Report on protest in the Sweet Home shack settlement in Cape Town

by Jared Sacks, Mail & Guardian

Over much of this past winter, communities in shack settlements across Cape Town took to the streets in some of South Africa's most active civil-disobedience protests since 1994.

The protests gave rise to a great deal of commentary and finger-pointing. I was disturbed by the double standard of the political rhetoric of politicians and some nongovernmental organisations in the way they expected the protesters to react in response to the violence the state and police subjects them to on a daily basis.

Thinking Fanon: Fanonian Translations in and outside the academy

A presentation by Nigel Gibson (author of Fanonian Practices in South Africa) hosted by the Centre for Contemporary Thought and the African Studies Workshop at the University of Chicago, February 21, 2012

Living Fanon: The rationality of revolt

by Nigel Gibson, Pambazuka

What better way to celebrate, commemorate and critically reflect on the fiftieth year of Fanon’s ‘The Wretched of the Earth’[1] than with a new North African syndrome: revolution - or at least a series of revolts and resistance across the region. Fanon begins The Wretched writing of decolonisation as a program of complete disorder, an overturning of order - often against the odds - willed collectively from the bottom up. Without time or space for a transition, there is an absolute replacement of one ‘species’ by another (1968:35). In a period of radical chance such absolutes appear quite normal, when, in spite of everything thrown against it, ideas jump across frontiers and people begin again ‘to make history (1968: 69-71). In short, once the mind of the oppressed experiences freedom in and through collective actions, its reason becomes a force of revolution. As the Egyptians said of January 25th: ‘When we stopped being afraid we knew we would win. We will not again allow ourselves to be scared of a government. This is the revolution in our country, the revolution in our minds.’[2]

A wholly other time? The revolutionary and the revolution

by Nigel Gibson, Seminar Presentation, School of Development Studies, UKZN, Durban, 2011

Fifty years is a very long time in the after-life of a revolutionary. Imagine 1933, fifty years after Marx’s death, when Marxism, which Marx had developed as a theory of liberation and life, had become associated with Stalin’s counter-revolution and death, forced collectivization and the gulag. Fanon is fortunate not to be associated with a state power though his thought has often been reduced to what states do best: violence.

The Rationality of Rebellion

Nigel Gibson, Seminar Presentation at the Centre for Sociological Research, University of Johannesburg, 25 May 2011

The Problem of Humanism

What is Fanon’s humanism, or better to say his new humanism? Simply put it is about putting invention into existence, or life into being. His is a living humanism. In Black Skin, Fanon speaks of this abstractly, he says, “yes to freedom no to exploitation”; but we have to also think of humanism as something that hasn’t happened. That is to say, critical of European humanism, which he says is an anti-humanism in practice, which kills and murders in the name of humanism (and still does). Fanon argues that a new humanism must include disalienation.

The Enduring Rationality of Revolt

by Richard Pithouse, People of Color Organize

In recent weeks the centre of the unstable and diverse social ferment that has been bubbling and boiling at the base of South African society since at least 2004 has shifted to Cape Town. People have often remarked that the conflict on the slopes of the Sentinel in Hout Bay, in which four people lost their eyes to rubber bullets fired by the police, has evoked the past.