The Mere Mention of the Words 'Affirmative Action'...

Mandisi Majavu, SACSIS

Last month the BBC published an article titled, “Do white people have a future in South Africa?” Western institutions like the BBC see no problem in commissioning articles like this due to mainstream whites’ misconception of racism as a zero-sum game. Research shows that mainstream whites associate a decrease in anti-black racism with an increase in anti-white racism. The notion of “reverse racism” is rooted in this misconception.

Vavi: Discursive Tension Stifles Rape Discussion

by Mandisi Majavu, SACSIS

One of the issues that the rape allegations against Zwelinzima Vavi highlighted is the unresolved discursive tension between feminists and anti-racists. This discursive tension  stems from the way in which both the feminist and anti-racist intellectual tradition respectively regard sexuality as a site upon which the oppression of women and the repression of black masculinity occurs. Feminists understand rape as a violent patriarchal tool that some men use to assert their power over women. Anti-racists, on the other hand, point out that, traditionally, black masculinity has been constructed by mainstream white society around the idea of a hypersexual, natural born rapist.

Is Black Consciousness Still Relevant?

by Mandisi Majavu, SACSIS

Although recent newspaper reports that the Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo) and the Socialist Party of Azania (Sopa) are to merge ought to be welcomed by those of Black Consciousness (BC) tradition, the fact of the matter is that the BC tradition in South Africa is intellectually stuck in the 20th century. According to the Unemployed People’s Movement (UPM), proponents of the BC tradition have not been able to rethink BC politics for a new situation. The new situation being the 21st century, which requires this tradition to articulate a coherent alternative political and economic vision for a better South Africa, a challenge that the BC tradition is yet to take up.

Mandisi Majavu's Review of "Fanonian Practices'

Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2013

Fanonian practices in South Africa: from Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo, by

Nigel Gibson, Durban, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011, 312 pp., R248

(paperback), ISBN 9781869141974

In Fanonian Practices, Gibson recreates Fanon’s philosophy of liberation in line with new realities. He traces Fanonian practices in South Africa from Steve Biko in the 1970s up to the emergence of Abahlali baseMjondolo in post-apartheid South Africa. According to Gibson, Biko’s critique of the white liberal idea of integration was derived in part from Fanon’s notion of Black Consciousness. Fanon’s Black Consciousness is a critique directed at blacks who internalise white supremacist values and beliefs. Black Skin White Masks basically maps out Fanon’s Black Consciousness in detail. According to Gibson, Fanon later developed this critique to explore how in the post-colonial context the black elite betray the emancipatory goals of the anti-colonial movement partly because of a ‘desire for a place in the machinery of colonial/capitalist expropriation’ (61).

The Politics of the Black Middle Class

Mandisi Majavu

by Mandisi Majavu, SACSIS

Before the 2009 general elections, political pundits predicted that a shift of black electoral support from the African National Congress (ANC) to Congress of the People (COPE) was inevitable. It was further pointed out that this shift was going to occur along class lines; we were told that the black middle class perceived COPE as the political party that could represent its class interest. Although COPE won about seven percent of the national vote in the 2009 elections, the internecine feud among its leaders has effectively made the party politically irrelevant.

‘This Africa to come’

by Mandisi Majavu, Pambazuka

Frantz Fanon once wrote that the challenge facing civil society and progressive governments in Africa is how to organize African countries around values that promote and encourage participatory democracy, equity and mutual aid. Although most African countries gained independence from European colonial rule in the 1960s and 1970s, that remains the biggest challenge facing the continent today.

The Oppressive Paradigm of the Colonial Academy

Mandisi Majavu, SACSIS

Almost two decades into post-apartheid South Africa many black academics still feel that the “white networks that have de facto run academic decision making” are derailing the transformation agenda. This is according to the Charter for Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS), a report commissioned by the Minister of Higher Education and Training, that was published in June this year.

What is the Cut Off Date for Inequality?

by Mandisi Majavu, SACSIS and The Daily News

Recently, Tokyo Sexwale, the Human Settlements Minister, announced that free housing for the poor has to have a “cut off date.” He argued that it is unsustainable to provide free housing to the poor “for a long time.” This is a far cry from the Freedom Charter’s spirit, which champions the principle that “All people shall have the right to live where they choose, to be decently housed and to bring up their families in comfort and security.”

Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism

Black Flame is the first of two volumes that reexamine anarchism’s democratic class politics, its vision of a decentralized planned economy, and its impact on popular struggles in five continents over the last 150 years. From the nineteenth century to today’s anticapitalist movements, it traces anarchism’s lineage and contemporary relevance. It outlines anarchism’s insights into questions of race, gender, class, and imperialism, significantly reframing the work of previous historians on the subject, and critiquing Marxist approaches to those same questions.

Lucien van der Walt teaches at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Michael Schmidt is a Johannesburg-based senior investigative journalist.

Mother City to Some: The Story of Housing in Cape Town

by Mandisi Majavu, SACSIS

Cape Town is the second largest city in South Africa. Affectionately known as the ‘mother city’, it is home to about 3,4 million people. Helen Zille recently argued in the Sunday Times that Cape Town is “the least unequal city in South Africa.” The point, however, is that Cape Town is an unequal city - a white city that is not very motherly towards poor people of colour.

The Case for Opening SADC Borders: 'We live here, we work here, we're staying here!'

by Mandisi Majavu, SACSIS

At the end of July 2011, the South African government plans to lift the moratorium on deportations to Zimbabwe and will probably start the deportation of all undocumented Zimbabweans living in South Africa.
Given the Minister of Home Affair's stated intent to begin ridding the country of undocumented people from other African countries after she is finished with Zimbabweans, it is more than likely that the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) is going to intensify its crackdown on all undocumented people after July 2011.

Mahmood Mamdani's 'Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, politics, and the War on Terror'

a review by Mandisi Majavu, LibCom (There is more writing by Mandisi Majavu here and two interviews with Ernest Wamba dia Wamba here.) 

In 2002, Mamdani wrote an essay entitled 'Making sense of political violence in Africa', in which he argued that to distinguish between cultural and political identities is to differentiate between self-identification and state-identification. He further pointed out that to historicise political identity through linking it to political power, is to acknowledge that all political identities are historically transitory and all require a form of the state to be reproduced. Furthermore, "when the raw material of political identity is drawn from the domain of culture, as in ethnic or religious identity, it is the link between identity and power that allows us to understand how cultural identities are translated into political identities and thus to distinguish between them" (p. 7).