kagablog

Brilliant military strategist, charismatic leader, and a true Warrior Queen, all of these terms aptly describe the remarkable character of Queen Nzingha of Angola.

Nzingha’s rise to power occurred during the early 17th century in the kingdom of Ndongo, which is now the present day country of Angola, in South West Africa. She lived during a period when the Atlantic slave trade was steadily growing, a time marked by the increased intensity of slave trading and consolidation of power by the Portuguese in her region. Portugal had been a presence in Angola since the early 16th century.

Starting with the forts they built along the coastline, the Portuguese gradually expanded their territory, as well as their control of the slave trade. They were able to do so by forming alliances with various local chiefs who supplied them with slaves in exchange for guns and other material items. One of these slave-trading chiefs was the King of Ndongo himself, Nzingha’s own brother.

Nzingha had strongly opposed her brother’s participation in the slave trade. However, it was not until the Portuguese traders began to make heavier demands on the King for slaves, thereby reducing his own profit from the trade, that he decided to resist and declare war. The war between the Portuguese, and the Ndongo people lasted for several years until the Portuguese decided that a peace conference would be held for both sides to negotiate an end to the war. It was at this conference that Nzingha would display her immense pride, determination, and iron will, traits that the Portuguese would be forced to reckon with for the next thirty years.

The conference was held in the city of Luanda in 1622. Nzingha, though not yet Queen, was the most ablest and uncompromising member of the royal delegate sent to represent the King. Despite the alleged purpose of the conference, to negotiate peace, the racist attitudes of the Portuguese were in full display. The governor only provided chairs in the conference room for himself and his councilors, in an attempt to force the future Queen to stand humbly before his presence. Nzingha and her people were unfazed by the governor’s arrogance. Her attendants promptly rolled out the royal carpet for Nzingha, and then one of them went down on all fours and formed himself into a human throne for her to sit on.

It was a move that spoke volumes not only about the fierce, and unbreakable spirit that she possessed, but also about the tremendous respect and devotion that her people had for her.

In 1623, after the death of her brother, Nzingha became the Queen of Ndongo.

The Portuguese had not respected the peace treaty signed at Luanda the year before, as they had continued their slave trading operations in Ndongo. Her first major move as Queen was to deliver an ultimatum to the Portuguese, demanding that they respect the terms of the treaty or else war would be declared. The Portuguese ignored her warning and so in that same year Nzingha went to war with them and commandeered a series of devastating strikes, defeating them in many battles.

Nzingha was an incredibly strong and charismatic woman. She was dearly loved by the people of Ndongo, able to rally masses of them to listen to her messages. A brave general, she was known to personally lead her troops into battle, and she forbade her subjects to call her “Queen” preferring the masculine title of King. Yet her aggressive traits were balanced by her charming and engaging personality, which she used to her own advantages when forming alliances with other kingdoms.

So clever was the Queen that she was able to take advantage of the Dutch arrival in Angola and form an alliance with them against the Portuguese. Certainly, the Dutch were not there as liberators of the Africans, they were merely competing against Portugal for a greater share of the slave trade. Still, Nzingha was wise enough to side with the foreigners to suit her own needs, a tactic she would use later on in her life by pretending to adopt Christianity.

One of Nzingha’s greatest acts as Queen occurred in 1624 when she declared all territory over which she had control to be Free Country. All slaves and reaching it from any region were forever free. This was to have a monumental impact, as thousands of slaves deserted Portuguese held areas to head for Nzingha’s land, strengthening her armies in the process.

Nzingha was perhaps the first Black Nationalist. By opening her territory to anyone escaping slavery, she transcended all the various ethnic and cultural differences of the people in the Angolan region. She saw that the common enemy was the Portuguese, who had been the masterminds of the slave trade and its devastating effect on her people for over one hundred years. Nzingha was well aware that the Portuguese used Black soldiers to fight their wars for them, and so she undertook a carefully organized attempt to infiltrate and destroy this use of Black soldiers by Europeans. She had several groups of her men wander back into Portuguese territory, and enlist in military service. Once her agents were established, they were able to convert whole companies of men to rebel against the Portuguese and join the cause of the Queen, taking with them the much needed guns and ammunition.

The Portuguese were outraged at this seemingly unbeatable Black Queen who constantly thwarted their efforts to conquer all of Angola. Their tactics of divide and conquer were ineffective against her because there was so much patriotism and fanatical devotion towards her. They even tried to discredit Nzingha by formally declaring that she was the illegitimate ruler of Angola, and by “appointing” their own ruler King Phillip.

In 1626, Nzingha’s stronghold in the city of Cuanza was captured, and she was forced to retreat from her country. Her time away seemingly only made her stronger, for in 1627 she returned to her country at the head of a strong army and recaptured Cuanza, sending the puppet King Philip fleeing for his life.

During her exile, Nzingha had become the Queen of the country of Matamba as well, and so she returned as the empress of two nations, more determined than ever to liberate her people. Despite several losses, including the capture and beheading of her sister by the hands of the Portuguese, Nzingha’s spirit was never broken.

She valiantly fought and held off the Portuguese control of Angola for over thirty years.

Finally in 1659, Nzingha, now more than seventy-five years old and perhaps weary from the long years of struggle, signed a peace treaty with the Portuguese. The remaining years of her life were spent trying to reconstruct her nations, seriously depleted by all the years of conflict.

She devoted her efforts to re-settling former slaves, and developing an economy of free men and women that could succeed without the slave trade.

Nzingha passed away in 1663 at the age of eighty. Sadly, the massive expansion of the Portuguese slave trade and eventual conquest of Angola followed her death, as none of her successors possessed her indomitable spirit. Though she did not succeed in expelling the Portuguese from her country, her historical legacy is of great importance as she awakened the spirit of nationalism and Black unity among her people in resistance to European domination.

Her legend would serve as an inspiration to the later resistance and anti-colonial movements that would occur throughout the West-Central African regions. To this day, her memory lives on among the oral traditions of the Angolan people who have not forgotten their Great Warrior Queen, Nzingha of Angola.

first published on knowyourblackhistory.com

Bringing It Home

The changes that the Black Panther underwent in the beginning of the 1970s proved relatively minor in comparison to his various transformations throughout the remainder of the decade. In 1973, an up-and-coming young writer, Don McGregor, was unexpectedly handed Marvel’s failing bimonthly series Jungle Action and instructed to give the Black Panther a starring role in the title. Prior to McGregor’s involvement, Jungle Action featured Tharn the Magnificent, a White Tarzan knockoff who battled jungle creatures alongside two beautiful White female sidekicks. In McGregor’s hands, Jungle Action became the Black Panther’s default solo title for the next four years. After transitioning from his role in the Avengers, the Black Panther assumed his new trajectory in issue 6 when McGregor took control and launched readers on his expansive 13-issue epic storyline entitled “Panther’s Rage.” At the outset of “Panther’s Rage,” the Black Panther realized he had lost touch with his native kingdom as his control of Wakanda is challenged by a rival chieftain named Erik Killmonger. The Black Panther’s protracted search to find and defeat Killmonger and his cadre of evil lieutenants gradually assumes the shape of an Odyssean saga, in which the Black Panther not only defeats Killmonger but painfully faces his own responsibility in allowing his country to suffer in his absence and slowly rebuilds his connection to his beloved homeland.

The first letter to appear in the “Jungle Reactions” column was printed in the July 1974 issue of Jungle Action. Responding to “Panther’s Rage,” Gary Frazier of Eugene, Oregon, kicked off the discussion by calling the story “revolutionary,” particularly McGregor’s subtle attention to the differences in language, which suggested more broadly “that Africans in Africa are different from Afro-Americans.”46 In the following issue, Bob Hughes of New Haven, Connecticut, added, “After all those great white fathers (and mothers) we’ve had tromping across Africa, a real bona-fide Black African jungle king was desperately needed.”47 In issue 12 in November 1974, Dean Mullaney of Staten Island, New York, commented “It’s great to see blacks drawn realistically for a change.”48 In the same issue, Meloney M.H. Crawford of Saratoga Springs, New York, remarked, “The interpersonal relationship and character developments reach a sensitivity that is rare in today’s comics,” adding that “The ‘Panther’s Rage’ is an emotional experience, like any great work of art.” Crawford concluded by asserting the importance of Wakanda’s existence as an independent African nation ruled by Blacks: “One final comment: Wakanda must survive! It is encouraging to know it has withstood the onslaught of white hunters, jungle girls, and Tarzan-types, and has remained a settlement of BLACK people in the African jungle.”49 In a similar vein, Ralph Macchio of Cresskill, New Jersey, contended (at considerable length) in the following issue that Don, once again, your characterizations of the entire Panther-cast were so clearly defined, I honestly felt as if I knew them. From the false bravado of Tayete to the overtly indulgent self-pity of Monica, you have unobtrusively helped advance the cause of the Negro far more than the melodramatic “relevancy” of Marvel’s competitors that was big a few years ago…Over the past several months, we have seen the inner workings of an all-Black society, with its customs, conflicts, and yes, prejudices …One other thing: please keep guest stars from other mags out of this series, because as you’ve presented Wakanda to us, it appears to be a self-contained world within a world, and I like that, immensely.50

