Frantz Fanon: A democratic philosopher

Richard Pithouse, Mail & Guardian

If there’s a philosopher of the moment it is, by some distance, Frantz Fanon. This is not surprising given that Fanon offers compelling accounts of the pathologies of both the colony and the postcolony – spaces that some of the young people at the fore of the new ferment in South Africa feel they must inhabit simultaneously.

The Fire this time

Richard Pithouse, Mail & Guardian

In 1963 James Baldwin prefaced and ended The Fire Next Time, two essays on race in America, with a lyric from a song composed by Africans enslaved in America: ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water but fire next time!’ In the Christian reading of Genesis God ‘set the rainbow in the cloud’ as a sign of a divine covenant that the elect, chosen to survive the flood that had cleansed the world of human evil, would never again have to confront the rising waters. But those who turned from the path of righteousness would, in a moment of final reckoning, perish in fire.

The Grahamstown launch of Lewis Gordon's "What Fanon Said"

Book Launch: Lewis Gordon's 'What Fanon Said'

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.

Seminar: Richard Pithouse on 'Frantz Fanon: Philosophy, Praxis & the Occult Zone'

An Urban commons? Notes from South Africa

Why Fanon continues to resonate more than half a century after Algeria’s independence

Richard Pithouse, The Conversation

Algeria marks its 53rd year of independence from France this month. The bitter struggle for freedom in the late 1950s and early 1960s became a central focus of the global movement against colonialism. It also influenced the evolving forms of repression and resistance in apartheid South Africa.

Independence followed a hard-fought revolutionary war that began in late 1954 and ended six years later. It cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Massacres were common, extending in 1961 to the mass killing of unarmed Algerian civilians in Paris. Torture and rape were routine features of French military operations.

Racial terror from Columbus to Charleston

Richard Pithouse, Mail & Guardian

Since the 1920s, Charleston has been the name of a dance, a dance with roots in Africa, made white and famous on Broadway. Now Charleston is the name of a massacre, the murder of nine people and the desecration of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Charleston was founded as Charles Town in 1670 when Charles II of England granted land in Carolina to some of his supporters after he was restored to the throne. The city and its putative Southern gentility were built on two great historical crimes – the genocide of the indigenous American people and the African slave trade.

Praxis & the Work of Building Counter-Power

Richard Pithouse

In the ‘70s and ‘80s the idea of praxis was often taken seriously in the process of building the organisations, movements and unions that undertook the work of developing the counter-power of the oppressed. Praxis was often understood as more than just the idea that effective political work required reflection on action, and action guided by reflection. It was also an idea with democratic and ethical dimensions.

South Africa in the Twilight of Liberalism

Richard Pithouse, Kafila

South Africa was supposed to be different. We attained our freedom, such as these things are, after everyone else but Palestine. It was late in the day but the afternoon sun was glorious and the best people, people who had passed through the long passage of struggle, told us that we would be able to avoid the mistakes made everywhere else.

There was a mass movement that, whatever its limits, had won tremendous popular support and carried some noble ideals through its travails. Its leaders cast long shadows. Our Constitution, we were always told, was as good as they get. Liberalism, apparently vindicated by history, had its evident limits but there was, it was said, lots of room for deft manoeuvre within those constraints. We were assured that there was room for everyone at what Aimé Césaire had called the ‘rendezvous of victory’.

No investigation, no right to speak?

No investigation, no right to speak?

Richard Pithouse

In January last year I was in Harare for a conference organised by the people around the journal Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy. There were lots of interesting people and papers, and interesting visits to flourishing farms, but one of the things that really struck me was a paper by a Brazilian scholar who has worked with and on the MST in Brazil, as well as the Landless Peoples’ Movement (LPM) in South Africa.

On Not Reducing Racism to Apartheid

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

We would be more effective at dealing with the endemic racism in our society if we didn’t relentlessly speak in a manner that reduces racism to apartheid and ‘apartheid tendencies’. The reason for this is not because historical trauma should be repressed and its consequences in the present naturalised. On the contrary it is because the development of an adequate understanding of how our society came to be as it is requires us to speak a lot more about both colonialism and neo-colonialism, and to take both phenomena seriously as powerful forces on the global stage that, from Ferguson to Paris and Johannesburg, continue to shape the present.

