kagablog

WHILE the nation has been kept busy with the sensational news of President Jacob Zuma’s love child, I have been part of a discussion on patriarchy and white supremacy on the Blackwash page on Facebook.

The debate was robust and some sparks flew!

The discussion was not moved by the hype around Zuma and his affairs in Soweto, but rather sought to understand the nature of a system that oppresses women in our society – called patriarchy.

Since Zuma’s Soweto child there has been a curious alliance of self-righteous gender activists, religious moralists and opposition parties in the condemnation of Zuma. For some reason Zuma is expected to behave differently from the rest of South African men.

The truth is that South Africa is a patriarchal country. Patriarchy is part of sexism; it puts the interests of men before those of women. It uses culture, religion, tradition – and even love – to justify the enslavement of women.

Women do all the difficult domestic work, including childcare. Women are forbidden to have more than one husband or lover. If women have more than one lover they are called izifebe but men with many women are praised as amasoka. Patriarchy reduces women to being the property of men.

It is patriarchy that explains the shockingly high incidence of rape and related violence against women in our country. The discussion on the Blackwash page focused on how black men are agents of patriarchy, while at the same time being victims of white supremacy with their womenfolk.

This raises the challenge of whether black men can be partners with black women in fighting patriarchy since they are beneficiaries and perpetrators of the same system that oppresses women.

Views on this matter are diverse. Some people argue that only women can liberate themselves from male oppression. This view mirrors Biko’s assertion that only the oppressed can free themselves.

While patriarchy turns women into slaves, white supremacy on the other hand places whites on top of all blacks, then place black men on top of black women, while oppressing both black men and women.

One of the examples used to explain how white supremacy sustains patriarchy is the fact that the ritual of Ulwaluko- hobolla-koma (male initiation into “manhood”) has been preserved by colonialists to create black men who remain boys in the eyes of white women, children and men, but these fake black men would kill for their “manhood” within the black community.

The colonialist took everything away from black people, including their land, and let them keep and celebrate their useless manhood. White supremacy and patriarchy are like milk and tea. It’s no longer possible or desirable to separate patriarchy from white supremacy.

Patriarchy is indeed bad for both men and women, so an anti-patriarchy alliance between black women and men is possible.

But men must be prepared to forgo some of the current benefits of patriarchy, such as owning the bodies of women if they want to be real comrades in the struggle against women oppression.

One of the most disturbing discoveries from the debate is that some of the black philosophies and movements that claim to fight white supremacy actually hates women, lesbians and gays. They use being “African” as a justification for their backward ideas.

The debate continues.

this article first published on the sowetan.co.za

Beware of the nice whites
The polite whites
They just waiting for you
To put your balls in their mouths….

…then their teeth suddenly sharpen
…and
…they
…bite
…just as hard
as their granddaddies used to

a white man’s mouth
is not a safe place for a black man
to keep his balls

aryan kaganof

art work was done by Athi Mongezeleli Joja

Reading Heinrich Böhmke is like de-quailing a porcupine. To feast one must invariably suffer the pain of bloodied fingers first. This edition of New Frank Talk (NFT) presents us with numerous difficulties. Firstly, this is no easy read, it requires patience but infinite rewards await those who stay the course to the end. Secondly, this is an essay by a white writer; we make no bones about the fact that NFT is about black people and for black people, white voices already saturate and pollute the public space. Frankly we don’t give a shit what whites do or say. Lastly, and this is important, Böhmke is an active player in the scene that he invites us to critically survey. So this essay is not some innocent, beautiful literary foray for its own sake; this is part of an ongoing battle amongst latter day white missionaries who go by such endearing titles as human rights activists, internationalists, researchers and resource persons.

The challenge for NFT is simply this: are we, by publishing this essay, not entering an internecine battle between whites whose sole aim is to capture the souls of black folk? From this point of view, whichever side wins, the black stands to lose. In some twisted ways this is the central point made by this essay - white help invariably serves white interests in the final analysis. This may come as a surprise to readers who are familiar with the history of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa because we remember as if it were yesterday the great white warriors for liberation such as Joe Slovo, Ronnie Kasrils, Judge Albie Sachs, Jeremy Cronin and Ruth First amongst others. They all suffered in the fight against white supremacy. Really? Read on.

This essay is essentially about the place, motivation and role of white people in black struggles. This is a painful and difficult subject which has plagued all attempts at transforming the anti-black world we inhabit. Böhmke’s conclusion is disturbing in its lucidity - white revolutionaries are essentially missionaries! The journey to this discovery is long; it eats up all of 185 years! To understand this conclusion the writer takes us through an inviting review of a book published in 1834 by a missionary named Stephen Kay with a long title: “Travels and Researches in Caffraria, describing the character, customs and moral condition of the tribes inhabiting that portion of Southern Africa.” Caffraria is real, it’s the region of South Africa we call the Eastern Cape today, the land of the Xhosa-speaking people and their “Bushmen” cousins. Böhmke infuses life into an ancient book that could have been left to rot and never come to public attention, but it’s as if he walked into an amazing piece of artillery just when he needed it most in the ongoing missionary battles of our day. He discovered a perfect brick to hurl at the glass edifice of white radicalism. You can almost hear the shattering glass as it comes down. Damn!

