The story told in this book begins in Chatsworth—a township on the outskirts of Durban, the largest city on the eastern seaboard of South Africa. It describes an ongoing spiral of struggle against market-driven measures to make residents of poor communities become paying customers in a capitalist society supposedly made non-racial by the defeat of apartheid and by the embrace of the free market in its place. This struggle has spread from Chatsworth to other poor communities around Durban, and to other parts of South Africa. To say that this struggle begins in Chatsworth is a kind of shorthand, which saves the trouble of explaining each time that, like all revolts that grow, it has many beginnings. It could surely have been traced back to other sources. Even so, there are good reasons to begin in Chatsworth.
When I started writing this story, Chatsworth was both a place and a struggle. It should become apparent as the story unfolds that Chatsworth has also become a politics. Race and class, the old chestnuts, still loom large. But new political variants have emerged, happily immune to infection by Robben Islanders, exiles, and ethnic entrepreneurs; the ruling post-apartheid political faction. Unemployed, single mother, community defender, neighbor, factory worker, popular criminal, rap artist and genuine ou (good human being). These constructs have all come to make up the collective identities of “the poors.”
The struggle in Chatsworth helped to ignite rebellions in other areas, and to illuminate struggles already happening elsewhere. These struggles, at first conducted in isolation from each other, have begun to jump the firebreaks of race and place. Will they continue to do so, and incinerate the fetters of old political allegiances and class compromise that have so immobilized us these last ten years? Or will the multitude be confined to the outer reaches of society doused by brigades of politicians, past masters of turning on and off the taps of struggle and expectation? Or will they stand side-by-side and in so doing light the way to a new society?
These hidden struggles have been epic, because they have taken guts and imagination. Above all, before a new basis of solidarity could emerge, the ethnic handicap had to be overcome. Chatsworth itself was created as a dumping ground for people classified as Indian by the apartheid system, and most of the people who live there are Indian. This made participants vulnerable to race baiting. They were Indians dissatisfied with an African government. As events have unfolded, it has become apparent that this ethnic dimension has been a blessing. It bestowed upon people crude accusations from desperate politicians. These accusations, the people considered and then rejected with the formulation of counter-identities. As these upsurges have spread to African communities like Mpumalanga, colored communities like Wentworth and Tafelsig, so these new identities have been strengthened and attempts to divide-and-rule are met more with laughter than concern.