Kennedy Road, Durban

Kennedy Road is a shack settlement, in the suburb of Clare Estate in Durban, in the province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. It was founded by a Mr. Mzobe in the late 1970s. The land on which the settlement was founded is steep and runs down between the Municipal Dump and the 6 lane Umgeni Road. At the time of the occupation, the suburb of Clare Estate was reserved, under apartheid legislation, for the exclusive use of people of Indian descent.The initial occupation was covert with shacks hidden in the bush and people being careful not to be seen entering or exiting the bush on the land. But the early 1980s, the settlement had attained critical mass and the occupation became overt.Various attempts to force people off the land were resisted and by the late 1980s the City accepted the permanency of the settlement. A development NGO linked to big capital, the Urban Foundation, began the upgrade and installed electricity and toilets and built a hall.However, in 1995, a year after the end of apartheid, the decision to allow the settlement to become permanent was withdrawn. Since then, there has been constant pressure for people to accept relocation to the rural periphery of the city. Thus far, this pressure has been successfully resisted.2005 Road blockadeOn 19 March 2005, around 800 people from Kennedy Road blocked Umgeni Road and held it against the police for four hours, resulting in 14 arrests. In October that year, the Kennedy Road Development Committee, together with Committees from 11 other settlements, announced the formation of a city wide movement of shack dwellers known as Abahlali baseMjondolo. By the end of 2007 the movement had members in 40 settlements in the cities of Durban, Pinetown, and Pietermaritzburg and smaller towns like Port Shepstone and Tongaat. 14 of these settlements are affiliated to the movement and are known as the autonomous settlements. In the other settlements the movement has branches with a minimum size of 50.