kagablog

Let us assume that black people receive the value of Absence. This mode of being becomes existence manqué—existence gone wrong. Their mode of being becomes the being of the NO. –Lewis Gordonii

The biggest mistake the black world ever made was to assume that whoever opposed apartheid was an ally. –Steven Biko.iii

I. Black Recognition? When I first arrived in South Africa in 1989, I was a Marxist. Toward the end of 1996, two and one half years after Nelson Mandela came to power, I left not knowing what I was. This is not to say that I, like so many repentant Marxists had come around to what policy wonks and highly placed notables within the ANC National Executive Committee called for then, a so-called “mixed economy;” a phrase that explained less than nothing but was catchy and saturated with common sense, thus making it unassailable. No, I had not been converted to the “ethics” of the “free” market, but I was convinced the rubric of exploitation and alienation (or a grammar of suffering predicated on the intensification of work and the extraction of surplus value) was not up to the task of (a) describing the structure of the antagonism, (b) delineating a proper revolutionary subject, or (c) elaborating a trajectory of institutional iconoclasm comprehensive enough to start, “the only thing in the world that’s worth the effort of starting: the end of the world, by God!”iv

In June 1992, not long after the massacre at Biopatong, Ronnie Kasrils co-chaired a Tripartite Alliance Rolling Mass Action meeting with a COSATU central committee member and an ANC NEC member. They sat together at a long table on the stage in the basement auditorium of the Allied Bank Building in Jo’burg. One hundred delegates of the Tripartite Alliance had been sent there to plan a series of civil actions designed to paralyze the urban nerve centers of South African cities (“the Leipzig Option” as some called it). I was one of the delegates. Out of 100 people it seemed as though no more than 5 to 10 were White or Indian. There were a few Coloureds. One Black American—me; and eighty to ninety Black South Africans.

We began with songs that lasted so long and were so loud and so pointed in their message (Chris Hani is our shield! Socialism is our shield! Kill the Farmer Kill the Boer!), that by the time the meeting finally got underway one sensed a quiet tension in the faces of Kasrils and his co-chairs. An expression I’d seen time and again since 1991 on the faces of Charterist notables; faces contorted by smiling teeth and knitted brow, solidarity and anxiety; faces pulled by opposing needs—the need to bring the state to heel and the need to manage the Blacks, and it was this need which was looking unmanageable.

Planning for a mass excursion was on the table: an armada of buses filled with demonstrators was to ride to the border of the “homeland” of the Ciskei, which was ruled by the notorious General Joshua Oupa Gqozo. We would disembark, hold a rally, then a march, then, at one moment in the march, we would crash through the fence, thus liberating the people of the “homeland” by the sheer volume of our presence. Kasrils and his co-chairs looked one to the other. Yes, things were indeed getting out of hand. As a round of singing and chanting ensued, they leaned their heads together and whispered.

Comrade Kasrils rises. He exits, stage right. He returns with a small piece of paper. An important intelligence report, comrades, news that should give us pause. Reading from the slip of paper, he says he has just received word that, were we to actually pass the motion on the floor to cross the Ciskei border en masse, to flood the “homeland” with out belligerent mass, General Joshua Oupa Gqozo would open fire on us with live ammunition. To Comrade Kasrils’ horror the room erupts in cheers and applause. This, I am thinking, as I join the cheering and the singing, is not the response his “intelligence” was meant to elicit.

Had Comrade Kasrils been hoisted by his own petard or was there dissonance between the assumptive logic through which he and the Tripartite Alliance posed the question, What does it mean to suffer? and the way that question was posed by—or imposed upon—the mass of Black delegates? The divergence of our joy and what appeared to be his anxiety was expressed as divergent structures of feeling which I believe to be symptomatic of a contrast in conceptions of suffering and to be symptomatic of irreconcilable differences in how and where Blacks are positioned, ontologically, in relation to non-Blacks. In the last days of apartheid, we failed to imagine the fundamental difference between the worker and the Black. How we understand suffering and whether we locate its essence in economic exploitation or in anti-Blackness has a direct impact on how we imagine freedom; and on how we foment revolution.v

Perhaps the bullets which were promised us did not manifest within our psyches as lethal deterrents because they manifested as gifts; rare gifts of recognition; gifts unbequeathed to Blackness; acknowledgement that we did form an ensemble of Human capacity instead of a collection of kaffirs, or a bunch of niggers. We experienced a transcendent impossibility: a moment of Blackness-as-Presence in a world overdetermined by Blackness-as-Absence.

