Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign » Video

Help bring Symphony Way for a book tour to the US/UK

antieviction — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 16:53:17 +0000

A beauty, extraordinary in every way.’
Naomi Klein, author of ’The Shock Doctrine’ and ’No Logo’.

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About This project:

The aim of this project is to bring three authors of the acclaimed book No Land! No House! No Vote! Voices from Symphony Way on a tour of the USA and the UK.

A group of families who have called themselves the Symphony Way Pavement Dwellers are demanding that their voices are heard and they need your help to bring them to your city:

London

New York

Boston

Philadelphia

Washington DC

Chicago

San Francisco

Ottawa

Los Angeles

Filed under: Anti-Eviction Campaign, Archives, Delft - evictions + resistance, Video Tagged: blikkiesdorp, Book Tour, Naomi Klein, No Land! No House! No Vote! Voices from Symphony Way, Pambazuka Press, Symphony Way

AEC’s Ashraf Cassiem on the World Cup

antieviction — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 06:19:50 +0000

Filed under: Anti-Eviction Campaign, From NGOs, Video Tagged: 2010 World Cup, Anti-Eviction Campaign, blikkiesdorp, FIFA, Poor People's World Cup

Press: Kicked Out for the Cup?

antieviction — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:45:19 +0000

Watch Christopher Werth’s multimedia report from South Africa: “Out of Bounds? Cape Town’s Cleanup for the World Cup.”

Kicked Out for the Cup?

South Africa is accused of clearing Cape Town slums to clean up for the big event

Newsweek Magazine, 4 June 2010

by Christhoper Werth

Victor Gumbi sits pensively beside a smoldering fire in a newly cleared lot, literally in the shadow of the recently renovated Ellis Park Stadium, one of the many venues where South Africa will host the World Cup football tournament, which kicks off this week. South Africa billed the world’s most popular sporting event as a boon to development that would help lift millions out of poverty, but Gumbi, a 35-year-old day laborer, says things are only getting worse. Not long after South Africa was awarded the tournament, an entire city block in the neighborhood where he lives was slated for destruction as part of a larger urban-regeneration scheme around the stadium, as Johannesburg began preparing for the throngs of tourists expected to come pouring in over the next few weeks. Late last year, the run-down building where Gumbi was squatting was torn down, leaving him in a small, jerry-built shack in the middle of a block of half-demolished houses that local residents have nicknamed “Baghdad.” Now many residents who’d been living in the area’s abandoned buildings for well more than a decade feel they’re being forced out because of the World Cup. “They want to hide us. They don’t want the Europeans seeing the people living here, so they demolished these dirty houses,” says Gumbi, who’s convinced he’ll be removed once and for all before the games actually begin.

Johannesburg city officials deny that any removals have taken place specifically for the tournament. Nevertheless, allegations of forced evictions for the World Cup have been sprouting up all over the country. Local headlines accuse South African police of rounding up the homeless and dumping them miles away (a charge the police deny), while residents from across Cape Town claim they’ve been relocated from their squatter settlements and dilapidated buildings to a temporary camp on the outskirts of town before the football fans arrive. In this case as well, the city dismisses such accusations, but it wouldn’t be the first time people have been uprooted in advance of a global sporting event. When Seoul hosted the 1988 Olympics, an estimated 15 percent of the population was displaced as a result of the capital’s overhaul. And 20 years later, it’s thought that far more than a million residents in Beijing found themselves in the path of a bulldozer in the run-up to the 2008 summer games. Now a recent report on such mega-events by the United Nations’ special rapporteur on adequate housing, Raquel Rolnik, states that in many current cases human rights are going out the door as host cities, including Cape Town, are being cleaned up to appeal to spectators.

