Mahmood Mamdani - Define & Rule: Native as Political Identity

Mahmood Mamdani - DEFINE AND RULE: Native as Political Identity from CenterforPlaceCulturePolitics on Vimeo.

David Scott interviewed by Stuart Hall

Bomb Magazine, 2005

Stuart Hall David, your book Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment is written in the shadow of what you call the exhaustion and collapse of “the social and political hopes that went into the anti-colonial imaginary and postcolonial making of national sovereignties.” What do you think went wrong, fundamentally, with that project?

Does 'On the Postcolony' break with the colonial library?

Mlamuli Hlatswayo, November 2013

Introduction

This essay takes the position that Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony (hereafter referred to as Mbembe’s text) does to a large extent, break with the colonial library. Furthermore, Mbembe’s text offers a critical analysis of postcolonial Africa through the privileging of African subjectivities, and a rejection of dominant modes of representations, which is largely found in Marxism and neo liberal discussions on Africa. Mary Porter argues that Mbembe rejects these simplistic binaries (“West” and “South”, “Developed” and “Developing” etc) and the segmented historical trajectories which not only influence the different modes of representations in Africa, but they are also influenced and informed by the Colonial archive (Porter, 2003: 274).

Shifting the Geography of Reason XI: Diverse Lineages of Existentialism—Africana, Feminist, and Decolonial

Caribbean Philosophical Association

2014 ANNUAL MEETING

Shifting the Geography of Reason XI: 

Diverse Lineages of Existentialism—Africana, Feminist, and Decolonial

June 19–21, 2014, Hyatt Regency, St. Louis, Missouri

Call for Papers

Submission Deadline:

February 1, 2014

Abstracts should be submitted to: caribphil@gmail.com

In recent years, existential thought has been revitalized by a new generation of theorists investigating questions of gender, race, and sexual orientation. They have brought to light numerous ways in which existentialism has contributed to, and been shaped by, Africana philosophy, Latin American philosophy, feminism, and the work of literary writers and performing artists.

Remembering Heroes on the ‘Fringe’: Anthony Egan reviews new books on Rick Turner & Neil Aggett

Remebering Heroes on the Fringe - Anthony Egan reviews new books on Rick Turner & Niel Aggett by TigersEye99

Julius Malema: It's Just a Jump to the Left, And Then a Step to the Right

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

Being against [one form of] evil doesn't make you good.

- Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream, 1952

Over the last ten years or so there has been an extraordinary degree of popular protest in South Africa. The seemingly incorrigible elitism of the higher reaches of our public sphere has meant that, particularly in the absence of sustained formal organisation, popular protest has seldom won the right to represent itself in this space. For years the media, NGOs, academy and political parties were able to substitute the presentation of their own assumptions, frequently inflected with crude stereotypes, for rational and democratic engagement. However now that the scale and tenacity of popular dissent is being more widely recognised there is an astonishing array of actors trying to capture it, or bits of it, including political parties, NGOs, activists of various sorts, minor political sects, entrepreneurs, tenderpreneurs and people with religious, ethnic and cultural projects.

Tongaat Mall Collapse: The Boomerang Effect

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

In 1961 Frantz Fanon described the colonial world as “cut in two”, divided into “compartments .... inhabited by different species”. For Fanon the creation of different kinds of spaces was central to the creation of different types of people and their ordering in a hierarchy of value. He concluded that the ordering of the colonial world must be examined to “reveal the lines of force it implies”, lines of force that “will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be reorganized”.

Autonomy in Brazil: towards a new political culture

By Raúl Zibechi, Roar Magazine

This is the second part of an article by Raul Zibechi on the recent Brazilian uprisings (read part one here). The full piece was originally published by the Observatorio Social de América Latina (OSAL Nº 34). English translation by Ramor Ryan for Upside Down World.

