Browsing by Author "Benson, Koni"

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    A land occupation called covid in the time of covid-19
    (Universty of the Western Cape, 2024) Mvimbi, Yanathi; Benson, Koni
    Most people would associate the word “Covid” with the coronavirus pandemic that disrupted people’s lives globally in 2020. However, in this research, besides referring to the pandemic, “Covid” refers to a land occupation in Cape Town, South Africa. Living without proper housing is one of the hardest struggles that millions of poor black South Africans experience every day. Reflecting ongoing spatial apartheid, it is one of the greatest injustices of the democratic era that many people still do not have a decent home. This research seeks to understand the struggles that people went through during and after COVID-19 in the land occupation that resulted in the informal settlement named Covid. The mini-thesis documents how settlements like Covid are publicly represented through a critical reading of a selection of news articles, government media statements and nongovernmental organisation (NGO) reports. The paper examines how these ‘outsider’ perspectives represent and construct socioeconomic rights, poverty and inequality and how this impacts their attitudes and solutions to homelessness in Cape Town. The study highlights the roles of NGOs and social movements in the fight against spatial injustice during and since the pandemic.
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    A land occupation called Covid in the time of COVID-19
    (University of the Western Cape, 2024) Mvimbi, Yanathi; Benson, Koni
    Most people would associate the word “Covid” with the coronavirus pandemic that disrupted people’s lives globally in 2020. However, in this research, besides referring to the pandemic, “Covid” refers to a land occupation in Cape Town, South Africa. Living without proper housing is one of the hardest struggles that millions of poor black South Africans experience every day. Reflecting ongoing spatial apartheid, it is one of the greatest injustices of the democratic era that many people still do not have a decent home. This research seeks to understand the struggles that people went through during and after COVID-19 in the land occupation that resulted in the informal settlement named Covid. The mini-thesis documents how settlements like Covid are publicly represented through a critical reading of a selection of news articles, government media statements and nongovernmental organisation (NGO) reports. The paper examines how these ‘outsider’ perspectives represent and construct socioeconomic rights, poverty and inequality and how this impacts their attitudes and solutions to homelessness in Cape Town. The study highlights the roles of NGOs and social movements in the fight against spatial injustice during and since the pandemic. Most importantly, all these perspectives are contrasted with how Covid residents represent themselves and their decision to occupy land. By interviewing residents of Covid this research enables them to represent themselves and present their versions of their history and the ongoing challenges in their living situation.
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    African history in context: Toward a praxis of radical education
    (Taylor & Francis Group, 2018) Benson, Koni; Gamedze, Asher; Koranteng, Akosua
    This chapter reflects on the context, process, and challenges of the Know Your Continent (KYC) popular education course which we ran in Cape Town in the second half of 2015. KYC brought together people from local high schools, community activist networks, universities � both students and academics, and others into conversations emerging from themes and debates in African history and their relevance and relationship to our own contemporary contexts of struggle. First, the chapter examines the KYC�s historical context. Second, it looks at how KYC was deliberately rooted in the contemporary questions posed by the urgent political project of decolonisation � questions concerning how to decentre the university, how to liberate knowledge from the hierarchies that bind it, and how to imagine and practice collaborative radical education. The third part speaks to some of the contradictory potentialities of doing radical work in, or in affiliation to, a university. Through a reflection on the successes and limitations of KYC, we hope to contribute to conversations about the potential for different kinds of engagement, and different kinds of solidarity between the often-segregated spaces of schools, universities, and activist organisations.
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    Crossroads Series
    (University of the Western Cape, 2019) Benson, Koni
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    Feminist activist archives: Towards a living history of the Gender Education Training Network (GETNET)
    (UNISA Press, 2018) Benson, Koni
    This article engages the dilemmas and challenges of writing histories of the recent past, and of the political agendas of intervening in those histories in the present. This is done through producing an archive of documentation and oral histories of the Gender Education Training Network, GETNET. GETNET was a feminist political education organisation formed in South Africa in the 1990s that is best known for creating spaces of thinking and learning to strengthen action and intervention at numerous levels from 1992 to 2014. This article portrays the history and pedagogy as well as groundbreaking work of GETNET�the first gender training organisation in South Africa that attempted to make real the gains made on paper by challenging gender dynamics and institutionalised sexism in post-apartheid South Africa. It draws on the literature of activist archiving and feminist methodologies of intergenerational dialogue, aiming to (a) share some of the most radical and relevant work done in the decade after 1994 by anti-apartheid feminist activists developing what they called indigenous and regional perspectives, materials, and methodologies to expose and shift gender dynamics, and (b) to spark ideas and conversations about ways of producing activist archives that are accountable to both movements and to the future.
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    �It�s My House and I Live Here�: The Mobilisation of Selective Histories for Claims of Belonging in Cape Town
    (University of the Western Cape, 2020) Africa, Keenan; Benson, Koni
    This mini thesis seeks to explore two legacies of apartheid: the insecurity of decent and available housing that has led to a housing crisis, and the insecurity of Coloured identity as caused by apartheid�s racial and identity politics and its aftermath in a democratic South Africa. Furthermore, it is an examination of identity and its relation to place, specifically Coloured identity in the place of Cape Town. It focuses the ripple effect of belonging, as this research starts with Cape Town then expands to further find cause for this growing cause of belonging by focusing on racism, the housing crisis, nation-building, globalisation, capitalism. Through interviews and archival research, I explore questions of belonging, identity, and its relation to the housing crisis in Cape Town. This is done through a case study of tensions that erupted in Siqalo, in Mitchell�s Plain on 1 May 2018. Siqalo is a land occupation of isiXhosa speakers in the apartheid-era �Coloured� area of Mitchell�s Plain in Cape Town. When Siqalo residents organised a protest around issues of electricity and housing they faced violent retaliation by neighbouring community and residents of Colorado, populated mainly by people classified as Coloured, with claims being made by an organisation called Gatvol Capetonians for Siqalo residents to return to Eastern Cape. I examine the role of identity in the creation of narratives of Cape Town and establish two narratives, one in which Cape Town is represented as a home for all and one in which it is not, this is done to show how belonging is made through identity and narrative and the effect that this creates. This comes to frame this mini-thesis as the question of a home is represented in the symbolic and physical sense and highlights the tension between Gatvol�s protest of Coloured belonging and Siqalo residents� protest for decent housing. Chapter Two reflects on this through the use of interviews from both sides of the protest. This chapter is written as an imagined debate that not only reflects on critiques of oral history but ways of writing history experimentally or speculatively Through investigating the source of the tension from the Siqalo protest, I argue that desegregation was, in theory, one of the first nation-building projects in South Africa, and its failure has deepened apartheid and colonial forms of classification that divide people. The views of Mahmood Mamdani, while rarely applied to African people classified as Coloured, are very important, as his book, Citizen and Subject was a premise for this research as it highlighted the pitfalls and requirements of African countries after independence from colonialism. At the same time, the literature on Coloured identity rarely brings up the question whether Coloureds can and do practice racism on those classified as black or African and how these categorisations have persisted in the post-apartheid era. This research asks: to what extent do present conditions enable a predatory dynamic to claims of Coloured identity? Based off the predatory argument which focuses on intensified competition for scarce resources under globalisation put forward by Arjun Appadurai, I highlight the influence that contemporary globalisation has had on both the dynamics of Coloured identity and on the housing crisis in Cape Town. This mini thesis concludes by providing two alternatives as to how the question of race can be assessed in South Africa.