I am not saying that we welcomed the prophesy of our collective death. I am arguing that the threat of our collective death, a threat in response to the gesture of our collective—our “living”—will, made us feel as though we were alive, as though we possessed what in fact we could not possess, Human life, as opposed to Black life (which is always already “substitutively dead,” “a fatal way of being alive”vi)—we could die because we lived…

The preceding is an excerpt from Chapter 4: “Biko and the Problematic of Presence” by Frank B. Wilderson, III. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. This extract is taken from the author’s original manuscript and has not been edited. The definitive version of this piece may be found in Biko Lives! Edited by Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander and Nigel Gibson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) which can be purchased from www.palgrave.com

Notes i Special thanks to Janet Neary and Anita Wilkins for their research assistance. ii Lewis Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), 98. iii I Write What I Like (London: The Bowerdean Press, 1978), 63. ivAime Cesaire quoted in Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1952, 1967), 96. v To my knowledge the term anti-Blackness was first named, as a structural imperative, by Lewis Gordon in Bad Faith. vi David Marriott, On Black Men (New York: Columbia UP, 2000), 15, 19.

When the “free” elections in South Africa happened in 1994, I was a 19 year-old college freshman at a small liberal arts college in Ohio. Fortunately, I had become friends with many South Africans on my campus, and in the neighboring universities that dot the central and Southern Ohio landscape. I remember looking at a copy of the ballot, given to me by my roommate’s mother, and seeing the dozens of candidates of many political parties that made up the government of the “New” South Africa, which strangely enough, has turned out to be as new as the “new” American South. Nevertheless, we all (Africans and Blacks from the U.S. and Caribbean) assembled in front of the televisions to watch Nelson Mandela become the new President of South Africa, transforming the ANC from an insurgent revolutionary movement into the dominant political party of the neoliberal nation.

Little did I know, at 19 years old, the price that had to be paid for the “progress” that the country was undertaking. While I now know that many were skeptical, few Black Americans knew that price better than Frank Wilderson, III, one of only two American Black members of the ANC, who with several other ANC members, was labeled by Nelson Mandela “a threat to national security” in 1995.

Wilderson, author of the newly published and highly controversial memoir “Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile & Apartheid,” offers an incisive view of how a liberation movement becomes a political party. He also reckons with what happens to a revolutionary who returns to a U.S. Left, mired in the politics of gaining access to the “rights” of civil society in multi-culti California.

I met Wilderson this past Sunday at a small reading at the Salon D’Afrique, a longstanding Harlem salon hosted by writer and scholar, Dr. Rashida Ismaili Abu-bakr, who gave a reading to about 15 invited guests. We engaged in a political dialogue with the author about the book, which intentionally does not offer a “what to do next” proscription for progressive movements in the U.S. or abroad.

“The Black demand is for subjectivity,” stated Wilderson. “But progressive political movements must have a coherent goal, but the reality is that the demand cannot be met by a coherent demand, like a civil rights policy for access into civil society.”

He modeled Incognegro after the 1987 autobiography of Black revolutionary Assata Shakur (currently in exile in Cuba), with chapters alternating between South Africa and the U.S. “The organizational structure comes from Assata Shakur—how do you write about a revolutionary underground movement, anti-black racism in liberal and progressive California, and also the use of poetry,” Wilderson remarked.

Many of the guests who’d read the book were struck by the biography of his early life as the son of two academics who were the first family to integrate a Minneapolis suburb – as Dr. Ismaili noted, “not the stereotypical background of a Black revolutionary.”

Others, including myself, were struck by the places of sheet vulnerability in the work of a Black male political memoir. I am still reading the book, but I find this aspect particularly refreshing.

A central question of the book is whether any real differences exist between the U.S. and South Africa. One story illustrates this point: in a trip back to the U.S. with his South African wife, she leaves Wilderson in New York telling him that if she wanted apartheid, she could get it at home.

This notion flies in the face of what so many on the left extrapolate from Black leftist politics—people seem to love the idea that Black revolutionaries learn to transcend concerns about Black people to take on more “international” concerns. From Malcolm X’s trip to Mecca to MLK’s speech on opposing the Vietnam War, Black radicals can make it into the leftist pantheon of stars. Wilderson is drawing the conclusion that anti-Black racism is a global phenomenon and has yet to be addressed, let alone already solved, as much of the Left seems to purport.

“The world needs the Black position,” Wilderson said.