Having successfully concluded “Panther’s Rage” In November 1975, McGregor and the Jungle Action crew immediately took their engaging vision of Black Superpower on the road by launching the ambitious and controversial “The Panther vs. The Klan!” saga in January 1976. In this storyline, Monica Lynne and T’Challa travel to Monica’s childhood home in rural Georgia to mourn the suspected suicide of Monica’s sister Angela. However, almost immediately upon their arrival in Georgia, Monica and the Black Panther become embroiled in a clash with two secret societies implicated in Angela’s death: the notorious Ku Klux Klan and the fictional Dragon Circle. While most critics agree “The Panther vs. The Klan!” never achieved the same artistic cohesiveness and narrative success as “Panther’s Rage,” the realistic subject matter, highly emotional scripts, and poignant illustrations that comprise the “The Panther vs. The Klan!” furthered readers’ identification with the story and evoked letters of unparalleled empathy from White and Black readers alike, including the following intimate disclosure from a reader identified only as “S.D.W.” situated “On the road”:

I’ve just finished JUNGLE ACTION #21…shaking…It has been months since I left Louisville, but the sights/sounds/smells of my encounters with the Klan and the anti-busers linger on. As I read “A Cross Burning Darkly, Blackening the Night,” all those events came rushing back…Don, your perceptions of character and contemporary myth/reality are so fine, so strong…and I wonder if here, in this oh-so-American drama, we can play the myth through, find the America we started to look for so many years ago.51

Despite the impressive feedback that McGregor and the Jungle Action team enjoyed from its loyal readers, the series suffered an untimely demise. It was cancelled In November 1976, only six issues into the “Panther vs. the Klan!” storyline. While many reasons have been offered for the unexpected cancellation of Jungle Action, most explanations center on business pragmatics and poor sales figures. Jim Shooter has also suggested McGregor’s authorial obduracy led to his dismissal. According to Shooter, McGregor “utterly refused to take direction of any kind, to change a thing he was doing, to take any steps whatsoever to improve sales. There was no way to work with him, no way to help him.52 Not surprisingly, McGregor has offered a counter explanation for his dismissal. While admitting that Jungle Action sales were not what either he or Marvel would have liked, the writer has repeatedly suggested that his decision to create the politically controversial “The Panther vs. The Klan!” story arc was among the primary reasons for both ending the series and eventually dismissing him from Marvel:

The dismissal editor said, and I quote, quite accurately, because some things I don’t forget, “Don, you’re too close to the black experience.” That’s the verbal reason given, I kid you not, as I looked at the back and front of my white hands. To which the editor responded, “You know what I mean.” And that…was the end of my time on the Panther.53

Ironically, it would take the Black Panther’s original co-creator Jack Kirby to reveal the true extent of readers’ personal investment in McGregor’s vision of the Black Panther. Two months after the last issue of Jungle Action, the Black Panther resurfaced in the first issue of his first self-titled series. The entirely new Black Panther series was written, illustrated, and edited by none other than Jack Kirby himself. Kirby, who left Marvel in 1970 after creative differences with Stan Lee, returned to the company in 1975 and, according to Shooter, was looking for titles to satisfy his new contract, which specified Kirby’s writing and penciling four issues a month. In the wake of McGregor’s removal from Jungle Action, Kirby found himself once again in command of the Black Panther. In an editorial comment from Kirby that appeared in the first issue, the new author promised Black Panther fans a “NEW BLACK PANTHER,” pledging “I can only say that you’re due to see the Panther the way he was originally meant to be.54

If readers had any doubts about the sincerity of Kirby’s dramatic predictions for change, they vanished upon reading the first issue. Kirby delivered a new interpretation of the Black Panther—to the extent that the character bore absolutely no relation to his most recent incarnation in Jungle Action. The initial story, “King Solomon’s Frog!,” inaugurated the series by immersing the Black Panther in an intergalactic struggle for an ancient magical artifact—a plot that included nothing less than a brass frog that functioned as an ancient time machine, a midget sidekick, and an eggplant-headed humanoid from the distant future named “Hatch-22.” Not surprisingly, readers immediately responded to Kirby’s radical changes to the Black Panther. The majority of these letters conveyed a pronounced sense of betrayal and personal loss as fans assailed Kirby for tampering with McGregor’s vision of the Black Panther. In issue 3 of the Black Panther, the first letter printed in response to the new series was from Bill Dickenson of Crystal, Minnesota:

I hope that you don’t plan on transforming the Black Panther into just another super-hero. Although this is an integral part of his character, his royal heritage cannot be overlooked. He is a true leader of men, the kind of leader we all look for. I also hope that a delicate balance is struck between the action/adventure hero and the concern he has shown for his race and for men of all creed and colors.55

While Dickenson expressed his desire that the Black Panther not lose the depth of character McGregor gave to the superhero, his comments were relatively mild in comparison to a letter from Jana Hollingsworth of Bellingham, Washington:

I can fully understand and appreciate, though not agree with, your desire for a less controversial storyline than McGregor’s “Panther vs. the Klan.” Listen, I am not one of Don’s coterie of fanatic fans—I quite disliked his LUKE CAGE—but his PANTHER stories were among the finest ever produced. They were relevant not in the cheap chic sense, but truly relevant both to the special problems of today and the eternal condition of mankind. McGregor’s storylines were as complex as the real world, and his characters were genuine human beings. After “The Panther’s Rage” and “The Panther vs. the Klan” there is only one word to describe “King Solomon’s Frog”: obscene…As originally presented in FANTASTIC FOUR #52 and #53, the Panther was not the crazy cosmic character you’ve depicted. He was the chieftain of an African nation which combined its traditional heritage with Western super-science. In “Panther’s Rage” McGregor explored this original premise on a more sophisticated and realistic level…Please, please, don’t abandon this real world to go careening throughout the universe. The real world is what is truly fascinating…I’m not asking for the return of McGregor. I know that won’t happen. I am asking for Kirby’s departure.56

Unfortunately for Kirby, Dickenson and Hollingsworth’s responses were just initial volleys in a long barrage of letters, begging Kirby and Marvel to not “forget what Don McGregor and Billy Graham set out to do with this character in JUNGLE ACTION.”57 In issue after issue, readers bombarded Kirby with protests to restore the “real world” of Black Panther and Wakanda to its previous glory. In doing so, many readers, such as John Judge of Clinton, Idaho, scathingly vilified Kirby, charging: “To take Marvel’s first black character and depersonalize him so severely is criminal.”58

Sadly, Kirby’s awkward attempts to convert his readers to his new vision for the Black Panther only served to fan the flames. In issue 6, Kirby controversially referenced Alex Haley’s 1976 Pulitzer Prize winning novel Roots to justify his perspective: “And, as you may have already noticed, my character is neither a Kunta Kinte nor a Chicken George…”59 In the ninth issue, Kirby revealed “the Black Musketeers” with the cover tagline: “His homeland facing holocaust—T’Challa goes wild!” Tellingly, the same issue also marked the permanent disappearance of the letters pages from the Black Panther. Following the release of his twelfth issue of the Black Panther and the culmination of his second year on the title in November 1978, Kirby quietly handed off the series to Ed Hannigan and Jerry Bingham. Jim Shooter has confirmed that the change was not due to poor sales but was entirely Kirby’s decision.60 Whether from disgruntled fan mail or his growing lack of interest with the Black Panther character, Kirby had washed his hands of the superhero. Only three issues after Kirby’s departure from the title, Marvel discontinued the Black Panther in May 1979.

Reading the Medium

Regardless of how one reads the reader responses to Jungle Action, it is quite obvious that something singular happened to the Black Panther under McGregor’s tenure. In McGregor’s hands, Jungle Action became one of the most intricately conceived and artistically audacious Marvel titles. After Marvel’s brief 2-issue trip to Wakanda in those first issues of Fantastic Four, the country disappeared from view as the Black Panther became an immigrant to America. After years of restless squatting in the margins of more traditionally superheroic titles, the Black Panther regained his homeland—a country so richly imagined and captivatingly vivid that readers became profoundly connected to it. What McGregor and his team understood is precisely what Lee and Kirby seemed to realize when they first created the Black Panther: that the character’s superpowers were mind-numbingly dull but the concept of Wakanda is endlessly compelling. While Lee and Kirby chose not to expand upon Wakanda’s potential, McGregor developed it as fully as possible.

In 1999, Dwayne McDuffie, comic book writer and co-founder of the most successful Black-owned comic book company, Milestone Comics, redolently memorialized his own readership experience of “Panther’s Rage.” In addition to calling the storyline “the most tightly written multipart superhero epic ever,” McDuffie echoed previous sentiments expressed in the letters pages of Jungle Action by stating:

It was 1973…The comic book was JUNGLE ACTION #6. It featured a super hero I’d never heard of called the Black Panther, but then, I’d never heard of the Black Panther political party either…What didn’t escape me was the powerful sense of dignity that the characters in this book possessed…[T]he Black Panther was king of a mythical African country where black people were visible in every position in society, soldier, doctor, philosopher, street sweeper, ambassador— suddenly everything was possible. In the space of 15 pages, black people moved from invisible to inevitable…I’ve spoken ad nauseam about the importance of multiculturalism in fiction, as in life. I’ve preached about the sense of validation a kid feels when they see their image reflected heroically in the mass media. This particular summer afternoon, reading about the dastardly (but nuanced) Eric Killmonger’s villainous plot to usurp the Black Panther’s rightful throne, is precisely when it happened to me. I realized that these stories could be about me, that I could be the hero. Years later writing in my own comic I’d describe that wonderful feeling as “the sudden possibility of flight.”.61

McDuffie’s poignant comments underscore a point implicit in so many reader responses to the Black Panther: that much of the appeal of the Black Panther superhero lay in his ability to transport readers to Wakanda—a utopian, hidden territory within which readers could “gain the perspective to allow you to see the many possibilities open to you.”