The Pan-American Games as a Rehearsal

“People have the illusion that they will profit from the World Cup events, but the truth is that they will be brutally suppressed,” said Roberto Morales, deputy adviser to Marcelo Freixo of the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), a year and a half before the Confederations Cup. (Zibechi, 2012b) Morales participates in the Comitê Popular da Copa (Popular Committee for the World Cup) that was created during the Pan-American Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2007, when local people began to resist forced relocation to make way for games’ facilities.

Autonomy in Brazil: below and behind the June uprising

by Raúl Zibechi, Roar Magazine

This article was originally published by the Observatorio Social de América Latina (OSAL Nº 34). English translation by Ramor Ryan for Upside Down World.

The huge mobilizations in June 2013 in 353 cities and towns in Brazil came as much a surprise to the political system as to analysts and social bodies. Nobody expected so many demonstrations, so numerous, in so many cities and for so long. As happens in these cases, media analyses were quick off the mark. Initially they focused on the immediate problems highlighted by the actions: urban transport, rising fare prices and the poor quality of service for commuters. Slowly the analyses and perspectives expanded to include the day-to-day dissatisfaction felt by a large part of the population. While there was widespread acknowledgement that basic family income had risen during the last decade of economic growth, social commentators began to focus on economic inclusion through consumption as the root of the dissatisfaction, alongside the persistence of social inequality.

Nomboniso Gasa: Long and short of the gender issue

by Percy Zvomuya, Mail & Guardian

Gender activist Nomboniso Gasa has been on Twitter for most of this year, although she hasn't yet memorised the social medium's first commandment: brevity. Her tweets, as a result, are often numbered 1 to 10.

"I was always intrigued by the power attributed to social media, the role it played in the Arab Spring, its power to report things as they happen," she said at her home in Observatory, Johannes­burg, on why she joined Twitter. "But I have always wondered about the depth of the platform. I didn't understand how you could communicate substantial issues in 140 characters. I still haven't mastered it. That's why I do the lists."

The death of anti-apartheid campaigner Neil Aggett and South Africa's dark past

Donald McRae, The Guardian

Darkness falls early on a cold afternoon in London as Jill Burger remembers how detention and death in Johannesburg changed her life for ever. The last shadowy strands of daylight seep from a room where she describes how Neil Aggett, her younger brother and a quietly spoken but uncompromising doctor, was detained by the South African security police. Thirty-two years ago this month, on 27 November 1981, Neil and his girlfriend, Liz Floyd, who was also a doctor and an anti-apartheid activist, were seized.

Africa & the Future: An Interview with Achille Mbembe

Achille Mbembe

Achille Mbembe interviewed by Thomas M Blaser, Africa is a Country

Since 2008, when you initiated the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC), you were very much concerned with thinking about the future — why and why now? Is there something about our current epoch that requires us to think about the future?

Mbembe: There were two reasons. The first was that the category of the future was very central to the struggle for liberation if only in the sense that those who were involved in it had constantly to project themselves towards a time that would be different from what they were going through, what they were experiencing. So the political, in that sense, was about a constant engagement with the forces of the present that foreclosed the possibility of freedom, but it was also the political, closely associated with the idea of futurity. And what seems to have happened after 1994 [in South Africa since the first democratic elections after apartheid], is the receding of the future as a temporary horizon of the political, and of culture in general, and its substitution by a kind of present that is infinite and a landing. This receding of the future and its replacement by a landing present is also fostered by the kind of economic dogma with which we live; to use a short term, neoliberalism. The time of the market, especially under the current capitalist conditions, is a time that is very fragmented and the time of consumption is really a time of the instant. So we wanted to recapture that category of the future and see to what extent it could be remobilized in the attempt at critiquing the present, and reopening up a space not only for imagination, but also for the politics of possibility.

Racism as a Form of Bad Faith

Lewis Gordon: Racism as a Form of Bad Faith by TigersEye99

Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters and the South African Left

Benjamin Fogel, Africa is a Country

In geographer Gillian Hart’s excellent Rethinking the South African Crisis, she points to a rather curious phenomenon as part of her engagement with the figure of one Julius Malema and the ‘populist’ turn he represents. She notes that for a change the far left and liberal right’s politics converge in the sense that they both share the same critique of the ex-Youth League president and current commander-in-chief of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).

