Category Archives: Padkos

Padkos: “They thought they had taken power. In reality they were taken by it.”

This week in South Africa, political parties compete for votes in nation-wide local government elections.

As we in South Africa experience another round of party politics, we offer, attached, some brief reflective comments from Padkos and also share, from a Latin American context, an interview with Alvaro Reyes.

The respondent, in the interview attached as your Padkos reading, is Alvaro Reyes, and he speaks from this contemporary Latin American context. In the short piece titled “They Thought They Had Taken Power. In Reality They Were Taken By It”, he adds some particularly useful insights to these questions and suggests that the kind of “disheartening

outcome[s]” alluded to above are also “due in no small part to an underestimation of the global political situation”. He also responds to the suggestion “that social change won’t be the outcome of government action, but of the mobilization and the fight of those ‘below and to the left’”. Reyes recalls that the concept of ‘below and to the left’ comes from the Zapatistas. He says: “I think that it is important to mention this because they coined this concept in order to point out that given the structural constraints placed on the contemporary state…, they have concluded that today, ‘above and to the left”’ can exist only as an oxymoron”.

Attachments


Interview with Alvaro Reyes
Reflective Comments

School of Thought: Part 3: Lewis R. Gordon – What Fanon Said. Wednesday 7th October at 10.30am

School of Thought: Part 3: Lewis R. Gordon – What Fanon Said. Wednesday 7th October at 10.30am

Lewis R. Gordon returns as the next in our remarkable series of radical padkos visitors for CLP’s 2015 “School of Thought”. We’re so grateful and humbled to have had Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar address and engage us in the previous session. It was profoundly insightful, and very productive in relation to our own thinking of emancipatory struggle here. The “School of Thought” continues to be a brilliant space of critical engagement for CLP’s padkos comrades and colleagues. In our ongoing work at CLP, the critical thinking of grassroots militants remains our principal point of entry and departure for emancipatory politics and thought. And there’s no question that this work benefits, and benefits from, mutual dialogue with other emancipatory thinkers and theorists who also take the real thought and practice of liberatory praxis in other places around the world seriously. Continue reading →

Padkos: School of Thought: Part 2: Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar – Bolivia: People’s Power and State Power, Saturday, 12 September at 10.00am

School of Thought: Part 2: Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar – Bolivia: People’s Power and State Power,

Saturday, 12 September at 10.00am

Thanks to Richard Pithouse and all who attended for a stunning first session in the padkos “School of Thought”! What a great discussion exploring current meanings and value in Fanon’s liberatory insistence on the ongoing ‘mutation’ of humans – ‘the recovery of the human from a history of waste’ in the phrasing of Achille Mbembe – through the unity of thought and action in struggle. Continue reading →

Attachments


Interview with Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar

Richard Pithouse on Frantz Fanon opens the Padkos “School of Thought 2015” on 3rd September

Richard Pithouse on Frantz Fanon opens the Padkos “School of Thought 2015” on 3rd September

We had encouraging feedback after the previous padkos mailing that marked the 90th anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s birth. It’s clear that a number of us want to to engage Fanon’s ideas more, and to think them through in and for our own context. Well, here’s a great opportunity! One of South Africa’s leading Fanon scholars – and longtime CLP padkos comrade – Richard Pithouse, has agreed to spend time with us at the Church Land Programme (CLP) offices, 340 Burger Street, on 3rdSeptember at 10.30. Some good coffee will be available from 10.00 and lunch will follow the discussion. Continue reading →

Attachments


Frantz Fanon: Philosophy, Praxis and the Occult Zone

Padkos: Pan-African Heritage of Struggle – Firoze Manji on Amilcar Cabral (24 September)

Church Land Programme is privileged to host Firoze Manji on Heritage Day, 24th September, from 10:30am till lunchtime at the CLP office.

Firoze Manji, of the Pan-African Baraza, has recently co-edited an amazing book on Amilcar Cabral – “revolutionary, poet, liberation philosopher, and leader of the independence movement of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde” (Manji, 2013). Based on that new book, Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral (co-edited with Bill Fletcher Jr. and published to mark the 40th anniversary of Cabral’s assassination), Firoze will share some thoughts on the heritage of Cabral’s political thought and praxis for us here and now.  Firoze and his colleagues have been gracious hosts and key supporters of emancipatory struggles from our corner of the African continent, and it’s a real pleasure to re-connect with him. Continue reading →

Attachments


Manji: Despotic governments in Africa
Introduction to Amílcar Cabral (English & Zulu)
The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral