In this
book, Nigel Gibson aims to examine how Fanon’s thoughts resonate with the
philosophy of Steve Biko and the practices of social movements in
post-apartheid South Africa against a backdrop of the incomplete transition
from a system of racial oppression to one of continued class oppression. He
seeks “not to recuperate the historical Fanon but to recreate Fanon’s
philosophy of liberation in a new situation” (x-xi) – that of contemporary
South Africa. Gibson finds in Fanon “not only a valuable critique of
post-apartheid South Africa, but also a critique of, and a practical guide to,
engaging the new movements that are emerging from below” (xi). He considers
Fanon as a “theorist of action”, and action as a “product of philosophy” (xi),
and speaks of how Fanon’s desire to invent new concepts is recreated in South
Africa. Viewing “Fanon’s philosophy of liberation as actional and engaged,
rather than detached and autonomous”, Gibson uses this philosophy “to amplify
the voices of the new movements among the damned of the earth, and to challenge
committed intellectuals (both inside and outside the movements) to search for,
listen to, and develop new concepts” (5). These new concepts are crucial if we
are to realise the emergence of a “new humanism” – one that can only emerge
from an understanding of the “humanity and solidarity of the damned, who have
been emptied of humanity and excluded from the human community” even after the
end of apartheid and the ushering in of equal political rights (9).
The
first chapter of the book sees Gibson, considering the “Fanonian practices” of
Steve Biko with the “eyes of today”, considering the development of Black
Consciousness and Biko’s critique of “White liberalism” (xviii). Like Fanon,
Black Consciousness emphasised the “liberation of the mind of the oppressed”
and “constituted a movement away from colonized objectification towards black
subjectivity” (1). It refused “compromise with, or reform of, the status quo”
(2) and insisted on “self-sufficiency” – “Black man you are on your own” (49).
“Biko understands that there is no demiurge, that freedom cannot be brought
from outside just as freedom cannot be given” (59). Gibson points to Biko’s
insistence on self-liberation: “Biko underscored the centrality of mental
liberation to the freedom struggle” (67). In this vein, Black Consciousness
could provide a “practical education, not in the sense of technique, but in the
sense of thought practices in the school of struggle… in the process or act of
reflection on and through the experience of the struggle” (67). Gibson also
highlight’s Biko’s construction of a “national culture”, whose concern, “not
unlike Fanon’s, was first and foremost with the need to reconnect to a national
culture and thereby resist the reification of culture that was produced by
apartheid – the inert, static and outworn custom
that served as the outer shell on which ethnic entrepreneurs and
chauvinists, as well as homeland leaders, apartheid academics and colonial
apologists, based their patronage and power” (55). Gibson insists that “while
the brilliance of the ‘Bikoian’ moment is an historical event, ‘Biko Lives’” (60).
“Implicit ideas of solidarity central to Biko’s notion of Black Consciousness –
however fragmented and often fleeting – continue to survive among the poor and
other sectors of the population marginalised in the post-apartheid polity”
(69).
Gibson
uses Fanon to describe the transition from apartheid as “a kind of ‘passive
revolution’ in Gramsci’s sense inasmuch as it was a revolution without a revolution, with the
opposition effectively contained from the start and the potentially
revolutionary mass movements rendered ineffective” (68). He argues that
“Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is
perhaps one of the most perceptive and undervalued critiques of the transition
scenario” in South Africa (111). Just as Fanon so presciently outlined in his
“Pitfalls of National Consciousness”, the end of apartheid did not bring about
genuine liberation, but only sham ‘flag freedom’ – a “fancy dress parade” in
which universal democratic values are trumpeted loudly while the poor are
trampled underfoot all the while. This was contained in Biko’s warnings
regarding white liberalism, which, in his estimation, stood as at least an
equal threat to prospects of true liberation in that it maintained a commitment
to white normativity (46).
According
to Gibson, “black political emancipation in South Africa is not full
emancipation because it leaves the state of human emancipation unfinished”
(113). What impeded the efflorescence of true liberation was, as Fanon warned,
“the absence of a liberatory ideology” (xii). Instead, “post-apartheid politics
was reduced to an elite project of capturing the state and the means of
governance, in contrast to creating an expansive and inclusive democracy” (2).
Rather than real democracy, what 1994 brought was the institutionalisation of
the ANC’s already authoritarian, centralist, hierarchical structure (2). The
marriage of this structure with neoliberal economic policies is said to have
signalled a radical betrayal of the majority on the part of a tiny ruling elite
and the repression of participatory democracy: “homespun authoritarianism and
anti-intellectualism”, combined with Washington Consensus, bred an intolerance
of dissent. “Critical voices within the ANC” were shunted into the “political
wilderness” (3). Nor has opposition from the Left espoused anything near an
affirmation of the need for true democratic participation for all, with the Left
largely unwilling to break with the “dominant ‘development’ paradigms” (3).
