Eddie Webster reviews 'Billy Keniston (2013) Choosing to be Free: the life story of Rick Turner'

Eddie Webster reviews 'Billy Keniston (2013) Choosing to be Free: the life story of Rick Turner' by TigersEye99

The New Brazil: Regional Imperialism and the New Democracy

The New Brazil

Reviewed by Levi Gahman, ROAR Magazine 

Raúl Zibechi, The New Brazil: Regional Imperialism and the New Democracy (translated by Ramor Ryan), Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014.

Brazil is bleeding, and in his book, The New Brazil: Regional Imperialism and the New Democracy, author Raúl Zibechi demonstrates how neoliberalism is responsible for inflicting the wounds. The latest offering from the Uruguayan journalist, militant and political theorist is a perceptive and incisive dressing-down of the capitalist world system, the multinational corporate cartels that drive it, and the ongoing colonial domination that is currently plaguing the masses of Brazil. The book forcefully exhibits how the insatiable drive for capital accumulation continues to dispossess, exploit, and repress the disempowered and voiceless. Zibechi also demonstrates how the historical trajectories of imperialism continue to operate within Brazil during contemporary times, thereby preserving privilege and power for a select minority elite at the expense of both the environment and the majority of Brazilian society.

Understanding Marikana Through The Mpondo Revolts

Sarah Bruchhuasen, 2014

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate some of the ways in which rural histories can enhance our understanding of both rural and urban resistance, both past and present, in contemporary South Africa. In order to do so, it explores two books in conversation with each other, Thembela Kepe and Lungisile Ntsebeza’s edited volume Rural Resistance in South Africa: The Mpondo Revolts after Fifty Years as well as Peter Alexander, Thapelo Lekgowa, Botsang Mmope, Luke Sinwell and Bongani Xezwi’s Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer. These two books provide a useful platform from which to engage in a re-examination of rurally based protest and repression in order to locate some of the suggestive links, particularly in regard to the transmission of repertoires of struggle, between the Marikana strike and the Mpondo revolts, as well as the on-going struggles of the organised poor in some of South Africa’s urban centres.

Remembering Heroes on the ‘Fringe’: Anthony Egan reviews new books on Rick Turner & Neil Aggett

Remebering Heroes on the Fringe - Anthony Egan reviews new books on Rick Turner & Niel Aggett by TigersEye99

Gramsci and the Postcolonial World

The Postcolonial Gramsci edited by Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya (New York: Routledge), 2012; pp 288, £85

Reviewed by Arun K. Patnaik, Economic & Political Weekly

The book under review, while explaining the relevance of Gramsci’s thoughts in the postcolonial world, deals with three key concerns: the role of intellectuals, cultural hegemony and neo-liberal political economy. Drawing upon the above three resources from different geographies in the postcolonial world, the book draws our attention to how Gramsci’s ideas have travelled across the globe from Peru, Algeria, India to China and elsewhere.

Feminist Biko – From Dana to Gqola

Simphiwe Dana

by Hugo Canham, Identities in Flux

The recently published A Renegade Called Simphiwe is as much about the supremely talented Simphiwe Dana and its author, leading feminist scholar, Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola. As she cautions the reader on more than one occasion, this book is not a biography, so readers who want an expose’ of Ms Dana may be a little disappointed. In Gqola’s words, this is a book by “a writer in conversation with the ideas in another artists work”. However, this book will go down as a cornerstone in South African feminist works on a public figure. Gqola is not a silent author putting forward sanitized ‘facts’ to an unimaginative readership. She is part of the story that she tells and she pushes readers to participate in the narratives that she weaves. At various points we as readers are asked to explore our own complicity in misogynous, patriarchal, anti-creative and anti-intellectual discourses.

Christopher Merrett reviews 'The Promise of Land'

The Promise of Land

by Christopher Merrett, The Witness

A STRUGGLE for land has been central to the history of South Africa, complicated by the fact that to the protagonists it represented very different world views.

The recent centenary of the Natives’ Land Act was a reminder that land was a cornerstone of white domination, a reason why Fred Hendricks argues in The Promise of Land that its reform is a “barrier to a unitary imagination of the South Africa nation”.

Instead, a revolution is required to complete the process of decolonisation and creation of a national identity. Twenty years after liberation, democracy, social justice and the symbolism of restitution should have made the country look very different, he suggests.

