tag:theconversation.com,2011:/uk/topics/black-consciousness-20044/articles
Black Consciousness – The Conversation
2023-05-25T12:27:22Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/206073
2023-05-25T12:27:22Z
2023-05-25T12:27:22Z
NFL icon and social activist Jim Brown leaves a complicated legacy
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528099/original/file-20230524-30-gv5a9o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=628%2C218%2C2206%2C2223&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Jim Brown takes a break during a 1963 Cleveland Browns football game.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/jim-brown-close-up-on-bench-news-photo/515449734?adppopup=true">Bettmann/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Throughout his <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/may/20/jim-brown-remembrance-complex-legacy">celebrated life</a>, Jim Brown was both praised for <a href="https://apnews.com/article/jim-brown-activist-actor-nfl-ali-jabbar-e1f179ce07d940d418062ffc01daac97">his community activism</a> and vilified for his <a href="https://www.cleveland.com/news/2023/05/jim-browns-legacy-clouded-by-allegations-of-domestic-violence.html">abuse of women</a>. </p>
<p>But no one questions his incredible ability on the professional football field or his subsequent career in Hollywood during the racially tumultuous 1960s as one of the movie industry’s few Black male stars. </p>
<p>Considered by some sports analysts as the <a href="https://bleacherreport.com/articles/157718-the-undisputed-greatest-jim-brown">best football player</a> in the history of the game, Brown became a <a href="https://www.profootballhof.com/players/jim-brown/">Hall of Fame</a> running back for the Cleveland Browns and used his celebrity status to <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-at-jim-browns-life-and-legacy-as-a-football-great-and-activist">fight for equal rights</a> at a time when America’s racial divide was erupting throughout the Deep South.</p>
<p>From his <a href="https://www.nfl.com/videos/a-football-life-how-jim-brown-dealt-with-racial-discrimination-63446">fight against racial discrimination</a> in the 1950s to his <a href="https://www.nydailynews.com/sports/football/nfl-legend-jim-brown-teaches-25-year-old-program-amer-i-can-foundation-article-1.972923">development of programs</a> to end gang violence in the 1980s, Brown set an early standard for being more than just a gifted athlete.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://lgst.wharton.upenn.edu/profile/shrop/">a scholar of African American Studies</a>, it’s my belief that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/sports/football/jim-brown-dead.html">Brown’s death on May 19, 2023,</a> at the age of 87 renews questions about the role that modern-day athletes could and should have on ongoing political and social debates. </p>
<h2>Brown’s first public act of activism</h2>
<p>Unlike later Black superstars such as <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/10/what-o-j-simpson-means-to-me/497570/">O.J. Simpson</a>, <a href="https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/29130478/michael-jordan-stands-firm-republicans-buy-sneakers-too-quote-says-was-made-jest">Michael Jordan</a> and <a href="https://apnews.com/article/458b7710858579281e0f1b73be0da618">Tiger Woods</a>, Brown was unafraid of potential financial losses and stood up for himself and, by extension, every Black man. </p>
<p>That boldness became clear when Brown <a href="https://www.daytondailynews.com/sports/brown-never-lamented-decision-to-retire-from-football-at-young-age/7EYPBMCBXNDYJLAJUSRHSDEYGA/">walked away from football</a> in 1966 to pursue another career as an actor in Hollywood, a decision prompted in part by the actions of Browns owner Art Modell. </p>
<p>Incensed that <a href="https://theathletic.com/4538174/2023/05/22/jim-brown-retirement-browns-super-bowl/">Brown was in England</a> filming the movie “Dirty Dozen” instead of practicing with the team, <a href="https://andscape.com/features/jim-brown-retires-while-on-the-set-of-the-dirty-dozen/">Modell threatened</a> to issue Brown daily fines of $100 until he returned. </p>
<p>Brown’s response was unequivocal. </p>
<p>In a letter to Modell, Brown wrote: “You must realize that both of us are men and that my manhood is just as important to me as yours is to you.” </p>
<p>His retirement in July 1966 from football was shocking.</p>
<p>As a young man who wanted to play professional football myself, I couldn’t understand why Brown walked away from the sport, voluntarily, at the age of 30 years old and at the peak of his career. </p>
<p>Little did I know at the time that <a href="https://andscape.com/features/jim-brown-retires-while-on-the-set-of-the-dirty-dozen/">his sudden retirement</a> was a form of activism to be himself.</p>
<p>Brown said as much in his letter to Modell. </p>
<p>“This decision is final,” <a href="https://www.profootballrumors.com/2018/07/jim-brown-retires-browns-nfl">Brown wrote</a>, “and is made only because of the future that I desire for myself, my family and, if not to sound corny, my race.” </p>
<p>I learned about Brown’s activism after I began to study sports as <a href="https://www.kennethshropshire.com/">a scholar</a> and came to realize how unique Brown was at the time and in comparison to other modern-day superstars who rarely jeopardize their livelihoods to protest racial inequality. </p>
<h2>The Cleveland Summit</h2>
<p>In June 1967, a year after his retirement, Brown organized what has come to be known as <a href="https://andscape.com/features/the-cleveland-summit-muhammad-ali/">the Cleveland Summit</a>, and it centered around Muhammad Ali and his refusal on religious grounds to join the U.S. military and fight in the Vietnam War.</p>
<p>For his refusal, Ali <a href="https://www.pbs.org/video/muhammad-ali-refuses-vietnam-war-draft-gqtvtv/">was stripped of his boxing titles</a> and faced a fine of $10,000 and a five-year prison sentence. But he still rejected the <a href="https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/muhammad-alis-draft-controversy/">government’s offer</a> to restrict his military activity to only boosting the morale of U.S. troops by boxing in sparring matches on military bases and not serve combat duty.</p>
<p>To show Ali support and convince him to accept the government’s offer, Brown gathered a meeting of the greatest Black athletes of the day and several politicians, including <a href="https://menofchange.si.edu/exhibit/men-of-change/ali/">Bill Russell</a>, Lew Alcindor – later known as <a href="https://www.news-journalonline.com/story/sports/2016/06/09/alis-passing-takes-jim-brown-abdul-jabbar-down-memory-lane/27955651007/">Kareem Abdul-Jabbar</a> – <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dc-sports-bog/wp/2016/06/07/a-redskins-hall-of-famer-once-tried-to-convince-muhammad-ali-to-serve-in-the-military/">Bobby Mitchell</a>, <a href="https://www.packersnews.com/story/sports/nfl/packers/dougherty/2017/02/17/dougherty-willie-davis-stood-up-ali/97995320/">Willie Davis</a> and then-<a href="https://teachingcleveland.org/category/carl-stokes-civil-rights-1960s/clevelands-muhammad-ali-summit-45-years-later/">Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A group of professional Black athletes and politicians are gathered together during a meeting." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527373/original/file-20230521-125283-55l4xo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527373/original/file-20230521-125283-55l4xo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527373/original/file-20230521-125283-55l4xo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527373/original/file-20230521-125283-55l4xo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527373/original/file-20230521-125283-55l4xo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527373/original/file-20230521-125283-55l4xo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527373/original/file-20230521-125283-55l4xo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jim Brown, seated, second from right, helped organize other professional athletes and politicians in 1967 to talk about Muhammad Ali’s refusal to fight in the Vietnam War.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/nations-top-negro-athletes-gathered-for-a-meeting-at-the-news-photo/517262256?adppopup=true">Bettmann/GettyImages</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>“I felt with Ali taking the position he was taking, and with him losing the crown, and with the government coming at him with everything they had, that we as a body of prominent athletes could get the truth and stand behind Ali and give him the necessary support,” Brown told the <a href="https://www.cleveland.com/sports/2012/06/gathering_of_stars.html">(Cleveland) Plain Dealer in 2012</a>.</p>
<p>In my view, not before, and certainly not since then, has there ever been a more significant gathering of athletes. Though the group <a href="https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/2022/0429/My-conscience-won-t-let-me-What-Muhammad-Ali-teaches-us-today">failed to convince Ali</a> to go against his religious beliefs, the meeting sent a powerful message that Black men were united and unafraid to support a Black man deemed an outcast by the U.S. government. Ali was later sent to prison.</p>
<p>“Everybody had taken a great risk at losing everything by meeting with him,” Brown <a href="https://www.news-journalonline.com/story/sports/2016/06/09/alis-passing-takes-jim-brown-abdul-jabbar-down-memory-lane/27955651007/">told The Associated Press in 2016</a>. “But what was so real was that we met for about five hours and Ali was asked every question that you could ask a person.”</p>
<p>Based on Ali’s genuine sincerity about his religious beliefs, Brown said the men became “a group of one” and decided “to back him all the way.”</p>
<h2>A flawed presence</h2>
<p>As a sports and entertainment attorney in Los Angeles, I often saw Brown at galas, some held at his home. Several years ago, I spent a day with him at <a href="https://amer-i-cancommunity.partners/about-amer-i-can/">Amer-I-can</a>, the organization that he founded in the 1980s that is focused on gang members and formerly incarcerated men and women. </p>
<p>In both of those settings, Brown had universal respect, and to say he had presence does not do him justice.</p>
<p>Part of that respect was due to Brown’s public admission that he had flaws. </p>
<p>In his <a href="https://www.kensingtonbooks.com/9780806539270/out-of-bounds/">1989 book</a> “Out of Bounds,” he wrote regarding one domestic abuse case he was involved in: “The toughest thing I did to her was slap her. I have also slapped other women. … I don’t think any man should slap a woman.”</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A black man with a grey beard wears a blue jacket as he stands in front of photographers." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527370/original/file-20230521-127159-zcvt5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527370/original/file-20230521-127159-zcvt5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527370/original/file-20230521-127159-zcvt5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527370/original/file-20230521-127159-zcvt5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527370/original/file-20230521-127159-zcvt5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527370/original/file-20230521-127159-zcvt5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527370/original/file-20230521-127159-zcvt5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jim Brown attends a gala in Manhattan Beach, Calif., on July 13, 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/cleveland-browns-full-back-nfl-champion-and-actor-jim-brown-news-photo/814424334?adppopup=true">Greg Doherty/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Clearly, some of Brown’s flaws were inexcusable. But for me, Brown offered a rare glimpse of a proud Black man who was willing to give up everything in order to stay true to his own principles. </p>
<p>The last time I saw Brown was during the 2023 Super Bowl festivities in Phoenix. Despite his frailty, crowded rooms still parted to make space for him.</p>
<p>No one invaded Jim Brown’s space without permission.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206073/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kenneth L. Shropshire does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The death of NFL great and Hollywood star Jim Brown renews questions about the role of modern-day athletes in political and social issues.
Kenneth L. Shropshire, Professor Emeritus of Legal Studies and Business Ethics; Faculty Director, Wharton Coalition for Equity & Opportunity, University of Pennsylvania
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/97619
2021-12-26T07:13:40Z
2021-12-26T07:13:40Z
Archbishop Desmond Tutu: father of South Africa’s ‘rainbow nation’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/304935/original/file-20191203-67028-uqkr65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Archbishop Desmond Tutu</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source"> Epa/Ian Langsdon</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu has <a href="https://ewn.co.za/2021/12/26/breaking-news-archbishop-desmond-tutu-passes-away">died</a> at the age of 90. </p>
<p>Archbishop Tutu earned the respect and love of millions of South Africans and the world. He carved out a permanent place in their hearts and minds, becoming known affectionately as “The Arch”. </p>
<p>When South Africans woke up on the morning of 7 April, 2017 to protest against then President Jacob Zuma’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/31/world/africa/south-africa-pravin-gordhan-jacob-zuma.html">removal </a> of the respected Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/archbishop-emeritus-desmond-mpilo-tutu">Archbishop Tutu</a> left his Hermanus retirement home to join the protests. He was 86 years old at the time, and his health was frail. But protest was in his blood. In his view, no government was legitimate unless it represented all its people well.</p>
<p>There was still that sharpness in his words when <a href="http://ewn.co.za/2017/04/07/tutu-makes-rare-appearance-to-support-anti-zuma-march">he said that</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>We will pray for the downfall of a government that misrepresents us.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These words echoed his stance of ethical and moral integrity as well as human dignity. It is on these principles that he had fought valiantly against the system of apartheid and became, as the Desmond Tutu Foundation rightly <a href="http://www.tutufoundationusa.org/mission-vision/">affirms</a>, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>an outspoken defender of human rights and campaigner for the oppressed. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>But <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/archbishop-emeritus-desmond-mpilo-tutu">Archbishop Tutu</a> didn’t stop his fight for human rights once apartheid came to a formal end in 1994. He continued to speak critically against politicians who abused their power. He also added his weight to various causes, including HIV/AIDS, poverty, racism, homophobia and transphobia. </p>
<p>His fight for human rights wasn’t limited to South Africa. Through his <a href="http://www.tutufoundationusa.org/mission-vision/">peace foundation</a>, which he formed in 2015, he extended his vision for a peaceful world “in which everyone values human dignity and our interconnectedness”.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301976/original/file-20191115-66937-1e6zrq4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301976/original/file-20191115-66937-1e6zrq4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301976/original/file-20191115-66937-1e6zrq4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301976/original/file-20191115-66937-1e6zrq4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301976/original/file-20191115-66937-1e6zrq4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301976/original/file-20191115-66937-1e6zrq4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301976/original/file-20191115-66937-1e6zrq4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Archbishop Tutu with the Dalai Lama at the Tibetan Children’s Village school in Dharamsala, in 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EFE-EPA/Sanjay Baid</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He also became relentless in his support for the Dalai Lama, whom he considered his best friend. He condemned the South African government for refusing the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader a visa to deliver the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/archbishop-emeritus-mpilo-desmond-tutu">“Desmond Tutu International Peace Lecture”</a> <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/southafrica/8807080/Tutu-South-African-government-is-worse-than-apartheid-after-Dalai-Lama-visa-row.html">in 2011</a>. </p>
<h2>Early years</h2>
<p>Archbishop Tutu came from humble beginnings. Born on 7 October, 1931 in Klerksdorp, in the North West Province of South Africa where his father, Zachariah was a headmaster of a high school. His mother, Aletha Matlare, was a domestic worker.</p>
<p>One of the most influential figures in his early years was <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/father-trevor-huddleston">Father Trevor Huddleston</a>, a fierce campaigner against apartheid. Their friendship led to the young Tutu being introduced into the Anglican Church. </p>
<p>After completing his education he had a brief stint teaching English and History at Madibane High School in Soweto; and then at Krugersdorp High School , west of Johannesburg; where his father was a headmaster. It was here that he met his future wife, Nomalizo Leah Shenxane. </p>
<p>It is interesting that he agreed to a Roman Catholic wedding ceremony, although he was Anglican. This ecumenical act at the very early stage in his life gives us a hint of his commitment to ecumenical work in later years. </p>
<p>He quit teaching in the wake of the introduction of the inferior <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/bantu-education-and-racist-compartmentalizing-education">“Bantu education”</a> for black people in 1953. Under the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/bantu-education-act-act-no-47-1953">Bantu Education Act, 1953</a>, the education of the native African population was limited to producing an unskilled work force. </p>
<p>In 1955 Tutu entered the service of the church as a sub-deacon. He got married the same year. He enrolled for theological education in 1958 and, after completing his studies, was ordained as a deacon of Saint Mary’s Cathedral in Johannesburg in 1960, and became its first black dean in 1975. </p>
<p>In 1962 he went to London to pursue further theological education with funding from the World Council of Churches. He earned a Master of Theology degree, and after serving in various parishes in London, returned to South Africa in 1966 <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/archbishop-emeritus-mpilo-desmond-tutu">to teach</a> at the Federal Theological Seminary at Alice, Eastern Cape. </p>
<p>One of the lesser known facts is that he had special interest in the study of Islam. He had wanted to pursue this in his doctoral studies, but this was not to be. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301983/original/file-20191115-66957-7p8h3n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301983/original/file-20191115-66957-7p8h3n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301983/original/file-20191115-66957-7p8h3n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301983/original/file-20191115-66957-7p8h3n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301983/original/file-20191115-66957-7p8h3n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301983/original/file-20191115-66957-7p8h3n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301983/original/file-20191115-66957-7p8h3n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and his wife Tutu at the Youth Health Festival in Cape Town in 2016.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EFE-EPA/Nic Bothma</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The activities he was involved in in the early 1970s were to lay the foundation for his political struggle against apartheid. These included teaching in Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland and, thereafter, a posting to London as the <a href="https://www.tutu.org.za/founders-journey/">Associate Director for Africa</a> at the Theological Education Fund, and his exposure to <a href="http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0259-94222016000100033">Black Theology</a>. He also visited many African countries in the early 1970s. </p>
<p>He eventually returned to Johannesburg as the dean of Johannesburg and the rector of St. Mary’s Anglican Parish in 1976. </p>
<h2>Political activism</h2>
<p>It was at St Mary’s that Tutu first confronted the then apartheid Prime Minister John Vorster, writing him <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/letter-desmond-tutu-p-w-botha-letter-pretoria">a letter</a> in 1976 decrying the deplorable state in which black people had to live. </p>
<p>On 16 June <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising">Soweto went up in flames</a>, when black high school pupils protested against the forced use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction, and were mowed down by apartheid police.</p>
<p>Bishop Tutu was thrust deeper and deeper into the struggle. He delivered one of his most passionate and fiery orations <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/bikos-imprisonment-death-and-aftermath">following the death in detention</a> of the black consciousness leader, Steve Biko in 1977.</p>
<p>His role as the <a href="http://sacc.org.za/history/">General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches</a>, and later as the rector of St. Augustine’s Church in Orlando West in Soweto, saw him become an ardent critic of the most egregious aspects of apartheid. This included the forced removals of black people from urban areas deemed to be white areas. </p>
<h2>A target</h2>
<p>With his growing political activism in the 1980s, the Arch became a target of the apartheid government’s full scale victimisation and faced death threats as well as bomb scares. In March 1980 <a href="https://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/04/16/South-Africa-revokes-bishops-passport/8490356245200/">his passport was revoked</a>. After much international outcry and intervention, he was given a “limited travel document” two years later to travel overseas.</p>
<p>His work was recognised globally, and he was awarded <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1984/summary/">Nobel Prize for Peace</a> in 1984 for being a unifying leader in the campaign to resolve the problem of apartheid in South Africa. </p>
<p>He went on to receive more distinguished awards. He became the Bishop of Johannesburg in 1984, and the Archbishop of Cape Town <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/archbishop-emeritus-mpilo-desmond-tutu">in 1986</a>. In the following four years leading up to the release of Nelson Mandela after 27 years in prison, the Arch had his work cut out for him. This involved campaigning for international pressure to be brought on the apartheid through sanctions.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301974/original/file-20191115-66932-1kefr5i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301974/original/file-20191115-66932-1kefr5i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301974/original/file-20191115-66932-1kefr5i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301974/original/file-20191115-66932-1kefr5i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301974/original/file-20191115-66932-1kefr5i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1081&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301974/original/file-20191115-66932-1kefr5i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1081&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301974/original/file-20191115-66932-1kefr5i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1081&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Archbishop Tutu received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from US President Obama in 2009.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EFE-EPA/Shawn Thew</span></span>
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<h2>Democracy years</h2>
<p>After 1994, he headed the <a href="http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/">Truth and Reconciliation Commission</a>. Its primary goal was to afford those who committed human rights abuses – for or against apartheid – the opportunity to come clean, offer legal amnesty to deserving ones, and to enable the perpetrators to make amends to their victims. </p>
<p>Two greatest moments in his personal life took his theological outlook beyond the confines of the Church. One was when his daughter Mpho declared she was gay and the church refused her same sex marriage. The Arch <a href="http://www.capetownmagazine.com/whats-the-deal-with/desmond-tutu/125_22_17533">proclaimed</a> </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn’t worship that God. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The second was when he declared his <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/07/archbishop-desmond-tutu-asks-for-the-right-to-an-assisted-death/">preference for assisted death</a>.</p>
<p>South Africa is blessed to have had such a brave and courageous man as The Arch, who truly symbolised the idea of the country as a <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-10734471">“rainbow nation” </a>. South Africa will feel the loss of the moral direction of this brave soldier of God for generations to come. <em>Hamba kahle</em> (go well) Arch.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/97619/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>P. Pratap Kumar receives funding from the National Research Foundation of South Africa. </span></em></p>
Archbishop Desmond Tutu didn’t stop his fight for human rights once apartheid came to a formal end in 1994. He continued to speak critically against politicians who abused their power.
