The Philosophical Revolutionary

AIJAZ AHMAD, Frontline

Frantz Fanon, who dedicated the closing years of his life to the revolution in Algeria, was a thinker of original insights and a psychiatrist who used his knowledge as an instrument for healing the victims of oppression.

THE HINDU ARCHIVES

FRANTZ FANON. THE current year, 2012, marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Frantz Fanon, one of the indispensable figures of the 20th century and a man of exemplary commitments to revolutionary action and human liberation. A thinker who offered original and lasting insights of great complexity, he was also a physician and a psychiatrist who used his scientific knowledge not just for professional purposes but as an instrument for healing victims of oppression and violence.

Lineages of Freedom

John Holloway

By John Holloway, Grahamstown, 2012

Lineages of freedom. I love the title of the colloquium, with its suggestion of a discontinuous continuity between past and present. It makes me think of Bob Marley: These songs of freedom, redemption songs, redemption songs.

That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Redemption. It’s the word that keeps on coming back to me in South Africa. I know that there are people in the room who were imprisoned and tortured in the struggle for a better world. I am sure that many of you will have known people who gave their lives in that struggle. And there must be a sense that this is not what you fought for, that this is not what you dreamed of. There have been great changes, of course, fundamental changes, but I cannot believe that in the world you dreamt of, there would be so much poverty beside so much wealth. I cannot believe that your ambition for South Africa was that it would win first prize as being the most unequal society in the world. I cannot believe that Marikana was part of your dreams. There have been fundamental changes, but the pain of capital is still there, the pain of a form of social organisation that quite literally tears up the earth and destroys the humans, animals and plants that live on it.

Jean-Paul Sartre on the French Communist Party

I was dealing with men who only considered people of their party as comrades, men who were covered with orders and prohibitions, who judged me as a provisional fellow traveler, and who placed themselves in advance in the future moment when I’d disappear from the melee, taken back by the forces of the right. For them I wasn’t a whole man; I was a dead man on reprieve. No kind of reciprocity is possible with men like that; nor any mutual criticism, which would have been something to hope for…. We lived in a poisoned atmosphere of thoughts that didn’t resist examination, but that they avoided examining. It was putrid, and we were never sure that they weren’t in the process of slandering us somewhere.

- Jean-Paul Sartre, A Fellow Traveler of the Communist Party, 1972

Simply having a female president will not rescue the ANC

Siphokazi Magadla

By Siphokazi Magadla, City Press

A recent edition of City Press carried an article “The time is nigh for the ANC to have a woman president” (City Press, October 7) by Thenjiwe Mtintso, the veteran ANC leader and Umkhonto weSizwe commander who now occupies the position of South African ambassador to Italy.

In her article, she asked: “Has there never been a politically astute, capable, competent woman of integrity ready and willing to lead the ANC in one hundred years?” Mtintso is the right person to be asking this question at a particularly apt time in terms of the ANC’s electoral calendar.

Pallo Jordan & Xolela Mangcu on Biko

The Durban Strikes 1973 ("Human Beings with Souls")

In January 1973 South Africa witnessed a momentous chain of events in its political history. The Durban Strikes were a turning point in the confrontation between the country's minority rulers and the worker majority. Motivated by material need and underpinned by principles of democracy and equality, the strikes conjoined academics, workers and political leaders among others, in a struggle that was to redefine the South African political landscape in the years to follow.

Frantz Fanon on reason and racism

Reason was confident of victory on every level. I put all the parts back together. But I had to change my tune.

That victory played cat and mouse; it made a fool of me. As the other put it, when I was present, it was not; when it was there, I was no longer.

- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Ranajit Guha on the failure to grasp the political agency of peasants

“…[I]nsurgency is regarded as external to the peasant’s consciousness and Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate for Reason, the logic of that consciousness”.

- Ranajit Guha, The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil

by James Holston, 2007

Insurgent citizenships have arisen in cities around the world. This book examines the insurgence of democratic citizenship in the urban peripheries of São Paulo, Brazil, its entanglement with entrenched systems of inequality, and its contradiction in violence.

James Holston argues that for two centuries Brazilians have practiced a type of citizenship all too common among nation-states--one that is universally inclusive in national membership and massively inegalitarian in distributing rights and in its legalization of social differences. But since the 1970s, he shows, residents of Brazil's urban peripheries have formulated a new citizenship that is destabilizing the old. Their mobilizations have developed not primarily through struggles of labor but through those of the city--particularly illegal residence, house building, and land conflict. Yet precisely as Brazilians democratized urban space and achieved political democracy, violence, injustice, and impunity increased dramatically. Based on comparative, ethnographic, and historical research, Insurgent Citizenship reveals why the insurgent and the entrenched remain dangerously conjoined as new kinds of citizens expand democracy even as new forms of violence and exclusion erode it.

