Category Archives: Richard Pithosue

SACSIS: The Antinomies of Democracy in Durban

http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1721

The Antinomies of Democracy in Durban

by Richard Pithouse

In the last days of June, Nkululeko Gwala was assassinated in Cato Crest – a shack settlement in Durban that is in the process of being upgraded with formal housing. Just over three months ago Thembinkosi Qumbelo was gunned down in the same streets. Both men had been prominent figures in the increasingly bitter struggles around housing that have convulsed Cato Crest in recent months. There have been road blockades, a land occupation – named, as they often are these days, ‘Marikana' – and the offices of two councillors have been burnt down.

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CounterPunch: Frantz Fanon Fifty Years Later

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/09/frantz-fanon-fifty-year-years-later/

Frantz Fanon Fifty Years Later

Richard Pithouse

Some days ago we saw a sunset that turned the robe of heaven a bright violet. Today it is a very hard red that the eye encounters.

– Frantz Fanon, Towards the African Revolution

Frantz Fanon, the Caribbean philosopher and revolutionary who joined the Algerian Revolution, died of leukaemia at the age of 36 on the 6th of December 1961. His last book, The Wretched of the Earth, was published soon after his death and so we are fifty years on from both Fanon and the first major attempt to think through the limits of newly independent Africa.

Fanon was committed to a radical humanism that insisted on the recognition of “the open door of every consciousness”, on the same right of every person to be a person amongst other people, to come into a shared world and to “help to build it together”, and the need to always question and to affirm a “refusal to accept the present as definitive”. Continue reading →