For South Africa, the first World Cup on African soil was supposed to be different. Initially heralded as an opportunity to raise standards of living for the country’s roughly 25 million impoverished citizens, organizers laid out a development agenda for ensuring that benefits trickled down to the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. Since then the country has invested more than $4 billion in stadiums and upgrading its airports and other infrastructure. But in recent weeks government ministers have sought to play down expectations over its economic payoff, while commentators warn of being left with nothing but “white elephant” stadiums after the games end. For starters, the global recession has caused a dramatic reduction in the number of projected visitors, down nearly 25 percent to 373,000. And as the kickoff approaches, FIFA’s demands for a commercial exclusion zone around the venues for its official sponsors such as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola have come as a blow to thousands of South Africa’s street traders, who say they’re being pushed out for the monthlong event. President Jacob Zuma has pleaded with South Africans not to air the country’s problems in front of World Cup visitors, but with the opening match just days away, angry protests over evictions and substandard living conditions have flared up in many cities and squatter settlements.

Perhaps nowhere is that frustration more palpable than in Cape Town. Rolnik reports she received numerous complaints—more than anywhere else in South Africa—about residents being forced out for the World Cup and relocated more than 16 kilometers outside of town in a “temporary relocation area” known as Blikkiesdorp, or Tin Can Town. With Table Mountain as a backdrop, the sprawling, remote camp consists of about 1,700 identical metal huts on a wide plain of gravel surrounded by heavy concrete fencing. Housing-rights campaigners contend that plans to move people to these relocation areas, far from schools and job opportunities, are in violation of international human-rights standards, and newcomers complain of ill treatment by the police and freezing temperatures. “Why couldn’t they have put us somewhere else instead of here?” asks Francisco Green, whose family had just been relocated from a hostel they’d been squatting in near Cape Town’s newly refurbished practice stadium. “It was much better where we lived. We’re going to go through our first winter, and I think it’s going to be a disaster.”

Several miles away from Blikkiesdorp is the most prominent example of forced evictions cited in the U.N. report: a vast conglomeration of shacks known as the Joe Slovo informal settlement (named after the anti-apartheid activist and former housing minister). The settlement lines the highway between Cape Town and the city’s international airport, making it one of the first sites greeting incoming visitors. Because of its high visibility, it was targeted for a national pilot project shortly after the country was awarded the World Cup in 2004. The project would have completely razed the shacks and moved as many as 20,000 people to a temporary camp to make way for new, more attractive housing. Critics say the project was nothing more than an attempt to beautify the city for 2010, and angry residents last year won a Constitutional Court ruling that imposed such costly conditions on the eviction order that the government dropped the plan to move them, but only after several thousand people had already been evicted.

It’s not clear how many of the recent evictions would have taken place even if the World Cup had never come to South Africa. When the African National Congress came to power with Nelson Mandela as president in 1994, it promised to build a free house for virtually everyone living below the poverty line as a means of redressing the effects of apartheid, which essentially restricted nonwhites from owning property and living in cities. In practice, this new government housing has only pushed many poor blacks from urban centers to low-income ghettos miles outside of town. Now, with a mounting backlog and limited funding, the program that began by building actual homes is often reduced to warehousing people in rural transit camps, some far worse than Blikkiesdorp. Rhodes University professor Richard Pithouse says that there are currently 100 court cases challenging evictions in Durban, and that none of them can be connected to the World Cup, although the link has been made in the press. “This idea that mega-events lead to evictions has become very popular,” says Pithouse. “This is very worrying because people were being evicted long before we got the World Cup, and they will be evicted for a long time afterward.”

Critics say that political leaders in many emerging economies see no place for the poor in their vision of “world-class” cities, the kind fit to host major international events. Illustrating this, Marie Huchzermeyer of the University of Witwatersrand says South Africa is misinterpreting the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goal for improving the lives of slum dwellers. The U.N. meant to encourage nations to bring services like water and electricity to informal settlements, but South Africa took this as a mandate for “eradicating slums”—a phrase recently used by Zuma’s new minister of human settlements, Tokyo Sexwale. The country has set a target for slum-free cities by 2014, and Huchzermeyer says its approach is being mimicked from Morocco to Angola and Zimbabwe. That’s a troubling prospect for a continent in which the majority of the urban population lives in slums.

