Crossroads continues: Histories of women mobilizing against forced removals and for housing in Cape Town South Africa, 1975--2005

This dissertation focuses on African women's movements for urban survival in Cape Town from 1975 - during the peak of apartheid where African women were banned from the city and were forcibly removed to impoverished bantustans - to 2005, more than a decade into democracy where over 260,000 families were living in shacks in the city. It focuses on resistance to forced removals in Crossroads - a famous symbol of defiance as one of the longest surviving squatter camps. The disjuncture between the critical and internationally celebrated role that women of Crossroads played in challenging apartheid, is juxtaposed by their current impoverishment, political marginalization, and disconnect between theirs and subsequent women's mobilizing. I explore how they arrived at such a position of local and international prominence at the peak of the oppressive apartheid regime, and how they were marginalized and rendered inaudible since that time by tracing the establishment, defense, and reconfiguration of Crossroads from 1975-2005, drawing on 60 life narratives of activists involved in two moments of women-only collective mobilizing for urban survival.;The first case follows squatter women leaders in the 1970s who, amongst many strategies for resisting the migrant labor system and its forced removals, created Imfuduso (Exodus) - a theatrical production about their struggle to remain in Cape Town. Returning illegally upon multiple violent "removals," they turned the building of shacks on the edges of the city into a highly visible political campaign which produced enormous backlash, and they were demobilized. Their gains were pushed back through a reconfiguration of power and politics, with reforms aimed at "orderly urbanization," exclusive commoditized low-cost housing, militarization and instigation of "low intensity conflict," of state-sponsored vigilantes (witdoeke) who burnt out 70,000 squatters in Crossroads in 1986. The repercussions have been severe, ongoing, and unacknowledged for those who remained.;The second case studies the 1998 Women's Power Group - 300 women came together across deeply entrenched divides, staged a four month sit-in demanding government accountability for undelivered housing and public services. In both the 1970s and 1990s Crossroads women's protests were organized collectively, beyond party politics, and separately from men, confronting state power to distribute resources for basic survival. Politicized gun violence surrounds both movements with punitive repercussions for women leaders, and for gender based organizing that challenges power dynamics and development practices. The representations of these protests remain controversial. The undocumented 1970s production and 1990s prolonged sit-in are important windows into the gendered dynamics of forced removals and ongoing struggles for the city and its history. Exploring the connections and disjunctures between these movements, I suggest that to the extent that their mobilizing for alternatives threatened the status quo during both the apartheid and post-apartheid period, organizers and the issues they stood for were attacked and displaced on multiple levels-individually removed, collectively demobilized, and historically dislocated.