Like the Hillbrow area, Blacks have taken over downtown Johannesburg. The official principle of separate development through which racial segregation was enforced under Apartheid seems to have been replaced by what one may call an unofficial principle of voluntary separation. While separate development instituted an order in which Blacks had to move out whenever Whites moved in, as was the case in Sophiatown, voluntary separation now induces Whites to move out quietly whenever and wherever Blacks move in. Downtown Johannesburg is a vivid example of a space in which this new South African drama is being played out. This space, which was still predominantly white during my earlier visit, has been taken over by Blacks. In large office complexes and shopping malls, one does not fail to notice the ubiquitous “To Let” signs, evidence of white retreat to other “safe” areas of the city like Rosebank or back “home” to Britain, Holland, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

I stopped for a light lunch at a KFC outlet, my mind busy taking in the new realities. I finished my lunch and went back into the street. I was about to cross a busy intersection when a street sign told me I was on Fox street. Fox street! I had heard a lot of terrifying things about that street since my last trip to South Africa. It is said to be one of the most violent streets in Johannesburg. One could get mugged or killed for as little as a hundred South African rands. I looked around me anxiously. I was surrounded by a sea of inscrutable Black faces. I touched my forehead and found out, much to my irritation, that I was perspiring profusely. It was winter in South Africa! And to my utter embarrassment, I discovered that I relaxed and felt safer each time white faces appeared in the crowd. Here was I, a Black man, looking anxiously for white faces to feel safe from Black violence in an African city! And to think that back in Canada, I had dismissed insinuations that I could be scared of “Black violence” in South Africa! I reluctantly came to the realization that I was far more affected by the oppression of the image than I had been willing to admit. The image of the post-apartheid Black condition in South Africa is constantly constructed in the Western media around the problem of violence. Such stereotypical and prejudicial narrativizations of Black South Africa always have two constantly-repeated, over-sensationalized buzzwords: mugging, robbery. That image had quietly slipped into my subconscious and was responsible for my feeling so uneasy amidst my own kind in a busy street in Johannesburg. I hurried back to IFAS.

On hearing that I had arrived in Johannesburg, Professor Harry Garuba came from his base in the University of Cape Town to spend a weekend with me. As Harry and I hadn’t seen each other since 1996, we had a riotously joyful reunion. The following day, we hit town. Harry wanted to see downtown Johannesburg. He also needed to go to the Consulate-General of Nigeria in Rosebank. As we meandered our way through the ever busy Bree street, Harry could not help observing how filthy downtown Johannesburg had become. I had made the same disturbing observation myself the day I arrived but had been reluctant to accept the disturbing fact that decay of public infrastructure seems to be the story in areas of the city inhabited by Blacks. Predominantly Black areas have become an eyesore. The beautiful lawns and flowerbeds I noticed in some areas three years earlier now tell sad stories of degradation. Some of them have become open-air urinals. Harry and I were worried. We tried to place ourselves in the shoes of White South Africans discussing the now filthy streets of Hillbrow and downtown Johannesburg: “Ah, the good old days of Apartheid!”

When Harry concluded his business at the Nigerian consulate, we took a bus and headed back to Georges Hérault’s residence. I still don’t know what it was about us that gave us away as foreigners but the other passengers, all Blacks, lapsed into an uneasy silence as soon as we entered. I looked at the faces around us and thought I saw hostility. The tension was so thick in the air you could cut it with a knife. Harry confirmed my worst fears when we left the bus. I had just experienced, firsthand, South African xenophobia and I was to experience it again and again throughout my three-month sojourn in that country. Harry explained to me – with the coolness of someone used to it - that the Black South African passengers on the bus had identified us as makwerekwere, hence the naked hostility. Makwerekwere is the derogatory term used by Black South Africans to describe non-South African blacks. It reminds one of how the ancient Greeks referred to foreigners whose language they did not understand as the Barbaroi. To the Black South African, makwerekwere refers to Black immigrants from the rest of Africa, especially Nigerians. I was confounded by the fact that Black South Africa had begun to manufacture its own kaffirs so soon after apartheid.

As I later discovered after a series of encounters, Black South Africans have found an easy explanation for the myriad problems of poverty, housing, transportation, unemployment, crime, violence, decay of public and social infrastructure. “Ah, the makwerekwere! These Nigerians are all criminals! When they are not busy trafficking drugs, they are taking over our jobs, our houses and, worse, our women. All foreigners must leave this country!” What Salman Rushdie refers to as a “demonizing process” of the Other is at work here and the consequences are predictably disastrous. There is so much anger and frustration among the Nigerians I met in South Africa. Most of them have become paranoid, living permanently in fear. In a discussion with some Nigerian medical doctors in Pretoria, I observed that their anger is directed more at Black South African leaders. “Imagine these South Africans treating us like this. They think Apartheid came to an end because they fought in Sharpeville and Soweto. It means Mandela never told them the truth. Mbeki never told them the truth.”