The
“elite pact” with capital (3) has meant that while apartheid laws have been
abolished, “the law of capital” continues to operate unchallenged: “it
certainly did not free the majority of blacks from having noting to sell but
their labour, nor has it ended the pauperisation of labour, employed and
unemployed. Indeed, one could say that is has, in fact, expanded the law of
capital” (123). At the same time, avenues for emancipatory politics have been
closed off (3). “Born during the high period of neoliberal globalisation, the
postapartheid government silenced more radical alternatives by trading on its
credentials as the ‘party of liberation’. Successfully outmanoeuvring its left
critics, the trajectory in South Africa has been a succession of neoliberal
restructurings” (xiii-xiv).
Gibson argues
that the constant assertion that there was “no alternative” on the part of the
ANC was not as a result of “pessimism of the intellect” but of “intellectual
laziness” (xiv). Indeed, he contends that “anti-intellectualism continues to be
especially prevalent in the ANC” in which “rather than encouraging a culture of
discussion, a virtue is made of a military-like discipline and silence in the
ranks” (79). The new government presided over what Gibson calls “the
depoliticisation of politics and the suppression of grassroots, democratic
voices” (83), which has been achieved through at least two models of
“co-option” which, according to Gibson, have been applied in post-apartheid
South Africa: “one governmental and the other non-governmental” (13). The first
rationalises people not as active citizens but as passive receivers of state
resources to be “looked after and controlled by various government agencies”
(28). This form of governmentality reconfigures rights “into the neoliberal
discourse of ‘access’ and thus based on ‘cost recovery’ rather than need” (29).
The second entails the “NGOization” of the state. In South Africa, Gibson
argues, “the realm of civil society is in fact a small one, one that is
‘quintessentially bourgeois’ (28), and “civil society is decreasingly a
space for the vibrant political dialogue that could have evolved from the 1990s
and increasingly a restricted, commercialised and restricted space where,
alongside ANC patronage, the freedoms of the market and the rights of property
take precedence as protected rights” (29). In this matrix, NGOs “often create a
systemic popular disempowerment through a language of individual ‘equal
rights’” (31). According to Gibson, “left-leaning NGOs in Africa are generally
hierarchical, urban-based, Northern focused operations, accountable to their
donors and to developing activities in terms of their benefactors’ missions
rather than being responsible to the people they supposedly represent” (32). Their
activities are said to generally “undermine the incipient participatory
democracy that characterises grassroots organisations” (32). They represent the
“safety valves” which channel “popular discontent along constitutional,
peaceful and harmless ways” (33). And they are even held to be “midwifing
recolonisation”: “it is the NGOs, not military interventions, that play a
significant role in shoring up neo-colonial globalisation” (33).
According
to Gibson, “to be truly democratic and accountable to the poor, NGOs must shift
the geography of reason and cease to operate like NGOs” (33). This means
abandoning “their donors as their key priority” and fostering “solidarity with
[popular democratic] movements” (34). Instead, most share a belief with
government in the “backwardness, unpredictability, and idiocy of the masses”
(35). Indeed, the poor are routinely blamed for their situation by the state
and NGOs alike in post-apartheid South Africa, rendered, as DuBois would put
it, “problem people”. They are portrayed as being plagued by “moral degeneracy”
(37).
Politics of space
Because
the rationalisation of space according to race was one of the most divisive
legacies of apartheid, Gibson analyses the post-apartheid situation from the
perspective of the politics of space, contending that “although post-apartheid
South Africa has shifted the racial boundaries of space, the location where one
lives still plays an important role in determining identity, class and
political voice” (14). In this landscape, the poor have become increasingly
alienated as post-apartheid cities have changed (14). This is not a far cry
away from Fanon’s characterisation of the native quarter in the colonial city: “colonialism
is a total experience. Built on spatial exclusion and repression, the ‘native’
is restricted and constantly reminded not to move. In this context, liberation
consists of the breaking down of these internal and external barriers” (14).
This has not been fundamentally restructured in the post-apartheid nation (18).
“One of the pitfalls of national liberation,” Gibson argues, “is that the
colonial city is not reorganised but taken over, and this includes taking over
colonial attitudes towards the ‘native quarters’ (25). And indeed there is
visceral stigmatisation of shack settlements (19) which perpetuates the same
social Manichaeism that characterised apartheid: “under apartheid and colonial
rule, the African poor were poor because it was their ‘nature as Africans’;
today the African poor are poor because it is ‘their nature to be poor’” (124).
