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.

Concept note: Willing seller – Willing buyer
Draft 1
June 2006

In the context of South Africa's failing land reform programme, the Willing seller – Willing buyer policy was problematic, and remains so1. It was/is one representation of how post-apartheid state policy structured and expressed power relations – in favour of market stability and capitalist relations over deep structural transformation in an overarching way; and specifically of (largely white) existing land owners over the rightful expectations the poor majority.

It is also important to recognise how it helped structure the poor too – in the name of a 'demand-led' policy approach, claimants had to identify and constitute themselves as some sort of entrepreneurial, legalistic and conforming unit entirely dependent on plodding through the bureaucratic processes decreed by the state systems.

Click here to read this article in Italiano.

Politics Beyond the State

by Brother Filippo Mondini

Michael Neocosmos argues that there is a politics beyond the state and that, within this form of politics, lies the true and trustworthy alternative to the status quo. This 'politics beyond the state' is carried out by active citizens who think, and who engage themselves in politics as militants rather than as politicians. In Neocosmos' words, citizenship, from an emancipatory perspective, “is not about subjects bearing rights conferred by the state, as in human rights discourse, but rather about people who think becoming agents through their engagement in politics as militants/activists and not politicians”.

http://zena.secureforum.com/znet/souzacity.htm

Z Magazine / ZNet and Porto Alegre 3 present

Life After Capitalism Essays

Marcelo Lopes de Souza

We were asked for two tasks by the organisers[1]: First, we should present a vision about a just city of the future, that is a city in which social justice would reign (which presupposes another society, a post-capitalist society); secondly, we should develop a strategy in order to achieve this just city.

Well, we need a vision, but we must avoid the temptation to develop a normative model. A normative model is a rationalistic exercise; its premise is that we are able to anticipate details about future urban forms and/or that we are able to prescribe how the future city form should be. I think this approach is both intellectually and politically wrong. A genuinely alternative city of the future should be planned and managed by concrete free men and women, not “socialist” gurus, technocrats and party officials acting in the name of the people (or in the name of the “working class” or whatever); history itself and not theory must determine the concrete spatiality of the future. However, we can and should discuss criteria and parameters, with which help we can talk about the question to which extent and under which circumstances spatial organisation can fit to alternative social relations.

An updated version of this paper was published in Interface in November 2009. Click here to read the updated version of the paper.

Civil society, citizenship and the politics of the (im)possible: rethinking militancy in Africa today

Abstract

The contemporary critique of neo-liberalism has concentrated overwhelmingly on its economic theory and socio-economic effects. Very little has been written so far on its political conceptions, particularly of the limited thinking which it imposes on political thought and practice. This paper makes a contribution to the latter endeavour by making a case for thinking an emancipatory politics in contemporary Africa. It shows that civil society - the expression of the freedom of the citizen in neo-liberal discourse - must be understood, not as organised society, but as a domain of politics where the hegemony of a liberal, state mode of politics prevails. Politics also exists beyond, or at the margin of civil society. The political passivity produced by neo-liberal thought must be countered by an active citizenship which often exists beyond the domain of state politics including civil society itself. But this active citizenship - political agency - is not necessarily conducive to a politics of emancipation; it merely enables the possibility of the envisaging of alternative modes of thought and political ‘possibles’. To initiate a discussion of the theorisation of emancipatory politics in Africa, the paper outlines the philosophy of change of Alain Badiou, and the anthropology of Sylvain Lazarus. In particular it concentrates on the latter’s understanding of subjective ‘modes of politics’and political ‘prescriptions’. It then suggests that it is possible to identify a National Liberation Struggle (NLS) mode of politics as a subjectivity which dominated on the continent from the 1940s to the 1970s. The main characteristics of this NLS mode of politics are outlined. However, this manner of thinking emancipatory politics has now come to an end, so that emancipation has to be thought differently today on the African continent. The argument then makes the point that the period 1984-86 in South Africa (re-) discovered the beginnings of a new mode of politics, which in several important ways contradicted the core features of the NLS mode. In particular this was a politics which did not see its object as the seizure of power, but as the transformation of the lived experience of power. The paper ends by comparing the politics of two current post-apartheid South African social movements - the Treatment Action Campaign and the Abahlali baseMjondolo. It shows that, despite appearances, it is the former which has operated within the domain of the state politics of civil society, and the latter which operates beyond those subjective limits. Hence it is the latter which shows the closest fidelity to the event of 1984-86, and which is thus the closest thing today, at least in South Africa, to being the bearer of an experience and thought of emancipatory politics.