kagablog

One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, “I want to be a poet–not a Negro poet,” meaning, I believe, “I want to write like a white poet”; meaning subconsciously, “I would like to be a white poet”; meaning behind that, “I would like to be white.” And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America–this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.

But let us look at the immediate background of this young poet. His family is of what I suppose one would call the Negro middle class: people who are by no means rich yet never uncomfortable nor hungry–smug, contented, respectable folk, members of the Baptist church. The father goes to work every morning. He is a chief steward at a large white club. The mother sometimes does fancy sewing or supervises parties for the rich families of the town. The children go to a mixed school. In the home they read white papers and magazines. And the mother often says “Don’t be like niggers” when the children are bad. A frequent phrase from the father is, “Look how well a white man does things.” And so the word white comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all virtues. It holds for the children beauty, morality, and money. The whisper of “I want to be white” runs silently through their minds. This young poet’s home is, I believe, a fairly typical home of the colored middle class. One sees immediately how difficult it would be for an artist born in such a home to interest himself in interpreting the beauty of his own people. He is never taught to see that beauty. He is taught rather not to see it, or if he does, to be ashamed of it when it is not according to Caucasian patterns.

For racial culture the home of a self-styled “high-class” Negro has nothing better to offer. Instead there will perhaps be more aping of things white than in a less cultured or less wealthy home. The father is perhaps a doctor, lawyer, landowner, or politician. The mother may be a social worker, or a teacher, or she may do nothing and have a maid. Father is often dark but he has usually married the lightest woman he could find. The family attend a fashionable church where few really colored faces are to be found. And they themselves draw a color line. In the North they go to white theaters and white movies. And in the South they have at least two cars and house “like white folks.” Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, Nordic art (if any), and an Episcopal heaven. A very high mountain indeed for the would-be racial artist to climb in order to discover himself and his people.

But then there are the low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority—may the Lord be praised! The people who have their hip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round. They live on Seventh Street in Washington or State Street in Chicago and they do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else. Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout. Work maybe a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. 0, let’s dance! These common people are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child. They furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardizations. And perhaps these common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself. Whereas the better-class Negro would tell the artist what to do, the people at least let him alone when he does appear. And they are not ashamed of him–if they know he exists at all. And they accept what beauty is their own without question.

Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art. Without going outside his race, and even among the better classes with their “white” culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work. And when he chooses to touch on the relations between Negroes and whites in this country, with their innumerable overtones and undertones surely, and especially for literature and the drama, there is an inexhaustible supply of themes at hand. To these the Negro artist can give his racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears. But let us look again at the mountain.

A prominent Negro clubwoman in Philadelphia paid eleven dollars to hear Raquel Meller sing Andalusian popular songs. But she told me a few weeks before she would not think of going to hear “that woman,” Clara Smith, a great black artist, sing Negro folksongs. And many an upper -class Negro church, even now, would not dream of employing a spiritual in its services. The drab melodies in white folks’ hymnbooks are much to be preferred. “We want to worship the Lord correctly and quietly. We don’t believe in ‘shouting.’ Let’s be dull like the Nordics,” they say, in effect.

The road for the serious black artist, then, who would produce a racial art is most certainly rocky and the mountain is high. Until recently he received almost no encouragement for his work from either white or colored people. The fine novels of Chesnutt’ go out of print with neither race noticing their passing. The quaint charm and humor of Dunbar’s’ dialect verse brought to him, in his day, largely the same kind of encouragement one would give a sideshow freak (A colored man writing poetry! How odd!) or a clown (How amusing!).

The present vogue in things Negro, although it may do as much harm as good for the budding artist, has at least done this: it has brought him forcibly to the attention of his own people among whom for so long, unless the other race had noticed him beforehand, he was a prophet with little honor.

The Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp criticism and misunderstanding from his own group and unintentional bribes from the whites. “Oh, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,” say the Negroes. “Be stereotyped, don’t go too far, don’t shatter our illusions about you, don’t amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,” say the whites. Both would have told Jean Toomer not to write Cane. The colored people did not praise it. The white people did not buy it. Most of the colored people who did read Cane hate it. They are afraid of it. Although the critics gave it good reviews the public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting the work of Du Bois) Cane contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America. And like the singing of Robeson, it is truly racial.

But in spite of the Nordicized Negro intelligentsia and the desires of some white editors we have an honest American Negro literature already with us. Now I await the rise of the Negro theater. Our folk music, having achieved world-wide fame, offers itself to the genius of the great individual American composer who is to come. And within the next decade I expect to see the work of a growing school of colored artists who paint and model the beauty of dark faces and create with new technique the expressions of their own soul-world. And the Negro dancers who will dance like flame and the singers who will continue to carry our songs to all who listen-they will be with us in even greater numbers tomorrow.

Most of my own poems are racial in theme and treatment, derived from the life I know. In many of them I try to grasp and hold some of the meanings and rhythms of jazz. I am as sincere as I know how to be in these poems and yet after every reading I answer questions like these from my own people: Do you think Negroes should always write about Negroes? I wish you wouldn’t read some of your poems to white folks. How do you find anything interesting in a place like a cabaret? Why do you write about black people? You aren’t black. What makes you do so many jazz poems?

But jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul–the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile. Yet the Philadelphia clubwoman is ashamed to say that her race created it and she does not like me to write about it, The old subconscious “white is best” runs through her mind. Years of study under white teachers, a lifetime of white books, pictures, and papers, and white manners, morals, and Puritan standards made her dislike the spirituals. And now she turns up her nose at jazz and all its manifestations–likewise almost everything else distinctly racial. She doesn’t care for the Winold Reiss’ portraits of Negroes because they are “too Negro.” She does not want a true picture of herself from anybody. She wants the artist to flatter her, to make the white world believe that all negroes are as smug and as near white in soul as she wants to be. But, to my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering “I want to be white,” hidden in the aspirations of his people, to “Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro–and beautiful”?

So I am ashamed for the black poet who says, “I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet,” as though his own racial world were not as interesting as any other world. I am ashamed, too, for the colored artist who runs from the painting of Negro faces to the painting of sunsets after the manner of the academicians because he fears the strange unwhiteness of his own features. An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he must choose.

Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand. Let Paul Robeson singing “Water Boy,” and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his hands, and Aaron Douglas’s drawing strange black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

THE NATION, 1926

published on the web here: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/hughes/mountain.htm

keep reading this article here: http://africasacountry.com/2013/04/30/aminata-traore-had-a-ticket-to-ride-and-we-dont-care/

The FBI added Assata Shakur to its Most Wanted Terrorist List today. In addition, the state of New Jersey announced it was adding $1 million to the FBI’s $1 million reward for her capture. Shakur becomes the first woman ever to make the list and only the second domestic terrorist to be added to the list.

Assata Shakur, who was born Joanne Chesimard, was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army. She was convicted in the May 2, 1973 killing of a New Jersey police officer during a shoot-out that left one of her fellow activists dead. She was shot twice by police during the incident. In 1979, she managed to escape from jail. Shakur fled to Cuba where she received political asylum. She once wrote, “I am a 20th century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the U.S. government’s policy towards people of color.”

Tune in Friday when we will cover these latest developments.

