Feminist praxis, citizenship and informal politics: Reflections on South Africa's anti-eviction campaign

Abstract

This article focuses on the Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) in Cape Town, South Africa, which is part of the larger anti-privatization movement, mobilized by disadvantaged township residents to assert their constitutional rights and resist evictions and service disconnections. It introduces the mutually constituted concepts of invited and invented spaces of citizenship and stresses the range of grassroots actions spanning those. The article also sheds light on the gender dynamics of the Campaign and how its patriarchal order is being destabilized. The AEC case study engages the pioneering feminist scholarship on citizenship that has embraced both formal and informal arenas of politics. The study points out the risk in constructing yet another binary relation between grassroots coping strategies (in invited spaces) and resistance strategies (in invented spaces). The article calls for a refinement of feminists' extended notion of politics, recognizing the oppositional practices of the poor in order to construct an inclusive citizenship. It argues that doing so better reflects the practices of the grassroots and furthers a progressive feminist praxis.

Keywords:

• citizenship
• civil society
• eviction
• gender
• grassroots
• privatization
• South Africa

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Elain Salo for her participation and insight in the initial phase of this project. I also thank African Gender Institute and Sophie Oldfield at the University of Cape Town; Antonia Darder, Ken Salo, Manisha Desai, David Wilson, Jan Nederveen Pieterse and participants in the transnational seminar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I thank Shana Wills for carrying out the 2002 interviews in Cape Town and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their extremely valuable comments. Above all I am indebted to the members of the Anti Eviction Campaign for trusting me with their stories of struggle.

Notes

1. I borrow the term ‘invited spaces of citizenship’ from Andrea Cornwall (2002: 50) and build on her critique of formulations of citizenship that circumscribe the possibility of public engagement within a frame defined by external agents, basically as a means of social control.

2. Fieldwork was conducted in Cape Town by the author in 2001, followed up in 2002 by Shana Wills and updated by the author in 2004. It involved a series of open-ended and in-depth interviews with residents of communities affected by evictions and service cut-offs, members of the Anti-Eviction Campaign and the Anti-Privatization Forum and other activists in these movements. Where consent has been obtained the interviewees' full identity is released; otherwise, they are referred to by an alphabetical code.

3. This strategy is also referred to as ‘cost-reflective pricing’ or full recovery of service costs, ‘wherein the entire cost of service delivery, including infrastructure maintenance and replacement, is structured into rates’ (Flynn 2003: 10). In this system, black areas with inferior infrastructure incur higher service delivery costs, whereas white suburbs, historically subsidized by the apartheid state for their infrastructure development, enjoy lower service delivery costs. Such ‘cost-reflective pricing’ of services does not allow for cross-subsidy between the areas; hence, residents in black townships pay more than do those in affluent white areas for identical services. Despite the high rate of unemployment, intense poverty and greater service delivery costs among black townships, impoverished residents who cannot afford to make their service payments have increasingly had service disconnected.

4. South Africa has the world's most unequal income distribution as measured by Gini co-efficiency. It has a Gini co-efficient of 0.65, compared with 0.61 for Brazil, 0.50 for Mexico and 0.41 or less for the advanced industrial countries (Castells 1998: 125).

5. See Oldfield and Stokke (forthcoming 2006) on the need to differentiate between these areas and their struggle for housing and against evictions, and to guard against conflating the divergent experience of these families into a generic category of evicted families.

6. Officially the AEC was formed in February of 2001 in Mitchels Plain following a brutal clash between the police and the residents who were trying to prevent a neighbor's eviction. Since arrears in payment for utility services frequently lead to an eviction, the AEC not only fights evictions, but also resists service disconnections.

7. Where interviewee's permission is obtained the real name is used in this text.

8. Residents from black townships like Khayelitsha, Guguletu and KTC joined the ‘colored’ townships of Delft, Elsie's River and Mannenburg in the campaign's first organized mass action, a march on the mayor's office in Cape Town, establishing an instant solidarity among the AEC's racially and regionally diverse participants.

9. Boycott of rent payments for housing and services was a strategy used by the anti-apartheid movements to protest the poor quality of services and the illegitimacy of an oppressive state (Mayekiso 1996; Adler and Steinberg 2000; Seekings 2000). See Zuern (2001: 13) on the extensive rent boycotts that led to the collapse of the black authorities.

10. Faced with the frequent incarceration of its activists starting in 2002 and accompanying costs associated with that AEC had to reach out beyond its poor members for financial support and launched a series of fund-raising efforts through the national and international networks of solidarity movements.

11. See, for example, Lister (1997); Yuval-Davis (1997); Sandercock (1998); Tripp (1998); McEwan (2000).

12. See, for example, Jelin (1990); Staheli and Cope (1994); Kaplan (1997); Lister (1997); Robnett (1997); Hassim and Gouws (1998); M. Desai (2002); Naples and Desai (2002).

13. Tripp (2003), for example, referring to the international promotion of NGOs and the experience of women in civil society groups in the African context, argues that although these groups might not have been feminist in their agenda or objectives, women's participation in them helped to justify and validate women's movements. Tripp asserts that, given the greater recognition and celebration of civil society discourse and NGOs, women have been successful in taking advantage of the new political openings of the last decade (see also True 2003).

14. There are also informal political practices that take place at the very center of the formal arena of politics, such as bribery and corruption. The concern of this article, however, is with the informal arena, not the informal practices of politics.