zapagringo
zapatista-inspired rebellion on Turtle Island and throughout the galaxy...RJ Maccanihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11330027127067847774zapagringo@gmail.comBlogger148125
Updated: 41 min 43 sec ago
PS for Raha
The Raha crew (pic from Sarah Maple)
Before getting to this month's post here are a few pieces of interest to zapagringo readers: The stellar Desinformémonos has released another issue of its bi-monthly global street paper in 6 languages, including interviews with Arundhati Roy and Oscar Olivera; Immanuel Wallerstein describes the central debate between Latin American left forces today and suggests it may be "the great debate of the twenty-first century"; The South Asia Solidarity Initiative has released a response to Time Magazine's war propoganda cover story, "What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan"; and Jeff Conant at Foreign Policy in Focus explores "What the Zapatistas Can Teach us About the Climate Crisis." And without further ado...
A 'PS' for the Raha Iranian Women's Collective
The workshop at this year's US Social Forum in Detroit was titled "Solidarity, not Intervention: Engaging the Iranian Protest Movement":
Following last year’s contested Iranian presidential election and the street protests of millions of Iranians, a decentralized “green” movement formed around a platform of democracy, transparency, human rights, and social justice. The government reacted with violence, arrests, torture, show-trails, and executions of protesters and activists. Some in the U.S. left have failed to appreciate this protest movement in the context of Iran's political history and Iranians’ economic, social and political grievances. The Iranian government’s defiance of U.S. imperialism has led some to question the legitimacy of the uprising in Iran. In New York, Where is My Vote - NY works to amplify Iranian demands for civil and human rights, and Raha Iranian Women's Collective seeks to integrate these demands into a political framework that foregrounds gender and sexual equality, anti-militarism and opposition to imperialism. This workshop seeks to engage participants in a discussion about the movement in Iran, beginning with an overview of Iranian liberation movements and proceeding to an open and interactive dialogue on what it means to organize trans-national solidarity.
I joined Raha and Where is My Vote for the second half of the session to discuss what I'd learned from transnational solidarity with the Zapatistas. There were also guest speakers sharing their experiences in support of Congolese, Filipin@, Iraqi, and Palestinian self-determination. Other than a good friend of mine, Ryvka, who co-presented on the boycott, divestment and sanctions for Palestine movement (BDS), the other presenters identified as members of the people with whom they are working in solidarity. For my part I mostly covered reflections that I've written about in pieces such as, "Learning Solidarity in the 4th World War."
The discussion was very rich and could have certainly continued well beyond the time of the session. The Raha crew did a great job of holding and facilitating the space, sometimes in spite of participants who were clearly hostile to the proposal of the workshop -> amplifying Iranian demands for civil and human rights and integrating them "into a political framework that foregrounds gender and sexual equality, anti-militarism and opposition to imperialism."
There were a few interesting facts I wanted to share with Raha and the rest of the room that I didn't get to that day. A few points to highlight connections, or entry points for greater connection, between the Zapatistas and Iranian struggles...
The most direct links come from a group of Iranian Marxists who have translated a number of Zapatista documents into Farsi, the majority of them coming from their past 5 years of activity. Unfortunately I never learned to read Farsi and can't divine much more than that, including what the connection might be between that group, and the group of Iranian workers who participated in the World Festival of Dignified Rage, which the Zapatistas' co-hosted in Mexico City and Chiapas over New Years '08-'09.
Hopefully we all remember that it was this same New Years that Israel brutally bombed Gaza. Although we are now talking about Palestine, and not Iran, the struggle for a free Palestine resonates strongly throughout the region. Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos gave a moving speech at the World Festival in response to the attacks. Protests circulated the globe, including Chiapas, and so did Marcos' words. A dear friend, Bilal, who co-founded Left Turn Magazine and now runs a café in Beirut (Ta-Marbuta), wrote me in the days that followed
...i read the marcos statement on al jazeera after having read it in english and they really did a good job translating, it was really nice to read marcos in arabic for the first time. but what is just as interesting are the many comments that follow from all sorts of arabs (from saudi arabia, gaza, morroco, emirates, you name it) who have nothing but praise. they're amazed how someone in the jungles of mexico can capture it all so well...
Part of the reason was perhaps because solidarity has passed in both directions, between Palestine and Mexico, many times over the years. In November of 2006, when the Mexican military entered Oaxaca City to crush a six month long popular commune, Jamal Jumá of the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign spoke up. In a post from August that year I documented several other instances of this relationship... each one a piece of the bridge that links these rebel lands.
Perhaps also relevant here is the emergence of indigenous Chiapaneco converts to Islam, this article even identifying 'Zapatist Muslims.' The thousand or so Zapatista communities of Chiapas are some of the only ones to have constructed enduring peace and solidarity between Catholics and evangelical Christians, so it doesn't surprise me much if some adherents to Islam are now in the mix. They identify as Sunni but even so this is certainly some indicator that the Zapatistas of southern Mexico and the rebellious citizens (religious, secular or otherwise) of the Islamic Republic of Iran are not as far from each other as we might first assume.
Before getting to this month's post here are a few pieces of interest to zapagringo readers: The stellar Desinformémonos has released another issue of its bi-monthly global street paper in 6 languages, including interviews with Arundhati Roy and Oscar Olivera; Immanuel Wallerstein describes the central debate between Latin American left forces today and suggests it may be "the great debate of the twenty-first century"; The South Asia Solidarity Initiative has released a response to Time Magazine's war propoganda cover story, "What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan"; and Jeff Conant at Foreign Policy in Focus explores "What the Zapatistas Can Teach us About the Climate Crisis." And without further ado...
A 'PS' for the Raha Iranian Women's Collective
The workshop at this year's US Social Forum in Detroit was titled "Solidarity, not Intervention: Engaging the Iranian Protest Movement":
Following last year’s contested Iranian presidential election and the street protests of millions of Iranians, a decentralized “green” movement formed around a platform of democracy, transparency, human rights, and social justice. The government reacted with violence, arrests, torture, show-trails, and executions of protesters and activists. Some in the U.S. left have failed to appreciate this protest movement in the context of Iran's political history and Iranians’ economic, social and political grievances. The Iranian government’s defiance of U.S. imperialism has led some to question the legitimacy of the uprising in Iran. In New York, Where is My Vote - NY works to amplify Iranian demands for civil and human rights, and Raha Iranian Women's Collective seeks to integrate these demands into a political framework that foregrounds gender and sexual equality, anti-militarism and opposition to imperialism. This workshop seeks to engage participants in a discussion about the movement in Iran, beginning with an overview of Iranian liberation movements and proceeding to an open and interactive dialogue on what it means to organize trans-national solidarity.
I joined Raha and Where is My Vote for the second half of the session to discuss what I'd learned from transnational solidarity with the Zapatistas. There were also guest speakers sharing their experiences in support of Congolese, Filipin@, Iraqi, and Palestinian self-determination. Other than a good friend of mine, Ryvka, who co-presented on the boycott, divestment and sanctions for Palestine movement (BDS), the other presenters identified as members of the people with whom they are working in solidarity. For my part I mostly covered reflections that I've written about in pieces such as, "Learning Solidarity in the 4th World War."
The discussion was very rich and could have certainly continued well beyond the time of the session. The Raha crew did a great job of holding and facilitating the space, sometimes in spite of participants who were clearly hostile to the proposal of the workshop -> amplifying Iranian demands for civil and human rights and integrating them "into a political framework that foregrounds gender and sexual equality, anti-militarism and opposition to imperialism."
There were a few interesting facts I wanted to share with Raha and the rest of the room that I didn't get to that day. A few points to highlight connections, or entry points for greater connection, between the Zapatistas and Iranian struggles...
The most direct links come from a group of Iranian Marxists who have translated a number of Zapatista documents into Farsi, the majority of them coming from their past 5 years of activity. Unfortunately I never learned to read Farsi and can't divine much more than that, including what the connection might be between that group, and the group of Iranian workers who participated in the World Festival of Dignified Rage, which the Zapatistas' co-hosted in Mexico City and Chiapas over New Years '08-'09.
Hopefully we all remember that it was this same New Years that Israel brutally bombed Gaza. Although we are now talking about Palestine, and not Iran, the struggle for a free Palestine resonates strongly throughout the region. Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos gave a moving speech at the World Festival in response to the attacks. Protests circulated the globe, including Chiapas, and so did Marcos' words. A dear friend, Bilal, who co-founded Left Turn Magazine and now runs a café in Beirut (Ta-Marbuta), wrote me in the days that followed
...i read the marcos statement on al jazeera after having read it in english and they really did a good job translating, it was really nice to read marcos in arabic for the first time. but what is just as interesting are the many comments that follow from all sorts of arabs (from saudi arabia, gaza, morroco, emirates, you name it) who have nothing but praise. they're amazed how someone in the jungles of mexico can capture it all so well...
