Struggles from Below for Housing and Public Services in South Africa

Ashraf Cassiem, chairperson, Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign (South Africa)
Friday, November 13, 2009
10am-11:30am
652 Barrows Hall
UC Berkeley

South Africa will be on the global stage as host of the 2010 World Cup. Yet, with one of the world's highest rates of economic inequality and social protest, it is likely that the country's glaring contradictions and its militant poor, perhaps more so than the "beautiful game," will be center stage next summer.

For the past nine years, Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign http://antieviction.org.za/ has been one of the most prominent organizations of those militant poor, fighting against evictions and police brutality as well as for free basic service and quality health care in South Africa's poor and working class communities. As a coordinating body of over 15 community organizations in the Western Cape Province, the AEC has been at the forefront of challenging the neoliberal economic policies have been imposed since the fall of apartheid, recently helping to found the Poor People's Alliance as a national network of South African poor people's movements.

Please join us for discussion and solidarity with Ashaf Cassiem, the chairman of the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, as he calls attention to the problem facing South Africa's poor and draws connections between the struggles being waged in his country and those now being taken up here in the midst of the Great Recession.

“As coordinators of the anti-eviction campaign, we are not leaders in the traditional authoritarian sense. Instead, we are like a set of cutlery. We are the tools that are there to be used by poor communities fighting against the cruel and oppressive conditions of South African society. Power to the poor people!”

Sponsored by: UCB Center for African Studies, The Onyx Foundation
More information: info [at] onyxfoundation.org or http://www.onyxfoundation.org