And though my friends, in 1994, watched the elections in South Africa with some level of pride and relief, we knew that being Black, whether from Soweto or St. Louis, Mombassa or Montego Bay, is what brought us into that room in the student center, shut away from the rest of the campus. But the hope we had is exposed as a fraud both in Incognegro and by the realities of where South Africa is headed. One of those friends, who was instrumental in my political growth, was killed in Soweto sometime around 2001. South Africa continues to expand its prison system much like the U.S., and HIV/AIDS rates in American Black communities rival those of Africans on the continent.

Incognegro, as a book, and Wilderson’s incessant and unrelenting look at the failure of the integration of Black concerns and liberation into “civil society” makes me highly recommend this book.

this review first appeared on www.indypendent.org

How we understand suffering and whether we locate its essence in economic exploitation or in anti-Blackness has a direct impact on how we imagine freedom: and on how we foment revolution.

Frank B. Wilderson III
Biko and the Problematic of Presence
in Biko Lives!, 2008

“It is my view that those who continue to call themselves ‘Afrikaners’ must realise the only way this sub-national identity could ever be accepted by all South Africans is if it were to be stripped of its anti-black historical baggage and rebuilt on the essential theme of anti-imperialism in which it was constructed as a conscious strategy…. Afrikaans, the language, does not belong to the Afrikaner; it belongs to all who speak it, especially mother tongue speakers.”

Dear Colleagues

In light of the recent attacks on Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) in Kennedy Road, Durban, the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) at University of Johannesburg/Rhodes University will hold a seminar entitled Democracy under Threat?: What Attacks on Grassroots Activists Mean for our Politics where grassroots activists, scholars and human rights campaigners will discuss threats to free political activity and their implications. For more information, see invitation attached.

Venue: Training Centre, 6th Floor, South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) – 29 Princess of Wales Terrace, cnr York and St Andrews

Streets, Parktown, Johannesburg. See map here: http://www.sahrc.org.za/sahrc_cms/downloads/Map%20of%20Directions.doc

Time: 9am to 3pm

Date: Wednesday, 4 November 2009

RSVP: Johnny Selemani – jaselemani@gmail.com / 073 553 0726

Kate Tissington – kate.tissington@wits.ac.za / 072 220 9125

If you would still like to attend please RSVP as soon as possible for catering/seating purposes.

Speakers:

Steven Friedman, Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD)

Pregs Govender, South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC)

S’bu Zikode, President, Abahlali baseMjondolo

Mnikelo Ndabankulu, Spokesperson, AbM

Zodwa Nsibande, General Secretary of the Youth League, AbM

Michael Neocosmos, Monash University

Richard Pithouse, Politics Department, Rhodes University

Andile Mngxitama, Foundation for Human Rights (FHR)

Noor Nieftagodien, History Department, University of the Witwatersrand

Programme:

9am Introduction: Threats to Democracy at the Grassroots? Steven Friedman, Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD)

10:45 Panel One: The View from the Ground: The Perils of Organising in Kennedy Road - Chair: Pregs Govender (SAHRC)

S’bu Zikode (President, Abahlali baseMjondolo)

Mnikelo Ndabankulu (Spokesperson, AbM)

Zodwa Nsibande (General Secretary of the Youth League, AbM)

12:30 Lunch

1-2:30 Panel Two: Is Democracy at Risk?: Understanding Conflict Between Social Movements and Local Elites - Chair: Michael Neocosmos (Monash University)

Richard Pithouse (Politics Department, Rhodes University)

Andile Mngxitama (Foundation for Human Rights)

Noor Nieftagodien (History Department, University of the Witwatersrand)

2:30 – 3pm Summary: Concluding Discussion

The one thing nobody wants to appreciate is that human beings have the capacity to decide what they want to do, when they want to do it. The problem we’ve had is that everybody seems to think that they know how to control people. All I’m saying is that if you are brave enough, and I think that counts a lot - if you’re brave enough - but also, if you sit down and plan properly, you can translate anything into a success.

The point about it is we have hooked ourselves for so long into texts that try to design for us how a revolution occurs. And every revolution that has occurred, the people who won wrote it the way they wanted to write it. Whether it was in the Soviet Union with the Communist Party, they wrote it the way they wanted to write it. It actually might not have happened that way. The ANC has rewritten the whole struggle of this country the way they want it to happen. And the point about it is you go anywhere in the world and you’ll see it like that.

From my point of view it’s good Black Consciousness has been written out of the struggle. Because if it was written in then we’re part of the problem. Now we’re still part of the solution.

interview with strini moodley, 2005, in biko lives!
edited by andile mngxitama, amanda alexander, and nigel gibson
palgrave macmillan

Our heroes
Mandela, Tutu, and the brave Jansen
The dancing Zuma and pipe smoking Mbeki
Hail our heroes and heroines who brought us freedom
Freedom to live in RDP houses,
Freedom to live in shacks
Freedom to perpetually look for employment with a smile
At least we eat pap and meat everyday
We are not Zimbabwe!