One can imagine Böhmke turning the pages of the book rapidly as he read, baffled by the shocking discoveries and startling parallels between the original missionaries in service of civilisation and today’s activist. He must have been floored by the similarities between contemporary white actors in black affairs separated from their colonial predecessors by almost 200 years; these brethrens in the service of a humanity that dehumanises share the same impulses, strategies, discourses and concerns. Their overriding interest, just like Stephen Kay two centuries ago, is to “urge upon the Christian world the loud and affecting calls of the perishing African”. The treasure of this discovery couldn’t have escaped a seasoned warrior of Böhmke’s calibre. His advantage is that he got there first; the charge sheet he presents to white radicals indicts him no less. But he doesn’t care to defend himself, he pleads guilty with a smile. What will the rest of the accused plead? Smart, wicked move.

The first section of the essay which contains the historical material makes for fascinating reading. We get to see the strategies of how the “affecting calls for the perishing African” are carried out by missionary Stephen Kay. We get to see how Kay places himself as the true friend of the “Kaffers” against the marauding Boere, against the rapacious competing missionaries and other colonialists. Böhmke randomly chooses some themes from Kay’s book for fairly elaborate treatment. The parallels between the missionary of yesterday and the white activist of today yielded from these themes are shocking, yet we are shocked despite the writer’s council that we shouldn’t be. We discover powerfully how today’s white activist is no different from the colonial missionary. They have identical concerns and designs for the lost soul of the native. Of course unlike the bible- pushing colonial missionaries today’s white activists’ time is expired in service of human rights, justice, participatory democracy or any other such battle. Their bible is the constitution.

From Kay’s forays into Caffraria we can see that when it comes down to it, both the colonial missionary and the contemporary human rights counterpart are dealing with the same evils confronting the blacks: deprivation, homelessness, landlessness, evictions, state repression and inadequate protection by the law, or more specifically lack of implementation of existing laws to defend the helpless native. The missionary of yore stood between the Boere hordes and the helpless natives with his hands to the heavens and the bible under his armpit. Today the white activist stands between the poor, the squatter, the landless, the HIV positive and an indifferent black government with the constitution under the armpit driven by the same impulse to civilise.

Reading the essay, look out for rouge colonialists like Stout and Lochenberg. I smile thinking what these and other missionaries thought of the self righteous Kay. Then beware of the “predatory natives” who were “uncontainable and unpredictable”, the “sneaky” Bushmen who despised civilisation. They lived outside of civilisation and were therefore available for harsh colonial disciplinary measures. Kay, the righteous, approved of such treatment against these hordes who refused to live within the rhythm and discipline of work and God. Here I was reminded of how a few years ago white activists in a social movement refused to give any legal assistance to black members of the same movement who were accused of murder because of their involvement in a collective community crime prevention measure which left one of the tormentors of the community dead. Basically, a squatter settlement in the south of Johannesburg was terrorised by a gang of thugs who raped, killed and mugged community members. The police refused to act each time. The community then decided or rather spontaneously took matters into their hands. But because they acted outside the law, they were branded vigilantes by their white comrades and were therefore left to face the full punishment of the law. They were abandoned to harsh measures just like the “predatory natives” of Kay’s time.

Dear reader I must warn you, take no word of the writer at face value and don’t be seduced into a lowering your guards because of the beauty of this essay. Remember this is a white battle for the soul of the contemporary native who otherwise goes by the name of “the poor”. For instance, where Böhmke in a single throwaway line writes, “How wonderful to be first to write about a place!” don’t be mistaken, he is not making an innocent statement. He is talking to the many white researchers who make it their business to research and write about black struggles. They come from Canada, the USA and Europe. And then of course there is our very own home-grown settler stock. They work for NGOs and volunteer their time for a good cause. All of them are the Stephen Kays of our day. As they research about or administer to the natives, they denounce and approve accordingly, in the process saving souls and converting heathens. The success of the preaching is the changed behaviour of the poor; all of a sudden tyre burners become articulate preachers of human rights and the constitution. They learn process and patience. They stop demanding the impossible and acting illegally. They become perfect victims failed by the law and state.

The key point is simply this; the missionary of yesteryear was in it for colonisation and civilisation through spreading the gospel of God. Today the white activist is in it to be “saved from the native”. Are the barbarians still coming? Truth is even those who fought against apartheid did it to serve and save white civilisation. They are “helpers who destroy”. The role of today’s white activist is in the main to channel black anger into the castrating chambers of the constitutional court where if they lose they must go home and accept their fate as a turkey would on Christmas Day. If they win, and they rarely ever win anything useful, they must party all night long and be thankful to their white saviours - the lawyers, researchers and other NGO types in service of human rights and the constitution. This process actually serves to shape the desires of black people and lowers their expectations of what it means to be free. Like animals they listen as judges and white lawyers argue about how many kilolitres of water are enough to keep them clean and quench their thirst; they hear arguments on their behalf about how many communal toilets can take their shit and the number of flood lights needed to keep them from smothering each other to death at night. It doesn’t stop there, there are court cases led by human rights lawyers to determine how the poor must be forcibly removed, they plead for a just process before the removals but removed the natives must be, it must just be done according to due process! You’d think these masses of helpless blacks are not a majority in their own country. Black people have lost all self-respect in the name of the constitution and democracy. Now both the ANC and the DA are able to build wall-less toilets for blacks!