Rolnik warns that as more developing countries vie to host global sporting events, the greater the risk that slum-clearance campaigns will become more aggressive. The 2010 Commonwealth Games will be hosted in Delhi, where Rolnik’s predecessor, Miloon Kothari, reported that 300,000 people have been removed to make the city “slum-free” by the opening ceremony later this fall. The 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics will take place in Brazil, where Rolnik reports that 35 “informal communities” already face eviction for the event, and this in a vibrant democracy with a long history of recognizing the rights of “informal settlers.” Rolnik says the International Olympic Committee did cooperate with the U.N. report, and agreed to begin including protections against evictions in its bidding process. FIFA, says Rolnik, never responded to repeated U.N. requests over several years for information. FIFA told NEWSWEEK that it “never requested any move or ‘cleaning-up’ of areas in any host city” for this year’s World Cup. However, it’s also unclear whether it has done anything to prevent it.

For people like Victor Gumbi in Johannesburg and those still living in the Joe Slovo informal settlement in Cape Town, such as 64-year-old Nonqaba Lujalajala, the threat of the World Cup has felt very real. Lujalajala built her diminutive shack in Joe Slovo shortly after the fall of apartheid, a time filled with pride and optimism for the future. Today, 16 years later, she says she’s glad football fans from all over the world will be confronted with the reality of her situation on their way to the games. “I’m still starving here,” she says, and now visitors will see South Africa as it really is, not how some of its leaders had hoped it would appear.

This story was supported by the Henry Demarest Lloyd Investigative Fund at the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Filed under: Anti-Eviction Campaign, Mainstream and Other News, Video Tagged: 2010 World Cup, blikkiesdorp, City of Cape Town, delft, joe slovo, N2, N2 Gateway, TRA

Solidarity: In the U.S., Wood Co. man forced from foreclosed home

antieviction — Fri, 07 May 2010 18:12:31 +0000

UPDATE: The Stony Ridge 7 are out of jail and free. All were charged with criminal trespass and impeding police business, both misdemeanors, and released.

STONY RIDGE, OHIO — Wood County Sheriff’s deputies swarmed the home of Keith Sadler Friday morning in an attempt to force him out of the foreclosed property.

Sadler and five others barricaded themselves inside the Stony Ridge home five days ago in protest of his bank’s foreclosure of the US 20 (Fremont Pike) property. Sadler’s home was sold after he was unable to keep up with the payments. According to protesters with The Toledo Foreclosure Defense League (TFDL), Sadler exhausted all other options.

Authorities were seen at the home around 7:00 a.m. Friday, preparing to force Sadler and the home’s current occupants out. Sadler began his protest on Sunday and was joined by other squatters from TFDL.

Shortly before 8:00 a.m., Sadler was physically carried out of the home by his arms and feet, by sheriff’s deputies, and arrested on scene. All protestors inside the home with Sadler were also arrested, according to officials. All were charged with trespassing and obstruction.

Sadler has been booked into the Wood County Jail. He was scheduled to be arraigned in Perrysburg Municipal Court at 1:00 p.m.

Filed under: Archives, Mainstream and Other News, News & Press Release, Solidarity, Video Tagged: eviction, Solidarity, Take Back the Land

Tin Town: A short documentary on the Symphony Way Anti-Eviction Campaign

antieviction — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 07:20:32 +0000

Promised housing by the South African government, more than a hundred Cape Town families found community through their struggle as squatters on a sandy road known as Symphony Way. Recently moved by court order to an indefinitely temporary relocation area dubbed ‘Tin Town’ or ‘Blikkiesdorp’ in Afrikaans, community members reflect on that road in their past and on the road ahead.
————————————————

Title: Tin Town

A Film By: Nora Connor, Clementine Wallace & Colton Margus

Produced By: Barefoot Workshops, Inc

Instructors: Alison Fast, Teddy Symes & Chandler Griffin

Sponsors by: Canon USA, Sennheiser, Bogen Imaging, Lowel, Litepanels

Created: December 2009, Cape Town, South Africa

Filed under: Anti-Eviction Campaign, Archives, Delft - evictions + resistance, Video Tagged: Barefood Workshops, blikkiesdorp, Symphony Way, Tin Town

How the World Cup will impact poor communities in South Africa

antieviction — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:23:13 +0000

Eva Davids from the Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) in South Africa talks about the impact of the 2010 Football World Cup on her community in Athlone.

