A ‘Political War of Words and Bullets’: Defining and Defying Sides of Struggle for Housing in Crossroads, South Africa

Abstract

This article looks at contemporary activism in Crossroads, South Africa -a famous symbol of women's defiance as one of the longest-surviving squatter camps under apartheid. In 1998 the Women's Power Group staged a four-month sit-in at City Council offices, demanding accountability for undelivered housing and public services. This was one of the first and most prolonged of what have become known as the post-apartheid or neoliberal period 'new social movements'. The occupation unravelled into a year of violent conflict in the township and a subsequent Commission of Enquiry into the events. Official documents -even those that revolve around actions taken by women -focus on men acting violently. However, life histories of Women's Power Group (WPG) members tell a very different story about what women were thinking and doing. I first piece together the unfolding events through archival and oral history research. I then turn from looking at the history of struggle to looking at the struggle over history, where women's struggles were reframed in an official discourse of naive pawns of shacklords at best, and undeserving, impatient troublemakers at worst. Women's leadership was demobilised, depoliticised, and dislocated from the issues they stood up for and from the celebrated history of women's mobilising in Crossroads. The case of the Women's Power Group history points to how silences around complex processes of the demobilisation of women's movements -the reconfiguration of power that is not named or acknowledged -plays out in subsequent attempts to mobilise. The article aims to document and extend an important piece of post-apartheid history, and to spark discussion on processes of demobilisation, the significance of the gaps between multiple versions of women's protest over time, and the implications for ongoing struggles today.

The Poolitical City: “Seeing Sanitation” and Making the Urban Political in Cape Town

“…This is the remarkable politicization of sanitation in Cape Town in recent years. We argue that this politicization, a new moment in the longer histories of protest across the city (Benson ; McDonald ; Thompson ), entails not just the jostling of different political claims and tactics, but the stretching and reconfiguring of the urban political itself. In particular, we highlight the crucial role of four “ poo litical tactics” in forging this urban political: spectacle , auditing , sabotage , and blockage .…”

Urbanizing social reproduction: (Re)thinking the politics of care in capitalist urban development

“…In the colonial era, African women refused to stay contained within their impoverished homelands and rural areas. They openly defied spatial segregation by setting up shacks in urban peripheries, which later morphed into what is now known as informal settlements on the African continent (see Cole (2017Cole ( [1987) and Benson (2015) for heroic spatial practices of defiance by Black women). Just as in apartheid Bantustans, women's defiance gave rise to their move to the "forbidden cities" and formation of peripheral settlements; in global Bantustans, the comfortable divisions are constantly shaken up and challenged by populations on the move who disrupt the capital arrangement of and relations between sender and receiver communities.…”

Graphic Novel Histories: Women’s Organized Resistance to Slum Clearance in Crossroads, South Africa, 1975–2015

“…4.For an expanded account of the history of Crossroads and its significance, see Cole (1987) and Benson (2009a, 2009b, 2015). …”