Shifting the Ground of Radical Reason

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

For some time now much of the left has either been alienated from actually existing popular mobilisation or unable to make and sustain productive connections with it. But the emergence of new forces to the left of the ANC, forces with money, a national reach, easy access to the media and, in the case of NUMSA, an established and organised membership, is generating fresh optimism.

Constituent Power in the Modern World: A Brief Introduction

Department of Politics & International Relations, Rhodes University

Constituent Power in the Modern World: A Brief Introduction

A post-graduate course to be taught by Richard Pithouse in the first semester, 2015

Throughout the modern era … constituent power has been in conflict with constituted power, the fixed power of formal constitutions and central authority. Whereas constituent power opens each revolutionary process, throwing open the doors to the forces of change and the myriad desires of the multitude, constituted power closes down the revolution and brings it back to order. In each of the modern revolutions, the State rose up in opposition to the democratic and revolutionary forces and imposes a return to a constituted order, a new Thermidor, which either recuperated or repressed the constituent impulses. The conflict between active constituent power and reactive constituted power is what characterizes these revolutionary experiences.

-         From the introduction to Antonio Negri’s Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (1999)

'Choosing to be Free: The Life Story of Rick Turner' - A review

Keniston, B., 2013, Choosing to be Free: The Life Story of Rick Turner. Johannesburg. Jacana (276pp.; R220)

Reviewed by Richard Pithouse, Interface

Rick Turner, a philosopher and a committed and effective radical, was assassinated in Durban, South Africa, in January 1978. Turner had, along with Steve Biko who was murdered in police custody in September 1977, been a leading figure in what came to be known as ‘the Durban Moment’. The phrase, which was first coined by Tony Morphet (1990), refers to a period in the early 1970s in which Durban became a site of significant political innovation in the struggle against apartheid, innovation that was conceptualised and organised outside of the strictures of the exiled African National Congress (ANC) and South African Communist Party (SACP). Morphet argued that ‘the Durban Moment’ enabled a “structural shift in the received intellectual patterns of the social world” (1990, pp. 92-3). It also had enduring political consequences of real significance (Macqueen, 2014; Webster, 1993).

Silencing the Present

Silencing the Present

Richard Pithouse

In Silencing the Past Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued that when colonial power asserted that enslaved Africans and their descendants in Haiti had no capacity to envisage freedom, or to develop strategies to win freedom and to carry them out, this was based not on any empirical evidence but “an ontology, an implicit organization of the world and its inhabitants”.

Sisulu’s War of the Ages Begins

Richard Pithouse, The Con

In 2005, early in her in her first term as Minister of Housing, Lindiwe Sisulu announced that the state had resolved to ‘eradicate slums’ by 2014. This was a time when the technocratic ideal had more credibility than it does now and officials and politicians often spoke, with genuine conviction, as if it were an established fact that this aspiration would translate into reality. It was not unusual for people trying to engage the state around questions of urban land and housing to be rebuffed as troublemakers, either ignorant or malicious, on the grounds that it was an established fact that there would be no more shacks by 2014.

Escalating Political Violence in South Africa

Richard Pithouse, Mail & Guardian

On Monday evening, not long after the sun went down, a man with a gun stepped out of the dark and into the everyday domestic routine in Thuli Ndlovu’s home in KwaNdengezi, Durban. He shot Ndlovu seven times, and her neighbour’s teenage son twice. Ndlovu died on the spot. Her neighbour’s son is in a critical condition.

Ndlovu was the chairperson of the KwaNdengezi branch of Abahlali baseMjondolo. Like Nkululeko Gwala, a member of the same organisation, who was assassinated in Cato Crest, also in Durban, in June last year, she had been subject to serious intimidation for some time and had told her family and comrades that she expected to die.

Running with Biko: Exploring the relationship between the world of the mind and the current social crisis in South Africa