A Fanonian Reading of Suresh Robert’s ‘Fit to govern: the native intelligence of Thabo Mbeki’

by Phumlani Majavu

“Well, if one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the Judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected –those, precisely who need the law’s protection most! – and listens to their testimony. Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person – ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice and then you will know not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it.” Baldwin (1972, p. 130)

Notes from a Farmworkers' Strike

by Ben Fogel, Mahala

Politics is not only about the exploits of big men (and the occassional woman); it’s not only about Zuma vs Motlanthe or Malema vs Zille and the rest of this sorry, but entertaining coterie that our political class consists of. Politics begins with people being able to talk and organise in their own communities or workplaces, it begins with ordinary men and women, rather than the latest Manguang related shenanigans.

Western Cape winelands: The strike's over, nothing's solved

December the 4th marked the short-lived resumption of the Western Cape farmworkers’ uprising, after a 10-day break for negotiations which have seemingly come to nothing. Workers across the Boland went back on strike, but only for day, as it appears the strike has been called off by all “stakeholders”. Yet it is clear that it was COSATU's Western Cape branch, chaired by Tony Ehrenreich, that called off the strike without receiving a mandate from most stakeholders or the workers themselves. 

By BENJAMIN FOGEL, The Daily Maverick

The second round of the strike has been a disaster - a major display of weakness that could potentially set back the farmworkers' struggle for years. Disempowering the emergent political agency that has resulted from the unified action of farmworkers, wage negotiations are now to be conducted by unions on a farm-by-farm basis, while also including the unrealistic temptation of a profit-sharing scheme.

Spatial reorganisation, decentralisation and dignity: Applying a Fanonian lens to a Grahamstown shack settlement

by Sarita Pillay

  “The divided, Manichaean colonial world and its social relations are manifested in space –one Fanonian test of post-apartheid society is to what extent South Africa has been spatially reorganised”  (Gibson, 2011: 187).

  

1.   Introduction

In Grahamstown, East and West are not merely cardinal points. East and West are not unbiased references to directional differences. In Grahamstown, East and West are contemporary manifestations of a colonial world that Frantz Fanon described in The Wretched of the Earth as “a world divided in two” (Fanon, 1963: 3). East and West are representative of the Manichaean (post) colonial town and its social relations.

The Unpreparedness of the Educated Classes in South Africa

by Himal Ramji

“It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps” (Fanon, 1963: 119).

How has this statement been proven true in post-apartheid South Africa?

This essay seeks to unpack the statement by Fanon, seeking to understand in what ways the educated classes have proven to be ‘unprepared’, ‘lazy’ and ‘cowardly’ in the face of liberation, how they have failed to continue the struggle through a dialectic with the people, and how these failures have led to the current situation South Africa is in. This piece takes ‘laziness’ as an unwillingness or inability to engage in conversation; indeed, it is much easier to speak to those you know, those with the same interests as you than it is to enter into an egalitarian discussion with those with different backgrounds, needs, interests.

Women, Nationalism and Fanon

by Yolandé Botha

“In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.” – Frantz Fanon (1952: 229)

If like Fanon we are constantly creating ourselves as we travel through the world then our potential for self-creation is limited by the world that surrounds us. In this paper a journey through the aesthetics of South Africa’s two National Women’s Monuments will be mapped. These two symbols of the South Africa in which we live will be explored in terms of their possibility for creating us just as we created them. Fanon will be our travel companion and will allow us to see the realities that underpin the world in which we live which are often obscured by the immediate materiality of what we see. With Fanon as our travel guide and companion we will see these monuments for what they really represent, we will see the nationalisms that have underpinned their creation, we will see the way in which women have been implicated in the gender constructions of these nationalism and we will also see what our country could potentially be if these monuments and others were to be transformed or if new ones, more radical ones were erected. Travelling with Fanon means that we will allow him to point out what we may have never seen before and may never have seen without his help, but it also means being critical of him when his own particularity as a black male does not allow him to see the world and its actors in all of its fullness.  

A Reconnoitre of Frantz Fanon’s Theory of Mutation

by Jocelyn Coldrey, 2012

The goal of this paper is to explore Frantz Fanon’s theory of mutation to track the manner in which the psyche of a human has to change to such an extent that a new meaning can be given. Though many Fanonian theorists have asserted that it is necessary for us to explore Fanon’s writings through the geographically space of right now, this paper will rather explain a principle of his thought in order to take it one step further and use it in the present. The necessity of radical mutation is crucial in order to entirely de-colonialize and for a human society to exist alongside symbols and equal opportunities for all, despite ontological and epistemological difference.

Fanon, black female sexuality and representations of black beauty in popular culture

by Efemia Chela, 2012

Frantz Fanon’s works are all very personal. Black Skins, White Masks, a treatise on the lived experience of being black is based on his experiences in Martinican society, being a student and then a black doctor in France. A Dying Colonialism is the Algerian War through the prism of his work with the FLN and The Wretched of The Earth arises from his experiences visiting post-colonial African countries, interacting with future African leaders and observing colonial and native elites. Even though Fanon was a man his oeuvre have great relevance to women and this piece will focus on the representation of black women in Fanon’s works and how his observations can be used to analyse contemporary depictions of black beauty in popular culture and hip-hop. This essay will also address the dimensions of black female sexuality and the similarities between sexism and racism.

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.”

The Selling of a Massacre: Media Complicity in Marikana Repression

By Ben Fogel, Ceasefire

The 16th of August 2012 will surely join June 16 1960* and March 23 1976** as a day of infamy in South African history. The police force of the democratically elected government shot 102 black working-class miners (killing 34 and wounding 78), while arresting an additional 270 men at the Lonmin (London Mining) mine in the small North West town of Marikana. This followed the deaths of 10 other men in the week leading up to the massacre, beginning with the murder of two miners- allegedly by NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) officials.