P. Pratap Kumar, Emeritus Professor, School of Religion, Philosophy and Classics, University of KwaZulu-Natal
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/169991
2021-10-18T14:16:29Z
2021-10-18T14:16:29Z
How South African editor Aggrey Klaaste put himself on the line with his contrarian idea
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/426982/original/file-20211018-15-u4rmbf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Aggrey Klaaste, right, used the Sowetan newspaper to drive his Nation-building campaign. He is seen here with John Mabatho, the newspaper's production manager.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul Velasco © Arena Holdings</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1988, Aggrey Klaaste <a href="https://www.omt.org.za/history/some-omt-beneficiaries/aggrey-klaaste/">became the editor of Sowetan</a> and launched a project to intervene in the fraught political situation in South Africa. The Sowetan was the foremost daily newspaper for black South Africans, a successor to the Post and <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/black-wednesday-banning-19-black-consciousness-movement-organisations">The World</a>, both banned by the apartheid state. </p>
<p>It was a tumultuous time in South Africa, with state persecution and efforts to quell protest and opposition reaching their zenith. Amid ongoing protest against the apartheid state, the government had declared <a href="https://www.saha.org.za/ecc25/ecc_under_a_state_of_emergency.htm">two states of emergency</a>. In addition, political groups within the country were at war with one another. </p>
<p>Klaaste was distressed by what he saw happening in black communities, where residents faced state terror and political violence. As a result, he sought to rebuild local community organisations and to restore values such as good citizenship, self-help and neighbourly conduct. On taking up the editor’s mantle, he began outlining his “big idea” – <a href="https://www.joburg.org.za/play_/Pages/Play%20in%20Joburg/Joburg%20Vibe/links/people%20of%20the%20city/Links/Aggrey-Klaaste---still-building-the-nation.aspx">nation-building</a>. Its central idea was to unite black South Africans behind community improvement and engagement. He intended the newspaper to be a key driver of the project.</p>
<p>What Klaaste was doing was providing a forum for citizenship at a time when black South Africans were marginalised. </p>
<p>Klaaste immediately ran into strong headwinds – inside the newsroom and outside it.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/public-trust-in-the-media-is-at-a-new-low-a-radical-rethink-of-journalism-is-needed-155257">Public trust in the media is at a new low: a radical rethink of journalism is needed</a>
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<p>Most of the journalists who worked for him supported the <a href="https://oxfordre.com/africanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277734-e-83">Black Consciousness Movement</a>. The movement brought together the country’s oppressed people to collectively fight against racial oppression. They strenuously opposed nation-building, as they saw it as collaborating with the apartheid system.</p>
<p>One of the arguments encountered was that it wasn’t the time to talk about nation-building. Apartheid needed to be torn down first. A former Sowetan journalist remembers:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We actually confronted and fought Klaaste … saying, you know, ‘liberation now’ and good stuff later. But he said, ‘No, no, no – it’s got to go in parallel.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Outside the newsroom, the union coalitions and mass anti-apartheid movements were advocating civil disobedience to bring the country to its knees, a far cry from Klaaste’s nation-building.</p>
<p>Klaaste persisted. He began to explore nation-building in his weekly column, “On the Line”. But the concept of nation-building presented a challenge. It was a vague ideal that needed to be fleshed out. So, at first, he floated the concept without too many details.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am preparing the ground, laying the bed so to speak for the seed of an idea I hope to be planting in the not too long future. Frankly, the idea excites and exhilarates me as it appears to have breath-taking possibilities.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>The birth of an idea</h2>
<p>Klaaste suggested that black South Africans were in a weak position, despite being in the majority, and that the weakness stemmed from a lack of unity, the lack of a “central idea” to motivate all the various movements. </p>
<p>Nation-building could be that idea.</p>
<p>His column inaugurated a conversation with his readers about nation-building. He also circulated them before publication to Sowetan journalists for critique. The idea began to evolve through these processes. His column became the philosophical heart of the nation-building campaign that Sowetan was establishing, the space where the idea was debated and developed.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/new-threats-to-media-freedom-come-from-unexpected-directions-148265">New threats to media freedom come from unexpected directions</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>At first, Klaaste maintained an uncertain and questioning position, reporting on reactions to the idea. He shared the positive responses and the negative. He tended to answer criticism by stressing the need to rebuild community, to work for a future.</p>
<p>However, soon he and his colleague <a href="https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1990-07-09-9007070127-story.html">Sam Mabe</a> began engaging vigorously with opposing views. Klaaste was always respectful and constructive in his engagements. He felt strongly that people with differing political positions should talk to each other. He demonstrated such bridge-building through his writing.</p>
<p>One column explicitly modelled the “for and against” of his idea. In early 1989, he put his nation-building approach side by side with its main opposition, the “liberation first” position, writing the column as a discussion between two friends. His interlocutor is unnamed, but could have been any one of a number of Sowetan senior colleagues or anti-apartheid activists. He is described by Klaaste as “a dear friend of mine”, “who has in various courageous, responsible ways, showed me what it means to be committed to the struggle”.</p>
<p>Klaaste “hears” the friend’s argument in the column, honouring both the speaker and his position:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He has convinced me in his quite persuasive way that if the decision for the total revolution is taken in his unselfish totally responsible way, you must be a fool not to agree with him … He has taught me that perhaps we are almost fated to pay the heaviest of prices for our mistakes…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In response, Klaaste convinces his friend to let him give nation-building a shot.</p>
<p>The column described not so much an argument, but an ongoing process of dialogue, in which everyone’s point of view was heard.</p>
<p>Klaaste and Mabe also began fleshing out nation-building in relation to other philosophies. Early on, <em>ubuntu</em> (humanness) is introduced as a foundational concept. The southern African word is often used to encapsulate sub-Saharan moral ideals, expressed in the maxim</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/what-archbishop-tutus-ubuntu-credo-teaches-the-world-about-justice-and-harmony-84730">a person is a person through other people</a>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Klaaste argued that nation-building was black South Africans taking moral leadership in creating a future for the entire country, based on the practice of <em>ubuntu</em>, which he connected to a range of black political leaders. Among them were <a href="https://theconversation.com/sobukwes-pan-africanist-dream-an-elusive-idea-that-refuses-to-die-52601">Robert Sobukwe</a>, founder of the Pan Africanist Congress, and Nelson Mandela.</p>
<p>Klaaste didn’t nail nation-building to any political flag, but as “the nation’s forum to sort out divisiveness”. He used the example of a family, in which each member has different political affiliations: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I belong to an extended family … we have leanings towards a whole range of diverse and ideological planks. We never fight over this … Nation Building is about the formation of such filial links.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation-building thus provided a broad church for the variety of politics in black communities. The campaign also explicitly drew on one aspect of Black Consciousness, active self-reliance, to argue that black communities must take charge of their own empowerment.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/journalism-makes-blunders-but-still-feeds-democracy-an-insiders-view-146364">Journalism makes blunders but still feeds democracy: an insider's view</a>
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<p>By 1989, a year into nation-building, the campaign was firmly established at the newspaper. In 1989, too, the apartheid government began talks with the ANC. These were to culminate in a democratic dispensation for South Africa.</p>
<p>This made nation-building highly relevant to the new era of creating inclusive citizenship.</p>
<p><em>This article is an edited extract from a chapter in the <a href="https://witspress.co.za/catalogue/public-intellectuals-in-south-africa/">book</a> Public Intellectuals in South Africa: Critical Voices from the Past, edited by Chris Broodryk and published by <a href="https://witspress.co.za/">Wits University Press</a></em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/169991/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lesley Cowling does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Klaaste was distressed by what was happening in black communities, where residents faced state terror and political violence. He sought to restore values such as self-help and neighbourly conduct.
Lesley Cowling, Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/148265
2020-10-16T13:34:56Z
2020-10-16T13:34:56Z
New threats to media freedom come from unexpected directions
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363914/original/file-20201016-19-jqz8wf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Percy Qoboza, editor of The World, second from left, being arrested by apartheid police following the banning of the newspaper in 1977.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Arena Holdings Archives </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Media Freedom Day in South Africa marks the anniversary of a brutal crackdown by the apartheid state on the media and the <a href="https://theconversation.com/black-consciousness-in-south-africa-demands-a-much-wider-historical-lens-125238">Black Consciousness Movement</a>.</p>
<p>The 1977 killing of Black Consciousness icon <a href="https://www.apartheidmuseum.org/exhibitions/biko-the-quest-for-a-true-humanity">Steve Biko</a> in police custody drew widespread rage and the state responded by closing newspapers, banning organisations and detaining journalists and activists. That was on October 19 of that year, which became known as <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/black-wednesday-banning-19-black-consciousness-movement-organisations">Black Wednesday</a>.</p>
<p>Since then, South African journalists have used Black Wednesday to draw attention to the importance of media freedom. As the country and the world changed around them, they have highlighted the enduring importance of that most basic of rights: the citizen’s right to information.</p>
<p>Over the years, the nature of the threats to media freedom has changed. The possibility of naked state repression has receded, at least in South Africa. The recent <a href="https://rsf.org/en/news/zimbabwe-well-known-journalist-arrested-his-harare-home">arrest of Hopewell Chin’ono</a> in Zimbabwe is a stark reminder that journalists in other countries are not as fortunate.</p>
<p>But other threats have emerged, some from unexpected directions.</p>
<h2>Coronavirus and journalism</h2>
<p>This year, the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic are top of mind, and the media have been among the sectors profoundly affected. A <a href="https://www.icfj.org/news/new-global-survey-raises-red-flags-journalism-covid-19-era">new global study by the International Center for Journalists</a> shows the extent of the damage: media organisations have suffered extensive revenue losses, and journalists have felt the physical and emotional strain of reporting a health crisis that endangers them too.</p>
<p>South Africa has seen all of these impacts, which affect journalists’ ability to do their work and thereby harm media freedom. The new <a href="https://journalism.co.za/resources/state-of-the-newsroom/"><em>State of the Newsroom</em> report</a> by Wits Journalism, about to be released, will chart the closures, job losses and other devastation suffered in the media.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/journalism-makes-blunders-but-still-feeds-democracy-an-insiders-view-146364">Journalism makes blunders but still feeds democracy: an insider's view</a>
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<p>In many ways the COVID-19 crisis has merely exacerbated trends that have long been visible. The traditional media business model was in terminal decline long before the first case of COVID-19 was diagnosed in Wuhan, China <a href="https://www.livescience.com/first-case-coronavirus-found.html">in November 2019</a>. As audiences find it easier to get information online, advertising money has moved from newspapers and other legacy media to the giant platforms like Facebook and Google. Studies like the 2018 Rhodes University report <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c8PfDb2VYjPiPNLvFciYXCx8F2NPcnpC/view?ts=5af04336"><em>Paying the Piper</em></a> have shown how media sustainability affects the quality of journalism.</p>
<p>On the positive side, the International Center for Journalists report has found increased levels of trust in journalism since the start of the crisis. Similar findings emerge in the Reuters Institute’s <a href="http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/"><em>Digital News Report</em></a>. It found that people around the world have relatively high levels of trusts in media coverage of COVID-19 – more than twice as high as for social networks, video platforms or messaging services.</p>
<p>This is welcome news, as these have become the purveyors of misinformation and disinformation – often called fake news. Difficulties in differentiating between reliable and unreliable information online has certainly contributed significantly to the general decline in public trust in journalism.</p>
<p>This is perhaps the most profound threat to media freedom that journalism faces. The relationship of trust between the news media and their audiences is central to the very idea of journalism: there really is little value to reporting that is disbelieved.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, journalists have scored too many own goals.</p>
<h2>Journalism own goals</h2>
<p>Veteran journalist Anton Harber’s new book, <a href="https://www.graffitiboeke.co.za/en/a/Search/0/date_publish%20DESC/Anton%20Harber"><em>So, For the Record: Behind the Headlines in an Era of State Capture</em>,</a> unpacks in great detail how a combination of factors led the <a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/">Sunday Times</a>, the country’s largest newspaper, to publish a series of stories that he describes as </p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/journalism-makes-blunders-but-still-feeds-democracy-an-insiders-view-146364">journalistic fiascos</a>. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>These included extensive reporting that the South African Revenue Service was running a “rogue unit”, which the paper <a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/news/2018-10-13-we-got-it-wrong-and-for-that-we-apologise/">later retracted</a>. The factors included manipulation by elements of the state security apparatus, a newsroom denuded of skills because of business pressures and an arrogant newsroom culture that refused to admit mistakes.</p>
<p>Harber also describes the fascinating backstory behind the <a href="https://amabhungane.org/stories/special-report-the-guptaleaks-and-more-all-our-stories-on-state-capture-2/">Guptaleaks</a>, in which a trove of emails provided unanswerable evidence of <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2018-09-14-00-definition-of-state-capture/">state capture</a> under the administration of former president Jacob Zuma. This was undoubtedly a high point of South African journalism.</p>
<p>More recently, there have been other missteps that damage audience trust. The brief flurry of speculation about the possible arrest of African National Congress secretary general Ace Magashule on corruption charges was seen as <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-10-07-if-ace-magashules-arrest-story-was-to-test-the-waters-they-look-chilly-for-him/">a manoeuvre by Magashule himself</a> to test the waters and mobilise political support. It seems that governing party factionalists and politicians are still able to find journalists willing to peddle misinformation for political gains.</p>
<p>And there have been other examples, like instances of victims being identified in politically tinged cases of sexual abuse despite clear rules protecting them.</p>
<h2>A more complex world</h2>
<p>The world has become infinitely more complex for journalists since the 1977 crackdown. They face a collapsing business model that is steadily destroying the capacity of news organisations to do thorough work and a torrent of weaponised misinformation, working together to undermine public trust.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/sexism-is-rife-in-the-nigerian-kenyan-and-south-african-press-and-its-left-unchecked-143358">Sexism is rife in the Nigerian, Kenyan and South African press. And it's left unchecked</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<p>These are the new threats to journalism and to media freedom. In response, practitioners need to focus on their relationship with audiences. In his book <a href="https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/polis/2008/04/27/can-you-trust-the-media-by-adrian-monck-book-review/"><em>Can You Trust the Media?</em></a>, journalism professor <a href="https://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/people/academic-staff/charlie-beckett">Charlie Beckett</a> writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Trust is a relationship, not a fact.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>More than anything, journalists need to hold firmly to the ethical standards that tell audiences their work is reliable and credible. This is what will ensure trustworthy journalism stands out from the noise around it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/148265/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Franz Krüger does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Journalists need to hold firmly to the ethical standards that assure audiences their work is reliable and credible.
Franz Krüger, Adjunct Professor of Journalism and Director of the Wits Radio Academy, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/124813
2019-10-18T10:01:31Z
2019-10-18T10:01:31Z
Onkgopotse Tiro: revolutionary who paid a heavy price for shaking apartheid to its core
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297643/original/file-20191018-56215-1hgbigw.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Onkgopotse Tiro</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Book cover</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The book, <a href="https://www.takealot.com/parcel-of-death/PLID55073335">“Parcel of Death”</a>, is a journey to a revolutionary past. It is a journey but not a return to the past. Former journalist <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.co.za/blogs/news/writing-the-little-told-story-of-onkgopotse-tiro">Gaongalelwe Tiro</a> has written a book about his uncle Onkgopotse Tiro – a revolutionary spirit who powered the student <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising">uprisings of June 1976</a> in Soweto, Guguletu – Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Umlazi – Durban, Bloemfontein and Pietermaritzburg. </p>
<p>It is the same spirit that was to galvanise another generation decades later in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/feesmustfall-the-poster-child-for-new-forms-of-struggle-in-south-africa-68773">fees must fall</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/it-will-take-critical-thorough-scrutiny-to-truly-decolonise-knowledge-78477">decolonisation </a> movements at the turn of the century.</p>
<p>Tiro was a student leader at the University of the North, now <a href="https://www.ul.ac.za/index.php?Entity=Home">University of Limpopo</a>, in the early 1970s and one of the early exponents of the revolutionary Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. He fled to exile in Botswana, where he was killed by a parcel bomb in 1974. It has always been suspected that it was sent by the apartheid security forces.</p>
<p>The book begins with a chapter entitled: “Blown to Smithereens”. The power and emotion contained in this chapter is enough to stop you from continuing. Even though I know the events that are described in the chapter and, had my own emotion and response on the morning of the day in February 1974 when the news of Tiro’s assassination came through, I still read the chapter over and over and hesitated to face up to subsequent chapters.</p>
<h2>Onkgopotse Tiro</h2>
<p>Onkgopotse Tiro was born in Dinokana Village outside the small town of Zeerust, in what is now known as the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/place/north-west">North West Province</a>, South Africa. These origins automatically define him as son of poor parents.</p>
<p>Like other African young men and women, Tiro somehow managed to make it to university. For him, being of a particular tribal origin, it could only be University of the North, also known as Turfloop, a blacks-only university for students designated for the Tswana, Sotho, Pedi, Venda and <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/tswana">Shangaan tribes</a>, located east of Polokwane. This, in line with the Apartheid racist segregation policies of the white minority state of the time.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297534/original/file-20191017-98648-3aqqvl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297534/original/file-20191017-98648-3aqqvl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297534/original/file-20191017-98648-3aqqvl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297534/original/file-20191017-98648-3aqqvl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297534/original/file-20191017-98648-3aqqvl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297534/original/file-20191017-98648-3aqqvl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297534/original/file-20191017-98648-3aqqvl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The family and social background and experiences that Onkgopotse brought to the university immediately came into conflict with the colonial and racial texture inscribed in every facet of the university life. The critical, questioning mind of the soon to be born philosophy of <a href="http://azapo.org.za/about-azapo/black-consciousness/">Black Consciousness</a> soon showed its real character when Tiro and other black students immersed themselves in debates about how they should organise themselves around their own reality, black reality.</p>
<p>Political existentialism was the core mark of the strategy of black resistance by university students in those early days of black consciousness. Tiro was a key leader in this regard and, this is how this revolutionary edge catapulted him to the helm of student political organisation.</p>
<p>The anger of the white racist administrators and staff at the university and on behalf of all other white racists was provoked beyond measure when Tiro <a href="http://azapo.org.za/graduation-speech-by-onkgopotse-tiro-at-the-university-of-the-north-29-april-1972/">delivered a graduation speech</a> in 1972, that ignited black student political uprising throughout the land.</p>
<p>Thus in the first chapter the author details the events preceding, surrounding and, following the assassination of Tiro. The book depicts how Tiro’s time at Turfloop amounted to a revolutionising political script for generations to come. It is particularly helpful to have this history of the Black Consciousness Movement which provides background to the later assassination of <a href="http://azapo.org.za/azapohistory/bantu-stephen-biko/">Steve Biko</a>, who similarly died brutally at the hands of agents of a white racist regime.</p>
<p>The message is simple: White supremacists murdered Onkgopotse Tiro. They also murdered his associates, <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/mthuli-ka-shezi">Mthuli Ka Shezi</a>, <a href="http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/national-orders/recipient/mapetla-mohapi-1947-1976">Mapetla Mohapi</a> and Steve Biko. The list is long.</p>
<p>Students of Black Consciousness need to grasp this in order to understand the movement and the people that Tiro died for. Deliberately, or not, the author’s choice of the starting point for the biography of his late uncle is inspired by the same spirit that shook the foundations of a racist settler-colonial regime.</p>
<p>The rest of the book walks back to the events that led to Tiro’s assassination. It is a biography that refuses to engage in political narcissism. Its story comes back to us from the future. We understand who Tiro was through the lens of what happened long after he was no more.</p>
<p>It is well written and does not confuscate, not even politically or ideologically. Through the chapters that follow the first one, we come to meet and know the people who gave birth to a movement and died for a country. We also come to understand how relationships change even among the closest of comrades. Readers will be served with the truth of events and intricacies that professional historians and ideologues <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-is-steve-bikos-remarkable-legacy-often-overlooked-82952">conceal for no good reason</a>.</p>
<p>The biographer is more than a family member. He is himself a player, activist and combatant in the theatre of struggle in which his uncle’s extinction was plotted and carried out. He navigates the terrain professionally and does so like a revolutionary.</p>
<p>The writer shares the initial circumstances that surrounded the moment of political ignition that led to expulsion of Tiro from the University of the North and set the country on fire. This discussion happens, rightfully, later in the book. It helps to remove the temptation to write the story chronologically. As we have said, the story of Onkgopotse Tiro comes to us from the future. For indeed, in his life story, to borrow from <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf">Karl Marx’s unforgettable words,</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>the phrase does not go beyond the content; the content goes beyond the phrase.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is a story that draws its “poetry from the future”.</p>
<p>The book, therefore, shares snippets of the famous graduation speech that led to Tiro’s expulsion from Turfloop and subsequently galvanized black students in all the black campuses to solidarity action. </p>
<p>The rest is history.</p>
<p>The real pity, though, is that the biographer deprived the readers of Tiro’s speech in its totality. It is not enough to have quoted parts of it. It is a classic by itself and in its own right.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/124813/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Itumeleng Mosala has received funding from universities for his research. He is a patron of the June 16, 1976 Foundation and the owner of Still Nascent Ventures (Pty) Ltd. He is a member of the Azanian People's Organisation and the party's past president. </span></em></p>
The book depicts how Onkgopotse Tiro’s time at Turfloop amounted to a revolutionising political script for generations to come.
Itumeleng Mosala, Research Associate professor, University of Pretoria
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/115185
2019-04-16T08:50:58Z
2019-04-16T08:50:58Z
Student resistance in South Africa: the SASO nine trial and Steve Biko
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/268575/original/file-20190410-2924-s9w28l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C34%2C897%2C738&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">One of the founders of South African Students' Organisation, Steve Biko.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source"> South African History Online</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Student protests swept across South African campuses in 2015 and 2016 under the banner of <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa/topics/feesmustfall-21801">#FeesMustFall</a>. The protests revitalised public interest in student politics. </p>
<p>My recently published book, <a href="http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/limpopos-legacy/">Limpopo’s Legacy</a> offers a historical perspective on these events. In it I analyse regional influences that have underpinned South African student politics from the 1960s to the present. </p>
<p>Student organisations in the Northern Transvaal (today Limpopo Province) have influenced political change in South Africa on a national scale, and over generations. At the centre was the University of the North at Turfloop (now called the University of Limpopo). The institution played an integral role in building the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) in the late 1960s and propagating Black Consciousness in the 1970s. </p>
<p>There are lessons from half a century ago for South Africa’s most recent student uprisings. Profound insights can be drawn from the trial of nine SASO activists, in particular what was said in the witness stand by one of the founders of SASO, Steve Biko.</p>
<h2>SASO and black consciousness</h2>
<p>SASO was an organisation launched by university students on the segregated campuses of so-called “non-white” universities. It created an organisational space for black students. It argued that other student organisations, such as the multi-racial National Union of South African Students (Nusas), were dominated by white interests. </p>
<p>SASO students developed the philosophy of Black Consciousness, arguing that psychological liberation was necessary for political liberation. They offered a new way for black South Africans to think about themselves and their place in their country.</p>
<p>In this SASO offered a new approach to liberation, led by a new generation, that differed from older groups like the African National Congress and the Pan African Congress. </p>
<p>In ways that still <a href="https://www.news24.com/Opinions/biko-lives-in-fallism-20160909">resonate with student activists today</a>, SASO criticised these older organisations for being quiescent and failing to achieve the promise of liberation.</p>
<h2>The state’s response</h2>
<p>The apartheid state initially saw SASO as racially separatist, and allowed it to organise on campuses in the early 1970s. But by the middle of that decade the state began to crack down on these student activists. </p>
<p>In July 1975 the trial of nine young activists began. Known as the SASO Nine, or the Black Consciousness Trial, it was to be a milestone in the politics of the era, and beyond. </p>
<p>Thirteen members of SASO and other Black Consciousness-affiliated organisations were arrested on charges of treason. This was after they defied a police ban and held rallies at Turfloop and in Durban to celebrate the independence of Mozambique, which was achieved in September 1974. </p>
<p>Of the 13 students and young activists, the state <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/trial-nine-bpc-and-saso-leaders-ends">charged</a> nine under the Terrorism Act, initiating what became one of the longest political trials in South Africa at the time. </p>
<h2>The trial</h2>
<p>South Africa’s longest terrorism trial played out over the course of 17 months and garnered substantial press coverage. </p>
<p>The nine young men charged in the trial came to play a pivotal role in the broader public conception of SASO. They were also to have a catalytic politicising affect across the country. And their names live on as veterans of the fight against apartheid. They were Zithulele Cindi, Saths Cooper, Mosioua Lekota, Aubrey Mokoape, Strini Moodley, Muntu Myeza, Pandelani Nefolovhodwe, Nkwenke Nkomo and Gilbert Sedibe.</p>
<p>Legal historian Michael Lobban argued in his book, <em>White Man’s Justice: South African Political Trials in the Black Consciousness Era</em>, that the trial offered particular insights into how the South African state sought to,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>use a political trial to control its opponents. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In <em>Limpopo’s Legacy</em> I argue that the trial also demonstrates the way that young activists used the court system and attendant press coverage to propagate their own political agenda. This was especially important for defendants who were students from Turfloop, who were under a gag-order on campus, and for those who were banned from publishing or public speech. </p>
<p>These defendants came to be the public face of student resistance at the outset of their trial in 1975. It provided a platform to highlight their cause. </p>
<h2>The court room as theatre</h2>
<p>Historian Daniel Magaziner has said in the book <a href="https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/The+Law+and+the+Prophets"><em>The Law and the Prophets</em></a> that,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the trial was more farce than tragedy, and, reasoning that some sort of conviction was inevitable, the defendants treated it like theatre. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>While theatricality did play a role in how the defendants presented themselves on the stand, there were serious motives behind this performance. </p>
<p>More than a stage, the defendants used the stand as a microphone, and indeed a pulpit from which to propagate their message. Famously, Steve Biko, SASO’s founder and figurehead, took his opportunity on the witness stand to expound on the philosophy of Black Consciousness as the guiding principle for SASO and the Black People’s Convention (BPC). The BPC was an affiliate of SASO that organised non-students around the ideals of Black Consciousness. </p>
<p>In his explanation to the presiding judge Biko stated:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Basically Black Consciousness refers itself to the black man and to his situation, and I think the Black man is subjected to two forces in this country. He is first of all oppressed by an external world through institutionalised machinery: through laws that restrict him from doing certain things, through heavy work conditions, through poor education, these are all external to him, and secondly, and this we regard as the most important, the black man in himself has developed a certain state of alienation, he rejects himself, precisely because he attaches the meaning white to all that is good, in other words he associates good and he equates good with white. This arises out of his living and it arises out of his development from childhood… This is carried through to adulthood when the black man has got to live and work. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Redressing this psychological conditioning formed the core thrust of the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/black-consciousness-movement-bcm">Black Consciousness movement</a>. </p>
<p>Over the course of five days of testimony in May 1976 Biko ranged from discussing the psychological grounding of the SASO slogan “Black is beautiful” to the importance of disinvestment in South Africa by foreign firms. </p>
<p>Fifty years after the founding of SASO - and nearly 45 years since the historic trial of the SASO Nine - the tactics, strategy, and ideas of this anti-apartheid student movement remain a model for student activists.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/115185/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anne Heffernan received funding during the conduct of this research from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Wits University Research Council. </span></em></p>
Fifty years after the founding of South African Students’ Organisation this anti-apartheid movement remains a model for student activists.
Anne Heffernan, Assistant Professor in the history of Southern Africa, Durham University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/100042
2018-07-16T14:09:42Z
2018-07-16T14:09:42Z
Blame politicians, not Mandela, for South Africa’s unfinished business
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227818/original/file-20180716-44097-192wazu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nelson Mandela, arriving for Thabo Mbeki's inauguration in 2004.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Jon Hrusa</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>July 2018 marks Nelson Mandela’s <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/nelson-mandela-100">centenary year</a>. Why is he still so revered across the world? The answer simply is that he is widely regarded as the personification of values which he spent much of his life fighting for. These included social justice, democracy, and freedom. </p>
<p>At the <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/content/nelson-mandelas-statement-dock-rivonia-trial">Rivonia Trial</a> in 1964, he asserted that it was these values for which he hoped to live, but for which he was “<a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/news/entry/i-am-prepared-to-die">prepared to die</a>”. He would spend 27 years in prison before he could realise his dream of a South Africa freed from repressive and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/07/apartheid-south-africa-cape-town-police-protests">brutal racial segregation</a>.</p>
<p>In prison, Mandela’s stature and mythology was carefully nurtured by his movement, the African National Congress <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/">ANC</a>, and the <a href="http://africanactivist.msu.edu/organization.php?name=Anti-Apartheid+Movement">anti-apartheid movement</a>. This established him as the focus for the global struggle against apartheid. </p>
<p>By the 1980s, Mandela was the world’s most famous political prisoner. He was celebrated at <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/nelson-mandela-freedom-rally">rallies</a>, featured on <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/05/world/africa/Mandelas-Struggle-in-Posters.html">protest posters</a>, and immortalised in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNpfJu1CVyc">popular culture</a>.</p>
<p>Mandela’s conviction and adherence to <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/the-freedom-charter">non-racialism and democratic ideals</a> came to symbolise the intrinsic moral nature of the struggle against white minority rule. </p>
<p>In the world’s current international climate of conflict and political cynicism, Mandela’s legacy continues to serve as a rare example of a principled politician who represented an indefatigable commitment to forgiveness and reconciliation. </p>
<p>Mandela commanded respect and moral authority at home and abroad for his strong convictions, humility, and courageous actions that ensured all South Africans could live in a democratic society. These achievements in the face of enormous challenges should not be underestimated.</p>
<p>As South Africa’s first democratic president there was a clear emphasis on transformation for the majority. This came about through political action under the slogan “<a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/a-better-life-for-all">a better life for all</a>”, the introduction of a progressive and liberal <a href="https://www.gov.za/documents/constitution-republic-south-africa-1996">constitution</a>, stabilising the economy, and enshrining the ideals of democracy by stepping down from the presidency after one term in office.</p>
<p>Yet there is mounting disquiet and frustration about the slow pace of South Africa’s transformation in the democratic era. This is characterised by stubborn <a href="http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/530481521735906534/Overcoming-Poverty-and-Inequality-in-South-Africa-An-Assessment-of-Drivers-Constraints-and-Opportunities">economic inequality</a>, <a href="http://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=11129">growing unemployment</a>, missed opportunities and the failure to establish the form of “new” society articulated by Mandela.</p>
<p>What would have seemed unthinkable a few years ago is a growing and vocal criticism of <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-south-africa-should-undo-mandelas-economic-deals-52767">Mandela’s legacy</a>. The primary target of this frustration is the compromises and reconciliation efforts of the early 1990s, which so endeared Mandela to the world. But for many South Africans the outcomes were too accommodating to the white minority.</p>
<p>Is the mounting criticism of Mandela fair? I would argue not. South Africa currently faces many challenges, but it isn’t Mandela who failed people’s expectations. The blame for that must be put squarely at the door of the country’s politicians.</p>
<h2>Is criticism of Mandela fair?</h2>
<p>First of all its deeply unfair and highly problematic to prescribe South Africa’s current travails on one person. Part of this problem stems from the perception that Mandela single-handedly delivered freedom for South Africa and led the negotiation process. </p>
<p>This is simply not true. And the “single story” is a disservice to the multitude of organisations and activists that fought apartheid including the ANC, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-is-steve-bikos-remarkable-legacy-often-overlooked-82952">Black Consciousness Movement</a>, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/congress-south-african-trade-unions-cosatu">trade unions</a>, and the <a href="http://www.saha.org.za/udf/origins.htm">United Democratic Front</a>.</p>
<p>In addition it was the collective leadership of the ANC, not Mandela alone, that negotiated with the National Party during the transition process to seek a political compromise. </p>
<p>The ANC should certainly have pushed for more concessions. In reality the party effectively sacrificed wider economic and social change for political power. </p>
<p>It is the lack of substantive change enacted during the transition that has prompted the emerging reevaluation of Mandela’s legacy.</p>
<p>To argue that Mandela “sold out” through these compromises is a misreading of the situation and fundamentally ignores the challenges and constraints of the period. These included: escalating violence across the country; the ANC negotiating from a position of structural weakness; the National Party remaining undefeated; the impossibility of overthrowing the apartheid regime by force; and a fundamentally altered post-Cold War political and economic environment. </p>
<p>Most important of all, 1994 was not supposed to be the final stage for transformation. Rather, it was a platform for future efforts. But the ANC has not succeeded in doing enough to initiate wider-societal transformation since 1994 based on the unfinished business of the negotiations. </p>
<h2>ANC failures</h2>
<p>The party’s inability to implement sustained policy changes for the benefit of the majority is evident from a number of ongoing political debates. These include anger about unemployment, land <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2018-06-05-south-africa-has-all-legislative-and-policy-tools-for-land-redistribution-politics-patronage-and-governance-paralysis-have-made-it-impossible-so-far/#.W0m4CGfGs7w">expropriation</a> without compensation, and <a href="https://citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/1964643/sa-is-shocked-the-anc-is-shocked-about-corruption/">corruption</a>. </p>
<p>In addition, the ANC appears to have lost its sense of direction. The political elite has been badly mired by <a href="http://ewn.co.za/2018/02/15/south-africa-s-divisive-president-zuma-s-many-scandals">scandals</a>, most notably under the former presidency of Jacob Zuma.</p>
<p>There is no doubt Mandela was a complex and flawed individual, but his vision still matters. What is required in this centenary year is for people from all sections of society to work together to embody Mandela’s values and convictions to keep the country moving forward to overcome the deeply ingrained legacies and injustices of the past.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100042/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Graham does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Mandela continues to serve as a rare example of a principled politician committed to forgiveness and reconciliation.