Slum politics: Community leaders, everyday needs, and utopian aspirations in Recife, Brazil

by Martijn Koster and Pieter A. de Vries

This article envisages slum dwellers’ politics in Recife, Brazil as a realm of possibility in which care and recognition are central. Community leaders are its main facilitators as articulators of slum dwellers’ needs and aspirations. The article’s notion of slum politics is an elaboration of Chatterjee’s (2004) ideas on popular politics as a “politics of the governed.” Yet the article critiques the governmentality perspective for its inability to envisage a politics of hope and possibility. It distinguishes among slum politics, governmental politics (projects and programs), and electoral politics (voting), which are entwined and interdependent, but different. Zooming in on a community leader’s urban agriculture project, the article argues that this project, which from an outsiders’ perspective may be considered non-viable, provided slum dwellers with possibilities to strive for community solidarity and personal recognition. Slum politics, the article concludes, is about claiming the right to be counted and recognized, and about the care for the other.

The Assault on Democracy in Haiti: Jeb Sprague interviewed by David Zlutnick

A Review of Nigel Gibson’s 'Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo'

by Mbali Baduza

Glory to a book that expresses the need for a new humanity, one based on human relations and action: a humanism that puts people first. A book that expresses the need for self-determinism that is divorced from pre-determined, normative and misanthropic notions of what it means to be a human being of worth. Nigel Gibson’s Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo is such a book. A book so well written that the reader escapes their own reality and begins to imagine, or rather re-think the possibilities of freedom, when taking seriously “the quest for a new humanity requires fundamental change” (50).

In Memory of Dr. Neil Aggett

IN MEMORY OF DR NEIL AGGETT
A Memorial Lecture at Kingswood College Grahamstown 24 September 2012

We do well in our country to critically examine our history and the stories of our heroes and heroines. It is a story and history that at times we ought not to be proud of, and at others it is a story that has brought out the best in so many of our people. It has been a story of endurance and fortitude, of critical engagement and refusal to live by a false consciousness. Like in all societies history brings out light and shadows, and does not always explain adequately social phenomena and human conduct.

Review: From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’

by Catherine Cunningham 

In From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’, Michael Neocosmos traces the events which led up to the May 2008 xenophobic attacks in South Africa. In doing this, Neocosmos uncovers the manifold ways in which ‘citizenship’ has been defined, in South Africa, over time. For Neocosmos, despite the inclusive definition of citizenship which was made manifest throughout the liberation struggle, a more exclusive understanding has now become dominant. Such a conception of citizenship is not spontaneous, however, but is reinforced by discourses originating from multiple actors such as: government officials, the media, civil society and society at large. These discourses overlap and reinforce each other, culminating in what Neocosmos calls ‘a politics of fear’. It is this fear, rather than economic deprivation and an influx of foreigners, which helps to explain the events of 2008. In order to counter this widespread fear, Neocosmos suggests that we need to reaffirm an inclusive understanding of citizenship in order to transcend fundamentally oppressive categorisations.

Media freedom debacles aside, the press is failing us

by Julie Reid, The Daily Maverick

Let me be clear. There is a small collection of really courageous journalists and editors in this country who consistently and tenaciously produce outstanding work in their dogged pursuit of the truths that matter, and ferociously battle to keep the reading public informed, sometimes at great personal cost. This column is not about them.

This column is about the flip side: the much larger number of journalists and publications who are rubbish.

Bombay Land Grab

A family’s loss, a country’s painful past

by Sue Grant-Marshall, Business Day

NEIL Aggett, the trade unionist and medical doctor who was tortured to death in 1982 by the apartheid security police, the first white detainee to die at their hands, would not be riding on the gravy train today.

That is the emphatic opinion of his biographer, Beverley Naidoo, who has spent 15 years working on Death of an Idealist: In Search of Neil Aggett (Jonathan Ball).

Engels: The condition of the working class in England in 1844 and the housing question (1872) revisited; Their relevance for urban anthropology

Engels: The condition of the working class in England in 1844 and the housing question (1872) revisited; Th... by TigersEye99

Land is at the Heart of our Struggle

by Lindela 'Mashumi' Figlan, Abahlali baseMjondolo

Yes I have to be bold and proud to be a South African. But I’m not proud because our lovely country belongs to the wrong hands. Our struggle began with the question of land and land remains at the centre of our struggle today.

In the old days the people in this country were so united. Even those who were not interested in politics they ended up in politics. This unity came from the fact that they were crying for the land of their forefathers that had been confiscated by those who thought the land was supposed to be under their authority. The people's land had been stolen, fenced and sold.

