As a part of building our national Take Back the Land Movement, we asked the famed Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR- ccrjustice.org) to act as our legal Strategic Partner. As part of that responsibility, CCR invited me to join them on a trip to South Africa to research learn from organizations engaged in anti-eviction and land reform work.

This trip is particularly exciting for me both because of my Pan-African ideological perspective and because the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign is one of the two organizations Take Back the Land Miami is modeled after (the other one is the MST in Brazil).

Our party of five will spend three days in Cape Town with the Anti-Eviction Campaign and Abahlali baseMjondolo (ABM) and three days in Durban with ABM. CCR will examine legal issues and responses there as well as look at how legal organizations provide support to social justice movements. For Take Back the Land, this trip has four (4) objectives:

Build an International Movement. We seek to realize housing as a human right for every person on this planet. As such, we seek to establish formal relationships with organizations fighting for those rights, thereby building an international movement for community control over land and housing as a human right.

Campaign Modeling. The WCAEC and ABM have executed mass campaigns to stop bulldozers and evictions. We in the US have much to learn from our sisters and brothers across the globe.

Network Modeling. South Africans have built a national anti-eviction and land reform movement. Take Back the Land strives to learn from their model and replicate their successes.

For the next week, I will post, email, blog, facebook, buzz and tweet from South Africa to share the experiences of Take Back the Land and the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Forward,

Max Rameau
www.takebacktheland.org
takebacktheland.blogspot.com,br> facebook.com/maxrameau
twitter.com/takebacktheland
google.com/profiles/takebacktheland
groups.google.com/group/take-back-the-land