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| Richard Pithouse |
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.
The manuscript that he carried in his briefcase was lost but
some people think it may have been his Theses on the Philosophy of History.
He’d written it earlier in the year in the shadow of the Nazi invasion of
France and it would be published ten years after his death. Its arresting
images speak to history as a permanent state of emergency for the oppressed, of
every civilisation having a barbarous underside, of the need to brush history
against the grain and, in the strained machismo of a delicate man, to burst its
continuum open. “The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the
past is”, he concluded, “the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead
will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious”. Benjamin also offered a
famous interpretation of a painting of an angel by Paul Klee, a painting that
Benjamin, broke as he was, had owned and which he described as image of the
Angel of History:
His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel cannot close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
We can't refuse the rush of time, or the world historical
forces that shape it. The longing to restore the wholeness of lost worlds is a
fantasy, that, while it can certainly legitimate the exercise of power in the
here and now, cannot actually restore what has been lost. But, Benjamin
implies, we can redeem the dead by contesting the future and striving to make
it worthy of the suffering that has marked our passage through time.
Just over twenty years later, in the midst of another war,
and on the eve of his own death, Frantz Fanon warned that “the weary road to
rational knowledge” requires us to give up our “too-simple” conceptions of who
is and is not the enemy and, also, of what counts as victory. The rule of
people who have been oppressed can itself be oppressive and so while the
removal of all barriers to equal participation in the governing of society is a
necessary condition for emancipation it is not, on its own, a sufficient
condition. For Fanon liberation was not merely about replacing one set of
rulers with another but, rather, about enabling the restoration of dignity, to
“create a prospect that is human because consciousness and sovereign persons
dwell therein”.
Two new books take us into the heart of the courage and
imagination that, to borrow another metaphor from Benjamin, set the sails that
carried us out of apartheid. Xolela Mangcu's Biko: A Biography opens a door
into Steve Biko's world and Beverley Naidoo's Death of an Idealist does the
same for Neil Aggett. These books carry the weight of death – of Biko and
Aggett naked and alone, their bodies broken by the police. They are heavy with
the price that was paid - by women and men whose journeys through oppression
will not be written into history in their singularity as well as those whose
names have come to mark out our shared journey along the weary road. But they
also sing with the spirit that affirms life against oppression.
Biko and Aggett both reached towards and, in their most
decisive choices, embodied a sense of justice that moved beyond narrow
calculations of material and discursive interest to touch the universal. Biko
looked forward to 'a true humanity' and insisted that 'you are either alive and
proud, or you are dead'. In his last moments Aggett chose, as part of his
epitaph, a line from William Faulkner that spoke to his communism: “to hold the
earth mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood”. From Nikos
Kazantzakis he added the line 'Faces change, crumble, return to earth; but
others rise to take their place'.
Both men, in their different ways, sought to organise in a
manner that enabled the oppressed to assume their own agency. This set them at
odds with much of the ANC in exile and today it would set them against both the
ruling party and the strands in the independent left that have sought to rally
people behind their own authority, be it mediated through individual charisma
or NGO bureaucracies.
In 2012 much of the horror of apartheid has been decisively
overcome and there is much to celebrate in society. But while we are not
Colombia, Pakistan or Zimbabwe we are moving away from and not towards our
highest aspirations. Amongst the facts that cannot be denied are these: The
ANC, sometimes operating on its own and sometimes through the state, is, in its
attempts to crush dissent, willing to kill, to openly threaten to kill, to
torture, to jail people against whom there is no evidence of having committed
any crime and to drive people from their homes and their livelihoods. The
language of war festers in the mouths of leading figures in the party. Open
sanction has been given for action, sometimes, violent, to be taken outside of
the law and democratic institutions in defence of the party. Places where
popular dissent has attained some sort of critical mass are temporarily ruled
with the logic of a police state. Millions are excluded from any rational
grounds for hope and the state's approach to functions as basic as education,
housing and policing are marked, above all, by sheer contempt for the people
who are most dependent on them.
It is true that there is not a single state that has moved
directly from colonialism and into a confident democratic flourishing. In fact
there is, across space and time, not a single state in which an attempt at
radical or revolutionary change has not encountered serious limitations or
outright disaster. But real social progress is possible. And every day all
sorts of choices, choices of consequence, are made. One of those choices has
been for various government departments to employ Steven Whitehead, the man who
tortured Neil Aggett with sadistic delight, as an intelligence consultant.
Reading Mangcu and Naidoo is a salutary reminder that Zuma's ANC disgraces the
dead as much as it insults the living.