Thapelo Lekgowa, Jane Duncan and Bheki Buthelezi on the media coverage of the Marikana strike and massacre

on MEDIA coverage x264 from marikanabuch on Vimeo.

Humanism, creativity and rights: invoking Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city in the tension presented by informal settlements in South Africa today

Humanism, creativity and rights: invoking Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city in the tension presented by informal settlements in South Africa today by TigersEye99

The Missing women of Marikana

by Camalita Naicker, Amandla Magazine

Often when the history of 'big' events is recorded, after a while, the stories with specific details are eroded and obscured. It is made to fit easily into a certain kind of analysis that endures over time. So much so that what is subsumed under these theoretical beacons of hope are the very real, very human stories of everyday life and the complexity involved in the moments leading up to them.

February harvest: Boland

Rustum Kozain

1. The grape picker

Her calves hard as stumps of vine

an old woman heaves a basket

like a hump to her back and hacks

a pearl of phlegm from her throat.

Daybreak. She yearns to taste

that warm and sweet sulphuric wine

and dreams of empty rows of vine:

one tot for each tenth load of grapes.

Remembering Edward Said ten years after his death

Vashna Jagarnath, Amandla Magazine

On 19 March 2003, the United States declared war on Iraq. Six months later, on 25 September, Edward Wadie Said passed away at the age of 67 in New York City after a decade-long struggle with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. The loss of one of the most elegant minds of the 20th century was all the more acutely felt given that the war with Iraq was being justified and framed by the most crude stereotypes about Arab and Muslim people.

Program for Global Uprisings conference

DAY ONE

FRIDAY 15 NOVEMBER

20.00: Welcome

Welcome from the Stichting Democratie en Media with an introduction and short film from the makers of the globaluprisings.org film series (Brandon Jourdan and Marianne Maeckelbergh).

The Logic of Nuremberg

Mahmood Mamdani, London Review of Books

In March, General Bosco Ntaganda, the ‘Terminator’, former chief of military operations for the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, voluntarily surrendered himself at the US embassy in Kigali and was flown to the headquarters of the International Criminal Court at The Hague. The chargesheet included accusations of murder, rape, sexual slavery, persecution and pillage, offences documented in detail by Human Rights Watch over the last ten years. Ntaganda’s trial, scheduled for next year, will follow that of Thomas Lubanga, the UPC’s president, who was convicted in 2012. There seems to be no question about the justice of the proceedings. At the same time, however, the UN Security Council has been pursuing a strategy of armed intervention in eastern Congo, using troops from South Africa and Tanzania, against the rebel groups Ntaganda and others commanded. Both initiatives – the prosecution of rebel leaders for war crimes and military operations against their personnel – are taking place when peace talks between government and rebels are well underway. This, then, is a co-ordinated military and judicial solution for what is also, and fundamentally, a political problem. Inevitably with such solutions, the winners take all.

Lewis Gordon on 12 Years a Slave

Six Theses on Waste, Value, and Commons

Vinay Gidwani: Six Theses on Waste, Value, and Commons by TigersEye99

Savages, Victims & Saviours: The Metaphor of Human Rights

Savages, Victims & Saviours: The Metaphor of Human Rights by TigersEye99

Fear and Loathing in the ANC – Part Two

It is almost a year since President Jacob Zuma swept to the leadership of the African National Congress for the second time at its national elective conference at Mangaung. Zuma’s margin of victory cemented his hold on the oldest liberation movement on the continent and also concretised a new way of political organisation and patronage within the political party that had developed out of its Polokwane conference five years earlier. In the second part of this series first published in Rolling Stone magazine, Niren Tolsi emerges from the mushroom cloud that was Mangaung. The Con

“It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.”

Neither the Irishman nor I was in death throes, floundering in a pool of vomit and blood after a relentless five days in Mangaung in December last year.