In 1998, Democracy Now! aired Shakur reading an open letter to Pope John Paul II during his trip to Cuba. She wrote the message after New Jersey state troopers sent the Pope a letter asking him to call for her extradition.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Your Holiness,

I hope this letter finds you in good health, in good disposition, and enveloped in the spirit of goodness. I must confess that it had never occurred to me before to write to you, and I find myself overwhelmed and moved to have this opportunity.

Although circumstances have compelled me to reach out to you, I am glad to have this occasion to try and cross the boundaries that would otherwise tend to separate us.

I understand that the New Jersey State Police have written to you and asked you to intervene and to help facilitate my extradition back to the United States. I believe that their request is unprecedented in history. Since they have refused to make their letter to you public, although they have not hesitated to publicize their request, I am completely uninformed as to the accusations they are making against me. Why, I wonder, do I warrant such attention? What do I represent that is such a threat?

Please let me take a moment to tell you about myself. My name is Assata Shakur and I was born and raised in the United States. I am a descendant of Africans who were kidnapped and brought to the Americas as slaves. I spent my early childhood in the racist segregated South. I later moved to the northern part of the country, where I realized that Black people were equally victimized by racism and oppression.

I grew up and became a political activist, participating in student struggles, the anti-war movement, and, most of all, in the movement for the liberation of African Americans in the United States. I later joined the Black Panther Party, an organization that was targeted by COINTELPRO, a program that was set up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to eliminate all political opposition to the U.S. government’s policies, to destroy the Black Liberation Movement in the U.S., and to discredit activists and to eliminate potential leaders.

As a result of being targeted by COINTELPRO, I, like many other young people, was faced with the threat of prison, underground, exile or death.

At this point, I think that it is important to make one thing very clear. I have advocated and still advocate revolutionary changes in the structure and in the principles that govern the U.S. I advocate an end to capitalist exploitation, the abolition of racist policies, the eradication of sexism, and the elimination of political repression. If that is a crime, then I am totally guilty.

To make a long story short, …let me emphasize that justice for me is not the issue, it is justice for my people that is at stake. When my people receive justice, I am sure that I will receive it, too. I know that Your Holiness will reach your own conclusions, but I feel compelled to present the circumstances surrounding the applicatlon of “justice” in New Jersey. I am not the first nor the last person to be victimized by the New Jersey system of “justice.” The New Jersey State Police are infamous for their racism and brutallty. Many legal actions have been filed against them and just recently, in a class action legal proceeding, the New Jersey State Police were found guilty of having an “officially sanctioned, de facto policy of targeting minorities for investigation and arrest.”

Although New Jersey’s population is more than 78 percent white, more than 75 percentof the prison population is made up of Blacks and Latinos. Eighty percent of women in New Jersey prisons are women of color. There are 15 people on death row in the state and seven of them are Black. A 1987 study found that New Jersey prosecutors sought the death penalty in 50 percent of cases involving a Black defendant and a white victim, but in only 28 percent of cases involving a Black defendant and a Black victim.

Unfortunately, the situation in New Jersey is not unique, but reflects the racism that permeates the entire country. The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. There are more than 1.7 million people in U.S. prisons. This number does not include the more than 500,000 people in city and county jails, nor does it include the alarming number of children in juvenile institutions.

The vast majority of those behind bars are people of color and virtually all of those behind bars are poor.

The result of this reality is devastating. One third of Black men between the ages of 20 and 29 are either in prison or under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system.

Prisons are big business in the United States, and the building, running, and supplying of prisons has become the fastest growing industry in the country. Factories are being moved into the prisons and prisoners are being forced to work for slave wages. This super-exploitation of human beings has meant the institutionalization of a new form of slavery. Those who cannot find work are forced to work in prison.

Not only are prisons being used as instruments of economic exploitation, they also serve as lnstruments of political repression. There are more than 100 political prisoners in the U.S. They are African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Natlve Americans, Asians, and progressive white people who oppose the policies of the United States government. Many of those targeted by the COINTELPRO program have been in prison since the early 1970s.

Although the situation in the prisons is an lndication of human rights violations inside the United States, there are other, more deadly indicators.

There are currently 3,365 people now on death row, and more than 50 percent of those awaiting death are people of color. Black people make up only 13 percent of the population, but we make up 41 percent of persons who have received the death penalty.

The number of state assassinations has increased drastically. In 1997 alone, 71 people were executed.

A special reporter assigned by the United Nations organization found serious human rights violations in the U.S., especially those related to the death penalty. According to these findings, people who were mentally ill were sentenced to death, and people with severe mental and learning disabilities, as well as minors under age 18. Serious racial bias was found on the part of judges and prosecutors.

Specifically mentioned in the report was the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the only political prisoner on death row, who was sentenced to death because of his political beliefs and because of his work as a journalist, exposing police brutality in the city of Philadelphia.

Police brutality is a daily occurrence in our communities. The police have a virtual license to kill and they do kill: children, grandmothers, anyone they perceive to be the enemy. They shoot first and ask questions later. Inside the jails and prisons there is at least as much brutality as there was on slave plantations. An ever increasing number of prisoners are found hanging in their cells.

The United States is becoming a land more hostile to Black people and other people of Color. Racism is running rampant and xenophobia is on the rise. This has been especially true in the sphere of domestic policy.

Politicians are attempting to blame social problems on Black people and other people of color. There have been attacks on essentially all affirmative action programs designed to help correct the accumulated results of hundreds of years of slavery and discrimination. In addition, the government seems determined to eliminate all social programs that provide assistance to the poor, resulting in a situation where millions of people do not have access to basic health care, decent housing or quality education.

It was with great happiness that I read the Christmas message that Your Holiness delivered. I applaud you for taking up the cause of the poor, the homeless, the unemployed. The fact that you are addressing the issues of today, unemployment, hopelessness, child abuse, and the drug problem, is important to people all over the world.

One third of Black people in the United States live in poverty, and our communities are inundated with drugs. We have every reason to believe that the CIA and other government agencies are involved in drug trafficking.

Although we live in one of the richest, most techically advanced countries in the world, our reality is similar to an undeveloped, Third World country. We are a people who are truly seeking freedom and harmony.

All my life I have been a spiritual person. I first learned of the struggle and the sacrifice of Jesus in the segregated churches of the South. I converted to Catholicism as a young girl. In my adult life I have become a student of religion and have studied Christianity, Islam, Asian religions and the African religions of my ancestors. I have come to believe that God is universal in nature although called different names and with different faces. I believe that some people spell God with one “O” while others spell it with two.

What we call God is unimportant, as long as we do God’s work. There are those who want to see God’s wrath fall on the oppressed and not on the oppressors.I believe that the time has ended when slavery, colonialism, and oppression can be carried out in the name of religion. It was in the dungeons of prison that I felt the presence of God up close, and it has been my belief in God,and in the goodness of human beings that has helped me to survive. I am not ashamed of having been in prison, and I am certainly not ashamed of having been a political prisoner. I believe that Jesus was a political prisoner who was executed because he fought against the evils of the Roman Empire, because he fought the greed of the money changers in the temple, because he fought against the sins and injustices of his time. As a true child of God, Jesus spoke up for the poor, the meek, the sick, and the oppressed. The early Christians were thrown into lion dens. I will try and follow the example of so many who have stood up in the face of overwhelming oppression.

I am not writing to ask you to intercede on my behalf. I ask nothing for myself. I only ask you to examine the social reality of the United States and to speak out against the human rights violations that are taking place.

