The award-winning South African documentary Dear Mandela is on a 3-city tour of Nigeria. Described variously by critics and reviewers as “stirring…evocatively shot, lucidly edited”, “enthralling”, “gripping” and “a call to action as much as it is an indictment of a government that has lost its way” the documentary has won multiple awards, including Best South African Documentary at the Durban International Film Festival and a nomination for Best Documentary at the African Academy Awards, screened in 40 countries and translated into 12 languages.

The Nigerian tour is being facilitated with support from Amnesty International Nigeria, The Ford Foundation and CMAP as part of a cultural exchange programme and will screen in Abuja, Port Harcourt and Lagos to raise awareness about housing rights issues and forced evictions as well as their impact on lives while telling the stories of communities struggling with this gross violation of their human rights.

Explaining their involvement, Amnesty International Nigeria’s Housing Rights Researcher Morayo Adebayo says “our objective at this event is to highlight the human rights issues evoked by forced eviction while sensitizing stakeholders on their obligations and rights, through human rights education and discussion sessions. Amnesty International is very much concerned about the trend of forced eviction which appears to be spreading across the country at an uncontrollable rate. It is in this light that we have considered it necessary to make the conversation a national one, and this tour which took off in Mpape, Abuja on World Habitat Day, Monday October 5, 2015 is one of the means for achieving this objective.”

Directed by Dara Kell & Christopher Nizza, Dear Mandela, tracks what happens to three friends who refuse to be moved from their shack in Durban’s vast shantytowns when the South African government makes good its promise to ‘eradicate the slums’ and begins to evict shack dwellers far outside the city.

“Dear Mandela follows their journey from their shacks to the highest court in the land as they invoke Nelson Mandela’s example and become leaders in a growing social movement. By turns inspiring, devastating and funny, the film offers a new perspective on the role that young people can play in political change and is a fascinating portrait of a South Africa coming of age.”

Special guests include Thembani Ngongoma and Nan-dipha Chala, founding members of the South African shack dwellers movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo which features prominently in the documentary.

The Lagos screening will take place at the famous Makoko floating school on Friday October 9, 2015 before the movie travels to Port Harcourt for a screening and concert at Bundu waterside on October 11, 2015.

Abahlali baseMjondolo, also known as AbM or the red shirts, is a shack-dwellers’ movement in South Africa. It is well known for campaigning against evictions and for public housing. The movement grew out of a road blockade organized from the Kennedy Road shack settlement in the city of Durban in early 2005 and is now the largest shack dweller’s organization in South Africa. AbM campaigns to improve the living conditions of poor people and to democratize society from below. The movement refuses party politics and boycotts elections. Its key demand is that the social value of urban land should take priority over its commercial value and it campaigns for the public expropriation of large privately owned landholdings.

According to The Times, the movement “has shaken the political landscape of South Africa.” However the movement has faced sustained, and at times violent repression and is currently undergoing the most brutal wave of evictions and murders at the hands of police since its founding. Three members of AbM have been either murdered in shadowy circumstances or killed by police since June. Nqobile Nzuza, a 17-year-old girl, was shot in the back and killed by a police officer during a protest in the Cato Crest area of Durban on the last day of September. No investigation was opened in the aftermath of any of these cases. Many more members have been injured in shootings and arrested during housing protests over the past few months.