From Steve Biko to Thuli Madonsela

This week the Public Protector was called a CIA agent. The ruling party’s tactic of labeling its critics foreign agents is counterproductive, has a bloody history and is damaging the country, writes Ayanda Kota. The Con

  

When Steve Biko galvanized young black intellectuals into an explosive new political awareness, Mac Maharaj called Steve Biko a CIA agent. In his recent biography on Biko, Xolela Mangcu recalls that in Ginsburg in the 1980s, “UDF crowds would in their hundreds go and sing in front of Steve Biko’s house: U-Steve Biko, I-CIA – alleging Steve had worked for the CIA. We would confront the crowds to defend Steve’s name, at the risk of our lives.”

What is an 'outside agitator'?

Richard Seymour, Lenin's Tomb

In Ferguson, Missouri, there are 'outside agitators'.  On this, the reactionaries and liberals agree.  Of course, there are all sorts of racialised rumours flying around in the guise of reporting about what is taking place in Ferguson.  We are well used to this.  We remember Katrina.

There will be time to sift through all that.  For now, I simply want to ask a quick question: what is an 'outside agitator'?  The metaphor of exteriority, of being outside, has two salient connotations.  First, one is transgressing the spatial ordering of the state.  It is states which constitute social spaces like districts, wards, counties, etc - a process that is historically far from racially innocent in the US.  Second, one is 'outside' the polis; one's political being as such is 'outside', one is traitorous and disloyal.  It is not just that one travelled from one city to another - that's fine, provided the political agenda one brings is benign for the system - but that one brought ideas that are not only not native to the destination, but actually foreign to the nation, the free world, civilisation itself.

A revolution’s dreams betrayed

Protests are rooted in the frustration and despair of poverty and rage at an uncaring government, writes Malaika wa Azania. The Sunday Independent

 In his poignant masterpiece Harlem, renowned poet Langston Hughes reflects on the nervous conditions of African-Americans whose dream of emancipation from the draconian laws of racial segregation has been aborted in the inter-city ghettos that are concentration camps.

There, levels of poverty, destitution and unemployment are soaring and drugs and alcohol serve as escape routes from the unbearable heaviness of tortured existence.

Hughes asks:

“What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore – and then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over – like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?”

Jacques Rancière on the 'evil third party'

Why has the philosophy of the intelligentsia or activists always needed to blame some evil third party (petty bourgeoisie, ideologist or master thinker) for the shadows and obscurities that get in the way of the harmonious relationship between their own self-consciousness and the self-identity of their popular objects of study? Was this evil party contrived to spirit away another more fearsome threat: that of seeing the thinkers of the night invade the territory of philosophy? 

- Jacques Rancière, Introduction to Proletarian Nights 

Abahlali’s Vocal Politics of Proximity: Speaking, Suffering and Political Subjectivization

by Anna Selmeczi, October 2012

Using as its point of departure the claim that today the urban is the main site for the abandonment of superfluous people, this article explores the emancipatory politics of the South African shack-dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo. Based on a notion of political subjectivization as the appropriation of excess freedom, I argue that Abahlali disrupt the order of the ‘world-class city’ when they expose the contradiction between the democratic inscriptions of equality and the lethal segmentation of the urban order. In articulating their living conditions as the unjustified breach of the promise of ‘a better life’, the shack-dwellers prove their equality and thus emerge as political subjects. As the article argues, at the centre of this process is a political practice of speaking and listening that is driven by the imperative to reverse the distancing and delaying practices of an order that abandons them by remaining physically, experientially and cognitively proximate to the experiences of life in the shantytown.

On the Third Force

by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

The National Union of Mineworkers has informed us that workers organising their own strikes are being covertly 'manipulated' and their strikes and protests 'orchestrated' by 'dark forces' and other 'elements' that amount, of course, to another manifestation of the infamous 'third force'. 'Backward' and even 'sinister' beliefs in magic consequent to the rural origin of many of the workers are, we've been told by an array of elite actors, including the Communist Party, central to this manipulation. Frans Baleni, horrified at the insurgent power of self-organisation, has not just informed us that his union is trying to “narrow the demands” and persuade workers to “return to work”. He has also called for “the real force behind the upheavals” to be “unearthed” by the state on the grounds that “It is completely untrue [that] the workers are responsible” for the ongoing revolt.

Marikana: The politics of law and order in post-apartheid South Africa

Suren Pillay

By Suren Pillay, Al Jazeera

With their pangas and machetes mixed with ethnic regalia, the striking mine workers at Marikana have become spectacularised. It is a stark reminder that the mine worker, a modern subject of capitalism, in these parts of the world is also the product of a colonial encounter. 

Many of us are trying to make sense of the massacre at Marikana through the obvious dire economic conditions, wage rates and inequality that these workers face. We must however also try to make sense of it through the lineages of law, order and the new configurations of politics emerging in post-apartheid South Africa. 

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.

Activists decry talk of 'third force' at Marikana

by Niren Tolsi, Mail & Guardian

The suggestion, presented with a sprinkling of muti, is that the 34 miners would not have been shot dead if some unseen hand had not been at work.

The Marikana dust appeared to have just settled on the bodies of the 34 dead miners last week when the spin machines started whirring out the spectre of a "third force", whispering of "agents provocateur" and "criminal elements" at work.

Taking Poverty Seriously: What the poor are saying and why it matters

by Xin Wei Ngiam, Abahlali baseMjondolo

A commitment to justice and democratic governance requires that we listen carefully as much as we speak loudly and act decisively.

It has become somewhat of a trope in both NGO and governmental circles to speak of “participatory democracy” and the “voices of (insert name of oppressed social group)”. Much of the work of development, we say, has to do with making these voices— and the grievances they express— public. Yet the glossy development reports and posh conference halls necessarily regulate the content and expression of such voices even as they promote them. And when the oppressed decide, independently, to force open public spaces to express their anger and frustration, they are often met with the police, bullets, and teargas.

Arundhati Roy on the academic inability to grasp popular agency

The tenacity, the wisdom and the courage of those who have been fighting for years, for decades, to bring change, or even the whisper of justice to their lives, is something extraordinary. Whether people are fighting to overthrow the Indian State, or fighting against Big Dams, or only fighting a particular steel plant or mine or SEZ, the bottomline is that they are fighting for their dignity, for the right to live and smell like human beings. They are fighting because, as far as they are concerned, “the fruits of modern development” stink like dead cattle on the highway….

We are the Third Force

by S'bu Zikode, 2005, via LibCom

The shack dwellers’ movement that has given hope to thousands of people in Durban is always being accused of being part of the Third Force. In newspapers and in all kinds of meetings this is said over and over again. They even waste money investigating the Third Force. We need to address this question of the Third Force so that people don’t become confused.