The poor are regarded as ‘corrosive element’ which threatens ‘bourgeois
society’ (20); they are represented as “‘undifferentiated, unwilling carriers
of social diseases’… as morally corrupt and behaviourally undisciplined – or,
to use the language of apartheid, ‘surplus population’” (150). Gibson quotes Huchzermeyer
when he contends that “the post-apartheid state now speaks of the growth of
shanty towns using ‘terminology otherwise applied to life-threatening
epidemics’ such as ‘eradication’” (152). “It is not surprising… that where the
poor live, and where they wish to live, has become a fault line in the vision
of post-apartheid liberation” (19).
And
indeed on the other side of this Manichean divide is bourgeois society, which
may have changed somewhat in complexion, but not in its fundamentally exclusive
structure – and even the racial transformation of this pampered stratum has not
changed radically. The white elite today, Gibson contends, “enjoy a freedom and
a feel-good factor that they could have never imagined before, while the majority
of the country’s population is pauperised or living close to poverty levels”
(xviii). Gibson quotes Richard Ballard: “the change from segregation to
assimilation is not necessarily a weakening of the white social agenda but a
shrewd move that ensures the sustainability of white social control” (18). And
indeed, “the share of white households in the top fifth of the income scale
actually grew after the end of apartheid” (73). However, Gibson contends that,
in the post-apartheid era, it has become apparent to the masses that oppression
“can wear a black face” too. “There is no racial solidarity: black capitalists
are just as exploitative as white; in fact BEE companies have been among the
worst labour law violators” (117-118). And this is a result of “a limited
transition that ‘allows’ a minority of the black population to feed off state
resources, the logic of which is patronage, corruption and exploitation” (118).
Yet, Gibson echoes Fanon’s idea of the uselessness of the nationalist
bourgeoisie: “the old problem of the accumulation of capital and technological
backwardness is addressed through the creation of cheap, skilled labour. Yet
the problem for the nationalist bourgeoisie remains: it can’t become an
‘authentic’ bourgeoisie because it can’t accumulate capital” (118).
Nevertheless, the rise of this bourgeoisie has been accompanied by “public
displays of greed and power” (xiv). “Overt manifestations of individual greed
as justification for the profound inequalities would have been frowned upon in
the late 1980s, but became quite acceptably by the late 1990s” (77). He points
to the 2010 World Cup, alongside the “citadelisation and securitisation of the
cities and the ‘elimination of the slums’ as expressions of the contemporary
commodification of space where the lines of force are quite clear” as being
proof of what Fanon would call a “fetish of grandiose buildings and prestige
expenditures” on the part of the nationalist bourgeoisie (25).
Gibson
quotes Fanon’s description of the bourgeois society as “a closed society where
its not good to be alive, where the air is rotten and ideas and people
putrefying. And I believe that a man who takes a stand against this living death is in a way a
revolutionary” (18). A place where “they talk of humanism but kill the human
being wherever they are found” (26). And Gibson points out that this foetid
bourgeois existence has increasingly barricaded itself behind the high walls of
‘privatised communities’: “The exclusivity of heavily guarded colonial spaces
that Fanon describes has probably increased since the ANC came to power… gated
communities and secure shopping and entertainment centres are the new
Manichaean divides which, with private security and rapid-response patrol
units, keep poor people out” (71). Gibson points to the property market as “a
representation of a larger economic process where, as Ballard points out,
racially coded fears about falling prices are fixated on the proximity of shack
settlements (the presence of which are always a threat), and ‘fortified
enclaves’ provide almost ‘total security’ from real and imagined threats” (19).
Biko could have been speaking of our contemporary context when he said
“township life alone makes it a miracle for anyone to live to adulthood. There
we see a situation of absolute want, in
which black will kill black to be able to survive. This is the basis of
vandalism, murder, rape , and plunder that goes on while the real sources of
evil – white society [which we might today instead characterise as bourgeois
society] – are sun-tanning on exclusive beaches or relaxing in their bourgeois
homes” (1978:75).
The
politics of space brings to light the question of “the Right to the City”, as
elucidated by Henri Lefebvre. According to Gibson, the “elite vision” imagines
South African cities rising to the level of “world class cities” (19) – a
vision which “cannot, and does not, support or accommodate the poor –
especially those who live in shack settlements close to middle-class
residences, and are considered a threat to security, health and hygiene” (20).