Despite the state's violence, our fight to escape the mud and fire of South Africa's slums will continue

S'bu Zikode, UnFreedom Day, Kennedy Road, 27 April 2009

S'bu Zikode, The Guardian

Our movement of shack-dwellers – Abahlali baseMjondolo, representing some of South Africa's poorest people – was formed in 2005 in Durban and now has more than 12,000 members in more than 60 shack settlements. We campaign against evictions, and for public housing: struggling for a world in which human dignity comes before private profit, and land, cities, wealth and power are shared fairly.

When Abahlali baseMjondolo members take our place in cities we take it humbly, but firmly. We have won many important battles in court, including the overturning of the anti-poor Slums Act – but the law has not bought justice. Despite that victory, thousands of shack dwellers were forcibly removed to make way for developments ahead of the 2010 World Cup. Most were dumped in transit camps, left to rot without basic services. Some camps – such as Isipingo, south of Durban – were built on flood plains.

Fear and Loathing in the ANC

by Niren Tolsi

A year after the African National Congress held its national conference in Mangaung, which returned president Jacob Zuma to its top position, The Con republishes a two-piece special that examines the Fear and Loathing in South African politics which first appeared in Rolling Stone magazine.

Shit. Why Not? If Marry-Wanna presents herself, you can’t refuse the dance.

Especially if, at that moment, the cops are gathered upwind around a police Nyala ten metres away in one of the most securitised parts of the country.

Insouciance demanded it. Even if it was kak Limpopo majat.

 December 2007. Everyone who matters in the African National Congress (ANC) is in Polokwane for the elective conference that will see Jacob Zuma rise to the party’s presidency.

EFF and the return of the warrior citizen

by Siphokazi Magadla, Thought Leader

The advent of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has gained much attention as the first clear reconfiguration of youth politics in post-apartheid South Africa. Much has been discussed about the policies proposed by “Commander-in-Chief” Julius Malema and his commissars, especially those regarding nationalisation and the appropriation of land. While there has been some discussion about the significance of the red beret, there has been little discussion about the significance of the military nature of the language used by the EFF. This language is important in the South African context because it demonstrates the extent to which “peace” in South Africa is evidently militarised peace.

More than just a thorny ride: (un) accounting for my silence in the company of homophobes

Lerato Makate, Bokamoso

After I attended my first annual Soweto Pride — LGBTI Parade in Johannesburg, South Africa — it was time to head on home. I ran across a bumper traffic congested main road, which runs between Mofolo, White City, Jabulani and Jabavu township locations in a typical  Soweto Saturday night.  As my cousin gestures  a random sign to the taxis, a minibus taxi stops and I in a snail’s pace climb into the front seat, minding my hip injury. Inside the taxi it’s a buzz with two toddlers singing their rendition of the South African national anthem remixed with a nursery rhyme, women sharing their day’s events especially from the stokvels — social gatherings that bring women from across any township location together, over music food and drink.

Unemployed People's Movement march at Grahamstown cathedral in protest at political repression in Durban

Nomboniso Gasa: "Eloquent Silences: Gender, Culture and the NDP"

Cry me a river of crocodile tears

Sisonke Msimang

Sisonke Msimang, The Daily Maverick

It is March. Anene Booysen is mutilated, murdered and raped. We are shamed into action, shaken by the brutality of the crime. We imagine our own seventeen year olds and we pray that her soul rests in peace.

It is October. Zandile and Yonelisa are murdered in communal toilets in Diepsloot. We think about our own babies, fat and brown swaying precariously on newly found feet. We wonder what their mothers would have felt. We want to weep.We are outraged.

The Housing List versus the Death List

by Bandile Mdlalose

We are supposed to be living in a democratic country, a country of justice, a country where everyone should be treated as one. Yet there is a huge inequality. That inequality is economic, it is spatial and it is political. We remain divided into rich and poor. We continue to be allocated to different kinds of places that are meant for different kinds of people with different kinds of opportunities, different kinds of lives and different kinds of rights. We continue to be divided into those that have the freedom to express themselves and those that face all kinds of intimidation and repression if we commit the crime of telling the truths about our lives.