Brazil and South Africa-Exploring Movement to Movement Solidarity

Abstract

This article examines the evolving relationship between Abahlali baseMjondolo, the South African shack dwellers’ movement, and the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), Brazil’s landless workers’ movement. It explores how direct solidarity between these two movements has developed over time, focusing particularly on the role of the MST’s political school, the Escola Nacional Florestan Fernandes (ENFF), in internationalising the political education of Abahlali baseMjondolo militants. The paper argues that this engagement has deepened Abahlali baseMjondolo’s political outlook, influencing its shift toward commune-building and food production as central components of its struggle.

Introduction

This article presents the first focused exploration of the significant relationship between Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or the Landless Workers’ Movement, and South Africa’s Abahlali baseMjondolo (Residents of the Shacks). Despite frequent passing references to connections between these two movements – each the largest of their kind in their respective countries – no dedicated study has previously examined this relationship.

The research specifically examines this relationship from Abahlali baseMjondolo’s perspective, demonstrating its profound importance to the South African movement’s development. This influence manifests both intellectually and practically, notably through the adoption of mística practices and a strategic pivot toward food production within occupied settlements, alongside the transformation of these occupations into communes. The paper also illustrates how participation in the MST’s political education initiative, the Escola Nacional Florestan Fernandes (ENFF), known in English as the Florestan Fernandes National School (Da Trindade and Fernandes, 2023; León, 2006), has been a transformative experience for a number of leaders in Abahlali baseMjondolo.

Notes on methodology

My relationship with Abahlali baseMjondolo spans nearly two decades, beginning with the movement’s founding in 2005. While never a direct participant, I have maintained proximity to the movement in Durban through observation, participation in movement-organised discussions, and sustained relationships with several leaders, including prominent co-founders S’bu Zikode and Richard Pithouse. Over the years, many of my students have produced studies on the movement. I have regularly written about the movement in newspapers for almost twenty years.

Research for this article centred on an intensive focus group discussion with movement members, ¹ followed by further discussions with a number of significant figures in the movement as well as people linked to it, along with a smaller set of people in or connected to the MST. The interview durations varied considerably, as I allowed discussions to continue as long as they remained productive, ensuring participants had ample opportunity to contribute beyond my initial questions. The recorded, transcribed, and, where necessary, translated focus group discussion extended for 3 hours and proved exceptionally rich as participants stimulated ideas and recollections from one another.

I deliberately centred the research around an open-ended focus group, co-organised with the movement and hosted at their offices, to facilitate a participatory approach that inverted traditional researcher-subject hierarchies and created space for participants to help shape research questions. As Andrea Cornwall and Rachel Jewkes have argued, this approach represents not merely a methodological choice but a political commitment to democratizing knowledge production and challenging existing power structures in research and society (Cornwall and Jewkes, 1995). The focus group proved highly effective, enabling collective meaning construction through dialogic engagement.

While I have visited Brazil once and established connections with segments of the Brazilian left, I did not connect with the MST during that visit. I conduct political education sessions in Maputo six times yearly and have developed some Portuguese language skills. However, while I did look at some primary sources in Portuguese with the help of a translation app where required, my research on the MST for this paper primarily derives from an extensive review of English-language academic literature over several years. I was nonetheless able to interview Elizabet Conceição, a popular educator with the MST and coordinator of their Samora Machel Internationalist Brigade in Zambia. Additional interviews included Richard Pithouse and Fabio Luis Barbosa dos Santos, both teachers at the ENFF, as well as Raj Patel, who maintains longstanding close relationships with both movements and recently facilitated an important workshop bringing together leaders from both organisations. Marie Huchzermeyer, an academic and long-time researcher in the area of housing, social movements, and the politics of space in South Africa and Brazil, as well as Kenya, was also interviewed.

Internationalism

Internationalism has always been a core value and practice of the left (Anderson, 2009), rooted in the understanding that struggles for justice cannot be confined within national borders. From early socialist movements to anti-colonial struggles and contemporary social movements, left internationalism has emphasised solidarity across borders, collective resistance to imperialism, and the shared fight against exploitation and oppression (Fletcher and Gapasin, 2008).

This article explores an instance of movement-to-movement solidarity – where grassroots organisations build direct connections, exchange strategies, and support each other’s struggles. Rather than relying on states or NGOs, or any other kind of mediation, this form of direct solidarity is forged from below, through shared political education, mutual aid and solidarity in times of crisis.

Middle-class intellectuals often assume that the oppressed – whether workers, peasants, or the urban poor – are confined to local concerns, incapable of engaging with broader struggles and wider issues. In The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson (1963) challenges the condescension of this kind of class prejudice, showing how ordinary people developed a political consciousness that extended beyond immediate economic grievances to national concerns. Thompson demonstrates that the English working class was not merely responding to economic conditions but actively participated in its own formation through cultural practices, political organisation, and the development of class consciousness. Through their reading societies, mutual aid associations, and political movements, working people created spaces where they could develop sophisticated political analyses that connected their immediate experiences to broader structural critiques.