Brecht Forum TV: Remembering Walter Rodney 40 Years After "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa"

Territories in Resistance

“Emancipation,” argues Raúl Zibechi, “is not an objective but a way of life.” For the last half century, new and emancipatory social formations have worked to carve out their own territories in Latin America, experimenting in rural and urban settings with new forms of liberatory politics that challenge neocolonialism, neoliberalism, and the very basis of the state itself. Not limited to a single path, these “societies in movement” have adopted forms of communitarian relations that allow experimentation and innovation to flourish at a riveting pace. Blending case studies and history with social theory and analysis, Zibechi opens our eyes to the new world being born just outside our gaze. With a foreword by Dawn Paley, and an epilogue that brings Zibechi into conversation with Michael Hardt and Alvaro Reyes on the continuing revolution of everyday life in Latin America.

Not all is well with Zuma's soul

by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

Last Sunday I attended a service at the Park Avenue Methodist Church in New York. The sermon, by the Reverend Cathy Gilliard, was based on the story of the orphaned Jewish girl Esther, who was chosen to be the queen of Persia. When the king's right-hand man devised a plot to kill all the Jewish people because Esther's uncle, Mordecai, refused to bow down to him, Esther continued to hide her identity. But Mordecai called on Esther to stop playing it safe and speak out on behalf of her people: "Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this."

Black Consciousness, Black Theology, Student Activism and the Shaping of the New South Africa

Abahlali’s Vocal Politics of Proximity: Speaking, Suffering and Political Subjectivization

by Anna Selmeczi, October 2012

Using as its point of departure the claim that today the urban is the main site for the abandonment of superfluous people, this article explores the emancipatory politics of the South African shack-dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo. Based on a notion of political subjectivization as the appropriation of excess freedom, I argue that Abahlali disrupt the order of the ‘world-class city’ when they expose the contradiction between the democratic inscriptions of equality and the lethal segmentation of the urban order. In articulating their living conditions as the unjustified breach of the promise of ‘a better life’, the shack-dwellers prove their equality and thus emerge as political subjects. As the article argues, at the centre of this process is a political practice of speaking and listening that is driven by the imperative to reverse the distancing and delaying practices of an order that abandons them by remaining physically, experientially and cognitively proximate to the experiences of life in the shantytown.

How should we at this moment in South Africa make use of contemporary theory?

by Mlamuli Hltatshwayo, 2012

The role of contemporary theory is significant in that it seeks to explain the present through various narratives and discourses. One can argue that the challenge for contemporary theory is to struggle with the current events in its attempt to make sense of them and also to provide a critically analysis of why the events are happening? How the events are happening? And why those particular events are happening at a specific time and space? Furthermore, one may also argue that it is also the role of contemporary theory to philosophically discuss, what Frantz Fanon referred to as the “new politics”, in not only critically analyzing current affairs and the status quo, but also attempting to provide alternative ideas and solutions concerning how to improve the current socio-economic status, at least philosophically (Fanon, 2001: 198). The role of contemporary theory with regard to South Africa is of paramount importance due to the colonial and apartheid history, whose repercussions are still largely being felt by the marginalized and disenfranchised. This means that South Africa as a state, which is rooted in the idea of reconciliation and “ubuntu” in 1994, could be said to have certain subalterns who are still trapped in economic apartheid in that they still don’t have basic service delivery, access to housing and cannot access government grants. Furthermore, one may argue that at this moment, contemporary theory is of significant relevance to South Africa due to the large number of political protests, gender based violence and the violent government reactions to organizations such as Abahlali baseMjondolo who choose to operate outside of the legitimate space of the state, and thus are perceived as a threat. Contemporary theory could be used as an instrument of discourse in not only analyzing current affairs and but also in providing possible solutions (albeit philosophical) to remedy the status quo.

A Review of Nigel Gibson's 'Fanonian Practices in South Africa'

by Joel Pearson

In this book, Nigel Gibson aims to examine how Fanon’s thoughts resonate with the philosophy of Steve Biko and the practices of social movements in post-apartheid South Africa against a backdrop of the incomplete transition from a system of racial oppression to one of continued class oppression. He seeks “not to recuperate the historical Fanon but to recreate Fanon’s philosophy of liberation in a new situation” (x-xi) – that of contemporary South Africa. Gibson finds in Fanon “not only a valuable critique of post-apartheid South Africa, but also a critique of, and a practical guide to, engaging the new movements that are emerging from below” (xi). He considers Fanon as a “theorist of action”, and action as a “product of philosophy” (xi), and speaks of how Fanon’s desire to invent new concepts is recreated in South Africa. Viewing “Fanon’s philosophy of liberation as actional and engaged, rather than detached and autonomous”, Gibson uses this philosophy “to amplify the voices of the new movements among the damned of the earth, and to challenge committed intellectuals (both inside and outside the movements) to search for, listen to, and develop new concepts” (5). These new concepts are crucial if we are to realise the emergence of a “new humanism” – one that can only emerge from an understanding of the “humanity and solidarity of the damned, who have been emptied of humanity and excluded from the human community” even after the end of apartheid and the ushering in of equal political rights (9).

