SYNOPSIS
The city of Durban, South Africa has promised to ‘eradicate the slums’ by 2010 in time for the Soccer World Cup and is evicting shack dwellers from their homes at gunpoint. ‘Dear Mandela’ is a feature documentary that takes viewers from the chaos on the streets to the highest court in the land as we follow three young shack dwellers who embark on a quest to stop the bulldozers and secure the better life Nelson Mandela promised them.
Zama, Mnikelo and Mazwi, along with other shack dwellers, come together to form the Shack Dwellers’ Movement. In an effort to stop the evictions, these seemingly powerless shack dwellers take their case all the way to the highest court in the land. Will the shack dwellers win the case, and can they stop the evictions?
Dear Mandela is at once a coming-of-age tale and a revolutionary parable about people who have decided early on to fight for something bigger than themselves. It is a story set in South Africa, but it could be anywhere as cities around the world begin to shut their doors to the poor.
BACKGROUND INFO
South Africa: the promise
On February 11, 1990 after 27 years of incarceration and hard labor Nelson Mandela walked out of prison a free man, the closest person the world had to a living saint. South Africa’s peaceful transition from racist apartheid governance to democracy was hailed as a triumph, and in 1994 Mandela was elected President. Millions who had endured the brutality, loss and exclusion of apartheid expressed great hope for a better life. Mandela stated during his inaugural speech, “Out of the experience of an extraordinary human disaster that lasted too long, must be born a society of which all humanity will be proud.” Behind the scenes however Mandela and the ANC had been making deals with the now-ousted apartheid regime and South Africa’s captains of industry. A seismic shift has taken place from the talk of redistribution expressed in the ANC’s Freedom Charter to neoliberal policies designed to attract foreign investment. Instead of the bold plans many anticipated to undo the gross inequality fomented by apartheid, the poor would have to wait for the riches to trickle down. The Wall Street Journal commented shortly after the election, “Mr. Mandela has in recent days sounded more like Margaret Thatcher than the socialist revolutionary he was once thought be.”
Amabhulu anyama
Asenzeli iworry
[The black capitalists
Are making us worry]
– Chorus of a contemporary protest song, sung in Xhosa
This shift has had devastating consequences for the poor. Since the ‘94 elections the number of people living on less than $1 a day has doubled to 4 million. In the last thirteen years, the South African government has build 1.8 million homes, but in the meantime 2 million people have lost their homes. Close to 1 million have been evicted from farms in the first decade of democracy. Such evictions have meant that the number of shack dwellers has grown by 50 percent.
- Source: ‘Disaster Capitalism’ by Naomi Klein
One in six South Africans presently live in informal shack settlements. For the last two years, the government has followed a policy of ‘Slum Eradication’. The South African government wants the ‘unsightly’ slums cleared to create ‘World Class Cities’ for the 2010 Soccer World Cup. They are supposed to have a court order to evict, and are required by law to provide suitable alternative accommodation for those being evicted. Instead, shack dwellers are evicted without warning, have their shacks demolished by bulldozers, and are told to relocate to remote ‘transit camps’ far away from schools, clinics and most importantly, jobs. All over the country, shack dwellers are being evicted from cities in scenes eerily reminiscent of the forced removals during apartheid.
The Shack Dwellers Movement
For the first time in post-apartheid South Africa, shack dwellers have been organizing to create a movement of society’s most excluded members. Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Shack Dwellers Movement, emerged out of a 2005 road blockade by residents of the Kennedy Road informal settlement protesting their local councilor’s repeated failures to provide them with formal housing. Now the group has expanded out to over 40 settlements and has close alliances with similar groups throughout South Africa. The South African government is threatened by this new powerful resistance coming out of the slums. The shack dwellers have been unjustly imprisoned, beaten, and in at least one case been shot and killed by the police. They have mobilized to prevent forced evictions and are developing what they call a ‘living politics’, a discourse and practice that can be understood by everyone from a teenage student to an 80-year old illiterate grandma.
