Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the constitution of local contentious politics in the freehold location of Evaton in the 1940s and early 1950s, a period of general radicalisation of black politics.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the constitution of local contentious politics in the freehold location of Evaton in the 1940s and early 1950s, a period of general radicalisation of black politics. It focuses attention on the efforts by a community of squatters to assert ownership over urban land and more broadly to claim a right to the city, in a context in which state policy increasingly sought to limit and reverse African land and property rights in urban areas. The occupation of land in Evaton, the legality of which was disputed, produced an uncontrolled place (from the perspective of the authorities) or contentious space, which, in turn, generated a form of resistance politics that was simultaneously distinctive and reflective of general struggles of urban land occupations at the time. Its distinctiveness was premised on the freehold character of the land, which created a strong sense among the land occupiers that they had a legitimate right to own a plot of land. The organisation that led this struggle - 'the eye of the land' - took the fight to the highest courts in the land, while mobilising defiance against the local state's efforts to remove the community. What this struggle revealed was the relative weakness of the local state and how it was outmanoeuvred by local activists, whose approach to the state oscillated between resistance and a desire to be recognised as orderly and legitimate.