The power of the cooking pot: fed up with the ANC's free-market policies that deliver nothing, marginalized South Africans—'the poors'—are taking politics into their own hands. Activist Ashwin Desai talks to Holly Wren Spaulding - Ideology Vs. Necessity - Interview

New Internationalist, Sept, 2003 by Holly Wren Spaulding

The state is slimming down its provision of maintenance and social welfare for the poorest of the poor. You need more and more money in order to survive as everything becomes privatized. This visits the most horrendous deprivation upon people: water and lights get cut off, parks get cordoned off with razor wire so kids in one neigbourhoood play in what was once a public space.

The hopeful thing is a sense amongst people that this government will never deliver and that we're going to have to start building our own lives. These kinds of governments operate on a kind of 'demobilization': you vote once every four years and you wait, and you wait and you wait, and the father figure (yesterday Mandela, today Mbeki) will deliver. Well, we are tired of father figures.

We're very conservative actually--we respect persons in authority here--but we're increasingly disrespectful of authority in new and unpredictable ways. There was one case about two months ago in Mandela Park in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, where the City Manager who has been evicting people and cutting off their water comes to address a mass meeting. He wants to go to the toilet in the middle of the meeting but of course there is no water because he has cut it off, so they bring him a bucket. Try as he might, he can't pee in the bucket in front of a thousand peering faces. That would never have happened in the past; people would have actually stopped the meeting to allow the person to go to the 100.

There's a sense that the state won't deliver and people are making connections at the local level. A mechanic fixes a car and then a person who sews returns that with dresses or school uniforms. It's almost as if people are part of the economy, but they're able not to be part of the economy at the same time, and there are incredible bonds being built between people as they're imagining a new world. These are small things, but they're very big things.

People's stories are being told for the first time. Not Mandela's story and so on, but the real lives of ordinary South African people are being taken seriously now. The Poors of South Africa have not given up. They will make history. Again.

Mutual aid

Poor communities in South Africa are 'doing politics'--by cooking for each other, by helping neighbours resist eviction--without necessarily using the traditional language or methodologies of politics.

Having experienced one liberation struggle--against racist apartheid--they have realized that true liberation will not be delivered from above, but is an ongoing process generated by their own efforts.

Ashwin Desai is a community activist. This is an extract from We Are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anticapitalism, Verso, September 2003. Order the book from the enclosed NI catalogue or online: www.newfnt.org/catalog