Hope from the Margins

By Gustavo Esteva, Wealth of the Commons

These notes offer a quick glance to ways, in the south of Mexico, in which people are regenerating the society from the bottom up. It is a new kind of revolution without leaders or vanguards, which goes beyond development and globalization. It is about displacing the economy from the center of social life, reclaiming a communal way of being, encouraging radical pluralism, and advancing towards real democracy.

Marikana: A Point of Rupture?

by Ben Fogel, Insurgent Notes, 2012

A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity) and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them. These incessant and persistent efforts…form the terrain of the “conjunctural” and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organise.[1]

Confronting Empire

A very dedicated and honorable activist, Eqbal was right in the middle of everything.... -- Noam Chomsky, MIT

Eqbal was a teacher, a poet-analyst, a mentor to far more of us than he knew. -- Phyllis Bennis, Insitute for Policy Studies

For [those] who have missed Eqbal Ahmad in the year since he died, this book comes like rain during a drought. -- Radha Kumar, Council on Foreign Relations

These interviews provide a wonderfully focused, yet wide-ranging compendium of Eqbal Ahmad's worldview.... -- Richard Falk, Princeton University

We have here the ideal combination for a dazzling intellectual encounter thoughtful questions by a superb interviewer... -- Howard Zinn, Boston University

Silences on the Suppression of Workers Self-Emancipation: Historical Problems with CLR James's Interpretation of V.I. Lenin

by Mathew Quest, Insurgent Notes, 2012

CLR James (1901–1989), native of Trinidad, was perhaps the most libertarian revolutionary socialist intellectual of both the Pan African and international labor movements. Best known as the author of the classic history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, he also became famous for mentoring anti-colonial intellectuals and post-colonial statesmen such as Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and Trinidad's Eric Williams. Far less understood was James's creative advocacy of direct democracy and workers self-management as found in his analysis of the Age of the CIO, Classical Athens, and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Yet undermining our understanding of the contours and absence of popular self-management as a framework for James's visions of the African World and Third World is the lack of a proper assessment of how he understood V.I. Lenin and the Russian Revolution. This selection from a forthcoming larger work will attempt to examine this dilemma by uncovering silences and dilemmas for how James understood Lenin.

Here to work: the socioeconomic characteristics of informal dwellers in post-apartheid South Africa

by Mark Hunter & Dorrit Posel, 2012

Government policy towards informal settlements in South Africa reflects a tension between two approaches: recognizing the legitimacy of informal settlements and aggressively removing these so-called “slums”. Drawing on nationally representative household survey data and interviews with 25 individuals relocated from an informal settlement to a “transit camp”, this paper argues that more detailed attention should be paid to the changing connection between housing, household formation and work. Whereas cities in the apartheid era were marked by relatively stable industrial labour and racially segregated family housing, today the location and nature of informal dwellings are consistent with two important trends: demographic shifts, including towards smaller more numerous households, and employment shifts, including a move from permanent to casual and from formal to informal work. This study is therefore able to substantiate in more detail a longstanding insistence by informal settlement residents that they live where they do for reasons vital to their everyday survival. The paper also highlights the limitations of relocations not only to urban peripheries but also to other parts of cities, and it underscoresthe importance of upgrading informal settlements through in situ development.

Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia

by Jeffery Webber, 2011

Bolivia witnessed a left-indigenous insurrectionary cycle between 2000 and 2005 that overthrew two neoliberal presidents and laid the foundation for Evo Morales’ successful bid to become the country’s first indigenous head of state in 2006. Building on the theoretical traditions of revolutionary Marxism and indigenous liberation, this book provides an analytical framework for understanding the fine-grained sociological and political nuances of twenty-first century Bolivian class-struggle, state-repression, and indigenous resistance, as well the deeply historical roots of today’s oppositional traditions. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, including more than 80 in-depth interviews with social-movement and trade-union activists, Red October is a ground-breaking intervention in the study of contemporary Bolivia and the wider Latin American turn to the left over the last decade.

How should we at this moment in South Africa make use of contemporary theory?

by Nthabiseng Modjadji, 2012

Contemporary theory can be used at this moment to properly explain how a country like South Africa which presents a picture of a rainbow nation, full of possibility, where democracy seems to be working is actually a xenophobic, corrupt, often violently authoritarian, poverty stricken society were majority of the people feel a sense of betrayal in terms of the dream that was sold to them as to the kind of society South Africa would become post-Apartheid. This essay will look at the firstly the issue of land in South Africa which has sparked a lot of unrest and has often been incorrectly labeled as being an issue of service delivery when it is actually a political problem. Also looking at the role of civil society in further marginalizing the masses and the manner in which people have been separated from politics though engaging with them as populations and not as citizens.  Politics in South Africa has become technocratic, everything is about how much the government can provide, not how much people can influence government and exercise real political power and lastly the essay will engage with Lewis Gordon’s argument about how people are turned into problems which he draws off Frantz Fanon’s idea of the lived experience of oppression.

