On this day, 6 January 2005, local residents in Bayview in Chatsworth, Durban, successfully fought off a local government water disconnection team. This was especially brave given that a council security team had previously murdered a teenage boy, Marcel King, elsewhere in the city, after he attempted to help his mother during a disconnection of her electricity. The council, run by the African National Congress, said that they would be back with greater force.
Since the ANC had been elected in 1994, they had pursued a neoliberal agenda and disconnected the water supply to over 1 million homes, while thousands of people continued to die each year from diarrhoea, mostly caused by unsafe water.
Pictured: a nearby water protest in 2014 https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1315603468624800/?type=3
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