When it comes down to it, the white radical is actually worse than the colonial missionary. Without Joe Slovo it would have been possible to attempt an entry into a register of black suffering which didn’t defer to whiteness at all. Blacks would have been able to simply say, “Look, this is our fucken country and we are going to fight for it by any means necessary”! The very presence of whites in the zone of black resistance crowds out other possibilities. In fact certain acts become outlawed. Certain demands unimaginable. Imagine the oppressed seeking agreeable means to fighting their oppression from their oppressors? Absurd!

Böhmke comes to a similar conclusion as Frank Wilderson even if they arrive there from totally different routes. Böhmke takes Sigmund Freud while Wilderson uses Frantz Fanon. For Böhmke, to understand the unbroken chain of the white radical’s postionality as a missionary, one has to search in the “pre-political”, a zone crafted upon the infantile traumas of the first encounters between black and white signified by violence and betrayals. These have now become “fixed, binding and canonical”, thereby a priori governing all future interactions. In other words, a template of behaviour is now set in stone. The nasty encounters between black and white, where white seeks to civilise are fated to be “perpetually re-enacted” in all black and white encounters. From here a devastating conclusion is inevitable; there is no relationship between blacks and whites which is not already trapped in the Manichean poles of civiliser and the heathen soul. The writer points at himself and admits quite candidly that, “The impulse to freedom I thought I had, was an impulse to civilise”. In the final analysis, the Kaffir Boetie and terrorist finds that this impulse was actually to “better the precarious prospect of the white settler in South Africa”. This is significant, what we are being told here is that if we want to understand how post 1994 South Africa delivered a liberation that re-enacted and sustained white supremacy, we may find the white radical as a key player in ensuring this raw deal for the celebrating and voting native.

Be careful, when Böhmke points to himself, he in not delivering a confessional. What Böhmke has done with this confession is to take away the agency of the white radical, at least as revolutionary subjects. All white sacrifice in the struggle for black liberation stands at once as illegitimate. However, Böhmke does more than just dispossess the white radical of his most potent weapon and claims to be allowed into the black war room. Through this act of dispossession, Böhmke has simultaneously orphaned blacks of their white radical father figure who makes their travails understandable to the media, the government the donor and the world. Without the white radical, there is no way the “affecting calls of the perishing African” can be heard. Without a white radical to calibrate their voices, the poor are tongue-less and nameless. Without a guiding white father, the orphaned black is likely to explode into a flame that consumes all! Terrified, the black gropes for his lost white father, mouthing mumbo jumbo about non-racialism, ubuntu, and also making claims like, “we are all humans”. The black community leader is by and large a native convert who will kill for his missionary spiritual guide. He now wants the missionaries to say what is good for him. He wants to be in the constitution! He wants human rights. Yes, occasionally the convert is a she.

From Fanon Frank Wilderson observes the multiple disadvantages presented by the presence of a white radical in black struggles. He writes; ‘White political thought and action is necessarily inadequate to, and parasitic on, the black body and black liberation”. Referring to the experience of black fighters in the USA and the place of white radicals in that fight, Wilderson makes the point that:

“White radicalism works through the same ensemble of questions, and the same structure of feeling, as does White supremacy. Which is to say that while the men (and women) in blue, with guns and jailers’ keys appear to be White supremacy’s front line of violence against Blacks, they are merely its reserves, called upon only when needed to augment White radicalism’s always already ongoing patrol: a patrol of a zone more sacred than the streets: the zone of White ethical dilemmas: the zone of civil society. ”

Here we must remember Stephen Kays’ “predatory natives” and the civilisation despising “Bushmen”, but more remember the name Quetu!
It’s disturbing but unfortunately true, that in the final analysis the leading Communist Jeremy Cronin occupies the same structure of feelings as the brutal enforcer of apartheid, the much hated Eugene De Kock. Ultimately, they are both about preserving “the zone of civil society”.

Here is the fifth edition of New Frank Talk.
Enjoy!

Andile Mngxitama
January 2010

New Frank Talk is available at the following stores:

Exclusive Books @ the Zone in Rosebank (JHB)

Xarra Books in Newtown (JHB)

Clarke’s Books in Cape Town and

Ike’s Books & Collectables in Durban

From where i’m sitting the man shouldn’t have spent one day in prison. The reason for this is that De Kock was a soldier of an evil system that benefited all white South Africans. It doesn’t make much sense to draw distinctions between what was “legal” and illegal under apartheid, because as we know the whole system was declared a crime against humanity. This means in essence that the benefits that are derived from apartheid are proceeds of crime. If such ill-begotten privileges were enjoyed by the whole community why should one man suffer for it?

