This pamphlet, researched and written by Zamalotshwa Sefatsa, draws on interviews with participants in a range of struggles in South Africa, shows that Freire’s ideas have been an important influence in the Black Consciousness Movement, the trade union movement, and some of the organisations associated with the United Democratic Front (UDF). His ideas remain influential today, from trade unions to grassroots struggles.
This article, by Richard Pithouse, was first published in the Mail & Guardian.
In 1968, revolt, much of it driven by students and young people, rushed from city to city against the global backdrop of the war in Vietnam, the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet military and the assassination in the United States of Martin Luther King Jr.
In Berlin, Warsaw, Detroit, Mexico City, Chicago, Prague, Kingston, Rio and many other cities, new actors asked new questions of the established order. In May that year, strikes, factory and university occupations and mass street protests in Paris rapidly escalated into an insurrection that left a mark that is still intensely felt in philosophy. Continue reading
Anne Harley, 2012
This thesis argues that it is both necessary and possible to change the world. Changing the world requires engaging with, to try to understand it from the basis of lived reality, and then acting. Our ability to do this is, however, affected by hegemony, which attempts to convince us that the way things are is either normal and natural and the only possible way they could be, or that it is impossible to change them. Nevertheless, there is always resistance to this, and I suggest that we might learn something useful by examining how this happens.
The thesis thus explores Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, and its applicability to our current world; and also considers resistance to this. I argue that the nature of capitalism has shifted, and discuss how this shift has impacted on hegemony, identifying three current interlocking hegemonic ideologies. I consider current resistance to this hegemony, including the role of social movements. Much resistance, and many social movements, I argued, cannot properly be called counter-hegemonic in that, although it/they may critique the dominant economic system, it/they remain trapped within hegemonic logic. However, it is clear that there is existing truly counter-hegemonic resistance, including some social movements, and I argue that Abahlali baseMjondolo is one such counter-hegemonic movement. Thus it is possible that those who join/align themselves with this movement might be considered to have ‘unlearned’ hegemony and be useful subjects for this study. I thus consider the life stories of seven people who have aligned themselves to this movement, in order to determine whether they have indeed ‘unlearned’ hegemony, and if so, how.
https://www.sensepublishers.com/media/1468-learning-and-education-for-a-better-world.pdf
“We are Poor, not Stupid”: Learning from Autonomous Grassroots Social Movements in South Africa
by Anne Harley
During the course of 2008, six militants from two South African social movements met every month to reflect on what they were learning through the struggle they were engaged in as social movement actors, and what they were learning as participants in a Certificate-level course at the local university. They called these sessions ‘Living learning’. Their reflections were written up after each session, and published in late 2009 as Living Learning (Figlan et al., 2009). ‘Living learning’ was intended partly as a space to reflect on what and how to take back the things that the militants, mandated by their movements to attend the course, had learned in the classrooms of the academy:
For a living learning, the critical question was always how best to take back to our communities whatever we might gain?; how best can our communities benefit from the few of us who are lucky to have access to the course?; how will we utilise the academic skills we can gain?; how do we take this information back? It has always been the task of a synthesis and a breaking down of the University theory so that we can work out properly what we can learn from it – and so we can understand for ourselves in what way it is different from the daily learning of struggle and life emijondolo [in the shacks] or eplasini [on the farms] (Figlan et al., 2009, p. 7).
But, significantly, ‘Living learning’ was also about how to combine the university of struggle and the academic university, and indeed ‘disrupt’ the academic university.
On dignity, love, and philanthropy
Mark Butler and Graham Philpott, Church Land Programme, October 2012.
Input presented by Graham to the panel on “Faith communities, philanthropy and social change: A giant awakes?” at the African Grant Makers Network’s “Growing African Philanthropy” event.
The burn of a ‘false generosity’
In John Steinbeck’s seminal novel of the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), a character called Annie Littlefield says:
If a body’s ever took charity, it makes a burn that don’t come out. … [I]f you ever took it, you don’t forget it… I did, … Las’ winter; an’ we was a starvin’—me an’ Pa an’ the little fellas. An’ it was a-rainin’. Fella tol’ us to go to the Salvation Army.” Her eyes grew fierce. “We was hungry — they made us crawl for our dinner. They took our dignity. They — I hate ’em!” … Her voice was fierce and hoarse. “I hate ’em,” she said. “I ain’t never seen my man beat before, but them — them Salvation Army done it to ‘im. ‘They took our dignity’.
It is not about what they gave, but more deeply about what they took – they
took our dignity. Is it about how they gave, their stipulations, their intentions, the amount, the frequency, the conditionalities? Maybe – but more profoundly, it is about what they took – they took our dignity, and my man was beat. There is no awakening giant here – just a man beaten and Annie Littlefield. Continue reading