So Over The Rainbow, Rugby & Reconciliation

By Fezokuhle Mthonti and Ntombizikhona Valela, The Con\

There is a popular refrain that can be heard in the recent student movements across the country: “Sixole kanjani?” It is an invocation of words that were said all too often by black people during apartheid. “How can we possibly forgive this?” “How can we possibly move past this point?” Except this time, we had to project it into the future tense: where will black people find the supposedly endless repositories of forgiveness that will help us deal with this exact moment?

Xenophobia in Grahamstown: 'We are not leaving!'

Kate Janse an Rensburg, Mikaela Erskog & Fezokuhle Mthonti, Daily Maverick

Picture by Kate Janse van Rensburg

At Masifunde, a local nongovernmental organisation in Bathurst Street, Grahamstown, six women are sitting on and around the staircase. Two women talk urgently on the phone as they relay information to various stakeholders. This concerns the bedlam that has descended upon the city since Wednesday 21 October. One week has passed since a xenophobic outbreak, fuelled by the rumour mill, began in the City of Saints.

Inqindi

Nina Simone: The Intensity of Beginning

Reading the artistic contributions of  Nina Simone through Frantz Fanon

by Fezokuhle Mthonti

But the constancy of my love had been forgotten. I defined myself as an absolute intensity of beginning. So I took up my negritude, and with tears in my eyes I put its machinery together again. What had been broken to pieces was rebuilt, reconstructed by the intuitive lianas of my hands.

(Fanon,1952:106)

After Fanon, African criticism cannot feign ignorance of history. But neither can they plead captivity to its consequences. Fanon is our pathfinder in that ‘conversation of discovery’ whose mission is to gather the voices of history and common dreams into the work of the critical imagination.

(Sekyi-Otu, 2003:14)

Stacked to the side of an old, rustic-looking glass and wooden cabinet is large pile of vinyl records. Positioned in the corner of our open plan dining room, is this cabinet and therein sits my mother’s prized gramophone. Each Sunday, as the pot roast was thickening in flavour and the vegetables; coming alive to the steam of my mother’s Hart pot was the scratching of the gramophone pin as it moved from song to song. The room already scented with the smells of simmering rice and curried meat would be transformed by the raw quaver and deep register of Nina Simone.

The Wretched of the Earth: On Caliban and Revolutionary Theatre

Fezokuhle Mthonti

Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth has been described, in part, as a prophetic entry into the inner workings of a decolonised and decolonising state.  Without being reductive or essentialist, one could argue that the first three chapters of this book typify and chart the complexities that come with a people who have been denied their socio-political subjectivities and their subsequent struggles to liberate themselves and in so doing, try to maintain the sentiments of their revolution. However, as Fanon shows quite consistently throughout the book, the transition into self-governance is an inherently difficult position to navigate, especially, when your personhood and political subjectivity has been eroded by the structural mechanisms of colonialism. I would argue that it demands from the state and its inhabitants, an ability to see the position which they have come to occupy through repression and a further ability to see beyond that subjugation.  It is an attempt to reclaim and to grieve over that which was worn out by the European colony and forge out of that, a political and social identity that is backward, forward and sideways-looking.

My encounter with Fanon

by Fezokuhle Mthonti

My approach in this paper will be slightly unorthodox.  I will speak about Barack Obama and Bill Cosby. I will talk to you about theatre and its performers and in so doing will relay to you, my first encounter with Frantz Fanon. My approach to this paper will be two -fold 1) My encounter with Fanon as live and present body on stage and 2) My encounter with Fanon through the medium of television, as I watched  the Cosby  Show and reconciled myself with the Politics of Respectability.

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.

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.

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.

Can the project of Community Engagement be used as an emancipatory tool?

Fezokuhle Mthonti

Post-apartheid  South Africa,  saw a number of  legislative decisions come into play, which sought to create a more inclusive socio political environment in which South Africans could start to reconcile themselves with the numerous  institutional and political divisions that had polarized  them for so long. Part of this legislative process was the release of the Education White Paper- A programme for Higher Education Transformation. This paper was drafted by the National Commission on Higher Education (NHCE) in 1997 and sought to integrate the theoretical practice of community engagement into the fabric of South African Higher Education. In a paper entitled Embedding Community Engagement in South African Education Mabel Erasmus argues that the White Paper “called on higher education institutions to ‘demonstrate social responsibility and commitment to the common good by making available, expertise and infrastructure for community service programmes’.” (Erasmus:2008,57) Further to that, Erasmus argues that “one of the goals of higher education, is ‘to promote and develop social responsibility and awareness among students and to increase the role of higher education in social and economic development through community service programmes’.” (Erasmus:2008,57)