Matthew Graham, Lecturer in History, University of Dundee
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/98563
2018-06-20T15:09:36Z
2018-06-20T15:09:36Z
Beyoncé and Jay-Z: the world is going APES**T for their vision of black culture
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/223762/original/file-20180619-126553-2yqd7c.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">beyonce</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Anyone who is familiar with Beyoncé’s work knows that every outfit, song sample, visual reference and album cover art contains a deeper, more significant meaning behind its mainstream pop culture sheen. Now that Beyoncé has added her relationship with her husband Jay-Z and her passion for art to her vast repertoire, the symbolic and literal depth of her own work has an added resonance.</p>
<p>From the On The Run Tour II tour poster which references and pays homage to the 1970’s classic African film, <a href="https://www.criterion.com/films/28412-touki-bouki">Touki Bouki</a> to the surprise release of the joint album <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/how-beyonce-jay-z-made-joint-album-everything-is-love-w521642">Everything is Love</a>, which takes a direct swipe at the white dominated high culture palace of the Louvre, Beyoncé and Jay-Z as reigning global megastars are turning their joint attention to celebrating black culture and highlighting historical and contemporary inequalities.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/BgOcB2slHoQ/?utm_source=ig_embed","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<p>The On The Run II tour images offer a direct reference to the 1973 Senegalese film written and directed by <a href="http://newsreel.org/articles/mambety.htm">Djibril Diop Mambéty</a> in Wolof, a native language of Senegal, and its title loosely translates to “The Hyena’s Journey”. The story of Touki Bouki follows a young couple from Dakar, who steal and scheme to acquire the money to travel to their dream city of Paris. The lead characters are reminiscent of Bonny and Clyde, whom Beyonce and Jay-Z have <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm0Xba8eFTg">previously referenced</a> in their work. </p>
<p>This homage, though celebrated by many fans and cultural commentators, was not entirely welcomed by Mambéty’s family (the director passed away in 1998). <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/monicamark/beyonce-jay-z-on-the-run-ii-tour-touki-bouki?utm_term=.srz6oJG1P#.tbV78yeEl">Buzzfeed News reported</a> they were somewhat critical of the press tour material, which was unveiled on social media. </p>
<p>Mambéty’s son, Teemour Diop Mambéty, <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/monicamark/beyonce-jay-z-on-the-run-ii-tour-touki-bouki">told Buzzfeed</a>: “We must welcome any creative exchange respecting the integrity of the works and their authors.” Despite this, for many, this referencing is important in that it highlighted an African film that, on release, <a href="http://amper.ped.muni.cz/%7Ejonas/knihy/vizualni_antropologie/questioning%20theories%20of%20an%20authentic%20african%20cinema.pdf">generated intense political debate</a> about colonialism and heritage.</p>
<h2>From pop to politics</h2>
<p>As two of the most prominent African-American musicians in pop culture, Beyoncé and Jay-Z have played increasingly visible political roles – from <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/jay-z-beyonce-raise-money-for-obama/2012/09/18/7a8e1190-01f7-11e2-b257-e1c2b3548a4a_story.html?utm_term=.00380c704b22">campaigning for former president Barack Obama</a> to championing the <a href="https://twitter.com/Blklivesmatter">Black Lives Matter</a> movement. </p>
<p>Beyoncé, in particular, has referenced the richness of African culture in recent years. In her visual album Lemonade, Nigerian influences were woven through with <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/siahlwilliams/6-african-gods-you-can-find-in-beyonces-lemonade-2bk2e">numerous references to Oshun</a>, the Yoruba mother deity, whose colour is yellow. Oshun is the goddess of beauty and love who unleashes her wrath when provoked. </p>
<p>Bricolage – or the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of cultural references that happen to be available – is keenly at work in the scope of Beyonce’s artistry. She has an astute ability to plunder high and low culture to make her own output appear completely fresh and relevant. This became even more apparent with the surprise release of Everything is Love, which dropped during the <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/reviews/beyonce-jay-z-on-the-run-2-tour-review-london-stadium-tickets-setlist-grenfell-tribute-a8402081.html">universally praised</a> On The Run II tour, which itself offers a paean to African American identity. </p>
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<p>Black Effect, which opens with a monologue about self-love, references being in love with your own blackness and becoming a symbol of black wealth. Jay-Z raps: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Shit I am the culture<br>
I made my own wave, so now they anti-Tidal.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here he explores his own contribution to capitalism, which both he and Beyoncé celebrate – but he is equally aware that as a black man, this comes with much public criticism.</p>
<p>He also name-checks <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/trayvon-martin-6488">Trayvon Martin</a>, the 17-year-old African American shot dead in 2012 by a neighbourhood watchman in a Florida gated community – and, in a twist on arena performers call and responses for crowd gesticulation: “Get your hands up high like a false arrest.”</p>
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<h2>Occupying ‘white’ space</h2>
<p>The couples plundering of almost the entire canon of art history for maximum effect is no more on display that in the video for APES** T. This is perhaps the most direct statement concerning the redressing of an oppressive, exclusive power structure that the power couple have ever made. They literally occupy a white space with images of black love and black unity – understanding that it was the institutional exclusion of these images that allowed a pervasive white-dominated narrative to govern the collective consciousness. That narrative being that blackness does not belong in galleries, that black art does not hold the same value structures. </p>
<p>The video, which was directed by <a href="http://rickysaiz.com/">Ricky Saiz</a>, who previously directed the “Yoncé” video, and produced by Iconoclast, intersperses close-ups of the Louvre’s most famous artworks – most prominently Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Jacques Louis David’s Consecration of Emperor Napoleon and Coronation of Empress Josephine. </p>
<p>Shot in a way that allows Beyonce and Jay-Z to almost obstruct the globally renowned works behind them – kneeling, swaying and smiling in the process – images of black bodies directly challenge the limited portrayals of blackness that audiences are used to seeing in museums. This invites the audience to take in an entirely new narrative, one that is direct and beautiful in its celebration of an (often intensely capitalist) sense of the many virtues of blackness.</p>
<p>It is abundantly clear that the power couple are effectively inserting themselves into the Western art canon and deftly highlighting the importance of a diversity of representation in such traditionally hallowed halls. What is so brilliantly relevant is that the pair have claimed white spaces and hosted their own black cultural moment that <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/what-it-means-when-beyonce-and-jay-z-take-over-the-louvre">has the world talking</a>. Art as an explicit metaphor for power has never seemed so present.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98563/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kirsty Fairclough does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Teeming with references to African culture and experience, the couple’s latest work places ‘blackness'at the heart of the Western canon.
Kirsty Fairclough, Associate Dean: Research and Innovation, University of Salford
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/94300
2018-04-03T13:03:05Z
2018-04-03T13:03:05Z
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela: revolutionary who kept the spirit of resistance alive
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212924/original/file-20180403-189807-1gv4h4d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">South African liberation struggle icon Winnie Madikizela-Mandela has died at the age of 81.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA-EFE/Jon Hrusha</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>No other woman – in life and after – occupies the place that <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/winnie-madikizela-mandela">Winnie Madikizela-Mandela</a> does in South African politics. A stalwart of the African National Congress (ANC), she nevertheless stands above, and at times outside, the party. Her iconic status transcends political parties and geographical boundaries, generations and genders. Poets have <a href="http://alicewalkersgarden.com/2016/09/winnie-mandela-we-love-you/">honoured her</a>, writers have <a href="http://panmacmillan.co.za/catalogue/the-cry-of-winnie-mandela/">immortalised her</a> and photographers have <a href="https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/winnie-mandela?sort=mostpopular&mediatype=photography&phrase=winnie%20mandela&family=editorial">adored her</a>. </p>
<p>Her life has been overburdened by tragedies and dramas, and by the expectations of a world hungry for godlike heroes on whom to pin all its dreams, and one-dimensional villains on whom to pour its rage. Yet perhaps it is in the smaller and more intimate stories of our stumbling to make a better world that we are best able to recognise and appreciate the meaning of the life of Madikizela-Mandela. </p>
<p>In her particular life, we may see more clearly the violence wrought by colonialism and apartheid, the profound consequences of fraternal political movements to whom women were primarily ornamental and, yes, the tragic mistakes made in the crucible of civil war. </p>
<p>Her political power stemmed from the visceral connection that she was able to make between the everyday lives of black people in a racist state, and her own individual life. State power, in all its vicious dimensions, was exaggerated in its response to her indomitable will – and in its stark visibility, personified. </p>
<p>Fearless in the face of torture, imprisonment, banishment and betrayal, she stood firm in her conviction that apartheid could be brought down. She said what she liked, and bore the consequences. Her very life was a form of bearing witness to the brutality of the system. </p>
<h2>A life of misrecognition</h2>
<p>Many obituaries will outline the broad sweep of her life; few will mark the extent to which her revolutionary ideas were shaped before she even met Nelson Mandela. To most of her social circle in the 1950s, for a long time into the 1980s, and certainly for Nelson Mandela’s biographers, Madikizela-Mandela was a young rural naif who charmed the most eligible (married) man in town.</p>
<p>This way of seeing her as primarily beautiful, and not as an emerging political figure, has coloured both contemporaneous accounts of Madikizela-Mandela (for she was surely too young and beautiful to have a serious political idea) as well as scholarly accounts of the period (which focused on the thoughts and actions of men). </p>
<p>This misrecognition resonated in the ANC, which had no way of accommodating Madikizela-Mandela’s political qualities other than by casting her in the familiar tropes of wife and mother. Astutely, she embraced the role of mother and wife of a political leader and fashioned it into a platform for her own variant of radicalism, drawing on recent memories of the forcible dispossession of land and its impact on the Eastern Cape peasantry, and <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/definition-black-consciousness-bantu-stephen-biko-december-1971-south-africa">black consciousness</a>. </p>
<p>She kept those traditions alive in the ANC, especially in the everyday politics of the townships, when the leadership of the party was crafting new forms of non-racialism and at times vilifying black consciousness. Even though she was not part of the inner circle of the black consciousness movement, being older than the students leading it at its height, she was an ally in words and spirit. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212927/original/file-20180403-189801-16jx8st.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212927/original/file-20180403-189801-16jx8st.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212927/original/file-20180403-189801-16jx8st.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212927/original/file-20180403-189801-16jx8st.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212927/original/file-20180403-189801-16jx8st.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1073&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212927/original/file-20180403-189801-16jx8st.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1073&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212927/original/file-20180403-189801-16jx8st.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1073&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Madikizela-Mandela in a T-shirt bearing the image of Chris Hani.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA-EFE/Kim Ludbrook</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the tumult after the <a href="http://overcomingapartheid.msu.edu/sidebar.php?id=65-258-3">1976 uprising</a>, she built a bridge between different political factions. In the early 1990s, when Nelson Mandela was urging armed youths to give up violent strategies, it was Madikizela-Mandela they called on (along with the then leader of the South African Communist Party <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/thembisile-chris-hani">Chris Hani</a>) to defend their change in tactics. </p>
<p>She played a similar role in brokering between moderates and radicals in the ANC and its breakaways up until her death. This was a form of gendered politics made possible by her status as mother of the nation, uniting warring sons and holding together her political family, even if peace was maintained only in her presence. </p>
<h2>White power and black suffering</h2>
<p>Winnie Madikizela was born in a rural Eastern Cape village called Bizana in September 1936. Her parents, Columbus and Gertrude, were teachers and her childhood was marked by the stern Methodism of her mother and the radical Africanist orientation of her father. </p>
<p>Rural life, with its entrenched gender roles, shaped her childhood. Not only was she aware of her mother’s desire to bear another son, but she and her sisters were expected to care for their male siblings. She was barely eight when her mother died months after giving birth to Winnie’s brother. Her childhood was cut short, and she had to leave school for six months to work in the fields and to carry out, with her sisters, all the daily chores of the household, from preparing food to cleaning. In her large and rambunctious family in which her parents upheld discipline with physical punishment, she learned to defend herself with her fists, if necessary.</p>
<p>Her rural background made her aware of land dispossession as a central question of freedom. By her own account, she learnt about the racialised system of power early in her life. From her father, she learnt about the Xhosa wars against the colonisers, and later would imagine herself as picking up where her ancestors <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Part-My-Soul-Went-Him/dp/0393302903">had failed</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If they failed in those nine Xhosa wars, I am one of them of them and I will start from where those Xhosas left off and get my land back.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She was to retain the theme of land dispossession by colonialism throughout her political career. Associated with this was the idea that race was central to colonialism. Taught by her grandmother that the source of black suffering was white power, her framing of politics was defined completely by the ways in which her family understood the relations of colonialism, and by their personal experiences of humiliation. </p>
<p>As with many other ANC members with Eastern Cape roots, she did not think of urban struggles as the only space of resistance, or workers as the only agents of change. She <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=HD7U2a1Sp-0C&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&dq=The+white+makes+a+mistake,+thinking+the+tribal+black+is+subservient+and+docile.&source=bl&ots=1YSWJjmA1F&sig=I1HuHC3iaevTwHkDcAgd1P6rMfI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjW4JyJ2p3aAhVmC8AKHSnXBlIQ6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&q=The%20white%20makes%20a%20mistake%2C%20thinking%20the%20tribal%20black%20is%20subservient%20and%20docile.&f=false">warned</a>, in 1985, that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The white makes a mistake, thinking the tribal black is subservient and docile. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Militant to the core</h2>
<p>After six short years together, Madikizela-Mandela’s husband, Nelson, was sentenced to <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/news/entry/nelson-mandela-sentenced-to-life-imprisonment-44-years-ago">life imprisonment</a>. By this stage, she too was inextricably involved in the national liberation movement, politics with single parenting. She was attuned to the mood of people, and was more of an empathic leader than a theorist or tactician. </p>
<p>She was an effective speaker, and had a gift for winning over an audience. Adelaide Joseph, a friend and fellow ANC activist, <a href="http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Part-of-My-Soul-Went-with-Him/">recalls</a> that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>when she made her first public speech…right on the spot, while she was speaking, the women composed a song for Winnie Mandela. And they started to sing right in the hall.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She joined the ANC Women’s League and the <a href="http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/?inventory/U/collections&c=AD1137/R/">Federation of South African Women</a>, and participated in several campaigns. She was militant to the core. On one occasion, when a policeman arrived at her house with a summons and dared to pull her arm, she assaulted him and had to defend herself in court for the action.</p>
<p>She was far from being a bystander, or a passive wife patiently waiting for her husband’s release from prison. In her autobiography, Madikizela-Mandela credits several other women for influencing her politically. Among these were Lilian Ngoyi, Florence Matomela, Frances Baard and Kate Molale, all leaders of the Federation. </p>
<p>For her, they were the “top of the ANC hierarchy” although at the time no women were in fact in any formal leadership positions in the ANC. The ANC only <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/content/women-and-african-national-congress-1912-1943">allowed women to become full members in 1943</a>, and during the 1950s, women were locked in an intense battle for recognition within the movement. </p>
<p>In the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/anc-womens-league-ancwl">ANC Women’s League</a> and in the Federation, she held positions as chairperson of her branch in Orlando, and was a member of their provincial and national executives. In the 1970s, with her close friend Fatima Meer, she formed the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/organisations/black-womens-federation">Black Women’s Federation</a>. It was a short lived organisation with few campaigns, but signalled an adherence to the new township based politics that was sweeping the country. </p>
<p>Her mode of work in any case was not that of painstaking organisation-building; she was more capable as a public speaker and as someone who could connect with people in the harsh conditions of life in apartheid’s townships. She attended funerals and counselled families, acts of public courage that sustained activists. She offered a form of intimate political leadership, instinctively aligning herself with people in distress. </p>
<p>Gender was her political resource, enabling her to draw on effective qualities to form political communities and providing a mode in which she could enter into the lives of people in the townships. She embraced the role of mother and wife of a political leader and fashioned it into a platform from which she challenged the apartheid state. </p>
<h2>Banishment and brutality</h2>
<p>If the apartheid state had hoped to break her, they failed. She was fearless in the face of the state’s attempts to silence her. Her home was repeatedly invaded and searched, and she was arrested, assaulted and imprisoned several times. Then, in 1977, in an act of extreme cruelty, she was served with a banishment order to a place in the Free State called Brandfort – a place she had never heard of nor had she ever visited. </p>
<p>It was a horrendous uprooting from her family and community in Soweto, a form of exile that she described as “my little Siberia.” Madikizela-Mandela grasped very clearly the power that could derive from associating actions against her with actions against the nation. As <a href="http://www.storiadelledonne.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Hassim2014.pdf">she put it</a>, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>When they send me into exile, it’s not me as an individual they are sending. They think that with me they can also ban the political ideas. But that is a historic impossibility… I am of no importance to them as an individual. What I stand for is what they want to banish. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>But although the state did not break Winnie, by her own account it did brutalise her. Talking about her long period of solitary confinement and torture in 1969, she told a journalist that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>that imprisonment of eighteen months in solitary confinement did actually change me … We were so brutalised by that experience that I then believed in the language of violence and the only to deal with, to fight, apartheid was through the same violence they were unleashing against us and that is how one gets affected by that type of brutality. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The consequences were awful, not just for her but also for <a href="https://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/graduations/2014---2012/biography-paul-verryn.html">Paul Verryn</a>, and especially for the families of <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/stompie-seipeis-murderer-goes-jail">Stompie Seipei</a> and <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/dr-abu-baker-asvat">Abu Asvat</a>. This period in her life, and in South African politics generally, is one that will not only occupy our moral energies, but also shape the ways in which narratives of violence in the 1980s are written. These were dark times in a country weighed down by states of emergency and militarised control. The exaggerated quality of Madikizela-Mandela’s life had to bear, too, the nightmares of our nation’s struggles to free itself. </p>
<p>The ANC could barely contain the nature of leadership that Winnie represented. Like many women in the movement, she was marginalised from its powerful decision making structures. Unlike male leaders, her personal life was constantly under the spotlight (no doubt aided by a zealous security machinery that kept her under constant surveillance), and she was judged harshly and unfairly for her private choices. Although she was a masterful player of the familial categories of wife and mother, she felt reduced by them too.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212929/original/file-20180403-189827-13ajmv1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212929/original/file-20180403-189827-13ajmv1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212929/original/file-20180403-189827-13ajmv1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212929/original/file-20180403-189827-13ajmv1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212929/original/file-20180403-189827-13ajmv1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212929/original/file-20180403-189827-13ajmv1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212929/original/file-20180403-189827-13ajmv1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Winnie with Nelson Mandela after his release from prison in 1990.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA-EFE/Stringer</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Commentators like to use words such as maverick and wayward to describe her, but these tendencies developed because the regular structures of the ANC could not easily accommodate a powerful woman with a radical voice. Stepping outside the agreed parameters of the official party line, as she frequently did, was a form of asserting her independence, a form of refusal of the terms of political cadreship that were available to women in the ANC and in society more generally. It also allowed her to build alliances with the new voices emerging after 1994, from standing with the <a href="http://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZACC/2002/16.html">Treatment Action Campaign</a> against Thabo Mbeki’s policies on HIV/AIDS, to supporting the formation of the Economic Freedom Fighters. It accounts for the tremendous affection for her among young activists who are equally wary of the sedimented power structures in politics.</p>
<p>The endless stream of photographs that picture her in romantic embrace with Nelson Mandela, even now in her death, and despite their divorce, miss this fundamental point: the marriage was only a small part of her life, not its definitive point. To present her simply as wife, mostly as mother, is to erase the many struggles she waged to be defined in her own terms.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94300/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shireen Hassim receives funding from the AW Mellon Foundation for a project entitled Governing Intimacies. </span></em></p>
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s political power stemmed from the visceral connection that she was able to make between the lives of the oppressed black people, and her own.