Think about it, how could apartheid have been designed and defended if not by violence and death? De Kock was a soldier of an unjust war, which accumulated unjust privileges for white people as a whole. Its thanks to men like De Kock that today the per capital income of whites is R136 000 as compared to the meagre R19 500 for the Africans.

The DA is short-sighted when it says “Neither De Kock nor Shaik deserve a presidential pardon”. Firstly, its plain wrong to equate the crimes of De Kock with those of Shaik. The latter together with the likes of Tony Yengeni and Rev Alan Boesak were thrown to the wolves because they had fallen out of favour with the powers that be or because they were dispensable. Their crimes pales into insignificance compared to the scale of the post apartheid thieving. De Kock on the other hand was fighting a dirty war on behalf of the whole white community.

Its a mistake to see racism as individualised acts of evil and not see it as an institutionalised power arrangement that benefits whites whether they are self declared racists or not. To create this white power a lot of violdence looting and dispossession was necessary. Laws were enacted to confirm the humanness of whites and the sub-humanness of blacks. All this was fossilised into normal behaviour and belief by both the perpetrators and victims. White power is therefore concentrated historical violence to realise unearned whites privilege. We have to understand the individual acts of racism such as the University of the Free State saga within this frame work. White power as naturalised and invisible makes such behaviour possible and un-punishable.

De Kock must be to be allowed to walk. I’m not sure about being pardoned, because surely no one can pardon on behalf of those who perished in the hands of Eugene and his Askaris. The reason why he should walk are the same reasons that drove Mbeki’s to offer P.W. Botha a state funeral, it’s the same logic that allowed F.W. De Klerk dripping with the blood of blacks to share a Noble with Nelson Mandela. But most importantly it’s simply a mistake if not pure hypocrisy to equate the apartheid crimes with Vlakplaas. What happened on that farm is what made life possible for white South Africa and hell for blacks within the logic and practise of white supremacy. Vlakplaas was therefore a mere symbolic representation of apartheid. In a sense when the ANC forgave the political figures of apartheid they in the same time forgave the likes of De Kock who only really took orders from his forgiven principals.

We also need to move beyond the annoying Psychological reasoning based on Freud’s fraud, that all evil is the fault of parents. Clearly De Kock made a choice to defend apartheid, maybe he was a little overzealous in his tasks but he was a hero for his troubles. De Kock was not a societal misfit but an epitome of its logic. As Franz Fanon councils, we need to abandon the habit of “considering racism as a mental quirk, a psychological flaw”, he goes on to show that “The racist in a culture with racism is normal”. Therefore the racist in such a society has “achieved a perfect harmony of economic relations and ideology”.

To understand the full extent of white culpability, one has to understand apartheid in Rian Malan’s terms. That apartheid’s greatest achievement was not the violence and mayhem it wreaked with black lives, but the creation of “ suburbs like Parktown, where English-speaking liberals lived in a bubble that resembled nothing so much as the more civilised parts of Boston or London”. The likes of Eugene De Kock and P.W. De Klerk, are two sides of the same coin, which is necessary to create this “ Western moonbase on Africa, where whites lived exactly like whites in the capitals of the great white empire”.

By placing De Kock and Shaik on the same list of those to be pardoned Zuma shall be helping in covering up for the exact nature of crimes committed by the commander of Vlakplaas. Hopefully, we are not going to waste more time and resources chasing another low key apartheid evil man who slipped the narrow history distorting TRC amnesty process. Let the De Kock confess nothing and be free to enjoy the rest of his days on earth like the rest of white South Africa. justice is still to be done.

Three broad segments:
1. Some questions about the business of remembering
2. Art and Resistance - some questions about the place of art and the difficulties of interpretation
3. Black Consciousness and the now

1. Problematising remembering

A few year ago Gail Smith writing on Biko said “Biko was being murdered through memory”
-Echoing Walter Benjamin’s warning that “not even the dead will be safe if the enemy wins. And the enemy has not ceased to be victorious”.
• memory is unreliable medium to access the past,
• memory is always in the making
• memory is selective, we chose to remember that which drive our desires and hopes and less our fears. (we tend to exaggerate our victories and diminish our failures)- the ghost of the “glorious African past forever chased by people who refuse to deal with the utter hopelessness of the now)

• the act of remembering is essentially a political act! in the sense that it can be mobilised to serve prevailing power (Fanon tell us so powerfully that the leaders pacify the masses through feeding them the heroic acts of anti-colonial struggles). I’m trying to say here when remember our era the bc era, we must be careful not use it for forgetting.

• perhaps the most exacting example of how the past can be murdered and used for political ends is how we remember june 16. Hector Peterson is trusted in our faces and etched in our memories instead of the fiery black power fist of Tsietsie Mashinini and his comrade Khotso Seatlholo. June 16 has been weaned of all Black power significance and substance, all tamed to chimes with Mandela and tutu’s rainbow nation nonsense as Jansen so powerfully has recently shown. It’s a joke! June 16 uprising tamed to serve current power. Kwaitofication of june 16!

