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  • Graphic Novel Histories:Women’s Organized Resistance to Slum Clearance in Crossroads, South Africa, 1975–2015
  • Koni Benson (bio)
Keywords

Forced removals, African history, women, gender, apartheid, Crossroads, Cape Town, South Africa, graphic novels, comics, cartoons [End Page 199]

The Crossroads series, first published by Cape Town’s Isotrope Comics in 2014, is a six-part comic book series that tells a history of African women’s organized resistance to forced removals and their ongoing struggles for housing in Cape Town.1 The women protested their living conditions at the peak of apartheid, and again in 1998. In 2015 there were still more than 460,000 families on the city’s housing lists, waiting for access to decent shelter. Based on my Ph.D. dissertation, and in partnership with the local artists André Trantraal and Nathan Trantraal (known as the Trantraal Brothers) and Ashley Marais, I have developed a graphic or cartoon history drawn from dialogue with women who continue to organize for their right to obtain housing (see figure 1).2

The history draws on sixty life narratives of so-called “squatter” women in Crossroads, the longest surviving African informal settlement under apartheid in Cape Town. The first case follows African women leaders in the 1970s and their many strategies for resisting the migrant labor system and its forced removals. Returning to the city illegally, they turned the building of shacks into a highly visible political protest using posters, plays, pickets, direct action, media campaigns, alliance building, and vigils (see figure 2). Their efforts received international attention, including an appeal on the part of twenty-two members of the United States Congress for an end to the demolition of Crossroads in Cape Town.3

Although the women’s campaign had unprecedented and history-changing victories in the 1970s, its gains were pushed back through a reconfiguration of power and politics, as reforms aimed at “orderly urbanization” and exclusive, commoditized, low-cost housing were introduced, and state-sponsored vigilantes (witdoeke) set the camp on fire and chased out seventy thousand squatters in 1986. Twenty years later, in 1998, in the same place and facing some of the same powerful male figures, the Women’s Power Group brought together three hundred women from across deep divisions of the traumatic previous decade. They staged a four-month sit-in at the City Council’s Housing Offices demanding government accountability for undelivered housing and public services. That demonstration was one of the first and most prolonged of what are now daily service delivery protests. Yet these women’s actions are predominantly oversimplified by South African media and disconnected from the complicated legacies of apartheid that continue to plague Cape Town.

In both the 1970s and 1990s Crossroads women’s protests were organized collectively, beyond party politics and separately from men, to confront state power with demands for the distribution of resources for basic survival (see figure 3). Yet these moments of women-only organizing were rarely connected to one another in public debate, and the representation of those protests has remained controversial. The Crossroads graphic history series aims to challenge the reproduction of masculinist and nationalist history by questioning the dominant struggle narratives of South Africa’s past. The conventional history freeze-frames Crossroads women as heroes [End Page 200]


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Figure 1.

The images here illustrate the establishment, growth, and initial responses to eviction notices in Crossroads in 1975.

Source: Benson, Trantraal, Trantraal, and Marais (2014a:6)

of the past and disconnects them from current contestations with authority, which are framed as the work of impatient troublemakers at best and as naive pawns of territorial shack-lord violence at worst. Histories of the Crossroads women’s movements are therefore important windows into the gendered and generational dynamics of migration, militarization, [End Page 201] displacement, and poverty, and the central role of women in apartheid resistance, slum clearance resistance, and the ongoing struggles for the city and its history.4


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Figure 2.

Following a police raid on September 14, 1978, in which 450 residents were beaten and arrested and one man was shot and killed, the Women’s Committee marched...

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