Nigel C. Gibson

Transition From Apartheid

The end of apartheid in South Africa has often been considered a miracle as well as a beacon of hope for the rest of the continent. This article takes a more sober view. Despite the massive changes toward a democratic and open society, black South Africans have not won social and economic justice. The poor are still black and the rich predominantly white. This limited democracy, that is, judged simply in terms of voting in democratic elections, mirrors the thesis put forward in the transition studies literature. Drawing on ideas from Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon, I argue that the South African case offers an addendum to transition studies highlighting how ideology and hegemony are critical to the processes of actively creating a legitimate polity. I argue that a limited transition was far from assured. It was neither determined by domestic capital nor from such forces as the IMF and World Bank but involved strategic homegrown choices including an ideological capitulation to neoliberal policies and a marginalization of more radical projects advanced by the South African left.

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

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 intellectuals 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 Bikos idea of a decolonized new humanism. At the same time Abahlalis 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 Bikos development of Black consciousness and his engagement of Fanons thought remains of historic importance to contemporary South Africa, the paper begins with a focus on the creativity and the contradictory processes by which Fanons philosophy of liberation is articulated in Steve Bikos conception of Black consciousness. From this starting point the discussion shifts from Bikos critique of white liberalism to the dialectics of contemporary neoliberal ‘postcolonial’ reality. What remains central, however, are the creative and contradictory processes that a reengagement 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.

Africa and Globalization: Marginalization and Resistance:

This chapter is a contribution to the ongoing debate about Africa and globalization and the interrelated issues of capitalism, marginalization, representation, and political leadership. Problematizing the discourse of Africa as “diseased” and “hapless,” the World Banks structural adjustment “cure-all” is presented as being much worse than the “disease” that preceded it. Proposing a critical ethics of globalization—which highlights the gap between globalizationss miraculous, self-reflective images and the miserable conditions it creates—there is an attempt to uncover agents of change on the African continent. Social movements such as those fighting for water and electricity in Soweto, for land in Kenya, or against environmental destruction by oil companies in the Niger delta raise questions about the viability of globalization. Often led by women, these movements not only challenge the “male deal” that defines national governments and multinational corporations, but also call for a revaluation of subsistence economies and local democratic polities as alternatives to globalization. In short, this chapter offers important conceptual, as well as practical, challenges to globalization, indeed to the very nature of politics itself.

Poor People’s Movements in South Africa - The Anti-Eviction Campaign in Mandela Park A Critical Discussion

Now that the dust has settled on the 10 year anniversary celebrations marking the end of apartheid, it is important to focus attention on the new social movements of ‘the poors’ that have emerged as a result of the African National Congress’ (ANC) embrace of neo-liberal, free market, economic policies. Apartheid South Africa was one of the most – if not the most – economically unequal nations in the world, yet 10 years after its demise little has changed. In fact, the rich have got rich and the poor have got poorer. It is estimated that since the end of apartheid there have been 1.5 million lost jobs, 10 million people have been disconnected from water and electricity, and two million people have been evicted from their homes. Today the unemployment rate is around 50 per cent. The ANC’s shift from the redistributive hopes of the Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP) to the trickle down market liberalization of the Growth and Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) occured in 1996. The privatization and commercialization of municipal services, that it encouraged, has deprived millions of people from access to healthcare, housing, electricity and water. Increasing the size of it parliamentary majority in the 1999 election, the ANC seemed untouchable and oppositional voices were silenced and disoriented. Yet it was exactly at this moment that the local movements which had emerged around basic needs began be heard, giving voice to the cost of the Government’s ‘homegrown’ structural adjustment. Since then, community-based movements have sprung up across the country, challenging the increasing costs of basic necessities, such as rent, water and electricity. These are new movements but they trace their lineage to the organization of township ‘civics’ that were some of the most sustained and militant forces against late apartheid. Life after apartheid is bittersweet. On the one hand, though the PassLaws, Group Areas and the military presence in the townships have ended, people’s experience of eviction, ‘relocation’, violence and police brutality is painfully akin to that experienced during apartheid. On the other hand, and it is not perhaps without some irony, poor people in South Africa are fighting to remain in the township housing built during apartheid and the squatter camps

The specter of Fanon: the student movements and the rationality of revolt in South Africa*

ABSTRACT The largest student revolt since Soweto 1976, the student movements of 2015, were historic, challenging the lack of serious reform in the university systems and bringing to the fore the question of decolonization. Named ‘the Fanonian moment,’ it was the latest expression of the disillusion of rainbow politics. Marked by the Marikana massacre and the death of Nelson Mandela, Fanon’s name is almost as popular as Steve Biko’s and his name is often referenced in newspaper articles. While Fanon’s critique of post-apartheid has been well rehearsed in South Africa, this paper considers ‘the Fanonian Moment’ and the current popularity of Fanon as well as Steve Biko’s idea of Black consciousness as critical elements of decolonial liberation. With a focus on the student movements, the paper suggests that Fanon’s thought, and his notion of the rationality of revolt, is especially alive in intentional spaces where decolonization and liberation are linked with everyday questions of movement democracy and organization.

Relative Opacity: A New Translation of Fanon's Wretched of the Earth—Mission Betrayed or Fulfilled?

Frantz Fanons revolutionary text The Wretched of the Earth has had a major impact on English-speaking readers since it first appeared in translation in 1963. This article charts the shifting contextualization of the book as it has framed subsequent editions, culminating in an exploration of the most recent translation by Richard Philcox. By contrasting this translation of the book with previous versions, and also by critically examining the new forward by Homi K. Bhabha, the author explores Fanons relevance to the current social and political world. He finds continued relevance for The Wretched in Fanons quest to get beyond the manicheanism that characterises the colonial and anti-colonial periods as well as the contemporary rhetoric of Bush and Bin Laden. The author argues that our engagement with Fanon should begin from his most critical insights into the postcolonial period and in his critique of the national bourgeoisie and postcolonial petit bourgeoisie, which is grounded in an engagement with Fanon as a living thinker.

Tunis Connections: Concatenations and Missed Opportunities, Bond, Fanon, Foucault:

Reflecting on Contested Terrains and Constructed Categories: Contemporary Africa in Focus, a book George Bond and I edited during our work at the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University in the late 1990s, this paper considers the notion of contested terrains, that for George Bond was played out in the scholarship of African studies, in the daily encounters which he had with his colleagues, and in his Zambian research. Bond understood these contestations as continuously operating on and across and often taking place below the surface or at the margins of insititutions. This paper emerged in response to Bond’s invitation to speak about Fanon’s psychiatry writings and Fanon’s critique of sociotherapy on a panel he was organizing at the American Anthropological Association in 2014 (AAA). After he died, the focus shifted to include Bond alongside Fanon and Foucault underscoring the continued need for dialog on the work of three intellectuals—African-American, African Caribbean, and French. The connections and misconnections between Fanon and Foucault is in part the discussion about contested terrains and the willfulness of constructed categories. Indeed, intellectual genealogies, the unknown connections as well as dividing lines was something that interested Bond, the anthrolopologist of the politics of knowledge.