Part of the reason was perhaps because solidarity has passed in both directions, between Palestine and Mexico, many times over the years. In November of 2006, when the Mexican military entered Oaxaca City to crush a six month long popular commune, Jamal Jumá of the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign spoke up. In a post from August that year I documented several other instances of this relationship... each one a piece of the bridge that links these rebel lands.
Perhaps also relevant here is the emergence of indigenous Chiapaneco converts to Islam, this article even identifying 'Zapatist Muslims.' The thousand or so Zapatista communities of Chiapas are some of the only ones to have constructed enduring peace and solidarity between Catholics and evangelical Christians, so it doesn't surprise me much if some adherents to Islam are now in the mix. They identify as Sunni but even so this is certainly some indicator that the Zapatistas of southern Mexico and the rebellious citizens (religious, secular or otherwise) of the Islamic Republic of Iran are not as far from each other as we might first assume.
Categories: News from Elsewhere
'09-'10 Year in Review
four years. from below. to the left.
Inspired by the Zapatistas' Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle (or simply "the Sexta"), which they released five years ago, you find documented here some of the collective labor of international affiliates (the Zezta Internazional) as well as of the national movement of Mexican adherents known as the Other Campaign. You'll find many Zapatista-inspired intersections with other people and movements in the US and around the world, and the occasional piece coming from Oaxaca where I reported on the Other Campaign in early '06.
2006 was the year Subcomandante Marcos toured Mexico as part of the Zapatistas' participation in building the Other Campaign... with so many organizations, indigenous peoples, communities, families and individuals beginning to build the movement from throughout the country and beyond. It was the year that the autonomous municipality of San Salvador Atenco, on the outskirts of Mexico City, and the six month long commune in Oaxaca City were attacked by the government with more violence than anyone had seen in recent memory. The year that the US-backed candidate for president won the elections through fraud. The year Mexicans played a crucial role in the massive demonstrations of immigrant workers on this side of the border wall.
Here we are four years later... with a ramped up and murderous war on the poor and working people within Mexico funded to the tune of $1.4 billion by the US government under the guise of a War on Drugs, and the proliferation of laws such Arizona's SB 1070 on this side. But, in the words of FORMER political prisoner Nacho del Valle, "Who can imprison the fury of a volcano?"
A Run Down of Zapagringo's Fourth Season
This year many initiatives and struggles begun in the past five years reached new stages. Last October Movement for Justice in El Barrio saw the fall of Dawnay, Day Group, the second mega-landlord trying to gentrify East Harlem who they've played a pivotal role in taking down.
An International Seminar of Reflection and Analysis was held in the days before and following New Years at CIDECI-Unitierra in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas where a book documenting the First International Colloquium in Memory of Andres Aubry, held their two years prior, was presented.
In February the Winter Olympics faced a resistance whose early whispers were first heard in Sonora, Mexico in October of 2007 at the Gathering of Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, which was co-convened by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
In April a national and international solidarity caravan that was attempting to break the paramilitary blockade of the Other Campaign affiliated autonomous municipality of San Juan Copala in Oaxaca was attacked. Paramilitary gunfire killed Bety Cariño (a powerful Mixtec organizer) and Jyri Jakkola (a solidarity activist from Finland). In the ongoing assault against the autonomous Triqui municipality San Juan Copala we can hear the clear echo of 2006, including the murder of an international solidarity activist. Following the attack, more solidarity organizing was born but the blockade continues and San Juan Copala continues suffering under low intensity warfare.
Another quite large wound from 2006, however, moved much closer to healing and transformation at the end of June. The mighty autonomous municipality of San Salvador Atenco won freedom for its 12 remaining political prisoners with support from compañer@s around the world. This is a truly historic victory on the path to justice for Atenco and beyond.
Looking beyond Mexico we can also remember that in 2006 Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos made what was a controversial decision at the time when he declined an invitation to attend the inauguration of Bolivia's first indigenous president, Evo Morales. Marcos had his reasons and they are appearing more and more reasonable four years down the road as the indigenous movements who put Morales into office are revolting against what continues to be a "colonial and oligarchic" state. For a very fair analysis of the situation, if you read Spanish, check out Raúl Zibechi's article in La Jornada from earlier this month. Otherwise this later article of his in English will do. The Mesa 18 Declaration, which came out of the World People's Conference on Climate Change, is also relevant here.
A place all too familiar with the dangers of placing hope in state power that has made its way into the posts of this season is South Africa, where the Poor People's Alliance has been shaking things up for the political class. In September of last year, the ruling African National Congress brutally attacked one of the core member organizations of the Alliance, Abahlali baseMjondolo (the South African Shackdwellers Movement). Having just been visited by them in August, Movement for Justice in El Barrio spoke out against the attack and in support of their compas across the Atlantic. The attack was believed to also be connected to the crackdowns and displacements taking place in the country in advance of June and July's FIFA World Cup. A broad description of the situation of these struggles in South Africa was written by Toussaint Losier for Left Turn, and published online here. Picture the Homeless, Domestic Workers United and The Poverty Initiative are another set of groups from NYC who have been mobilizing support of the Poor People's Alliance, including this creative and educational message of solidarity from the US Social Forum. These struggles have been generating some very powerful analysis alongside their action, such as this critique of some of the ways the idea of Right to the City has been mobilized... even as Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape launches a Right to the City campaign of its own in Capetown!
The Palestinian freedom struggle returned again this year, and appropriately as ever, with the ongoing development of the US-Palestine Youth Solidarity Network and the successful struggle to free Jamal Juma'.
Perhaps most powerfully embodying the expansive vision of zapatismo this year was Movement for Justice in El Barrio's Third Encuentro for Dignity and Against Displacement, which included fellow organizers from across the Harlems as well as San Salvador Atenco, South Africa and Haiti. In the lead-up to the second US Social Forum this June in Detroit, I co-organized a rooftop fundraiser for Movement where we screened Sleep Dealer, heard from filmmaker Alex Rivera and raised over $1,250 for their delegation!
At the first US Social Forum in 2007, I attended as part of the Another Politics is Possible delegation from NYC. In the time since then, our study group of the same name participated in a roundtable for Upping the Anti and collaborated with LA COiL (Los Angeles Communities Organizing in Liberation) to create a pamphlet further exploring our principles and practices, which was distributed at this year's USSF. Hopefully we'll find an online home for the pamphlet, "So That We May Soar: Horizontalism, Intersectionality and Prefigurative Politics," soon... in the meantime here is a post from a fan featuring a few snippets of the text.
It was also this year that our childcare collective, Regeneración, launched a new website and began organizing in a network with six other collectives from around the country in advance of the Forum. If only they would've let us organize the Children's Forum! But that's a story for a later date...
What has come into much sharper focus this year, and I believe will continue to be at the center of my work, is organizing toward Transformative Justice. Our Challenging Male Supremacy Project has really grown into itself this past season, holding work in NYC as well as across the country and world as part of generationFIVE's Transformative Justice Collaboratives and a Partner in the StoryTelling and Organizing Project.
This focus on transformative justice grows out of my years of commitment and work around penal abolition, engagement with liberatory social/political movements such as the Zapatistas, and my own experiences of child sexual abuse. This was also a year for surfacing in a big way around this last part; especially participation in the creation and cast of Secret Survivors, an oral history theatre work in Ping Chong and Company's Undesirable Elements series.
Somatics has been crucial to building my capacity to hold transformative justice work and work around my experiences of sexual abuse and it is for this reason that I'll continue training as a practitioner in the months and years ahead.
All of this work collided, somewhat brutally for me, this year at the Allied Media Conference and US Social Forum, which were held back-to-back last month in Detroit. It is SO NICE to be on the other side of that.
Looking forward, a lot of this work will heat back up as the summer winds down, and we've got a big fundraising event near the end of the year in celebration of the Brecht Forum's 35th Anniversary. I'm also stepping away from (paid) domestic work after several years as a dear friend passes the baton to me after two powerful years at The Foundry Theatre. I'm coming on as their Community Programs Producer and you can be sure that we've got some exciting stuff in the works for the year ahead :-)
Who knows what else this fifth season will bring? In the words of Octavia Butler, "Whether you're a human being, an insect, a microbe, or a stone, this verse is true. All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change."
Inspired by the Zapatistas' Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle (or simply "the Sexta"), which they released five years ago, you find documented here some of the collective labor of international affiliates (the Zezta Internazional) as well as of the national movement of Mexican adherents known as the Other Campaign. You'll find many Zapatista-inspired intersections with other people and movements in the US and around the world, and the occasional piece coming from Oaxaca where I reported on the Other Campaign in early '06.
