Upright and free: Fanon in South Africa, from Biko to the shackdwellers’ movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo)

Social Identities, November 2008

Grounded in the South African experience, in discussions with Blacks about their everyday experiences of oppression and in attitudes formed from that experience and sharpened by an engagement with Africana philosophers like Fanon, Steve Biko recreated the kind of praxis that Fanon suggested in the conclusion of The Wretched of the Earth, namely that the working out of new concepts cannot come from the intellectual’s head alone but must come from a dialogue with common people. Today a new shackdweller movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo) has emerged in South Africa, which has put post-apartheid society on trial and has resonated with Fanon and Biko’s idea of a decolonized new humanism. At the same time Abahlali’s notion of a person and its critique of reification has been challenged by the spontaneous eruption of xenophobic violence indicating that the stark choice between humanism and barbarism is a most concrete question in the shack settlements. Because Biko’s development of Black consciousness and his engagement of Fanon’s thought remains of historic importance to contemporary South Africa, the paper begins with a focus on the creativity and the contradictory processes by which Fanon’s philosophy of liberation is articulated in Steve Biko’s conception of Black consciousness. From this starting point the discussion shifts from Biko’s critique of white liberalism to the dialectics of contemporary neoliberal ‘postcolonial’ reality. What remains central, however, are the creative and contradictory processes that a re-engagement with Fanon will create. In other words, since it is ‘the live subject that unites theory and reality’, the issue becomes how, in a new historic moment, a philosophy born of struggle makes itself heard.

Concept note: Willing seller – Willing buyer
Draft 1
June 2006

In the context of South Africa's failing land reform programme, the Willing seller – Willing buyer policy was problematic, and remains so1. It was/is one representation of how post-apartheid state policy structured and expressed power relations – in favour of market stability and capitalist relations over deep structural transformation in an overarching way; and specifically of (largely white) existing land owners over the rightful expectations the poor majority.

It is also important to recognise how it helped structure the poor too – in the name of a 'demand-led' policy approach, claimants had to identify and constitute themselves as some sort of entrepreneurial, legalistic and conforming unit entirely dependent on plodding through the bureaucratic processes decreed by the state systems.

Click here to read this article in Italiano.

Politics Beyond the State

by Brother Filippo Mondini

Michael Neocosmos argues that there is a politics beyond the state and that, within this form of politics, lies the true and trustworthy alternative to the status quo. This 'politics beyond the state' is carried out by active citizens who think, and who engage themselves in politics as militants rather than as politicians. In Neocosmos' words, citizenship, from an emancipatory perspective, “is not about subjects bearing rights conferred by the state, as in human rights discourse, but rather about people who think becoming agents through their engagement in politics as militants/activists and not politicians”.