Class prejudices are inevitably worsened when race becomes the ‘modality through which class is lived’ (Hall, 1980: 341). In Silencing the Past Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) critiques how dominant historical narratives have erased or downplayed the agency of enslaved Africans in shaping the Haitian Revolution – a profoundly international struggle that defied European colonial order.

Radical anti-colonial thought has long contested the assumption that the political imagination of the most oppressed among the colonised is inevitably confined to the local, emphasizing the capacity of oppressed people to participate in the development of universalizing ideas and practices. This critique is strongly evident in the Black Radical Tradition (Robinson, 1983). Perhaps the foundational text in this regard is James’s (1989) The Black Jacobins, which demonstrates how enslaved Africans in Haiti developed a vision of universal emancipation through a dynamic dialogue with the French Revolution. Far from being confined to parochial concerns, the Haitian Revolution represents a profound contribution to global ideas of freedom and equality. Similar arguments are made by Frantz Fanon (2008, 2021), Walter Rodney (2018, 2019), Sylvia Wynter (2003), Angela Davis (1981), Kelley (2002), and other radical thinkers. Michael Neocosmos provides an ambitious synthetic theorisation of this in his Thinking Freedom in Africa (2016).

Popular movements in Brazil and South Africa

Brazil and South Africa are both countries marked by extreme racialised inequality. They are also both countries where democracy was won by mass mobilisation. In both cases significant strikes by industrial workers in the 1970s (French, 2020; Friedman, 1987; Pithouse, 2023; Seidman 1994) marked important turning points opening the way to wider forms of popular mobilisation (French, 2020; Mamdani 1996; Morais, 2024; Neocosmos, 2016, 2018).

In Brazil, mass mobilisation has been sustained, and includes industrial workers, rural, and urban struggles. There are numerous instances of effective collaboration between progressive middle-class intellectuals and mass-based formations (Morais, 2024). Popular movements are often aligned with political parties on the left and movements and intellectuals with different party alignments have been able to work together in times of crisis, such as when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was arrested in 2018 (Morais, 2024).

In South Africa, industrial trade unions remain militant in the workplace, with the strongest union, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa), being particularly effective at winning gains for its members (Business Day, 2024). However, there is deep factionalism in the union movement, often driven by personal rather than ideological contestation but also actively fuelled by some Trotskyist NGOs seeking to exploit divisions to gain control of unions with the aim of forming a vanguard party. With massive, rapid and escalating deindustrialisation, the industrial unions are all on the backfoot, and the ongoing structural changes to the economy can only continue to weaken their power.

Despite a social crisis rooted in systemic unemployment, there is very little sustained political organisation among the poor. It is well known that the middle class left is overwhelmingly alienated from the existing mass-based formations, is often more connected to NGOs than to popular struggles, and that instances of effective collaboration with mass-based organisations are rare. The middle class left is also notorious for destructive rumour mongering and petty but vicious sectarianism. There is no left party on the ballot in South Africa, so progressive popular organisations remain unaligned in electoral politics.

The MST is widely recognised as Brazil’s largest and most significant popular movement. (Branford and Rocha 2002; Tarlau, 2019; Wright and Wolford, 2003). Founded in 1984, it is a rural movement focused on agrarian issues. The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST), or Homeless Workers’ Movement, originally an offshoot of the MST (Boulos, 2021; Fierro, 2020; Rosa, 2018) is also significant. Founded in 1997 it is an urban movement focused on issues pertaining to what can, in its most radical sense, be termed the right to the cities – to inhabit cities and to participate in their management (Harvey, 2012; Huchzermeyer, 2014; Lefebvre, 1996).

The MST has around 1.5 million members in a country of more than 212 million and is often acknowledged as the largest organised social movement in the world. There is less clarity on the membership of the MTST. A 2017 article gave the figure as around 50,000 (Gonçalves, 2017), and a number of non-academic online sources say that 55,000 families have been part of the MTST at different points since its formation. However, none of the more recent academic articles surveyed for this article gave a clear figure for membership.

The MST is strongly aligned with Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), the Workers’ Party, and its leader Lula da Silva (Morais, 2024), while the MTST is aligned to the Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (PSOL), the Socialism and Liberty Party (Boulos), an off-shoot of the PT, but supported Lula and the PT against repression from the right.

None of the first generation of South African social movements that emerged around the turn of the century (Ballard et al., 2006) had formal membership systems, and there was often a ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ (Freeman, 1970). Most had a few hundred regular participants, or less in some cases, and the capacity to mobilise a few hundred or a few thousand people for well-funded large actions. These were, in the manner that became internationalised after the protests at the meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Seattle in 1999, often tied to international events being held in South Africa. Significant protests were held at the 13th International AIDS Conference in Durban in 2000, the World Conference against Racism in Durban in 2001 and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. After this, the focus on protesting at international meetings and summits fell away.

