Zabalaza, Unfinished Struggles against Apartheid: The Shackdwellers' Movement in Durban

Gibson illustrates how the principle of emancipation being the mission of working people is exemplified by the revolutionary activities of the "poors" in Durban, South Africa, who have long been waiting for Nelson Mandela's 1994 election promise of housing for them. The promise was broken -- the land turned over for commercial development. Rather than wait for the American National Congress to support & organize them, on 19 Mar 2005, 750 black shack-dwellers from the Kennedy Road settlement took law & order into their revolutionary hearts & hands, rebuffed the bourgeois state's efforts to silence them, & barricaded a major ring road in Durban. Market forces were treating these blacks just as the white population in general had done during apartheid -- as "surplus population," for whom promises don't have to be kept. The police arrested 14 protestors that day, but on 21 Mar -- Human Rights Day -- they fired on a crowd of demonstrators, killing 61. However, the shack-dwellers' movement was one whose time had come & it has developed both within South Africa & beyond -- in the shantytowns of Haiti, Turkey, & Latin America -- in the struggle for basic human rights. References. J. Stanton