Xenophobia,'stakeholders' and human rights in Grahamstown

Paddy O'Halloran, The Daily Maverick

Grahamstown’s month-long unresolved xenophobic crisis has finally gained international attention. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) will convene a meeting in Grahamstown on Monday morning to address the needs of displaced spaza shop owners and their families. They have been in limbo since looting on 21 October, receiving insufficient support, with many unable to go back to their shops in town.

Xenophobia in Grahamstown: Police Fail the Community

Paddy O'Halloran, Daily Maverick

On Monday 19 October 2015, Grahamstown police reinforced by officers and equipment from East London twice dispersed protesting students at Eastcape Midlands College (EMC). Students at the college were protesting corruption by their institution’s administration. They had been joined by students from Rhodes University, down the hill, who had shut down their institution early in the morning as part of the national protest against unaffordable tertiary education. The police threw stun grenades and, in the second dispersal, chased students with a water cannon using chemical water that caused severe itching. When the students retreated to the Rhodes University campus, the police gathered in force at the campus entrance until the vice-chancellor went to the police station to officially request that they stand down. Elsewhere in South Africa so far this week — in Cape Town, Stellenbosch, and Port Elizabeth — protesting students and academics have been met with arrest, tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets. With the exception of Rhodes, the reaction by state and universities has been to break the protests using force.

“They Will Not Take the Street”: Ferguson and Colonial Histories

Paddy O'Halloran, CounterPunch

Last week, activists staged protests in Ferguson, Missouri to memorialize the death of unarmed, black teenager Michael Brown at the hands of an armed policeman a year ago. The protesters marched and shouted, publicly challenging the legitimacy of the police department. The police response shows continuity with a longstanding logic and practice of colonialism in regard to protest and space.

Paddy O'Halloran on Fanon, the post colony & 'non-war' communities

Thinking beyond Divisions with Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject

Paddy O'Halloran

Conclusions to even the most thorough intellectual efforts often leave readers with more unresolved questions than answered ones.  Perhaps the writer shares in this dilemma, as well, arriving at ‘the end’ only to find themselves unsatisfied.  Maybe, too, it is fortunate for the long process of intellectual work that no question is ever fully answered, but it can be frustrating and difficult to accept in the short term.  However illuminating a line of thought might be, it seems that the only end it can achieve is an artificial one.  Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject (1996) concludes in this way: with much more to say; with questions.  My point here is not to reiterate Mamdani’s thesis in that book, but to explore some questions that seem to arise from his argument in the hopeful interest of providing some basis for expanding on his project.

Transcending Myth: A Reading of Achille Mbembe’s 'On the Postcolony'

by Paddy O’Halloran

‘And how can one live in death, be already dead, while being-there—while having not necessarily left the world or being part of the spectre—and when the shadow that overhangs existence has not disappeared, but on the contrary weights ever more heavily?’ – Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (2001, 201).

In a famous passage of The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon describes the dreams of colonized people.  The dreams are of ‘muscular prowess’, of going ‘beyond certain limits’: ‘I dream’, Fanon writes, ‘that I burst out laughing, that I span a river in one stride […]. During the period of colonization, the native [le colonisé] never stops achieving his [sic] freedom from nine in the evening until six in the morning’ ([1961] 1963, 52).  These are dreams which challenge, in the subconscious world, unfettered from reality, the limitations of the coerced reality of colonization.  They are dreams which the dreamers wish to make real, desiring to mimic the excess of action of their nightly fictions in waking life.  Fanon, later, imagining an uprising of the ‘slaves’ writes: ‘We were running like madmen; shots rang out . . . we were striking [….] Blood and sweat cooled and refreshed us’ and, as they burned the structures of the colonizers, ‘the flames flickered sweetly on our cheeks’ (1963, 88).

Reflection on Nigel Gibson’s 'Fanonian Practices in South Africa'

Paddy O'Halloran

Perhaps the most shocking and discouraging aspect of the Marikana incident in South Africa in August 2012 is the fact that, before the day of the massacre, mine workers were shot at from within the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) office building near the mine—the office of their union.  Worse is the fact NUM officials at the Marikana enquiry displayed no compunctions in stating that their actions were justified in that they were protecting themselves from the workers.  What union must protect itself from the workers, its workers?  It is a paradox, an absolutely irrational train of thought.  It is another match in the “cat and mouse” game with reason that leaves Fanon so frustrated: ‘for a man [sic] whose only weapon is reason there is nothing more neurotic than contact with unreason’ ([1952] 1967, 89, 90).  When a union brings the weapons of violence against its workers, where has reason fled?

Reflections after 'Frantz Fanon: A Portrait', by Alice Cherki

 by Paddy O'Halloran

          Biographers are set a difficult task in Frantz Fanon.  Apart from recounting the narrative of the subject’s life and situating him or her within a history, a biographer—at least, a good one—will lend meaning to the subject’s life, or, better yet, will elucidate for the reader the meanings which the subject ascribed to his or her life by action and consequence.  Gleaning the importance from Fanon’s life, a life which, despite its brevity, was brimming with meaning, proves a trying adventure. 

Anti-Colonialism and Alienation: Reading Marx in Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism

by Paddy O'Halloran

In reading anti-colonial literature of the mid-Twentieth century, it becomes apparent that there was a close relationship between anti-colonialism and socialism-communism; one that was both practical and ideological.  Why did anti-colonialists draw so much on these political ideologies, and why were so many anti-colonialists also socialists or communists?  One answer would explain the relationship as a matter of strategy: In the 1950s and 60s, the governments of the imperial metropoles were in direct antagonism with a communist superpower, which made political association with the Soviet Union attractive for anti-colonial political parties, movements, and armies; and support for these groups, in Cold War logic, could benefit the Soviet Union by destabilizing and dismantling the Western empires.  However, that answer seems superficial.  In developing a deeper understanding of the relationship between anti-colonialism and communism, the writing of Aimé Césaire proves useful.