On this day, the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., I am reminded of all those who gave their lives for freedom. Most of the people who live on this planet are still not free. I ask only that you continue to work and pray to end Oppression and political repression. It is my heartfelt belief that all the people on this earth deserve justice: social justice, political justice, and economic justice. I believe it is the only way that we will ever achieve peace and prosperity on earth. I hope that you enjoy your visit to Cuba. This is not a country that is rich in material wealth, but it is a country that is rich in human wealth, spiritual wealth and moral wealth.

Respectfully yours,

Assata Shakur
Havana, Cuba

first published here: http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/5/2/ex_black_panther_assata_shakur_added_to_fbis_most_wanted_terrorist_list#.UYN1HZaG_8A.facebook

by Mia McKenzie

Hey, White Liberals*:

I needed to break protocol to reach out to you and let you know that you’re killing me. No, worse. Much worse. You’re robbing me of part of my humanity.

In lots of ways, really, and frequently, but right now let’s just talk about this one way:

Your constant prioritization of the lives of white people over the lives of people of color is taking a serious toll on my psyche and those of many in my community. And by that I don’t mean what you might expect. Most of us already know that racism and its BFF white privilege have detrimental effects on people of color. Racial oppression leads to any number of unhealthy conditions, including high blood pressure, depression, heart disease, diabetes and even asthma. But what I’m talking about is something different. Something I’m going to call DSWP: desensitization to the suffering of white people.

keep reading this astonishing article here: http://blackgirldangerous.org/new-blog/2013/4/22/hey-white-liberals?fb_action_ids=10151581126406187&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map={%2210151581126406187%22%3A400954060011774}&action_type_map={%2210151581126406187%22%3A%22og.likes%22}&action_ref_map=[]

first published here: http://scalabrinicentrecapetown.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/five-years-on-scalabrini-hosts-film-screening-on-annivesary-of-2008-xenophobic-attacks/

With the “Tell Them We Are From Here Project” the producers of “Man on Ground” are handing over the baton to South African communities by helping them to tell their stories and reflect on their lives and questions concerning identity, belonging and exclusion

The “The Tell Them We Are From Here Project” is an audio-visual initiative targeting youth in under-resourced communities across South Africa. The project is an offshoot from the film “Man On Ground”. Using the medium of film, the project is designed to inspire creativity, encourage youth activism and storytelling through film under the banner “We Are From Here”. ‘Here’ being planet earth”.

Using video cameras, the participating youth will tell their own stories and reflect over who they are, where they are from and how that has shaped them. The filmed five-minutes stories will be part of an exhibition by the name “Tell Them We Are From Here” to be screened and discussed among the participants as well as a wider audience.

The project has a Facebook page and this and the use of other related media, print, television, on-line presence will fuel continual interest in what the project is trying to achieve in the society and will definitely generate interest leading up to the exhibition, not just in this country but beyond our borders.

BACKGROUND

The Xenophobic attacks of 2008

On the evening of Sunday 11th May 2008, young men in Johannesburg’s Alexandra Township forced their way into a hostel on London Road and initiated a merciless attack on residents they deemed to be ‘foreigners’. From this spark, the murder, rape and looting directed at the bodies and belongings of non-South Africans spread within days from Alexandra to informal settlements in Diepsloot and the East Rand, where a Mozambican man, Ernesto Nhamuavhe, was burned alive while bystanders were laughing. By the time the violence subsided in early June, sixty-two people had died- a third of them South Africans.

The violence led to a state of profound national and continental shock followed by soul searching. The film “Man On Ground” was part of this soul searching and its producers commissioned research into the cause of the violence and its unfolding. One of the displaced children interviewed by the researcher was asked what he would say to his attackers if he met them. He replied; “Tell them we are from here.” – a declaration that perfectly encapsulated the ethos of “Man on Ground” and gave the project its name

The Film “Man on Ground”

The Story
Ade and Femi are expatriate Nigerian brothers. Ade is a successful banker in London, while Femi, once a political dissident in his home country has had to escape to South Africa, lives in refugee tenements and work menial jobs. The brothers have not only been physically estranged, their relationship is riddled with unspoken betrayal, guilt and scorn, which they have carried since the early days of their youth. During a short visit to Johannesburg, Ade discovers that his brother has been missing for a week. He sets out to investigate Femi’s mysterious disappearance, reconstructing the pieces of his everyday life and the cruel hardships he endured just to survive. A riot erupts while Ade is visiting Femi’s former boss, Timothi, in Extension 29. Ade is forced to take shelter with the employer. The mounting violence outside seeps into their exchanges and, eventually, prompts an explosion of revelation.

Cast and crew
The film stars Hakeem kae-Kazim (Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End), Fabian Adeoye Lojede (Jacob’s Cross), Fana Mokoena (Hotel Rwanda), Bubu Mazibuko (Catch A Fire), Makhoala Ndebele (Hijack stories), Mandisa Bardill (Nomzamo) and Thishiwe Ziqubu in her first role.

“Man On Ground” was produced by Rosie Motene, A.K Tshabalala, Fabian Adeoye Lojede, Hakeem kae-Kazim and Akin Omotoso.

Funding
To fund the film, the team opted for crowd funding, a method that reflects the ethos of the film and the “Tell Them We Are From Here-Project”

Crowd Funding describes the action of mobilizing the support of people who network and pool their money and other resources together to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Letters were sent to family and friends and friends of friends asking them donations beginning at R1000 in return for an Associate Producer credit. Donations came from around the world, mostly from people the team had never met but who believed in the producers’ vision and shared the ideals of the film.

Reception

“Man On Ground” premiered at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival in September 2011. It was the only South African film selected to screen at the 2012 edition of The Berlin International Film Festival and it won two awards at the African Movie Academy Awards in April 2012.

“A cross hybridization of BBC police thriller and Bergmanesque meditation on intra-African immigration, “Man On Ground” boasts some literally fantastic flourishes. Helmer Akin Omotoso is a stylist of considerable flair”.
Variety

“A skillfully told drama, economical, highly accomplished sense of style, recurring images and symbols foreshadow in unexpected ways. The actors turn in entirely convincing portrayals of these conflicted people without a false note between them”
Art & Culture Mavern

“With “Man On Ground”, director Akin Omotoso exemplifies the kind of filmmaking that makes cinema worthwhile with a film that’s thoughtful, intelligent and heartbreaking. It tackles a notoriously difficult subject with sensitivity, yet unflinching directness (not to mention beautifully crafted cinematography) and still manages to insert moments of gentle humour and unexpected sensuality.

Was Steve Biko over-optimistic when he said ”blacks are tired of standing on the sidelines and witnessing a game in which they should be participating”? It seems to me black South Africans do not want to be involved in the struggle for their own liberation. How else does one interpret the frenzy black people all over the country have gotten into as a result of Gillian Schutte’s letter to white people?

The letter says “Dear White People”. A white person writes to fellow white settlers to discuss their collective and unique problem of race privilege, supremacy and racism. Very well. This is precisely what Biko taught us, that the work of white anti-racists is in the white communities — they need to talk each other out of racial arrogance while we blacks talk each other out of self-hatred. Later we meet as equals, to decide on the kind of South Africa we want to build — if whites are interested. Biko reprimands white liberals out of black communities and reminds them they can’t have it both ways: gladly accept exclusive race privileges but also moonlight as anti-racists. The blatant hypocrisy is out there for everyone to see: accept skin-colour benefits and repeatedly vote back into power that racism machinery, yet make an empty claim to non-racism.

