Twenty years ago, shack dwellers in Durban founded Abahlali baseMjondolo, which is now the largest movement of poor people in post-apartheid South Africa. Its members practice a ‘living politics’ of assemblies, mandates, and recall, treating the ballot as a tool rather than a destination. As Raj Patel writes in his contribution to the “Deep Democracy” series, this emancipatory politics has been tested by assassination and, this year, by an organized campaign of xenophobic terror.
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In March 2005, eleven years after the establishment of South Africa’s democracy, approximately 750 residents of the Kennedy Road shantytown in Durban blocked a major road with burning tires and demanded to speak with their elected councilor. When the councilor arrived in an armored police vehicle, he told the police that his constituents were criminals and should be arrested. Fourteen people were arrested, including two schoolchildren. The settlement raised the bail money, collecting ten rand from each household.
In the weeks that followed I was one of a handful of academics invited to work with the settlement’s elected development committee, and saw what came next up close. Kennedy Road then had six working public toilets for more than six thousand people. Its residents had voted, loyally and repeatedly, for the African National Congress (ANC). The committee’s chairperson, S’bu Zikode, had risen to deputy chairperson of the local ANC ward branch, where he carried carefully minuted mandates from the settlement into party meetings and watched them evaporate. “We were expected to be voting cattle,” he later recalled, “but when it came to decisions, our voices meant nothing.”
This phrase deserves attention. Cattle are not outside the farm – they are its wealth. The oldest words for wealth reflect this idea. The word ‘capital’ comes from the Latin for ‘heads of cattle,’ and the English word ‘stock’ originally referred to animals long before it referred to shares. India’s politicians coined the modern term ‘vote bank,’ a bloc of loyal poor people held on deposit and drawn down on election day. This was the position of the poor in South Africa’s democracy: not excluded, but banked. They were courted at election time, policed in between, and promised houses that were sold out from under them. When residents discovered that land promised for housing had been sold to a businessman for a brick factory and that they were to be relocated far outside the city, they blocked the road.
That October, elected representatives of fourteen settlements, seventeen men and fifteen women, met at Kennedy Road and founded Abahlali baseMjondolo, isiZulu for “the people who live in the shacks.” Twenty years on it counts more than 180,000 members in over 100 branches across four provinces. It is the largest popular movement to emerge in South Africa since the end of apartheid, and it was built almost entirely by people whom the state classifies as surplus.
The assembly and the ballot
Ahead of the 2006 municipal elections the new movement adopted a position that scandalized the political class: ‘No Land! No House! No Vote!’ If the poor were a vote bank, this was a run on it: the depositors closed their accounts. Since 2005, Abahlali has held UnFreedom Day on April 27, the day the country marks Freedom Day. They mourn what they call a ‘freedom that has not yet arrived for the poor.’ Commentators responded that the poor needed ‘political education.’ In a newspaper article that became a founding text, Zikode answered that the movement’s members think and speak for themselves, and their politics are made from the material of daily life.
What that looks like in practice is unglamorous and demanding. Branches hold weekly meetings and keep minutes. Decisions of consequence go to general assemblies open to all, and they take time, sometimes days. Leaders are elected, mandated, and subject to recall, and around sixty percent of members are women. In 2023, when three national leaders attempted what members described as turning the movement into a business, a special general assembly dissolved the movement’s own national council and required every leader, implicated or not, to return to the base and seek a fresh mandate. Confronted with corruption, the movement’s response was more democracy, applied to itself. Few parliaments have managed anything comparable.
None of this means the ballot is refused on principle. It is used the way one uses any tool, deliberately and then put down. In 2014, at an open mass meeting, members voted to cast a tactical ballot for the opposition Democratic Alliance, a party whose politics they largely reject, to punish the ANC for evictions and assassinations. Sources inside the ANC later suggested the shock prompted an instruction to halt the killings. None of the movement’s leaders were assassinated in the two years that followed. In 2024 the process ran for months: thousands of members in hundreds of meetings distilled a set of People’s Minimum Demands, and a rally of 20,000 announced a conditional vote for the Economic Freedom Fighters. This time the vote was a loan, with conditions attached. The announcement ended: “On 29 May we will vote. On 30 May we will continue the struggle.”