Unlike readers of early versions of the Black Panther such as Guy Haughton who wished to abstract the superhero and his Blackness from his African homeland and import him to the U.S., McGregor’s expansive imagination of Wakanda was the source of much of the Black Panther’s power as a cultural icon. For many readers, Wakanda functioned as a surrogate, utopian vision of a powerful, Black organized, and separately determined state—the goal of many groups that fell under the generalized banner of the Black Power movement. Wakanda’s technological and social progress rivaled (or even exceeded) that of the United States and offered a valuable affirmation that successful self-governance and community self-improvement were neither geographically nor culturally dependent. As such, McGregor’s Wakanda provided readers a new frontier for experimentally imagining alternative possibilities for real world Black Power, and readers passionately valued such an opportunity, as evidenced by Meloney Crawford’s insistence that “Wakanda must survive!”62 and Jana Hollingsworth’s desperate plea for Kirby to “Please, please, don’t abandon this real world to go careening throughout the universe. The real world is what is truly fascinating.”63

What emerges from a study of reader responses to Marvel’s Black Panther is that the ability to occupy, explore, and map the magical land of Wakanda was not the exclusive right of the vibrant superheroes framed within the pages of each comic book. Rather, Wakanda existed materially in the medium of the comic book itself. Through the shared interaction between the various groups of writers and readers, the space of the comic book became a fertile ground for surveying the boundaries of sociocultural identity and expression. Instead of functioning solely as a self-indulgent and entirely fanciful distraction for avoiding the racial tensions of the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panther offered a public space for actively engaging and collectively imagining new possibilities for representing race and power. In his examination of reader responses to the first gay and lesbian superheroes, Morris E. Franklin III has noticed a similar ability for comic books to function as vehicles for collectively exploring politically contentious territories:

In the case of comic books, the reader has the potential to move from a position as an isolated individual, separate from the text, to part of a discourse community in the form of a letter column; the reader’s ideas become part of the textual product itself. In this way, comic books can serve in the stories they tell and in the discussion of those stories as epistemology, a way of knowing about particular subjects, ideas, and opinions.64

As such, the Black Panther storylines and letters pages became dynamic discursive spaces for authors and readers to safely assay new permutations of emerging African American power within the larger rhetorical context of Cold War superpowers.

In his preface to Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Superman in the 20th Century, Scott Bukatman captured the liberatory powers of superhero comics through his observation that All the fantasied escapes from gravity…[such as] Superman’s flight across the skies of Metropolis, recall our bodies to us by momentarily allowing us to feel them differently. It is a momentary effect, a temporary high: we are always returned to ourselves. These escapes, however, are more than retreats from an intolerable existence, they are escapes into worlds of renewed possibility.65

Superheroes are powerful precisely in their ability to transport their devotees into such “worlds of renewed possibility.” It is through this creative ability to temporarily free their readers from the otherwise intractable material constraints by drawing them into entirely new possibility spaces that the most important superhero comics artfully negotiate the fine line between escapism and hope. As resplendent lodestars on the vast, fluctuating horizon of the American cultural imaginary, superhero comics construct a path from frustrated desire to productive imagination that can most poetically be described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari emancipatory conception of “lines of flight” or Dwayne McDuffie’s equivalent evocation of the “sudden possibility of flight.” It is through such creative escapism that superhero comics empower readers to experience imaginative heights that conventional configurations of social power never allow them to reach. Yet, as McDuffie has so eloquently indicated, the act of reaching can itself be transformative.

Exhibition Opening: 4 pm on Sunday 15 November 2009 at the Johannesburg Art Gallery,

To be preceded by a panel discussion at 2:30 pm

Panelists: Andile Mngxitama (keynote), Zethu Matebeni, Lefifi Tladi, Motlhabane Mashiangwako

The exhibition is intended to be a journey through a number of artworks within the holdings of the Johannesburg Art Gallery that were directly or indirectly influenced by the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) and works that in some way comment on the politics of race. The BCM was the first political movement in South Africa to recognise the importance of culture in waging the war against Apartheid.

One of the central tenants of the BCM was the elimination of the inferiority complex amongst Black people. As a philosophy that sought not only to liberate Africans politically and economically but also psychologically, encouraged cultural production and intellectual output were an important part of the BCM’s programme of action.

The result was an intense atmosphere of creativity that was fed by writers, musicians, theatre practitioners, artists, poets and political activists that produced an immense corpus of works, often working collaboratively and breaking down barriers between various art forms and genres.

There has been a renewed in the interest around Black Consciousness and its most popular figure Steve Biko. Recently published books include, Biko Lives, edited by Mngxitama, Alexander and Gibson as well as We Write What We Like: Celebrating Steve Biko edited by Chris van Wyk.

This exhibition will draw from the collections of the Johannesburg Art Gallery including artists such as Charles Nkosi and John Muafangejo as well as several archival sources. A panel discussion will precede the opening of the exhibition.

Exhibition Closes: February 2010
Exhibition Equiries: Khwezi Gule
(011) 725 3130
khwezig@joburg.org.za

Men were not created in order to obey laws. Laws are created to obey men. They are established by men and should serve men. The laws and rules which officials inflict upon poor people prevent them from functioning harmoniously in society. There is no disagreement about this function of law in any circle the disagreement arises from the question of which men laws are to serve. Such lawmakers ignore the fact that it is the duty of the poor and unrepresented to construct rules and laws that serve their interests better. Rewriting unjust laws is a basic human right and fundamental obligation.

Before 1776 America was a British colony. The British Government had certain laws and rules that the colonized Americans rejected as not being in their best interests. In spite of the British conviction that Americans had no right to establish their own laws to promote the general welfare of the people living here in America, the colonized immigrant felt he had no choice but to raise the gun to defend his welfare. Simultaneously he made certain laws to ensure his protection from external and internal aggressions, from other governments, and his own agencies. One such form of protection was the Declaration of Independence, which states: “. . . whenever any government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such forms as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

Now these same colonized White people, these bondsmen, paupers, and thieves deny the colonized Black man not only the right to abolish this oppressive system, but to even speak of abolishing it. Having carried this madness and cruelty to the four corners of the earth, there is now universal rebellion against their continued rule and power. But as long as the wheels of the imperialistic war machine are turning, there is no country that can defeat this monster of the West. It is our belief that the Black people in America are the only people who can free the world, loosen the yoke of colonialism, and destroy the war machine. Black people who are within the machine can cause it to malfunction. They can, because of their intimacy with the mechanism, destroy the engine that is enslaving the world. America will not be able to fight every Black country in the world and fight a civil war at the same time. It is militarily impossible to do both of these things at once.

The slavery of Blacks in this country provides the oil for the machinery of war that America uses to enslave the peoples of the world. Without this oil the machinery cannot function. We are the driving shaft; we are in such a strategic position in this machinery that, once we become dislocated, the functioning of the remainder of the machinery breaks down.

Penned up in the ghettos of America, surrounded by his factories and all the physical components of his economic system, we have been made into “the wretched of the earth,” relegated to the position of spectators while the White racists run their international con game on the suffering peoples. We have been brainwashed to believe that we are powerless and that there is nothing we can do for ourselves to bring about a speedy liberation for our people. We have been taught that we must please our oppressors, that we are only ten percent of the population, and therefore must confine our tactics to categories calculated not to disturb the
sleep of our tormentors.

The power structure inflicts pain and brutality upon the peoples and then provides controlled outlets for the pain in ways least likely to upset them, or interfere with the process of exploitation. The people must repudiate the established channels as tricks and deceitful snares of the exploiting oppressors. The people must oppose everything the oppressor supports, and support everything that he opposes. If Black people go about their struggle for liberation in the way that the oppressor dictates and sponsors, then we will have degenerated to the level of groveling flunkies for the oppressor himself. When the oppressor makes a vicious attack against freedom-fighters because of the way that such freedom-fighters choose to go about their liberation, then we know we are moving in the direction of our liberation. The racist dog oppressors have no rights which oppressed Black people are bound to respect. As long as the racist dogs pollute the earth with the evil of their actions, they do not deserve any respect at all, and the “rules” of their game,
written in the people’s blood, are beneath contempt.

The oppressor must be harassed until his doom. He must have no peace by day or by night. The slaves have always outnumbered the slavemasters. The power of the oppressor rests upon the submission of the people. When Black people really unite and rise up in all their splendid millions, they will have the strength to smash injustice. We do not understand the power in our numbers. We are millions and millions of Black people scattered across the continent and throughout the Western Hemisphere. There are more Black people in America than the total population of many countries now enjoying full membership in the United Nations. They have power and their power is based primarily on the fact that they are organized and united with each other. They are recognized by the powers of the world.

We, with all our numbers, are recognized by no one. In fact, we do not even recognize our own selves. We are unaware of the potential power latent in our numbers. In 1967, in the midst of a hostile racist nation whose hidden racism is rising to the surface at a phenomenal speed, we are still so blind to our critical fight for our very survival that we are continuing to function in petty, futile ways. Divided, confused, fighting among ourselves, we are still in the elementary stage of throwing rocks, sticks, empty wine bottles and beer cans at racist police who lie in wait for a chance to murder unarmed Black people. The racist police have worked out a system for suppressing these spontaneous rebellions that flare up from the anger, frustration, and desperation of the masses of Black people. We can no longer afford the dubious luxury of the terrible casualties wantonly inflicted upon us by the police during these rebellions.