Abahlali baseMjondolo currently has more than 150,000 members organised into 92 active branches (Mohapi, 2024) in a country of around 64 million people and regularly launches new branches. It is by far the largest, best organised and longest sustained popular movement to have emerged in South Africa after apartheid (Al-Bulushi, 2024; Gibson, 2011; Pithouse, 2008). No comparable organisations have been formed in terms of scale and the rigour with which formal forms of democratic organisations, including personal membership and branch constitution and affiliation, are organised. Abahlali baseMjondolo does have some rural members in the Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga provinces, but is primarily an urban movement with its strongest bases in the cities of Durban and Johannesburg, and focused on issues very similar to those of the MTST.

There are some striking parallels between Abahlali baseMjondolo and the MTST. Guilherme Boulos has explained that for the MTST: ‘A basic rule is that you cannot sell an occupied lot of land. Upholding this is extremely difficult, because it challenges powerful interests, even mafia groups, who want to take advantage of the occupations to make money and exploit people’ (Boulos, 2021). This, along with this account of communal gardens and kitchens, the majority of the MTST’s members being women, its strategies to manage alcohol, and so on, sound just like Abahlali baseMjondolo.

All three movement are organised around land occupations – rural occupations in the case of the MST and urban occupations in the case of the MTST and Abahlali baseMjondolo – and sustain their mass membership through collective affiliation via democratically organised and self-managed occupations that operate with considerable operational autonomy from the wider movement (Pithouse, 2024a; Vergara-Camus, 2009; Zikode, 2024).

Connections between movements in Brazil and South Africa

Marie Huchzermeyer, who has collaborated with Abahlali baseMjondolo and many smaller community organisations in shack settlements, made the first significant post-apartheid academic attempt to place the Brazilian and South African experiences in dialogue in the context of urban issues and struggles in 2004 (Huchzermeyer, 2004). She has engaged grassroots activists in Brazilian favelas and ‘corticos’ (run down inner city buildings) and has strong connections to South African shack settlements across multiple organisations and organisational forms.

Huchzermeyer argues that grassroots South African organisations can learn from the MST in terms of how it has ‘sustained itself and engaged politically’, and that there are important opportunities for sharing experiences around how to adhere to political principles and ensure that ‘activists are not seduced by power and money’ offered by ‘local government, NGOs and political parties’ (Huchzermeyer, 2024). She also makes the point that a striking difference between Brazil and South Africa is that in Brazil she saw impressive solidarity ‘efforts between professionals and working class people in the favelas (Huchzermeyer, 2024), efforts enabled by and mediated through the MST. Such solidarity is, as noted above, rare in South Africa.

There have also been NGO connections between Brazil and South Africa. In fact, both the MST and the MTST initially connected to South Africa via NGOs without a popular base. This was simply because, unlike grassroots struggles, these NGOs already had a strong international presence, and so it was significantly easier for the MST to make connections with NGOs. The assumption was that these NGOs would, in turn, enable connections to popular formations; however, this did not happen in practice.

This was recognised, and Augusto Juncal, an MST militant, was sent to South Africa to explore the political landscape and build solidarity with active popular struggles. Although initially hosted by an NGO, he quickly made his own connections to popular struggles. As a result, in around 2015, the MST was able to begin to reorient its relationship to South Africa toward mass-based formations. The MTST seems to be beginning a similar reorientation. The MTST’s political focus is much closer to that of Abahlali baseMjondolo, but, probably because the MST began to reorientate towards mass-based formations in South Africa much earlier, there is a much closer relationship between Abahlali baseMjondolo and the MST.

At the end of apartheid, there was a sudden shift from people’s politics to state politics (Neocosmos, 1999, cf. 2016). This meant that much of the political infrastructure and networks that had enabled grassroots internationalism in the 1970s and 1980s were swiftly dismantled. As a result, when the first generation of post-apartheid social movements began to emerge, they did not have the networks and resources to establish their own international connections. For some years, a network of left-learning, mostly Trotskyist, NGOs and academics established and mediated international connections.

Grassroots activists reported that, despite being elected leaders in their organisations, they had no influence in determining who attended events like the World Social Forum meetings between the important and energising first meeting in Port Alegre in 2001 and the desultory NGO dominated meeting in Nairobi in 2007. Grassroots activists across a number of organisations complained that NGOs would either send people in their own networks while marginalising movement activists or would unilaterally decide which movement activists to send, bypassing the movement’s own decision-making structures and processes.

