Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Viscerality

Black Study, Black Struggle

Robin D.G. Kelley, The Boston Review

In the fall of 2015, college campuses were engulfed by fires ignited in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. This is not to say that college students had until then been quiet in the face of police violence against black Americans. Throughout the previous year, it had often been college students who hit the streets, blocked traffic, occupied the halls of justice and malls of America, disrupted political campaign rallies, and risked arrest to protest the torture and suffocation of Eric Garner, the abuse and death of Sandra Bland, the executions of Tamir Rice, Ezell Ford, Tanisha Anderson, Walter Scott, Tony Robinson, Freddie Gray, ad infinitum.

That the fire this time spread from the town to the campus is consistent with historical patterns. The campus revolts of the 1960s, for example, followed the Harlem and Watts rebellions, the freedom movement in the South, and the rise of militant organizations in the cities. But the size, speed, intensity, and character of recent student uprisings caught much of the country off guard. Protests against campus racism and the ethics of universities’ financial entanglements erupted on nearly ninety campuses, including Brandeis, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Claremont McKenna, Smith, Amherst, UCLA, Oberlin, Tufts, and the University of North Carolina, both Chapel Hill and Greensboro. These demonstrations were led largely by black students, as well as coalitions made up of students of color, queer folks, undocumented immigrants, and allied whites.

#RHODESSOWHITE - Director's Cut

#FeesMustFall: Democracy Under Fire

Adam Haupt, The Con

The rise of the #FeesMustFall movement in South Africa has revealed key fault lines. I would like to offer two arguments here. The first is that the use of police brutality against peaceful protesters on campuses undermines citizens’ rights to free speech. The second is that the corporatisation of public institutions produces the same negative effects on the public sphere as state repression of dissent. Public institutions’ mandate to preserve an information commons is undermined by an economic system that places a low premium on public spending. Universities are thrown at the mercy of the market and, effectively, cost barriers to education are introduced. It is in this way that any talk of a national democratic revolution is reduced to empty rhetoric.

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.

Shutting Down the Rainbow Nation: #FeesMustFall

How the failed ideals of 1970s activists haunt post-apartheid SA

Ian Macqueen, The Mail & Guardian

South Africa is in many ways a very different country to that envisaged by political activists of the 1970s. For one, the equitable society they anticipated would replace apartheid remains a chimera. Instead, a process has taken place that political geographer Gillian Hart calls the “denationalisation” and “renationlisation” of the economy under the African National Congress (ANC).

The ‘African university’ as a site of protest

Paddy O’Halloran, Pambazuka

Photographs of dozens of black intellectuals, artists and revolutionaries decorate the walls of the Black Student Movement Commons, formerly the Council Chambers, at the university currently known as Rhodes in Grahamstown, South Africa. Among the many people honoured there are Angela Davis, Steve Biko, Albertina and Walter Sisulu, Bob Marley, Frantz Fanon, Ellen Kuzwayo, Frederick Douglass, Maya Angelou, Robert Sobukwe, Harriet Tubman and Malcom X. Unlike the dreary portraits of Vice-Chancellors of bygone years that hang in the hallways outside the doors of the Commons, the many faces stuck up by the Black Student Movement (BSM) exude no pomp, none of the unearned arrogance of tradition, nor the security of age-old hierarchy. The assemblage of poets, fighters and thinkers provide inspiration for BSM members, who have occupied the Chambers for two weeks demanding a long-term resolution to the problem of vacation accommodation in university residences as a first practical step toward transforming their university.

Policing student politics: Is there a ‘right’ way to protest?

Jonis Ghedi Alasow, The Daily Maverick

On Friday 28 August the Black Student Movement (BSM) at the institution still known as Rhodes University reached a watershed moment in its short history. University management called armed police officers – with dog units – to confront students who wished to address the University senate on accommodation during the short vacations. There was an overwhelming sense of fierceness among the police, dog units and university campus protection.

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’.