• In the same vein Ramphele Mamphele, the Steve Foundation has been steadily turning Biko into a pretty boy of our neo-colonial hell-hole through certain ways of remembering. The new books have “great exponent of BC” like Mbeki, Tito Manuel (people rejected even by the ANC as members of the 1996 class project, who fell in polokwane), are put forward as the custodians and stalwarts of BC. Mpjanku Gumbi told an Azapo gathering recently that the night Biko was killed he was due to be lifted out of the country by the ANC! Ramamphele (UCT, World Bank, Anglo American) has now praised Helen Suzman as heroic in the same spirit as Biko.

I’m saying when we approach these artefacts, we have to decide how we wish to locate them. how do we chose to remember? We can as it think we tend to do remember the past as glorious and rebellious, when in fact it was a long lullaby. We tend to be harsher of the present generations.

• The existing BCM organisations (Azapo, sopa and bcp) are into monumentalisation. Freezing bc and biko in the past and only mobilising the past as part of an attempt to lobby for inclusion in the ongoing ANC racket in defense of white supremacy- they want highways, jails cell names after Biko.

• The black business classes, academics, civil servants have also appropriated the BC or more specifically Biko to stake a claim in the wealth of the nation held by white capital. They don’t want transformation that want inclusions, called representation (Eskom is the latest saga, i’m with maroga against Godsell, its time for blacks to eat, but i’m not blinded to the fact that when maroga eats its does not translate into abundance for the excluded majority, nor will i fight for maroga!).

2. Art and resistance

• It’s a boring old question between art and resistance. And art for art sake.

• Some of us have considered the point that reactionary art can itself be technically competent even alluring and even enchanting. Aesthetics of death are not any less superior that those of revolt (Nazi art and Negritude or on the other extreme Pushkin and Baron). It’s the premium we place on each political judgement which counts. If you are a fascist i suppose you will have difficulty appreciating art forms produced by what you consider sub-humans. Maybe only as curiosities- curious!

• Flowing from the above i want to ask the question. How does the visual medium ignite revolt and help build resistance? In other words what made the 70s and mid 80s bc inspired art resistance art? How did this art assist, propel, question and inspire revolt?

• Furthermore, if i take the children of Soweto today and place them before the same pieces which here read as resistance and we call them resistance, would the contemporary reader deduce this resistance from the silent language of these paintings and other artefacts?

• I’m suggesting that there is nothing revolutionary in the artefacts themselves (it’s a controversial point and maybe an ignorant one too). I’m suggesting that revolutionary art is born of the revolution and are given revolutionary readings by a highly a philosophically/politically aroused/aware population/reader/viewer. Outside of this revolutionary milieu (a revolutionary moment of rapture and a consciouss reading), these art pieces are just art pieces. Which at best becomes zones of amusement by highly specialised academic groups who are irrelevant to the large questions facing a people.

• This leads to another question. Can a moment of political imbecility ignite art which is revolutionary, which is counter culture? And here i’m staying with the visual medium still, because other forms such as literature etc lend themselves much easier to a particular reading- but fuck abstract art?! But i’m prepared to say save for a few brave instances (Simphiwe, Lesogo, ghamakhulu and Kgafela) even the underground is only underground until discovered! Poets sell shares on TV!

• In a moment of political lull as we are in right now. how to you create art that resists co-option? It is possible or are artists mere workers and mercenaries at worst? I’m thinking about the piece bought by the presidency.

• What must still be explained is how come the post-1994 art scene has not connected with any of the points of the new resistance? I’m not talking about pictures of red ants in an art gallery, the victims will never enter.

• I have no solutions to these problems but i do think that part of the conversation has to be about how the denigration of “figurative” art (township art, fists etc) in favour of what is assumed to be high artistic expression (abstract) robs us of the possibility of marrying again art and the new resistance.

3. Black consciousness philosophy for the now

In some ways the theme of this exhibition gives the prize away right at the start. Remembering BC has strong references to a past! To a death and a burial. We remember mostly through visiting the site of a loss, a death or burial. So is BC dead? Mphutlane oa bofelo lamented during last years out-burst of Negrophobic attacks (the media calls xenophobia). That….

Bc as revolutionary philosophy that urge us towards continuous rebellion is dead! But i’m not against resurrection (some pieces here have a strong reference to death as a path to a new beginning). But sometimes dead is just that - an eternal end.

To say BC is dead is not to deny that it’s hotly contested. Please again check Frank Talk 1 and our book Biko Lives!

• some of us are trying to re-imagine BC for the now!

1. Capitalism is a racist white supremacist system. The bc fight is therefore in the main for the vanquishing of the capitalist anglo saxon civilisation.

2. How do we read post 1994? Blackwash tag line reads: Coz 1994 changed fokol, and we linking up with the likes of Chinweizu to give us a language of speaking the horrors of post independence/democracy fraud! Black colonialist! A strategy is suggested right there.

3. Homophobia, patriarchy and misogyny are central to fight against white supremacy. From this point of view culture, religion and traditions comes under attack (ulwaluko, ukuthwala, respect docility in presence of aged, a god that only takes money and breeds fear in the now and promises happiness in the hereafter). We start from the beginning again. We learn from Haiti 200 years of freedom which didn’t liberate.