These kinds of power dynamics between NGOs and movements, noted at the time by Pithouse (2006), are a global phenomenon (e.g., Hearn, 1998; Jad, 2004; Sangtin Writers and Nagar, 2006) but popular movements faced unusually intense NGO hostility in South Africa when Abahlali baseMjondolo, and two now defunct movements, the Landless People’s Movement and the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, began to insist on respect for their autonomy in 2006 and were, as a result, publicly disparaged as criminal (Huchzermeyer, 2015). Pithouse (2024c) remarks that ‘It is sometimes difficult for people to understand the unthinking and, frankly, vicious degree to which powerful figures in the NGO and academic left expressed the same prejudices as wider society towards impoverished Black people for the “crime” of insisting that they be engaged with dignity’.

He adds that ‘Rather than personalising this discussion I’ve often referred people to Peter Hallward’s book on Haiti, Damming the Flood, which reports very similar dynamics in the relationships between a popular movement and NGOs in Haiti, as well as a tiny Trotskyist organisation. Although particular personalities have behaved appalling, it can, I think, be useful to understand these things in a wider systemic context rather than personalising them too much and Hallward’s account is extraordinarily resonant with our own experience’.

What Pithouse calls ‘NGO substitutionism’ (Pithouse, 2024b) occurs in mainstream NGOs too. Huchzermeyer sounds a note of caution around neoliberal NGOs such as Shack Dwellers’ International and what she calls its ‘grassroots internationalism narrative’ (Huchzermeyer, 2024). This narrative has, like many of the organisation’s claims, very little relation to realities on the ground (Huchzermeyer, 2023) but serve to legitimate states and international organisations by offering them the appearance of having grassroots partners (Podlashuc, 2011).

However, things have changed and there is now a vibrant and strong relationship between the MST and Abahlali baseMjondolo, along with some connections to the MTST. The leadership of the MST and Abahlali baseMjondolo have direct contact, there have been exchanges in terms of reciprocal visits, opportunities for meetings have been facilitated by progressive donors, NGOs and intellectuals and a good number of Abahlali baseMjondolo leaders have participated in classes at the MST’s political school, the ENFF, in Guararema outside São Paulo.

Political education and internationalism

Both movements take political education seriously (Gill, 2014; Harley, 2012, 2014; Picower and Mayorga, 2021; Vergara-Camus, 2009) and the ENFF, founded in 2005, has been critically important for the development of solidarity between the MST and Abahlali baseMjondolo. It seems clear that the pre-existing pedagogic practices of both movements laid the foundations for productive encounters at the ENFF. Huchzermeyer sees the idea of ‘conscientisation’, which derives from Paulo Freire (Freire, 2017), as important to both the MST and Abahlali baseMjondolo (Huchzermeyer, 2005). Similarly, Pithouse, who has taught at the MST’s Florestan Fernandes National School and participated in Abahlali baseMjondolo’s political education processes since the movement’s formation, points out that while the two movements have some strikingly different approaches to pedagogy, with the MST’s political education being significantly more text based, they do both have an approach to political education that is broadly Freirerian. Patel also stresses that both organisations take political education very seriously (cf. Patel, 2008, 2024a).

Fabio dos Santos, a Brazilian scholar who has taught at the ENFF recalls it as ‘a lifechanging experience’ and adds that ‘it was the key to driving me to pursue a university education. I realised that it was very necessary for me to get a qualification to continue my engagements with various movements’. However, he also notes that while he continues to support the MST, and has made regular financial contributions to the movement over the last ten years, he was not invited back to teach at the ENFF after writing a piece critical of Lula’s government. He concludes that ‘What this teaches us is that even in progressive movements there often are political tensions – in this case they were not willing to engage me on my critique of the Lula government, they were not open to critical reflection’. Nonetheless, he maintains that ‘the education that they provide is truly wonderful. It is also really impressive that they are able to build bridges amongst grassroots movements . . . [across] the Global South’ (dos Santos, 2024).

In Huchzermeyer’s assessment there is a strong potential point of connection between the MST and Abahlali baseMjondolo resulting from the fact that both movements ‘explore the possibilities of democracy in a principled and creative way’ (Huchzermeyer, 2024).

Pithouse suggests that another point of shared political sensibility inheres in the fact that Abahlali baseMjondolo’s idea of ‘ubuhlali’ – something like the philosophy of being a resident – has very strong parallels in terms of its ethic of centering the dignity of the person with the liberation theology that has been influential in the MST (cf, Khosi, 2020; Pithouse, 2024c). He argues that the dogmatic nature of much of the middle class left after apartheid has made many unable to see this as a genuinely political posture, or to see it at all. He says that when it is recognised it is often derided or, at best, seen as ‘pre-political’, as something to be transcended by top down political education provided by the middle class left via NGOs (Pithouse, 2024b).

