Breaking down the walls: Forging alliances in the struggle for habitability

 

Words by Anselmo Matusse, Nobukhosi Ngwenya, Lauren Culverwell, Zaakiyah Rabbaney, Nikiwe Solomon, Lesley Green, Zainab Adams, Nteboheng Phakisi, James Granelli, Faith Gara, Tawanda Jimu, Martin Chari, mpho ndaba, and Cecilia Ojemaye

On the 20^th of November 2024, around 25 activists working with local communities in Cape Town, representing 14 civil society organisations, came together to a workshop organized by the Environmental Humanities South (EHS), based at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Their coming together at the EHS seminar room, which is to be named after the late Wangari Maathai, symbolizes the collapsing of the proverbial walls that have historically kept the Apartheid categorized subjectivities of the Blacks and Coloureds out of the university space. [1]Perched on Table Mountain, UCT has traditionally been seen as metaphorically and physically ’above’ society and the city[2]. 

Fig 1. Post it notes identifying organizations working with communities in Gugulethu, Cape Town

Shared struggles, territorialized responses across the commons

The two-hour event, that started with a round of introductions, saw participants initially identify other organizations that are found in the areas where they work or live. These areas included Khayelitsha, Gugulethu, Zeekoevlei, Princess Vlei, Vrygrond, the Philippi Horticultural Area (PHA), and Lotus River. During this very engaged and interactive session participants listed organizations they know of on post it notes and stuck these on maps of specific areas. In the brief feedback session when we were all back in plenary, participants were asked to talk about those organizations they had identified. This provided an opportunity for participants to connect with each other not just based on the area(s) in which they worked but also in terms of shared missions.

Fig 2. Post it notes depicting some of the challenges communities are facing in Zeekoevlei, Cape Town.

After this conversation, participants were asked to do the same exercise but now identifying the problems that each organization aims to tackle in their respective communities. This too ended with one of the participants feeding back to the plenary on the issues that they identified. This exercise revealed the extensive knowledge and capabilities that local organizations and activists mobilize to tackle multiple crises in their communities. This revelation challenges the knowledge deficit theory models, which by denying a community’s situated knowledge and dumping information equates to what the Brazilian pedagogue, Paulo Freire, called the “pedagogy of death”[3]. This, in turn, is conducive to what Walter Mignolo would calls “epistemicide”[4]— the killing of Other’s knowledges.

From the engagements in the seminar room, it became clear that the so-called “subalterns” not only could speak [5], but they also showed deep understanding of what their capabilities and limitations were. They know! And they also act! They are not passive citizens 'waiting for handouts' as the common stereotype maintains. Every activist in that room was committed to transforming the socio-environmental conditions in their areas.

From the interventions it became clear that almost invariably, all the communities are dealing with issues such as water contamination, poor solid waste management, flooding, criminality, gang violence, gender-based violence, environmental degradation, displacements and dispossessions due to mining or urban development plans, lack of official schooling, unemployment, drug abuse, re-traumatization, and a sense of abandonment by the state that has historically sided with large corporations to enhance economic growth and infrastructural development.

It became clear to the participants involved, as they discussed each one of those issues, that they were struggling with similar issues, however, through a divided and territorialized front. [6] The imposition of a territorialized logic of action, atomization and partition of reality is, to quote Isabelle Stengers[7], “one of the sorceries of capitalism”.

Remarking on the feedback from a Zeekoevlei-based activist, another participant from the PHA Food and Farming Campaign that is fighting against proposed sand mining, asks: Why are you not joining us in our fight to stop a corporation from sand mining in the PHA that has driven us into a long legal battle?, For the PHA activist, Zeekoevlei activists should be active in their struggle because sand mining activities within the PHA will impact the salinity of the Zeekoevlei and Rondevlei freshwater lake.  Sand mining allows the intrusion of seawater which in turn will affect communities in Zeekoevlei who are attempting to establish food sovereignty and combat chronic hunger through food gardening. Moreover, the contamination of the Cape Flats Aquifer (CFA) because of sand mining, will increase the impacts of stormwater runoff on the Zeekoevlei, that may have a detrimental impact on water quality that reaches watercourses connected to the vlei. This further implicates the health and quality of life for the many bird species and biodiversity that the Zeekoevlei hosts.

With that intervention, another wall was collapsing! This question raised important issues that forced us to think about the environment in ways that break the spell of capitalist sorcery. The walls and boundary lines that build territory for private property do not stop earthly flows like water, wind, salinity, fire, and others that circulate contaminants, pollutants, and toxins across spaces. Yet, they do seem to restrict our responses to these threats to habitability and environmental integrity. The result is that, even at the grassroots level, we see fragmented environmental management responses to challenges that span the commons.

We did not know about the mining issue in the PHA, the other activist responded. Also, we have so many challenges that it is hard for us to combat them all, he continued. We all could sympathize with that statement. Most Black and Coloured people in South Africa have been pushed into a pragmatist approach of trying to survive with the little that is available and meeting immediate, localized problems. But a kind of politics emerges out of that. This shows that communities are overwhelmed by polycrises they face, and the result is a politics of the here that cannot attend to issues of here and there[8] but the issues of here or there. Moreover, it highlights the neoliberal trap that one must be here and there, which hardens the building of communities of care.

Despite all those multiple crises and challenges, what emerged in the gathering was an embryonic platform that can help tie the nodes among the diverse struggles the activists, our graduate students and universities are facing. Most crucial, the gathering enabled us to ask questions like: How does, for example, gender-based violence connect to environmental degradation in those areas? For some participants it did not, whilst for others it did. This was the case for many of the questions that this kind of engagement enabled us to ask.