Posted in Archives, Athlone, Video Tagged: 2010, 2010 World Cup, Green Point Stadium

When the mountain meets its Shadow Trailer (english)

antieviction — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 07:03:04 +0000

in cinema 2010…

Posted in Archives, Video Tagged: Wehn the mountain meets its Shadow

A video by American students of the Symphony Way Pavement Dwellers

antieviction — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:45:15 +0000

a 6 minute short film, made to raise awareness of the eviction situation in Cape Town, South Africa.

Posted in Anti-Eviction Campaign, Archives, Video Tagged: Ben Frymer, evictions, Sonoma State University, SSU, Symphony Way, the issues

DemocracyNow! Video and radio interviews

antieviction — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:15:30 +0000

South Africa’s Poor Targeted by Evictions, Attacks in Advance of 2010 World Cup

Thousands of South Africans are being displaced in preparation for the 2010 World Cup. While Durban completes the finishing touches on its new stadium, thousands of the city’s poor who live in sprawling informal settlements are threatened with eviction. On Saturday, an armed gang of some forty men attacked an informal settlement on Durban’s Kennedy Road, killing at least two people and destroying thirty shacks. We speak to two South African activists who are fighting back.

LISTEN
WATCH

As President Obama is heading to Copenhagen today to vie for the Olympics to come to Chicago in 2016, we take a look at South Africa, which is poised to host the World Cup, the largest international soccer competition, next year. While Durban completes the finishing touches on its new stadium, thousands of the city’s poor who live in sprawling informal settlements are threatened with eviction by the ruling African National Congress or ANC’s slum clearance policies.

Late this Saturday night an armed gang of some 40 men attacked an informal settlement on Durban’s Kennedy Road killing at least two people and destroying 30 shacks. A thousand people have reportedly been driven out of the settlement. Eyewitnesses say the attackers acted with the support of the local ANC structures. Members of the Durban Shack Dweller’s Movement which brings together tens of thousands of shack dwellers to demand their right to fair housing in the city were holding a youth camp when they were attacked.

Well, last month we interviewed a young leader from the Shack Dwellers Movement. Eighteen-year-old Mazwi Nzimanda is president of the movement’s youth league. He has been displaced by this latest attack and is currently in hiding. We also spoke to Reverend Mavuso Mbekhiseni from the Rural Network in South Africa. They were in the United States speaking out against the anti-poor policies in post-apartheid South Africa.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We end today with a look at South Africa, which is poised to host the World Cup, the premier international football competition, next year. While Durban completes the finishing touches on its new stadium, thousands of the city’s poor who live in sprawling informal settlements are threatened with eviction by the ruling African National Congress’s, or ANC’s, slum clearance policies.

Late this Saturday night, an armed gang of some forty men attacked an informal settlement on [Durban’s] Kennedy Road killing at least two people and destroying thirty shacks. A thousand people have reportedly been driven out of the settlement. Eyewitnesses say the attackers acted with the support of the local ANC structures. Members of the Durban Shack Dwellers Movement, which brings together tens of thousands of shack dwellers to demand their right to fair housing in the city, were holding a youth camp when they were attacked.

Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: Well, last month we interviewed a young leader from the Shack Dwellers Movement, eighteen-year-old Mazwi Nzimande. He is president of the movement’s youth league. He has been displaced by this latest attack. He’s currently in hiding. We also spoke with Reverend Mavuso Mbhekiseni from the Rural Network in South Africa. They were in the US speaking out against the anti-poor policies in post-apartheid South Africa.