Shireen Hassim, Professor of Political Studies, WiSER, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/91703
2018-02-15T11:40:02Z
2018-02-15T11:40:02Z
How I marvelled at Black Panther’s reimagining of Africa
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/206538/original/file-20180215-131024-1qx38ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Marvel Studios' BLACK PANTHER</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Watching Marvel’s highly anticipated comic-book film adaptation, Black Panther, was no ordinary tried and tested cinematic experience. Much like the unapologetic showmanship, flamboyance and atmospheric idiosyncrasies of Sunday service black congregational worship, the cinema metamorphosised beyond its remnants of unswept popcorn kernels and sticky milkshake residue into an augmented space. It became a “mega-church” sanctuary of spiritual catharsis –with all the impassioned and melodic trimmings of Afro-Pentecostalism. </p>
<p>But, make no mistake, this was not the time nor place for solemn contemplation or confessing past transgressions – but an opportunity for continental Africans and diaspora to offload socially sanctioned climactic expressions of individual and collective excitement and expectations, as well as lip-bitten anxieties about a fictionalised Africa. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xjDjIWPwcPU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>If this was an Afro-baptism in filmic spirit, I sought – and submitted to – full-bodied immersion. </p>
<p>Let’s be clear, the fervour over Black Panther among the Ankra-wearing, close-cropped Afro-crowned cinemagoers is incredibly warranted for several reasons. Not least for its reimagining, its re-presentation of Africa and communities therein – with magical realism – that makes it an intriguing anomaly among the slew of other questionable Western cinematic attempts to deliver “Africa” on screen.</p>
<p>Die-hard Marvel fans and those newly christened have waited with baited breath to secure a one-way ticket to Wakanda – the wondrous Afro-futuristic utopia and homeland of the titular character Black Panther (played by Chadwick Boseman). But this is by no means Hollywood’s first foray into fictionalised African kingdoms. Before Wakanda, there was the similarly named and seemingly “African-sounding” Zumunda in Eddie Murphy’s 1998 blockbuster <a href="http://www.ebony.com/news-views/coming-to-america-offensive-to-africans-981">Coming to America</a>.</p>
<p>But Zumunda presented as nothing more than a visual repository of African clichés and normative assumptions, where wild animals, as domesticated pets, cohabit “as they do” nonchalantly with humans. So too, where royalty enrobe in lion’s fur. As the Nigerian literary darling <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg">Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie</a> put it: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, animals and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and Aids, unable to speak for themselves.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If only I could speculate on what may have informed such a proclamation … dare I venture towards films such as <a href="http://www.filmsite.org/afri.html">The African Queen</a>, <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/africa/kenya/articles/Out-of-Africa-The-film-that-made-us-fall-in-love-with-Kenya/">Out of Africa</a>, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2005/04/the-movie-review-hotel-rwanda/69612/">Hotel Rwanda</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/jun/10/last-king-of-scotland-history">The Last King of Scotland</a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/08/movies/08diam.html">Blood Diamond</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/sep/02/beasts-of-no-nation-review-brutal-epic-opens-awards-season-in-style">Beasts of No Nation</a> – to name a handful. </p>
<h2>Africa’s burden</h2>
<p>Those cinematic offerings were the colonial-era mythmakers and extenders whose white lensed romanticisms have determined the space within which Africa is defined and knowable. It is also within this space that the complexities and pluralities of African representation have been lost in simplification and concealment. </p>
<p>Surely these films must have affixed the “Afro” in the unmistaken and riotous Afro-futurism of Black Panther. But its the “futurism” aspect that makes Black Panther stand head and shoulders above the rest. Showcasing an iteration of Africa that is more imaginatively radical than merely culturally palatable for audiences who are used to being spoon-fed – better yet, force-fed – microwavable doses of an Africa that is melancholic, benighted and savage, to satisfy their visually myopic cravings.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/206544/original/file-20180215-131000-1o4hwsd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/206544/original/file-20180215-131000-1o4hwsd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=317&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206544/original/file-20180215-131000-1o4hwsd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=317&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206544/original/file-20180215-131000-1o4hwsd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=317&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206544/original/file-20180215-131000-1o4hwsd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206544/original/file-20180215-131000-1o4hwsd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206544/original/file-20180215-131000-1o4hwsd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Afro-futuristic: Winston Duke as M'Baku.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://image.net/xads/actions/layout/preview.do?asset=566930781&fromPage=product">Marvel Studios' BLACK PANTHER</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Unlike its predecessors, Black Panther’s Afro-futuristic elements challenge stereotypes by readjusting the barometer of African imagination. Where Africa and black-Africanness is equated with discourses of futurism, cybernetics, sci-fi fantasy and mysticism.</p>
<h2>New African century</h2>
<p>This is a far cry from previous film interpretations of Africa, and especially of Africa’s future – or lack thereof. It has too often been represented as provisional and ephemeral – or arbitrated by the technocratic and philanthropic efforts of white do-gooders. Instead, Black Panther provides a prophetic reimagining of Africa with its postmodern gravity-defying vehicles and supersonic technology that far exceed human comprehension. </p>
<p>This has important implications for how we see Africa, through films which have long anchored it in a “forever-more” state that is seemingly unenlightened, backward-leaning and perceived as a prolongation of the past. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/206542/original/file-20180215-131029-1pa40h9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/206542/original/file-20180215-131029-1pa40h9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206542/original/file-20180215-131029-1pa40h9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206542/original/file-20180215-131029-1pa40h9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206542/original/file-20180215-131029-1pa40h9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206542/original/file-20180215-131029-1pa40h9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206542/original/file-20180215-131029-1pa40h9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Letitia Wright as Shuri.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://image.net/xads/actions/layout/preview.do?asset=535907517&fromPage=product">Marvel Studios' BLACK PANTHER</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So, too, the film speaks volumes about how young and old black African “selves” can infiltrate otherworldly spheres. Its Afro-futurism allows black folk to apply self-iterations and augment alternate realities that transcend the limitations of the “here and now” towards the “what ifs” and “could bes”, through their own melanin-infused, ethno-cultural lens. </p>
<p>Equally, with its vestiges of the past and nods to the future, Black Panther presents a certain “contemporary ordinariness” within Africa that is discernible in all its parts. Where streets of African cities, for example, are littered with mother-tongue speaking, iPhone-clutching youth, dressed in dashiki-patterned bomber jackets, skinny jeans and with basket-woven braided hairstyles. </p>
<p>Moreover, the portrayal of Wakanda as resource-rich, unsoiled by European colonialism and the paraphernalia of international development, challenges cinematic presumptions of an Africa that is deficient, agentless and lacking internal diplomacies for sovereignty.</p>
<h2>Africa upgraded</h2>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/206539/original/file-20180215-131006-3syii7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/206539/original/file-20180215-131006-3syii7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206539/original/file-20180215-131006-3syii7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206539/original/file-20180215-131006-3syii7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206539/original/file-20180215-131006-3syii7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206539/original/file-20180215-131006-3syii7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206539/original/file-20180215-131006-3syii7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Role models: the women of Wakanda.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://image.net/xads/actions/layout/preview.do?asset=568875306&fromPage=product">Marvel Studios' BLACK PANTHER</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is further reinforced by the central staging and representation of steely-eyed, intelligent African women – as Beyoncé avows in her feminist-imbued record <a href="http://blackyouthproject.com/upgrade-u-what-we-can-learn-from-beyonce/">Upgrade U</a>, if the men are “the block” the women are “the lights that keep the streets on”. We see this in the female Wakandans, the unyielding pillars of the film, who demystify allusions and illusions of Africa – through its female proxies – as infantilised, subordinate and devoid of individual articulation of unique intent. </p>
<p>As a Marvel trailblazer, Black Panther is stunning in its redefining of Africa’s aesthetic within the cultural zeitgeist of cinematic consciousness. It trades cinema’s historical blueprint for Africa, for its own set of black paws. Suffice to say, representation (in all its shades) matters.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/91703/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dr Edward Ademolu PhD, FHEA does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
This new Afro-celebratory sci-fi trendsetter sets out to unsettle and subvert film stereotypes about Africa – and succeeds brilliantly.
Dr Edward Ademolu PhD, FHEA, PhD Researcher at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/85868
2017-10-18T15:04:49Z
2017-10-18T15:04:49Z
Why media freedom remains fragile in South Africa
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190831/original/file-20171018-32345-18kfusq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Demonstrators protest against the decision by the South African Broadcasting Corporation to stop airing violent protest scenes.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Mike Hutchings</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Four decades after the <a href="http://www.apartheidmuseum.org/sites/default/files/files/BIKO%203b.pdf">Black Wednesday</a> crackdown on the media and the black consciousness movement, South Africa is a different country. Freedom of expression is guaranteed in the <a href="https://www.gov.za/DOCUMENTS/CONSTITUTION/constitution-republic-south-africa-1996-1">constitution</a> and a <a href="http://www.constitutionalcourt.org.za/site/constitution/english-web/ch9.html">slew of institutions</a> and laws support the guarantee. At the same time, powerful groups continue to seek ways to limit and undermine journalism.</p>
<p>On October 19, 1977, two South African newspapers - World and Weekend World - and a church journal - Pro Veritate - <a href="https://www.iol.co.za/sundayindependent/remembering-qobozas-sense-of-duty-1594527#.ViI2CX4rLnA">were closed</a>, journalists were banned and detained and some 18 organisations of the black consciousness movement were banned. Since then, the country’s journalists have marked the day as Media Freedom Day.</p>
<p>The 1977 crackdown went further than even the apartheid cabinet of the time had decided: cabinet minutes from the day before, laboriously written in longhand in leather-covered volumes held in the national archives, record the decision that the World newspaper “be suspended for a week” and that the editor Percy Qoboza and others be detained. The Weekend World is not mentioned. </p>
<p>In fact, both papers were banned permanently. There are other differences: the list of organisations actually closed is much longer than was decided by <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/bj-vorster-steps-down-prime-minster">Prime Minister BJ Vorster’s</a> cabinet.</p>
<p>One can speculate about the reasons for the difference between decision and implementation – perhaps the powerful apartheid police simply thought they knew better than their political bosses.</p>
<p>Black Wednesday remains a particularly brutal act of repression in a long line of attempts to silence critical media voices. There have been many victims, before and since. </p>
<p>What’s clear is that the battle for media freedom in South Africa isn’t over. Attacks on journalists continue – whether in the form of physical intimidation or through the threat of new legal measures that seek to restrict the media’s ability to do its job. And the online world has opened up new frontiers that need defending. </p>
<h2>Targeting journalists</h2>
<p>Journalism is under attack from a number of quarters.</p>
<p>A number of laws and bills contain problematical provisions. The board of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, who met in Durban in June, <a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2017-06-12-worlds-press-calls-for-renewed-solidarity-in-the-wake-of-threats-to-independent-free-media-in-sa/">highlighted concerns</a> with bills on cybersecurity, hate crimes and films and publications as infringing on media freedom. </p>
<p>Then there’s the Protection of State Information Bill (generally called the<br>
<a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/04/29/south-africa-secrecy-bill-improved-still-flawed">Secrecy Bill</a>, whose problematical provisions include an overly broad definition of the national interest and which would severely restrict the freedom to report. The bill was passed in 2013 but is still awaiting signature on President Jacob Zuma’s desk. </p>
<p>There also appears to be a concerted move to reopen the debate around a <a href="http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/contentious-media-tribunal-still-on-the-cards-20170708">Media Appeals Tribunal</a> through a parliamentary inquiry, which would subject the media to regulation by Parliament. </p>
<p>Also, this year has seen attempts to intimidate and threaten journalists, most notably by Black First Land First <a href="http://ewn.co.za/2017/07/28/police-criticised-for-failing-to-stop-blf-harassment">(BLF)</a> and other proxies in what has become known as the <a href="http://pari.org.za/betrayal-promise-report/">state capture project</a>. This has involved attempts by powerful individuals and groups to shape South Africa’s political and economic landscape through corrupt relationships and deals to benefit their own private interests. After BLF’s protest at the home of former Business Day editor Peter Bruce in June turned violent, the South African National Editors Forum obtained a <a href="http://ewn.co.za/2017/08/09/all-journalists-now-protected-against-blf-harassment">court interdict</a> against the organisation and its leader Andile Mngxitama.
As the forum’s chairperson Mahlatse Gallens pointed out in her response to the court ruling:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They have specifically targeted journalists that have done in-depth reporting on allegations of corruption and state capture. We will not be deterred.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These kinds of attacks attest to the strength and importance of journalism in present-day South Africa. From exposes on the <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2009-12-04-zumas-r65m-nkandla-splurge">Nkandla scandal</a> to the <a href="http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/gupta-leakscom-everything-you-ever-need-to-know-about-guptaleaks-in-one-place-20170721">Gupta emails</a>, which detailed the extent of <a href="http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/download-the-full-state-of-capture-pdf-20161102">state capture</a>, journalistic investigations have set the public agenda. Government ministers have been forced to account and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/sep/07/bell-pottinger-could-go-under-within-days-sources-claim">international corporations</a> have been ruined following exposure of their complicity. </p>
<p>When around 1000 of the world’s investigative journalists gather for the <a href="https://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/general-news/2017/2017-10/global-investigative-journalism-conference-programme-released.html">Global Investigative Journalism Conference</a> at Wits University in a few weeks – the first time the event is held in Africa - the South African experience will be of considerable interest.</p>
<h2>Media freedom in a changed era</h2>
<p>Attacks and threats to media freedom are a mark of the importance of journalism, but the effects are felt by the citizenry at large. <a href="https://www.ivir.nl/publicaties/download/Current_threats_journalism.pdf">As the Council of Europe</a> pointed out in a paper on protecting journalists, interference with media freedom </p>
<blockquote>
<p>is simultaneously an interference with the public’s right to receive information or ideas.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The constitutionally guaranteed right to free expression is mainly about citizens’ right to be informed; journalists hold it in trust for the broader public. Journalism and its organisations have not always been successful in making that point clear.</p>
<p>Seen in that light, the media freedom discussion needs to broaden out and take into account developments which do not amount to direct attempts to harass journalists, but damage their ability to do this important work in other ways.</p>
<p>The long-standing business model of journalistic media is in terminal decline as audiences move to online and social media. Legacy media companies are under <a href="http://www.journalism.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/State-of-the-newsroom-2014.pdf">intense financial pressure</a> and staffing levels in newsrooms keep dropping. Investment in the time and effort to do journalism of quality is way down.</p>
<p>At the same time, the growth of online platforms has led to an explosion of available information. In many senses, this has been positive, but it has also opened the door to abuse. The campaign in support of state capture involved the extensive use of social media for <a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2017-09-04-how-the-gupta-campaign-weaponised-social-media/">cyber-bullying </a> and to create the illusion of a groundswell of opinion that does not exist.</p>
<p>The use of information as a weapon is not new - propaganda is as old as the hills, and South African political and factional campaigns have often made use of leaks as a form of warfare. But we seem to be entering a new phase where it becomes harder and harder to distinguish real exposes from the false kind. Some journalists and media outlets, in some cases liberally supported by public funding, are allowing themselves to be used for factional ends.</p>
<p>Trust is journalism’s most valuable asset. In an era of fake news, that trust is harmed not only by what the media themselves may do, but by what is done by pedlars of misinformation, who are often hard to distinguish from professional journalists.</p>
<p>A loss of trust may in the long run cause more harm to journalism than the repressive tactics of past decades.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85868/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Franz Krüger is head of the journalism programme at Wits University. He is a member of the SA National Editors Forum. </span></em></p>
As South Africa marks Media Freedom Day, it’s clear that its battle isn’t over. Attacks on journalists continue –through physical intimidation and there’s also the threat of new laws.
Franz Krüger, Adjunct Professor of Journalism and Director of the Wits Radio Academy, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/82952
2017-09-04T08:58:38Z
2017-09-04T08:58:38Z
Why is Steve Biko’s remarkable legacy often overlooked?
<p>While Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Desmond Tutu are rightly venerated for their role in opposing and ending white minority rule in South Africa, another leader of the liberation years has been remarkably overlooked: Bantu Steven Biko, who led the enormously influential <a href="http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/sites/default/files/pdf_files/sanov75.pdf">Black Consciousness Movement</a>. Four decades after his death in police custody on September 12 1977, he deserves to be recognised as one of the towering heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle.</p>
<p>Black Consciousness re-energised black opposition to apartheid and helped draw the world’s attention to the brutality of South Africa’s white minority rule. It began after the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/sharpeville-massacre-21-march-1960">Sharpeville Massacre</a> in 1960, when established liberation movements such as the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) were banned by the South African government and forced into exile. With the organised opposition apparently moribund, the South African state presided over an economic boom for the white minority and created the conditions for apartheid’s so-called <a href="http://www.sadet.co.za/road_democracy_vol1.html">golden age</a>. </p>
<p>In 1969, with overt political activism and leadership largely dormant, Black Consciousness emerged from the South African Students’ Organisation to fill the void. Biko advocated that black liberation would only follow once psychological liberation from the internalised acceptance of racial oppression was achieved, <a href="http://www.sbf.org.za/home/index.php/steve-biko-quotes/">arguing</a> that “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed”. </p>
<p>At its heart, Black Consciousness demanded pride, self-assertion, and self-confidence. Biko’s idea was that this would in turn stimulate a “revolution of the mind”, allowing oppressed peoples to overcome the racial inferiority <a href="http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/sites/default/files/pdf_files/sasep71.pdf">and fear</a> propagated by white racism so they could appreciate that they were not just “appendages to the white society”. This relatively simple idea radically changed perceptions of the struggle. It helped instil a new cultural and psychological outlook among the black population, and thereby renewed the challenge to the apartheid system.</p>
<p>Biko turned ideas into a potent new weapon, and the white minority state was slow to appreciate that the spread of ideas could not be contained by physical force alone. As a consequence, Biko was given a <a href="https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/asset/biko-s-banning-order/IQEhU3uuNE2REg">banning order</a> in 1973, which confined him to King William’s Town in the Eastern Cape, and prevented him from speaking in public. </p>
<p>In fact, as <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/2253092.stm">Nelson Mandela</a> put it, the apartheid state was so fearful of Biko’s influence that “they had to kill him to prolong the life of apartheid”.</p>
<p>In 1977, Biko was killed in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG5Zjt2SE28">police custody</a> after brutal interrogation and torture. Despite a subsequent political <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/11/18/lawyer-alleges-coverup-on-biko-death/ee85b03e-b0de-4a17-ba4c-d68e0d0f6634/?utm_term=.c578f80a0310">cover up</a>, the circumstances of his death were exposed, laying bare the violence of the apartheid state. His death led to greater international pressure against white minority rule, particularly via the global <a href="http://www.aamarchives.org/">Anti-Apartheid Movement</a> and influential people such as white journalist and activist <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/20/world/donald-woods-67-editor-and-apartheid-foe.html?mcubz=1">Donald Woods</a>, whose friendship with Biko was the subject of the 1987 film <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq4VjE0_AVQ">Cry Freedom</a>.</p>
<h2>Squeezed out</h2>
<p>So why hasn’t Black Consciousness left as deep an institutional footprint as the ANC and its like? Part of the answer is that as a movement, it was relatively weak organisationally. </p>
<p>Beyond its activists’ community projects, Black Consciousness was never an effective or broad-based organisation; with most of its leaders imprisoned or banned by the mid-1970s, it was predominantly an intellectual movement confined to South Africa’s urban areas. As newly politicised South Africans variously joined and formed alternative organisations, it fragmented and began to lose influence. By 1977, it was deemed illegal under the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/apartheid-government-declares-19-organisations-unlawful">Internal Security Act</a>, and Biko’s murder robbed it of its intellectual and political leader. </p>
<p>But the movement was long outlived by its ideology. Ideas are very difficult to extinguish, and they don’t necessarily need an institutional home to flourish. The “revolutionary consciousness” Biko called for enabled people to appreciate their subjugation, and to take action. It inspired the children of Soweto to protest against the imposition of Afrikaans in schools in 1976, resulting in <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising">an uprising</a> that caught the world’s attention and put the regime under more pressure than ever. </p>
<p>In fact, Black Consciousness was a more powerful catalyst than the established liberation movements. It “freed” minds, revived and mobilised political opposition, and re-energised the declining ANC as militant young activists joined the exiled armed struggle.</p>
<p>Yet since the end of apartheid in 1994, the governing ANC has worked hard to <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2017-07-20-the-anc-has-captured-the-countrys-history/#.WZ2eGD6GOpo">monopolise</a> the history of liberation. A plethora of groups including Black Consciousness, the <a href="http://www.saha.org.za/udf/origins.htm">United Democratic Front</a>, the <a href="http://newafricanmagazine.com/sobukwes-unremembering/">PAC</a>, and student organisations were all involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, yet the ANC has worked to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/31/anc-centenary-airbrushing-history">disregard</a> the efforts of alternative actors. To fully recognise the power and influence of Biko’s ideas would disrupt the ANC’s preferred version of history.</p>
<p>So even though Biko became a martyr for the anti-apartheid struggle in his day, he is too often left out of the story. The same goes for other figures who helped topple the system, especially those who worked outside the ANC. It’s long past time to properly celebrate these other elements of the struggle – of whom Steve Biko was surely among the strongest.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82952/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Graham does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The ANC has worked hard to monopolise the history of the anti-apartheid struggle – meaning transformational figures are being left out.