Both movements are strikingly internationalist. The MST’s political organisation emphasises global solidarity as integral to its praxis (Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, 2024) and positions local struggles for land within a global context of systemic inequalities (Legg et al., 2021). The MST is a founding member of La Vía Campesina, a global network of peasant movements advocating for food sovereignty and agrarian reform and plays a pivotal role in the organisation (Martínez-Torres and Rosset, 2010; Milani, 2008; Patel, 2024b). Through its international brigades, it sends dedicated militants to various countries to support movement building and to develop solidarity.

A similar commitment to internationalism is evident in Abahlali baseMjondolo. To cite just one example, on 26 April 2023, thousands of members of the movement marched from the storied Curries Fountain football ground to the Durban City Hall. The march was to stage a counter-event to the official celebrations of the national public holiday known as ‘Freedom Day’ and celebrated each year on 27 April, the anniversary of the first democratic election in South Africa held on 27 April 1994. The movement has held the counter-event annually since 2006 and is known in the movement as ‘UnFreedom Day’. The movement’s president, S’bu Zikode, gave the last speech of the day from the steps of the City Hall. His quietly delivered speech focused on Palestine as the crowd listened in absolute silence.

Reflections of Abahlali baseMjondolo leaders on their relationship with the MST

In order to give a strong sense of how Abahlali baseMjondolo leaders view their relationship with the MST, I will engage a few key elements of the discussion in the focus group (Buccus, 2024). A useful point of departure is the depth of the idea of internationalism, of solidarity beyond national borders and identities. I began by asking what the movement thought of the idea of ‘grassroots internationalism’.

Thandeka Thusini, a leading member of the movement’s youth structure, replied that ‘It is very important to acknowledge that there are other humans who are suffering the way we are suffering’ (2024). S’bu Zikode answered that the movement prefers not to use the phrase and offered, instead, an idea of a universal humanity:

Our humanity is denied, and we are in solidarity with all people whose humanity is denied whether they are inside or outside our borders. Humanity is universal and so are our goals. There is one world, we are all interconnected and so the struggle is universal. Our General Assemblies [monthly meetings of around 400 movement leaders which are open to the public] start with the Internationale, we sing the Internationale first and then we sing the national anthem (2024).

Bathabile Makhoba, a senior woman leader in the movement, added that:

We are fighting one common element, which is the capitalist system. Capitalism has no borders and so it is very important for us to build solidarity across borders, build solidarity with other struggles. We must know what is happening in Palestine, what is happening in the Congo. We invite people from the Congo, they come to our meetings and share what is happening so our members have that knowledge, and have it direct. We discuss what kind of solidarity we can share to them or help with them (2024).

Although she didn’t mention it in the focus group discussion, Abahlali baseMjondolo worked with migrants from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to start the Congolese Solidarity Campaign (CSC) in South Africa, which now also has a presence in the DRC.

In a WhatsApp discussion, Raphael Bahebwa (2024), the leader of the CSC now based in the DRC explained that:

The Congolese Solidarity Campaign (CSC) started in 2014 under leadership of Abahlali baseMjondolo after some of us met S’bu Zikode in Pretoria. From 2015 we went for a few trainings at the Abahlali office. They supported us in many ways [to build our movement]. Zuma was friends with Kabila. We were being massacred and they were being killed. We had a lot in common . . . . We funded ourselves from barber shops (2024).

Another point that repeatedly emerged in the discussions is that making connections with other struggles took time, as opportunities for international connections were initially mediated by NGOs and academics. The movement explains that it has very enriching relationships with some academics and very useful forms of solidarity with some NGOs, most notably the Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI), but has had very bad, even traumatic, experiences with others.

Speaking in the focus group, Zikode explained that:

When you only receive solidarity that can be a kind of charity. From the beginning we wanted to actively give as well as to receive solidarity. We did not want to be kept in dark confined corners while other people think, decide and speak for us. In the beginning, there were NGOs and academics that controlled all international connections and insisted on keeping this control. We had to fight for the right to speak for ourselves. Of course, this meant that we were not popular. A few professors and NGOs became extremely hostile. They thought that it was their job to think for us, to speak on our behalf, to connect us. The SMI [Social Movements Indaba] was the turning point. That’s when we said no . . . you cannot just pass us with good words, pass us without listening . . . we must be part of thinking, planning. For this we were called criminals. We found that there is not just a struggle of the left, there is also a struggle in the left, a struggle for our dignity to be recognised in the left. There will always be those who insist that they are the vanguard of our revolution and that our job is just to obey them. They use all this academic language but really they just don’t believe that we as poor black people can think for ourselves (2024).

The Social Movements Indaba (SMI) was an annual meeting managed by NGOs and academics. At a meeting in Johannesburg in 2005, movements requested the right to participate in planning the agenda and running future meetings. This was agreed to and then suddenly denied on the eve of the 2006 meeting in Durban. At the suggestion of Ashraf Cassiem, of the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, the movements staged a collective walkout out resulting in wholly unfounded allegations of criminality (Huchzermeyer, 2015; Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, 2007). This, various interviewees agree, began a process of the movement being able to build its own international connections.