BASICALLY:
4. We don’t want a fucken job and an RDP house in the middle of nowhere.

5. We want it all! (diamonds, oil, gold, platinum, all those lands and fields).

6. Are there any artists out there who are ready and able to give fire to this desire FOR eternal rapture?

By Alex Duval Smith

The moment when Nelson Mandela congratulated Francois Pienaar after South Africa won the Rugby World Cup has been recreated for the film ‘Invictus’

Invictus should probably win Oscars. Its star-studded cast is a “Bokbuster” gift to the marketing world. But in South Africa, the timing of Clint Eastwood’s film about Nelson Mandela’s ultimate charm offensive on sceptical whites coincides with a new debate about the actual achievements of reconciliation.

Last night, Morgan Freeman, 72, who has already won a National Board of Review’s Best Actor award for his portrayal of Mandela, was in Johannesburg for the local premiere. He will be in Durban tonight and in Cape Town tomorrow. Later in the week, Freeman reportedly hopes to attend a private screening at the home of the frail 91-year-old former South African president.

Invictus is named after a poem by William Ernest Henley and based on Playing The Enemy, the non-fiction book by The Independent’s former Johannesburg correspondent, John Carlin. The film marks the most ambitious cinematic attempt to portray South Africa’s captivating racial narrative since films like Cry Freedom and A Dry White Season in the 1980s.

Set during the 1995 rugby union World Cup, which South Africa hosted just a year after Mandela became the country’s first black president, its climax has the hero of the apartheid struggle embracing the Afrikaner- dominated sport and rallying fellow blacks to cheer to victory a national team whose colours and emblems had been seen as symbols of oppression.

It is hitting South African cinemas just a few days after the draw for the 2010 football World Cup was staged in Cape Town. In many ways, the country’s successful World Cup bid marks the logical extension of the leap of faith Mandela inspired when he created one of the iconic images of the 20th century by donning the number six Springbok jersey.

Sport, race and the uncomfortable issue of South African identity are once again on people’s minds. But Sowetan columnist Andile Mngxitama suggested the film will only please whites. “The rebellion against apartheid should not have been about rainbows – accommodating the 10 per cent of the population who were white – but about freedom for the majority of South Africans. They live in abject poverty today.”

Aubrey Matshiqi, a political analyst for the Centre for Policy Studies, said the euphoria of the Rugby World Cup had overshadowed the inequalities that remain in South Africa: “We became the symbol of reconciliation, and this masked the reality of the lack of reconciliation among people.

“There is a perception that it is almost always the black person that extended the hand of reconciliation. To some extent white people embraced Mandela but not the race from which he came.”

Statistics published by Absa bank at the weekend bear out the criticisms. The growth in wealth among black South Africans since the first all-race elections in 1994 has been relatively modest. Of 400,000 South Africans who earn in excess of 600,000 rands per year (£48,000), only 18 per cent are black. More than half the population still earns under 20,000 rands (£1,500) per year.

Sport has also largely failed to transform itself. In the 1995 final, against the All Blacks, one of the players was black; Chester Williams. By the 2007 final the number had risen to two. Apart from in the Eastern Cape, a province where blacks have always played both cricket and rugby, the higher echelons of those sports remain largely white. Even in football – a “black” sport – whites appear over-represented among the coaches and administrators of the Premier Soccer League.

Invictus looks at a time when the country’s survival was seen as dependent on the mood of 10 per cent of the population. The debate in South Africa has moved on.

Nevertheless, the film may provide a lifeline for the embattled springbok on the South African rugby jersey. Last year, loose forward Luke Watson said the sight of the gamboling gazelle made him “feel like vomiting” because of its association with rugby under apartheid when the springbok was the sporting symbol of the National Party. Asad Bhorat, the president of Soweto Rugby Club, said the continued use of the springbok is “akin to the German national team wearing the swastika”. In the end, the sports ministry and the South African Rugby Union compromised: the springbok was moved to the right-hand side of the jersey, replacing a sponsor’s logo, and the King Protea flower – also the symbol of cricket – was stitched to the left side.

first published on the independent

THE moralistic condemnations that follow each episode of negrophobia – mistakenly named xenophobia – needs to make way for explanation.

All the explanations to date have failed to answer the key question: Why the orgy of violence for so little when there is so much to fight for?

A related question is: Why are only black “foreigners” targeted? What we see is in fact the outcome of the creation of the black as a subjugated non-being by the long period of racist colonisation.

The 350 years of white domination have reduced blacks to the status of sub-humans who wallow in deep darkness and have lost a sense of the self.

As Steve Biko said: “The white system has produced throughout the world a number of people who are not aware that they too are people”.

The fundamental problem is the “unpeopleness” of black South Africans, from the black squatter up to the politicians.

Blacks are the creation of whites. Modern Africa is a creation of whites. In the specific case of South Africa the creation of the black is associated with land dispossession, Christianisation and turning Africans into mere ­workers.