Black people must now move, from the grass roots up through the perfumed circles of the Black bourgeoisie, to seize by any means necessary a proportionate share of the power vested and collected in the structure of America. We must organize and unite to combat by long resistance the brutal force used against us daily. The power structure depends upon the use of force within retaliation. This is why they have made it a felony to teach guerrilla warfare. This is why they want the people unarmed.

The racist dog oppressors fear the armed people; they fear most of all Black people armed with weapons and the ideology of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment. If a government is not afraid of the people it will arm the people against foreign aggression. Black people are held captive in the midst of their oppressors. There is a world of difference between thirty million unarmed submissive Black people and thirty million Black people armed with freedom, guns, and the strategic methods of liberation.

When a mechanic wants to fix a broken-down car engine, he must have the necessary tools to do the job. When the people move for liberation they must have the basic tool of liberation: the gun. Only with the power of the gun can the Black masses halt the terror and brutality directed against them by the armed racist power structure; and in one sense only by the power of the gun can the whole world be transformed into the earthly paradise dreamed of by the people from time immemorial. One successful practitioner of the art and science of national liberation and self-defense, Brother Mao Tse-tung, put it this way: “We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.”

The blood, sweat, tears and suffering of Black people are the foundations of the wealth and power of the United States of America. We were forced to build America, and if forced to, we will tear it down. The immediate result of this destruction will be suffering and bloodshed. But the end result will be the perpetual peace for all mankind.

read more on www.africawithin.com

by Chinweizu

Negrophobia, the fear and dislike of blacks, is a great disease. It has killed more blacks in the last five hundred years than all other diseases combined: more than malaria, more than epidemics and plagues of all sorts, In the coming years, it could kill far more than AIDS. It is a psychological disease, a disease of the mind, which harvests dead black bodies every day.

The blacks who died through slavery were killed by negrophobia. The blacks who died all over the globe from white colonial aggression were killed by negrophobia. The blacks who died in our liberation struggles - Bookman, Toussaint and Dessalines with all their soldiers in Haiti; the Mau Mau warriors in Kenya; the liberation fighters in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, Sudan and elsewhere — were all killed by negrophobia.

The blacks dying from the structures and policies of neocolonialism are dying from negrophobia. The blacks killed by AIDS, a disease manufactured by whites in the biological warfare labs of the USA and deliberately introduced into central Africa and Haiti to kill off blacks, are dying of negrophobia.

Ah, Negrophobia, I didn’t know that hate could kill so many!

Negrophobia is a psychoneurosis, a mental disorder. So too is blancophilia, its twin. If someone hates everything black, including the black butterfly, including the most fertile black soil, isn’t he mentally disturbed? If someone loves everything white, including white trash, including white arsenic, isn’t he mentally disturbed? Negrophobia and blancophilia form a syndrome, a characteristic set of psychoneurotic passions that occur together.

The negrophobia syndrome is characterised by melanotropism. A magnetic movement away from or toward different intensities of melanin, the skin pigment. Blancophilia induces a reflex movement toward things white, even toward white ugliness. The stimulus object is white skin, any skin that is low in melanin.

Negrophobia, for its part, induces a reflex movement away from things black, even from black beauty. The stimulus object is black skin, any skin blessed with melanin in high dosage.

Negrophobia and blancophilia are, of course, conditioned responses to white power and black powerlessness. In a sad case of stimulus substitution, the responses to superior power have become transferred to white skin, and those to powerlessness have become transferred to black skin. The negrophobia syndrome is a chronic disease with the white race, a disease born of pride of power. It is a disease with which they have infected the whole world, including the black race, giving rise to negro negrophobia, the disease of black self-hate.

Negro negrophobia is a most absurd disease. Can you imagine some black running to escape his blackness? To escape from himself? His obsession with fleeing from himself proves he is unfit to live. His running to embrace his white enemy proves he is a suicide. The entire affair shows he is mad. Some call it alienation, a mental disorder. Yet some black sirens now sing in praise of alienation, beckoning all blacks to acquire the disease.

What are the symptoms of negro negrophobia? Negro negrophobia makes black women bleach, till some proudly sport yellow monkey faces and ebony-black thighs. (or ‘Fanta Orange face and Coca-cola legs’ as some call it). It makes black parents prefer their lighter skinned children to the darker skinned. It makes blacks who marry white or mulatto think they are marrying up and improving the race. It makes a pitch-black Sudanese proclaim himself Arab, on account of just one white Arab ancestor ten generations back; it makes him count as nothing, indeed as a blemish, all his 1,023 black ancestors in that generation, and all the millions before and since.

Negro negrophobia makes African-Americans, and now black South Africans too, believe that integrating white neigbourhoods is social advancement. It makes blacks desperate to integrate white schools, white churches, white communities, white ideologies, white movements and white organizations. Some would even gladly die to integrate the Ku Klux Klan.

Negro Negrophobia makes blacks defer to whites. It makes bright black boys, the thinkers of the race, obey the IMF, the World Bank, GATT and the UN, even when they know that the orders from such outfits are aimed to destroy their own people. It makes black intellectuals swallow and spout any silly idea, provided it is put forth by some guru of the white world, like Marx, like Jesus, like Mohammed.

Negro negrophobia makes blacks accept leaders of thought and of action that are chosen for them by whites. It makes blacks revere any third class mind, any tinpot potentate, that whites anoint to confuse and mislead them. But for negro negrophobia, we would automatically reject any leader chosen for us by our historic enemies. But for negro negrophobia, we would thoroughly suspect the loyalty to the black race of any black Rhodes Scholar, of any black Nobel laureate, of any black Faisal laureate, of any black Lenin laureate, of any black knight or peer of England, of any black elect of the French Academy. He would have to work extra hard to convince us that he is not an agent sent to help hasten our ruin.

Believing the blancophile dogma that white is right, that white is quick-witted, that white is beauty and virtue and salvation; believing the negrophobe dogma that black is wrong, that black is dumb, that black is ugliness and sin and damnation, the negrophobic black does not feel comfortable in a blacks-only group. Blacks-only associations give him claustrophobia; he must throw open the doors to let in some white skin to boss or spy on him; only then can he relax; only then can he feel that all is well with his world. Negro negrophobia is, thus, a disease which drives blacks to crave racial integration and to espouse continentalist Pan-Africanism.

In multi-racial societies, it drives the black elites to flee to white suburbs. In the name of racial equality, they decapitate their own black communities, rob the ghetto of black leadership, and abandon it to confusion and predatory gangs, In the name of black freedom they flee from the black world. Similarly, in international relations, pulled by the call of the white, blacks are eager to join a British Commonwealth. They are desperate to join a French Community. They sell their sanity to join a Russian Collective. And an Arab empire? They disown their black inheritance to get into its latrine! They will pay any price, suffer any humiliation, to join any club formed by whites. But a black community, or commonwealth, or league? They will not only not join, they will oppose its being formed at all! The idea of blacks getting together, all by themselves, disorganizes their being. In their blancophilia they are self-made orphans desperately seeking white foster homes. For all their outcry on behalf of the black community, all they want is to disappear into the whiteness of the white world, whether Arab or European. They want to disappear by any means possible or available — physically, mentally, emotionally.

In such ways, negro negrophobia has affected Pan-Africanism, affected Negritude, affected even the great leaders of these Black Redemption Movements. Senghor’s Francophilia weakened his Negritude; made him ecstatic to join the “Universal Civilization” by becoming an elect of the French Academy.

Nkrumah’s Arabophilia subverted the Garveyism of his Black Star symbol; it truncated his Pan-Negro Pan-Africanism into a continentalist Pan-Africanism which would exclude Garvey from membership of its organizations, and which distorted Pan-Africanism into an Arab and Black African tango.

With Du Bois, when the racial integrationism of his NAACP triumphed, it wrecked the black community in the USA; it bore the bitter fruit of black ghettos whose absentee black leaders squat in white suburbia, squawking as hostages to white power.

Cheikh Anta Diop’s Marxism, with its dedication to the primacy of multi-racial class solidarity, made him most unenthusiastic about a sub-Sahara Federation of Black Africa. He would accept it only as a very last resort, only if the Arab invader-settlers doggedly excluded themselves.

Mandela’s liberalism, with its dedication to the primacy of multi-racialism, is allset to subvert the cardinal goal of returning to the black aborigines of South Africa all the land stolen from them by the white invader-settlers.

Senghor, Nkrumah, Du Bois, Cheikh Anta Diop and Mandela are proof that not even the best among us are immune from the negrophobia syndrome. Of the great black redeemers of the 20th century, only Garvey escaped the syndrome, principally because he was unequivocal and uncompromising on black solidarity. Significantly, he did not call his movement Pan-Africanism, with all the equivocation on race that is harboured by that term; he called it the United Negro Improvement Association, a name which unequivocally implies a redemption movement of blacks, by blacks, for blacks.

To call yourself a leader of blacks, one leading them to liberation from the white world, and yet run off to integrate white suburbia— isn’t that absurd? It can only mean that your Black Consciousness is shallow, or even opportunistic; that hiding under your black mask is a blancophile heart. To call yourself a leader of blacks, one leading them out of the prison cell of white power, and yet insist on bringing whites into every organization for blacks — isn’t that folly of the first order? Those blacks who espouse continentalist Pan-Africanism, are they not like those Trojans who carried the Greek wooden horse into their own citadel, and hastened their people’s destruction?

