Building African Solidarity, Locally and Transnationally
For the Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education, support from the Constitutionalism Fund came at a pivotal time. It enabled the organisation to deepen relationships with movements and organisations across Cape Town, while also linking their work to formations in SADC, East and North Africa. These connections laid the foundation for a transnational African solidarity programme. As the grantee reflected, “SA exceptionalism is toxic – it is an ugly underlying reality of SA activism”, and the Fund made it possible to confront this by hosting initiatives such as the annual African Solidarity Learning Festival.
Locally, the Fund’s support helped seed Citizens Commons at the University of the Western Cape, a hub for citizen engagement, politics, and research. “It brings together the university community for discussion. It’s an open space to invite others – political education at the University, research for the poor”. From this hub, visible shifts began to take root: organisations moved away from narrow, sectarian organising toward more intersectional approaches. One striking example was the organising around the Cissie Gool House occupation, where informal settlement residents, the homeless, and those displaced by gentrification came together to resist evictions and collectively press for low-cost housing near economic opportunities.
This spirit of solidarity extended to migrant struggles. Local groups began creating African Solidarity Action Hubs to challenge divisive narratives and mobilise practical responses. “In short”, the coordinator of the centre noted, “there is an active problematisation of organising in corners… now there is a real thing about how these struggles need to unfold, and there is a greater expression when it comes to solidarity”. Slowly, South Africans are “eating away from the South African exceptionalism”, recognising shared crises with others across the continent.
The grantee emphasised that constitutional values are expressed not only on paper but in lived struggles: “The fight against evictions might not say which section of the constitution this is, but definitely in spirit, it’s profoundly understood.” For migrants, the constitution is seen as an immediate tool of defence, while South Africans are still “unlearning the passivity” of assuming rights will be delivered without vigilance.
Quoting Issa Shivji’s Do Constitutions Matter: The Dilemma of a Radical Lawyer?, they added: “It’s the revolutionaries that make constitutions, and constitutions do not make revolutions.”
The CF’s flexible approach was key. “We did not encounter restrictions. I think we were respected in the work we were doing. We were trusted that we would continue to execute it ethically”. While most of the funding went into programme activities, the organisation regarded it as “unrestricted… it was left up to us how to actually use that money”.
Beyond external impact, the Fund’s support also catalysed internal change. Tshisimani moved away from hierarchical leadership to a coordinator model, comanaging programmes with activists rather than for them. “We do things with activists”, they explained, ensuring that programmes were shaped by those most directly engaged.
Looking back, they underlined the importance of the CF’s collaborative model, with multiple foundations pooling resources: “It’s very avant-garde… forward looking. If other foundations can adopt this, diversify how they work, then there’ll be more help available, particularly at this current moment.” They saw the Fund’s contribution as helping undo apartheid legacies of division and xenophobia, enabling South Africans, Zimbabweans, and Mozambicans to “see themselves not only as comrades, but as belonging to one group that is the architects of a just future”.
At its heart, the work supported by the CF was about enabling communities to self-organise, build solidarity across borders, and defend constitutional values in practical ways. As they concluded: “The future is for communities to organise themselves… we need to really, really organise ourselves and be able to defend what’s left and try to recover what’s lost. And the help from the CF – I wish that something like this could happen again”.
Extract from the Stategic Review Report.