2006 was the year Subcomandante Marcos toured Mexico as part of the Zapatistas' participation in building the Other Campaign... with so many organizations, indigenous peoples, communities, families and individuals beginning to build the movement from throughout the country and beyond. It was the year that the autonomous municipality of San Salvador Atenco, on the outskirts of Mexico City, and the six month long commune in Oaxaca City were attacked by the government with more violence than anyone had seen in recent memory. The year that the US-backed candidate for president won the elections through fraud. The year Mexicans played a crucial role in the massive demonstrations of immigrant workers on this side of the border wall.
Here we are four years later... with a ramped up and murderous war on the poor and working people within Mexico funded to the tune of $1.4 billion by the US government under the guise of a War on Drugs, and the proliferation of laws such Arizona's SB 1070 on this side. But, in the words of FORMER political prisoner Nacho del Valle, "Who can imprison the fury of a volcano?"
A Run Down of Zapagringo's Fourth Season
This year many initiatives and struggles begun in the past five years reached new stages. Last October Movement for Justice in El Barrio saw the fall of Dawnay, Day Group, the second mega-landlord trying to gentrify East Harlem who they've played a pivotal role in taking down.
An International Seminar of Reflection and Analysis was held in the days before and following New Years at CIDECI-Unitierra in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas where a book documenting the First International Colloquium in Memory of Andres Aubry, held their two years prior, was presented.
In February the Winter Olympics faced a resistance whose early whispers were first heard in Sonora, Mexico in October of 2007 at the Gathering of Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, which was co-convened by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
In April a national and international solidarity caravan that was attempting to break the paramilitary blockade of the Other Campaign affiliated autonomous municipality of San Juan Copala in Oaxaca was attacked. Paramilitary gunfire killed Bety Cariño (a powerful Mixtec organizer) and Jyri Jakkola (a solidarity activist from Finland). In the ongoing assault against the autonomous Triqui municipality San Juan Copala we can hear the clear echo of 2006, including the murder of an international solidarity activist. Following the attack, more solidarity organizing was born but the blockade continues and San Juan Copala continues suffering under low intensity warfare.
Another quite large wound from 2006, however, moved much closer to healing and transformation at the end of June. The mighty autonomous municipality of San Salvador Atenco won freedom for its 12 remaining political prisoners with support from compañer@s around the world. This is a truly historic victory on the path to justice for Atenco and beyond.
Looking beyond Mexico we can also remember that in 2006 Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos made what was a controversial decision at the time when he declined an invitation to attend the inauguration of Bolivia's first indigenous president, Evo Morales. Marcos had his reasons and they are appearing more and more reasonable four years down the road as the indigenous movements who put Morales into office are revolting against what continues to be a "colonial and oligarchic" state. For a very fair analysis of the situation, if you read Spanish, check out Raúl Zibechi's article in La Jornada from earlier this month. Otherwise this later article of his in English will do. The Mesa 18 Declaration, which came out of the World People's Conference on Climate Change, is also relevant here.
A place all too familiar with the dangers of placing hope in state power that has made its way into the posts of this season is South Africa, where the Poor People's Alliance has been shaking things up for the political class. In September of last year, the ruling African National Congress brutally attacked one of the core member organizations of the Alliance, Abahlali baseMjondolo (the South African Shackdwellers Movement). Having just been visited by them in August, Movement for Justice in El Barrio spoke out against the attack and in support of their compas across the Atlantic. The attack was believed to also be connected to the crackdowns and displacements taking place in the country in advance of June and July's FIFA World Cup. A broad description of the situation of these struggles in South Africa was written by Toussaint Losier for Left Turn, and published online here. Picture the Homeless, Domestic Workers United and The Poverty Initiative are another set of groups from NYC who have been mobilizing support of the Poor People's Alliance, including this creative and educational message of solidarity from the US Social Forum. These struggles have been generating some very powerful analysis alongside their action, such as this critique of some of the ways the idea of Right to the City has been mobilized... even as Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape launches a Right to the City campaign of its own in Capetown!
The Palestinian freedom struggle returned again this year, and appropriately as ever, with the ongoing development of the US-Palestine Youth Solidarity Network and the successful struggle to free Jamal Juma'.
Perhaps most powerfully embodying the expansive vision of zapatismo this year was Movement for Justice in El Barrio's Third Encuentro for Dignity and Against Displacement, which included fellow organizers from across the Harlems as well as San Salvador Atenco, South Africa and Haiti. In the lead-up to the second US Social Forum this June in Detroit, I co-organized a rooftop fundraiser for Movement where we screened Sleep Dealer, heard from filmmaker Alex Rivera and raised over $1,250 for their delegation!
At the first US Social Forum in 2007, I attended as part of the Another Politics is Possible delegation from NYC. In the time since then, our study group of the same name participated in a roundtable for Upping the Anti and collaborated with LA COiL (Los Angeles Communities Organizing in Liberation) to create a pamphlet further exploring our principles and practices, which was distributed at this year's USSF. Hopefully we'll find an online home for the pamphlet, "So That We May Soar: Horizontalism, Intersectionality and Prefigurative Politics," soon... in the meantime here is a post from a fan featuring a few snippets of the text.
It was also this year that our childcare collective, Regeneración, launched a new website and began organizing in a network with six other collectives from around the country in advance of the Forum. If only they would've let us organize the Children's Forum! But that's a story for a later date...
What has come into much sharper focus this year, and I believe will continue to be at the center of my work, is organizing toward Transformative Justice. Our Challenging Male Supremacy Project has really grown into itself this past season, holding work in NYC as well as across the country and world as part of generationFIVE's Transformative Justice Collaboratives and a Partner in the StoryTelling and Organizing Project.
This focus on transformative justice grows out of my years of commitment and work around penal abolition, engagement with liberatory social/political movements such as the Zapatistas, and my own experiences of child sexual abuse. This was also a year for surfacing in a big way around this last part; especially participation in the creation and cast of Secret Survivors, an oral history theatre work in Ping Chong and Company's Undesirable Elements series.
Somatics has been crucial to building my capacity to hold transformative justice work and work around my experiences of sexual abuse and it is for this reason that I'll continue training as a practitioner in the months and years ahead.
All of this work collided, somewhat brutally for me, this year at the Allied Media Conference and US Social Forum, which were held back-to-back last month in Detroit. It is SO NICE to be on the other side of that.
Looking forward, a lot of this work will heat back up as the summer winds down, and we've got a big fundraising event near the end of the year in celebration of the Brecht Forum's 35th Anniversary. I'm also stepping away from (paid) domestic work after several years as a dear friend passes the baton to me after two powerful years at The Foundry Theatre. I'm coming on as their Community Programs Producer and you can be sure that we've got some exciting stuff in the works for the year ahead :-)
Who knows what else this fifth season will bring? In the words of Octavia Butler, "Whether you're a human being, an insect, a microbe, or a stone, this verse is true. All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change."
Categories: News from Elsewhere
Black Queer Theatre
I've been holding on to this post for awhile and the time to drop is NOW as Freedom Train Productions' annual new play festival FIRE! is set for ignition. I hope to see you at the 7:30p performance of Origins of Us this Saturday in the Bronx!
Before sharing with you FTP's moving "manifesto for citizen theatre artists", I've got to play catch up with zapagringo history:
* The Allied Media Conference just keeps getting better. If you missed it this year, make sure you are there in 2011 (June 23-26).
* While the neo-colonial FIFA World Cup played out in South Africa, so did the growth and expression of power from below. Here's a video of solidarity from organizers gathered at the US Social Forum in Detroit to the Poor People's Alliance of South Africa, put together by some favorite compañeros of mine, Divad and Tej.
* The Federation of Neighborhood Councils of El Alto, Bolivia (THE indigenous city of the hemisphere) declared the government of Evo Morales to be "colonial and oligarchic" and joins the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia in mobilizations to defend their territory. I could say more but will stop for now, to understand what is happening I highly recommend picking up the absolutely fascinating (and timely) "Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces" by Raúl Zibechi.
* Arundhati Roy, who had an arrest warrant issued against her earlier this year in India for her interviews and coverage of Maoist rebels, gave a brief interview for the latest issue of Desinformémonos in which she observed, "The indigenous movements and struggles... are our only hope. While the communist resistance movements, including the guerrilla wars, may have something to teach us about resistance, I do not believe that they have the vision or the imagination to show us a way of living sustainably." Here is the English translation of that piece.
