The
Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University (UHURU) will host one of South
Africa’s most potent contributors to the analysis of modern politics, Prof
Achille Mbembe. He will be delivering a public lecture on Wednesday (6 August
2014) entitled: "Non-racialism and the New Native Question in South
Africa"
“Prof
Mbembe is one of the few intellectuals in South Africa who is deeply familiar
with modern social theory and philosophy, particularly with what is termed
‘continental philosophy’. He was
educated in France and publishes regularly in that country,” said the Director
of UHURU, Prof Michael Neocosmos.
“Moreover
he is precisely concerned with Africa, not as the place of ‘the other’, but as
our own place with all its problems and all its extraordinary history and
people. Who better to begin the new term
under the auspices of UHURU?,” he added.
Prof
Neocosmos said that “the problem of race cannot simply be ignored in this
country and it cannot be assumed that it will vanish of its own accord simply
because we now have a black government.
It needs to be discussed openly”.
“Racism
in academia in particular is deeply rooted, not least because Western
liberalism - from which most academics derive their thinking - sees itself as
an island of civilization and moderation in a sea of philistine barbarism and
extremism. This is as much the case in South Africa as it is elsewhere,” he
added.
“The
idea of ‘non-racialism’ invented by the Black Consciousness movement was
central to South African nationalist politics during the popular liberation
struggle of the 1980s. The ‘Native
Question’ was the term used by the colonial state in Africa when it thought
about how to ‘control the restless natives’.
It did this by encouraging tribal divisions, in other words by underlining
what we call ‘ethnic identities’ and solidarities today. Ethnic divisions are growing in South
Africa,” he says.
Writing
in the Mail and Guardian weekly newspaper recently, Prof Mbembe argued that:
“Born out of the crucible of the struggle against apartheid, the idea of
nonracialism is arguably one of South Africa’s most potent contributions to
modern political thought and practice.”
“At
its most utopian, nonracialism gestures towards a future when the structures of
racism will be dismantled and all forms of racial injury and trauma will be
healed.”
He
argued that race as a category of political organisation and an index of social
identification will become irrelevant. The distribution of the means of life
and survival will be made on a basis other than mere claims of descent.
“The
utopian ideal of a world free of the burden of race has powered the struggles
of the oppressed since the advent of the modern age. It gave meaning and
purpose to the campaigns for the abolition of slavery in the 19th century. It
was central to the decolonisation struggle, the Civil Rights movement in the
United States, and some of the radical attempts to change the world in the 20th
century.”
He
argued that, “as racism has kept mutating, though, so have forms of intersections
between race, class and gender. Although local in its manifestations, racism
has always been a global phenomenon and part of its persistence is a result of
its globalisation. Furthermore, the force of racism in our world stems from its
capacity to mutate and to reappear constantly in ever-changing forms in the
most unexpected sites of everyday life.”
According
to Prof Mbembe, “the weakness of most antiracist struggles is the result of our
inability to keep up with the mutating structures of racism and their
virulence. As racism worldwide takes on a genomic turn and is now propelled by
the war on terror, various anti-migratory policies, the resurgence of
compensatory forms of nationalism and mass incarceration, South Africa is
caught between various contradictory processes.”
UHURU
aims to create a forum for intellectual reflection and debate on thinking
political emancipation on the African continent in general and in South Africa
in particular.
“This
requires a sophisticated grasp of theory in the humanities and social sciences
as well as a clear understanding that South Africa is located on the African
continent and is not some island floating in mid-Atlantic. Unfortunately South
African universities are not generally renowned for their theoretical
initiatives,” said Prof Neocosmos.
“Broadly
speaking South African academics have been content to simply derive their
theoretical perspectives from the British or American academy. It seems to us at UHURU that Prof Mbembe is
not only one of the main public intellectuals in this country, but also that
his work is characterized by theoretical sophistication and original thought,
as well as by a desire to locate the thinking of South Africa and all its
problems within the African continent," he added.