Moreover, an image of a generation that is not waiting for the government to come to their aid and support their transition into adulthood emerged[9]. The activists – both young and young at heart – provide food for the hungry, teach how to read and to write, reconnect people with the soil and feed them through food gardens, provide locals with tools to participate in the political machinery of modern citizenry through digital literacy programs, provide income generation opportunities through entrepreneurship training, provide healing through church integration, and reforest abandoned and degraded urban landscapes with indigenous flora.

This initial engagement enabled us to understand that research problems in academia cannot and should not be developed separately from community struggles. An understanding that connects us to Antonio Gramsci’s idea of organic intellectuals[10], which in other words means, an intellectual that does not look at the world through the windows of their ivory towers. EHS, and by extension the university, cannot live within a set of buildings on a mountain, it must exist within communities’ struggles, efforts, and victories. UCT is funded by taxpayers, meaning that it does not belong to itself; its loyalty, and the efforts of those within it, should be with communities that need support the most.

Fig 3. CZA students sharing their research proposals with members of the communities.

An invitation to ‘think like a tree’

The coming together of the community organizations, activists, and EHS researchers is part of the latter’s nearly 10-year struggle to reframe African environmentalism, rethink universities beyond the hegemonic neocolonial, technocratic and neoliberal approaches,[11] while building  public through meaningful alliances with grassroot movements, activists, and scholars in Africa and worldwide.

EHS is currently running a four-year Critical Zones Africa (CZA) project which takes the abovementioned struggles a step further by embracing a muddy-boots, pan-African, and libertarian approach to environmentalism in the continent. CZA brings together 70 academics from different academic backgrounds and seniority levels working at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ), University of Dar Es Salaam, University of Cape Town (UCT), University of Addis Abba (UAA), Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR), and the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC). Some of the key tenets of CZA are generative science and community engagement, beyond the reigning and alienating, top-down information dumping on allegedly ignorant communities — a myth that the knowledge deficit model reproduces.[12]

The Critical Zones Africa project, much like the PHA activists’ question, invites us, as Lesley Green states, to think like a tree, on the vertical, and focus on earthly flows through which we can reimagine politics, alliances, and environmentalism towards multispecies habitability in Africa[13]. It does so by drawing on and expanding the budding field of Critical Zones within Earth sciences that focuses on the thin layer of just a few kilometers that has been transformed by life and make it possible[14]. 

CZA situates this body of scholarship, which was developed in the Global North and isolated areas, in Africa’s complex histories of colonialism, racism, capitalism and their rearticulations with the special focus on water catchment areas in peri-urban East Africa. CZA explores the CZ through the lenses and realities of the continent.

As stated at the beginning, the gathering happened in our seminar room that is to be named after the late Wangari Maathai, a leading African environmental figure who became the first African woman Nobel Peace prize in 2004 for her work with the Green Belt Movement. Her biggest accomplishment, in our view, was the creation of a space for the coming together of rural unemployed women, soil erosion, and deforestation in Kenya, as connected problems that required a collaborative work among academics, policymakers, seeds, and soils, in a web of actions through muddy boots towards habitability[15]. The gathering of these activists and community members at EHS is part and parcel of that ancestral legacy that provides clues to dismantling the several proverbial and real walls that separate communities from universities and decision-making centers.

As we sat in that seminar room, one thought crept in: the fact that a little bit over 40 years ago, a lifetime of some of the participants, their presence in this space was outlawed.  Today these walls still murmur sentences like “you do not belong here”, “you are not like us”, “go back to your town”. These are the afterlives of apartheid that incentivized a series of students' protests[16] which in turn led to a series of transformations at the university. There is indeed progress! The presence of these community members in a space like this attest to that progress, however, the road to transformation is long and bumptious.

But we strongly believe that the proverbial breaking down of the walls, reckoning with the colonial debris mentioned above, and building of communities of care are the conditions for the emergence of the Africa and African Universities We Want![17] A Luta continua!

References

 

African Union, ‘Goals & Priority Areas of Agenda 2063’ (2013) <https://au.int/agenda2063/goals> accessed 15 June 2022

Freire P, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Bloomsbury publishing USA 2018)

Gramsci A, ‘The Intellectuals’ [1971] Selections from the prison notebooks 3

Green L, ‘Rock| Water| Life’, Rock| Water| Life (Duke University Press 2020)

——, ‘Material Flows as Earth Politics: Concepts, Methods, and Approaches for Transdisciplinary Diagnostics and Repair at Muizenberg East, Cape Town’ [2023] Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 25148486231219156

Honwana A, ‘Youth, Waithood, and Protest Movements in Africa’, African Dynamics in a Multipolar World: 5th European Conference on African Studies—Conference Proceedings (2014)

ka Canham H, Riotous Deathscapes (Duke University Press 2023)

Latour B and Weibel P, Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth (MIT Press 2020)

Maathai W, The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience (Lantern Books 2003)

Mbembe A and Shread C, ‘The Universal Right to Breathe’ (2021) 47 Critical Inquiry S58

Mignolo W, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton University Press 2012)

Mkandawire T, African Intellectuals: Rethinking Politics, Language, Gender and Development (CODESRIA BOOKS 2005)

Nyamnjoh B, # RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa (African Books Collective 2016)

Simis MJ and others, ‘The Lure of Rationality: Why Does the Deficit Model Persist in Science Communication?’ (2016) 25 Public understanding of science 400

Spivak GC, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Imperialism (Routledge 2023)

Stengers I and Pignarre P, Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. (Palgrave 2011)