They are starving because Mugabe offended the whites
Whites bring pap and meat
Mugabe is stupid!
The moronic moron

Hail our super intelligent leaders who saved us so that we can be:
Waiters and waitresses
Mine workers
Volunteers
Managers without power
Loaded BEE zombies

Voters every five years!

We are free!

Viva Mdiba we thank you for 2010 soccer world cup
Now the whites can come and play soccer and we shall sing shosholoza!
We shall show them all how good and efficient we are
Together as one simunye grooves

Behold the heroes of our celebrated democracy
Our heroes are those who endured shit and piss at UFS
Our hero is the man cleaning the toilet at O.R. Tambo Airport with a smile
Thank you sir, yes mam, smiling happy toilet cleaner
The black woman who sweeps the street at dead of night hail!

Democracy is a miracle

Free but a slave

Freedom we love you
Our heroes are full of shit!

From Mau Mau’s poetry for a shit country

Why are the politicians, the press, the artists, the so-called-thinkers and ‘observers’ in this funny-sunny land of ours so numb-dumb to the harsh realities? Does NOBODY understand how the psyche of the post apartheid black youth in this country has been fed by a rampant lack of reparation and are responding with unbridled violence? The pre-election press has fed into the overwhelming popularity of Zuma by doing everything to denigrate him. Does this not send alarm bells ringing in the minds of those who are supposed to notice? Who have a voice of concern? Personally, I have never had a problem with Zuma, but I certainly have been disturbed at the way in which the media has fed his popularity. Is this ‘lack of seeing’ attributed to our mainstream societies’ complete refusal to accept the basic functionality of the psyche within the post apartheid ethos? Of course the psyche is not something new, but the intransigence within the mainstream media of accepting that the psyche is a concrete reality is close to becoming self destructive. The lack of willingness and inability of our police force to quash the rapes, the hijackings etc. has long since been sending alarm signals to any concerned South African. Yet it continues unabated. Yes, there is fantastic work being done by those within certain organisations to stem this tide of belligerence, if not within the police force itself, but I do not see that they are making any headway. The new education system with its fantastic new subject of Life Orientation is not succeeding in getting through to a culture of human rights. At a Life Orientation workshop earlier this year we were told that it was now up to the Educators to become the moral voice of the country - the churches had failed, the legal system had failed, the parents had failed. Given the sway of politicians and how easy it is to stir up a vastly uneducated and emotive youth for their own gains, how can the already overburdened Educator achieve anything? Surely this is a concern of ALL stake holders?

Now I ask you: What do you think releasing the Reitz Four is going to do to the youth in the townships? There is going to be at least 400,000 more youth feeling empowered to strengthen their sense of entitlement and continue their pillage of this country in spite of the high minded ideals of some fuzzy thinking minority. Sad, shocking, but true.

Somebody please tell me I am wrong.

The world is now dominated not by governments but by images. International media corporations are phantom states shadowing the world, with real political power everywhere more distant and invisible. In another key scene in the film “Guy Debord, son art et son temps” a group of African immigrant girls are reading Zola’s ‘Au bonheur des dames’ with a white middle-class teacher in the Parisian suburbs. When they are asked what century they are living in, they reply in all seriousness that they do not know. This scene has no metaphorical importance, but stands as a literal representation of the fact that, like all of us in the society of the spectacle, the girls are condemned to a perpetual present which they cannot understand or alter.

andrew hussey
the game of war: the life and death of guy debord

Cécile Guilbert, now one of the most important young novelists and essayists in France, was eighteen, bored and wandering around her native Paris on a sweltering day in June 1981, when on a whim she entered the dim, empty cinema on the rue Cujas, which resembled more a porno cinema than any of the glitzy corporate picture houses of the great boulevards. Inspired, moved and disturbed by what she had seen (a programme of 4 films by Guy Debord) she hurried to look for a copy of the almost unfindable Society of the Spectacle, whose arguments struck her with the force of revelation. ‘Debord for me was an adventure and a great discovery,’ she says. ‘Everywhere you read that France was changing and that democracy would solve all our problems, but in the film ‘In girium imus nocte et consumimur igni’ Debord was telling us, in his grave and melancholy way, that the war was not yet finished, that it could not yet be finished whilst the spectacle was transforming life into non-life. I did not know then much about Hegel or )Marx’s) The German Ideology, but I knew that what Debord was saying was true because I could see it all around: the spectacle of politics, the illusion of democratic power. I left the cinema feeling as if I had seen something transgressive, like a porno film or a novel by Georges Bataille, but most of all I knew what I had just seen was not cinema but something else.’

