A Critique of Crain Soudien’s Realising the Dream: Unlearning the Logic of Race in the South African School

by Mbali Baduza, 2012

Crain Soudien’s “Realising the Dream: Unlearning the logic of race in the South African school” is a book whose publishing could not be more relevant to the current South African reality. He poses a question that is not uniquely modern, but a question that has been faced throughout the centuries: “what kind of human beings do we wish to be?” (Soudien, 2012: 2-3).  Although, a seemingly simple question at first, when we take seriously the factors and implications which confront it, it becomes a question pregnant with meaning. This is because, I argue, it calls into question what we mean by being human. Soudien says and I quote at length (2012: 2):

“What it means to be a human being – to have the choice to exercise the full panoply of one’s rights and, critically, to accord that choice to others, or, to put it more starkly, the right to full recognition and the unspeakably difficult task of gifting that right to others – is a question that arises in South Africa with an immediacy and complexity rarely found in modern history. The question is simultaneously philosophical, economic, political, sociological and, in elaboration of the latter, ontological and practical in its nature.”

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).

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)

A Response to Alice Cherki's 'Frantz Fanon: A Portrait'

by Mbali Baduza

Alice Cherki’s biography of Frantz Fanon is anything but a monotonous read. From the descriptions of Fanon’s childhood to his death, Cherki helps us conceptualise Fanon the personality, Fanon the human.

Other than Cherki’s defence of Fanon in the question of violence which has been widely used to prosecute him, I was struck by a theme that carries the book: Fanon’s belief in the potential of the human. Fanon’s faith in the potential of the human, reminds me of a book I have recently read, Antonio Negri and Cesare Casarino’s In Praise of the Common. In the preface, Casarino says that “[t]he common is legion”, meaning that the common refers to a number of people. Put differently, the common refers to ‘The People’ i.e. all human beings.