If you are such a black leader or intellectual, take a look at Michael Jackson and see the incarnation of your spirit, see your mind made flesh. Michael Jackson has most publicly done what black negrophobiacs secretly dream of doing: act out George Schuyler’s great satire Black No More! Michael Jackson is the supreme, public example of negro negrophobia, which is why he is such a valuable negative example, which is why I just love Michael Jackson. Every racially integrating black, every continentalist Pan-Africanist black, is Michael Jackson minus opportunity. They are the social and political counterparts of Wacko Jacko, as the white press dubbed him. The only difference is that he has carried his negro negrophobia to its logical, physical conclusion — turn himself into a fake white man! Because the others cannot afford the cash or courage for the skin and bone surgery, they settle for the next best thing: they disappear into white communities, or integrate into white ideologies and white movements. Presumably, from seeing so many white faces around them at all times, they will lose sight of the fact that they themselves are black.

After being created and entrenched by five centuries of white power, Negro negrophobia has, alas, become a character neurosis. From one generation to another, black parents pass on to their children the neurotic character structures which foster negrophobic attitudes and behaviour. The global mechanisms of white power (religion, media, school, advertising, propaganda) then reinforce the neurosis.

Blacks, alas, cannot take control of the Black World until they are cured of this neurotic syndrome. Until they get rid of this neurotic plague, any white boy or girl or child can seize control of their affairs by flashing a bit of white skin. Proof? All you need do is introduce a white face among negrophobic blacks and they become disorganised, they become disoriented. Just put one ugly blondie among them, and their eyes will stray and their minds will wander from the doughnut before them and focus on the white hole. Some will be obsessed with desire for whitey; some will be obsessed with hate for whitey; either way, they lose touch with basic reality and ignore what they must do to keep control of their lives, their situation, their environment. And at that point, any white waif can take them over.

What then is the cure? That is for our medical and social scientists to investigate. But from the sidelines, let me observe that it may require psychotherapy, both individual and group therapy. It may require cultural therapy, with basic retraining to break the habits of the negrophobic syndrome and inculcate non-negrophobic habits of thought and valuation. It would be the job of homes, schools, media, and social organisations to bring up new generations untainted with Negrophobia and blancophilia. It may require, above all, environmental therapy of a political sort, through the emergence of at least one powerful black nation that would destroy the five-century -old correlation of white skin with power and black skin with powerlessness. That is probably the strategic cure for the syndrome.

My guess is that until the power therapy for this power neurosis is accomplished, all other therapies would be only partially effective. Whatever the case, until the race cures itself of negrophobia, it has no future. Which is why getting rid of Negro negrophobia is perhaps the cardinal task of internal reparation.

Thami aka Mbongo

Thami aka Mbongo: Black people are losing their dignity by being beggars for jobs, not trusting their integrity and are being reduced to performing “puppets”.

I was very fortunate to deliver a speech (some facts I will share in this article) at the National Theatre and Dance Indaba 2009 held at the Baxter Theatre Centre in Cape Town on 7 February 2009 and after reading the Cape Times article by Craig Mckune on 22 October 2009 (Cape Town a racist city - study) I do agree and disagree with some of the issues in the Cape Times article. Since their study was not specific in arts and culture - I would like to share my experience in the arts sector.

There is a problem when people are being asked to speak their minds. When you speak the truth it is associated with politics. When you are outspoken about the truth, people always say you are ungrateful or a troublemaker. What I want to say is; a truth shall remain a truth - it must not be mixed with politics. That’s why I am not going to apologise for saying the following:

We live in the city (Cape Town) where racial discrimination is still our daily bread. The living proof of that is even in our theatres today; from the managements of these theatres to people working backstage. Black people seem to be “puppets” in Cape Town theatres. The few blacks who got the cake from white people and the system are feeding themselves and they should be ashamed for allowing that to happen.

These are words that this industry has made me, as a young black man in Cape Town, to know, love and hate:

Disadvantaged community
- I know it because I was born in that community.
- I love it because it’s one of the most creative, original places where you will find raw talents.
- I hate it because lots of people have taken advantage of that place and are making business out of it.

Exposure
- I know it because people from that community taught me skills and showed me that I have talent while they worked without being recognized and supported by the government, but some well known people or institutions who got funding from the government are taking credit for my talent.
- I love it because it made me to see the world, with all its goodness and evil.
- I hate it because it undermines me and exploits my people.

Development
- I know it because one person said to me: “A development is not a development of natural vegetations or development of buildings, but it is the development of people and no one can develop people but people can develop themselves.”
- I love it because it makes you grow as a person and as an artist.
- I hate it because people undermine you and think your whole life you need to be developed and you are never ready.

Opportunities
- I know them because in school they taught me that Otto von Bismarck said that when opportunity presents itself, one must grab it with both hands.
- I love them because I have worked hard to look for them.
- I hate them because the opportunities that are given to me are those that set me up for failure, or if they’re good ones I must eternally grateful, to the point grovelling at the expense of my dignity and self-respect.

Look around and tell me; where are the shows by black writers, directors and producers in our Cape Town mainstream theatres? Where are black people in the managements of these theatres?

Some are still being developed. Some are still being given exposure somewhere. Some are still stuck in their disadvantaged communities where there is no infrastructure because of government failures.

Most are still crippled with fear, not even wanting to attempt because they know the environment is not ready and not prepared to even try and make space for them.

Interestingly, we do see black stories being told in our theatres, but who tells these stories?

I just wonder how long black people must be developed to be given opportunities to showcase how developed they are.

The government should do more on funding new works by black writers, directors, producers and managers. They should make sure that the state-funded theatres are practicing that. They need to invest more in black artists in Cape Town. The government also shouldn’t feel apologetic for that.

By doing that, we must never compromise the professional standard of the work because of race. I strongly believe that we want the best people with the best capabilities doing the jobs.

Black people, especially in Cape Town, are losing their dignity by being beggars for jobs, not trusting their integrity and are being reduced to performing “puppets’.

It is high time for black people to let their voices be heard and showcase their talents in our Cape Town theatres.

Thami aka Mbongo
Performing Artist
akambongo@gmail.com
074 861 4260

this article first appeared on artslink.co.za

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BY CASEY ALT

In July of 1966, only three months before the Black Panther political party was formed in Oakland, California, Marvel Comics introduced the Black Panther as the first Black superhero admitted into the immortal circle of American comic books. Originally conceived by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as the “Coal Tiger,” the Black Panther officially entered the “Marvel Universe” via issue 52 of Marvel’s phenomenally popular title The Fantastic Four. As the hereditary king of the hidden African nation of Wakanda, the Black Panther possessed mystical powers that endowed him with panther-like strength, speed, senses, reflexes, and agility. Though the Black Panther was not the first Black character to appear in American comics, he was the first Black comics character to possess superpowers—an advancement that Marvel would later hail as “nothing short of a revolutionary event.”1 Considering that police from Greenwood, Mississippi, had arrested Stokely Carmichael for inciting a crowd of 3,000 civil rights marchers with a new cry for “Black Power!” only a few weeks prior to the Black Panther’s debut, Marvel could not have chosen a more controversial moment to unveil its new superhero.

At a time in which African American intellectuals had just begun to explore the new concept of Black Power, what did it mean for the almost exclusively White staff at Marvel to introduce the first representation of Black Superpower? How was Black Superpower imagined at the time and how did it differ from emergent definitions of Black Power? The goal of this paper is to investigate how Black Superpower was configured in the popular cultural icon of the Black Panther as well as how the comics community reacted to and interacted with this new possibility for power. Though often dismissed as a seductively puerile and escapist medium, superhero comics have repeatedly served as active public spaces for imagining and contesting the proper relationship between individual Americans and the often invisible forces of contemporary American technoscientific power. Through an analysis of these comics texts and the readers’ letters published in them, this paper explores how the concept of Black Superpower was negotiated by Marvel readers through the symbol of the Black Panther.

Power and Pulp

Carmine Infantino, longtime editorial director of DC Comics, once observed, “The theme of comic books is power.”2 Considering that most comic books traffic in the colorful exploits of superheroes and their superpowers, Infantino’s pronouncement might seem remarkably hollow. Yet Infantino was far from naïve, and his comment reflects a much deeper understanding of the relationship between representations of power in superhero comic book culture and perceptions of political and social power within the larger American cultural imaginary. Superpowers give human form to the often invisible exertions of power than undergird every American historical instant by illustrating exactly which powers their readers cannot possess. In doing so, superheroes provide a human interface to the otherwise unimaginable forces of the 20th century technoscientific sublime.