The doctors were referring to Nigeria’s heavy moral, political, and financial investment in the anti-Apartheid struggle. Nigeria’s financial and political commitment to that cause was total and unflinching. In the 1970s-80s, the South African freedom struggle was completely woven into Nigeria’s national imaginary, so much so that a Nigerian leader, Olusegun Obasanjo, suggested we mobilized “African juju” and other maraboutic forces of African sorcery to attack Pieter Botha and free our black brothers in South Africa. And he wasn’t joking. Every Nigerian musician, from reggae singers to fuji musicians in the Yoruba tradition, waxed radical anti-Apartheid lyrics to energize the 1970s – 1980s. “Who owns the land, who owns the land? We want to know who owns Papa’s land”, crooned Sonny Okosuns. Majek Fashek, the reggae man replied: “Now, now, now, Margaret Thatcher, free Mandela”! Victor Eshiet of The Mandators screamed: “Truth is our right, Jah is our might, we must free South Africa”.

Everywhere you turned in the Nigeria of those heady decades, freedom for Black South Africans was the dominant national agenda. Black South Africans, including President Thabo Mbeki and Ezekiel Mpahlele, found warmth, hospitality, and friendship during their years of exile in Nigeria. Many of Black South Africans attended Nigerian Universities on Nigerian scholarships. When it became clear that South African whites, like their European and American kinsmen, were determined to make peaceful change impossible and make violent change inevitable, Nigerians donated money to the armed struggle. Personally, I recall donating money during special anti-Apartheid fundraisers as a high school student in Nigeria. In view of this, the Nigerians I met in South Africa had only two words to describe the attitude of Black South Africans to them: collective amnesia.

Prejudice has been the force majeure of so much of human history. Our pantheon of small-minded hate is formidable: Christian prejudice manufactured the unbeliever; Islamic prejudice manufactured the infidel; heterosexual prejudice manufactured the faggot; patriarchal prejudice manufactured the hysteric; European prejudice manufactured the native; American prejudice manufactured the nigger; German prejudice manufactured the Jew; Israeli prejudice manufactured the Araboushim; Afrikaner prejudice manufactured the kaffir. Not to be outdone, Black South Africa has manufactured the makwerekwere as her unique post-Apartheid contribution to this gory pantheon. The joy of your instant-mix coffee (Nescafé) or your instant-mix powdered milk is the considerable labor and hassle it saves you. Just pour water, add sugar to taste, and your drink is ready. The makwerekwere is Black South Africa’s instant-mix kaffir, very easily produced with minimum labor.

* Pius Adesanmi is Associate Professor of English and Director, Project on New African Literatures ( at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Apart from his academic work, Dr. Adesanmi publishes opinion articles regularly in various internet fora. He runs a regular blog for The Zeleza Post ( [email protected] or comment online at

South Africa's police chief has maintained his innocence from corruption charges during a brief court appearance. Jackie Selebi who appeared in court in Johannesburg on Friday is accused of having a "generally corrupt relationship" with Glen Agliotti, a convicted drug smuggler, and trying to shield him from criminal investigations.

OUT LGBT Well-being (OUT), which is a gay healthcare rights organisation in Tshwane, is collaborating with the Gauteng Department of Education to include homosexuality issues in the existing Life Orientation (L.O.) subject taught in South African schools.

The second anniversary that marks brutal murder of Zoliswa Nkonyane in Khayalitsha, Western Cape Province, met with a launch of ‘Call to Action’ by Western Cape Alliance for the 07-07-07-Campaign. ‘Call to Action’ is aimed at ending hate and gender-based violence. “We chose to launch the ‘Call to Action’ on the second anniversary of the brutal death of Zoliswa because nothing has been done on her case yet. The case is still pending”, attested Marlow Valentine of the Triangle Project, which is spearheading the campaign.

The letters came within two days of each other. The first was an invitation from Professor Georges Hérault, Director of the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS). Three years after my last visit to South Africa to assess the perception of Francophone African literatures in that country’s Universities, IFAS was again inviting me as visiting scholar. The second was from Chris Dunton, the well-known British Professor of African literatures who is now Chair of the English Department of the National University of Lesotho at Roma.

After years of stalling and much criticism from the HIV/AIDS sector, the Policy Committee of the National Health Council on Friday finally adopted new guidelines for the prevention of mother to child transmission (PMTCT). At the heart of the new policy is the addition of second antiretroviral drug, AZT, for pregnant women with HIV and their babies to the current treatment with nevirapine only.

The Palestine Solidarity Committee is proud to participate in the fourth consecutive International Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), the key event being a public rally with Azmi Bishara on the 3rd of February at the Careers Centre in Soweto. The rally will be broadcast to the other participants of the global Israeli Apartheid Week in the US, Canada, UK, Palestine amongst other countries and will serve as the international launch pad for their respective IAW campaigns.