We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa

When Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa in 1994, freedom-loving people around the world hailed a victory over racial domination. The end of apartheid did not change the basic conditions of the oppressed majority, however. Material inequality has deepened and new forms of solidarity and resistance have emerged in communities that have forged new and dynamic political identities. We Are the Poors follows the growth of the most unexpected of these community movements, beginning in one township of Durban, linking up with community and labor struggles in other parts of the country, and coming together in massive anti-government protests at the time of the UN World Conference Against Racism in 2001.

We Are the Poors follows the growth of the most unexpected of these community movements, beginning in one township of Durban, linking up with community and labor struggles in other parts of the country, and coming together in massive anti-government protests at the time of the UN World Conference Against Racism in 2001. It describes from the inside how the downtrodden regain their dignity and create hope for a better future in the face of a neoliberal onslaught, and shows the human faces of the struggle against the corporate model of globalization in a Third World country.

Contents

1. Fatima Meer Comes to Chatsworth
2. Harinarian “Moses” Judhoo in the Promised Land
3. How Are These People Even Able to Exist?
4. A Social Time Bomb Starts Ticking
5. The Struggle and Its Fruits: From the Militant Eighties to the End of Apartheid
6. “We Are the Poors”
7. Upgrading the Houses and the Return of Relocation
8. Is It Legal to Be Poor?: Evictions and Resistance
9. Faces in the Crowd
10. Working Life: From Rags to Tatters
11. Thulisile Manqele’s Water
12. A Revolt Grows in Isipingo
13. Mpumalanga’s New War (co-authored with Heinrich Bohmke)
14. Fighting Neoliberalism in Soweto and Tafelsig
15. Labor and Community: The Volkswagon and Engen Strikes
16. Chatsworth Reignites
17. Global and Local: The World Conference Against Racism and the Durban Social Forum
18. Building a New Movement?

Appendix: Durban Social Forum Declaration

Ashwin Desai teaches at the Workers’ College in Durban, South Africa, and is a newspaper columnist and community activist. He is the author of Arise Ye Coolies and South Africa: Still Revolting.