I began by asking Mazwi to explain the Shack Dwellers Movement.

MAZWI NZIMANDE: The Shack Dwellers Movement is a movement that was made by the poor people, the people who were waiting for housing since 1994. It’s the movement that is made out of poor people only, because the poor people are feeling betrayed, so they decided to join hands together and approach the government and make the government to be aware. They say there are still poor people in South Africa, because they feel that they are the forgotten citizens of the country. The only thing that is being remembered is to build stadiums for the 2010 World Cup. They don’t talk about the poor people anymore. They’re only talking about promoting the country, so the poor people decided to join hands together and approach the government and say, “Hey, we are still existing in the country, so we are still waiting for those houses.”

JUAN GONZALEZ: What is the [Slums] Act? When was it passed? And what has been the impact of it on the poor communities of South Africa?

MAZWI NZIMANDE: The Slums Act was first a bill in 2006, when the Shack Dwellers Movement was invited at the provincial parliament in Pietermaritzburg, when it was still a bill, you know. So we were invited to come and observe while they were introducing the Slums Act. And it has not been good for the shack dwellers, because the Slums Act says you should not resist eviction. If you resist evictions, you might be fined 20,000 rand or being sentenced at five years. So, most of us cannot afford that, because we want to be in our shacks, we want to be close in the city. I mean, that’s what we want. We want the government to provide houses where the people are, close to our working place, close to our schools, close to the hospital. Plus, we have a right to be close to the city.

AMY GOODMAN: Isn’t South Africa unusual in that it has housing as a human right written into the Constitution?

MAZWI NZIMANDE: It does, yes. But now, it seems like it’s working for certain individuals, not for the poor people, because you will be surprised and shocked when you go to South Africa and see thousands and thousands of informal settlements. And then we just don’t understand, because, I mean, since 1994, these people are still on the waiting list. Each informal settlement has about 7,000 people. And in our movement in Durban only, we have fourteen settlements, and each of those have about 7,000, 5,000. And you will just find it so hard to understand why at this time of the year.

AMY GOODMAN: Mazwi mentioned the World Cup. It’s almost the only way we talk about South Africa today in the United States. But what exactly is happening to people as a result of the World Cup, which is watched by over a billion people and is going to be in South Africa for the first time?

REV. MAVUSO MBHEKISENI: Our government is concerned about developing spaces, not population development. So, as they develop spaces, they move away people. They say people should move away, so to pave way for the development, to help it. So, by building these stadia, they are moving people away from the cities and away from their original places, even in rural areas, because they want to build malls, big malls. They want to build freeways, so that, to us, this World Cup is a mass eviction of poor people. So that’s what is happening in South Africa. We are not going to live and stay in the stadia. We are not going to sleep there. So they are destroying our houses or our homes. Because we can afford those homes, so they say—they call them slums, and so we are evicted. So we are saying this World Cup is accompanied by evictions and destruction of our own—and demolishing of our own homes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And when you say they are moved out, does the government—where are they being moved to? Is the government providing them adequate housing where they’re being moved to?

REV. MAVUSO MBHEKISENI: Government is promising them that they are going to have houses about fifty kilometers away from the cities, only to find that there are no houses. You will be moved to transitional relocation camps, where they say you have to wait for some—it’s ten years before you get housing.

AMY GOODMAN: Give us a historical perspective. Reverend Mavuso, you were there before the first democratically elected government of Nelson Mandela. You were there under apartheid. Compare that to today.

REV. MAVUSO MBHEKISENI: There is now a widening gap between the rich and the poor. During apartheid, it was the whites and blacks. So, now that is the type of apartheid that we see now, that people are getting more richer, and people are getting more poor.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you ever get a chance to meet Nelson Mandela? You’re eighteen years old, but President Mandela is still alive.