Matthew Graham, Lecturer in History, University of Dundee
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/72518
2017-03-05T10:36:37Z
2017-03-05T10:36:37Z
Afrofuturistic, cosmic jazz comes to the Motherland
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/159131/original/image-20170302-14714-18pc15p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Saxophonist Kamasi Washington will be performing at the 2017 Cape Town International Jazz Festival.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>The golden era days of <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/style/jazz-rap-ma0000012180">jazz-rap</a> occurred during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hip-hop artists of the time sampled jazz and funk records to create their sound. </p>
<p>Unlike then, we are now entering an age where jazz and funk artists are redefining the boundaries and the sound of hip-hop. The <a href="http://www.capetownjazzfest.com/">Cape Town International jazz festival</a> has tapped into this new age. A number of these musical trailblazers are coming to the African motherland soon, where their musical prowess will be showcased at the annual festival.</p>
<p>Some context on these musicians: They do this delineation by fusing genres like <a href="http://pitchfork.com/features/pitchfork-essentials/9724-astral-traveling-the-ecstasy-of-spiritual-jazz/">spiritual/cosmic jazz</a>, <a href="http://www.stereogum.com/1822964/p-funk-albums-from-worst-to-best/franchises/counting-down/">Pfunk</a> and <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/subgenre/west-coast-rap-ma0000002932">West Coast hip-hop</a> with ideologies of <a href="http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/pages/6001/Black-Consciousness.html">black consciousness</a>, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.za/entry/your-far-out-guide-to-afrofuturism-and-black-magic_us_5711403fe4b0060ccda34a37">Afrofuturism</a> and <a href="http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&context=blackstudfacproc">syncretic black spirituality</a>.</p>
<p>We also see more of an emphasis on collaboration between hip-hop artists and contemporary jazz musos. Not only well versed in the golden era hip-hop, these jazz musicians also know their way around the jazz of yesteryear. This interaction sees more interplay between traditional hip-hop sampling methods and a jazz-based composition, improvisation and performance aesthetic in hip-hop. A prime example of this development can be found in songs like Kendrick Lamar’s “For Free? (Interlude)”, “<a href="https://worldgalaxyrecords.bandcamp.com/track/astral-progressions-feat-kurupt">Astral Progressions</a>” by contemporary jazz trumpeter <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/josef-leimberg-mn0001717508/biography">Josef Leimberg</a> featuring rapper Kurupt and the works of artists like the Canadian jazz band, <a href="http://badbadnotgood.com/">Badbadnotgood</a>.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_ZTYgq4EoRo?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘For Free?’ by Kendrick Lamar from his album, To Pimp a Butterfly.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Unlike in the golden jazz-rap era, jazz is no longer a mere sonic muse or pallet for beat makers. It’s now at the forefront of hip-hop production and is directly influencing the trajectory of the genre. For jazz this period marks a new era of fusion that’s heavily influenced by the open minded innovators of the fusion movement of the 1970s such as <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/herbie-hancock-mn0000957296">Herbie Hancock</a>, <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/miles-davis-mn0000423829">Miles Davis</a>, <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/weather-report-mn0000243527">Weather Report</a> and <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/tony-williams-mn0000791318">Tony Williams</a>. These musical revolutionaries were able to change the shape of jazz and other genres simultaneously through the redefinition and fusion of styles.</p>
<p>Something really magical is taking place at the moment. The last few years have seen a gradual increase of black artists who are really – as opposed to just aesthetically – tuned into the circuit-jamming frequencies and epoch-making ideas of <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/george-clinton-mn0000533117/biography">George Clinton</a>), <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/sun-ra-mn0000924232/biography">Sun Ra</a>, <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/2pac-mn0000921895/biography">Tupac Shakur</a>, <a href="http://malcolmx.com/biography/">Malcolm X</a> and everything in between and beyond.</p>
<p>As a scholar of Afrofuturism, a DJ and record collector I am extremely grateful that the Cape Town International Jazz Festival has booked some of these gifted young artists that have built this movement over the last few years.</p>
<p>I’m particularly excited to witness, in my own city, the stellar art of <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/laura-mvula-mn0003052732/biography">Laura Mvula</a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/taylor-mcferrin-mn0001881073/biography">Taylor McFerrin</a> and <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/marcus-gilmore-mn0000935640/credits">Marcus Gilmore</a>; <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/kamasi-washington-mn0000772447">Kamasi Washington</a> and <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/digable-planets-mn0000826762">Digable Planets</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Laura Mvula</strong></p>
<p>I can best describe Birmingham native Mvula’s music as ethereal, spaced out vocal jazz with gospel and African choral roots. She sounds unique, exploring themes of blackness, spirituality and space in an elegant manner. </p>
<p>Her style is minimal, clean and elegant with a particular knack for making full use of emptiness and space. Listening to her music makes me feel like I’ve been teleported to church in outer space. Worth noting is that her African surname is of no significance to her music – it’s simply her Zambian husband’s surname.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Laura Mvula’s musical feel is well illustrated in this song ‘That’s alright’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>Digable Planets</strong></p>
<p>The title of <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/digable-planets-mn0000826762">Digable Planets</a>’ 1993 jazz-heavy debut release “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/reachin-a-new-refutation-of-time-and-space-mw0000616174">Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space)</a>” is an apt and clear indicator of the musical direction they were taking during that period. This particular album served as my first introduction to jazzy hip-hop and the idea of “space, jazz and blackness”. Their second release “<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/blowout-comb-mw0000119422">Blowout Comb</a>”, which is super Afrocentric and created around themes of Black Nationalism, black urban culture, jazz and entomology, took me further down the rabbit hole of Afrofuturism .</p>
<p>For me the group exemplifies my comparison between the golden era of hip-hop, the advent of late 90s <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/subgenre/neo-soul-ma0000004426">neo-soul</a> and the here-and-now, as they were one of the first groups to explore Afrofuturism, space, time travel, blackness and urban culture through the idioms of jazz and hip-hop. They definitely set the tone for this kind of expression and continued to do so even after their protracted hiatus which occurred between 1995 and their reunion tour of 2016.</p>
<p>During that period group member Ishmael Butler went on to establish another highly influential Afrofuturistic outfit, <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/shabazz-palaces-mw0002138257">Shabazz Palaces</a>, and Cee Knowledge created and recorded with the spaced out hip-hop/jazz band <a href="http://cosmicfunkorchestra.com/">Cee Knowledge and the Cosmic Funk Orchestra</a> while Lady Mecca went on to record her solo hip-hop offering, “<a href="http://prince.org/msg/8/431132">Trip The Light Fantastic</a>”. One simply cannot discuss Afrofuturism and jazz within the bounds of hip-hop without mentioning Digable Planets and their unique legacy.</p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Digable Planets with their hit ‘Rebirth Of Slick (Cool Like Dat)’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>Taylor McFerrin and Marcus Gilmore</strong></p>
<p>The idea that DJ, producer and multi-instrumentalist <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/taylor-mcferrin-mn0001881073/biography">Taylor McFerrin</a> is teaming up with jazz drummer <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/marcus-gilmore-mn0000935640/credits">Marcus Gilmore</a> is most thrilling because they have never recorded a collaborative album that showcases their collective sound. This collaboration is an argument in favour of the assumption that musicality is innate by way of one’s genes. Both these artists are direct descendants of two of the most prolific artists of our time.</p>
<p>Gilmore, who is the grandson of legendary jazz drummer <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/roy-haynes-mn0000290464">Roy Haynes</a>, recently recorded an album with the jazz fusion giant Chick Corea. Gilmore has also collaborated with foremost Afrofuturist <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/flying-lotus-mn0000717419">Flying Lotus</a> and <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/ravi-coltrane-mn0000401568">Ravi Coltrane</a>. Both are from impeccable jazz stock – the latter the son of jazz gods, <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/john-coltrane-mn0000175553">John</a> and <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/alice-coltrane-mn0000006143/biography">Alice</a>, and the former their grand nephew.</p>
<p>McFerrin, the son of <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/bobby-mcferrin-mn0000768367">Bobby</a>, is known for his left-field, futuristic fusion of electronica, jazz, soul and hip hop. He is affiliated to the aforementioned Flying Lotus’s experimental LA-based <a href="http://www.thefader.com/2015/08/26/brainfeeder-flying-lotus-label-interview">Brainfeeder</a> record label, a purveyor of some of the finest Afrofuturistic art of the last decade.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zRxt0vQ5kDc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Gilmore and McFerrin in concert.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>Kamasi Washington</strong></p>
<p>Saxophonist <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/kamasi-washington-mn0000772447">Washington</a>’s multiple 2015 award winning debut studio album “The Epic” (also released via Brainfeeder) is one of the most important jazz albums of the last five years. It simultaneously garnered the <a href="http://www.metacritic.com/music/the-epic/kamasi-washington">respect of critics</a> and jazz purists, as well as audiences who wouldn’t otherwise listen to anything as musically complex.</p>
<p>Released as a triple disk on vinyl, “The Epic” is a worthy investment for any vinyl enthusiast and music lover.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KqJJ-2cRR0M?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Kamasi Washington and his band with ‘Clair de Lune’ from ‘The Epic’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This phenomenal album, along with Washington’s work as a notable collaborator on a significant number of the most prominent Afrofuturistic, jazz, hip-hop and funk albums of the last five years, makes him an artist of great stature. One finds his name <a href="https://www.discogs.com/artist/324293-Kamasi-Washington?filter_anv=0&subtype=Writing-Arrangement&type=Credits">printed in the liner notes</a> of recent, groundbreaking albums by Kendrick Lamar, Josef Leimberg, Flying Lotus, Thundercat, Miles Mosely and Run the Jewels.</p>
<p>Washington definitely is an important part of the machinery that’s shaping the future sound of jazz, hip-hop and funk, in their individual forms and as a futuristic, experimental fusion projects.</p>
<p>The festival is an exceptional opportunity to engage with artists, who are relevant and progressive, especially in the Motherland. I sincerely hope that South Africa inspires their art and that we can absorb something from whatever they project.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/72518/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Shakib Bhatch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Something really magical is happening at the intersection between jazz and hip-hop at the moment. Many of the artists involved will be playing at Africa’s foremost jazz festival.
Michael Shakib Bhatch, Lecturer of English. PhD Candidate in Afrofuturism and African Studies, University of the Western Cape
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/67389
2016-10-20T15:29:34Z
2016-10-20T15:29:34Z
What must fall: fees or the South African state?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142515/original/image-20161020-8862-1x1eefy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The polarising effects of <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa/topics/feesmustfall-21801">#FeesMustFall</a> are now pervasive in the academy, and probably beyond. Academics turn on each other, as do their schools and faculties. </p>
<p>Whole universities are pitted against one another – the <a href="http://www.thedailyvox.co.za/tactics-future-feesmustfall-wits/">“Wits option”</a> vs the <a href="http://www.politicsweb.co.za/comment/the-degradation-of-uct">“UCT option”</a>. Some academics are accused of being blindly supportive of “the innocent students” and parading their colours as the immaculate left; while others are <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/493499504144839/">seen</a> as blindly securocrat, unreconstructed racists, or terminally bewildered.</p>
<p>So let’s (try to) agree on a modicum of common ground. Remarkably, there is a lot of it about. No-one can reasonably argue that universities are not underfunded. No-one can reasonably argue that the impact of underfunding has been transferred to fee increases, and that in turn, black (primarily African and coloured) students bear the burden. Given the failure of the post-apartheid economy to sufficiently redistribute wealth and the abject failure of trickle-down economics, <a href="http://www.thedailyvox.co.za/a-letter-to-white-people/">“black debt”</a> is a reality. </p>
<p>Let’s also accept that for many students, much of the academy is an alienating, overwhelmingly white, Eurocentric space and experience. Students arrive and are expected to meet imported norms, seminar room sarcasm, unknown customs, foreign authors, hard marking and plain hard slog of tertiary education, while being young and going through their own life transitions, and doing so in “othered” spaces, out of vernacular, and so on.</p>
<p>Let us also agree that virtually no university or further education college has genuinely grappled (institutionally, not at the level of the individual) with what it means to <a href="https://theconversation.com/decolonise-more-than-just-curriculum-content-change-the-structure-too-44480">decolonise</a>, beyond (at best) looking around quickly for some black/African authors. This is not true at school level, where many advances have been made – but these are islands in an ocean. Students swim in the ocean.</p>
<p>Let’s also accept the dangers of commodified knowledge and universities, and the fact that the system is slowly becoming a sausage machine for lawyers, accountants, MBAs and others deemed economically necessary for the economy. Those schools and faculties seen to add no “dollar value” are discriminated against locally and globally. </p>
<p>I say “let’s agree” because these issues have all been <a href="https://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/general-news/2016/feesmustfall2016/statements/draft-pledge-on-access-to-higher-education.html">agreed</a> to by both protesters and university management. There may be quibbles over the severity of this or that issue in this or that part of the sector, but the central issues are undisputed.</p>
<h2>Divided we fall</h2>
<p>So what divides us, and with such vehemence? For the immaculate left, it is ultimately a capitalist state that has no interest in the poor emerging from poverty; overlapping with black people in a society dominated by whiteliness; creating an unreconstructed racial capitalism that needs to be toppled. Students in this view lack agency, and are in every context victims of external forces. Every action is the response of victim to oppressor. </p>
<p>“Senior management” is seen to lead with security, follow up with more security, and have no interest in negotiation or compromise. Students just want a free, decolonised education in a transformed institution and are shot for daring to ask for it – and they remain innocent, brutalised “black bodies”.</p>
<p>For those who are not in this group, there is a basic commitment to teach, and to getting students to complete the academic year. They are disregarded as <a href="https://theconversation.com/navigating-south-africas-loaded-political-lexicon-42791">“liberals”</a>, the ultimate South African insult. Security is regarded as a necessary evil – but since many academics have personally been assaulted and/or abused and/or disrupted, and many targeted for hiding students desperate to learn and/or shielding them from protesters, security seems a basic necessity. The pleas from students for support to finish the year have been incessant.</p>
<h2>Returning to class</h2>
<p>What is at fault with all these views is the assumption that if protesters win enough compromises – such as sector-wide agreement on free, quality, decolonised education and the need to plan, design and cost it so that it can be an implementable reality not a slogan (being self-evidently not swiftly realised) – they will return to class. And they will do so as victors. We know that the vast majority of non-protesters also want to be back in class - and a great many are there already. But this core assumption is wrong.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142520/original/image-20161020-8862-1ps4wz7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142520/original/image-20161020-8862-1ps4wz7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142520/original/image-20161020-8862-1ps4wz7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142520/original/image-20161020-8862-1ps4wz7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142520/original/image-20161020-8862-1ps4wz7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142520/original/image-20161020-8862-1ps4wz7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142520/original/image-20161020-8862-1ps4wz7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Students use shields belonging to private security during clashes with police at Wits University.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It is increasingly difficult to retreat from the notion that this is an incipient insurrection. While some protesters are undoubtedly idealistic and brave fighters for free quality education, the movement of 2015 has been colonised by political parties and anarchist movements in 2016. A movement without prominent leaders of 2015 has become leaderless in 2016. </p>
<p>Acts of bravery and camaraderie in 2015 have become acts of racist abuse and thuggish violence in 2016. Burning has replaced marching; destruction of university infrastructure is a key goal. This is no longer #FeesMustFall as we knew it – it has become #StateMustFall. </p>
<p>Universities are being used for testing the potential for broader insurrection –- if you can bring down universities you can bring down cities, if you can bring down cities, you can collapse and take control of the state. No compromise will get the core protesters back into class, or satisfy their academic or political mentors, because their goal is so much larger: state capture. It has allegedly been <a href="http://f3magazine.unicri.it/?p=402">done</a> once under democracy, so why not again?</p>
<h2>Who is to blame?</h2>
<p>Politics hates a vacuum, more than nature. The ruling African National Congress (ANC) is <a href="http://city-press.news24.com/News/an-illegitimate-morally-and-politically-compromised-president-malema-doesnt-hold-back-20160217">morally compromised</a> on every front. Seemingly all courts in the land are packed with lawyers attempting to stop good governance and allow uninterrupted <a href="http://www.corruptionwatch.org.za/why-is-corruption-getting-worse-in-south-africa/">bingeing</a> at the trough. The brazen moves to cover various political derrieres are breathtaking – but create space for any other party to claim the moral high ground. </p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising">1976</a> during the Soweto youth uprising, protesting students were given political education by mainly the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/black-consciousness-movement">Black Consciousness Movement</a>.
