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.
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
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)
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
In light of the recent attacks on Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) in Kennedy Road, Durban, the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) at University of Johannesburg/Rhodes University will hold a seminar entitled Democracy under Threat?: What Attacks on Grassroots Activists Mean for our Politics where grassroots activists, scholars and human rights campaigners will discuss threats to free political activity and their implications. For more information, see invitation attached.
Venue: Training Centre, 6th Floor, South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) – 29 Princess of Wales Terrace, cnr York and St Andrews
Streets, Parktown, Johannesburg. See map here: http://www.sahrc.org.za/sahrc_cms/downloads/Map%20of%20Directions.doc
Time: 9am to 3pm
Date: Wednesday, 4 November 2009
RSVP: Johnny Selemani – jaselemani@gmail.com / 073 553 0726
Kate Tissington – kate.tissington@wits.ac.za / 072 220 9125
If you would still like to attend please RSVP as soon as possible for catering/seating purposes.
Speakers:
Steven Friedman, Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD)
Pregs Govender, South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC)
S’bu Zikode, President, Abahlali baseMjondolo
Mnikelo Ndabankulu, Spokesperson, AbM
Zodwa Nsibande, General Secretary of the Youth League, AbM
Michael Neocosmos, Monash University
Richard Pithouse, Politics Department, Rhodes University
Andile Mngxitama, Foundation for Human Rights (FHR)
Noor Nieftagodien, History Department, University of the Witwatersrand
Programme:
9am Introduction: Threats to Democracy at the Grassroots? Steven Friedman, Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD)
10:45 Panel One: The View from the Ground: The Perils of Organising in Kennedy Road - Chair: Pregs Govender (SAHRC)
S’bu Zikode (President, Abahlali baseMjondolo)
Mnikelo Ndabankulu (Spokesperson, AbM)
Zodwa Nsibande (General Secretary of the Youth League, AbM)
12:30 Lunch
1-2:30 Panel Two: Is Democracy at Risk?: Understanding Conflict Between Social Movements and Local Elites - Chair: Michael Neocosmos (Monash University)
Richard Pithouse (Politics Department, Rhodes University)
Andile Mngxitama (Foundation for Human Rights)
Noor Nieftagodien (History Department, University of the Witwatersrand)
The one thing nobody wants to appreciate is that human beings have the capacity to decide what they want to do, when they want to do it. The problem we’ve had is that everybody seems to think that they know how to control people. All I’m saying is that if you are brave enough, and I think that counts a lot - if you’re brave enough - but also, if you sit down and plan properly, you can translate anything into a success.
The point about it is we have hooked ourselves for so long into texts that try to design for us how a revolution occurs. And every revolution that has occurred, the people who won wrote it the way they wanted to write it. Whether it was in the Soviet Union with the Communist Party, they wrote it the way they wanted to write it. It actually might not have happened that way. The ANC has rewritten the whole struggle of this country the way they want it to happen. And the point about it is you go anywhere in the world and you’ll see it like that.
From my point of view it’s good Black Consciousness has been written out of the struggle. Because if it was written in then we’re part of the problem. Now we’re still part of the solution.
interview with strini moodley, 2005, in biko lives!
edited by andile mngxitama, amanda alexander, and nigel gibson
palgrave macmillan
Our heroes
Mandela, Tutu, and the brave Jansen
The dancing Zuma and pipe smoking Mbeki
Hail our heroes and heroines who brought us freedom
Freedom to live in RDP houses,
Freedom to live in shacks
Freedom to perpetually look for employment with a smile
At least we eat pap and meat everyday
We are not Zimbabwe!
They are starving because Mugabe offended the whites
Whites bring pap and meat
Mugabe is stupid!
The moronic moron
Hail our super intelligent leaders who saved us so that we can be:
Waiters and waitresses
Mine workers
Volunteers
Managers without power
Loaded BEE zombies
Voters every five years!
We are free!
Viva Mdiba we thank you for 2010 soccer world cup
Now the whites can come and play soccer and we shall sing shosholoza!
We shall show them all how good and efficient we are
Together as one simunye grooves
Behold the heroes of our celebrated democracy
Our heroes are those who endured shit and piss at UFS
Our hero is the man cleaning the toilet at O.R. Tambo Airport with a smile
Thank you sir, yes mam, smiling happy toilet cleaner
The black woman who sweeps the street at dead of night hail!
