The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question: How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question: How do we make democracy work for the poor?
SACSIS endorses the right of the poor to decent housing. We also support solutions aimed at transforming the unequal balance in land ownership, which currently concentrates much of South Africa's land in a few hands.
Richard Pithouse -
In 1652, the year that Jan van Riebeck first stepped on to these shores, Gerrad Winstanley, an English radical, published a pamphlet called The Law of Freedom in a Platform. Three years earlier he had led a land occupation on St. George's Hill in Surrey. The occupation had aimed, against the growing enclosure of common lands for private profit to insist that “the Earth becomes a Common Treasury again”. It was quickly and violently crushed.
The pamphlet that Winstanley published...
Richard Pithouse -
On Friday night Thembinkosi Qumbelo was gunned down in a local bar where he was watching a football game on television. It was a well organised hit on a man who had, for years, been at the centre of a local struggle around land and housing - the keenest point of conflict between citizens and the local state – in Cato Crest in Durban.
Qumbelo made a remarkably bold entrance onto the local political stage on Freedom Day in 2005. Thabo Mbeki was set to speak in the King's Park stadium...
Anna Majavu -
A Khoi and San umbrella organisation has given the thumbs down to government’s latest offer to allow new claims for land stolen from indigenous South Africans before 1913.
According to Chief !Kora Danab Hennie van Wyk of the Xoraxoukhoe Khoisan Indigenous Peoples’ Organisation, the department of rural development and land reform has chosen “puppets” for its new “consultative process” which will not restore any real rights to the already marginalised Khoi...
Felicity Kitchin -
“People who live in the shacks have other people planning for their lives; whatever they get is not planned with them; there are people planning for them.” – Resident of Siyanda, eThekwini
Recent riots in Zamdela in the Free State have brought the issue of community participation in development decision-making into sharp focus. Zamdela revealed a complete lack of regard for an affected community’s input into a key decision that would have far reaching implications...
Anna Majavu -
The government's recent demolition of houses in Lenasia, apart from anything else, has exposed how inadequate the state is at providing housing for those who neither qualify for bank mortgages, nor for RDP houses.
The Lenasia families seem to fall into the category of those who qualify for so-called “gap housing” on the basis that they earn between R2200 and about R7500 per month and can therefore afford to pay for their homes. However, gap housing is being rolled out at a...
Gillian Schutte -
It was with sheer terror that we witnessed the grotesque spectacle of the bulldozing of fully built brick and mortar houses in Lenasia by government officials last week. Images of desperate women being pulled out of their houses and attempting to stop bulldozers from demolishing their lives haunt our recent memories. This was reminiscent of the forced removals of yesteryear when fully settled communities were forced out of their homes by a draconian apartheid government.
What could prompt...