Cecil John Rhodes, one of the brutal colonialists, made it clear back then that blacks couldn’t be allowed to own land and cows ­because “in the future nine-tenths of them will have to spend their lives in daily labour” – basically working for whites.

This is an important issue to consider because we take it for granted that to work in order to live is a natural state of affairs.

The truth is we were made workers after being violently dispossessed of our land and black souls.

What the above shows is that you can make people into what you want them to be over time. Blacks have forgotten that they own this country, its land and wealth. T

hey have accepted their position as workers, hence most of the so-called xenophobic ­attacks have been directed at those who are perceived to be stealing our jobs.

What is even more troubling is that the jobs we are prepared to kill for are the worst-paid jobs. The people of De Doorns are expelling Zimbabweans so that they can have seasonal farm jobs. This is slave labour.

These same people have never taken any meaningful action to demand land for themselves or to share in the local economy, which is owned by whites.

The problem is we have accepted a “workers consciousness” not a black consciousness, which would be a repudiation of the worker identity, an identity of subjugation.

Those who know have tried to understand how consciousness is formed. If we say blacks have over time accepted their position of inferiority that means they can’t think out of this reality.

Karl Marx has argued that “life determines consciousness”. If this is true then we have a part explanation for what seems to be the irrational behaviour of black against black for nothing.

Your circumstances determine who you are. The sense of inferiority is not just a psychological state. It is produced and reinforced by the material reality.

That is why whites are never amakwerekwere. They are employment creators and investors. They give us life. How could we not think of them as superior?

Let’s take a crude analogy. Hunting dogs catch prey for their owner and then enter into dog fights over the bones thrown to them by the lazy owner. The dogs never revolt against the owner.

Luckily for humans our minds can be aroused to higher consciousness and we can begin to ask questions of our conditions, what Biko has called Black ­Consciousness.

Without this consciousness it doesn’t help even if you have the vote and declare yourself liberated – your mind is still that of a slave.

Your thinking remains that of a happy hunting dog. To live you fight for bones!

first published by city press

According to the London Independent, Clint Eastwood’s Mandela/Rugby World Cup film, Invictus, has sparked controversy in South Africa among blacks because of its “Rainbow Nation” message.

The article quotes Sowetan columnist Andile Mngxitama who says that the majority of blacks in South Africa still live abject poverty today and that the fight against apartheid wasn’t about rainbows or “accommodating” whites.

8 December 2009

Hi,

Look, there is a very big chance you will fail the 2009 Grade 12 examinations. Each year, thousands of black learners who write these exams do not make it and an even bigger number never even get to Grade 11 or 10. A large percentage of those who do pass, do not have good enough results to go to university or simply cannot afford the fees. So there is clearly a problem, yet each year prayer meetings are held and ‘good luck’ messages are sent in the hope that all matric students will pass, but none of these confront the simple reality that black learners in this country are likely to fail. This is a hard truth we can no longer ignore, in the same way that we cannot ignore the fact that the majority of white learners are guaranteed to pass.

But why is this the case? Why is it that white learners can be sure of passing Grade 12 while most blacks who are in township schools are more likely to fail? Is it because white learners are naturally smarter and harder working than black learners? Are the blacks in Model C schools perhaps cleverer than blacks in township schools since they also pass well and have better chances of going to university to further their studies. Or maybe this has nothing to do with individual blacks and individual whites at all, but with how the South African system favours whites to blacks in all situations. But what exactly do we mean by this?

We all know that during apartheid blacks had to study under Bantu Education which was an inferior form of education compared to what whites got. Black people were oppressed in all forms of life and Bantu Education was just one of the many ways of ensuring that they would remain oppressed and work for whites. Under apartheid, black schools had bad text books or none at all, no stationary or libraries. The schools were also overcrowded because the white government simply refused to build more schools for blacks while white classes were small enough for each learner to get the necessary attention they needed. Black schools also didn’t have enough sports facilities or extra mural activities while white schools provided activities such as chess, music lessons, swimming, debating, drama, art classes etc etc. All of these things cost money to provide and the white government put more money into white schools than into black schools as a way of oppressing blacks. And this money they used to build better schools in white areas was mostly from gold, diamond and platinum mines which black people worked on while earning peanuts. In other words, black people worked as slaves on farms and mines so that white kids could get a good education. And the white government was right to look after white learners because it was in power at the time; in fact it would have been foolish not to do so. We must ask ourselves though why these conditions persist even after a black government has been put in power

In the last fifteen years of democracy, nothing much has changed. Township schools are still getting a type of Bantu Education that results in very low pass rates amongst black learners. (Even if this education is given all sorts of names like OBE, it remains Bantu Education for blacks). Most of the teachers in township schools were also educated under apartheid and do not have the necessary skills that white teachers have. And so the reality is that even though we now live at a time when blacks and whites are supposed to get equal opportunities, blacks who are in township schools have little opportunities or skills. For example, a Grade 7 learner in a white school is more likely to have better mathematics and literacy skills than a black learner in matric. So black learners fail Grade 12 because they have been systematically underprepared from Grade 1. Even those who manage to pass and go to university often fail their first year because they don’t have good reading and writing skills. This means that out of all the Grade 12 learners who wrote the 2009 exams, a very small number of black learners have a chance to get good jobs in three to four years time. Many of them will join the unemployed blacks who are trapped in townships and struggling to make ends meet.