In June 2007, the KwaZulu provincial government passed what has come to be called the ‘Slums Act’ (aka the ‘Elimination & Prevention of Re-emergence of Slums Act’). Ranjith Purshotum from the Legal Resources Centre says that “Instead of saying that people will be evicted from slums after permanent accommodation is secured, we have a situation where people are being removed from a slum, and sent to another slum.”
The Shack Dwellers Movement decided to contest the Slums Act in the country’s highest court: the Constitutional Court – South Africa’s version of the Supreme Court. South Africa is one of the few nations in the world that guarantees a constitutional right to housing. Eight years ago, the beloved Irene Grootboom brought her community’s case before the Constitutional Court, calling attention to the horrific conditions faced by the adults and children living in her slum. Her case resulted in a landmark judgment calling upon the State to design and implement “a comprehensive and coordinated program to realize the right of access to adequate housing.” On 30 July, 2008 she died in a shack, still waiting for the Government to meet her constitutional right to a home. Remembering her resilience, the Shack Dwellers Movement and their lawyers took the case to the Constitutional Court, requesting the Court to declare the Slums Act unconstitutional. The shack dwellers are awaiting the decision.
The political landscape in South Africa is set to change immensely in 2009. Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s new president, has built a dedicated and massive following among the nation’s poor. He stated in a 2005 speech, “The existence of shack inhabitants and slum settlements on the continent remain a constant reminder that we have not fully achieved our goal of restoring the right to human dignity to all our peoples.” The shack dwellers however have heard many politicians promise change, in exchange for votes. It remains unclear whether the Zuma government will shift away from the current trend of relocating shack dwellers to the urban periphery and towards the upgrading of settlements and adequate public housing demanded by the Shack Dwellers Movement.
A global phenomenon
The Shack Dwellers Movement is a timely challenge to an economic and social order that faces a deepening crisis. One billion people in the world live in slums , and the UN predicts this number will double in the next 30 years. Around the world, shack dwellers being removed from the cities: they are being evicted from slums in New Delhi, Port au Prince, Istanbul and here in the U.S. in New Orleans. With half the world’s population now living in urban areas, Dear Mandela poses difficult questions about the challenges facing our cities today: who has the right to live in the city? What are the more just alternatives to evictions? How do we balance the rights of shack dwellers with the demands of the housing market?
DIRECTORS STATEMENT
Dara Kell – Co-director:
Dear Mandela is a deeply personal project. I grew up in apartheid South Africa, went to a segregated school and lived in a middle-class white suburb in Cape Town. There were always walls hiding the slums, gates protecting our houses. It was very claustrophobic. I see film, and ‘Dear Mandela’ in particular, as a way to cross those borders, to bring audiences into a world that ordinarily they would never see, a world they need to see in order to help change it. Part of my desire to make this film is also holding onto a dream. I was born in 1980, and came of age during the exciting transition from apartheid to democracy. I was 14 years old when the first democratic elections were held in 1994, when the first black girl was admitted to my school and the country was swept up in the hope that a ‘New South Africa’ could be born. Fifteen years later, our democracy is straining under the weight of greed, betrayal and deepening poverty. For me, Dear Mandela is a testament to the hope that still survives among those whose spirits could otherwise have been broken. It is an ode to those who gave their lives for a new South Africa, and a love letter to my country.
With co-director Christopher Nizza, I founded Sleeping Giant in 2007 to combine our experience in the high-end sports and documentary worlds with our experience as grassroots media organizers. In 2006 we were given an article that changed our lives . We read about the Shack Dwellers Movement and this new, hidden force that for the first time was starting to question the moral authority of Mandela’s party, the African National Congress.
In December 2007, we met with the Shack Dwellers Movement and after working with them for just a few days, knew that we had to make this film. We were deeply touched by the group’s collective energy and absolutely democratic nature. In some of the harshest living conditions in the world we saw a beauty in the struggle and a resilient spirit in the people. As we left, S’bu Zikode, the elected President of the Shack Dwellers movement, said to us – “Take our story to the world”. We intend to do just that.