What would be required of a theoretical practice for it to be premised on a genuine commitment to universal equality?

by Michelle Morgan, 2012

This essay serves to discuss what would be required of a theoretical practice for it to be premised on a genuine commitment to universal equality. I will argue, in line with Jacques Ranciere (2006), that for this to be achieved a theoretical practice has to start from the point of equality, a genuine equality in which each and every human being is respected in being able to think and act for themselves. The point of departure of this theoretical practice has to be equality of every human being, equality of intelligence and status. Therefore, such a principled theory would have to form part of an emancipatory political project, which arguably can only be realised though a genuine commitment to universal equality. Furthermore, for this equality to be truly universal it has to be part of a dialectical approach which is premised in theory that is specific as opposed to singular.

Representative Democracy as a Farce

by Antonio Folgore, 2012

1. Introduction

In the contemporary era, parliamentary democracy or representative democracy rules the political stage. After 1989 and the end of Cold War, the United States was able to implement its agenda uninterrupted. As a result, representative democracy began to spread globally, under the ever-watchful eye of the United States and its allies. The result is that democracy in today’s world is more oligarchy, and it will be argued that this form of rule removes the political out of the public realm and into the private. Using Jacques Ranciere as a foundation, it will be shown that contemporary parliamentary democracy is a farce in the context of ‘rule by the people’. This analysis will then be applied to both historic and contemporary examples, using Alain Badiou’s work on the Paris Commune as well as the recent mining massacre at the Lomnin Platinum mines at Marikana. The final conclusion will argue that parliamentary democracy does not automatically represent the will of the people, but rather it oppresses them, giving them a false sense of freedom under the mask of representation.

Stathis Kouvelakis: Marx's Critique of the Political: From the Revolutions of 1848 to the Paris Commune

Kouvelakis, Stathis - Marx's Critique of the Political

Governing Post Apartheid Spatiality: Implementing City Improvement Districts in Cape Town

by Faranak Miraftab, Antipode, 2007

To achieve a world-class city capable of attracting business in a competitive global

market, the municipal government of Cape Town, South Africa, like many cities of the global North, has adopted a model of urban revitalization popularized by New York City: business or city improvement districts (BIDs or CIDs). By examining CIDs in city center Cape Town, the paper casts light on the socio-spatial relationship facilitating the neoliberal post-apartheid regime and its governance. Analyzing discursive and spatial practices of Cape Town Partnership, the managing body of downtown CIDs, from 2000 to 2006, the paper reveals its difficulties in stabilizing the socio-spatial relations of a transnationalizing urban revitalization strategy and rejects the view of CIDS as simply a global roll-out of neoliberal urban policies. It highlights how CIDs are challenged from both within and outside of their managing structures by contentious local issues, and in particular by vast social inequalities and citizens’ historical struggle for inclusive citizenship and the right to the city. Whether and how CIDs’ inherent limitations can be overcome to address socio-spatial inequalities is an open question.

Does parliamentary democracy automatically represent the will of the people?

by Joshua Rorke, 2012

Parliamentary, or representative, democracy has long been held as the best way to represent the will of the people and conduct democracy. Citizens of a country vote in free and fair elections for the political party that they most agreed with or best represents their political beliefs. After the elections, the most popular party carries out the will of the majority of people. If the party fails in correctly carrying out the will of the people, the citizens vote them out of power in the next election cycle, and install a more suitable party. This essay, however, disagrees with this pluralistic view of electoral politics. This essay will argue that states no longer derive their legitimacy through representing the will of the people, but rather through delivering services to the people and so they are not concerned with carrying out the will of the people. This idea draws on Trouillot’s critique of ontological categorisation in which certain people, usually of the lower classes, are not seen to have the same capacity for rational thought and agency. Those who are seen to have the capacity, generally the political elites, then formulate policies to deliver services to the passive populations and the rise of technocratic rule takes place.

Contemporary Social Theory 2010

Contemporary Social Theory

Sociology III

Department of Sociology

Rhodes University

Fourth Term 2012

This year there is a special Contemporary Social Theory course to mark the visit to the Department of Sociology of Professor John Holloway during the fourth term.

The course focuses on specific theorists, as follows:

Week 1: Partha Chatterjee (by K Helliker)

Weeks 2 & 3: John Holloway

Week 4: Alain Badiou (by Michael Neocosmos, UNISA)

Week 5: Samir Amin (by T Alexander)

Week 6: Jacques Ranciere (by R Pithouse, Politics Department).

