Nigel Gibson
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Sun, 2009-10-11 10:14.
Alberto Toscano | Bruno Bosteels | Corey Robin | Ernesto Laclau | Greg Grandin | Jacques Depelchin | Nigel Gibson | Noam Chomsky | Peter Hallward | Slavoj Zizek | The Attack on AbM in Kennedy Road | Todd May | William I. Robinson Statement in support of Abahlali baseMjondolo
9 October 2009
The South African shack-dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) is an egalitarian, democratic organisation dedicated to the self-empowerment and self-education of thousands of disadvantaged people. We the undersigned support the resolve of AbM activists to play a leading part in the determination of their own future, and to help make, rather than suffer, public decisions about housing, land, and development. We condemn all acts of violence and intimidation against AbM members and the residents of South Africa's informal settlements. We condemn any participation or collusion of the government and police in the recent assault against AbM leaders and their families, and in the destruction of their homes and offices. We call on the government to do all that is required to repair the damage done in recent weeks, and to protect AbM activists and settlement residents from any future violence; we note in particular the repeated death threats against AbM President S'bu Zikode and Vice President Mashumi Figlan. We call on the ANC to respect and facilitate, rather than discourage, popular participation in the governing of South Africa.
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Fri, 2009-10-09 10:12.
Nigel Gibson | Pambazuka | Raj Patel | The Attack on AbM in Kennedy Road http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59322
Democracy’s everyday death: South Africa's quiet coup
Nigel Gibson and Raj Patel
2009-10-08, Issue 451
You don’t need presidential palaces, or generals riding in tanks, or even the CIA to make a coup happen. Democracy can be overthrown with far less pomp, fewer props and smaller bursts of state violence. But these quieter coups are no less deadly for democracy.
At the end of September, just such a coup took place in South Africa. It wasn’t the kind involving parliament or the inept and corrupt head of the ANC (African National Congress), Jacob Zuma. Quite the opposite. It involved a genuinely democratic and respected social movement, the freely elected governing committee of the shack settlement at Kennedy Road in Durban. And this peaceful democracy was overthrown by the South African government.
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Sat, 2009-10-03 10:34.
Anne Harley | Busi Ngema | Church Land Programme | Lindela Figlan | Mark Butler | Nigel Gibson | Reverend Mavuso | Richard Pithouse | S'bu Zikode | Sihle Sibisi | University of Abalali baseMjondolo | Zodwa Nsibande Click here to download the Living Learning booklet in pdf.
Living Learning
Just two days before Abahlali baseMjondolo was violently attacked in Kennedy Road, the movement was in celebratory mood as hundreds of shackdwellers crowded into the eMmause Community Hall on Heritage Day, 24th September, for the launch of a new booklet, Living Learning.
Living Learning is the collected notes from an extraordinary series of discussions between militants of two key movements in contemporary South Africa, Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Rural Network. When, in late 2008, they made the decision to publish them, these authors explained that “this Living Learning is a living testimony and a record of how we made reflections and distinctions about what we face in life and in our learning. Living Learning is part of a living politics”.
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Mon, 2009-07-27 18:01.
academic | fanon | Français | Nigel Gibson | Türkçe Click here to read an annotated version of this essay in word and here to read it in pdf.
Bu makaleyi Türkçe okumak için buraya tiklayin.
Fanonian Practices and the politics of space in postapartheid South Africa: The Challenge of the Shack Dwellers Movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo)
Presentation at the Frantz Fanon Colloque, Algiers July 7, 2009
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Wed, 2009-09-30 06:01.
2010 Fifa World Cup | Nigel Gibson | Raj Patel | The Attack on AbM in Kennedy Road September 29, 2009
Dear Members of the International Media
Like many of you, we fought and protested against the injustices of
the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and celebrated the fall of that
monstrous government in 1994. As South Africa prepares to host the
2010 World Cup, we write to you in grief and horror at the return of
some of the most horrific tactics of that era, directed at South
Africa’s poorest citizens.
We have worked for years with shack dweller communities living in
South Africa, communities of people too poor to live in townships, who
have waited patiently for the South African government to bring the
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Fri, 2008-11-28 20:47.
academic | biko | fanon | Nigel Gibson | Social Identities | theory 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.
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Mon, 2008-09-08 14:29.
Amanda Alexander | Andile Mngxitama | Nigel Gibson http://www.sundayindependent.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4598012
Steve Biko's paradise lost
This extract from Biko Lives! looks at early black consciousness and today's South Africa
September 07, 2008 Edition 2
"This is one country where it would be possible to create a capitalist black society, if whites were intelligent, if the nationalists were intelligent. And that capitalist black society, black middle class, would be very effective … South Africa could succeed in putting across to the world a pretty convincing, integrated picture, with still 70 percent of the population being underdogs." - Steve Biko (1972)
Submitted by abahlali on Mon, 2007-04-23 22:44.
academic | Nigel Gibson Download a pdf version of this paper here and the final version published in Socialism & Democracy here.
Zabalaza, Unfinished struggles against apartheid: the shackdwellers' movement in Durban
Talk to us … not about us.
Abahlali T Shirt
“We are on our own”: The Birth of a new movement
The struggle that started in Kennedy Road was the beginning
of a new era.
S’bu Zikode
On March 19th 2005, in a scene reminiscent of the anti-apartheid struggle, 750 Black shackdwellers barricaded a major ring road in Durban, fighting the police for four hours. By this time the shackdwellers had been waiting patiently for Nelson Mandela’s historic 1994 election promise of housing to be realized. These promised houses were to be built on a nearby piece of land.
Submitted by abahlali on Wed, 2007-01-31 21:30.
academic | article | Nigel Gibson Temple University
Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought,
Nov. 28, 2006
Is Fanon Relevant? Translations, the postcolonial imagination and the second stage of total liberation
Nigel Gibson
Download full version with notes here.
The state of emergency is also always a state of emergence. (Bhabha)
The rich speak about us as we get poorer. (Zikode)
At the conclusion of my article “Relative Opacity: A New Translation of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth—Mission Betrayed of Fulfilled” I wrote the following:
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