Tom Wolfe evocatively captured the conflation of comic book superpowers with the equally fantastic realm of modern American technoscience in his 1967 account of the American counterculture movement, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test:

But of course!—the feeling—out here at night, free, with the motor running and the adrenaline flowing, cruising in the neon glories of the new American night—it was very Heaven to be the first wave of the most extraordinary kids in the history of the world…with all this Straight-6 and V-8 power underneath and all this neon glamour overhead, which somehow tied in with the technological superheroics of the jet, TV, atomic subs, ultrasonics—Postwar American suburbs—glorious world!…the feeling—to be very Superkids! the world’s first generation of the little devils—feeling immune, beyond calamity. One’s parents remembered the sloughing common order, War & Depression—but Superkids knew only the emotional surge of the great payoff, when nothing was common any longer—The Life! A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon Renaissance—And the myths that actually touched you at the time—not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses, and Aeneas—but Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman, The Human Torch, The Sub-Mariner, Captain America, Plastic Man, The Flash—but of course! On Perry Lane, what did they think it was—quaint?—when he talked about the comic-book Superheroes as honest American myths? It was a fantasy world already, this electro-pastel world of Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis in the suburbs.3

Particularly at a time in which the “technological superheroics of the jet, TV, atomic subs, [and] ultrasonics” invisibly subtended the binary logic of US-Soviet superpower rhetoric, comic book superheroes provided an understandable human face to technoscientific power. In considering the relationship between superhero culture and Cold War doctrine, Saul Braun observed in his 1971 New York Times Magazine article on comics and counterculture, “Shazam! Here Comes Captain Relevant”:

It is not irrelevant to note that the Vietnamese war developed without hindrance— with some few exceptions—from a generation of men flying around the world on a fantasy-power trip, and was resisted in the main by their sons, the generation that began rejecting the comic books of the fifties with their sanitized, censored, surreal images of the world: a world in which “we” were good and “they” were bad, in which lawlessness masqueraded as heroism, in which blacks were invisible…. A world in which no superhero, whatever his excesses, ever doubted that he was using his powers wisely and morally.4

As Bradford S. Wright has demonstrated in Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America, superhero comics were one of the major mechanisms by which the young counterculture imagined new configurations of American superpower during the politically turbulent decades of the 1960s and 1970s. The comics company most responsible for the new upsurge in comics popularity during the 1960s was the brashly innovative team of Marvel Comics. Headed by the prolific powerhouse of Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Jack Kirby, Marvel reinvented comics during the early 1960s by rejecting the model of the classic superhero as a noble savior who stood outside of humanity in favor of a new kind of antihero who was as mired in the existential challenges as the rest of us and for whom superpower was more of an alienating burden than liberating blessing.

As Wright has noted, the appeal of Marvel’s new superheroes to the upper echelons of the American youth movement during the 1960s and 1970s was profound. Within five years of introducing the Fantastic Four in 1961, Marvel’s average sales figures doubled while those of its competitors remained unchanged or declined.5 The September 1965 issue of Esquire Magazine noted that “Spider-Man was as popular in the radical sector of American universities as Che Guevera.”6 In September 1966, Esquire again reported the immense popularity of Marvel Comics among college students across the country and the growth of Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee as one of the most prominent youth icons of the time:

The Princeton Debating Society invited Stan Lee, author of Marvel’s ten superhero comics, to speak in a lecture series that included Hubert Humphrey, William Scranton and Wayne Morse. Other talks were given at Bard (where he drew a bigger audience than President Eisenhower), N.Y.U. and Columbia…As one Ivy Leaguer told Stan Lee, “We think of Marvel Comics as the twentieth-century mythology and you as this generation’s Homer.”7

While superheroes may have offered a familiar friendly face for adjudicating the appropriate use of power among the growing counterculture of the 1960s, the symbol of the superhero carried a decidedly different connotation for youth within the emerging Black Power movement, in which the term “Superman” often was appropriated as a symbol of the selfaggrandizing hubris of the White-dominated power structures of the United States. In one of his infamous outbursts at the Chicago 7 trial in 1969, Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party, exclaimed, “This racist administrative government with its Superman notions and comic book politics. We’re hip to the fact that Superman never saved no black people.”8 Seale also challenged Judge Julius Hoffman during the trial by declaring, “Black people ain’t supposed to have a mind? That’s what you think. We got a body and a mind. I wonder, did you lose yours in the Superman syndrome comic book stories?”9 In his 1970 book entitled Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton, Seale also applied the term “Superman” to an FBI agent during an August 19, 1969, confrontation with Seale in Oakland: “He looked at me and just grinned. He really thought he was Superman. You can just look at a cat and see how he’s psychologically goofed up with Superman notions, so brainwashed that he thinks he’s defending the so-called ‘free world.’”10 Similarly, the Black Power poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron, creator of the now-famous Black Power anthem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” in 1970, also later released a song entitled “Ain’t No Such Thing as Superman.”11 From Seale and Heron’s rejection of the concept of “Superman” and US comic book culture, it is apparent that within the different camps of the Black Power movement the category of “superhero” represented yet another mythic symbol of exclusively White superpower and was therefore worthy of critical deconstruction.

By the mid-1960s, it had become increasingly difficult for Marvel to neglect the Civil Rights Movement as one of the most powerful forces within the contemporary American landscape, and, continuing in its tradition of embodying current symbols of social power in human form, Marvel introduced the Black Panther in 1966. Prior to the Black Panther’s premiere, Timely Comics (Marvel’s name before May 1963) had already tested the waters of race relations by introducing its first and decidedly non-super African American character in the early 1940s in its World War II title Young Allies. Named Whitewash, the character appeared in blackface and zootsuit and spent a preponderance of his time tied up. Omar Bilal, curator of the online Museum of Black Superheroes, has described Whitewash as “[c]reated for comic effect only, Whitewash was portrayed as a helpless buffoon whose only purpose was to provide laughs as he fell into one dire situation after another.”12 Around the same time, early comics innovator Will Eisner also introduced Ebony as the Spirit’s sidekick in Eisner’s popular series. Like Whitewash, Ebony appeared in blackface, possessed no powers of his own, and served largely as typical Black minstrel-style relief for the Spirit’s more sober heroics.

With such dubious forerunners in the medium, it is perhaps fortunate that mainstream comics were largely devoid of Black characters after Ebony and Whitewash—that is, until 1963 when Marvel introduced its first “positive” Black character, Gabe Jones. Appearing in Lee and Kirby’s World War II war comic Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, which Marvel rebelliously billed as “The War Mag for People Who Hate War Mags,” Jones was a Black soldier in the otherwise all-White squad led by commando-extraordinaire Nick Fury. Though Jones initially did not play a major role in the series, his “Blackness” was an important point for Marvel. When the company in charge of color separation inadvertently assumed Jones was White and colored him pink in the first issue, Lee dispatched a very detailed memo making it clear that Gabe Jones was in fact a Black soldier.13

Perhaps even more significant, considering Gabe Jones’ limited visibility, was the gradual inclusion of Black citizens in the backgrounds of various Marvel street scenes. Wright has noted that “random black bystanders, college students, and policemen” can be seen for the first time in the 1965 issues of The Amazing Spider-Man.14 While such acknowledgements of ethnic diversity were long in coming to the comics industry, they were nonetheless among the first mass media presentations that included African Americans as regular members of society. Such representations took a radical leap when Marvel introduced its first Black superhero, the Black Panther.

Though Marvel has hyped the Black Panther’s arrival as a “revolutionary event,” the upheaval seems to have gone largely unnoticed by everyone except comics readers at the time. A survey of the most popular publications which explicitly targeted an African American audience and were in print during 1966 and 1967, including the Negro Digest, the Liberator, Freedomways, Negro Heritage, Ebony, and the Chicago Daily Defender, reveals that the debut of America’s first Black superhero was ignored all of the African American community’s major publications. The identically named The Black Panther, the official publication of the Black Panther Party first released on April 25, 1967, never once mentioned the new Marvel character. Even more surprisingly, four months after the Black Panther’s debut, Ebony ran an eightpage article by Ponchitta Pierce, “What’s Not Funny about the Funnies: Bias Bans Negros from Popular Comics,” in which the author investigated the conspicuous absence of Black characters in daily comic strips.15 Though also oblivious to the recent introduction of Marvel’s Black Panther, Pierce’s Ebony article underscores the degree to which Marvel’s creation of the character was an unquestionably bold move. As Pierce explained, comics printed during the Civil Rights movement ceased to include Black characters for fear of either inadvertently offending African Americans readers who might consider the characters derogatory or, conversely, offending White readers who might be opposed to overly positive representations of Blacks: “‘Comic characters are a white man’s land,’ admits Alfred Andriola, artist and co-creator of Kerry Drake, ‘Let’s face it. You can’t deal with race or color in comics. A colored maid or porter brings on a flood of letters. And if we show the Negro as a hero we get angry letters from the South.’”16

Charles Hardy has similarly noted in “A Brief History of Ethnicity in Comics” that In 1961 when “On Stage” featured a Black music coach, four papers immediately canceled the strip. The inclusion by creator Dale Messick in 1965 of a Black girl in “Brenda Starr” caused its temporary removal from circulation, in order not to offend readers in the Southern states. In 1970 when Lieutenant Flap joined the gang at Camp Swampee, “Beetle Bailey” was dropped not only by a number of Southern papers but also, for a short while, by Stars and Stripes! 17

According to Jim Shooter, longtime comic book artist and editor-in-chief of Marvel from 1978 to 1987, a reluctance to include Black heroes was not limited to newspaper comic strips but also extended to comic book producers as well. Shooter recalls that during his employment at DC Comics prior to his move to Marvel, “I had tried to introduce a black Legion of Super-Heroes character in 1966. Mort Weisinger, my editor, rejected the idea. He said that with a black character in it, the book ‘wouldn’t sell in the South,’ and that Southern distributors would boycott DC comics.”18

This journalistic intervention by S’bu Zikode, the chairperson of Abahlali baseMjondolo, caused a national sensation when it was first published in November 2005 and then rapidly translated into Afrikaans, Xhosa and Zulu and widely republished in newspapers and popular magazines. It is quite probably the most widely republished piece of journalism in post-apartheid South Africa. The term Third Force became part of the national imagination in South Africa after it was used to describe the apartheid security agents who offered covert military support to Zulu nationalists waging a war against the ANC in last years of apartheid. It is highly pejorative, implies covert white manipulation towards evil ends and, in its contemporary avatar, assumes an absolute inability for poor black people to exercise historical agency on their own. From the road blockade that birthed this movement until now numerous, and very often contradictory variations of the Third Force argument have been deployed by the state in an increasingly neurotic and at times outrightly hysterical mode. It is an unfortunate fact that a section of the NGO left, a section that chooses not to attend the meetings of, or to in any way engage in serious discussions with the people it assumes a natural right to lead, is increasingly also resorting to the racism of the white agitator thesis to try and explain away the fact that a large movement of the militant poor is uncompromisingly asserting the right to speak for and to represent itself. It seems that everyone in the business of speaking for the poor, in the state or on the left, is equally disturbed by the assumption by the poor of the right to speak and act for themselves. In this article Zikode offers a startling and now classic response to claims that the Third Force is behind the mass mobilisations organised by Abahlali baseMjondolo.

we are the third force by s’bu zikode

The shack dwellers’ movement that has given hope to thousands of people in Durban is always being accused of being part of the Third Force. In newspapers and in all kinds of meetings this is said over and over again. They even waste money investigating the Third Force. We need to address this question of the Third Force so that people don’t become confused.