When, in 2015, the MST made its own shift away from mediating its relationships to South Africa via NGOs, it became possible to begin building direct solidarity between the movements. Mqapheli Bonono, the current deputy president of the movement, explained that: ‘The first person to go was Thina [Thinabantu Khanyile] in 2015, he went to the ENFF as a student. Comrade Richard [Pithouse] was teaching there that year too. After that, more of us started to go. I had an opportunity to go in 2016, I went with Sindile [Nsibande]. The MST had a comrade living in South Africa, whose name was Augusto [Juncal]. Before we could go to the ENFF, we were trained by Augusto’ (2024).

A clear and important point emerging from the focus group was that people felt respected at the ENFF, something that they had not often experienced in NGO workshops at home. ‘We were’, a number of interviewees said, ‘taken serious’. Bonono said that ‘I felt free at the school because the school says something about me as a human being because I can be there whether I’m poor or not’.

Bonono spent 7 weeks at the school during his first trip, and his detailed account of his experiences is fascinating and moving, but exceeds the focus of this article. I intend, though, to make more use of it in future work on movement pedagogy. He recounts hearing the most senior leaders of the MST, João Paulo Rodrigues and Neuri Rossetto, speak at the opening of the school, the practical mechanisms required to manage a multi-lingual group of students, the day-to-day running of the school – including the shared labour of social reproduction – and the ongoing construction of the school as well as the rigour of the practices around collective reading.

Bonono stresses that, in a standard Freirean move, after the opening welcome and presentation from the MST leaders, the school began with presentations from the participants on their own struggles and organisations. He said that via these presentations, as well as informal discussions, ‘you find that we are facing one common struggle, one common enemy, which is capitalism’ (2004).

He also said that ‘I never had the opportunity to actually speak with João Pedro [Stédile] directly, but the more I connected with comrades in school, I noticed that he also follows Abahlali. Oh yes. He follows each footstep on what is happening in Abahlali’ (2024). It was clear that Bonono was moved by this.

Zikode had made the point that when the movement began to be able to make its own international connections, it was far easier to travel to North America and Europe than elsewhere in Africa. Bonono notes that it was at the MST school where he first met activists from elsewhere in Africa. He also expressed his surprise at meeting white militants engaged in struggles like those of Abahlali baseMjondolo. Thusini also mentioned her surprise at encountering impoverished white people in Brazil. She said, ‘We were taken to São Paulo to see the class struggle. I was really shocked to see white people staying in shacks’ (2024).

Bonono also stresses the significance of the trips out of the school to spend time at land occupations run by the MST, explaining that:

Their way of living in their occupation is the same as what they are always teaching in the school. There is no one that has a shop that is going to seek profits among them. There is one shop, it’s a community shop, a collective shop. Everyone gets up and contributes to the work of the occupation. And when they come back they make these big groups. When the groups are meeting everyone must be there, all the neighbours, nobody must be in their home. The kids are well looked after during the meetings so that everyone can participate (2024).

He concludes that ‘I saw that for the MST the whole foundation of struggle is building cooperatives on a ground level’ (2024).

Bonono went back to participate in the second course as a student and then, for a third time, this time as a teacher. This refusal to reify the roles of students and teacher is, of course, indicative of deeply held Freirean principles. Bonono has since been invited to teach at political schools modelled on the ENFF elsewhere in the world, such as the impressively Pan-African Kwame Nkrumah Political School in South Africa and the Amílcar Cabral Political School in Ghana. As with the ENFF, these political schools are managed by the organisations that send their members for training. This includes the curriculum design and selection of teachers.

The significance of experiences outside of formal learning environments, noted by Bonono, was also powerfully explained by Thusini. She was in Brazil in 2022 when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was re-elected as President.

People were really fighting for Lula, people were crying. After a day of campaigning on the streets of São Paulo, we walked through the city; we really walked, and it was really full, we were thousands, thousands and thousands. We were all wearing MST t-shirts and so nobody knew we were internationalists until we had to speak. We couldn’t go much beyond Olá and Bom dia.

We were all walking, chanting, dancing, and then Lula came to greet us and then everyone was rushing forward. I am so short but this guy, a white guy, took me and lifted me. That really helped and I could see.

Then we went to a hall to get the results, to see who would reach 50%. People were really crying and praying that Lula wins the elections, holding each other. I’ve never seen a South African crying for Ramaphosa and praying that he wins the election. I mean we see this emotion, this togetherness in our movement, but never when it comes to voting for the [political] parties. When Lula reached 50%, everyone started crying. I also found myself crying.

To see people that are really participating in the political life of their country, understanding it through in their blood and their vessels and understanding what they are really going through . . .

