A Review of Nigel Gibson's 'Fanonian Practices in South Africa'

by Joel Pearson

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).

Ubuntu: Reflections from eThembeni

by  Joel Pearson, Thinking Africa Newsletter

Life is arduous for the people of eThembeni informal settlement on the outskirts of Grahamstown. They live without electricity, and water must be collected from one of only a few taps which frequently run dry. Last year, a couple died in a shack fire that community members were unable to fight because there were no taps nearby. Fire trucks could not enter the settlement because there is no adequate road leading into it. The region’s dry, hot summers are felt most acutely here, and winter rains turn the sparsely-vegetated plateau on which people have built their houses into a muddy deluge. It should be no surprise that promises made by well-meaning visitors are received with an air of scepticism – they seldom materialise. And indeed promises have come from many, most enthusiastically from the politicians who make the rounds as election season approaches, giving full assurance that “service delivery” will happen tomorrow, that a brighter future awaits. The people of eThembeni are still waiting.

Anti-Semite and Jew: A review essay

by Joel Pearson, August 2012

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in 1906, at the beginning of what would prove to be a century of great turbulence. Two cataclysmic wars would ravage Europe as ‘modernity’ shuddered through society. In a climate of alienation, marginalization and violence, Sartre developed his diagnosis of the human condition. His writings – plays, biographies, novels and notebooks – explored the problems of “existential thought (la contingence) and the vicissitudes of social history through the troubled lives of individual actors” (Jules-Rosette, 2007:266). With the smoke of Auschwitz still looming large over a continent in ruin after the Second World War, Sartre’s political work interrogated how the devastations of fascism, racism and inequality had erupted, and what their effects were on the individual psyche (Jules-Rosette, 2007:266). In 1944, as the war petered out in Europe and an increasing number of Jews returned home from Nazi Germany, Sartre set out to examine the roots of anti-Semitism in France. Anti-Semite and Jew (Réflections sur la question juive) examined the “interpersonal construction of personal identities” in the dramatic personae of the anti-Semite, the democrat, the inauthentic and the authentic Jew (Walzer, 1995:xxvi). His central claim, perhaps: identity and culture cannot be reduced to timeless essences; they are socially constituted within historical situations; and both individual and group perceptions are intimately tied to the (often hostile) perceptions of the “other/s” (Walzer, 1995:xxiii).