Friends and comrades, the situation in Durban is dire. To summarise:

1. On Saturday night members of the Kennedy Road Development Committee were subject to a surprise attack by a group of about 40 armed men chanting anti Mpondo slogans. The police failed to intervene. People were killed. Later on that night all key AbM (Abahlali baseMjondolo) leaders were subject to attack. Everyone's houses (and businesses in two cases where people had shops) were destroyed. This mob (now known as 'the Zulu mob' in the settlement) has direct connections to the local ANC who had promised, two weeks ago, to turn the AbM office into an ANC office.

cc With South Africa's Constitutional Court today set to hear the efforts of the Abahlali baseMjondolo shackdweller movement to have the KwaZulu Natal Slums Act declared unlawful, Richard Pithouse reflects on the state's routine willingness to evict occupiers of informal housing in contravention of the protection afforded by the country's constitution. Stressing the destruction engendered through forcing people out of their communities, Pithouse discusses the state's flawed assumption that blindly razing settlements without fully accommodating their inhabitants amounts to progress. Highlighting the similarities of the 2007 Slums Act with apartheid-era legislation, the author criticises a technocratic act that regards the poor as the problem rather than the material and political realities they face, and proposes the implementation of measures aimed at privileging the social value of urban land over commercial concerns.

The rebellions in the ANC against Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma have broken the hermetic seal that had been tightly wound around electoral politics by the dominance of the ANC since 1994. Despite the ongoing debasement of political discourse by Zuma and some of his supporters, a new space is opening in which there can be some discussion of alternatives, argues Richard Pithouse. Although this space remains constrained by all kinds of shared dogmas it is, clearly, important for previously suppressed voices to seize this moment, to use it as effectively as possible and to hold it open for as long as is possible. The debates on the prospects for new and better policies are to be welcomed and we should take them up with vigour. But we also need to be clear sighted about the limits to a conception of politics that focuses on policy without taking sufficient account of the other factors that shape the reality of how things really go down in practice.

The industrial and mining towns on the Eastern outskirts of Johannesburg are unlovely places. They’re set on flat windswept plains amidst the dumps of sterile sand left over from old mines. In winter the wind bites, the sky is a very pale blue and it seems to be all coal braziers, starved dogs, faded strip malls, gun shops and rusting factories and mine headgear. All that seems new are the police cars and, round the corner from the Harry Gwala shack settlement, a double story facebrick strip club.

But even here the battle for land continues. The poor are loosing their grip on the scattered bits of land which they took in defiance of apartheid more than twenty years ago. The state is, again, sending in bulldozers and men with guns to move the poor from central shack settlements to peripheral townships. In every relocation many are simply left homeless. It is very difficult to resist the armed force of the state but people do what they can. Officials are often stoned. In principle the courts should provide relief from evictions that are not just illegal but are in fact criminal acts under South African law. There have been notable successes but it is often difficult to get pro bono legal support, legal processes are slow and the evictions continue.

In the Harry Gwala settlement the poorest women are on their hands and knees searching for bits of coal to bake into lumps of clay to keep the braziers burning. S’bu Zikode from Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban and Ashraf Cassiem from the Anti-Eviction Campaign in Cape Town are here to meet with the Harry Gwala branch of the Landless People’s Movement. These are all poor people’s movements that have been criminalised and violently attacked by the state. The meeting is to discuss strategies for holding onto the urban land that keeps people close to work, schools, libraries and all the other benefits of city life. This is what it has come down to. Militancy is about holding onto what was taken from apartheid.