Frantz Fanon: A Portrait

reviewed by Fezokuhle Mthonti 

Alice Cherki’s Frantz Fanon: A Portrait is a rich biographical account of the events that shaped Fanon’s trajectory as a key psychological and political thinker in Post-Colonial and Critical Humanist thought.  The book is a  nuanced account of how Fanon himself was a “yes that vibrated to cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, pursued, baffled, doomed to watch the dissolution of truths that he had worked out for himself.” (1986:2) It is an attempt to humanise the thinker that we have come to know as Fanon through a truly Fanonian praxis of recognition, a kind of strategic historicism, and an attempt to reconcile a particular subjectivity with the universal.

A revolution’s dreams betrayed

Protests are rooted in the frustration and despair of poverty and rage at an uncaring government, writes Malaika wa Azania. The Sunday Independent

 In his poignant masterpiece Harlem, renowned poet Langston Hughes reflects on the nervous conditions of African-Americans whose dream of emancipation from the draconian laws of racial segregation has been aborted in the inter-city ghettos that are concentration camps.

There, levels of poverty, destitution and unemployment are soaring and drugs and alcohol serve as escape routes from the unbearable heaviness of tortured existence.

Hughes asks:

“What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore – and then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over – like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?”

Empty promises to rural people

The land restitution bill is not the game-changer that President Zuma promised, write Nomboniso Gasa and Nolundi Luwaya. Sunday Independent

The Land Restitution Bill approved by the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) on Thursday may raise a cheer from traditional leaders, but it is not the game-changer that President Jacob Zuma promised in his State of the Nation address last year.

Zuma and his Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform, Gugile Nkwinti, punted the bill as a second chance for the Khoi, San and Africans who were dispossessed before the notorious 1913 Natives Land Act redesigned the South African landscape.

Reflections after 'Frantz Fanon: A Portrait', by Alice Cherki

 by Paddy O'Halloran

          Biographers are set a difficult task in Frantz Fanon.  Apart from recounting the narrative of the subject’s life and situating him or her within a history, a biographer—at least, a good one—will lend meaning to the subject’s life, or, better yet, will elucidate for the reader the meanings which the subject ascribed to his or her life by action and consequence.  Gleaning the importance from Fanon’s life, a life which, despite its brevity, was brimming with meaning, proves a trying adventure. 

Review of Alice Cherki’s 'Frantz Fanon: A Portrait'

Jonis Ghedi Alasow        

Alice Cherki’s 2006 biography of Frantz Fanon, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, offers an interesting and insightful understanding of the man who has had a tremendous impact on the way in which the postcolonial situation is understood today. In her book Cherki traces the trajectory of Fanon’s life from his youth in Martinique to his untimely death in 1961. She also provides an interesting and personal window into the development of Fanon’s political thought. The remainder of this essay will pay particular attention to this development of intellectual and political thought in Frantz Fanon. Though the trajectory of Fanon’s life will be mentioned in this essay, the primary focus will be with the ideas of Frantz Fanon which are highlighted by Cherki.

Taking Politics beyond the Factory Seriously

by Richard Pithouse, Amandla Magazine

Numsa's resolve to break with both the ANC and the authority that the SACP has tried to exert over the union movement carries the potential for a real political opening. The union's commitment to work with other struggles, including community struggles, in a broad united front offers the prospect of these struggles, often isolated in organisational terms, attaining a greater degree of collective coherence and power.

Trade unions, like any other form of organisation including community organisations, social movements and political parties can become overly bureaucratic, reliant on charismatic individuals or corrupt. They can make strategic misjudgements, they can chose to integrate themselves into social institutions and arrangements that reproduce domination and exclusion and they can be captured by elites for their own purposes. In South Africa a number of unions, most notoriously NUM, have not only become bureaucratised and integrated into various kinds of elite power, including capital in the case of NUM, but have also degenerated to the point where there is a vast social distance between union bosses and ordinary workers. But, especially when they remain democratic, unions can be hugely important mechanisms for workers to advance their power and interests against that of capital.

