We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa

POLITICS Ashwin Desai. We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002. 153 pp. Photographs. $19.00. Paper.

Writing "from the frontlines of the establishment's undeclared war on the poor" (14), Ashwin Desai, an activist and academic, presents an account of a number of community struggles for decent services and wages in postapartheid South Africa. Desai participated in many of the protest actions and organizations discussed, although his exact role is not explained. His general purpose is "to give some account of the lived experience of both the human cost of the ANC's capitulation to domestic and international capital and the growing resistance to the ANC" (12). He is very laudatory of what he sees as a nascent movement of poor South Africans, and the book, with its focus on individuals, is highly descriptive and engaging. However, it lacks significant analysis of both the current government's economic policies and the community structures and actions themselves.

As Desai recounts it, this movement was born in early 1999 in Durban's Chatsworth township and culminated with the Durban Social Forum's demonstrations against ANC's policies during the UN's World Conference on Racism in late 2001. Its actions are observed largely in Durban's poor townships via protests against evictions and water and electricity disconnections. In one chapter Desai also discusses similar protests for affordable services in Johannesburg's Soweto and Cape Town's Tafelsig; in another, he reviews strikes against Volkswagen in Uitenhage and Engen in Durban. Although he successfully brings out the linkages among the community protests within greater Durban and among the major cities, he is less able to demonstrate that participants see the linkages, which he believes are present, between workers' strikes and community protests.

A major theme throughout the book is condemnation of the South African government's neoliberal "Thatcherite" economic policies. Desai notes the disappearance of jobs, particularly in Durban's textile and leather goods industries, for which he holds the national government's trade liberalization policies responsible. But greater attention, and scorn, is heaped on local government officials whose attempts to get residents to pay for housing, rent, and electricity are described as "reminiscent of the apartheid days" (91). With detailed anecdotal cases, Desai shows how many individuals suffer severely as a result of local authorities' treatment of residents as customers buying services rather than as citizens receiving their constitutional rights. Most local councilors are regarded as sell-outs-no political party is spared, and attacks on their offices, homes, or characters are gleefully recounted. More data concerning the declining economy and government policies would have strengthened this aspect of the book and also would have strengthened Desai's argument.

We Are the Poors depicts recent community struggles and provides a vivid picture of the continuing economic trials of poor urban South Africans. But it provides little analysis of the events and conditions it describes. Desai concludes that South Africa's revolution has "failed" (123), insisting that an on-going movement of the urban poor rejects many of the South African government's economic policies. Yet he fails to prove that the community campaigns he has observed constitute one of the "new weapons of liberation" (9). Affiliates of the Durban Social Forum engage in marches, assaults, violence, payment boycotts, illegal hook-ups, and organizing, just like earlier community movements did. In the end, many questions remain: What exactly is new about "the poors movement"? Is this movement likely to survive? Are activists likely to betray residents? Are community protests likely to result in meaningful changes in government policy?

Kimberly Lanegran

Hood College

Frederick, Maryland

Copyright African Studies Association Sep 2003
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