A ‘Political War of Words and Bullets’: Defining and Defying Sides of Struggle for Housing in Crossroads, South Africa

Abstract

This article looks at contemporary activism in Crossroads, South Africa – a famous symbol of women's defiance as one of the longest-surviving squatter camps under apartheid. In 1998 the Women's Power Group staged a four-month sit-in at City Council offices, demanding accountability for undelivered housing and public services. This was one of the first and most prolonged of what have become known as the post-apartheid or neoliberal period ‘new social movements’. The occupation unravelled into a year of violent conflict in the township and a subsequent Commission of Enquiry into the events. Official documents – even those that revolve around actions taken by women – focus on men acting violently. However, life histories of Women's Power Group (WPG) members tell a very different story about what women were thinking and doing. I first piece together the unfolding events through archival and oral history research. I then turn from looking at the history of struggle to looking at the struggle over history, where women's struggles were reframed in an official discourse of naive pawns of shacklords at best, and undeserving, impatient troublemakers at worst. Women's leadership was demobilised, depoliticised, and dislocated from the issues they stood up for and from the celebrated history of women's mobilising in Crossroads. The case of the Women's Power Group history points to how silences around complex processes of the demobilisation of women's movements – the reconfiguration of power that is not named or acknowledged – plays out in subsequent attempts to mobilise. The article aims to document and extend an important piece of post-apartheid history, and to spark discussion on processes of demobilisation, the significance of the gaps between multiple versions of women's protest over time, and the implications for ongoing struggles today.