Following Fanon: Fanonian Practices in South Africa,

Following Fanon: A review of Nigel Gibson's Fanonian Practices in South Africa - From Steve Biko to Abahlal... by TigersEye99

Algerian Chronicles

Algerian Chronicles

By Albert Camus

Edited by Alice Kaplan & translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press 224pp £16.95)

Camus: conflicting opinions

Reviewed by Andrew Hussey, Literary Review

  

For a long time, the accepted wisdom on Albert Camus's response to the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62) has been that he was a coward. This was the view first promulgated by his former friend and rival Jean-Paul Sartre, who accused Camus of having the 'morality of a boy scout' for refusing to praise the terrorist actions of the Algerian nationalists, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 1957, Camus famously stated: 'People are now planting bombs on the tramway of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.' Since then this impassioned statement has been held up by generations of anti-colonialists and academic post-colonialist theorists - including the likes of Edward Said - as proof of Camus's weak-mindedness and vacillating nature and, by extension, colonial arrogance towards Algeria, the land where he was born and grew up in the poorest kind of pied-noir family (pied-noir, 'blackfoot', was the term used to describe French settlers in Algeria on the grounds that they wore 'black shoes').

Writing Revolt: An Engagement with African Nationalism

Writing Revolt: An Engagement with African Nationalism 1957-1967, by Terence Ranger. James Currey, 2013., Reviewed by Duncan Money, New Left Project

Terence Ranger is best known for co-editing The Invention of Tradition with Eric Hobsbawm, but his first book Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-97, on the first Chimurenga uprising against British colonial rule, was a landmark work of African history. Revolt was a careful reconstruction of how spirit mediums and other religious figures drew on the shared histories of the Ndebele and Shona peoples to organise one of the most widespread and serious challenges to colonial rule in this period. The book quickly became the seminal text for the nationalist movement which fought white minority rule in Rhodesia in the 1970s, with copies dispatched to leaders incarcerated in Rhodesian prisons and to military camps in Zambia and Mozambique. While its specific arguments that the first Chimurenga was inspired and directed by spirit mediums and that the risings were co-ordinated at all have been challenged and largely discarded by later historians,[1] Ranger's more general claims that African societies had a history that was recoverable and significant, and that they themselves had a sense of that history, proved a fatal blow to existing colonial historiography.

‘A Little Feu de Joie’

by Adam Shatz, London Review of Books

• Days of God: The Revolution in Iran and Its Consequences by James Buchan
  John Murray, 482 pp, £25.00, November 2012, ISBN 978 1 84854 066 8

At the end of the Second World War, an anonymous pamphlet surfaced in the seminaries of Qom, the bastion of Shia learning. The Unveiling of Secrets accused Iran’s monarchy of treason: ‘In your European hats, you strolled the boulevards, ogling the naked girls, and thought yourselves fine fellows, unaware that foreigners were carting off the country’s patrimony and resources.’ Iran, it proposed, should be ruled by an assembly of religious jurists headed by a wise man. In such a state, there would be no need for elections or a parliament, or even a standing army: a religious militia (basij) would ensure obedience to the law.

Mandisi Majavu's Review of "Fanonian Practices'

Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2013

Fanonian practices in South Africa: from Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo, by

Nigel Gibson, Durban, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011, 312 pp., R248

(paperback), ISBN 9781869141974

In Fanonian Practices, Gibson recreates Fanon’s philosophy of liberation in line with new realities. He traces Fanonian practices in South Africa from Steve Biko in the 1970s up to the emergence of Abahlali baseMjondolo in post-apartheid South Africa. According to Gibson, Biko’s critique of the white liberal idea of integration was derived in part from Fanon’s notion of Black Consciousness. Fanon’s Black Consciousness is a critique directed at blacks who internalise white supremacist values and beliefs. Black Skin White Masks basically maps out Fanon’s Black Consciousness in detail. According to Gibson, Fanon later developed this critique to explore how in the post-colonial context the black elite betray the emancipatory goals of the anti-colonial movement partly because of a ‘desire for a place in the machinery of colonial/capitalist expropriation’ (61).

Demolition Job

Postcolonial Theory &
the Specter of Capital

Rosinka Chaudhuri, The Indian Express

Book: Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital

Author: Vivek Chibber

Publisher: Navayana

Price: Rs 450

Pages: 306

Vivek Chibber does not like the Subaltern Studies historians, and his mission in this book is to tear down the early theories of, in his order of importance, Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee. What these historians have influentially said seems to him to be simply wrong-headed and methodologically dubious; his favourite descriptions of them here are as "cultural essentialists" and "Orientalists" (the latter without reference to Edward Said, who is mentioned only once on page eight). Culture, in fact, is a bad word for him in general, and one of his main objections to the Subalternists is the primacy they choose to give to cultural locations.