Students, Apartheid and the Ecumenical Movement in South Africa, 1960–1975

Students, Apartheid and the Ecumenical Movement in South Africa, 1960–1975 by TigersEye99

From Commoning to Debt: Microcredit, Student Debt and the Disinvestment in Reproduction

An audio recording of a talk by scholar, teacher and activist Silvia Federici at Goldsmiths University (London, UK) on 12 November 2012.

Black Consciousness, Black Theology, Student Activism and the Shaping of the New South Africa

The Durban Moment: Revisiting politics, labour & resistance in the 1970s

An Experiment in Confrontation: The Pro-Frelimo Rallies of 1974*

by Julian Brown, Journal of Southern African Studies

This article examines the political nature of South Africa’s Black Consciousness movement through an account of the pro-Frelimo rallies organised in Durban and at the University of the North by the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) and the Black People’s Convention (BPC) in September 1974. It places these rallies in the context of these organisations’ adoption of confrontational and public forms of protest after 1972. These represent a high-water mark in Black Consciousness organisation and provided the excuse for the state’s prosecution of the leaders of the movement. Despite this, these rallies have been understudied. This article therefore presents a new account of these protests. It shows how the leaders of SASO and the BPC progressively revised their ideas about public confrontation through the process of
organising these rallies. After the Minister of Justice announced his intention to ban them, these leaders refused to back down. The rallies each took place as planned, and each provoked a response from local police forces – which, in turn, were clearly expecting the rallies and prepared for the task of dispersing them. This article suggest that the embrace of confrontational forms of protest by SASO and the BPC should be understood as representing a significant moment in the development of public forms of mass protest in South Africa.

Black Man, You are on Your Own

Saleem Badat

by Saleem Badat, 2010

Black Man Was Truly on his Own

a review by Don Makatile, The Sowetan

Bruce Waters, operations manager at the Biko Foundation, says the words were actually from the mouth of one Nyameko Barney Pityana, a long-time Biko ally.

It is a fitting title to the scholarly look into the role and identity of the SA Students Organisation (Saso), a body of which Biko was elected national president at its inaugural launch in July 1969.

Re-imagining South Africa: Black Consciousness, radical Christianity and the New Left, 1967 – 1977

by Ian Macqueen, PhD Thesis, 2011

This thesis places Black Consciousness in comparative perspective with progressive politics in South Africa in the late 1960s and the 1970s. It argues that the dominant scholarly focus on Black Consciousness, which is passed over as a ‘stage’ in the Black struggle against white supremacy, insufficiently historicises the deeper roots, and the wider resonances and ideological contestations of the Black Consciousness movement. As they refined their political discourse, Black Consciousness activists negotiated their way through the progressive ideologies that flourished as part of the wider political and social ferment of the 1960s. Although Black Consciousness won over an influential minority of radical Christians, a more contested struggle took place with nascent feminism on university campuses and within the Movement; as well as with a New Left-inspired historical and political critique that gained influence among white activists.

The Coming War on the Occupy Movement

by George Ciccariello-Maher, CounterPunch 

As I begin to write this, Occupy Oakland circulates in a by-now familiar pattern: forced from the camp at the break of day, the occupiers reconvened as they have done before on the steps of the Public Library. Later, they will attempt to close a repeating circuit that stretches a short six blocks along 14^th Street between City Hall and the Library.

James Baldwin interviewed by Kenneth Clark

Nine Important Things

by Christopher McMichael, Mahala

I ran as an independent candidate in the local Makana Muncipality elections (Ward 12), a newly demarcated voting zone, including Rhodes University, in May this year. Representing the Students for Social Justice (SSJ), a recently formed non-hierarchical campus-based organisation, supported by the Unemployed Peoples Movement and the Democratic Left Front. On voting day, the DA won. I managed 130 votes. It may not sound like a lot but in actuality a bunch of students, without money or the support of a political party, missed coming second in the election (and beating the ANC) by just 8 votes.