andrew hussey
the game of war: the life and death of guy debord

Aufhebung is the term used by Hegel to describe the dialectical transition in which a lower stage is both annulled and preserved in a higher one and which is commonly translated as ’sublation’. Debord quoted Hegel on the dialectic as the envoi to the book “The Real Split in the Internationale, public circular of the Situationist International”: ‘One party proves itself to be victorious by breaking up into two parties; for in doing so it shows that it contains within itself the principle it is attacking, and thus had rid itself of the one-sidedness in which it previously appeared… So that the schism that arises in one of the parties and seems to be a misfortune, demonstrates rather that party’s good fortune.’

The game of absolute negation played by the Situationst International under Debord’s direction, he was asserting here, had always been entirely faithful to this principle, which meant not that to destroy was to create but that destruction was in itself an absolute value.

Andrew Hussey
The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord

Debord began to use the word ’spectacle’ with increasing frequency around the middle part of 1963. The term had been first used in print in L’Internationale situationniste 3 in 1959, in an article probably penned by Guy Debord, which gave rare approval to Alain Resnais’ film Hiroshima mon amour. This film, scripted by Marguerite Duras, had caused a stir on its release when its unconventional treatment of a Franco-Japanese love story had led to its being dropped as France’s official entry at that year’s Cannes Festival, apparently on the grounds that it was too uncommercial, too literary and too political for American tastes. The film’s visual content was uncompromising. The famous opening shots of the film present a montage of images of Hiroshima and the wounded, fragmented bodies of its inhabitants, intercut with images of a couple making love. These are accompanied by Emannuelle Riva’s elliptical, stilted commentary. There is an essential separation between voice and image which marks out the film’s theme of memory and dislocation.

It was precisely this aspect of the film which pleased Debord, who saw this deliberate disassociation of text and image as being in line with the various Situationist strategies that sought to ‘reduce the cinema to nothing’. This technique, he wrote, marked a leap forward in the development of the ‘cinematographic spectacle of the world’ towards ‘free cinema’, a cinema which, like the ‘free jazz’ currently espoused by Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, sought to extend the limits of the art to breaking point. ‘It is likely that than’, Debord wrote, ‘the freedom of the cinema will be superseded, forgotten, in the development of a world where the spectacle will no longer be dominant. The fundamental feature of the modern spectacle is the representation of its own ruin.’

The term ’spectacle’ was here used for the first time not only to denote visual representations of the world which denied or distorted its reality, but also an ideology which shaped that representation. The phrase, as it was now being used by Debord, came from Nietzsche. In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy in the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche had argued that the origins of all modern forms of thought lay in the realization that life could not be truly represented in art.

This separation between art and life, for Nietzsche, had a political dimension. More specifically, it was traditionally argued by contemporary commentators that the ‘chorus’ in Greek tragedy represented the mood and will of the people. This, argued Nietzsche, was patently untrue, indeed an impossibility in a community which had not yet begun to conceive of political relations in terms of democracy or equality. The chorus were then passive spectators of a process in which they could neither participate nor act upon. ‘What kind of artistic genre,’ wrote Nietzsche, prefiguring Situationist positions on art, ‘could possibly be extracted from the concept of the “spectator”, and find its true form in the “spectator as such”? The spectator without the spectacle is an absurd notion. We fear that the birth of tragedy is to be explained neither by any high esteem for the moral authenticity of the masses nor by any concept of the spectator without a spectacle: and we consider the problem too deep to be even troubled by such superficial considerations.’

The realization of this separation, according to Nietzsche, was the moment which heralded the arrival of ‘the second spectator’ who was no longer passive or controlled by events. This ’second spectator’ was also in this sense what Nietzsche called ‘the theoretical man’, the artist who was able to announce a break with the past and imagine the future. Towards the end of his life Nietzsche also began to use the term ’spectacle’ to denote the lack of real meaning in the passing events of modern life. ‘A riot or a newspaper in a big city are both deep down no more than “spectacle”, an absence of authenticity,’ Nietzsche wrote in a fragment from 1880, prefiguring early definitions of what the Situationists termed ‘the modern spectacle’.

Andrew Hussey
The Game of War: The life and death of Guy Debord
2001

if I sometimes write anything political, it is by necessity focused on the terror of normality which totally dominates all the channels which are supposed to contain free communication. The stagnation is absolute.