South Africans celebrated Freedom Day and the anniversary of the end of apartheid on Saturday, 27 April, with official ceremony and a public holiday. But 30 years after the election of Nelson Mandela as president, millions of black South Africans are still waiting and still fighting for their freedom.

For families who still live in shack settlements without running water, electricity, and access to sanitation, the spectacle of this celebration was especially bitter. 

Many feel grievously let down, and physically threatened, by Mandela’s party, the African National Congress (ANC), which has been in power since 1994 yet failed to deliver on constitutional commitments for safe and fair housing. 

Now these communities are mobilizing to unseat the ANC at the parliamentary election on 29 May. Political analysts expect the party to lose its overall majority for the first time in history.

On 21 April, more than 10,000 shack dwellers poured into a sports ground in Durban, South Africa’s third largest city, to launch this campaign with a day-long UnFreedom Day event. The assembly was organized by the social movement Abahlali baseMjondolo (shack dwellers in isiZulu). But challenging the powerful in South Africa today is dangerous. Twenty-five of Abahlali’s local leaders have been killed fighting for the cause since 2013 and now its national leaders are all in hiding after death threats allegedly from the ANC.

“Thirty years of freedom, but we still do not know what freedom is!” S’bu Zikode, the Abahlali president, told the crowd, to cheers. “The rich have become richer and the poor have become poorer. Far more people live in shacks than in 1994. We remain landless and without work. Millions are without even the most basic services, such as water, sanitation and refuse removal. Millions are hungry and we continue to live in terrible violence."

The sea of shack-dwellers, dressed in Abahlali’s colors of red, black, and gold, were seated in neat rows inside a vast white tent that covered the ground’s expanse. Many had travelled thousands of kilometers from rural areas and urban shack settlements across South Africa to express solidarity.

Leon Bennett, 35, a construction laborer who had come with a delegation from his settlement on the outskirts of Durban, put it bluntly: “We wake up every morning in our shacks thinking about what to put together in order to survive. Survival is not freedom.”

Today such settlements are home to approximately two million households, according to 2023 data from the National Department of Human Settlements, in spite of shack-dwellers being granted the right to proper homes in the 1994 constitution written by the ANC. Many are the legacy of apartheid-era townships where non-whites were forced to live under strict racial segregation.

Abahlali baseMjondolo was formed in 2005 in response to the ANC’s apathy or often outright hostility to these communities. The spark was ignited when land promised by a local councilor to people in the Kennedy Road shack settlement in North Durban was leased without warning to a private company.

Zikode, now president, but then leader of Kennedy Road’s community development committee, realized that they would need to organize more effectively in order to hold elected officials to account. Uniting with five other settlements, Kennedy Road voted to create Abahlali. Its goal: a unified front of shack dwellers dedicated to opposing demolitions and forced removals and to negotiating quality housing for their families.

Today the movement is one of the largest and most effective unions of shack dwellers in the world with 87 branches representing more than 120,000 dues-paying members across four of South Africa’s nine provinces.

In the crowd on Unfreedom Day, three Zulu words printed in bold black letters adorn almost every red shirt: umhlaba (land), izindlu (housing) and isithunizi (dignity). They are Abahlali’s three central tenets.