I welcomed Gillian’s letter because I thought she would create an alternative space for white activists who are crowding and collapsing the black struggle. I thought at last we would have white people talking among themselves about their issues, as opposed to the dominant practice of imposing themselves on black initiatives while their stomachs and purses are full of white privilege. With benefit of hindsight, I should have known better. Blacks, educated urban ones in particular, went crazy. It’s a combination of being star-struck, drunk, mad, high, possessed etc. All these states of body and mind at the same. This is the prevailing white effect on black bodies/minds. I am not faulting Gillian, neither am I interested in the subsequent discourse after her letter was published. I respect people and give them the necessary space to sort out their affairs. The letter is addressed to white people, written by a fellow white settler, raising issues of collective concern in the white community. I am not white, I therefore fall outside the scope and ambit of the letter.

But why has this letter caused so much noise and excitement in the black community? Therein lays the fundamental damage in the minds of black people. So unprepared and unwilling to fight their own battles, black people will celebrate any white person that purports to be doing or saying things on their behalf. Two phenomena are at play here: fear and misguided admiration. Black people fear white supremacy so much they would rather self-censor in order to remain in the good books of white people in general. Those who claim to be communist are under immense pressure to stick to the traditional Marxist lexicon of ”capital” against ”working class” even though its crystal clear that in South Africa capital is white and the working class black, save for the apartheid-created puppet black elite and the tender-manufactured political class. That’s why the victims of the ANC-sponsored Marikana massacre are all black. That’s why the victims of grand exploitation in the Western Cape farms are all black. That’s why victims of the ANC Lenasia demolitions are all black. Still, black communists prefer the abstract language so as not to offend fellow white comrades. We are a rainbow nation after all, well, so the fairy-tale goes.

The second phenomenon governing the pathetic behaviour of black people is misguided admiration for whiteness. Whiteness is shoved down our throats 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s on television, radio, internet, billboards, lecture theatres, company boardrooms, church halls — THERE IS NO ESCAPE FROM WHITENESS. Black people have deeply internalised the unquestionable supremacy of whiteness that even among themselves, in the ghetto, they are always exchanging ideas of how best and quickly to fully assimilate into the white culture, be it through moving to reside in Sandton, applying skin-lightening creams or plugging in straight hair to the heads of black women.

Whiteness is now a self-sustaining practice entrenched in the psyche of black people. Everybody who possesses white flesh is thus instantly admired, loved, looked up to as an ipso facto embodiment of truth, beauty, intelligent and progress. And if that possessor of the white flesh displays pity and solidarity for the never-ending horrors visited upon black bodies by white supremacy, he/she becomes an instant hero in the black community. We blacks fear whiteness, we are not prepared to confront it. We are desperate for some whites to intervene on our behalf, not unlike how some people left the soil of oppression and sailed all the way to Britain, to plead to the Queen to intervene on our behalf. Even black Americans, being a minority in the US, have never displayed such pathetic cowardice to fight against their oppression. But we, the indigenous people, the overwhelming majority have shivers down our spines from the mere thought of confronting white racism in our country.

Was Biko misguided in stating: “We are going to change South Africa. What we’ve got to decide is the best way to do that. And as angry as we have the right to be, let us remember that we are in the struggle to kill the idea that one kind of man is superior to another kind of man. And killing that idea is not dependent on the white man. We must stop looking to him to give us something. We have to fill the black community with our own pride. We have to teach our black children black history, tell them about our black heroes, our black culture, so they don’t face the white man believing they are inferior. Then we’ll stand up to him in any way he chooses. Conflict, if he likes, but with an open hand, too, to say we can all build a South Africa worth living in — a South Africa for equals, black or white, a South Africa as beautiful as this land is, as beautiful as we are.”

When will the culture of expecting white messiahs stop? When will we blacks take it upon ourselves to fight our own battles, to the exclusion of white do-gooders?

Jackie Shandu is an MA student at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, currently in Germany on an exchange programme.

first published here: http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/readerblog/2013/01/10/blacks-fight-your-own-battles/

zev krengel Jewish community leader implicated in violent assault of Palestine solidarity protesters

17 April 2013 Rose*, one of the two victims from Monday night’s violent assault by members of the Jewish Community Security Organization has revealed that Mr Zev Krengel, the President of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), was present and also involved in the violent assault of herself and her colleague. During a counselling session yesterday afternoon, Rose identified Mr Zev Krengel as one of the approximately 10 people present in the parking lot of Gold Reef City in Johannesburg where she was physically assaulted by security personnel belonging to the Jewish CSO. “The Jewish CSO members”, Rose explains, “had my hands tied with cables, my face forced on the ground and would forcibly lift my head up by my hair so that the man wearing a checkered shirt could take photos of my face with his cellphone camera. This happened several times”. Rose later identified Krengel as the man with the “checkered shirt.”

Shereen Usdin, a Jewish member of BDS South Africa commented: “Its appalling that a leader of any community, including the Jewish community, may have been involved in such acts of violence and intimidation. As a Jewish person, I support the young protesters who are pursuing charges against the perpetrators and the CSO.”

South African activists are pressing charges against the South African Jewish Community Security Organization (CSO), the South African Zionist Federation and the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) for the recent violent assault of two young women Palestine solidarity protesters (including the daughter of a senior member from South Africa’s largest trade union federation, COSATU) . One Palestine solidarity protester was left in a state of concussion due to the assault injuries (see: www.bdssouthafrica.com/2011/04/press-release-jewish-security.html ) * The victim wishes to remain anonymous as she is in fear of her life. Rose is a pseudonym. (To arrange a telephonic interview with Rose or one of the other victims you can contact Muhammed Desai on 0842119988)

background

On Monday night supporters of Israel held a music concert to celebrate Israeli Independence Day at Gold Reef City Casino in Johannesburg, which was organized by the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) and the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD). The South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) and the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) had insisted on arranging their own security (the “Jewish Community Security Organization”) instead of allowing either Gold Reef City Casino or the South African Police Services (SAPS) to perform the role of safety and security for the Israeli event. Palestinian protesters contested that the Israeli celebration was essentially a “celebration of murder, expulsion and continued Israeli oppression against the indigenous Palestinian people” and arranged a picket outside the venue where over 250 members from COSATU, the SA Students Congress, BDS South Africa and several other civil society organizations were present. In addition, young activists (mostly women students) had also bought tickets, made their way into the venue of the Israeli event and partook in a direct-action Greenpeace-like protest where they released bad smelling “stinky-bombs” and wore T-shirts that read “Israeli Apartheid Stinks” in luminous green writing. During the direct-action protest inside Gold Reef City, two young women protesters were violently assaulted by the Jewish Community Security Organization (CSO) including having their hands tied with cables, their faces covered and their heads smashed into the parking lot’s concrete paving. Other protesters were forcibly thrown down escalators and one protester was locked into a passageway where he was repeatedly and simultaneously kicked in the stomach by more than five Jewish Community Security Organization (CSO) personnel – he later suffered a concussion. Members of the Jewish community attending the event also punched a woman protester in the face several times resulting in a serious swelling injury. Charges against the Jewish Community Security Organization (CSO), the SA Zionist Federation (SAZF) and the SA Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) include:
- Smashing the heads of two young women protesters into the concrete paving of the Gold Reef City Casino parking lot; – Illegally restraining the young protesters with cable ties and leaving them with their heads covered in the Gold Reef City parking lot; – Locking a protester into a passage way, throwing him to the ground and then instructing over five security personnel to kick the protester, which resulted in a state of concussion; – Throwing two young women protesters down escalators resulting in several body bruises, including a badly injured leg; – Forcibly hurling several women protesters onto walls; – Verbally abusing the young protesters, including threatening to “find them” and “kill them”; – In addition, a charge of theft will be laid against the Jewish CSO, the SAJBD and the SAZF for having illegally confiscated cellphones and other possessions from the protesters.

