http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/57070

Still far from the dream of Biko
Reflections on the 1976 youth uprising
by Mphutlane wa Bofelo

Imprisoned at 17 as an anti-apartheid activist, Mphutlane wa Bofelo emerged even more determined to confront the system. It was the dream of ‘the freedom of our people’ that people act with boldness and bravery, he writes, even though ‘we knew the ultimate price could be death’. Yet 33 years after the 1976 youth uprising, confronting living conditions in Durban’s Kenville squatter camp, wa Bofelo considers why ‘former freedom fighters can sometimes be more vicious in attempts to abort freedom’. As Kenville residents consider class action against the government for decent housing, wa Bofelo wonders why South Africans should have to go to court to secure constitutionally enshrined basics of water and housing. ‘How can you have a sense of self-respect and dignity when you live in opulence but your brothers and sisters… live in squalor?’ asks wa Bofelo. ‘Pity how it seems we joined the struggle to be rich materially but poor in spirit!’

Blackwash will be joining the PPA tomorrow in the Soweto march….

Dear young black person,

Black youth living in South Africa today is in deep trouble. Even though we were promised a better life after 1994 by our black government, many of us still live in squatter camps and small RDP houses because white people still own more than 80% of South African land which has been stolen over the last 300 years. As young black people we have to ask ourselves what is stopping our government from improving our lives and is there a future for us if black people do not have land. Will black people not be trapped in squatter camps and townships forever if our government refuses to take our land back from whites?

http://www.sowetan.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=980480

‘Path of riches wasn’t for Biko’
15 April 2009

Azapo today is a danger to black South Africans and stands for everything that Steve Biko rejected, according to Andile Mngxitama in his new book, Why Biko would not vote.

Mngxitama says that Biko would reject black consciousness parties because they “prostitute their blackness as a lucrative path to enjoy the privileges of whiteness”.

He says if Biko was alive he would boycott the elections – along with the Abahlali base Mjondolo and Landless Peoples’ Movement. Linking Azapo and the DA, he says: “Both have pathologised crime, removing it from its socio-economic roots.”

Upright and free: Fanon in South Africa, from Biko to the shackdwellers’ movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo)

Social Identities, November 2008

Grounded in the South African experience, in discussions with Blacks about their everyday experiences of oppression and in attitudes formed from that experience and sharpened by an engagement with Africana philosophers like Fanon, Steve Biko recreated the kind of praxis that Fanon suggested in the conclusion of The Wretched of the Earth, namely that the working out of new concepts cannot come from the intellectual’s head alone but must come from a dialogue with common people. Today a new shackdweller movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo) has emerged in South Africa, which has put post-apartheid society on trial and has resonated with Fanon and Biko’s idea of a decolonized new humanism. At the same time Abahlali’s notion of a person and its critique of reification has been challenged by the spontaneous eruption of xenophobic violence indicating that the stark choice between humanism and barbarism is a most concrete question in the shack settlements. Because Biko’s development of Black consciousness and his engagement of Fanon’s thought remains of historic importance to contemporary South Africa, the paper begins with a focus on the creativity and the contradictory processes by which Fanon’s philosophy of liberation is articulated in Steve Biko’s conception of Black consciousness. From this starting point the discussion shifts from Biko’s critique of white liberalism to the dialectics of contemporary neoliberal ‘postcolonial’ reality. What remains central, however, are the creative and contradictory processes that a re-engagement with Fanon will create. In other words, since it is ‘the live subject that unites theory and reality’, the issue becomes how, in a new historic moment, a philosophy born of struggle makes itself heard.