* The 12 remaining political prisoners of Atenco, Mexico are finally free! If you don't know how historic this victory is, take a minute to check out my article from earlier this year on the case of Atenco, the struggle of Atenco's People's Front in Defense of the Land, and their connection to East Harlem's Movement for Justice in El Barrio.
* For their part, Movement for Justice in El Barrio is organizing ongoing support for the struggle of Atenco and recently hosted an Encuentro IN San Salvador Atenco for the Other Campaign this past Sunday.
So that is a long way of saying that there is much more to come - including word of my new gig with The Foundry Theatre! Without further ado, here are some potent words from inspirational friends and compañeros in the struggle at Freedom Train Productions (see you on Saturday!):
manifesto for citizen theatre artists
Theatre in the United States today exists in a nation that revolted against its own cultural ministry almost twenty years ago -- a right wing inspired and left wing affirmed attack on artistic expression of race, gender, and sexuality. We birth our work within a larger economic structure that systematically devalues the subjective profits our art offers society -- the well known story of the actor-waiter is one of many cases to which to point.
It is fire, imperative, NOW, and change to re-claim the artist’s stake in a nation gone haywire. Our practice of a citizen theatre artist is one with responsibilities toward connecting the on stage with the off stage struggle.
We believe many theatres hold and aspire to revolutionary values, however, the forces of the anti-citizen state compel theatre artists and institutions from fully realizing all areas simultaneously.
We must state our claim to the people’s symbols and institutions to governance and the artist’s stake in it all. Shaping their process in the image of the world that the citizen theatre artist knows is possible is one way forward.
We’ll do it by switching things up from a majority rules society to a canaries rule humanity where laws and state actions are informed by those most in danger, i.e. canaries in the coal mine. For example, Freedom Train Productions recognizes that black queer protagonists, if they are ever seen on stage, are sequestered off, splintered into different groups, and are not fully empowered in the exchange of ideas. For this theatre work, canaries rule ensures that black playwrights and their black queer protagonists are given ample resources and opportunities to tell their story and the stories of their people.
We’ll do this by openly embracing the inherent feminist and egalitarian ideals of collaboration that our professional medium offers. And we’ll call this tenet stage democratics. Directors, actors, playwrights, technicians, designers, and producers come together to make the good work happen. In some "avant-garde" theatre, multiple individuals hold the position of the director. Sometimes there is no director. In all cases there should be respect for all creative workers, no matter what title they hold. This process asks audiences to hold a fuller set of responsibilities and brings them further into the work.
Finally we’ll cultivate an infinite capacity in re-memory, an exercise that today’s nation-state and unchecked capitalist empires blatantly ignore and actively resists. The citizen theatre artist does this with an unending curiosity to explore and implement theatrical form and tradition. Re-memory debunks the paradigm of Western Theatre as traditional and everything else as unconventional. Black Arts Aesthetics, Magical Realism, Spoken Word, Hip Hop Theatre are indeed traditions and traditional. Re-memory informs new work development, play analysis and dramaturgy, and the staging, rehearsal and production of all work. This tenet also addresses the socio-political responsibility of the citizen theatre artist to address the un-addressed and to order and disorder the untold stories of the private and the public, homes, neighborhoods, and nation-states around the world.
Alright now, let’s go.
- Freedom Train Productions
Brooklyn, New York, 2009
Categories: News from Elsewhere
See You in The D!
People's Movement Assemblies on the Road to the US Social Forum in Detroit
It's that time of the year again, but not only is my favorite conference, the Allied Media Conference, coming around... but so is the US Social Forum. This second iteration of the USSF is coming to the AMC's hometown, Detroit, and their back-to-back! So that means basically that some of us are working our asses off right now :-)
It's exciting though, and you should check out the video above about the People's Movement Assembly process that is building toward and will culminate on the last day of the USSF. Yet one more innovation on the road to radical democracy, peoples power... whatever you wanna call it I think you know what I'm talking about ;-)
If you're gonna be in Detroit, come and find me! I'm involved in a bunch of activities through the different collective work I'm a part of and would love to connect... here's where you'll find me (and some other places I wish I could be too!):
ALLIED MEDIA CONFERENCE
FRI (6/18):
10:45a-12:15p - Power of Storytelling (with Secret Survivors)
SAT (6/19):
9-10:30a - Media Tools for Creating Safe Communities: A Science Fair (with Challenging Male Supremacy Project)
5:30-8p - StoryTelling and Organizing Project Partners Gathering
SUN (6/20):
10-11:30a - Safe in Our Skin: A Paradigm Shift
UNITED STATES SOCIAL FORUM II
WED (6/23):
10a to Noon - Secret Survivors: Using Theater to Break Taboos Surrounding Child Sexual Abuse
1-5p - Politicizing and Transforming Trauma: Somatics, Trauma and Transformative Justice in our Movements, Communities and Lives
THURS (6/24):
11a-Noon - Presentation of our new DVD "Paths to Transformation: Men's Digital Stories to End Child Sexual Abuse" and facilitated conversation about its use, in the Transformative Practices Canopy
Noon-1p - Networking session "How are we cultivating the capacity & commitment of men to challenge male supremacy," in the Transformative Practices Canopy
3-5:30p - Solidarity, not Intervention: Engaging the Iranian Protest Movement (Guest panelist on the possibilities and pitfalls of transnational solidarity activism)
FRI (6/25):
10a-Noon - Building an Intergenerational Movement for Collective Liberation: The Work of Childcare Collectives Across the States... and the Galaxy! (with Regeneración Childcare NYC)
3:30-5p - Challenging Men, Changing Communities: Organizing for Transformative Justice and Against Male Supremacy
SAT (6/26):
10:30a-Noon - Co-hosting a networking and skill-share session for childcare collectives at the Liberation Exploration Station (aka Left Turn Canopy)
Also keep an eye out for these workshops that I won't be able to attend:
* Two from Movement for Justice in El Barrio:
The Zapatista's Other Campaign Breaking Down Borders: Live Cross-Border Dialogue with Mexico
AND
The Zapatista's Other Campaign & The Fight Against Global Displacement
* A workshop led by LA Communities Organizing Liberation (LA COiL, formerly LA Crew), an organization with whom we (Another Politics is Possible) have just collaborated to create a pamphlet they will be distributing at the USSF:
Re-thinking our Vision and Organizing for a Better World
Categories: News from Elsewhere
Challenging Male Supremacy Project
Experiments in Transformative Justice
The Challenging Male Supremacy Project in New York City
by RJ Maccani, Gaurav Jashnani and Alan Greig
Originally published in issue 37 (Jul/Aug '10) of Left Turn (a rough draft was accidently used in the publishing of the magazine; the correct version of the article appears below)
Together with many others, we have come to see male supremacy as a system causing a great deal of violence and harm not only in the world at large, but also within our own radical and Left movements. Whether it’s physical or sexual abuse, talking over others, unsolicited neediness, or shrugging off emotional and logistical work, practices of male supremacy often work to undermine solidarity and community. They harm, traumatize and push people away, placing even more obstacles in our collective path to social transformation.
Male supremacist behavior within our organizing spaces is often allowed to go unchecked because the ‘real struggle’ is thought to be elsewhere, whether in the streets or the halls of government. In addition, some of the most obvious forms of this behavior, such as male sexual violence, can feel especially difficult to address for those of us who recognize that the police and prisons not only fail to prevent this violence but actually produce and reproduce systems of heteropatriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism. Left unaddressed, however, male violence within our communities reinforces the status quo and undermines the belief that a better world is within our collective capacity to create. The joint statement issued back in 2001 as a collaboration by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and Critical Resistance on ‘Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex’ is particularly instructive on this point, urging “all men in social justice movements to take particular responsibility to address and organize around gender violence in their communities as a primary strategy for addressing violence and colonialism. We challenge men to address how their own histories of victimization have hindered their ability to establish gender justice in their communities.”
Through facilitating or supporting various accountability processes, we’ve also learned that men who have caused harm are often easier to reach if they are engaged by people they already trust, and are frequently more likely to be accountable if they can maintain pre-existing relationships or even build new ones. When we address the problem through this lens, it becomes clear that the responses often employed to address male violence—public shaming, physical punishment, exile from spaces or a community, calling the police or just doing nothing—are at best insufficient and at worst actually counterproductive. Demonization, isolation, retaliatory violence or state intervention not only lead to partial or ineffective solutions, but ultimately can be destructive for all those scapegoated and targeted by the prison industrial complex.
Study-into-Action
The question becomes: how do we create responses to these widespread harms that have the potential to actually build solidarity, create community, and support the healing of those who have been harmed while also challenging the male supremacist context within which the incident occurred? How do we do this without relying on unnecessary violence, exclusion, or state systems? We might call responses that meet these criteria transformative justice, at least to the degree that they seek to not only address the harm but also to transform the convictions and structural conditions that facilitated the harm happening in the first place.