This is the distinction the movement has spent twenty years elaborating. Electoral democracy asks the poor for their consent every five years. Deep democracy is what they do with each other every day: the food gardens and crèches, the communal kitchens, the land occupations planned in assembly and defended in court, the commune at eKhenana with its poultry project and its political school named for Frantz Fanon. The state understood the difference perfectly. This is why eKhenana’s elected leaders – Ayanda Ngila, Nokuthula Mabaso, and Lindokuhle Mnguni – were assassinated within six months of each other in 2022. Ngila was shot while repairing a water pipe in the commune’s vegetable garden. An ANC Youth League member was convicted of his murder. The movement’s marches did not draw this violence so much as its demonstration that the poor could govern themselves and hold land in common without councilors, tenders, or rent.
Neighbors, not enemies
The hardest test of any democracy is what it does with anger, and here the movement’s record is instructive. In May 2008, pogroms against migrants spread from Johannesburg across the country, killing at least sixty-two people, a third of them South Africa’s citizens, and displacing more than a hundred thousand. When word reached Kennedy Road that attacks were being planned in Durban, the movement did not rush out a condemnation. It met, for two days, in assembly. The statement that emerged has been translated around the world: “There is only one human race. An action can be illegal. A person cannot be illegal. A person is a person wherever they may find themselves.”
The same statement skewered the elite consensus that the poor required tutoring out of their prejudices. “When we get cholera we must be educated about washing our hands when in fact we need clear water. When we get burnt we must be educated about fire when in fact we need electricity.” The solution to xenophobia was not a workshop; it was land, housing, and an end to the conditions that make neighbors into competitors. And the statement was a plan, not a sentiment: day-to-day contact with street trader and refugee organizations, members born elsewhere moved into the movement’s front ranks, a commitment to shelter and defend anyone attacked. In 2008 there were no xenophobic attacks in any settlement where Abahlali had an organized presence.
The pattern held in July 2025, when Operation Dudula, which had been blockading hospitals to keep migrants from care, marched on the offices of the Socio-Economic Rights Institute, the movement’s lawyers. Abahlali debated its response in general assembly, then turned out in numbers that left Dudula outnumbered and deflated on a Braamfontein street. It is holding now, under far worse conditions. This year an outfit called March and March, aligned with Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe Party, set a deadline for migrants to leave the country and sent armed men through poor neighborhoods to enforce it. Thousands have been driven from their homes; some ten thousand people were penned into a single Durban park while the government, which has arrested tens of thousands of migrants this year, recites the mob’s talking points about jobs. Migrants are roughly four percent of South Africa’s population. They did not produce its forty-four percent unemployment. Abahlali’s leaders have said so in public, at the cost of death threats, including threats of necklacing. Zikode has spent two decades being told he is about to be killed, and says so anyway.
Scapegoating instead of agency?
Why does deep democracy inoculate where electoral democracy does not? Because scapegoating is what a shallow democracy offers people instead of power. Politics that consist of choosing masters produce spectators, who can be sold as villains. An assembly produces something else entirely. Mozambique’s traders are not abstractions on posters, but rather comrades with seats, voices, and votes on issues such as shared fire pits and absent toilets. When anger has somewhere real to go, it goes there.
As folks in Europe watch the return of pogroms to Belfast and the rise of the far right in Germany, they might take note of the resistance that held in South Africa. It wasn’t in the Constitutional Court or at the polls, but rather in assemblies of the poorest people in the country who met weekly and kept minutes. Shack dwellers have a proverb for the age of mass displacement: Unyawo alunampumulo. The foot has no resting place. Everyone is a migrant eventually. A person is a person wherever they may find themselves.