Category Archives: academic

EPW: Marikana and the Subaltern

Camalita Naicker, Economic & Political Weekly

This article addresses recent debates around the strikes and the massacre of the mine workers at South Africa’s Lonmin Platinum Mine in Marikana from 2012 onwards. It argues that there is a failure to delve deeper into the culture of people who come from Mpondoland in the Eastern Cape of South Africa and to link culture to the political in the way workers’ actions have been reported and understood. Culture has been used as a way to explain away an aberration rather than exploring the use of cultural political tools within the strike. The article offers an analysis which takes seriously the political implications of culture.

 

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Marikana and the Subaltern

Understanding and Overcoming Xenophobia: A One Day Colloquium

UHURU PRESENTS:

UNDERSTANDING AND OVERCOMING XENOPHOBIA
A ONE DAY COLLOQUIUM

At the present moment, xenophobic practices in South Africa are taking a number of nefarious forms from the exclusion of foreign students and staff from universities through the denial of visas, to the systematic unleashing of mob and state violence against the weakest sections of our population. This violence in particular has gone so far as to invade the sanctuary of churches and has included the deployment of the military and not just the police against poor communities thus treating the latter as potential enemies. It has recently become clearer in fact that xenophobia is not a problem of poverty but primarily a problem of identity politics endemic to South Africa, a kind of politics which state institutions and their agents have been pursuing since the early 1990s. Most analyses reduce the question of xenophobia to one of criminality and poverty and deplore xenophobic practices without offering much in terms of ideas for a solution.

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CounterPunch: Whose Democracy?

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/03/whose-democracy/

Whose Democracy?

by JULIE WARK

Just before Papua New Guinea became independent in 1975, I had the immense good fortune to be studying Anthropology, Sociology and Politics at the country’s ten-year-old university (UPNG). It was a kind of decolonisation laboratory in which boffins from everywhere, shared their expertise in everything: tropical medicine and agriculture, public administration, development studies, Third World literature, and much more. They were agitated years of intellectual ferment, student (and teacher) activism, Marxism, feminism, opposition to the Vietnam War, small-is-beautiful, free love and parties, lots of parties. Many of us believed that Papua New Guinea would be different. It could never be just another neo-colony. Its future leaders were fellow students and friends. We were tear-gassed together at demonstrations over Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor and, side by side, fought the bureaucrats to get a students’ vegetable garden (the dining room slop was a prelude to nutritional disease). Several of those friends became politicians in this marvellous, resource-rich country and did their bit to make it one of the most corrupt in the world with extremely high levels of (mainly sexual) violence and over 50% of the population below the poverty line ($1/day). Some of those scintillating teachers went on to unexceptionable careers elsewhere. Ken Good remained outspoken and exceptional. Continue reading →

Locating Fanon in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Mabogo More

There is a huge re-emergence of Frantz Fanon’s ideas and an equally huge interest in his work in post-apartheid South Africa, both in the academy and social movement and organizations. Contrary to some commentators, particularly his biographers, this article aims to locate Fanon within the South African struggle for liberation. It is argued here that Fanon, throughout his life, as evidenced by his writings, was highly concerned about apartheid just as he was about French Algerian colonialism. For him, the paper claims, apartheid was synonymous with colonialism and therefore his critique of colonialism was just as much a critique of apartheid. The resurgence of his name and ideas in the country is a consequence of this critique.

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Locating Frantz Fanon in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Notes on Praxis for the RGS Panel on the Co-Production of Urban Contestation, London, August 2014

Notes on Praxis for the RGS Panel on the Co-Production of Urban Contestation, London, August 2014

Richard Pithouse

Rigorous ongoing reflection on praxis is an essential practice for all participants in any struggle. There can be no effective emancipatory political action on a sustained basis without this reflexivity. It is simultaneously ethical and strategic work. It is necessary to strive to ensure that this is a collective practice within struggles as well as taking it on as an individual obligation.

An Element of the Contradiction

It is not unusual for academics in popular struggles, or linked to popular struggles, to fail to take full measure of the political weight of their own location. One of the common reasons for this is that academic engagement with popular struggles is often mediated through NGOs, or NGO like formations in the university. Contemporary liberal ideology presents NGO based ‘civil society’ as a democratic and representative space when it is plainly not. In fact civil society is often an acutely raced and entirely undemocratic space that has a far less credible claim to representivity than, say, the African National Congress which, despite all its flaws, is elected. Nonetheless despite the often striking degree to which civil society is a space of (often raced) elite power the ideology that presents civil society as, by definition, enlightened and representative is often strong enough, and sufficiently normalised, to inhibit the development of a sufficiently critical attitude to the NGO form. Academics are also often seduced by fantasies, sometimes acutely narcissistic and driven by a will to their own power, that enable the academic to imagine him or herself as part of an enlightened vanguard – be it socialist, feminist, anarchist, autonomist or nationalist – that has an a priori right to lead, and in some instances, to dominate others in the name of their own emancipation. When this fantasy is materially sustained via privileged access to donor funding rather than popular consent it frequently reinscribes what Jacques Rancière describes as the ‘stultification’ that is consequence to any situation where “one intelligence is subordinated to another”. It can become an instance of the sort of domination that Paulo Freire describes as “Manipulation, sloganizing, ‘depositing’, regimentation, and prescription”. In South Africa it can take the form of a set of practices in which, to borrow a phrase from Steve Biko, there is the sort of “stratification that makes whites perpetual teachers and blacks perpetual pupils”. Continue reading →