Cocoa is blood and they are eating my flesh

Toby Green, London Review of Books

• Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery and Colonial Africa by Catherine Higgs
  Ohio, 230 pp, £24.95, June 2012, ISBN 978 0 8214 2006 5

For centuries, the region that now straddles northern Angola and the western part of the Democratic Republic of Congo formed a political and cultural whole. South of what the BaKongo knew as the Zaire river lay the heartland of the Kingdom of Kongo, one of the most powerful states of West-Central Africa. Kongo sat at the crossroads of trade routes linking the forests of the interior with the arid coastal areas near Luanda, in Angola, and the savannahs of the plateau further north. These deep-rooted connections meant that slaving wars in one area influenced the political stability of the rest of the region. In the late 17th and 18th centuries, Kongo and Ndongo – the kingdom at the heart of what is now Angola – fractured into warring statelets whose main business was to bring slaves to the coast, thus helping Atlantic slavery to reach ever further into Central Africa. These countries remain interlocked, involved in geopolitical struggles for coltan, diamonds, oil and timber.

A tale that is a warning & stark reminder

Death of an Idealist — in search of Neil Aggett

by Beverley Naidoo - reviewed by Terry Bell

Ably written and extremely well-researched, this book is much more than the very well told story of the life and tragic death of the young idealist that is its focus. It is at once a warning and stark reminder of the mundane brutishness that can be unleashed when bigotry and power supercede justice; also a reminder to those middle aged and elderly South Africans across the board who, by silence and acquiescence, if not active support, were complicit in the horrors perpetrated in their name.

To younger generations it is also a lesson in history about what was done — and, in many parts of the world is still done — in the proclaimed cause of state security and the preservation of authoritarian law and order. Above all, perhaps, it is the story of the sad waste of human potential on the altar of idealistic belief.

A Fanonian Reading of Suresh Robert’s ‘Fit to govern: the native intelligence of Thabo Mbeki’

by Phumlani Majavu

“Well, if one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the Judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected –those, precisely who need the law’s protection most! – and listens to their testimony. Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person – ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice and then you will know not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it.” Baldwin (1972, p. 130)

A Critique of Crain Soudien’s Realising the Dream: Unlearning the Logic of Race in the South African School

by Mbali Baduza, 2012

Crain Soudien’s “Realising the Dream: Unlearning the logic of race in the South African school” is a book whose publishing could not be more relevant to the current South African reality. He poses a question that is not uniquely modern, but a question that has been faced throughout the centuries: “what kind of human beings do we wish to be?” (Soudien, 2012: 2-3).  Although, a seemingly simple question at first, when we take seriously the factors and implications which confront it, it becomes a question pregnant with meaning. This is because, I argue, it calls into question what we mean by being human. Soudien says and I quote at length (2012: 2):

“What it means to be a human being – to have the choice to exercise the full panoply of one’s rights and, critically, to accord that choice to others, or, to put it more starkly, the right to full recognition and the unspeakably difficult task of gifting that right to others – is a question that arises in South Africa with an immediacy and complexity rarely found in modern history. The question is simultaneously philosophical, economic, political, sociological and, in elaboration of the latter, ontological and practical in its nature.”

Not Even the Dead

Richard Pithouse

by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

And then, despite the fear, I set off

I put my cheek against death's cheek

− Roberto Bolaño, 'Self Portrait at Twenty Years', The Romantic Dogs, 2006

On the 26th of September 1940 Walter Benjamin – a brilliant writer struggling to the point of being short of paper, an intellectual acutely attuned to the poetic, Jewish and, in his own way, communist – found himself, for the second time in his life, in desperate flight from fascism. On the border between Spain and France, with his library lost to the Gestapo in Paris and his way through Spain blocked, he took his own life.

A Review of Nigel Gibson’s 'Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo'

by Mbali Baduza

Glory to a book that expresses the need for a new humanity, one based on human relations and action: a humanism that puts people first. A book that expresses the need for self-determinism that is divorced from pre-determined, normative and misanthropic notions of what it means to be a human being of worth. Nigel Gibson’s Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo is such a book. A book so well written that the reader escapes their own reality and begins to imagine, or rather re-think the possibilities of freedom, when taking seriously “the quest for a new humanity requires fundamental change” (50).

Review: From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’

by Catherine Cunningham 

In From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’, Michael Neocosmos traces the events which led up to the May 2008 xenophobic attacks in South Africa. In doing this, Neocosmos uncovers the manifold ways in which ‘citizenship’ has been defined, in South Africa, over time. For Neocosmos, despite the inclusive definition of citizenship which was made manifest throughout the liberation struggle, a more exclusive understanding has now become dominant. Such a conception of citizenship is not spontaneous, however, but is reinforced by discourses originating from multiple actors such as: government officials, the media, civil society and society at large. These discourses overlap and reinforce each other, culminating in what Neocosmos calls ‘a politics of fear’. It is this fear, rather than economic deprivation and an influx of foreigners, which helps to explain the events of 2008. In order to counter this widespread fear, Neocosmos suggests that we need to reaffirm an inclusive understanding of citizenship in order to transcend fundamentally oppressive categorisations.