Abstract

New community-based movements have been appearing in South Africa since the end of apartheid, dominated by women, youngsters, the poor, where everyone participates. They are struggling against the ANC, refusing to pay for public services as a way of compensating for their diminishing rents, they are trying to invent new services. The old militants of national liberation are being foreced to reconsider their alliances and to merge instead into this horizontal movement. History is rewritten, outside of those compromises that were made with the coloniser during the struggle for independence. It is now a matter of fighting against the politics imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and, in concrete terms, fighting against the expulsion from homes and the privatisation of public services and urban spaces. The community has ceased to believe in the State as father figure. And so, filling empty homes with people chosen by themselves, they muddy the frontier between the legal and illegal. They draw inspiration from the struggles of the piqueteros in Argentina and from what they have heard about Seattle