Liberalism: A Counter-History

In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery.

Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieyès, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today’s politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.

Raj Patel Speaks in Grahamstown - 5:00 p.m., 31 March 2014

Book Launch: A Renegade Called Simphiwe

Requiem for a dream: On loving and leaving the ANC

Sisonke Msimang, The Daily Maverick

It could all be so simple/but you’d rather make it hard/ see loving you is like a battle/ and we both end up with scars/ tell me who I have to be/ to get some reciprocity/ see no one loves me more than you/ and no one ever will.

When I came home almost exactly eighteen years ago, this song played a constant loop in my head. I put it on when I got up in the morning, I brushed my teeth to it, I pressed play in my car and it came on, I got to work and played it in my headphones as I clicked away at my computer. I fell asleep to it each night. I lived in a fog, wrapped in a delicate blanket of misery, and this song was my soundtrack.

Makana Municipality Bans another March

Tuesday, 18 March 2014

Unemployed People's Movement Press Statement

Makana Municipality Bans another March

Municipalities around the country are banning marches and supressing the right to protest. The Makana Municipality in Grahamstown is one of the worst offenders.

The year before last they illegally banned one of our marches on the grounds that one of our comrades was on a list provided by intelligence of people who are not allowed to address public gatherings unless the riot police are present. We had to go to court to march and when we did march riot police came from all over the Eastern Cape to monitor our comrade.

Suttner's View: How do we stop the violence that is all around us?

A reflection of C.L.R James’ Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

Ntombizikhona Valela

C.L.R James' The Black Jacobins documents the events leading to the Haitian Revolution and the revolution itself. In the Prologue of this book, James explains that one of his intentions of writing about this history is to not only point out the fact that African slaves could organize in the same way that the Americans and French did for their revolutions, but that this book would hopefully serve as a blueprint for African countries that were at the brink of independence from colonization. Through the story of Toussaint L'Ouverture, potential African leaders would draw some sort of ''inspiration'' to the kind of leadership that is required to get an independent state on its feet. In light of the time in which James as writing I would say that this book is a way of getting its reader to be hopeful about the where Africa could be after the post-colonial moment if quality leadership and political will are put to good use.

First Annual Neil Aggett Labour Studies Lecture: Beverley Naidoo

Launch of the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit

Bravo Estela

Nelson Mandela & Fidel Castro

Vashna Jagarnath, The Con

Living in Grahamstown, a small settler town that began its life as a fort on the colonial frontier, is often hard work.

On most days it seems that the spirit of John Graham, the British soldier sent to drive the Xhosa across the Fish River in 1811, would feel more at home in this town today than that of Makhanda Nxele, who, seven years later in 1818, led an attack on the colonial fort.

But here and there daily life throws up sometimes surprising moments of inspiration. And every now and then we are richly indulged by visits from remarkable people.

In recent years Tariq Ali, Jacques Depelchin, Lewis Gordon, Silvia Federici, Nomboniso Gasa, John Holloway, Achille Mbembe, VY Mudimbe and Raymond Suttner have all shared their gifts and strength with us.

No to Police Brutality! No to Attacks on the Right to Protest!

Life & Legacies of Stuart Hall - WITS, 10 April 2014

Anti-Colonialism and Alienation: Reading Marx in Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism

by Paddy O'Halloran

In reading anti-colonial literature of the mid-Twentieth century, it becomes apparent that there was a close relationship between anti-colonialism and socialism-communism; one that was both practical and ideological.  Why did anti-colonialists draw so much on these political ideologies, and why were so many anti-colonialists also socialists or communists?  One answer would explain the relationship as a matter of strategy: In the 1950s and 60s, the governments of the imperial metropoles were in direct antagonism with a communist superpower, which made political association with the Soviet Union attractive for anti-colonial political parties, movements, and armies; and support for these groups, in Cold War logic, could benefit the Soviet Union by destabilizing and dismantling the Western empires.  However, that answer seems superficial.  In developing a deeper understanding of the relationship between anti-colonialism and communism, the writing of Aimé Césaire proves useful. 

