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.

Everything; or: a short critique of identity politics

by Grant Farred[i]

Identity politics was founded as a critique of the grand narrative, charged with inaugurating a different mode of struggle. Instead of the Great White Man theory of history and politics, identity politics demanded thinking the political in its specificity; it undertook, in the wake of the post-War anti-colonial struggles and the anti-Establishment turmoil that rocked Western societies in the 1960s, the thinking of the Other. Identity politics sought to rearticulate the extant political categories by, inter alia, complicating the workings of class with race; attending to gender and sexual orientation in the campaign for national liberation; foregrounding the constitutive importance of ethnicity in political struggles. However, from its inception identity politics has been haunted by the question of how to think the specific against the grand political narrative.

Reflections on the Frantz Fanon Fifty Years Later Colloquium

by Camalita Naicker, Thinking Africa Newsletter

There are many clichés one could devolve into when speaking about an event like this, I will try my best to refrain from doing so, however clichés have become such because of their overuse but also their ability to describe feelings and emotions fairly appropriately. What I will say is that for me it was an extremely novel, profound experience. Reading Frantz Fanon and engaging with people who have known him and engaged with his work over so many years and still recognise not only his relevance to our society today but how we, through our fidelity to him and in living Fanon, can recognise the possibility for the creation of a new humanity.

Thinking Africa, rethinking everything

by Nigel Gibson, Thinking Africa Newsletter No. 2, 2011

The fact is that everything needs to be reformed and everything thought out anew.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Has it paradoxically become more difficult to be an oppositional critical humanist in the post-apartheid academy? I ask because during the 1980s some quite amazing intellectual spaces opened up in the universities, often related in one way to the social movements, the trade union movements and so on, in the struggles against apartheid. After 1994, the problem seemed one of practice and policy, leading to policy units trumping the development of more reflective units of academic study.