A response to Lewis Gordon's 'Fanon & the Crisis of European Man'

by Mbali Baduza, 2012

Introduction:

In reading Gordon’s Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences, I found myself asking why Gordon felt that he had to write this book. What was he trying to do? The answer can be found quite early on in the book when he says, and I quote at length, that:

“This is not a study on Fanon so much as it is an opportunity for an engagement with Fanon... I here regard Fanon as a locus of many pressing questions in contemporary philosophy –particularly in philosophy of human science. Regarding Fanon as an opportunity, I regard myself as working within the spirit of his way of seeing the world... since Fanon respected most of those who have the courage to state what they believe. I believe Fanon was a great philosopher and that his ideas continue to be of great value to other philosophers, cultural critics, human scientists, and laypeople alike”. 

(1995: 2, my emphasis)

Constructing Mutuality: The Zapatistas’ Transformation of Transnational Activist Power Dynamics

by Abigail Andrews, 2010

This article examines the evolution of transnational Zapatista solidarity networks. Although scholars have described an emerging “mutuality” between the Zapatista movement and its allies at the level of international framing, this article considers how the Zapatistas forged this mutuality on the ground, through active redefinition of alliances with Northern supporters. It argues that the Zapatistas delimited who was included in their solidarity networks, set new terms for partnerships, and redefined legitimacy in their transnational alliances. In so doing, they asserted their autonomy from donors. They also fostered discourses and practices of mutual solidarity and Southern leadership, shifting the balance of power between North and South. The case both illuminates the possibilities for Southern movements to challenge Northern control from within and suggests potential pitfalls of doing so; by defying Northern NGOs’ influence, the Zapatistas may have risked their long-term viability.

Lineages of Freedom Catalytic Project

The Humanities Faculty at Rhodes University and SAHUDA (South African

Humanities Deans' Association) invite you to attend the following: 

LINEAGES OF FREEDOM LUNCH TIME LECTURES 15-19 OCTOBER 2012
Venue:  Eden Grove Blue 
Time: 13h05
Discussant for all talks:  Nomalanga Mkhize

The idea behind these dialogues is to trace our various trajectories of
liberation and repression and to reflect critically on our past as well as
our present.  The intention is to highlight the ongoing problems confronted
by a post-apartheid South Africa.  It is clear to all that formal apartheid
is dead.  Yet, in very many ways, apartheid continues to linger on in all
spheres of our body politic.  Hence, the proposed three sets of events will
subject to critical scrutiny the contemporary relevance of the questions
about change and building a new society which animated the struggle against
apartheid.  

Chris Nicholson's Talk at the Durban Launch of 'Death of Idealist: In Search of Neil Aggett'

It is indeed a great privilege and honour to be asked to speak at the Durban launch of Beverley Naidoo’s book on Neil Aggett.  It is also somewhat eerie to realize that Neil was born on my elder brother’s birthday and died on mine. Not being into astrology, I will leave that as coincidence.

I intend to be brief and understand my mandate to be an assessment of the book. I will leave the details of the life of Neil to the author and my assessment of the quality of her work means that you are in very good hands.

The short answer to the question of the quality of this book is that it is a magnificent testament to a life and the quality of its writing measures up to this portrayal. The book is a serious academic work of 432 pages and has copious end-notes and a detailed index.

On the Third Force

by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

The National Union of Mineworkers has informed us that workers organising their own strikes are being covertly 'manipulated' and their strikes and protests 'orchestrated' by 'dark forces' and other 'elements' that amount, of course, to another manifestation of the infamous 'third force'. 'Backward' and even 'sinister' beliefs in magic consequent to the rural origin of many of the workers are, we've been told by an array of elite actors, including the Communist Party, central to this manipulation. Frans Baleni, horrified at the insurgent power of self-organisation, has not just informed us that his union is trying to “narrow the demands” and persuade workers to “return to work”. He has also called for “the real force behind the upheavals” to be “unearthed” by the state on the grounds that “It is completely untrue [that] the workers are responsible” for the ongoing revolt.

The Road to Marikana: Abuses of Force During Public Order Policing Operations

by David Bruce, SACSIS

During apartheid some of the most notorious instances of police brutality were the killings of demonstrators involved in peaceful protests. It therefore made sense that one of the issues that received concerted attention during the police reform process of the 1990s was public order policing.

An important initial step in this regard was the introduction of new legislation. The Regulation of Gatherings Act, in fact, came into force in January 1994 prior to the formal transition to democracy. A special Standing Order ‘on crowd management during gatherings and demonstrations’ was eventually also adopted by the South African Police Service (SAPS) in 2002. These documents were intended to entrench a policy framework in terms of which the primary role of public order police was to support the right of members of the public to assemble and demonstrate.

