Africans in India

Camalita Naicker, The Con

I am an African. A South African Indian to be more precise. A few years ago, after much research and determination, my father, almost 60 years old at the time, managed to locate the indenture number of one of his maternal grandmothers. This identification number, given to indentured labourers who boarded ships to work in the sugarcane fields of the British colony of Natal in south-eastern Africa in the 1860s, allows one, who is lucky enough to find it, to trace the village where an ancestor came from, and the port at which she must have left her homeland. The village was in a rural area near Madras.

South African student protests and re-emergence of people’s power

Camalita Naicker, Kafila

The #nationalshutdown of all major universities in South Africa continues, even after a historic victory yesterday, when, after several days of mass mobilisation by students and workers President Jacob Zuma was forced to concede a zero-percent fee increase in university tuition fees next year. Yet, it was bittersweet for the more than twelve thousand people who marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria who were, once again, tear-gassed and shot at with rubber bullets and stun grenades. The police turned violent when students began demanding, after waiting for several hours, that the President address them. Instead, Zuma chose to speak to the media in a press briefing and leave the students to the police. In Cape Town, students marched to the airport to show their solidarity with those in Pretoria; there too police fired rubber bullets, tear gas, and stun-grenades even as students fled into the neighbouring residential areas. For many, the victory it is only a partial one, a short-term solution deferring the problem to another day. It does not resolve the issue of unaffordable education nor does it address other important issues that the national action has been tied to like the outsourcing of labour on university campuses or the general discontents of the lack of transformation at higher education institutions in the country.

Camalita Naicker on Marikana as an Event in the Subaltern Sphere of Politics

Post-Marikana SA, birthing the new student politics

Camalita Naicker, The Daily Maverick

The Black Student Movement has established a political praxis that shows marked breaks with traditional hierarchical student representative structures. This has serious implications for the post-Marikana student, who has seen the failings of the government, the party, and the leader, and who has witnessed popular mobilisations that break with traditional top-down politics; practices which have repeatedly failed to fix the problems of black and oppressed people in this country.

Marikana & it's Afterlives in Popular Struggles in South Africa Today

Making a Sow’s Ear from Palestinian Protest

Camalita Naicker, The Con

The recent decision by the Congress of South African Students (COSAS) to place a pig’s head in what was assumed to be the kosher section of Woolworths, and then, in fact, turned out to be the halal section, could be written off as a mere “fail of the week.”

But it is indicative of a far more serious and insidious politics being cultivated by Boycott. Divestment. Sanctions-South Africa (BDS-SA) who have proved unable and unwilling to run a disciplined and ethical campaign in solidarity with Palestinians.

Gaza vigil - Rhodes University 8/8/2014

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.

Silvia Federici: Revolution at Point Zero

Marx, Fanon & Biko: Touchstones in a Time of Crisis?

Unemployed People’s Movement

Marx, Fanon & Biko: Touchstones in a Time of Crisis?

Arts Major, 5:00p.m., Tuesday 16 September

Our country is slipping into serious crisis. The state has been captured by a ruthless and predatory elite bent on plunder. The people’s struggles are being seriously repressed. From Ficksburg to Marikana and Durban activists are being murdered.

Last week we marked the anniversary of the assassination of Steven Bantu Biko. This week we are hosting a public discussion on the light that Biko, and other radical humanists like Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon, can shine into our darkening present.

All struggles are connected: The intersections of the political

by Camalita Naicker, Bokomoso

During the Rape Crisis Teach-in held by the Rhodes University Politics Department in Grahamstown this July, South African historian and researcher Dr Catherine Burns, brought up a little known event that happened in Soweto in February 1990.

Mary Mabaso had organised an anti-rape march to draw attention to the increase in rape after 1976. Young women were being abducted and raped by gangs of young men who were known as ‘jackrollers,’ and this soon became a ‘fashionable’ practice amongst some male youth.

The Semantics of Synecdoche

by Camalita Naicker

“And more than anything, my body, as well as my soul, do not allow yourself to cross your arms like a sterile spectator, for life is not a spectacle, for a sea of sorrows is not a stage, for a man who cries out is not a dancing bear.”

Aimé Césaire

Being ‘Indian’ in post-apartheid society is a precarious position. Apartheid aimed to create a racial hierarchy in which ‘Indians’ straddled a middle position. Legally, socially and economically they were given privileges not awarded to African people but these were limited and served to keep them inferior to white people but more privileged than races lower down the ladder.

Reflections on the Frantz Fanon Fifty Years Later Colloquium

by Camalita Naicker, Thinking Africa Newsletter

There are many clichés one could devolve into when speaking about an event like this, I will try my best to refrain from doing so, however clichés have become such because of their overuse but also their ability to describe feelings and emotions fairly appropriately. What I will say is that for me it was an extremely novel, profound experience. Reading Frantz Fanon and engaging with people who have known him and engaged with his work over so many years and still recognise not only his relevance to our society today but how we, through our fidelity to him and in living Fanon, can recognise the possibility for the creation of a new humanity.

The Politics of Everyday Racism

by Camalita Naicker, Pambazuka

A friend of mine was recently ranting after having attended a predominantly ‘white’ social gathering where she was repeatedly introduced to the only other person of colour in attendance. It happens often; the underlying assumption being that ‘they’ must have something in common, owing simply to their shared race.

'Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms' - A review

by Camalita Naicker

“I sincerely believe that subjective experience can be understood by others; and it would give me no pleasure to announce that the black problem is my problem and mine alone and that it is up to me to study it. But it does seem to me that M.Mannoni has not tried to feel himself into the despair of the man of colour confronting the white man. Physically and affectively”. (Frantz Fanon 1967: 63/64).

It is in a similar vein that Tracey Denean Sharpley – Whiting makes her argument against the blunt assertions of, what she terms, ‘Liberal Euro -American Lit-Crit Feminism’ which labels Fanon among other things, a misogynist.

The Fact of Blackness in a Sea of Whiteness

by Camalita Naicker 

The Fact of Blackness, the fifth chapter of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks, is not an answer or an explanation to the statement that is the title, rather it is an insight into the inner turmoil and tense soliloquy that Fanon is experiencing. The answer on what is The Fact of Blackness is exceedingly less important that the question of it. If we take this as our starting point then we begin to understand his angst in trying to locate his identity in a sea of whiteness and white power. It is a conversation not unlike the ones we all have with ourselves every now and again, if you’re a person of colour. His inner rumination and contemplation is central to the chapter, it is the guide that leads to the end of the chapter where Fanon finds himself in crisis.