When the three of us first got together, we spent months discussing what we wanted to see and help to create in terms of community responses to violence. The “Transformative Justice Collaborative” model initiated by Generation Five, a Bay Area-based organization focused on ending child sexual abuse, was particularly inspiring to us. All three of us had been involved with work organizing around gender violence or child sexual abuse, and one of us had just co-facilitated a circle process to hold accountable a prominent local activist who had sexually assaulted within the citywide student movement. When we examined the landscape of organizations and collectives developing community-based responses to harm, they were made up predominantly, if not entirely, of cisgender women, transgender and gender non-conforming organizers and activists. We felt that we needed more cisgender men engaged in this work and that we would all need to do some advanced work specifically around male privilege and violence in order to enter future organizing work with more shared analysis, capacity and commitment. In the fall of 2008, we founded the Challenging Male Supremacy Project. We made a conscious decision to use the still somewhat unfamiliar term ‘cisgender’ in doing this work, a term coined by transgender activists used to describe those of us who identify with the sex we were assigned at birth and the gender identity we were raised with.
In an attempt to bring more cis men into this work, as well as to meet an expressed need to challenge male supremacy within various NYC social justice organizing communities, we facilitated our first Study-into-Action from May 2009 to January 2010. For nine months, this group discussed, read and reflected on male supremacy both in our personal as well as our political lives. Facilitating this process for a diverse group of cisgender men from all over the city, we tried to construct spaces and practices of confronting male supremacy in its concrete manifestations, as it intersects with other systems of oppression. For example, in one session we broke into groups to analyze how different racialized masculinities are represented in mainstream media, be it Black, Caribbean, Latino, Asian or white. This was instructive for exploring both how we had related to our own particularly racialized masculinities growing up and how we have been targeted, privileged, or otherwise pigeon-holed in the popular imagination. One of the questions that remained at the end of this session was whether we were seeking to construct new and better masculinities or move beyond and end masculinity.
One novel element of our monthly sessions was our practice of Somatics, an integrative approach to healing and transformation that understands and treats human beings as a complex of mind, body and spirit. With support from Generation Five co-founder and long-time Somatics instructor Staci Haines, who co-facilitated our first session, we tried to adapt Somatics to addressing shared privilege and power (from its more common application to healing from experiences of trauma). We communicated to the group that we incorporated Somatics not simply as a practice of self-help or self-improvement—which is often socially decontextualized and strongly individualistic—but because we feel strongly that we cannot just think and talk our way out of male privilege and male violence. This felt particularly important to us as so much of this violence manifests in relationship to bodies and what we do with and to them. As we shared in the group, we need to work with our whole organisms and transform ourselves at the level of everyday behaviors in order to shift our practices of male privilege.
Building Practice
It became clear over this first cycle of work that there were recurring dynamics that we needed to address and particular skill sets that we needed to develop. One key area involves the development of emotional intelligence and the capacity to provide and seek appropriate support—struggling to replace the norm of cis men who are unable to notice their own or others' emotions and emotional triggers, with one where they reciprocate the support they get and provide support for others in ways that challenge patriarchal social relations.
Another area of focus is developing a profound grasp and consistent practice of consent and moving from a legalistic framework of soliciting permission to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of power. We’ve tried to reframe consent—and particularly the word ‘no’—as something that can make healthier relations possible for all parties, and allow us to maintain connection in the future. At the same time, we’ve strived to question our basic assumptions about sexuality and desire itself, denaturalizing our sexual desires and examining the ways that they’ve been historically and culturally shaped or produced. The third area, finally, is learning to share work that has historically been relegated to women, especially in the home or in formal political settings.
Thus far, we’ve sought to work in these areas through education, skills-building and mobilization with other cis men, and in collaboration with feminist, queer and trans organizers. Part of what the latter has looked like thus far is building solidarity in analysis and practice together. In founding the CMS Project, we’ve joined a patchwork landscape of organizations and collectives in NYC working to eliminate violence against female/queer/trans individuals and communities and/or build alternative forms of safety and accountability beyond the prison industrial complex. We’ve learned from and collaborated with Support New York, a collective who have been doing work around survivor support and community accountability for several years; we’ve also been in touch with members of Reflect, Connect, Move around our shared work on gender violence, while CONNECT—an organization focused on family and gender violence—has shared space and resources with us. We continue to be inspired by Critical Resistance NYC and the People’s Justice Coalition, who are building community-based responses to state violence: the former (as part of a coalition) recently won a campaign to stop construction of a new jail in the Bronx, while the latter is working to foster and support a citywide culture of observing the police as a tactic to deter abuse and brutality on their part.
Before beginning our Study-Into-Action, we also decided to approach some of the groups doing this work and formally partner with them in organizing this project. In the role of Accountability and Support Partners, these organizations gave us feedback on a curriculum outline several months before our first session, helped to shape its structure and content, and met with us halfway through the nine-month program to again give us feedback. The groups included the Safe OUTside the System Collective of the Audre Lorde Project, Sisterfire NYC (a collective affiliated with INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence), Third Root Community Health Center, the Welfare Warriors Project of Queers for Economic Justice, and individual members of the Rock Dove Collective and an emerging queer people-of-color anti-violence group.
As the name suggests, we were hoping to culminate the Study-into-Action with some sort of collective action in support of and useful to one or more of our partners. Lacking a clear opportunity to do so, we instead organized a report back event in March, to which we each invited friends, family and members of our communities. The goals of the event were to organize something collectively between the three of us who facilitated the nine-month program and the nine participants who completed it, to broaden the dialogue and share our commitments with a larger group of people to whom we are actually accountable to in different ways and to create a platform for this dialogue to happen within the context of our accountability and support partner organizations, who also participated in the event, as a way to continue building connection and collaboration. The need for this kind of work was reflected in the packed room of around 100 people who showed up for the report back, representing a rich cross section of the city.
Next Steps
We currently find ourselves in a moment where we are attempting to hold and synthesize all the learning and feedback gained from these experiences with accountability processes, the Study-into-Action and the collective event. Our relationship with Generation Five, with whom we are deepening our understanding of transformative justice and training in Somatics, will continue to be crucial in supporting our next steps following this assessment process.
Presently, we are producing the curriculum developed for the Study-into-Action in order to share it with people from across the country this June in Detroit at the Allied Media Conference and US Social Forum. While in Detroit, we are also looking forward to collaborating with the Story Telling and Organizing Project, an organization that provides a forum and a model for “collecting and sharing stories about everyday people taking action to end interpersonal violence,” and who’s audio stories we used to help ground our discussion on accountability in one of our Study-Into-Action sessions.
Most importantly, we are looking for ways to deepen collaboration with our Accountability and Support Partners locally while continuing to engage and support the Study-into-Action participants and their communities. Whether we remain in our current formation or shift into something else will depend greatly on these two groups’ needs and desires.
In taking on this project, we have learned to embrace the fact that there are real and significant things we stand to lose by undermining male privilege, but that we have honest emotions, healthier relationships, greater dignity and a fuller humanity to gain. Through this work toward transformative justice, it is our hope that we are creating responses to violence and harm that make our vision for a better world—one that offers safety without depending on prisons—not only more likely, but also more credible.
RJ Maccani, Gaurav Jashnani and Alan Greig are founders of the Challenging Male Supremacy Project. You can contact them at cmsprojectnyc [at] gmail.com. A more in-depth exploration of these themes can be found in their contribution to the forthcoming book from South End Press, “The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities,” edited by Ching-In Chen, Dulani, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.
Categories: News from Elsewhere
In the Shadow of the 2010 World Cup
Abahlali baseMjondolo march on City of Cape Town demanding an end to their harrassment by the Anti-Land Invasions Unit
A Quiet Coup
South Africa’s largest social movement under attack
By Toussaint Losier
Originally published in Spanish at Desinformémonos
An earlier version of this article appeared in Left Turn Magazine
At roughly 11:30pm on September 26th, a group of 30 to 40 men – survivors are still unsure about the actual numbers –surrounded the community hall in Kennedy Road shack settlement in Durban, South Africa. Brandishing sticks, machetes, and automatic weapons and echoing the language of the state-sponsored internecine political conflict that tore through South Africa during the last years of apartheid, the mob launched an attack on a meeting of the Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) Youth League taking place inside the hall. In the melee that followed, over a dozen people were injured, with four people left dead and the attackers left in control of the hall.