ISSUED BY MUHAMMED DESAI BDS SOUTH AFRICA SPOKESPERSON: 084 211 9988

keep reading this article here: http://acousticstringsafrica.blogspot.com/2013/04/django-unchained-unfortunate-scapegoat.html

first published on clive’s blog here: http://clivesnell.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/the-land-questionreclaiming-our-heritage-in-stellenbosch/

(For the trajectory of the Palestinian struggle, Abulhawa searches for lessons from the past, neo-liberal thought, and Black Consciousness)

By Susan Abulhawa

It’s safe to say that a book you can’t put down is a good one. But I’ve come across a novel I can’t recommend enough, even though it took me months to finish. TIME OF WHITE HORSES, by my friend, Ibrahim Nasrallah, was a fabulous read that I had to put down, repeatedly.

I read the first 300 pages of this translated work from the original Arabic in just a few days. Then the world changed and I moved through the next 300 pages slowly, tiptoeing through lives I recognised and characters I came to love. I turned these pages with trepidation for nearly a month, sometimes holding my breath and swallowing hard. I was reading the unfolding of my own life, and the lives of all Palestinians. I knew what was going to happen and in the strange ways of a heart touched by literature, I wanted to warn the characters. I needed them to make different decisions to save us all from our fate; until, I finally came upon the last chapter and stopped. I put the book down and left it there for another 2 weeks. Along with other reading material, I carried this thick hardback with me on a flight to South Africa. The final chapter was only 5 pages long, but I didn’t read them on the flight. In my hotel room in Johannesburg, I put the book on the table by my bed, looked at its it’s beautiful cover, an image painted by Nasrallah himself, and I read other books instead. I did the same thing a week later when I flew to Durban to take part in Time of the Writer literature festival.

Evenings at the festival started with panel discussions among invited writers. A group of us would then continue on at a local bar or restaurant. These were nights with new friends and meaningful discussions around the Black Consciousness movement, pan-Africanism, labor struggles, personal relationships, and anything in between. After one evening of particularly intense discussions that were born from a single figure at the event – a Black Consciousness thinker named Andile Mngxitama – I decided to take the plunge for those final 5 pages. I had been awake for 21 hours and exhaustion was conquering me.

My Land, “even if I just want to look at it”

Andile’s panel discussion had been an expose of his uncompromising position that has no interest in settlement or pragmatism toward black liberation from white oppression, which clearly remains the social and economic order in a post-Apartheid South Africa. In a statement that some would examine the next day in conversation, he said that his position on land was that it belonged to blacks. Period. And should be reclaimed from white ownership regardless of economic, agricultural, or social repercussions. He said, “..even if I just wake up and look at it [the land]. Because it’s mine!”

Although I was aware of the discomfort of some in the audience around me, Andile grew larger in my eyes. His words touched a rage and an outrage that lives at my core. A wound that does not heal. I thought of that book on my hotel bedside table, 620 pages of Palestinian life spanning the Ottoman Empire’s occupation to the British, then Zionists. A story of four generations of Hadiya, a Palestinian village, its leaders and traitors, weddings and traditions, songs and seasons, loves and scandals, and deep kinship with horses and the land – their land, even if they should choose to just wake up and look at it.

Andile Mngxitama spoke his truth eloquently without equivocation, without tempering his own outrage in order to be heard by those in the audience who were not already supporters. Indeed, most only heard a lack of pragmatism in his message. And they heard a threatening strength in his resolve, which was later trivialised as irrational and unrealistic. He spoke of armed struggle if necessary and some in the audience heard only violence, misogyny and chauvinism. I heard what his supporters in the audience must have: a liberated black man in full possession of his humanity, unwilling to concede an inch to those who have shackled, oppressed, raped, exploited and committed unspeakable and still untold crimes against one black generation after another.

I admired and loved Andile after that session, but others did not feel the same. Not surprisingly, his message and demeanor provoked visceral reactions from some personalities and a sort of drama ensued in the aftermath that left me torn between new friends for whom I felt sincere affection, and a desire to talk further with Andile. I chose the former, but as it was my last night at the festival, I remained awake long after the others and found myself wandering in my own thoughts. I called my daughter in the US. I missed her and wanted to hear her voice. I spent some time speaking with Aman Sethi, a brilliant and witty reporter and author to whom I had taken an immediate liking and who was feeling the same ambivalence about sleep. Eventually, I had a conversation with Andile, however brief it was, and when I got back to my room, it was nearly 3am.
We died all over again, in the last five pages

Despite the assaults of fatigue, I picked up TIME OF WHITE HORSES and opened it to my bookmark. A few agonising minutes later, I had finished the final chapter. I closed the cover, put the book back on the bedside table, and wept. I had walked around carrying that final chapter for over 3 weeks, wanting but unable to look at it. I knew what was going to happen. I knew zionist thieves and thugs were going to take everything and rip all our hearts out one generation after another for the next six decades after the last chapter. I knew my grandmother and thousands of grandmothers were going to rot away as refugees in shacks until they died while European Jews occupied their homes. I knew our lives were going to fall and crumble and we would be blamed for our own miserable fate while a Zionist boot pressed on our necks. But I had hoped, for all those weeks, that the villagers of Hadiya would miraculously turn things around and stay and defeat those Zionist gangs and change the world.

Alas, Palestine was stolen and we all died all over again in the last 5 pages. I fell asleep with the remains of that long day in Durban, the wreckage of that final chapter, and the lullaby of the Indian Ocean coming through my open waterfront hotel window. A few hours later, my body’s annoying habit of rising with the sun had me dragging my mind to the breakfast room in the lobby at 6am. I walked holding hands with the newly dispossessed villagers of Hadiya in TIME OF WHITE HORSES. The ineffable sorrow and humiliation of being carted away, as if cattle, from everything they knew and everything they were so that new Jewish arrivals could take their place, was part of that morning in a Durban hotel restaurant.
Polite ironic violence

Aman Sethi had been my faithful breakfast companion for most of the week, because I would wake him (another habit that annoys my friends), but I didn’t have the heart to do so that morning. Instead, 4 cups of coffee later, I was joined by a prominent white South African writer who was held in high esteem by other writers at the festival. He was the only one of the writers at the festival with whom I had not really spoken at any length and I finally had a chance to do so, more or less privately, that morning over breakfast. Reflecting on the previous evening panels was the usual breakfast conversation and this was no exception. I was interested in hearing his thoughts on Andile Mngxitama’s panel. Quite simply, he completely dismissed Andile and Andile’s thesis, smiling as he said “No one here really listens to him [Andile]. He’s quite a fringe character. If he shows up for a revolution, it would just be him and a handful of followers.” From what I had seen and read, I didn’t think that was true.