The annual gathering of Sociologists under the ageist of the South African Sociological Association (SASA) was held at the university of the Witwatersrand at the end June. For a week discussion raged on issues which pre-occupy sociologists these days. Having been away from the academy for almost 20 years, I was surprised by the general lack of progress in sociological scholarship, granted there are a few new exciting projects, however in the main the terrain remains essentially the same.
Sociology seem to suffer from an acute case of identity crisis. This crisis has to do with the retreat from engaging with the large questions which affect society. In the 80s and 90s attempts by white academics at inter-disciplinary innovations coalesced around the History Workshop project. This project problematically fashioned itself as doing “history from below” and to amplify the “consciousnesses” of the oppressed. However, in reality it was an obscene if not racist attempt at getting inside the heads of natives by white academics. Mike Morris, cautioned then about the dangers of the “myopia of minutia”, he said such scholarship obsessed with “what have you eaten for breakfast this morning” detail, instead showing how everyday life is shaped by larger structural power dynamics.
The love for detail has returned with a vengeance. The new field studies lack sufficient critical theoretical grounding. Secondly, they continues the focus the patronising focus on blacks as objects of study. Consequently, these studies are more anthropology than sociology.
The work done on domestic work, and classes identities amongst black township people come to mind. The work is shot through with unsaid political assumptions. Wittingly or otherwise this work serves to deny the centrality of race as a legitimate area of historical redress. The focus is on exposing how badly black women “exploit” and mistreat black domestic workers. This sociology seeks to expose black on black “exploitation”. In the end we see that blacks are as bad if not worse than whites. This conclusion flies against the know fact that domestic work in white household is generally hell. In fact all domestic work is semi-slavery, why draw parallels and hierarchies? Who wants to be a domestic worker? This sociology re-inscribes colonial anthropology which informed on natives to assist the colonising forces.
The underlying political consequence of this sociology is simple - if blacks also “exploit” other blacks why do they complain about white racism? These studies ultimately serve to deny historical claims for redress by blacks. The same strategies play themselves out in the obsession with new black capital and BEE. Black capital is reviled as a standard practise in the new sociology, however, little is ever said about black capital’s subordinated relation to white capital which remains the main beneficiary of colonialism and apartheid and now well protected by the post 1994 political process.
The rubbishing of race has a long history in South African scholarship. The academy refuses to engage race as a legitimate scholarly pursuit. Little wonder there has never been any serious engagement with black consciousness by the academy, despite the fact that it had a direct impact on a whole generation’s social and political life. The thing about bc is that it exposes the unearned privilege of whiteness, even for the committed white scholar and activists. Class is safe, race risky. Class analysis is abused to hid white privilege. This focus on class at township level is to demonstrate “class contradictions” amongst blacks, to confirm the stereotype that race is not important. This is simply bad sociology.
Imagine the so called class contradictions between amapantsula and ama-ivy? Or cheese boys and an ama-bourgeoisie? For white academics and their young black recruits these are exciting social markers of difference, for blacks a laughable matter of mere style if not fashion. On the other hand the absurdity of studies of domestic work is revealed when young black students animatedly talk about domestic workers as representing workers and their black employers as capitalists. One cant help imagining Karl Marx’s socialist revolution ensuing in match box township four rooms houses and RDP pondokies.
Blackwash, the new blacks only initiative spoke in one of the panels and raised the troubling observations that the university remains a racist construct in service of white supremacy, black vice chancellors notwithstanding. The university we were told, serves to produce the next layer of managers of the system which is anti-black. Blackwash further suggested that useful knowledge is produced outside the university. This seem to me to be legitimate areas of scholarly inquiry, and has major implications for black academics and aspirant black students. Are they merely being groomed to be black colonialists like the African political and business class?
One wonders if in search of a more usable identity would sociology step up to the challenge or will it perpetually remain trapped in “myopia of minutia”. Judging from the unreflective self-righteous demeanour of sociologists which is only rivalled by NGO practitioners, one can’t help think that critical self evaluation is almost impossible from within the discipline itself. For some reason sociologists believe that by the mere fact of doing sociology they contribute to societal good. Evidence suggest something totally different actually. Time seem opotune to do critical sociology on sociology.