But each year the Department of Education promises that things will get better and that they need more time. While young people wait for things to get better the country builds expensive stadiums that we don’t need and the children of our government ministers go to fancy schools where they are guaranteed to pass. In countries where the government is serious about making sure that blacks are not oppressed, education is always made a priority. In Haiti, for example, the pro-black government of President Aristide, reduced illiteracy levels by a large percentage in less that four years. In Burkina Faso too, Thomas Sankara was president for only four years before he was killed but he had managed to put in very good education programmes for the black poor and was very unpopular with the white world for doing this. Both of these countries are much smaller and poorer than South Africa but their leaders were revolutionaries who wanted to see the end of white power.

After this year’s results are announced many individual black learners in rural and township schools who did exceptionally well will be praised for their hard work and dedication. We will be told by the newspapers that all black learners in townships who work hard can also do well. But this is a lie. The majority of white learners pass well whether they work hard or not and black learners also fail either way. If you fail you may blame yourself, see it as a personal failure and be depressed as a result even though you have been set-up to fail by forces beyond your control. Some parents might also think they are personally responsible for their kids’ bad results even though the responsibility lies with our government which continues to make life a breeze for whites and a living hell for blacks.

As the revolutionary leader Che Guevara said, “An uneducated people is easy to deceive”. We must not allow ourselves to be deceived into believing that this is the best that we deserve and demand a better education. The youth who fought the Apartheid government in 1976 didn’t die for things to be like this. Its time to take action. Vuka Darkie!

“PROTESTS everywhere” is the best description of the protest engulfing the country right now. Some say it’s the “winter of discontent”, linked to workers’ demands for salary increases, some blame President Jacob Zuma’s promises to the masses.

These commentators have missed the fact that these protests are qualitatively different from what we know; we are currently facing a general strike from the poor.

The militancy, bold demands, defiance and direct action of these protests are indicative of the fundamental questioning of the post-1994 democratisation project.

The 1994 agreement between the politicians and the people as reflected in the Constitution was long broken by the elites – the poor kept their side of the bargain.

Truth is the past 15 years have seen the reproduction of apartheid development characterised by arrogance of power and enrichment for a few.

The South African Unemployed People’s Movement has shocked the nation with its audacity to loot some chain stores to draw attention to the problems of the poor.

The direction of the action poses a question – is it morally acceptable to starve while there is plenty of food around?

By demanding a R1500 social grant, this movement is asking for a living grant from the national Treasury.

The food looters’ actions may be illegal, but they are certainly not immoral. They expose laws which criminalised the poor and hungry.

Are our laws unjust? If so, as even former president Nelson Mandela said a long time ago, unjust laws can be broken. Poverty and hunger are not only unjust but immoral too. We are not a poor country, no one should starve.

It’s not too late, South Africa must pay the overdue debt it owes the poor, the old white wealth and new black BEE money must be shared by all or we must wait for the coming implosion. This is a mere dress rehearsal of a waiting Armageddon.

The Zuma administration is in a difficult position.

The last electoral victory of the ANC was a poisoned chalice – the poor were serving notice to those who had been eating. Yes, the poor did inscribe messianic powers on Zuma to deliver.

However, if truth be told, Zuma didn’t make any outrageous promises not already made by Mandela and Mbeki and which are in the Constitution of the country.

And these promises are even less than what was expected of freedom.

The Zuma conundrum is this – if the Mbeki/Manuel policies could not deliver the poor from hunger how does the Zuma administration hope to achieve different result from the same policies?

The Polokwane resolutions were a major tinkering on the margins, a gloss over the same deeply flawed cracks.

Actually, the Polokwane resolutions must be seen as a ritual of leadership change not policy change.

This means we are sitting with a political process which can’t give the poor what is rightfully theirs.

In the last issue of New Frank Talk I made a prediction that in the end the Zuma presidency will be left with two options, either to abandon capital through rejecting Mbeki/Manuel policies or to give bullets to the poor. Already hundreds of injuries and three deaths by Zuma’s police’s bullets have been registered in this round of protests.

I also wrote that “Cosatu and the SACP will be available to rationalise the pogroms of government against the poor in the name of the revolution”.

Indeed, the president has already come out against the food looters, calling their actions illegal and anarchic.

As a protester said, “they can’t finish us”. No amount of promises, threats, jail or bullets are going to stop the coming floods of the poor. Only a share of the pie would do. We dare not fail.

- Mngxitama is the publisher of New Frank Talk

this opinion first published by the sowetan

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

support independent black publishing, buy your own copy of new frank talk from, in Cape town - go to Clarke’s Books, in Jozi, Exclusive Books in the Zone Rosebank and Xarra
books newtown, or they can gooi andile mngxitama an email at newfranktalk@gmail.com

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

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.

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

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