Asian Coalition for Housing Rights

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Goodbye to our comrade, brother and friend Patrick Magebhula Hunsley

August 07, 2014

Patrick has been dodging bullets all his life - literally and figuratively. He survived being stabbed in the lung. He survived vicious assaults. He survived stints in reformatory and in prison. He survived being gang-pressed into an Ihkatha Impi. He survived a prolonged fight in the shacklands of Inanda to bring a progressive civic organisation into being in his settlement. He survived wave after wave of attacks from forces of reaction and crime to unseat him. He survived alcoholism. He survived TB. He survived HIV. He survived being a poor man in the shacklands of South Africa.

Today he breathed his last. The accumulated batterings of poverty wore him down. It is a miracle that he lived for 56 years. It is impossible to imagine a future without him - without his marvellous sense of humour, his poetic soul, his fiery oratory, his capacity to find common ground with one and all, his deep compassion for his fellow human being. A flawed genius has passed on. My life will be immeasurably poorer as a result, and on a far grander scale so too will be a movement that shares his dream for a just and equitable world in which poverty and exclusion, oppression and intolerance are consigned to the past.

For the next few weeks there will be mourning for Patrick in hundreds of informal settlements, backyard shacks, pavement dwellings in dozens of countries. There will be mourning for him in places of power where his sparkle and his candour, his determination and his unwavering commitment earned him enemies but won over many, many more.

Joel Bolnick, SDI Secretariat

Senzeni na?
Sono sethu, ubumnyama?
Sono sethu yinyaniso?
Sibulawayo
Mayibuye i Africa

Please go to to the SDI tributes to Patrick page here for more messages and stories.

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