When called to the scene, the local police only took statements from those who now held the hall and arrested eight members of the settlement’s representative governing body, the Kennedy Road Development Committee (KRDC), regardless of whether or not they had been in the settlement the night of the attack. The next morning, the mob that had attacked the community hall returned to the settlement with police and African National Congress (ANC) officials and proceeded to destroy and loot over two dozen shacks, all of them belonging to the elected members of the KRDC.
“We are under attack,” offered a press statement jointly released by the KRDC and AbM a week later. “We have been attacked physically with all kinds of weapons – guns and knives, even a sword. We have been driven from our homes and our community. The police did nothing to stop the attacks despite our calls for help.”
The statement continued: “What happened in Kennedy Road was a coup – a violent replacement of a democratically elected community organization. The ANC have taken over everything that we built in Kennedy Road. We always allowed free political activity in Kennedy and all settlements in which AbM candidates have been elected to leadership. Now we are banned.”
Neoliberal policy
With the African continent’s largest economy and one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, South Africa is considered by most to be a model middle-income developing country. Yet, it is nation wracked by a series of interlocking crises, from the epidemics of rape and HIV/AIDS to those of landlessness and poverty. Much of this has worsened since the mid-1990s, when then President Nelson Mandela voluntarily adopted neoliberal economic policies, in contrast to the ANC’s long held goals of nationalization and socialism. While these macroeconomic policies helped to create a small black middle class, they also contributed to ever growing inequality, with the average black citizen earning an eighth of their white compatriot in 2007. Today, South Africa is considered the most unequal country in the world, ranking lower than Occupied Palestine on the UN’s Human Development Index.
At the same time, South Africa, with its rich history of political struggle and labor militancy, also has one of the world’s highest per capita protest rates. Over the past several years, the country’s largest social movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo (Zulu for “people based in shacks”) has led it fair share of these actions. Emerging in 2005 in the Kennedy Road settlement during the course of a dispute over housing with the local ANC city councilor, the shackdwellers movement has grown to include over 10,000 paid up members in more than thirty informal settlements throughout the province of KwaZulu-Natal.
For the first two years of its existence, AbM’s mobilization efforts were met with state violence and political repression. In 2005, for example, police illegally banned their permitted demonstration and then attacked residents of the Foreman Road when they took to the streets. A year later, police arrested the movement’s President and Vice President on their way to a radio interview, beating and torturing them while in custody. In 2007, police shot at their peaceful marches. Later, the Kennedy Road Six, five of whom were elected members of the KRDC, won their release from jail after their hunger strike (all charges against them were later dropped for lack of evidence). Yet, in spite of these obstacles, some of the South Africa’s poorest citizens have built a democratic and non-partisan organization, impressive as much for its grassroots accountability and internal democracy, as its success in ensuring the participation of shackdwellers in the upgrading of their settlements.
Several weeks after the attack in Kennedy Road, this success continued when the South African Constitutional Court ruled in AbM’s favor in striking down the KwaZulu-Natal Slums Act. Passed by the province in late 2007, the bill gave the provincial minister the power to compel municipalities and private landowners to evict shackdwellers from occupied land and set the time frame in which these actions would occur. If allowed to stand, the act would have served as a template across the country. While the court only found the section giving the provincial housing minister wide latitude in initiating eviction proceeding against shack settlements, the decision remains a major victory in the poor people’s struggle for land and housing. Still in hiding, AbM’s President S’bu Zikode said the court decision “had far-reaching consequences for all the poor people in the country.”
State impunity
In the weeks that followed this most attack, Kennedy Road residents reported that those who carried them out had been left to patrol the settlements, intimidating them and threatening their leaders. ANC Branch Executive Committee officials replaced the KRDC with their own local governing body. Fearing further violence, key leaders of AbM fled the settlement and went into hiding. In the following months, AbM members who did not leave Kennedy Road have been intimidated and assaulted for not coming to ANC meetings. Few have been able to open cases against ANC members because of the support of the police and senior ANC officials. Several of these officials have publicly spoken of the government’s move to liberate’ the community from AbM and their willingness to “jail people to get development going.” There are now allegations that those who participated in the attack have not only received positions in settlement committee formed after the attacks, but also rewarded with cash from the ANC.
Following this logic, police would continue to target KRDC members, arresting 13 in total and charging them with murder and aggravated assault. At each of their bail hearings, the local ANC officials have mobilized busloads of their members, who physically threatening AbM’s supporters and demand that the ‘Kennedy Road 13’ not get bail. For more than two months, the ‘13’ had their bail hearing postponed for lack of evidence. It was only after, the Bishop of Rubin Phillip of the local Anglican diocese and other church leaders denounced their continued detention as a “complete travesty of justice” that all but five were released from prison on bail. It was only on May 14th, roughly eight months since the arrest, that the court gave the case docket to the defense attorney for the accused, including the five members still in prison, political prisoners awaiting a political trial. The trail is set to begin on July 12, a day after the 2010 World Cup tournament ends in South Africa.
While ANC officials have sought to criminalize their actions, AbM has consistently identified violence, assaults and harassment directed against them as politically motivated. This perspective has proved even more prescient as the ANC recent success in the April 2009 KwaZulu-Natal provincial elections have made it possible for local ANC officials to eliminate what they have long taken to be a potential political threat. With many of their leaders not prison still in hiding, AbM members can still not operate openly in Kennedy Road, but continues to organize in secret inside and meet every Sunday outside of it. AbM President S’bu Zikode, who was made homeless by the attacks on Kennedy Road, offered these thoughts during a university lecture entitled “Democracy on Brink of Collapse” given in October 2009: “To some leaders democracy means that they are the only ones who must exercise authority over others. For some government officials democracy means accepting anything that is said about ordinary men and women.”
“With the attack on Abahlali baseMjondolo in Kennedy Road,” he maintained, “we have now seen that this technocratic thinking will be supported with violence when ordinary men and women insist on their right to speak and to be heard on the matters that concern their daily lives. On the one side there is a consultant with a laptop. On the other side there is a drunk young man with a bush knife or a gun. As much as they might look very different they serve the same system – a system in which ordinary men and women must be good boys and girls and know that their place is not to think and speak for themselves.”
This need for ordinary men and women to think and speak for themselves is ever more pressing as South Africa prepares for the 2010 World Cup. Across the country, the government has spent millions constructing or refurbishing sports stadiums for the matches that will be played in June and July, while millions remain without access to adequate housing, potable water, and other basic services. Rather than fulfilling the promise of employment and equitable development, the World Cup has thus far provided a shot in the arm of city planners and real estate speculators who have sought to bar informal trading from Central Business Districts and clear ever-growing shack settlements to the peripheries of the city. Yet AbM has maintained its opposition to this version of democracy. In spite of a heavy police presence, several thousand members and their supporters marched in downtown Durban on March 22nd, calling not only for housing, but also human rights and justice. On May 14, as a delegation from the London Coalition Against Poverty delivered a message of solidarity to the South Africa High Commission, echoing AbM’s calls the outstanding charges against its members to be dropped and for an independent commission to investigate the attacks in Kennedy Road. Having already built up international solidarity through trips to Britain and the United States, AbM members traveled to Italy in late May to meet with other social movements, draw attention to the plight of African migrants workers in Italy, and to explain what the World Cup means for the poor in South Africa.
To make good on this goal, a branch of AbM in the Western Cape province (AbM WC) recently announced the launch of their ‘Right to the City’ campaign to develop a program of action for the World Cup. Already the province has a backlog of over 400,000 people in need of housing. In May 2009, members of this branch assisted backyard dwellers, those renting a shack on someone else’s property, to occupy prime government land in Cape Town. In response, the city’s Anti-Land Invasion police unit illegally evicted them from the land, confiscating their materials, and assaulted and arrested those it perceived to be leading the occupation. It was only after filing a court injunction against further evictions and launching other protests, including a road blockade, were those in need able to claim the land.
In the days leading up to the World Cup, AbM WC is once again demanding that the government provide quality houses for the poor inside the city, rather than tin shacks on the city’s outskirts, as has become the norm in the province’s capital of Cape Town. In addition to boycotting the World Cup, AbM WC has vowed to build shacks outside the city’s soccer stadium just before cup’s first match to draw the attention of the rest of country and the international community of needs of the poor. Unlike the attacks in Kennedy Road, how the government responds to the actions of South Africa’s militant poor will be on display for the world to see.
For more information, visit the websites of Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign. Together with the Rural Network and the Landless Peoples Movement, these organizations make up the Poor Peoples Alliance.