Fezokuhle Mthonti on 'Discourse on Colonialism'

“My mouth shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth,

my voice the freedom of those who break down

in the prison holes of despair.”

-Aimè Cèsaire. A Return to My Native Land?

Above, is an excerpt from Aimè Cèsaire’s book entitled A Return to My Native Land? The reason why I have chosen to lead with this excerpt is because I feel that Cèsaire is able to grapple with all the themes and the ideas of a Discourse on Colonialism here in a prosaic and  uncomplicated way; which to me not only signals the kinds of politics that he is interested in within this pamphlet on colonialism, but also how freedoms can become visible and available when we inscribe art into forms of resistance.

12 Years a Slave: A view from the Other South

Litheko Modisane, Africa is a Country

A grossly detestable subjection of one human being by another, slavery was a structural guarantor of white control of blacks in the Americas. It was to whites in that part of the world and other parts of the world including the Cape Colony in South Africa, what colonial subjugation and apartheid would later be to whites in the rest of Africa. There is no longer slavery in the Americas. However, white supremacy is still around, not only in the United States but also in many recently colonized societies. On what structural ropes then does white supremacy hang today? Even then, does it still need an institutional apparatus of dominance for its continuity?

Fezokuhle Mthonti on 'The Black Jacobins'

Fezokuhle Mthonti, March 2014

C.L.R James’s book entitled The Black Jacobins is perhaps the most comprehensive thesis on the complex political moves and motivations that led to the Haitian Revolution. Apart from providing a detailed description and/or narration of how and why the events that led to and sustained the liberation of Saint Domingue were so violent and so prolonged, I would argue that James was particularly interested in humanizing the subjects that led to this revolution within this text. In trying to engage meaningfully with this text I would like to specifically look at how James was able to carry out what perhaps may have been the secondary aim of this  book; which I believe was to humanise and subsequently give context to  some of the actors in this revolution.

A Week of Events in Solidarity with Palestine

MONDAY 10TH MARCH: EVENING MOVIE SCREENING - LEMON TREE, EDEN GROVE SEMINAR ROOM, 18:30 

About the Film:  LEMON TREE is a 2008 Israeli drama film directed by Eran Riklis and co-directed by his cousin Ira Riklis. The film describes the legal efforts of a Palestinian widow to stop the Israeli Defense Minister, her next door neighbor, from destroying the lemon trees in her family farm. At the same time, she develops a human bond with the minister's wife.  It was released in Israel on 27 March 2008, and it received a tepid response from Israeli audiences. It was released internationally through IFC Films on 17 April 2009. From there, the film has achieved critical success and it has received nominations for several awards such as 'Best Actress' and 'Best Screenwriter' at the EUROPEAN FILM AWARDS

bell hooks: Homeplace - A Site of Resistance

bell hooks: homeplace - a site of resistance by TigersEye99

Angela Davis on Prison Abolition, the War on Drugs and Why Social Movements Shouldn’t Wait on Obama

Lewis Gordon - "Living Thought, Living Freedom: A Lecture in Black Existential Philosophy"

Estelle Freedman: Redefining Rape

Freedom, Race & Social Cohesion

FREEDOM, RACE AND SOCIAL COHESION

SENATE HALL, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AFRICA, 4 MARCH 2014

08:30 – 10:30   SESSION ONE

SPEAKERS:             Michael Neocosmos, Rhodes University

Richard Pithouse, Rhodes University

Issa Shivji (Mwalimu Nyerere Chair UDSM, Tanzania)

10:30 – 11:00      Tea

11:00 – 13:00   SESSION TWO

SPEAKERS:             Achille Mbembe, WISER, Wits

Suren Pillay UWC

13:00 – 13:45      Lunch