Marikana prequel: NUM and the murders that started it all

by Jared Sacks, The Daily Maverick

Because the Marikana Massacre marked a turning point in the history of our country, I went to the small mining town in the North West. I wanted to know what truly happened and what it meant for the future of our so-called democracy. I hoped my trip would enable me to answer some of the burning questions left obfuscated by media, government and civil society campaigns alike.

Ousmane Sembene - Interviews

• Introduction 
• You Look at Us as If We Were Insects (1965)
• For Me, the Cinema Is an Instrument of Political Action, But ... (1969)
• We Are Governed in Black Africa by Colonialism’s Disabled Children (1971)
• Filmmakers Have a Great Responsibility to Our People (1972)
• Ousmane Sembène Interviewed in Munich (1972)
• Ousmane Sembène: An Interview (1972)
• African Cinema Is Not a Cinema of Folklore (1973)
• Interview with Ousmane Sembène (1975)
• Interview with Ousmane Sembène (1976)
• Sembène Ousmane in Kinshasa (1977)
• Interview with Ousmane Sembène (1978)
• In the Name of Tolerance: A Meeting with Ousmane Sembène (1979)
• Samori: The Last Grand Oeuvre of Sembène Ousmane (1986)

A response to 'A Dying Colonialism: Transformation and the Algerian Revolution'

by Sarita Pillay

It is 1959. The fifth year of the Algerian Revolution. The fifth year of what others would rather call the Algerian War – perhaps as a means to detract from the gravity of the event. This is a Revolution. This is a mass struggle by a people who will not settle for anything less than a new society. This is a tug-of-war between the defenders of a colonial outpost and the Algerian people who say, “no more”.

We are Fighting for Our Land - Durban, 2012

John Berger: Directions in Hell

John Berger: Directions in Hell by TigersEye99

Are Those-Who-Do-Not-Count Capable of Reason? Thinking Political Subjectivity in the (Neo-)Colonial World and the Limits of History

By Michael Neocosmos, 2012

This article is concerned to show that the historical science of the (neo-)colonial world is unable to allow
for an analysis of the political subjectivities of ‘those-who-do-not-count’ or ‘subalterns’ as rational beings.
Rather, it can only think such subjectivities as the products of people who are merely bearers of their social
location, not thinking subjects. As a result, such history can only be a history of place, not a history of the
transcending of place; it therefore amounts to colonial or state history. Historical objectivity invariably
produces state history. The thought of the possibility of emancipatory politics, which always exceeds place,
is thus precluded. This is an unavoidable epistemic problem in history and the social sciences in their current
form. Following the work of Lazarus, I argue for an alternative historical methodology in Africa in terms of
an internal analysis of the idioms of politics as discontinuous subjective sequences.

The Idea of 1804

Nesbitt Nick 2005 the Idea of 1804 by felix_fuhg

Cato Manor, June 1959: Men, Women, Crowds, Politics and History

by Iain Edwards

The militant crowd challenging existing social order is no novelty in Durban. Crowds have often been responsible for forceful interventions in city politics.

Frantz Fanon and the Subject of Emancipation

The Institute for Comparative Modernities, Cornell University

Frantz Fanon is one of the very few thinkers to have risked something that resembles a theory of decolonization. The European game having finally ended, at least so he thought, he argued in The Wretched of the Earth that “we today can do everything.” In this lecture Mbembe will reflect on the dialectics of the end/closure and boundless possibility evoked by Fanon and the ways it is played out under contemporary conditions. Mbembe will also assess the place contemporary struggles for emancipation assign to the key Fanonian concepts of time, creation and reconstitution and the extent to which they truly transcend the “law of repetition,” which he foresaw as the biggest threat to newness.

Achille Mbembe is a Research Professor in History and Politics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (South Africa), and a Visiting Professor in the Romance Studies Department and The Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. For ten years a contributing editor for the US-based journal Public Culture, he is also a Senior Researcher at the Witwatersrand Institute of Social and Economic Research (WISER). He is the author of numerous books in French. He is mostly known in the English-speaking world for his classic, On the Postcolony. His latest book, Sortir de la grande nuit (Editions La Decouverte, Paris, 2010), will be published in 2013 by Columbia University Press. 

John Locke: The Philosopher of Primitive Accumlation

by George Caffentzis, Bristol Radical History Group, 2008

John Locke is the most famous philosopher born and raised in the vicinity of Bristol. He born in Wrington, Somerset about 12 miles from Bristol on August 29, 1632 and he was brought up in the market town of Pensford, about seven miles south of Bristol.

Locke is also not only the main intellectual founder of liberalism, but also of neoliberalism, the “ruling idea” of the ruling class of today.