I must warn those comrades, government officials, politicians and intellectuals who speak about the Third Force that they have no idea what they are talking about. They are too high to really feel what we feel. They always want to talk for us and about us but they must allow us to talk about our lives and our struggles. We need to get things clear. There definitely is a Third Force. The question is what is it and who is part of the Third Force? Well, I am Third Force myself. The Third Force is all the pain and the suffering that the poor are subjected to every second in our lives. The shack dwellers have many things to say about the Third Force. It is time for us to speak out and to say this is who we are, this is where we are and this how we live. The life that we are living makes our communities the Third Force. Most of us are not working and have to spend all day struggling for small money. AIDS is worse in the shack settlements than anywhere else. Without proper houses, water, electricity, refuse removal and toilets all kinds of diseases breed. The causes are clearly visible and every Dick, Tom and Harry can understand. Our bodies itch every day because of the insects. If it is raining everything is wet – blankets and floors. If it is hot the mosquitoes and flies are always there. There is no holiday in the shacks. When the evening comes – it is always a challenge. The night is supposed to be for relaxing and getting rest. But it doesn’t happen like that in the jondolos. People stay awake worrying about their lives. You must see how big the rats are that will run across the small babies in the night. You must see how people have to sleep under the bridges when it rains because their floors are so wet. The rain comes right inside people’s houses. Some people just stand up all night. But poverty is not just suffering. It threatens us with death every day. We have seen how dangerous being poor is. In the Kennedy Road settlement we have seen how Mhlengi Khumalo, a one year old child, died in a shack fire last month. Seven others have died in fires since the eThekwini Metro decided to stop providing electricity to informal settlements. There are many Mhlengis all over our country.

Poverty even threatens people in flats. In Bayview, in Chatsworth, a woman died of hunger earlier this year – she was fearing to tell the neighbours that she had no food and she died, alone.

Those in power are blind to our suffering. This is because they have not seen what we see, they have not felt what we are feeling every second, every day. My appeal is that leaders who are concerned about peoples’ lives must come and stay at least one week in the jondolos. They must feel the mud. They must share 6 toilets with 6 000 people. They must dispose of their own refuse while living next to the dump. They must come with us while we look for work. They must chase away the rats and keep the children from knocking the candles. They must care for the sick when there are long queues for the tap. They must have a turn to explain to the children why they can’t attend the Technical College down the hill. They must be there when we bury our children who have passed on in the fires, from diarrhoea or AIDS.

For us the most important struggle is to be recognised as human beings. During the struggle prior to 1994 there were only two levels, two classes – the rich and the poor. Now after the election there are three classes – the poor, the middle class and the rich. The poor have been isolated from the middle class. We are becoming more poor and the rest are becoming more rich. We are on our own. We are completely on our own.

Our President Mbeki speaks politics – our Premier Ndebele, and Shilowa in Gauteng and Rasool in the Western Cape, our Mayor Mlaba and mayors all over the country speak politics. But who will speak about the genuine issues that affect the people every day – water, electricity, education, land, housing? We thought local government would minimise politics and focus on what people need but it all becomes politics.

We discovered that our municipality does not listen to us when we speak to them in Zulu. We tried English. Now we realise they won’t understood Xhosa or Sotho either. The only language that they understand is when we put thousands of people on the street. We have seen the results of this and we have been encouraged. It works very well. It is the only tool that we have to emancipate our people. Why should we stop it?

We have matured in our suffering. We had a programme to find a way forward. Our programme was to continue with the peaceful negotiations with the authorities that first started ten years ago. But our first plan was undermined. We were lied to. We had to come up with an alternative plan.

The 16th of February 2005 was the dawn of our struggle. On that day the Kennedy Road committee had a very successful meeting with the chair of the housing portfolio of the executive committee of the municipality, the director of housing and the ward councillor. They all promised us the vacant land on the Clare Estate for housing. The land on Elf Road was one of the identified areas. But then we were betrayed by the most trusted people in our city. Just one month later, without any warning or explanation, bulldozers began digging the land. People were excited. They went to see what was happening and were shocked to be told that a brick factory was being built there. More people went down to see. There were so many of us that we were blocking the road. The man building the factory called the police and our local councillor, a man put into power by our votes and holding our trust and hopes. The councillor told the police, ‘Arrest these people, they are criminals’. The police beat us, their dogs bit us and they arrested 14 of us. We asked what happened to the promised land. We were told ‘Who the hell are you people to demand this land?’ This betrayal mobilised the people. The people who betrayed us are responsible for this movement. Those people are the second force. Our movement started with 14 arrests – we called them the 14 heroes. Now we have 14 settlements united together as abahlali base mjondolo [shack dwellers]. Each settlement meets once a week and the leaders of all the settlements meet once a week. We are prepared to talk but if that doesn’t work we are prepared to use our strength. We will do what ever it costs us to get what we need to live safely. We have learnt from our experience that when you want to achieve what you want, when you want to achieve what is legitimate by peaceful negotiations, by humbleness, by respecting those in authority your plea becomes criminal. You will be deceived for more than ten years, you will be fooled and undermined. This is why we have resorted to the streets. When we stand there in our thousands we are taken seriously.

The struggle that started in Kennedy Road was the beginning of a new era. We are aware of the strategies that the police are coming with to demoralise and threaten the poor. We don’t mind them building the jails for us and hiring more security if they are not prepared to listen to what we are saying. It is important for every shack dweller to know that we are aware of what is happening in Alexandra in Johannesburg, in P.E., in Cape Town. We know that our struggle is not by itself. We have sent our solidarity. We will not rest in peace until there is justice for the poor – not only in Kennedy Road; there are many Kennedy Roads, many Mhlengis, many poor voices that are not heard and not understood. But we have discovered the language that works. We will stick with it. The victims have spoken. We have said enough is enough.

It must be clear that this is not a political game. This movement is a kind of social tool by which the community hopes to get quicker results. This has nothing to do with politics or parties. Our members are part of every political organisation that you may think of. This is a non-political movement. It will finish its job when land and housing, electricity and basic services have been won and poverty eliminated. It is enough for us to be united until our people have achieved what is wanted – which is basic. But until that is materialised we will never stop.

The community has realised that voting for parties has not brought any change to us – especially at the level of local government elections. We can see some important changes at national level but at local level who ever wins the elections will be challenged by us. We have been betrayed by our own elected councillor. We have decided not to vote. The campaign that has begun – ‘No Land, No House, No Vote’- is a campaign that has been agreed upon in all 14 settlements.

We are driven by the Third Force, the suffering of the poor. Our betrayers are the Second Force. The First Force was our struggle against apartheid. The Third Force will stop when the Fourth Force comes. The Fourth Force is land, housing, water, electricity, health care, education and work. We are only asking what is basic – not what is luxurious. This is the struggle of the poor. The time has come for the poor to show themselves that we can be poor in life but not in mind.

For us time has been a very good teacher. People have realised so many things. We have learnt from the past – we have suffered alone. That pain and suffering has taught us a lot. We have begun to realise that we are not supposed to be living under these conditions. There has been a dawn of democracy for the poor. No one else would have told us – neither our elected leaders nor any officials would have told us what we are entitled to. Even the Freedom Charter is only good in theory. It has nothing to do with the ordinary lives of the poor. It doesn’t help us. It is the thinking of the masses of the people that matters. We have noted that our country is rich. More airports are being built, there are more developments at the Point water front, more stadiums are being renovated, more money is floating around, even being lent to Mugabe. But when you ask for what is basic you are told that there is no money. It is clear that there is no money for the poor. The money is for the rich. We have come to the decision of saying ‘enough is enough’. We all agree that something must be done.

S’bu Zikode is the elected chairman of the Abahlali baseMjondolo
[Shack dwellers] movement

first published in centre for civil society research reports, 2006, volume 1
edited by amanda alexander and richard pithouse

frank b. wilderson III
biko and the problematic of presence
in biko lives! (2008)
edited by andile mngxitama, amanda alexander and nigel c. gibson

frank b wilderson III
biko and the problematic of presence
in biko lives!, 2008

Township blacks will not say the precise moment when it hit them, but it was a good few days after township “klever” Irvin Khoza allegedly made a booboo by calling a black journalist a “kaffir”.

Slow thinkers that they are, they have now started noticing that the wise guys who protest too much about Khoza’s use of the words are neither called “kaffir” themselves nor black.