In that same breakfast discussion, my colleague said I was intellectually lazy to use the label “colonised mentality”. The accusation, of course, was said in a polite way, but he certainly used the word “lazy”. It brought to mind what Andile called “polite white violence” and “ironic white violence”. My comment about a colonised mentality was in the context of the recent Marikana massacre in which 34 striking mine workers were shot dead by post-Apartheid police. My white colleague at breakfast remarked that many people in the black townships expressed solidarity with the police, invoking colonial stereotypes of primitive blacks who needed to be put in their place. That, to me, is the essence of a colonised mentality – the way oppressed people will often channel their own thoughts through the labyrinth of racist structures of their colonial past. My colleague was quick to chastise me for slapping such a label because, he said, it ignores the complexity of human beings. He said it was a lazy way to think because it disregards the nuances of what might be happening in the townships – although he couldn’t give an example of such a nuance which would provoke anything but outrage against the wanton murder of striking mine workers, much less satisfaction for it. Instead, he said that by using the term “colonised mentality,” I presumed to be in their heads, as if looking down on black people them from above, labeling and moving on.

Who is “Intellectually Lazy”?

On the surface (and ignoring my white colleague’s broad brush stroking, non-nuanced wholesale dismissal of Andile Mngxitama) his argument sounds enlightened. After all, as some intellectuals will happily (and quickly) tell you, using labels to explain human complexities is ignorant and unworthy of an intelligent discourse. It is a discourse that does not point fingers or make judgments, but one that looks for clues to discuss and probe endlessly. In this conversation project, people like me who pass judgment on human behaviour are unsophisticated (unless, of course, the judgment is made about individuals, like me, who make such judgments). In this discourse, usually “white” in nature, it is not correct to explain societal (especially black or brown society) behaviour with terms that refer to described phenomena. My colleague told me it was offensive. He didn’t say to whom it is offensive, but I think it at least offends the neo-liberal sensibilities, replete with white guilt and a desire to separate from the epic historic crimes that lie just beneath the skin that burned under Africa’s sun. It is understandable to want to detach from the label mentality that birthed centuries of perpetual misery on entire black and brown societies. But what, then, should one do with the enormous body of evidence, spanning all of recorded human history, that human behaviour is actually quite predictable? What should one do, then, with decades of social science data that demonstrate, both through controlled social experiments and real-world cross sectional studies, that given X, a certain proportion of people will do Y?

It is well-known that very frequently, victims become victimisers, both on individual and societal levels. Who would have thought that Jews, fresh from concentration camps, would come to Palestine and preside over new forced labor camps for Palestinians, just 4 years after the last forced labor camps closed in Germany? Who would have thought that these Jews who were dispossessed of everything and marched off into camps would turn around and dispossess Palestinians of everything and march them off into camps of a different kind? And who would have thought that Palestinians, who were tortured in Israeli dungeons, would turn around and torture other Palestinians once they got a taste of some power, however illusory, following the ill-fated Oslo Accords? It is a bitter truth that this is what human beings do. While we are capable of self-reflection, change, and evolution, we remain subject to unconscious programs.

To ignore established patterns of human behaviour is intellectually dishonest. This! is the lazy intellectual put-on that looks down from high above, insisting on nuance in order to avoid indicting victimisers who may have once been victims.
Neo-liberal “nuance”

I remember a talk I gave once at Smith College on the role of women in the Palestinian struggle. During the question and answer session, a member of the audience, a professor at the university, remarked that my thesis lacked nuance. She used phrases like “showing the other side”, “Ismalic terror”, and descriptors (like the ones politely leveled at me during breakfast) that stopped short of calling me an anti-Semite. She was a brown woman with a classic “colonised mentality”.

There you go my white friend at the breakfast table! There is no nuance, nor am I interested in finding nuance, in the fact that foreigners from Eastern Europe are living in the ancestral homes of Palestinians who languish in refugee camps that aren’t fit for rats! There is no nuance in the daily savage violence that is inflicted by a Zionist regime armed with the most advanced technological death machines against a principally unarmed indigenous civilian population. There is no nuance in five soldiers tying up a 13 year old girl and posing for pictures with their guns pointed at her, or nuance in the fact that over 500 children fester in Israeli jails without charge or trial, without access to their parents, imprisoned in solitary confinement or with adult criminal populations. And there is no nuance in the indiscriminate shooting of mine workers engaged in a labor struggle. There is only a vulgarity that must be confronted. The project of “finding nuance” in criminal behaviour then becomes a profound endeavor of obfuscation in the place where indictment should be. Sadly, this is the essence of western neo-liberal discourse on the Zionist project that is wiping Palestine off the map.

My colleague finished his breakfast and left. I stayed, nursing another cup of coffee (I had lost count at this point).

Black Consciousness versus a Colonized Mind

Other writers came down, looking fresh and energised. I became more aware of my uncombed, un-showered, flip-flop wearing, caffeine junkie self. I wished Aman would come down already. He’d be the only other person in that room who would look like he just rolled out of bed as I had. The conversation now was with two South African writers, one white, one Indian, and two writers from other African nations. Andile’s words were still the topic of discussion. Everyone more or less agreed that they disagreed with Andile and each gave different reasons. The white South African was offended by a perceived reduction of the issues to a black versus white matter. She said whites too had suffered and fought against Apartheid. She didn’t say, but I saw in her a fear of being alienated or outcast in the only country she had ever known, for no fault of her own. Others thought Andile was too rigid in his beliefs. The comment about taking back the land even if “just to look at it” was foolish as far as they were concerned and examples were cited of economic collapse in other places where nationalisation or redistribution of natural resources had been implemented. Some were offended by his insistence that armed struggle should not be removed from the equation. These were writers who had witnessed the human cost of armed struggle.

I listened, the villagers of Hadiya still with me.

During the British Mandate rule, Jewish immigration was encouraged and the British, seeing Zionists Europeans as more civilised than the indigenous Palestinians, were happy to arm the newcomers. Palestinian farmers in Hadiya were aware of the primitive tools they still used compared with new Jewish arrivals who employed heavy farm machinery on Palestinian land that the British government had designated for them. And I thought of the Jewish settlers now, who live in fortified Jewish-only colonies in the heart of Palestinian towns, with their Israeli-only roads and Uzi-totting arrogance that rampages through our lives, painting racist graffiti on our homes, beating our mothers and sisters, and fathers, and grandfathers. Shitting in our mosques and wiping themselves with pages from the Quran.

I picked up all these things, held them in my grip, and joined the conversation. I thought the claim of white suffering in resistance to Apartheid was absurd and said as much. That alienated me somewhat in the conversation. I said Andile was right to leave no room for pragmatism or concession with racists. There should be only liberation first and foremost. I said I wanted my land back, even if just to look at it. Because it is mine. Because they are thieves and opportunists and racists who have destroyed our society. Because they are terrorists with whom there should be no negotiation and no settlement. Because justice must also be restorative.

“Writing a New World”

Aman finally awoke long after I left breakfast and separately we managed to clean ourselves up before heading off together to Andile’s book launch and subsequent panel with Ashwin Desai on a Black Consciousness article that got pulled from the Harvard Review at the first complaint from a prominent white South African. That’s another story and Ashwin Desai is yet another agitating academic personality. But I digress.

