The township becomes a sacred text
eKasi begins by reading the kasi as an engineered geography of dispossession. Informal settlement, landlessness, grief and structural trauma become starting points for theology.
What we do
Theologies
from the ground.
We create space for unsupervised theologies, shaped by people who bear the brunt of injustice in townships, informal settlements and across eKasi.
The kasi produces knowledge. People living with dispossession, poverty, gendered violence and exclusion are thinkers and makers of theology. Their questions do not need permission from an ivory tower, a pulpit or an academic title. Scholarship enters this space as a conversation partner, accountable to lived experience.
Through gatherings, shared reading, contextual Bible study and critical conversation, we bring everyday struggles into dialogue with Black liberation and other liberating traditions. We make room to question inherited images of God, challenge the authority that sustains injustice, and learn from one another’s memory, anger, faith and hope.
The archive carries these questions into material life: sanitation and human dignity; patriarchy and gendered violence; the colonial image of God; and the lives of people facing mental illness and exclusion. We hold and share this work so that reflection can return to communities as a resource for struggle.
Our praxis is to see, judge and act: read life together, confront the powers that diminish it, and build solidarities for total human liberation.
A living history
The work keeps moving.
A movement shaped in conversation, gathering, resistance and a relentless return to the realities of the kasi.
The history of eKasi Theologies is larger than the history of a single group. It begins with the long making of the township: a geography shaped by colonial land dispossession, apartheid urban planning and the migrant labour system.
For generations, Black people were denied land, permanent urban belonging and the material conditions of a dignified home. The township was engineered as a place of containment: close enough to extract labour from Black bodies, yet structurally separated from the wealth those bodies helped create.
In 2003, The Warehouse Trust was established through the Anglican Parish of Saint John in Cape Town. Its commitment to just and transformed urban communities made it an important sanctuary for a younger generation of organisers, students and practitioners.
The 2015 and 2016 student uprisings were a decisive rupture. Young people confronted financial exclusion, racism and the persistence of colonial power, while challenging church messages that offered reconciliation without justice.
Black Theology of Liberation gatherings in Khayelitsha, and the 2018 VukaniBantu consultation convened at the request of the late Professor Vuyani Vellem, brought local reflection into dialogue with the global Black radical tradition and the memory of James Cone.
By 2019, the work was naming its question in public: Thixo, yintoni ingxaki yakho? - “God, what is your problem?” Later gatherings, including Crucifixion After Church in 2021, continued to read faith from a Black township perspective.
That history continues in the papers, gatherings and practices documented here. Its future is not a finished doctrine. It is a shared, ongoing practice of seeing, judging and acting for total human liberation.
Milestones
A history still unfolding.
- Before eKasi
The historic wound
Land dispossession, migrant labour, racial spatial control and the continuation of material inequality form the movement's ground.
- 2003
A space to gather
The Warehouse Trust begins in Cape Town and becomes a sanctuary for growing theological resistance.
- 2015–16
A generation wakes up
The student uprisings sharpen a refusal of theology detached from material freedom.
- 2017–18
Local work meets the Black radical tradition
Gatherings in Khayelitsha and the VukaniBantu consultation connect local work to the wider Black radical tradition.
- 2019–21
The questions deepen
“Thixo, yintoni ingxaki yakho?” and “Crucifixion After Church” read faith through an eKasi perspective.
- Ongoing
A movement of total human liberation
The work remains a living intersectional praxis of protest, care, theological experimentation and collective action.
Development of the work
From a diagnosis of woundedness to a practice of liberation.
Each stage moves from lived reality, through theological interrogation, toward an embodied response.
The Warehouse becomes an incubator
The Warehouse Trust offers a communal space where young organic intellectuals and township residents can re-read scripture from within their own lived realities.
Church theology is brought to account
The movement retrieves Black Liberation Theology, the Kairos tradition, and a protest-and-confessing practice of faith.
Shit Theology names spatial violence
The struggle for sanitation, clean water and bodily safety in informal settlements becomes a direct theological demand for dignity.
Penis Theology confronts patriarchy
Womanist, feminist and queer thought challenge gender-based violence, toxic masculinity and phallocentric images of God.
Intersectional praxis widens the circle
The work develops toward collective safety, care and public lament, centering people treated as disposable.
Theological interventions
Ideas that became practices.
Shit Theology
The denial of sanitation, clean water and physical safety in informal settlements is exposed as theological violence against human dignity.
Penis Theology
Gender-based violence, toxic masculinity and phallocentric images of God are confronted through womanist, feminist and queer lenses.
Critical social theories
Lenses for
reading life.
eKasi Theologies brings these critical frameworks into conversation with Black township knowledge. They sharpen the analysis of power without replacing the authority of lived experience.
Black Consciousness
Names Black agency, self-definition and the refusal of white authority over Black life and knowledge.
Black feminist & Womanist thought
Centers Black women’s knowledge and exposes the interlocking force of race, gender, class and patriarchy.
Intersectionality
Reads how race, gender, class, sexuality, disability and age shape unequal exposure to harm and access to dignity.
Critical Race Theory
Shows how racism is embedded in institutions, law, space and everyday social arrangements, not only in individual prejudice.
Decolonial thought
Questions colonial ways of knowing and takes seriously the knowledge, memory and futures held in the township.
Racial capitalism
Connects poverty, landlessness and precarious work to systems that extract value while treating Black lives as disposable.
Spatial justice & the right to the city
Reads the kasi as planned space: where land, transport, water, sanitation and housing distribute life chances unequally.
Care & social reproduction
Makes visible the labour of care, survival and raising children that sustains households, communities and resistance.
Queer theory
Challenges norms that police bodies, desire and belonging, insisting that liberation must include queer people.
Disability justice & Mad studies
Refuses the marginalisation of disabled people and people living with mental illness, treating their lives as sources of knowledge.
Critical childhood studies
Recognises children as social beings with dignity, insight and rights, rather than only as future adults or objects of care.
Environmental justice
Connects polluted environments, unsafe sanitation and unequal access to water with the struggle for bodily safety and flourishing.