Maybe Jody Kollapen and Alex Boraine are correct to see this as a human rights issue. Or maybe they have no business to speak up on behalf of blacks without first consulting them. Or it’s that the use of the K-word is something that most whites still need to discuss with their psychiatrists. I am not sure.

But the more I follow this furore, the more I realise that blacks have no problem with calling each other “kaffir” — or “nigger”, for that matter. They understand what the words mean in a black context.

And let the record show that I mean no disrespect to self-appointed spokespersons for black people. In between these “outsiders” to the black township cultural milieu deciding what is good for the people, blacks are concerned that they are not consulted for their opinion on the matter.

In fact, many that I have spoken to say whites and other non-blacks are exquisitely and monumentally delusional, of course, to think that even in a free democracy other people must speak for blacks. It is their fundamental belief that nobody has the right to speak on behalf of blacks, including some blacks.

I am doing the honourable thing as a mere messenger of what some blacks think and say. It is important to say, without hurting anybody, that many blacks in the townships do not mind if Irvin calls another black a kaffir.

In fact, kaffirs do exist! The biggest sin will always be: Who says it?

Anyway, let’s politicise Khoza’s use of the K-word. It is an interesting political crisis that is, unintentionally, poised to deprogramme black people from a deep-seated inferiority complex and self-hate inculcated by centuries of colonialism and apartheid.

The time may be right for a society that has been undergoing transition for the past 13 years to appreciate new methods of defining the meaning of words and understanding their use in blunt, intense and provocative public speech.

The K-word is now having its theatrical outplay after being kept out of our political-correctness-charged times ever since self-styled kwaito king Arthur Mafokate released his album Don’t Call Me Kaffir in the early 1990s.

The use of the K-word has been taboo for whites. But, now, it seems that the ban has been extended to include blacks for whom its pejorative and derogatory meaning was intended.

Khoza’s right to freedom of self-expression and speech has effectively been suppressed as a result of white guilt following the negative meaning and connotation that they have always attached to the word.

But now that he has brought it out of the closet, pseudo-liberal forces both within the white community and their black imitators have forced him to apologise and hush up any use of the word lest it raise the spectre of the apartheid past that haunts us.

Perhaps we should ask the Pan South African Language Board (Pansalb) to step into this matter to provide thought-leadership and clear the air about how blacks and whites understand and use certain words that are part of our apartheid cultural baggage.

It is important for us to understand that languages, especially words, are the primary carriers of culture, which is an ever-changing, dynamic and progressive development towards nation building and redefinition of identity and heritage.

Khoza has been subjected to psychological harassment that has an unintended consequence of bringing apartheid ghosts tumbling from the closet and denying blacks the right to appropriate word meaning. In fact, his use of the word has not necessarily harmed the image and integrity of black people. It is for this reason that he has no business to apologise.

Instead, the brouhaha that has been stirred does not come from black people themselves. Largely, the blacks have been indifferent with the whites doing the protestation on their behalf, as usual.

This is a disturbing and unfortunate development.

But the panic and hysteria that has been caused in the white social and cultural circles is a sad farce of good intentions.

The conclusion that should be drawn on this matter is that it is a combination of white guilt and political correctness.

Both positions grow out of white intentions to denigrate and dehumanise black humanity who now want to impose their holier-than-thou political position on their former victims.

It would be advisable for those who purport to speak on behalf of black people to consult. Perhaps they may learn that Khoza is not at fault. Yes, it would be insightful to hear the views of blacks themselves.

In fact, Khoza has been correct to assert that the word has a totally different meaning in a township cultural context.

As things stand now, things have gotten controversial simply because non-black interference stigmatise “kaffir” as something that is taboo and should never be used in public discourse.

But this is exactly what will prevent us from shedding our apartheid baggage and contribute to suppression of freedom of expression and speech.

The open secret about Khoza’s use of the word, especially among blacks intuitively connected to township culture, is that despite its negative connotation in white minds, his serious intention was to question the integrity of a journalist who peddles prejudice and stereotypes about Africa’s prospect of hosting a successful World Cup.

What got to him was a perception that the media are hell-bent on perpetuating the view that 2010 is destined to fail simply because it is managed by blacks (sic).

Now, anyone who holds such view in the 21st century characterised by the African renaissance deserves to be called a kaffir because he or she perpetuates outdate racist stereotypes and prejudice.

This is part of our self-redefinition and expanding the meaning of words to fit into a new socio-cultural vocabulary that will help ultimately to break with white guilt, political correctness and a deep-seated inferiority complex.

Well, Khoza’s faux pas may not yet be appreciated, now. But we need to keep an open mind and listen to what he had in his own mind.

After all, the meaning of a word is not in the word itself, but in people’s heads.

Unlike the rose, the K-word does not smell the same to black and white.

this opinion first published by mail & guardian

By now, Fanon’s penultimate claim in his rejoinder to Sartre is well known: “ontology - once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside - does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; but he must be black in relation to the white man.” Fanon is arguing that, though Blacks are indeed sentient beings, the structure of the world’s entire semantic field - regardless of cultural and national discrepancies, that is, “leaving existence by the wayside” - in other words, the Modern episteme, is sutured by anti-Black solidarity. This is a dialectic of negativity, that offers no imaginable synthesis - not Sartre’s dialectic through which the Black becomes the proletariat, nor Biko’s dialectic through which the Black becomes a “man” (sic).

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

from “Biko and the Problematic of Presence”
in “Biko Lives!”

To be ‘waylaid by whiteness’ is my term for the fixation of blacks on colonialism and imperialism. Is it time for not only blacks but all of us, to get over this. It will not go away, anymore than one could wish it never existed. This does not mean it should be ignored. Rather blacks should see ways forward within the core issues of development, rather than in ‘deconstruction’.

“Illegal to be black”? That is a very strange interpretation.

What does this mean|?

It means that we all (not only blacks) should focus on the constitution and how that constitution could be made a living reality in the lives of those black youths at the bottom of the social ladder. Surely this should have been the aim of the new government?

Instead it was about doing what apartheid did. Grabbing money where ever possible, riding round in 4 X 4’s, hanging on to cellphones, and looking more Afrikaner than Afrikaners. And of course corruption is rampant. What legacy is there in that? It is this that makes whites feel more empowered about their silly ‘superiority’ than anything else. So while there is corruption, the spectre of colonialism and imperialism will abound!

Phase one: I would like to suggest that the anc (because they are the overwhelming majority) use their youth league meetings to educate the youth on the true meaning of democracy. Malema being all bravado and loud mouthed, which may be emotively satisfying, does nothing for democracy, empowerment in the right sense, or deliverance. The only thing this does is empower a zulu/black chauvinism to rape, steal and grab whatever they can like impetuous children who feel they have lost out on a slice of the cake. (sad but true) Yet it is silly to expect the educator in the classroom to spearhead these democratic issues. The youth are not responding to the need for education via the school system. They seem to think this is a form of imperialist/colonialist indoctrination! (The Education Department must stop their rampant exploitation of educators if this issue is ever vaguely to be addressed!) It also astonishingly naive to expect a white educator still steeped in an apartheid mindset, to teach the history of apartheid effectively.
On the other hand expecting a black educator to teach the history of apartheid without a heavy bias is also naive!

Phase two. Real concerns from the youth need to be looked at fairly and squarely. i.e. nepotism, lack of delivery, and rampant spending of money that should be used to address these issues must be rooted out immediately. The youth must feel connected to a constructive desire to make them feel, and be relevant.

Phase three. In the same way that apartheid practitioners where given the golden handshake, these corrupt officials within government structures should be given the golden handshake. New, accountable and passionate leaders, well focused on serving rather than enriching, should take their place. Urgently!!

Blacks must overcome their victim mentality by hating whites (they know how to be despicable don’t they!) while trying to be like them. This is what eventually happens to them with that silly mindset. They must look at what is ‘beyond whiteness’ such as universal issues of democracy, human rights, accountability, transparency, structure, law and order, equitability, fairness, deliverance, inclusiveness. In fact everything enshrined within the constitution and to see a united nation beyond colour!

Apartheid kept this country so far behind, that when change came an overwhelming world mentality rushed in as well. Not only did apartheid stunt the growth of Afrikaners (they were too terrified to question anything least they discovered the awful truth) but it also stunted the growth of everybody (many whites have difficulty in accepting this because they were on a roll of exploitation) including blacks. This was but just one of their ‘determinations’. The need for blacks in leadership to suddenly make huge paradigm shifts from becoming involved in liberation (and many of these had a right wing mentality) to becoming democratic ambassadors, was a bit much to expect.

At the same time the world is suffering a crisis of mismanagement. We have global warming, and environmental issues which cannot be ignored either. Many blacks (and I am referring to my experiences in the classroom, feel that environmental issues are a ‘white’ problem!)

But now 15 years on, surely there can be no more excuse of teething problems? Surely it now time for a second purge?

The revolution therefore has to get its heart back in the right place. Not by being anti white or anti imperialist. But by getting back to sound values. Not on paper. But as a living reality. Nobody wants to see this country fail more than the apartheid practitioners. In this regard the ANC are doing very well. The ANC needs to catch a huge wake-up, but certainly not along the Malema lines. He represents nothing more than a knee jerk reaction.

So yes, in fact we do need an agenda. But it not going to come from those youths who are criminalised, and jump borders. They are just as out of control as those who should know better!

We cannot ignore history. But we can grow from its mistakes.

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