The struggle is really global. I was a comrade there and our comrades from around the world are comrades when they are here with us (2024).

Participants in the focus group also placed great stress on the theory and practice of collectivity. For Thusini (2024):

Our own struggle brought us into the consciousness of collectivism. We meet other comrades with that consciousness but each movement learns from what other movements have achieved. Struggle is about building collective power, a collective voice, a collective advocacy, a collective agenda and collective goals. All this shapes how we are going to organise and build common ways of [being in] solidarity.

For Bonono (2024), ‘I think the most important thing I have seen in MST, there is no one who is bigger than others. Everyone is the same, everyone counts the same, has the same respect’. In a related point, he adds that ‘This thing of solidarity, it’s not one way. When we are repressed, they are with us; when they are repressed, we are with them’.

There is considerable implicit learning, in the schools, much of it from other participants. Bonono says, speaking of João Pedro Stédile, ‘I watched carefully how he speaks, and I followed that style. He will never finish talking without making examples of what he wants us to learn. I followed that’ (2024).

Several interviewees also mention the importance of movements being able to develop specific practical skills. Bonono says:

The MST they invest to their comrades. If you are sick, you are not going down. There is a clinic in the occupation. There is an MST doctor there. MST took that person, a poor person, to train as a doctor in Cuba. He comes back and he is a movement doctor, a comrade doctor, a doctor for the people. That doctor is also running lessons on how to be a nurse. He is running those lessons in the occupation. They have medicines in the occupation, you get the medicine right there. We have a long way to get to this level (2024).

There are also schools that teach specific skills. Thusini participated in a school on media and communication, and now runs much of the movement’s media. She says:

I learnt how to design posters, how to take the pictures, use social media – all that stuff. Computers are there. Laptops are there, cameras. I have improved in so many things. Even when we are designing the t-shirts or taking a picture I am always aware that it’s not just about a t-shirt or a picture. It is a tool. Amilcar Cabral was always saying that every soldier must have their own weapon. I am taking pictures, editing video, designing t-shirts, making posters. This is my weapon. You know a picture is not just a picture. There is a politics in every picture.

Now other comrades that are starting to use cameras. Our Facebook is not like before because we’ve gone to Brazil. There is a change now. Even our t-shirts, TikTok. We know how to design, to edit (2024).

There has also been material support. In early 2024, the MST sent a brick-making machine to Abahlali baseMjondolo from Brazil. It was presented to the movement at one of its General Assemblies.

There was also a significant stress on food sovereignty. Bonono quotes Thomas Sankara as having said ‘He who feeds you controls you’ and says:

Look, if the government feeds us it will tell us what to do, it will control us. If we have to get our food from the supermarkets they will set the prices and decide what to sell, including all this food that is slowly poisoning the people. But if we can use the land and feed ourselves, feed ourselves with healthy food like the MST are doing, then we have some autonomy (2024).

Abahlali baseMjondolo leaders who have participated in courses at the ENFF also stress the importance of mística. A central element of the MST’s political culture mística is a practice that blends collective ritual, symbolism, and storytelling to inspire and sustain militants in their struggle. Mística is performed in meetings, political schools, and land occupations, using theatre, poetry, and song to evoke and reinforce a shared political identity (Carter and Carvalho, 2010). Rooted in liberation theology and popular education, it serves not only as a spiritual and emotional anchor but also as a tool for political formation, strengthening commitment to the movement. Through mística, the MST fosters a sense of belonging and collective purpose, ensuring that its struggle is not merely an economic demand but a deeply ethical and historical project.

Abahlali baseMjondolo had drawn on and developed a rich array of politicised cultural practices before its encounter with the MST, including choirs, dance groups, poetry and, in some occupations, organised theatre projects. However it now explicitly develops mística as a specific project often using richly symbolic performances to dramatise important issues and experiences at the start of meetings. This often includes staging confrontations with oppressive forces, performing unity and displaying healthy food produced on democratically managed occupied land, something that elicits significant pride.

For Thusini mística ‘helps us to build togetherness, confidence and a clear idea of what we are struggling against and what we are struggling for’ (Thusini, 2024).

Communes

In recent years, Abahlali baseMjondolo has placed considerable emphasis on what it calls ‘developing occupations into communes’. Pithouse explains that, broadly speaking, the movement’s evolution progressed from initially defending existing settlements against eviction, to establishing new occupations, and now advancing toward transforming occupations into communes.

After careful discussion, it was clear that the move to constructing communes had three sources. One was the transfer and translation of academic knowledge into the movement via its own education processes. Another was the concrete political innovations developed in an occupation that became the eKhenana Commune by Lindkuhle Mnguni, an important young leader and intellectual in the movement, who was assassinated in 2022. But the idea of the commune as a living practice was primarily influenced by the experiences of Abahlali baseMjondolo leaders in Brazil, experiences that were shared with Mnguni, particularly by Bonono, who spent a period in prison with Mnguni.

