Over the past 18 months Zabalaza Books has published over two dozen new publications or new editions of previous publications, all of which can be read online or downloaded in PDF format from the Zabalaza Books website.by Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF)
C’de Bobo at the “Reclaim June 16” demonstration in Soweto, 2009.
The ZACF is saddened to learn of the passing away of comrade Bobo Makhoba in Soweto this Thursday 29 September, at the age of 41, after a long illness. He is survived by his son, to whom we extend our deepest sympathies and condolences – as we do to the rest of his family, friends and comrades.
Bobo was a founding member of the ZACF as well as one of the original guerilla electricians for the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee’s Operation Khanyisa campaign, which illegally reconnected thousands of households’ electricity after it was cut off for non-payment – forcing Eskom, the state electricity utility, to scrap arrears for thousands of Sowetans.
by Organização Anarquista Socialismo Libertario (São Paulo, Brazil)
OASL: Could you briefly describe what the ZACF is, and what model of organisation you chose to enact?
ZACF: The Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front , ZACF or just Zabalaza (which means “struggle” in the African languages of isiXosa and isiZulu), is a specific anarchist organisation, or a political organisation. The ZACF identifies with the platformist tradition within anarchism, or in Latin American terms, with Especifismo.
Zabalaza is a unitary organization, with membership open only to committed anarchist communists, who agree with our goals and principles, and are able to show them in practice.
As an organization that identifies itself with the platform, while recognizing its limitations and weaknesses, we demand a certain level of theoretical and strategic unity and collective responsibility. This is mainly due to our own experience, when we discovered that a smaller but more firmly united organization, with a greater level of strategic and theoretical unity and collective responsibility, can achieve much more than a large organization with very little common understanding of its goals and objectives, little strategic and tactical unity, and therefore little collective responsibility.
This is how we understand the distinction between the specific anarchist organization, an organization open only to militants of a particular tendency within anarchism, and the organization of synthesis, bringing together those who identify themselves as anarchist, even if their interpretations of anarchism is completely different, even opposed.
zabalaza.net 