A Quiet Coup
South Africa’s largest social movement under attack
By Toussaint Losier
Originally published in Spanish at Desinformémonos
An earlier version of this article appeared in Left Turn Magazine
At roughly 11:30pm on September 26th, a group of 30 to 40 men – survivors are still unsure about the actual numbers –surrounded the community hall in Kennedy Road shack settlement in Durban, South Africa. Brandishing sticks, machetes, and automatic weapons and echoing the language of the state-sponsored internecine political conflict that tore through South Africa during the last years of apartheid, the mob launched an attack on a meeting of the Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) Youth League taking place inside the hall. In the melee that followed, over a dozen people were injured, with four people left dead and the attackers left in control of the hall.
When called to the scene, the local police only took statements from those who now held the hall and arrested eight members of the settlement’s representative governing body, the Kennedy Road Development Committee (KRDC), regardless of whether or not they had been in the settlement the night of the attack. The next morning, the mob that had attacked the community hall returned to the settlement with police and African National Congress (ANC) officials and proceeded to destroy and loot over two dozen shacks, all of them belonging to the elected members of the KRDC.
“We are under attack,” offered a press statement jointly released by the KRDC and AbM a week later. “We have been attacked physically with all kinds of weapons – guns and knives, even a sword. We have been driven from our homes and our community. The police did nothing to stop the attacks despite our calls for help.”
The statement continued: “What happened in Kennedy Road was a coup – a violent replacement of a democratically elected community organization. The ANC have taken over everything that we built in Kennedy Road. We always allowed free political activity in Kennedy and all settlements in which AbM candidates have been elected to leadership. Now we are banned.”
Neoliberal policy
With the African continent’s largest economy and one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, South Africa is considered by most to be a model middle-income developing country. Yet, it is nation wracked by a series of interlocking crises, from the epidemics of rape and HIV/AIDS to those of landlessness and poverty. Much of this has worsened since the mid-1990s, when then President Nelson Mandela voluntarily adopted neoliberal economic policies, in contrast to the ANC’s long held goals of nationalization and socialism. While these macroeconomic policies helped to create a small black middle class, they also contributed to ever growing inequality, with the average black citizen earning an eighth of their white compatriot in 2007. Today, South Africa is considered the most unequal country in the world, ranking lower than Occupied Palestine on the UN’s Human Development Index.
At the same time, South Africa, with its rich history of political struggle and labor militancy, also has one of the world’s highest per capita protest rates. Over the past several years, the country’s largest social movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo (Zulu for “people based in shacks”) has led it fair share of these actions. Emerging in 2005 in the Kennedy Road settlement during the course of a dispute over housing with the local ANC city councilor, the shackdwellers movement has grown to include over 10,000 paid up members in more than thirty informal settlements throughout the province of KwaZulu-Natal.
For the first two years of its existence, AbM’s mobilization efforts were met with state violence and political repression. In 2005, for example, police illegally banned their permitted demonstration and then attacked residents of the Foreman Road when they took to the streets. A year later, police arrested the movement’s President and Vice President on their way to a radio interview, beating and torturing them while in custody. In 2007, police shot at their peaceful marches. Later, the Kennedy Road Six, five of whom were elected members of the KRDC, won their release from jail after their hunger strike (all charges against them were later dropped for lack of evidence). Yet, in spite of these obstacles, some of the South Africa’s poorest citizens have built a democratic and non-partisan organization, impressive as much for its grassroots accountability and internal democracy, as its success in ensuring the participation of shackdwellers in the upgrading of their settlements.
Several weeks after the attack in Kennedy Road, this success continued when the South African Constitutional Court ruled in AbM’s favor in striking down the KwaZulu-Natal Slums Act. Passed by the province in late 2007, the bill gave the provincial minister the power to compel municipalities and private landowners to evict shackdwellers from occupied land and set the time frame in which these actions would occur. If allowed to stand, the act would have served as a template across the country. While the court only found the section giving the provincial housing minister wide latitude in initiating eviction proceeding against shack settlements, the decision remains a major victory in the poor people’s struggle for land and housing. Still in hiding, AbM’s President S’bu Zikode said the court decision “had far-reaching consequences for all the poor people in the country.”
State impunity
In the weeks that followed this most attack, Kennedy Road residents reported that those who carried them out had been left to patrol the settlements, intimidating them and threatening their leaders. ANC Branch Executive Committee officials replaced the KRDC with their own local governing body. Fearing further violence, key leaders of AbM fled the settlement and went into hiding. In the following months, AbM members who did not leave Kennedy Road have been intimidated and assaulted for not coming to ANC meetings. Few have been able to open cases against ANC members because of the support of the police and senior ANC officials. Several of these officials have publicly spoken of the government’s move to liberate’ the community from AbM and their willingness to “jail people to get development going.” There are now allegations that those who participated in the attack have not only received positions in settlement committee formed after the attacks, but also rewarded with cash from the ANC.
Following this logic, police would continue to target KRDC members, arresting 13 in total and charging them with murder and aggravated assault. At each of their bail hearings, the local ANC officials have mobilized busloads of their members, who physically threatening AbM’s supporters and demand that the ‘Kennedy Road 13’ not get bail. For more than two months, the ‘13’ had their bail hearing postponed for lack of evidence. It was only after, the Bishop of Rubin Phillip of the local Anglican diocese and other church leaders denounced their continued detention as a “complete travesty of justice” that all but five were released from prison on bail. It was only on May 14th, roughly eight months since the arrest, that the court gave the case docket to the defense attorney for the accused, including the five members still in prison, political prisoners awaiting a political trial. The trail is set to begin on July 12, a day after the 2010 World Cup tournament ends in South Africa.
While ANC officials have sought to criminalize their actions, AbM has consistently identified violence, assaults and harassment directed against them as politically motivated. This perspective has proved even more prescient as the ANC recent success in the April 2009 KwaZulu-Natal provincial elections have made it possible for local ANC officials to eliminate what they have long taken to be a potential political threat. With many of their leaders not prison still in hiding, AbM members can still not operate openly in Kennedy Road, but continues to organize in secret inside and meet every Sunday outside of it. AbM President S’bu Zikode, who was made homeless by the attacks on Kennedy Road, offered these thoughts during a university lecture entitled “Democracy on Brink of Collapse” given in October 2009: “To some leaders democracy means that they are the only ones who must exercise authority over others. For some government officials democracy means accepting anything that is said about ordinary men and women.”
“With the attack on Abahlali baseMjondolo in Kennedy Road,” he maintained, “we have now seen that this technocratic thinking will be supported with violence when ordinary men and women insist on their right to speak and to be heard on the matters that concern their daily lives. On the one side there is a consultant with a laptop. On the other side there is a drunk young man with a bush knife or a gun. As much as they might look very different they serve the same system – a system in which ordinary men and women must be good boys and girls and know that their place is not to think and speak for themselves.”
This need for ordinary men and women to think and speak for themselves is ever more pressing as South Africa prepares for the 2010 World Cup. Across the country, the government has spent millions constructing or refurbishing sports stadiums for the matches that will be played in June and July, while millions remain without access to adequate housing, potable water, and other basic services. Rather than fulfilling the promise of employment and equitable development, the World Cup has thus far provided a shot in the arm of city planners and real estate speculators who have sought to bar informal trading from Central Business Districts and clear ever-growing shack settlements to the peripheries of the city. Yet AbM has maintained its opposition to this version of democracy. In spite of a heavy police presence, several thousand members and their supporters marched in downtown Durban on March 22nd, calling not only for housing, but also human rights and justice. On May 14, as a delegation from the London Coalition Against Poverty delivered a message of solidarity to the South Africa High Commission, echoing AbM’s calls the outstanding charges against its members to be dropped and for an independent commission to investigate the attacks in Kennedy Road. Having already built up international solidarity through trips to Britain and the United States, AbM members traveled to Italy in late May to meet with other social movements, draw attention to the plight of African migrants workers in Italy, and to explain what the World Cup means for the poor in South Africa.
To make good on this goal, a branch of AbM in the Western Cape province (AbM WC) recently announced the launch of their ‘Right to the City’ campaign to develop a program of action for the World Cup. Already the province has a backlog of over 400,000 people in need of housing. In May 2009, members of this branch assisted backyard dwellers, those renting a shack on someone else’s property, to occupy prime government land in Cape Town. In response, the city’s Anti-Land Invasion police unit illegally evicted them from the land, confiscating their materials, and assaulted and arrested those it perceived to be leading the occupation. It was only after filing a court injunction against further evictions and launching other protests, including a road blockade, were those in need able to claim the land.