Those students went into exile got their education from the liberation movement organisations, the ANC and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). Whether they were <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/origins-formation-sharpeville-and-banning-1959-1960">Africanist</a> – closer to the PAC – or <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/DC/theooct90a/theooct90a.pdf">Charterist</a> – aligned with the ANC – they were taught about the democratic state that had to be built and the principles on which it was to be built. Who now provides political education for protesting students?</p>
<p>The ANC is utterly compromised and cannot claim the moral authority to “lead”. The Democratic Alliance and ANC student wings, <a href="https://www.da.org.za/get-involved/da-youth/">DASO</a> and <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/south-african-students-congress-sasco">Sasco</a> respectively, were loud in proclaiming their various Student Representative Council victories earlier in the year but have vanished from the scene. The prominence of <a href="http://effighters.org.za/">Economic Freedom Fighters</a> leaders – at national and student level – may or may not be relevant. So too the various incarnations of <a href="http://blf.org.za/">Black First Land First</a>, pan-Africanist student movements and others. We are reduced to using student leaders of the 1980s as <a href="http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/if-sa-wanted-to-it-would-have-free-education-mpofu-20161008">mediators</a>, still on the faulty assumption that protesters want to return to class. They don’t. They are far more ambitious than that.</p>
<p>We have to call the bluff of those who keep moving the goalposts. Universities have agreed to free, quality, decolonised education in a transformed institution. Exam dates have been changed. Exam content is being modified to accommodate lost classes. But then the <a href="http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2016/10/09/Wits-will-remain-shut-until-our-demands-are-met-%E2%80%93-student-leader">demands shift</a> – we want this fully legislated now, or we won’t return to class. Or, we want amnesty for students suspended after due process regardless of what they did. Or, we want students arrested by police released. And so on and so on. These are patently not demands that the academy has the legal mandate to meet, even if we assume it had the will so to do.</p>
<p>If we do not call this for what it is, we face the danger of realising apartheid architect <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/hendrik-frensch-verwoerd">Hendrik Verwoerd’s</a> dream – the man who <a href="http://www.azquotes.com/quote/727563">advised</a> us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is no place for [the Bantu] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour … What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>If, as seems likely, for the second year in a row, university students in South Africa are going to complete only part of their annual curriculum, and will be examined on only part of their curriculum, the result is that every subsequent year is divided between “catching up” on what was missed and squeezing a year of teaching into less time – we face the danger of ensuring that no student will receive even a quality colonised education (an oxymoron for some, of course). We are not educating our students to compete locally or globally. We are crippling them. They are being sacrificed for the few who see state capture as tantalisingly close.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67389/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Everatt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
University authorities in South Africa have agreed to most fees protesters’ demands. Yet, the protesters keep moving the goalposts. Do they want more than fees to fall?
David Everatt, Head of Wits School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/65257
2016-09-29T17:24:48Z
2016-09-29T17:24:48Z
The Mandela Foundation’s verdict on the Mandela era: it failed …
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139460/original/image-20160927-11541-sq8bj7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nelson Mandela, accompanied by his wife Winnie, walks out of the Victor Verster prison on February 11, 1990.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ulli Michel/Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In a little-heralded move in 2015, the <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/">Nelson Mandela Foundation</a> released a <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2015-04-15-the-nelson-mandela-foundation-race-and-identity-in-2015/">“position paper”</a> on race and identity. It was written by the Foundation’s CEO Sello Hatang and archivist Verne Harris. </p>
<p>Sadly, it triggered little debate, possibly overtaken by #Rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall, the subsequent political fallout and rise of Fallist <a href="http://digitalcollections.sit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3363&context=isp_collection">movements</a>. This is ironic, given that the purpose of the paper seemed to be re-positioning the Foundation to be a part of the <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/real-state-of-the-nation-south-africa-after-1990/oclc/54363879">segment of civil society</a> that regards 1990-1994 as a moment of failure.</p>
<p>The African National Congress (ANC) and other liberation movements were unbanned by the apartheid government in 1990. In 1994 South Africa had its first democratic election, which the ANC won. The four year period came with a number of gains, most obviously formal equality, gender equality and others. There was also defeat for many less savoury proposals such as minority rights and so on. </p>
<p>Inevitably, there were also compromises such as “<a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/negotiations-toward-new-south-africa-grade-12-1#sthash.i13r9Iqn.dpuf">sunset clauses</a>” that guaranteed the gradual phasing out of white rule rather than one dramatic handover of power. These clauses ensured public service jobs for white people for a period of time. A key compromise protected private property - the latter arguably entrenching existing inequality and appearing later in the <a href="http://www.gov.za/documents/constitution/constitution-republic-south-Africa-1996-1">Constitution</a>.</p>
<p>For a foundation honouring Nelson Mandela, this revisionist piece was quite a move. Here 1994 is re-imagined as a moment of defeat, in which “white” capital entrenched itself in return for political power for the ANC, and bought off the total defeat of total strategy for 30 pieces of silver. </p>
<p>That a complete military and political victory for the ANC was even on the cards in 1990-1994 is the product of malfunctioning hindsight. But it has become part of a discourse that looks back at 1994 as an opportunity lost, the onset of failure, because the present feels too much like the past and change is slow and uneven.</p>
<p>The paper does three quite remarkable things. It jettisons non-racialism (to which Mandela’s political life was dedicated) in favour of black consciousness. Secondly, it sees the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) macroeconomic strategy, adopted while Mandela was president, as the source of our current malaise by “either setting or being closely aligned to a global neoliberal agenda”. Lastly, it writes off most of Mandela’s reign as comprising “grand symbolic gestures” and reconciliatory moves, which (it argues) failed.</p>
<h2>New lingo</h2>
<p>The paper ignores non-racialism by seeking to create new terminology. The authors ignore the <a href="http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/the-origins-of-non-racialism/">fact</a> that non-racialism emerged from the 1950s when racists were termed “racialists” and non-racialism was and is, at its core, anti-racist. </p>
<p>The authors drop any mention of non-racialism whatsoever. They fail to grapple with how South Africans get beyond the present other than by appealing to black consciousness and railing against white supremacy. This elision reflects an error in judgement. Non-racialism was born not out of a wishy-washy “can’t we all just get along” set of sentiments. It was, from the outset, the adversary of racialism, in the language of its time.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139463/original/image-20160927-11554-19xop1f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139463/original/image-20160927-11554-19xop1f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139463/original/image-20160927-11554-19xop1f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139463/original/image-20160927-11554-19xop1f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139463/original/image-20160927-11554-19xop1f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139463/original/image-20160927-11554-19xop1f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139463/original/image-20160927-11554-19xop1f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Graca Machel, the late former South African president Nelson Mandela’s wife at the annual Nelson Mandela Lecture in 2016. It is arranged by his Foundation.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Cornell Tukiri/EPA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Although Mandela stood by non-racialism through his political life (after flirting with more exclusive Africanism while in the ANC Youth League), the authors argue that South Africans should rather use “non-racism”. To waste the long history and constitutional <a href="http://www.gov.za/documents/constitution/Constitution-Republic-South-Africa-1996-1">imperative</a> around non-racialism seems at least poor strategy, compounding questionable history.</p>
<p>The paper adopts similar views to those expressed by various Africanist movements: that non-racialism is an outdated liberal colour blindness, a soft search for a “Kumbaya moment” rather than toughing it out by <a href="http://thoughtleader.co.za/simonhowell/2012/11/26/the-problem-with-non-racialism/">confronting race</a>. There seems to be a desire to be “relevant” by pandering to a more racially muscular black consciousness.</p>
<p>Emerging from this view of history, the solution is to return to and tear up the compromises that were made. The next step is to organise an “economic <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/codesa-negotiations">Codesa</a>” – the forum where all political formations negotiated the post-apartheid future – and, by destroying the economic underpinnings of white privilege, attain equality. </p>
<p>This is an undeniably attractive proposition. It however ignores context and what practically could be done then, or now. Rather than accepting the compromises that were required and taking the struggle for a just society forward, meeting old and new challenges as they arise, the Foundation’s proposed move is backward, to shred the 1990-1994 compromises and start afresh.</p>
<h2>A meeting of equals</h2>
<p>South Africa’s best known proponent of black consciousness, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/stephen-bantu-biko">Steve Biko</a>, <a href="http://www.saha.org.za/nonracialism/black_man_youre_on_your_own.htm">wrote eloquently</a> of the need for integration to be based on full and substantive equality. </p>
<p>This requires a meeting of equals, not the subsuming of black people into white society – a point central to critical race theory and identity politics. But this also applies to non-racialism, which <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02589346.2012.656912">asserts substantive equality</a> as its starting point. </p>
<p>The authors of the “Position Paper” clearly find much to value in <a href="https://spacrs.wordpress.com/what-is-critical-race-theory/">Critical Race Theory</a> and black consciousness. But they identify a hierarchy within “race and identity” that is headed by white domination and black un-freedom. No intersectionality here, even though it is core to Critical Race Theory. No integrated approach that regards the challenges of race, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and so on as equally important and fundamentally linked. </p>
<p>No-one walks a single path through life. But the paper shows little appreciation of this. Race – white domination, to be specific – trumps all. Flowing from this logic, xenophobia was tritely rejected as an “unhelpful label”. That provides scant comfort to the victims of <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/xenophobic-violence-democratic-south-africa">xenophobic violence</a> that erupted a month or so after the paper appeared.</p>
<p>According to the authors, race “is still a critical fault line in South Africa’s social landscape”, a point all South Africans agree with. They go on to argue:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Public discourses on race, in our view, are dominated by expressions of denial, alienation, obfuscation and even self-hatred. Listen to the spiteful chattering on social media and radio talk shows, in letters to newspaper editors and at dinner parties. Listen to the often laborious constructions and deconstructions of the academy. Listen to the platitudes of politicians and bureaucrats either papering over or playing fast and loose with the pain and confusion of daily experience.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Few authors like being told, “it is more complicated than that”. But this is glaringly the correct response. The work of civil society, the efforts of individuals, of organised labour and feminist and LGBTIAQ+ movements, of civil and uncivil society, and of those public servants and politicians who try to do their work honestly, are written off in a pastiche designed to conclude that everything is dominated by white racism.</p>
<p>The Mandela government had three strategies for transformation: nation-building, interventions geared at redress and longer-term societal restructuring. The authors want these revived – because they have failed and “the state … has had little success in shifting apartheid-era socioeconomic patterns”.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139466/original/image-20160927-11544-10nkabe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139466/original/image-20160927-11544-10nkabe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139466/original/image-20160927-11544-10nkabe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139466/original/image-20160927-11544-10nkabe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139466/original/image-20160927-11544-10nkabe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139466/original/image-20160927-11544-10nkabe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139466/original/image-20160927-11544-10nkabe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Credited for his ‘grand gestures’, Nelson Mandela hands over the rugby world cup to Springbok captain Francois Pienaar in 1995.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The authors give Mandela credit for “grand gestures” in the area of reconciliation, but cannot square the circle: Mandela was also the president who ushered in the GEAR macroeconomic policy. </p>
<p>Nation-building was spearheaded by Mandela, for whom national reconciliation was the priority for his presidency.</p>
<h2>Nifty footwork</h2>
<p>There is also some adroit footwork here. Mandela is given credit for a number of grand symbolic gestures for reconciliation – even though they are regarded as ultimately futile. But then his name is not invoked in relation to GEAR, nor is he criticised for failing to push for “total victory”. The authors see the post-1994 strategies as necessary, but are unsure where to place blame for their failure.</p>
<p>The paper concludes gloomily that the notion that South Africa “belong[s] to all who live in it” – a statement indelibly associated with Mandela – seems to be “an impossible ideal”. Mandela emerges as a reduced figure in this narrative, from the iconic to the initiator of a set of well-meaning but failed interventions. Perhaps some revisionism away from hagiography is not a bad thing. Revisionism however should be based on decent history.</p>
<p>Looking to the future, the paper offers “key insights”, which are sadly pedestrian such as: </p>
<ul>
<li><p>combating racism will not be easy or speedy; </p></li>
<li><p>there are no “quick-fix” solutions; </p></li>
<li><p>inequality must be challenged by economic growth (how growth will diminish inequality is not explained); and</p></li>
<li><p>South Africans need to engage in more dialogue.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>The key problem with the Foundation’s paper is that it hankers for an opportunity to turn back the clock and rewrite 1994, rather than looking forward and rising to meet the new challenges of a democratic, unequal, racist and stubbornly human South Africa. Attaining formal democracy was a critical first step – but only a first step – in a long struggle to establish a just society. The Foundation should be leading us in the long walk ahead, not looking backwards.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65257/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Everatt is affiliated with the Wits School of Governance, which receives research funding from various sources.</span></em></p>
The foundation founded by Nelson Mandela in 1999 has done a major revision - it has written off most of his reign as comprising “grand symbolic gestures”.
David Everatt, Head of Wits School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/63528
2016-08-09T07:13:57Z
2016-08-09T07:13:57Z
Of political hair, Jewish noses and South Africa’s failure to become a nation
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/133343/original/image-20160808-18043-u9lw9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Author Christine Qunta says forgiveness trumps justice in South Africa.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Elelwani Netshifhire</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Book Review: <a href="https://seritisasechaba.co.za/">Why we are not a nation</a>, by Christine Qunta.</em> </p>
<hr>
<p>This readable book by Christine Qunta, free of any jargon, divides into three extended essays. The first, mostly historic and political, is titled Why we are not a nation? The second essay, sociological and psychological, is called Is hair political? – and should be a hot sell among African-Americans. The third is a 50-page part-autobiography called Law, national duty, and other hazards.</p>
<p>It is sad that half a century after <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Basil-Davidson/e/B001IXMLRI">Basil Davidson</a> and <a href="https://www.google.co.za/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=Joseph+Needham%E2%80%99s+books">Joseph Needham’s</a> books popularised respectively African history and Chinese mechanical inventions, Qunta still finds it necessary to devote pages to an Afrocentric summary of history.</p>
<p>It is sad that half a century after the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/422977?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">Oxford History of South Africa</a> and a steady stream of archaeological publications, Qunta still finds it necessary to debunk the colonial and apartheid the-whites-settled-in-empty-land dogma.</p>
<p>But just read the letters to the editors, and the websites, blogs, Facebook and Twitter of 2016, where the <a href="http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/its-just-the-facts-penny-sparrow-breaks-her-silence-20160104">racist memes of apartheid</a> persist and reproduce themselves, and we immediately understand why. Qunta writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>White supremacy constituted part of the ideological arsenal developed and deployed by colonialism and imperialism, developing an autonomous existence that has survived long after its economic rationale ceased to exist.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The core argument of the book is that South Africa has:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>…. a type of post-traumatic stress disorder of a nation, one that cannot be treated because it has not yet been diagnosed. (We are a country) where forgiveness is overrated and justice is underrated.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/133111/original/image-20160804-466-1y5wurx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/133111/original/image-20160804-466-1y5wurx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=893&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133111/original/image-20160804-466-1y5wurx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=893&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133111/original/image-20160804-466-1y5wurx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=893&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133111/original/image-20160804-466-1y5wurx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1122&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133111/original/image-20160804-466-1y5wurx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1122&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133111/original/image-20160804-466-1y5wurx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1122&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Qunta advocates a reparations fund; to accelerate corrective policies; that white businesses should learn to think strategically; that schools should be freed from colonial indoctrination; and that African culture should be mainstreamed, especially African languages.</p>
<p>The author’s heroes include <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/marcus-garvey">Marcus Garvey</a>, <a href="http://www.ibtauris.com/Books/Humanities/Philosophy/Social%20%20political%20philosophy/Frantz%20Fanon%20The%20Militant%20Philosopher%20of%20Third%20World%20Liberation.aspx?menuitem=%7B65A3FB7C-5D2E-4158-BBA9-D7824186AD5B%7D">Franz Fanon</a>, <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/malcolm-x">Malcolm X</a> and <a href="http://azapo.org.za/azapohistory/bantu-stephen-biko/">Steve Biko</a>. She advocates that colonial symbols, including statues, should be removed from public places and sent to museums; the same with colonial names.</p>
<h2>Of black hair and Jewish noses</h2>
<p>The essay Is Hair political? starts by quoting <a href="http://www.ngugiwathiongo.com/bio/bio-home.htm">Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o</a> that a:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… multibillion industry in the world is built around the erasure of blackness – and its biggest clients are the affluent black middle classes in Africa and the world.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Qunta recalls her screaming in pain as a child when her granny tried to comb her hair straight and her mother burnt it straight, leaving her with marks on her forehead. She then summarises the fashion and beauty industries’ war against African hair. In a profoundly feminist statement, she writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If the fashion and beauty industries were states, they would undoubtedly be fascist.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The phenomenal proportion of black women still using hair-straightening and skin-lightening products decades after white racist laws have been revoked can be explained by a sociological comparison.</p>
<p>From at least the 1930s until the 1960s, many wealthy Jewish women went for “nose jobs” – for plastic surgeons to make their noses look “less Jewish” and more Aryan. During the 1950s and 1960s many Japanese women had surgeons reshape their eyes from almond to round. Even today, many Brazilian and Egyptian women feel pressured to get a gynaecologist to reconstruct their hymens before marriage.</p>
<p>Not those women, but respectively anti-Jewish racism, US hegemony and military occupation of Japan, and contemporary misogyny and double standards, should be blamed for pressuring persons until they felt the need for self-mutilation.</p>
<p>The third essay, Law, national duty, and other hazards, needs to be compulsory reading for all black women to motivate them to succeed in business. Her pages on the South African <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/truth-and-reconciliation-commission-trc">Truth and Reconciliation Commission</a>, after the end of apartheid, vividly remind us of the routine torture, perversion of justice, and perjuring of affidavits under the apartheid machine. She sketches how the apartheid security apparatus tried to turn <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/political-activist-and-advocate-dumisa-ntsebeza-born">Advocate Dumisa Ntsebenza</a>, one of the commissioners, into a second <a href="https://global.britannica.com/event/Dreyfus-affair">Dreyfus affair</a>.</p>
<h2>Egyptian civilisation</h2>
<p>This reviewer has quibbles with one or two claims in the text, but none of these affect the main points which the author makes. </p>
<p>Ancient Egyptian civilisation is probably best dated (page 3) as emerging not in 4000BC, but between 3400 and 3100 BC.</p>
<p>The claims about Dogon knowledge of astronomy lack independent substantiation. But this does not affect African contributions to historic astronomy, from the calendar to what is possibly the world’s oldest Stonehenge at <a href="http://www.ancient-wisdom.com/egyptnabta.htm">Nabta Playa</a>, dating before 4000 BC.</p>
<p>Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Diagne’s magisterial <a href="http://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/product.php?productid=2216">The Meanings of Timbuktu</a> points out that there was no institute such as a University of Sankoré. This was a metaphor that African authors used to interpret for western readers that Timbuktu was a centre of higher education, where students studied under individual leading scholars.</p>
<p>In the Cape, slaves were not randomly given the names of months (page 67); they were named after the month in which the slaver ship unloaded them in Cape Town.</p>
<p>Everyone should buy this book – it can be read over a weekend.</p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="http://wits.worldcat.org/title/why-we-are-not-a-nation/oclc/951524791">Why we are not a nation</a> is published by <a href="https://seritisasechaba.co.za/">Seriti sa Sechaba</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/63528/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Keith Gottschalk is affiliated with the ANC. He writes this review in his individual capacity.</span></em></p>
Qunta advocates a reparations fund to accelerate corrective policies, that schools be freed from colonial indoctrination and that African culture should be mainstreamed, especially African languages.