An Interview with Alice Walker: “Go to the Places That Scare You”

Alice Walker interviewed by Valerie Schloredt, Toward Freedom

Alice Walker is a poet, essayist, and commentator, but she’s best known for her prodigious accomplishments as a writer of literary fiction. Her novel The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1983 and quickly became a classic of world literature. Set in an African-American community in the rural South during the decades before World War II, the novel is told in letters written by Celie, a woman who survives oppression and abuse with her spirit not only intact, but transcendent. 

Walker’s writing is characterized by an ever-present awareness of injustice and inequality. But whether describing political struggle—as in Meridian, which deals with the civil rights movement—or meditating on the human relationship to nature and animals, as in her latest book, The Chicken Chronicles, her work conveys the possibility of change. In Walker’s vision, grace is available through love and a deep connection to the beauty of the world.

LGBT Activists Disrupt Jo'burg Gay Pride 2012

The Dignity of Resistance: Women Residents’ Activism in Chicago Public Housing

by Roberta Feldman & Susan Stall, 2004

The Dignity of Resistance  chronicles the four decade history of Chicago's Wentworth Gardens public housing residents' grassroots activism. This comprehensive case study explores why and how these African-American women creatively and effectively engaged in organizing efforts to resist increasing government disinvestment in public housing and the threat of demolition. Roberta M. Feldman and Susan Stall, utilizing a multi-disciplinary lens, explore the complexity and resourcefulness of Wentworth women's grassroots, organizing the ways in which their identities as poor African-American women and mothers both circumscribe their lives and shape their resistance. 

Through the inspirational voices of the activists, Feldman and Stall challenge portrayals of public housing residents as passive, alienated victims of despair. We learn instead how women residents collectively have built a cohesive, vital community, cultivated outside technical assistance, organizational and institutional supports, and have attracted funding - all to support the local facilities, services and programs necessary for the everyday needs for survival, and ultimately to save their home from demolition.

Marikana and the problem of pack journalism

Jane Duncan

by Jane Duncan, SABC

The televised images of armed miners rushing towards the police in Marikana on the 16th August, and the police opening fire on the miners, will haunt South Africans for many years to come. 

Reporting from behind the police line in relative safety, journalists presented to the world images that on the surface of things vindicated the police’s view of events, namely that they shot in self-defence.But subsequent academic, journalistic and eyewitness accounts have called this narrative into question, with evidence having emerged of a second ‘kill site’ where miners were allegedly killed in a far more premeditated fashion by the police. 

Paramilitarism and the assault on democracy in Haiti

Belen Fernandez,  Al Jazeera

In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti, certain media outlets painted a picture of a country overrun by looters and at the mercy of gang members and other criminals, including thousands of prisoners jolted free by the quake. 

Relevant details were ignored, such as the contention by prominent Haitian human rights attorney Mario Joseph that 80 per cent of said prisoners had never been charged. The media effort perhaps aided in rendering less incongruous in the eyes of the international public the deployment of a sizeable US military force to deal with quake-affected people who did not seemingly require military attention. 

KPFA Radio Interview by Walter Turner with Richard Pithouse & Ayanda Kota on Marikana

Africa Today - October 1, 2012 at 7:00pm

Click to listen (or download)

We are the Crisis of Capital and Proud of It: A Public Lecture by John Holloway 15 October 2012

Hosting the World

by Chris McMichael, 2012

Using the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa as a case study, this paper will explore how security measures for sports mega-events have been steadily militarized with policing operations comparable to war planning. It will be argued that this is representative of the ‘new military urbanism’ in which everyday urban life is rendered as a site of ubiquitous risk leading to the increased diffusion of military tactics and doctrines in policing and policy.

While the interpenetration between urbanism and militarism has often been studied

against the context of the War on Terror, the paper will argue that in the case of South Africa this has primarily been accelerated by a pervasive social fear of violent crime, which has resulted in the securitization of cities, the remilitarization of policing and the intensification of a historical legacy of socio-spatial inequalities. The South African government used the World Cup to ‘rebrand’ the country’s violent international image, while promising that security measures would leave a legacy of safer cities for ordinary South Africans. However, using military urbanism as a conceptual backdrop, the case studies presented in the second part of the paper argue that policing measures were primarily cosmetic and designed to allay the fears of foreign tourists and the national middle class. In practice, security measures pivoted around the enforcement of social control and urban marginalization while serving as a training ground for an increasingly repressive state security apparatus. The paper will conclude with a discussion of how the global crossover between militarism and urbanism threatens to stimulate and rehabilitate deeply entrenched authoritarian tendencies in South Africa.

Democratic Republic of Congo: From Destructive to Healing Politics - A Public lecture by Jacques Depelchin - 11 October 2012

Charles Mills - Liberalism and Racial Justice