Anne Hope (February 12, 1930 – December 26, 2015)

Sally Timmel, The Cape Times

Anne Hope, co-author and founder of the classic Training for Transformation books and training programmes, has passed on in an interfaith intentional community in Claremont, California.

Anne Hope was born and grew up in Johannesburg. She attended Rhodes University in Grahamstown and obtained a degree in English literature and history. She then received her Master’s degree in education from Oxford University in England. During her university days, she immersed herself in the Catholic Student Movement and not only became convinced of the horrors of apartheid, but became more and more committed both emotionally and spiritually to the struggle for liberation.

How the failed ideals of 1970s activists haunt post-apartheid SA

Ian Macqueen, The Mail & Guardian

South Africa is in many ways a very different country to that envisaged by political activists of the 1970s. For one, the equitable society they anticipated would replace apartheid remains a chimera. Instead, a process has taken place that political geographer Gillian Hart calls the “denationalisation” and “renationlisation” of the economy under the African National Congress (ANC).

'The New Radicals: A Generational Memoir of the 1970s' - A review

Glen Moss, The New Radicals: A Generational Memoir of the 1970s, Jacana, Johannesburg, 2014

Reviewed by: Benjamin Fogel, Journal of Asian & African Studies

The New Radicals is a generational memoir, or rather a political memoir of a generation of white South African student radicals that came of age in the early 1970s through the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). This generation formed a key part of the emerging movements that awakened South Africa from the political slumber of the 1960s. As Glenn Moss puts it, his book “records how they (a group of students) moved from the relatively liberal protest and symbolic politics of an elite university to help in creating the preconditions for a radical challenge to the society that had formed them” (p.vii).

Eusebius McKaizer in Conversation with Lewis Gordon

The New Radicals: A generational memoir of the 1970's

Fanon in South Africa, from Biko to the shackdwellers' movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo)

Students, Apartheid and the Ecumenical Movement in South Africa, 1960–1975

Students, Apartheid and the Ecumenical Movement in South Africa, 1960–1975 by TigersEye99

Marx, Fanon & Biko: Touchstones in a Time of Crisis?

Unemployed People’s Movement

Marx, Fanon & Biko: Touchstones in a Time of Crisis?

Arts Major, 5:00p.m., Tuesday 16 September

Our country is slipping into serious crisis. The state has been captured by a ruthless and predatory elite bent on plunder. The people’s struggles are being seriously repressed. From Ficksburg to Marikana and Durban activists are being murdered.

Last week we marked the anniversary of the assassination of Steven Bantu Biko. This week we are hosting a public discussion on the light that Biko, and other radical humanists like Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon, can shine into our darkening present.

Johnny Dyani Quartet: Song for Biko

PAYD Summit: The radicals called Fanon, Biko and Marx

Feminist Biko – From Dana to Gqola

Simphiwe Dana

by Hugo Canham, Identities in Flux

The recently published A Renegade Called Simphiwe is as much about the supremely talented Simphiwe Dana and its author, leading feminist scholar, Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola. As she cautions the reader on more than one occasion, this book is not a biography, so readers who want an expose’ of Ms Dana may be a little disappointed. In Gqola’s words, this is a book by “a writer in conversation with the ideas in another artists work”. However, this book will go down as a cornerstone in South African feminist works on a public figure. Gqola is not a silent author putting forward sanitized ‘facts’ to an unimaginative readership. She is part of the story that she tells and she pushes readers to participate in the narratives that she weaves. At various points we as readers are asked to explore our own complicity in misogynous, patriarchal, anti-creative and anti-intellectual discourses.

Finding Fanon, Looking for second liberations

Nigel C. Gibson, Presentation at the Algiers conference on Fanon and Africa, June 2013

Finding Fanon, Looking for second liberations

[I]f action does not transform individual consciousness then it is nothing more than incoherence and agitation … Have faith in your people and devote your life to their dignity and betterment. For us there is no other way. Your brother, Franz

Fanon, Dedication to Bertène Juminer

A second phase of total liberation is necessary because [it] is required by the popular masses.

Fanon, “First Truths on the Colonial Problem,” 1958

Finding Fanon

I was introduced to Fanon via Steve Biko, and it was in 1981 that I first met Black Consciousness émigrés from South Africa in London. 1981 was the year of the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland. Bobby Sands and other prisoners were also reading Fanon finding the measure of national culture as a “combat culture” essential as, in the hellholes of the H blocks, they taught each other the Irish language as a conscious anti-colonial activity.

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).

We Need to Move beyond Mngxitama’s Gutter Politics

Tuesday, 26 March 2013

Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement

We Need to Move beyond Mngxitama’s Gutter Politics

Andile Mngxitama has become notorious for trying to privatize the memory of Steve Biko. He is not the only person trying to privatize that legacy, which is a legacy that must be there for all of us. But he is the only one that uses gutter politics to defend his privatization of Biko’s legacy.

The Dignity of the Poor is Vandalized from Many Quarters

by Abahlali baseMjondolo (KwaZulu-Natal), Rural Network (KwaZulu-Natal) & the Unemployed People's Movement (Eastern Cape, Free State & KwaZulu-Natal), Harvard International Review

When black people rose up against apartheid, the government usually said that they couldn’t have organized themselves and that there must have been a white person making them resist. Some thought that only whites were capable of thinking, speaking, and acting for themselves. But it was not only the government that looked for conspiracies every time black people organized themselves. This also happened within the movement.

African Modernity and the Struggle for People's Power: From Protest and Mobilization to Community Organizing

Xolela Mangcu

by Xolela Mangcu, The Good Society, Volume 21, Number 2, 2012, pp. 279-299 

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Populism has been a controversial term in South African public discourse in recent years precisely because it has been used as a tool in the lexical armoury of the combatants in the battle for the leadership of the ruling African National Congress. In order to understand why populism has been denigrated to great effect by the political, economic and social elite one has to have some idea of the historical resistance to popular democracy by African elites going back to the nineteenth century.

Conference Programme: The Durban Moment - Revisiting Politics, Labour, Youth and Resistance in the 1970s

Rhodes University  21–23 February 2013

Thursday 21st February	Venue: Centre for Continuing Education
First Session
9.00 – 9.30	Registration
9.30 – 9.45	Welcome by Professor Saleem Badat, Vice Rector
9.45 – 10.00	Welcome and announcements by Omar Badsha
10.00 – 11.30	The Meaning of the Durban Moment Now
	Richard Pithouse: The Meaning of the Durban Moment Now
11.30 – 11.45	Tea

Xolela Mangcu & Pallo Jordan Discuss Mangcu's New Book on Biko

Video streaming by Ustream

Not Even the Dead

Richard Pithouse

by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

And then, despite the fear, I set off

I put my cheek against death's cheek

− Roberto Bolaño, 'Self Portrait at Twenty Years', The Romantic Dogs, 2006

On the 26th of September 1940 Walter Benjamin – a brilliant writer struggling to the point of being short of paper, an intellectual acutely attuned to the poetic, Jewish and, in his own way, communist – found himself, for the second time in his life, in desperate flight from fascism. On the border between Spain and France, with his library lost to the Gestapo in Paris and his way through Spain blocked, he took his own life.

Biko: A Biography

Xolela Mangcu: Biko

The first comprehensive biography of an exceptional and inspirational leader who changed South African history. As leading anti-apartheid activist and thinker, Biko created Black Consciousness, which has resonance to this day. His death by torture, at the hands of the police, robbed South Africa of one of its most gifted leaders. Biko’s intellectual legacy cannot be overestimated.