• DOI:10.1080/02589346.2014.990149
• Corpus ID: 143531049

The Rise and Fall of Abahlali baseMjondolo, a South African Social Movement

@article{Mdlalose2014TheRA,
  title={The Rise and Fall of Abahlali baseMjondolo, a South African Social Movement},
  author={Bandile Mdlalose},
  journal={Politikon},
  year={2014},
  volume={41},
  pages={345 - 353}
}

• Bandile Mdlalose
• Published 2 September 2014
• Political Science
• Politikon

Many people are asking me about the fall of Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), an organization that was the darling of academics, many journalists, documentary makers and Ph.D. students. Since 2013, it has gone very quiet on the ground, losing members and leaders, among them, me. It supported the pro-capitalist Democratic Alliance (DA) in the 2014 national elections. This is not what made AbM a darling of academics and left activists since 2005. Up until recently, in AbM they found people who would prove their theories about the revolt of the poor coming any day. This revolt against the ANC was supposed to start after 20 years of no delivery. It was to be a very peaceful and democratic kind of revolt, a revolt that respected the constitution, using court cases and peaceful protest and moral pressure to bring out the humanity of poor people. The academics and left activists coming from the suburbs found shack-dwellers who could be made to look like their dreams and assumptions. AbM was declared to have a philosophy which is the same as all sorts of writers and to have a politics like other sorts of poor peoples’ movements. In South Africa (SA), AbM was found to be unique. There have been many movements in SA, but the thing that made AbM so amazing was our website and press statements. Journalists and academics could always raid this website for juicy quotes. ‘Speak to us, Not about us’, ‘No Land, No House, No Vote’, ‘A Living Politics’. For the journalist and foreign student, AbM was a useful thing to exist because it said things relevant to the budget, Marikana, the Occupy movement, Mandela, neoliberalism, xenophobia, World Cup, Zuma, or even the Comrades Marathon. But there were real problems eating away at the inside of AbM. From the understanding of an activist, a social movement organization is one formed by people to discuss and solve the social problems of the people. It is an organization that practises and implements democracy. Its decisions come from the people not individuals. Social movements play a very big role in changing the lives of their members. Marginalized at the grassroots level, the voices Politikon, 2014 Vol. 41, No. 3, 345–353, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02589346.2014.990149