They Die Out There: It Matters Not Where, Nor How

Richard Pithouse, CounterPunch

On Monday morning there was a protest, in the form of a road blockade, organised from a shack settlement in Durban, South Africa. The settlement, officially known as Quarry Road but popularly known as KwaMam’Suthu, is on a sliver of land that runs along a river bank squeezed between two busy roads. It is in the suburbs to the North of the city. The current sequence of open contestation between people occupying land in the interstices of this part of the city and the local state stretches back to the ‘80s. It has a prior history that, before the mass evictions of the ‘50s and ‘60s, came to a head in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s. Over the last decade it has ebbed and flowed as the state has alternated between offering material and political concessions and responding to struggle with increasingly violent repression. Recently things have been getting hot again. Last month residents from the nearby Kennedy Road settlement burnt a municipal truck during two days of protest.

Reality in Colour

Danielle Bowler, Eyewitness News

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it… How does it feel to be a problem?

The St Louis County grand jury’s decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, did not come as a surprise. While it registers as unthinkable, it simultaneously fits within a paradigm that continually devalues black lives.

Walking while black at 9.50am

Nikiwe Bikitsha

Nikiwe Bikitsha, Mail & Guardian

Walking while black has always has its hazards in this country. The most common is that dogs will bark while you walk by; if you are unfortunate they may even try to bite you. It is a phenomenon which I’m sure is unique to South Africa.

My experience in other countries has been that dogs don’t bark randomly at blacks walking down the street. It must be that these dogs are often trained to antagonise black passersby or keep the imagined or real black intruder at bay.

Lewis Gordon on the Trayvon Martin Murder

Of Illicit Appearance: The L.A. Riots/Rebellion as a Portent of Things to Come

By Lewis Gordon, Truthout 

In early spring 1994, I paid a visit to Los Angeles, where I was greeted in the airport at the arrival gate - that was still possible in those days - by my friend Mina Choi, who was a former babysitter to my eldest son when I was in graduate school. Having completed her studies at Yale, Mina was pursuing her writing career in Los Angeles. We embraced each other in a hearty hello, a mundane act expected of good friends, which, however, led to a halt and uncomfortable silence among our fellow travelers, their family and friends. Such was the response to a meeting of Northeast Asia and African America nearly two years after the 1992 Riots/Uprisings.[1] Although Rodney King famously pleaded, "Can we all get along?" there clearly continued to be much doubt.