The theme of Time of the Writer literature festival was “writing a new world” and it turned out to be fitting that I carried a hardback of the past with me, even with only 5 pages to go. TIME OF WHITE HORSES is made of short chapters, each a sort of self-contained story of different characters in the village of Hadiya. The chapters are akin to individual pieces of a larger whole and as the reader moves from one to another, the pieces begin to fit together as if a puzzle, until a beautiful tortured nation emerges from the pages. What emerges, too, are patterns of human behaviour, including the “colonised mentality”. Given X, some people will do Y. Given imperial power, some subjects will collaborate. Given occupation and colonialism, most will resist. Some will want to negotiate and others will insist on a fight. Heroes emerged from the story of Hadiya and the downfall of the village, indeed of the country, could not have been accomplished without the cooperation of collaborators. The appeasers wanted to negotiate with the Ottomans or the British, and now zionists.

In hindsight, the ones who clearly had it right were those who stood defiant, in full possession of themselves as an indigenous people, heirs to their own lands and their own heritage. They were the Andile Mngxitamas and Steve Bikos of their time and country. Had we but listened to them and followed their lead! Instead, we trudge in the molasses of a neo-liberal discourse of “nuance” trying to find our way through a maze of racist negotiations ands accords and settlements that are clearly wiping Palestine off the map. If I could write a new world, I would start it with the closing line in my friend Ibrahim Nasrallah’s novel TIME OF WHITE HORSES. It is a quote we all know well, by David Ben Gurion, who was born a Polish man named David Grunn. He said:

“If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country…They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”

Why, indeed?

- Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian thinker, essayist, and the author of the international bestselling novel, Mornings in Jenin (Bloomsbury 2010). She is also the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, an NGO for children. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

first published on the web here: http://ramyabdeljabbar.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/reading-time-of-white-horses-at-time-of-the-writer-in-durban-palestine-chronicle/

gillian’s articles always make me think of a reading that lesego rampolokeng gave at the national arts festival in grahamstown in 2000.

it was the usual lesego thing, hard to follow, lots of urine, faeces, ugliness. the audience was all white; middle-aged ladies from the book club.

most of them sat there appalled of course, wondering who had made the mistake of selecting this guy for their book club, but at the end of it one of them put up her hand bravely and said to lesego (in a very upper class madam voice) “as a woman i too have been oppressed and i therefore understand you and your pain.”

and lesego spat his reply out at her like a snake, venomously – “i don’t want to be understood by you, don’t oppress me with your understanding.”

watching this i saw her recoil with pain, she genuinely did not understand where he was coming from and it made no sense to her that he had to hurt her. she could not imagine that she was hurting him. it was inconceivable to her that her comment was like a slap in his face.

actually the nice whites are the worst because they are so insensitive. gillian schutte in speaking on behalf of black men does more damage than good. unfortunately she has not learned the one thing that the black world requires of her. to shut up.

aryan kaganof

in response to this article: http://mg.co.za/article/2013-04-01-off-with-his-head-the-case-against-andile-mngxitama

Nice People’s Pogrom.

Who the hell is Andile Mngxitama, anyway? He’s a self-serving, self-satisfied proponent of black consciousness whose career largely depends on white people in the media and the publishing world paying him some attention. Not being a man very experienced in the arts of irony or self-examination, he fails to identify the obvious contradictions in this embedded lifestyle.

Recently he has become famous for attacking Jared Sacks. But who the hell is Jared Sacks, anyway? He’s a self-serving, self-satisfied proponent of Trotskyism based in Cape Town whose career largely depends on capitalists in the media and the publishing world paying him some attention. If he identifies the obvious contradictions in this embedded lifestyle, he doesn’t seem troubled by it. In sum, the similarities between Andile Mngxitama and Jared Sacks appear to outsiders to be greater than the differences. Perhaps the smallness of the differences drive the desire to make distinctions and thus promotes conflict.

But perhaps there is something else there which is more important, and therefore it might be worth asking what the fuss was all about, anyway.

Jared Sacks wrote an article in the Mail and Guardian about Mamphela Ramphele’s non-party party, “Agang”. Hurray! And in his article he said some stuff, most of which was too boring to mention. One little teeny-weeny bit indicated, however, that Steve Biko would not have voted for Mamphy Ramphy. And this caused poor Andile to go completely off his chump and start charging around declaring (tweeting, truthily) that he himself would give Jared Sacks a thick ear if he ever met him, and indeed that all blacks in South Africa should queue up (with organisational participation, presumably, from taxi-rank organisers) and punch, kick or otherwise structurally inconvenience Jared Sacks until he stopped being that way, whichever way it was.

Yes, it was extremely silly. Why, however, did Andile get so het up? Is it just that he’s blown all his income from posturing as the PC of BC on coke, and can’t handle the stuff? Perhaps not, for there does seem to be some method in this madness.

What does it mean to say that Steve Biko wouldn’t have voted for Agang? On the face of it, simply that anyone who has read I Write What I Like will have noted Biko’s distrust for black people who are working as political facades for white people. All the evidence suggests that Agang fulfils this criterion. Hence, Biko would have distrusted Agang, and therefore probably Ramphele as well, and would very possibly have disowned his “son”. (That is if he had any biological connection with the child Ramphele had after Biko’s death whom she named for Biko.) Said son recently wrote a crock of nonsense on behalf of white big business which he calls “The Great South Africa” (copying President Lyndon B Johnson, the notorious genocidaire). Enough said about such people.

The problem is, however, that Biko is not only a third-rate knock-off Frantz Fanon. As such he is worthy of respect simply because next to Biko’s rather ordinary writing, most current “political commentators” appear fit only for the sewer. But Biko is also an icon of black independence and resistance to white authority. As such, when a white person says “Biko would not have liked that”, even if it is obvious that the point is true, the white person is implicitly saying “I have the right to say what Biko would, and would not, have liked”. In other words, the white person is effectively colonizing Biko for the white community, and in a strange way, is posthumously turning him into the same kind of front-person for white interests that Ramphele is – except that Ramphele consciously chose to be such, whereas Biko is dead and cannot resist his appropriation.

That is, of course, very bad. It is perfectly possible that Jared Sacks didn’t really mean to do this. However, it is also perfectly likely that Jared Sacks would have no problem with doing this. After all, one of the main characteristics of white culture is that it denigrates all other cultures and tolerates their manifestations only insofar as they can be accommodated and repositioned within the frameworks laid out by white culture. Ouch!

Can one be certain of this? Unfortunately, there is a lot of evidence substantiating it. Why, after all, did Sacks mention Biko at all? It is true that Ramphele has moved a long way from Biko’s politics since the days when she used to sleep with him, but we actually do not know how far she encapsulated his politics along with his penis. Certainly, most of her activities since her liberation from her banning order have been devoted to serving the white ruling class, and even before then her concern was much more with local self-help programmes than with the revolutionary struggle which concerned almost everybody else in the mid-1980s. So a criticism of Agang could have, and should have, focused quite exclusively on Ramphele.

Bringing in the Biko seems to suggest that Biko was indeed presented as a talisman (exactly as he is used by black consciousness intellectuals like Mngxitama) and that the message was “If you are black and like Biko, then you ought not to like Ramphele”. In other words, “We, the white people, are entitled to tell you, the black people, how to make use of your own iconography”. One begins to see that Mngxitama might have a point in wanting to give Sacks a clip over the earhole.