The state uses its muscle to intervene in cases “where the real-estate market
fails to reinforce class lines and exclusions”, employing forced “removals and
intimidations couched in the rhetoric of development”. This is part of a
renewed politics of “divide and rule” which “generates zero-sum market-based
identities of haves and have-nots”, rendering the poor and marginalised
“always, by definition, a stigmatised mass” (134). The post-apartheid,
neoliberal rationalisations of the government have insisted that “shack
dwellers have got to understand that it is far too expensive to build housing
for them in the city, and that new developments will create economic
opportunities on the city’s margins” (152).
This is
contrary to Henri Lefebvre’s idea of “right to the city” as “freedom of
movement as an affirmation of life” (xvi) – and indeed, this right has come to
be increasingly espoused by social movements of the marginalised which, Gibson
argues, are calling for a “new urban humanism” (xvi) and to “democratise our
cities from below” (xvi). Indeed, the right to the city is framed as “part of
the continuing struggle for liberation” (xvi). Quoting Fanon, Gibson agrees
that “the beginning of the end of the colonial city is… marked when the
colonised subvert the violence employed to police the dividing line between the
‘conqueror’s city’ and the ‘native city’ by surging into forbidden quarters,
transgressing the boundaries and subverting the lines of force” (24). “A
transformed and renewed right to urban life” (25) sees people refusing “to
remain in their place and insist on the importance of thinking a politics that
does not begin from the art of the possible” (27).
Gibson
echoes Fanon when he asserts that “those hemmed in by lines of force” – those
in the “shanty towns and shack settlements, in the ghettos and ‘native
quarters’” – play a pivotal role “in leading the urban revolutionary movement”
(26). This resistance “begins from the perspective of a common struggle founded
on a consciousness of post-apartheid’s broken promises” (20). Through action,
they have “articulated a living politics that challenges the ascriptive idea of
South African citizenship” (21). And these revolts are not to be understood as
“service delivery strikes”: “social revolts were products of the broken
promises of liberation, but they were misunderstood in terms of neoliberal
discourse as service-delivery revolts” (xiv). “Organised shack dwellers don’t
simply want things, they want to be
recognised as human equals. They are fighting for freedom and justice and the
right to the city, a struggle that fundamentally challenges the production of
space” (18). As Friedman puts it: “Public service starts from the recognition
that, in a democracy, the government’s job is not to ‘deliver’ to citizens. It
is, rather, to listen to them, to do what the majority asks, if that is
possible, and, where it is not, to work with citizens to ensure that what is
done is as close to what they want as it can be” (38). According to Gibson, local
uprisings “expressed a break with the state/party discourse of ‘development’
and an unwillingness to be co-opted or spoken for” (133).
One
such example of this sort of action is embodied by Abahlali baseMjondolo, a
shack-dwellers movement which, according to Gibson, has “in a small way,
attempted to reappropriate colonial space”, connecting this to the “need to
transform politics.” Abahlali stands out for its “democratic practices with its
insistence on discussion and reporting back to fully inclusive meetings” (xv). Thus,
he argues, “the shack dwellers’ movement concretises the importance of
Lefebvre’s idea that there is a politics of space because space is political”
(27). The insistence “that the policy makers ‘speak to us not about us’ was not
a request for service delivery but for the democratisation of development” (xv).
“Rather than a pre-approved plan, there is reflection, decision and action at
each step” (16). Rather than a philosophy of ‘leader knows best’, S’bu Zikode
is instead described as enacting “a Fanonian principle: the leader does not
lead the people, but rather helps in the work of self-clarification; the
philosophic idea of ‘knowing thyself’ is and must be a social and collective
process” (155). And just as Fanon indicated that negotiations with an
oppressive force was futile, so Abahlali is not concerned “with political
negotiations but with principles that flowed from an open and egalitarian moral
discourse and democratic practice” (157). Humanisation is the goal of the
organisation: Zikode argues that through Abahlali “people are starting to
remember that they are human beings” (157).
Gibson
also considers the role of the academic intellectual. Fanon writes “everything
can be explained to the people on the single condition that you really want
them to understand” (40). Gibson points to the fundamental problem: “the
reformer’s disconnection from the people, believing that things are better
‘without letting the people interfere’” (40). What is required is “a break with
the idea that they are privileged theorists, and a recognition that while their
work is not to cheer from the sidelines, being serious and critical listeners
and interlocutors is the key starting point” (41). Gibson thus demands nothing
less than “shifting the geography of reason”, which is to be understood as “not
simply a critical move away from the
positivism of the powerful, but a critical move towards the often hidden praxis and thinking of the damned of the
earth” (220).