Review: From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’

by Catherine Cunningham 

In From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’, Michael Neocosmos traces the events which led up to the May 2008 xenophobic attacks in South Africa. In doing this, Neocosmos uncovers the manifold ways in which ‘citizenship’ has been defined, in South Africa, over time. For Neocosmos, despite the inclusive definition of citizenship which was made manifest throughout the liberation struggle, a more exclusive understanding has now become dominant. Such a conception of citizenship is not spontaneous, however, but is reinforced by discourses originating from multiple actors such as: government officials, the media, civil society and society at large. These discourses overlap and reinforce each other, culminating in what Neocosmos calls ‘a politics of fear’. It is this fear, rather than economic deprivation and an influx of foreigners, which helps to explain the events of 2008. In order to counter this widespread fear, Neocosmos suggests that we need to reaffirm an inclusive understanding of citizenship in order to transcend fundamentally oppressive categorisations.

Marikana: A Point of Rupture?

by Ben Fogel, Insurgent Notes, 2012

A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity) and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them. These incessant and persistent efforts…form the terrain of the “conjunctural” and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organise.[1]

A response to 'A Dying Colonialism: Transformation and the Algerian Revolution'

by Sarita Pillay

It is 1959. The fifth year of the Algerian Revolution. The fifth year of what others would rather call the Algerian War – perhaps as a means to detract from the gravity of the event. This is a Revolution. This is a mass struggle by a people who will not settle for anything less than a new society. This is a tug-of-war between the defenders of a colonial outpost and the Algerian people who say, “no more”.

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

by Jocelyn Coldrey

Alice Cherki, a trained psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who worked under Fanon at both Bilda and in Tunis, was also an active comrade in the Algerian wage for independence, gives personal insight into fragments of Fanons life as well as the contemporary relevance his work and way of thinking (Cherki, 2006 and Martin, 2004: 165). The book gives a representation of Fanon as a person, exposing his temperament in a textual portrait. Cherki does not write a meticulous biography of Fanon’s life but rather draws to light certain experiences and ways of the world which enable the Fanonian reader to historically contextualize not only what he was exposed to at the time of his writing but also his mode of being in reality. She claims that it is “important to reconstruct the journey if one is to rein in the profusion of attributes that have been imputed to Fanon” (2006: 1). In harnessing her personal interaction with Fanon, and what she found out from other people, she places particular importance on the parallels between the way Fanon viewed psychiatric patients and colonized subjects.  Ultimately her portrayal of Fanon’s life remains true to his belief that “[o]ne must not relate one’s past but, but stand as a testimony to it” (2006: 1).

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.

The Marikana Massacre: a Premeditated Killing?

by Benjamin Fogel, CounterPunch

“Two hundred thousand subterranean heroes who, by day and by night, for a mere pittance lay down their lives to the familiar `fall of rock` and who, at deep levels, ranging from 1,000 to 3,000 feet in the bowels of the earth, sacrifice their lungs to the rock dust which develops miners` phthisis’ and pneumonia.”

- Sol Plaatjie, first Secretary of the African National Congress, describing the lives of black miners in 1914

The Night Before Lonmin's Explanation

by Richard Stupart, African Scene

As I write this, South Africa sits in a peculiar space. Poised in a moment of rage over the massacre that has taken place in Marikana, but with barely any facts through which to channel that fury at someone. Tomorrow – because some imbecile thought  this could wait – there is meant to be a press briefing, after which more information will be available, and we can begin to make sense of what happened. Can begin to find out who in the nation will bear the incandescent torrent of outrage bottling  up tonight.

Anti-Semite and Jew: A review essay

by Joel Pearson, August 2012

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in 1906, at the beginning of what would prove to be a century of great turbulence. Two cataclysmic wars would ravage Europe as ‘modernity’ shuddered through society. In a climate of alienation, marginalization and violence, Sartre developed his diagnosis of the human condition. His writings – plays, biographies, novels and notebooks – explored the problems of “existential thought (la contingence) and the vicissitudes of social history through the troubled lives of individual actors” (Jules-Rosette, 2007:266). With the smoke of Auschwitz still looming large over a continent in ruin after the Second World War, Sartre’s political work interrogated how the devastations of fascism, racism and inequality had erupted, and what their effects were on the individual psyche (Jules-Rosette, 2007:266). In 1944, as the war petered out in Europe and an increasing number of Jews returned home from Nazi Germany, Sartre set out to examine the roots of anti-Semitism in France. Anti-Semite and Jew (Réflections sur la question juive) examined the “interpersonal construction of personal identities” in the dramatic personae of the anti-Semite, the democrat, the inauthentic and the authentic Jew (Walzer, 1995:xxvi). His central claim, perhaps: identity and culture cannot be reduced to timeless essences; they are socially constituted within historical situations; and both individual and group perceptions are intimately tied to the (often hostile) perceptions of the “other/s” (Walzer, 1995:xxiii).

Haiti's forgotten Revolution and C.L.R. James

by Ben Fogel, The Amandla Blog

The great Trindadian intellectual C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins is a decidedly partisan text, it has no pretensions of grandiose academic objectivity or liberal 'fairness'. It is a great Marxist text, not great in the sense of providing a new insight into the inner workings of capital or alienation in late capitalism, but great in the manner in which that demonstrates the fundamental unity between theory and praxis at the heart of the Marxist tradition. In contrast to some of the other great historical works located within in the Marxist tradition, it does not contain the grand historical range and vision of Hobsbawm or display the detailed social imagination, empathy and lyrcism of E.P. Thompson.