Bonono says that ‘The idea of communes came from the MST, which, of course, organises in the rural context. They are building rural communes, but we adapted that to the cities’ (2024). Makhoba adds that:

When we are doing communes, when we are encouraging our communities to build communes, where we have to work together and that’s building a unity amongst us. When I compared what I’ve learned from these kinds of struggles around the world, economic struggles, political struggles, I can see that we are doing the right thing by doing communes in Abahlali (2024).

Thusini, who spent time at a commune in Venezuela (Maher, 2016; Gilbert, 2023), stressed the value of seeing and participating in ‘communal life’ and said that she was surprised to see how free sexual minorities felt in the commune she visited. ‘Seeing a man kissing a man in public or a woman and a woman. It’s done openly there. In Africa, we say that we accept that we are all human, but this is still a taboo in many places’ (2024). It was clear that for these leaders in the movement, the experience of visiting communes in Latin America was a transformative experience.

The MST in Africa

The MST’s Samora Machel Internationalist Brigade arrived in Mozambique from Brazil in 2000 and moved to Zambia in 2008. The brigade focuses its efforts on teaching literacy, agroecology and supporting women’s organisation.

Elizabet Conceição, who leads the brigade, emphasised the importance of Africa for the MST. She said that because more than a hundred million Brazilians are of African descent, it is vital for the MST to connect to Africa, and for there to be reciprocal learning. She also stated that for the MST, it is politically urgent for the internationalism of capitalism and imperialism to be countered by an internationalism of ideologically clear movements, something that requires ongoing political education. Her vision resonates strongly with Abahlali baseMjondolo’s frequently articulated commitment to build ‘a movement of communes and a global movement of movements’.

For Conceição ‘Abahlali baseMjondolo has a lot of similarities with the MST. Our struggles are about land and our political views on the democratisation of land are similar. There is an increased consciousness of members across both organisations as they realise more and more just how similar these two organisations are’ (Conceição, 2025). She also explained, as had Abahlali baseMjondolo leaders, that the two organisations maintain active solidarity and said that the Brigade visited Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban and mobilised support when Mnguni was assassinated. For Conceição, the key task ahead is to ‘collaborate and share ideas especially for political training and education’ (Conceição, 2025).

Bonono, who has visited the Samora Machel Internationalist Brigade in Zambia, says ‘these guys are very, you know, creative. They have all these different initiatives for poor people in the rural areas in Zambia. They have visited us here too. They bought seeds that we used in our communes. Of course, comrades from the MST are also invited to our political schools in South Africa’ (2024).

The conversation in the focus group circled back to conclude near where it had begun. Bonono, reflecting on international solidarity, said:

Look, you know that when we started connecting to each other, the NGOs were no longer there, they were no longer needed and they attacked us, heavily, for having taken their space. But now we are in solidarity with the MST and other movements in other countries, a genuine solidarity with other people who are also in pain, also struggling.

But that process is not finished. I mean, the solidarity with the Palestinians has always been with academics and not directly with everyone else. If we are asked to go to the university we are treated really badly, we are really disrespected there. It is painful. It is only this year that we started to be able to have direct solidarity with Palestinian comrades. A Palestinian comrade [Haidar Eid] was here. We became emotional when we were talking to him because we could feel the pain that he was feeling. A pain that we understand. Our comrades were crying as he told his story (2024).

He concluded that ‘We still need to meet in the struggle. We still need to find ways’ (2024).

Conclusion

Anyone with substantial experience engaging leading grassroots militants in South Africa will recognise that interest in international issues and internationalist commitments are common, as is interest in building direct forms of international solidarity between struggles and organisations. This was strikingly clear when I first met Ashraf Cassiem from the then militant but now defunct Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign in 2004. It has always been equally clear since I first encountered leaders in Abahlali baseMjondolo almost twenty years ago now.

Nonetheless, the ‘common sense’ among middle-class progressives, which assumes that only progressive middle-class intellectuals can cultivate an internationalist perspective while impoverished people are locked into local concerns, remains widespread. This paper shows that this assumption is a prejudice and that popular internationalism in the form of movement-to-movement solidarity must be taken seriously.

If struggles from below are to sustain themselves, let alone build real power, they cannot remain isolated within national or local contexts. The experiences of movements like the MST and Abahlali baseMjondolo show that direct, popular internationalism is not only possible but also hugely valuable. It enables movements to share strategies, strengthen their political education, and develop forms of solidarity that are grounded in lived experience and shared ideological commitments. These connections are built in occupations, land struggles, political schools, and resistance against repression, forging bonds that are both practical and deeply political. In the MST and Abahlali baseMjondolo, popular internationalism is not an abstract ideal; it is an active, ongoing process of mutual learning, solidarity, and collective resistance.