MAZWI NZIMANDE: I mean, I didn’t get a chance to see the days of Nelson Mandela, but, I mean, I’m hearing things that he’s such a wonderful man, he’s such a good man. You know, he has that powerful voice. But I don’t believe, because he is still alive, but there are informal—there are shack dwellers in South Africa, but he hasn’t said anything. There is that huge gap. Mandela is up there, and the people are down there, so it’s very hard to, like, get a chance to meet with Nelson Mandela. Even the current president, I haven’t met him, you know, because those people are high up. The only time they come to the communities is when the elections are going to take place. And they come with bodyguards. So, for me, it’s hard to understand why does a man that we must elect as a president come to our community, has bodyguard. That means he fear us, you know. So how can we access the man who comes with bodyguard in our communities? I don’t understand.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And if it’s true, as you say, that there’s been so many problems in terms of the widening gap in the country, why is the ANC leadership still receiving such huge support at the polls?

REV. MAVUSO MBHEKISENI: People were educated, through what we call domestication, that they should love one party, because that party gave them—will give them freedom. This is a majority party of—and it is a black government, so they say if we vote for another party, then it means it will not be democracy. They think democracy comes with the ANC. So they think ANC is democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: Rev. Mavuso of the Rural Network in South Africa and eighteen-year-old Mazwi Nzimande, president of the Shack Dwellers Movement’s youth league. We only have fifteen seconds, but he is now in hiding after a major attack on their shacks this weekend, Saturday night.

Mazwi, what happened? Very quickly, who did this? Who attacked people, killed two and hurt the shacks?

MAZWI NZIMANDE: Thank you. Firstly, we were not there, but on Sunday during the day, we went back to Kennedy Road to check on how things were, how the conditions were. I mean, it became clear when we saw the ANC guys who were there, you know, enjoying themselves, having that gathering. Even the [inaudible]—

AMY GOODMAN: We have five seconds. We have five seconds.

MAZWI NZIMANDE: Even, I mean, so clear, it’s the ANC, because they have mentioned it, that they want the whole informal settlement to be known to the ANC [inaudible]—

AMY GOODMAN: Mazwi Nzimande, we have to leave it there.

Posted in Archives, Mainstream and Other News, Poor People's Alliance, Video Tagged: Democracy Now, evictions, World Cup

AbM: Eyewitness Video Testimony

antieviction — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:07:19 +0000

New video has been put together from the scene at Kennedy Road. Eyewitnesses to the menacing mob on Saturday night directly contradict both the official ANC story that ‘Abahlali-connected people’ perpetrated the attack and the ridiculous comment by Ward Councilor Yakoob Baig that the community is ‘terrified of Abahlali’. The slightest scrutiny reveals that in fact Abahlali was the target of the vicious 36 hours plus of deadly mob violence. In the 3 days since at least 4 people have been killed, many injured and over 1,000 have been displaced from the settlement under threats of violence. Their safe return has no secure guarantee and has not even been addressed by the ANC or police. The ANC’s persistent support and connection to the actual attackers proves that the government is at a minimum complicit in the violence. At the moment no member of the armed mob these witnesses were threatened by has been arrested while 8 unarmed members of the Kennedy Road safety committee, which was protecting Abahlali members that night, are in police custody facing possible murder charges. Abahlali President S’bu Zikode and Vice President Lindela Figlan remain refugees, unable to return to their homes at Kennedy Road while the armed mob holding death threats over their heads roams free to terrorize the remaining residents at the settlement. In fact anyone with even the most cursory connection to Abahlali, for example the ladies who cook for children in the crèche near the Abahlali office are being threatened and forced to leave. Please watch this video as it is an important counter to the blatant lies being peddled by the ANC and swallowed whole by much of the South African media. You can watch on YouTube here.

Click here to sign the petition asking Zuma to intervene and stop the violence

Posted in Archives, Poor People's Alliance, Solidarity, Video Tagged: anc, Documentary, Kennedy Road, Video