241 The Marikana land occupation in Cato Manor, Durban, in 2013 and 2014: A site where neither the state, the party nor popular resistance is fully in charge Richard Pithouse 10 This chapter provides an account of some of the contestation around a land occupation in Cato Manor, Durban. It shows that none of the actors aspiring to exercise control – party structures, the local state, the courts, NGOs and popular organisations – were, in the period under study, able to exercise full control over the people or territory in question. It also shows that actually existing forms of contestation frequently operated outside the limits established by liberal democratic arrangements. 1 Cato Manor: A long history of contestation For nearly 100 years, from the 1870s until the mid-1960s, Cato Manor was the most significant of the urban spaces that enabled an autonomous black presence in Durban outside the archipelago of spaces, often carceral, created and managed by white authority. From the 1870s until March 1958 – when the mass evictions from Cato Manor that resulted in black residents being expelled from the city to the bantustans and segregated townships began – there was never a simple answer to the question, ‘Who is in charge?’ There was a variety of constantly dynamic social forces at play, and the balance between these social forces was never stable for very long. But from the moment when the evictions began, until they were completed in 1965, there was no doubt that in this space – which after the evictions were completed became empty of any human occupation and socially sterile – the apartheid state was firmly in charge. There was also no doubt that the state was attempting to reorder society in accordance with its desire to inscribe white supremacy into the spatial logic of the country. The ideal model for this was well described by Frantz Fanon in 1961 in his description of the colonial city as a ‘world cut in two’ (Fanon 1976: 29), a ‘world divided into compartments, a motionless, Manichean world’ (1976: 40). Fanon argued that the event that will inaugurate the end of the ‘world of compartments’ occurs when the violence used to police the dividing line is ‘taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his [sic] own person, he [sic] surges into the forbidden quarters’ (1976: 31). He concluded that the urban land occupation ‘is the sign of the irrevocable decay, the gangrene ever present at the heart of political domination’ (1976: 103). In Henri Lefebvre’s view, the appropriation of land, planning and style inherent to the shack settlement produces ‘an extraordinary spatial duality. And the duality in space itself creates the strong impression that there exists a duality of political power’ (Lefebvre 1991: 375). More SoN 2016.indb 241 2016/02/19 5:24 PM