Sacks is also part of the Western Cape Trotskyite movement. He has, for instance, written exuberantly inaccurate articles for the Daily Maverick, a Web publication controlled by white people and heavily influential over white conservative journalists who like to use left-wing jargon through which they can pretend to be actual leftists. One recent article was about how the Democratic Alliance in the Western Cape is allowing black people’s shacks to burn down without providing fire protection – a claim earlier made by the local ANC leader Marius Fransman, though Sacks doesn’t mention this. It might very well be true. However, it seems obvious that while Fransman’s party has a slim chance of gaining power in the Western Cape, Sacks has no such chance, so his writing has no political significance even though it purports to have political significance. And, of course, Sacks, in writing the work, is crowding out the people who actually experience the fires – the black people who actually live in the shacks.

Sacks, like other South African Trotskyites, does not acknowledge this distinction. His line is that he is representing the People in his writing. But where are the People? They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented (as Marx wrote in “The Eighteenth Brumaire” about the conservative appropriation of the electoral power of the French peasantry in 1848). This, again, is a sign of Sacks and his friends taking the suffering or the conundrums of black people in a white-dominated society and appropriating this in order to make political capital and private gain out of it. This is remarkably like the activities of white liberalism in the days before it became dominant in the white community – when it appropriated black voices in order to empower itself – and it is also characteristic of Trotskyism, which appropriates the voices of shackdwellers such as Abahlali baseMjondolo or those with genuine grievances like the South Durban environmental campaigners, and in doing so erodes the authority and organizational capacity of the grassroots while only temporarily providing legitimacy for itself.

In other words, politically speaking, Mngxitama may be a fool but he is at least authentic in his objectives, whereas Sacks is both a fool and a pseudo-radical.

This is particularly evident in the responses to Mngxitama. One would think, would one not, that a battle between two undistinguished journalists is not worthy of much commentary. However, and instead, this whole affair has flooded across the white-dominated fake alternative media spectrum, where websites and e-journals controlled by white people present messages of radical action to other white people with no intention of implementing them but who feel that transmitting such messages is a convenient substitute for actual radicalism which might deprive them of their swimming-pools.

As one might expect, there has been no support, nor even any understanding, for Mngxitama’s position. Whites do not like blacks – this is the secret which the fake alternative media exists to conceal, but it comes out when the whites have to defend themselves against a recalcitrant black. How dare someone become indignant when one of Our Side does the job which we have allocated to him! So the call has gone out to denounce Mngxitama, coming from the Western Cape Trotskyites – virtually all of them the whites and coloureds of the Marxist Workers’ Tendency rebranded as the Democratic Left Front, together with the spurious nominally black but actually organizationally nonexistent names of Abahlali and the “Unemployed Workers’ Movement”. In other words, the white middle-class appropriators of the image of black working-class activism are leaping to the defense of one of their own.

All this should not surprise Mngxitama, although it probably does – since he has long depended on white endorsements to sustain his own little disempowered political niche. It is perhaps a little more surprising that two Young Democrats have issued a call for Mngxitama to be denied all access to the media and thus silenced forever. (Like, before him, Malema and Ronald Suresh Roberts.) One might think it odd that Young Democrats, the pom-pom girls of the white supremacist free-market, should be marching shoulder to shoulder with Trotskyists who purport to speak for black people in order to crush someone else who also purports to speak for black people.

However, this is altogether comprehensible in terms of the notion that Mngxitama is suspected of actually believing in what he writes. All frauds, fakes and pseuds naturally unite against an honest person, especially a passionate honest person. This is surely the principal lesson we must learn from this episode – that, and the fact that since the frauds, fakes and pseuds are in charge, a passionate person cannot afford to be too honest.

first published here: http://hismastersvoice.wordpress.com/2013/03/31/nice-peoples-pogrom/

first published here: http://pretoriapen.co.za/?p=746

RASTAFARIAN LEARNER UNLAWFULLY SUSPENDED FROM KHAYELITSHA SCHOOL
ISSUED BY: EQUAL EDUCATION
ATTENTION: NEWS EDITORS
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

RASTAFARIAN LEARNER UNLAWFULLY SUSPENDED FROM KHAYELITSHA SCHOOL

On 13 March 2013, Sikhokele Diniso, a grade 10 learner from Siphamandla High School in Khayelitsha, was instructed to leave school and not to return until he had cut his hair. Diniso is a Rastafarian and growing his hair is a part of his faith. Equal Education (EE) and the Equal Education Law Centre (EELC) have been in contact with the school and the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) to ensure his return to school. However, neither the school nor the WCED have attempted to facilitate Diniso’s return.

Unlawful and unconstitutional exclusion
The principal of Siphamandla High unlawfully suspended Diniso from school on 13 March despite the fact that he was scheduled to write tests for History on 14 March, Mathematics on 15 March and Life Sciences on 18 March.

He has been unable to write these tests and has fallen behind in the curriculum due to his suspension. On 20 March, the EELC, acting on behalf of EE and the learner concerned, wrote to the WCED requesting that the learner urgently be re-admitted to his school
[equaleducation.org.za/content/2013/03/27/Letter%20to%20MEC%20Grant%20regarding%20Sikhokele%20Diniso.pdf].

Schools cannot use learner dress codes as the basis for unlawful exclusions that violate constitutional rights as well as the South African Schools Act (SASA). School Governing Bodies are supposed to consider the National Guidelines on School Uniforms when adopting a code of conduct for a school.

Section 29 of the guidelines state: *“A school uniform policy or dress code should take into account religious and cultural diversity within the community served by the school. Measures should be included to accommodate learners whose religious beliefs are compromised by a uniform requirement.”
The principal’s actions violated Diniso’s constitutional rights to dignity; freedom of religion; and basic education. His exclusion is also a violation of section 9(3) of the Constitution which prohibits unfair discrimination on the basis of religion, conscience, belief or culture.
The principal’s conduct is unlawful as it violates section 5(1) of the SASA which requires a “public school to admit learners and serve their educational needs without unfairly discriminating in any way”.

His action disregards a Constitutional Court ruling (MEC for Education:
KwaZulu-Natal and Others v Pillay) that stated that schools must, where possible, accommodate learners’ sincerely held religious and cultural beliefs and practices.
A widespread problem

This is not the first time EE has had to contact the WCED on behalf of Rastafarian learners who have been unlawfully suspended from, or denied admission to, school because of their religious beliefs
[http://www.equaleducation.org.za/article/rastafarian-learner-suspended-for-dreadlocks].

On two previous occasions this year and during the course of last year the EELC, acting on behalf of EE had cause to contact the WCED when Bulumko High, also in Khayelitsha, unlawfully suspended learners on this basis
[equaleducation.org.za/content/2013/03/27/EE%20Letter%20to%20MEC%20Grant.pdf].

These cases underscore the reoccurring nature of this problem in Khayelitsha schools and elsewhere in the Western Cape (as in the recent case of the Muslim learners in Kuilsriver). The WCED must intervene in these cases, as learners are not only being denied access and admission to school, but are also being deprived of valuable schooling time.

EE has requested that the WCED consider adopting a broader approach by issuing a circular to schools to provide clarity on the legal position concerning schools codes of conduct and learners’ religious and cultural beliefs and practices. To our knowledge, this has not occurred.

For comment please contact
Yoliswa Dwane (EE Chairperson) on 072 342 7747/ 021 387 0022
Lisa Draga (EE Law Centre Attorney) on 072 650 0214/ 021 461 6582
Kate Wilkinson (EE Media Officer) on 082 326 5353