Precarity and Autonomy: Life and Death in the Shacks

This chapter argues that the shack settlement has become a paradigmatic site of anti-black necropolitics in contemporary South Africa. It returns to the story of the shack dweller movement Abahlali and examines its members’ oscillating relationship with electoral politics and the repressive arm of the state. Foregrounding two shack communities where incipient grassroots mobilization led to breaks with local elected ANC officials, the chapter tells the story of political assassinations of Abahlali leaders. However, I also argue that theories of anti-blackness can never offer the fully story; instead, they require a reconceptualization of dominant color-blind notions of the political together with a reckoning with actually existing black radical traditions. The chapter therefore concludes with a comparison of Abahlali’s autonomous politics and that of the Economic Freedom Fighters, a black nationalist political party established in 2013 with the aim of challenging the ANC from the counter-hegemonic radical left.