In the days leading up to the World Cup, AbM WC is once again demanding that the government provide quality houses for the poor inside the city, rather than tin shacks on the city’s outskirts, as has become the norm in the province’s capital of Cape Town. In addition to boycotting the World Cup, AbM WC has vowed to build shacks outside the city’s soccer stadium just before cup’s first match to draw the attention of the rest of country and the international community of needs of the poor. Unlike the attacks in Kennedy Road, how the government responds to the actions of South Africa’s militant poor will be on display for the world to see.
For more information, visit the websites of Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign. Together with the Rural Network and the Landless Peoples Movement, these organizations make up the Poor Peoples Alliance.
Categories: News from Elsewhere
Sleep Dealer & Movimiento
a still from Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer
"Science fiction always tells outsider stories, with people coming into conflict with the system. But I wanted to create a science-fiction point of view that we've never seen before. We never see films about the future of Mumbai or Mexico City. Just yanking the point of view out of London, or New York, or Los Angeles and dropping it somewhere else is a powerful gesture." -Alex Rivera in Wired Magazine
Sleep Dealer is part of what I hope will be an upsurge of what we might call science fiction of the oppressed; an art form with quite old roots of course... in the US we might think of the the sci-fi writings of W.E.B. Du Bois at the turn of the last century or, more recently, Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames. Last year District 9 emerged from South Africa to huge commercial success and the Mother Continent is keeping it coming with Pumzi, a short from Kenya, debuting at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
I first met Alex Rivera while at Sundance in 2008. I was there as part of the team debuting Slingshot Hip Hop and Rivera was there to debut Sleep Dealer -> as the film's writer, director and editor, he took home two awards at the end of that week. And he has now generously lent us a copy of the film for a fundraiser for Movement for Justice in El Barrio's trip to Detroit for the US Social Forum later this month... I do hope you can make it!
Friday, June 11 at 6p in the LES
ROOFTOP PARTY & FILM FUNDRAISER
for MOVEMENT FOR JUSTICE IN EL BARRIO's
delegation to the US SOCIAL FORUM
beginning with
FOOD, DRINK and SPECIAL GUESTS
and closing with the groundbreaking work
of revolutionary third world sci-fi
SLEEP DEALER
Join us on the Bluestocking's Rooftop
85 Stanton St (and Orchard), buzz #6A
in Manhattan's Lower East Side
$10 door, food and drink by donation
(All funds raised during the party will go directly to support Movement for Justice in El Barrio's delegation to Detroit for the Second United States Social Forum)
More Info on the Film, the Movement and the Forum:
* Sleep Dealer
"Exuberantly entertaining, a dystopian fable of globalization disguised as a science-fiction adventure... Mr. Rivera — a brilliant young director — takes his audience into a future of “aqua-terrorism” and cyberlabor that I wish I could dismiss as implausible." A.O. Scott, New York Times
* Movement for Justice in El Barrio
"Best Power to the People Movement in NYC" -Village Voice
Check out an article on their recent Encuentro for Dignity and Against Displacement
* US Social Forum 2010
Another World is Possible, Another US is Necessary
"Science fiction always tells outsider stories, with people coming into conflict with the system. But I wanted to create a science-fiction point of view that we've never seen before. We never see films about the future of Mumbai or Mexico City. Just yanking the point of view out of London, or New York, or Los Angeles and dropping it somewhere else is a powerful gesture." -Alex Rivera in Wired Magazine
Sleep Dealer is part of what I hope will be an upsurge of what we might call science fiction of the oppressed; an art form with quite old roots of course... in the US we might think of the the sci-fi writings of W.E.B. Du Bois at the turn of the last century or, more recently, Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames. Last year District 9 emerged from South Africa to huge commercial success and the Mother Continent is keeping it coming with Pumzi, a short from Kenya, debuting at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
I first met Alex Rivera while at Sundance in 2008. I was there as part of the team debuting Slingshot Hip Hop and Rivera was there to debut Sleep Dealer -> as the film's writer, director and editor, he took home two awards at the end of that week. And he has now generously lent us a copy of the film for a fundraiser for Movement for Justice in El Barrio's trip to Detroit for the US Social Forum later this month... I do hope you can make it!
Friday, June 11 at 6p in the LES
ROOFTOP PARTY & FILM FUNDRAISER
for MOVEMENT FOR JUSTICE IN EL BARRIO's
delegation to the US SOCIAL FORUM
beginning with
FOOD, DRINK and SPECIAL GUESTS
and closing with the groundbreaking work
of revolutionary third world sci-fi
SLEEP DEALER
Join us on the Bluestocking's Rooftop
85 Stanton St (and Orchard), buzz #6A
in Manhattan's Lower East Side
$10 door, food and drink by donation
(All funds raised during the party will go directly to support Movement for Justice in El Barrio's delegation to Detroit for the Second United States Social Forum)
More Info on the Film, the Movement and the Forum:
* Sleep Dealer
"Exuberantly entertaining, a dystopian fable of globalization disguised as a science-fiction adventure... Mr. Rivera — a brilliant young director — takes his audience into a future of “aqua-terrorism” and cyberlabor that I wish I could dismiss as implausible." A.O. Scott, New York Times
* Movement for Justice in El Barrio
"Best Power to the People Movement in NYC" -Village Voice
Check out an article on their recent Encuentro for Dignity and Against Displacement
* US Social Forum 2010
Another World is Possible, Another US is Necessary
Categories: News from Elsewhere
From El Barrio to San Juan Copala
UPDATE Jun 1: A caravan organized by the United for Human Rights Network, which is part of the Other Campaign, will be leaving from Mexico City to San Juan Copala on June 8.
A little over a week ago paramilitaries aligned with the ruling party in Oaxaca violently attacked a solidarity caravan that was attempting to break their blockade of the autonomous municipality of San Juan Copala. Two were killed and many wounded. A national and international response quickly mobilized, and it will be crucial to build on this initial response in the days, weeks and months ahead. You can find the latest news at El Enemigo Comun, such as this call for a huge international solidarity campaign. There was a protest at the Mexican Consulate here in NYC last friday and here is a message from our compañer@s in East Harlem...
Message of Support and Denouncement
from El Barrio, New York, US
To our people of Mexico:
To the people of the World:
To the Other Campaign:
To the Autonomous Municipality of San Juan Copala, Oaxaca:
To Oaxacan Voices Building Autonomy and Liberty (VOCAL):
To The Center of Community Support Working United (CACTUS):
To Contralinea Magazine:
To the Zezta Internazional:
Accept this cordial greeting and very strong embrace on the part of Movement for Justice in El Barrio. We want to tell you that we, the simple and humble people of East Harlem, New York, are enraged about the repressive attacks that the compañer@s who were attacked had to face in Oaxaca, Mexico. It deeply fills us with pain and rage to know that the compañ@ros Beatríz Cariño Trujillo, from the Center of Community Support Working United (CACTUS) and Jyry Jaakkola, from the Organization Uusi Tuuli Ry (New Wind) were murdered and that compañer@s from the Caravan of Support and Solidarity with the Autonomous Municipality of San Juan Copala, Oaxaca were seriously injured.
We want to let you know, that as immigrants on the other side, we are aware of what happened and that we condemn the repression that they faced.
We also know about the repression that our sisters and brothers from the Autonomous Municipality of San Juan Copala, Oaxaca are facing and we want to let them know that they are not alone. Here in New York, we are also adherents of The Other Campaign and we admire your dignified struggle. We also condemn the repressive attacks from the state that they face.
From El Barrio, New York, we denounce and condemn all the acts that occurred on the 27th of April and what the Autonomous Municipality of San Juan Copala, Oaxaca has had to face. We directly blame the paramilitary group UBISORT and the Mexican government, and especially the corrupt governor of Oaxaca, Ulises Ruiz who utilizes paramilitary groups to attack our beloved people in struggle.
As part of The Other Campaign, we know that this most recent attack is part of the repression that our compatriots who fight for our beloved Mexico face. We also know that the capitalist system and the political class of Mexico with its three political parties PRI, PAN, and PRD do this with the objective of crushing our dignified struggle. We know very well that this repression is happening in different parts of Mexico including our dear Zapatista sisters and brothers in Chiapas and our dear compañ@ros from San Salvador Atenco. Which is the reason that we are sharing these words from the other side, to let you all know that from here in East Harlem, New York we are going to support you and we will do everything necessary so that the day of tomorrow together we can achieve our liberation.
Sisters and brothers you are not alone, we are with you and we unite in a cry of rebellion and dignified rage.
If they touch one of us, they touch all of us!
Stop the aggression towards the Autonomous Municipality of San Juan Copala!
Stop the repression in Oaxaca and in all of Mexico!
Long live the dignified struggle of those from below in Oaxaca!
Long live the dignified struggle of The Other Campaign!
Sincerely,
Movement for Justice in El Barrio
Categories: News from Elsewhere