Keith Gottschalk, Political Scientist, University of the Western Cape
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62374
2016-07-13T20:57:01Z
2016-07-13T20:57:01Z
Under the influence of … the Black Consciousness novel ‘Amandla’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130440/original/image-20160713-12389-e1910l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Portrait of Miriam Tlali as part of Adrian Steirn's 21 Icons South Africa project. Date: 15.10.2014
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.21icons.com">Adrian Steirn/Courtesy of 21 Icons South Africa</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>South African novelist <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/miriam-tlali">Miriam Tlali</a>’s “Amandla” is one of a handful of Black Consciousness novels that renders in fiction the June 1976 <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising">Soweto uprising</a>.</p>
<p>Published in 1980 by <a href="http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3781">Ravan Press</a>, it was only the second novel authored in English by a black woman to be published within the borders of apartheid South Africa (her 1975 debut, “<a href="http://www.postcolonialweb.org/sa/tlali/mukhuba3.html">Muriel at Metropolitan</a>” was the first). Predictably, “Amandla” was <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/miriam-tlali">banned</a> upon publication.</p>
<p>“Amandla” offers a richly detailed fictional account of the 1976 Soweto uprising, when the township’s youth rose up against the decision to make Afrikaans compulsory as a medium of instruction in black schools. “Amandla” is written from the perspective of a number of young revolutionaries of the time. </p>
<p>Based on Tlali’s experience as a Soweto resident in 1976, the novel depicts the uprising and its aftermath. It vividly sketches the mechanics of the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/introduction-black-consciousness-movement">Black Consciousness</a> ideology in the service of anti-apartheid activism. “Amandla” does so while teasing apart gender relations between men and women activists, and within the larger community.</p>
<p>It is one of four novels considered “Soweto novels”, works of fiction depicting the June 1976 uprising. The others are Mongane Serote’s “<a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02564710308530320">To Every Birth its Blood</a>” (1981), Sipho Sepamla’s “<a href="https://africainwords.com/2014/02/18/teaching-africa-sipho-sepamla-literary-realism-and-a-ride-on-the-whirlwind/">A Ride on the Whirlwind</a>” (1981) and Mbulelo Mzamane’s “<a href="http://www.mml.co.za/children-of-soweto-review-bookchat">The Children of Soweto</a>” (1982).</p>
<p>These novels are heavily influenced by Black Consciousness ideology. They are also shaped by <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/stephen-bantu-biko">Steve Biko</a>’s writings on a unified black populace that would decolonise itself from racist indoctrination.</p>
<p>However, “Amandla” departs from these novels in an unprecedented attentiveness to the <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10130950.2013.778620">gender politics</a> of the day. It engages in the mimetic work of reflecting black gender relations in Soweto. The novel also constructs a new vision of black masculinity.</p>
<h2>Why is/was it influential?</h2>
<p>Tlali uses Black Consciousness discourse as a launching point for this vision of masculinity. The novel tracks the life of the student leader, Pholoso, and a range of minor characters.</p>
<p>The reader follows Pholoso as he becomes a leader of the youth. In this role he has conscientising sessions in the cellar of a church with young people active in the struggle. Here Tlali allows him long streams of dialogue. He outlines several position statements from the underground resistance movement on how society should be organised.</p>
<p>Relationships between black men and women is one area where he “instructs” the youth on ethical behaviour. In one scene, Pholoso addresses a room of 22 activists as “Ma-Gents”, making it clear that the room is filled with young men. Within this masculinised space, Pholoso articulates, among other things, a strong position on gender equality and relationships with women.</p>
<p>First, he addresses the absence of women from the “innermost core” of the underground movement this gathering represents. He attributes women’s absence to the high levels of sexual harassment to which women are subject whenever they move around Soweto.</p>
<p>Pholoso names this scourge of molestation as an impediment to women’s participation in political activity. He believes it should be countered through educating the public at large.</p>
<p>Critics such as <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/463784?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">Cecily Lockett</a> and <a href="http://www.english.uct.ac.za/professor-kelwyn-sole">Kelwyn Sole</a> have critiqued Pholoso’s centrality as a student leader. They have also scrutinised the masculine space wherein he operates as reifying women’s subservient positions within the anti-apartheid struggle. <a href="https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-34153224/forms-of-resistance-south-african-women-s-writing">Margaret Miller</a> makes the case that Pholoso’s utterances confirm the marginal role women seemingly played in the 1976 uprising in his “patronising and contradictory” speech. </p>
<p>What critiques such as Miller’s ignore are the reasons Tlali may have for recruiting a black man in the role of gender conscientising. He is equated with Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, to disseminate a message of gender parity through the community.</p>
<p>In addressing the “Ma-Gents” on the sexual harassment, treatment and education of women, Pholoso advocates an oppositional black masculinity to counter dominant iterations of masculinity in Soweto. He exhorts the men to “go out and educate the people”. Pholoso is reliant on a ripple effect his message will have as it spreads out in concentric circles among the township’s men.</p>
<p>It is important to note that he is not addressing white men or women and their treatment of black women, but black men specifically. A black man himself, he holds black men as a group accountable for the safety, education and equitable treatment of women. He is gesturing to a time as yet unknown, in the future, when black subjects will be free of the oppression of apartheid.</p>
<p>Pholoso infers that women will not only be instrumental in fighting for this new, racially equitable social order. Black men also need to prepare for this time of freedom by ensuring that women and men are fully prepared and able to partake in its fruits.</p>
<h2>Why is it still relevant today?</h2>
<p>Another vignette from the novel deals with the sexual abuse and rape of young women activists while in detention. Here Tlali chillingly notes that rape and sexual abuse in prison is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the price we have to pay for our liberation. We have to fight hard and free ourselves, otherwise these things will always happen to us.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These words seem an uncanny foreshadowing of the high rape and sexual abuse rates women would experience after apartheid. It draws into question whether the revolution against apartheid has been fully completed through overcoming only racial oppression.</p>
<p>It also carries a deliberately ambiguous meaning – while the “we” having to fight hard to free “ourselves” signifies the struggle against apartheid, it additionally invokes black women’s gendered struggle against sexual violence. Here, women are being called to simultaneously fight racial oppression while fighting the sexist oppression that spawns rape and sexual abuse. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Oarkgx4ekb0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A short documentary on Miriam Tlali.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In “Amandla”, Tlali thus negotiates Black Consciousness ideology by producing a critique of apartheid rooted in Black Consciousness. Simultaneously she complicates the discourse by showing the gendered experiences of sexual harassment that are singular to black women during the 1976 uprising. </p>
<p>“Amandla” provides a rich historical rendering of one of the turning points in the anti-apartheid struggle. It also gives an insightful analysis of the gender politics of the time. Given this content and context, the novel has great potential to contribute to contemporary discussions of violence against women, especially within national student movements.</p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africa-student-movement-splinters-as-patriarchy-muscles-out-diversity-57855">Disagreements</a> about the role of gender and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and questioning (LGBTIQ) students’ role within the most recent student protests seems to have split the movement. Tlali’s novel provides an instructive critique of the gender politics of Black Consciousness, an ideology that has been forcefully reasserted in these most recent protests.</p>
<p>With its strong position on gender relations within Black Consciousness organising, “Amandla” is worth revisiting by student activists seeking to negotiate an ethical path between economic, racial and gender equity demands. Its didactic aims, instead of being dismissed as aesthetically unappealing, could be well utilised in reframing, for young men in particular, the historical events of the 1976 uprising. It could also be a blueprint for avoiding a repeat of the mistakes then made regarding women’s participation in political movements.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62374/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Barbara Boswell is a board member of the Triangle Project.</span></em></p>
A South African novel, published in 1980 and dealing with the Soweto student uprising four years earlier, still provides lessons for students today.
Barbara Boswell, Senior Lecturer, English, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61758
2016-06-28T19:26:06Z
2016-06-28T19:26:06Z
Adam Small, South Africa’s poet, prophet and man of the people, has gone home
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/128507/original/image-20160628-7815-1is7iwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Celebrated South African poet Adam Small passed away at the age of 79.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Cape Argus/Independent Newspapers</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/uwc-saddened-by-death-of-professor-adam-small-20160626">death</a> on June 25 2016 of Adam Small, the South African Black Consciousness activist, Afrikaans poet and revered academic, was not unexpected. In the twilight of his years, in his public interactions, he came across as alert but increasingly frail, often teary-eyed. In his last creative writings such as “<a href="http://www.tafelberg.com/Books/15868">Klawerjas</a>” (2013) and “<a href="https://www.behance.net/gallery/31750529/Maria-Moeder-van-God">Maria, Moeder van God</a>” (Mary, Mother of God, 2015) he often referenced impending death or retraced the vagaries of a life lived.</p>
<p>Small always had an air of compassionate consideration, of thoughtfulness, of critical engagement. He treated ideas seriously and death, like life, was something to be explored. At the death of his mother, of Muslim Indian heritage, he thanked her “for everything and thinking of Goree / for reading and writing … / /… your sense of humour…”</p>
<p>He was <a href="http://www.iol.co.za/capeargus/love-at-centre-of-prof-smalls-life-1873802">born</a> on December 21 1936 in the small town of Wellington, about 70km northeast of Cape Town. He grew up in a village called Goree where his father, a slave descendant and a <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/dutch-reformed-church-south-african-history-online">Dutch Reformed</a> Protestant, was a primary school teacher. </p>
<p>The family later moved to Cape Town where Small completed his secondary schooling and later an <a href="https://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/18043">MA thesis</a> at the University of Cape Town on “Nicolai Hartmann’s appreciation of Nietzsche’s axiology”. He completed most of his schooling through the medium of English. Small however found his artistic niche in liberal intellectual thought, and Afrikaans literary, cultural and linguistic association.</p>
<h2>Afrikaners aren’t only white</h2>
<p>From early on he confessed a close kinship with Afrikaans. He even identified himself as an Afrikaner. It was a very controversial statement at a time when the appellation “Afrikaner” was reserved for Afrikaans-speaking white people. Small’s association was cultural and linguistic. </p>
<p>Throughout his life, from his long essay “<a href="https://www.capetown.gov.za/en/mayor/Pages/Adam-Small.aspx">Die Eerste Steen</a>” (The First Stone, 1961) to his play “<a href="http://www.nb.co.za/Books/15865">The Orange Earth</a>” (or “Goree”, 1978; 2013), he maintained that one of the greatest injustices that <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/apartheid-and-reactions-it">apartheid</a> brought about was that people who spoke the same language and shared the same cultural heritage were arbitrarily divided on the basis of skin colour. </p>
<p>For him apartheid was an abomination that denied people the experience of their most basic humaneness and humanity. The very basis of monochromic apartheid was anathema to him: he grew up in a house that was defined by its syncretism, its multiculturalism and its multilingualism.</p>
<p>As a young writer and a keen polemicist he became a controversial figure, often taking positions that people on the right and the left, or the side of the apartheid regime and their opposition found unpalatable. For Small was his own man, not given to groupthink or the unearned graces of political masters. </p>
<p>His first collections of poetry “<a href="http://www.tafelberg.com/authors/524">Verse van die Liefde</a>” (Love Poems, 1957) and “<a href="http://www.nb.co.za/authors/524">Klein Simbool: Prosaverse</a>” (Little Symbol: Poetry in Prose Form, 1958) were acknowledged as the beginnings of a budding poet.</p>
<h2>Small finds his voice</h2>
<p>He found his voice in “<a href="http://www.litnet.co.za/adam-small-1936/">Kitaar my Kruis</a>” (Guitar my Cross, 1961). Here, he writes with sure-footedness. Small expressed himself in an idiom of which few of his fellow Afrikaans writers had intimate knowledge or had regular access to.</p>
<p>In a foreword to a reprint of “Kitaar” he defended his use of the <a href="http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0041-476X2012000100009">vernacular</a> at a time when (white) Afrikaner nationalists promoted “pure Afrikaans” as “civilised or standard Afrikaans”. The argot of the Cape Peninsula’s coloured working class, often ridiculed as “Gamattaal” or “Capey”, was regarded as the abject speech of deficient beings who could barely aspire to the lofty speech of “civilised Afrikaans”. </p>
<p>Small named this vernacular, creolised urban Afrikaans, <a href="https://shouldbetold.wordpress.com/tag/adam-small/"><em>Kaaps</em></a>. He became its most persistent <a href="http://city-press.news24.com/Voices/afrikaans-is-not-the-enemy-on-campus-20160401">defender and promotor</a>: “<em>Kaaps</em> is a language … people live their whole lives ‘with everything in it’ … <em>Kaaps</em> is not a joke or funny … it is a language.”</p>
<p>Thereafter, most of his better known works such as the poetry collections, “<a href="http://repository.uwc.ac.za/xmlui/handle/10566/1167">Sê Sjibbolet</a>” (Say Shibboleth, 1963) and “<a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=eYhgf_Y90soC&pg=PA305&lpg=PA305&dq=Oos+Wes+Tuis+Bes+Distrik+Ses&source=bl&ots=eGc5UYcvML&sig=733ag5VWTGx1e1YQAxUGAmGNpZY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjJ8sDhrsrNAhWIDsAKHVjZDycQ6AEITTAM#v=onepage&q=Oos%20Wes%20Tuis%20Bes%20Distrik%20Ses&f=false">Oos Wes Tuis Bes Distrik Ses</a>” (East West Home Best, 1973, with Chris Jansen) were written in <em>Kaaps</em>. </p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">An excerpt from Adam Small’s drama, ‘Krismis van Map Jacobs’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He also valorised this language variety in his plays “<a href="http://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/view/73547">Kanna Hy Kô Hystoe</a> (Kanna, He Comes Home, 1965)”, “<a href="http://www.broadwayworld.com/south-africa/regional/Joanie-Galant-Hulle-160700">Joanie Galant-hulle</a>” (Joanie Galant-them, 1978) and “<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17447150-krismis-van-map-jacobs">Krismis van Map Jacobs</a>” (Christmas of Map Jacobs, 1983) or the novella, “<a href="http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/18033/10/Adam-Small">Heidesee</a>” (1979). In those works he gave voice to the downtrodden, those marginalised by the imposition of the apartheid policies of spatial and social separation, and political repression. </p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Adam Small’s play, ‘Kanna Hy Kô Hystoe’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The introduction of <a href="http://scnc.ukzn.ac.za/doc/HIST/Apartheid%20Legislation%20in%20South%20Africa.htm">formalised apartheid</a> in 1948 caused a generation of black professionals, particularly those classified as <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/full-citizenship-coloured-people-called">coloured</a> or mixed race, to emigrate to Britain, North America and Europe. The absent character in Small’s best-known play, “Kanna Hy Kô Hystoe” is Kanna.</p>
<h2>Foremost literary work</h2>
<p>Kanna is one of those emigrants who found a new, welcoming world elsewhere and left a struggling family behind. The play is universally considered one of the foremost Afrikaans literary works. It’s not only for its profound social message, and its linguistic and textual plurality, but also for its theatrical experimentation.</p>
<p>One of the pernicious, enduring consequences of the apartheid policy is its destruction of social life. The demolition of the old inner city area of Cape Town, <a href="http://www.saha.org.za/news/2010/February/district_six_recalling_the_forced_removals.htm">District Six</a>, was emblematic of this legacy. Increasingly during the 1960s and 1970s Small wrote in his newspaper columns and open letters against apartheid broadly, especially against the Group Areas and Population Registration Acts. </p>
<p>His voice was most strident in the Afrikaans newspapers, and he was often described as “embittered”. To the apartheid authorities Small was an irritant. The security police at times made his life miserable. Perhaps his fame as an Afrikaans writer insulated him from possible terrible outcomes such as unlawful incarceration or preventive detention.</p>
<p>During the 1970s he found himself at odds with his place of work, the <a href="https://www.uwc.ac.za/Pages/default.aspx">University of the Western Cape</a>, where he in solidarity with protesting anti-apartheid students, resigned as a senior lecturer in philosophy. He later returned, under vastly different circumstances, and became <a href="http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/uwc-saddened-by-death-of-professor-adam-small-20160626">professor of social work</a> until his retirement in 1997.</p>
<h2>Black Consciousness</h2>
<p>From a writer who closely associated with Afrikaans literature, and even the luminaries of its tradition, Small’s thinking and writing had evolved and took a different turn in the 1970s.</p>
<p>Small became an important campaigner for the <a href="https://www.capetown.gov.za/en/mayor/Pages/Adam-Small.aspx">Black Consciousness</a> movement. He even testified as an expert witness in the famous South African Student Organisation <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/iii-black-consciousness">trial</a> where he said that “the coloureds were part of the greater black community”. He added that “a violent war between black and white was a distinct possibility”. During this period he wrote the first of a number of English medium works, but most of his English plays and poetry remain unpublished. </p>
<p>Although Small is acknowledged as one of the foremost Afrikaans writers, literary award committees often found ways of not awarding his outstanding works. Recognition mostly came belatedly. In 1993 Small accepted the South African <a href="http://whoswho.co.za/adam-small-4351">Order</a> for Meritorious Service (Gold) from the last National Party administration under FW de Klerk. </p>
<p>He was awarded four honorary degrees – from the universities of Natal (1981), Port Elizabeth (1996), the Western Cape (2001) and Stellenbosch (2015) – and a number of cultural and literary awards in later life.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/61758/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hein Willemse does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Black Consciousness activist, Afrikaans poet and revered academic Adam Small has passed away. In his large volume of work he gave voice to the downtrodden – those marginalised by apartheid.
Hein Willemse, Professor of Afrikaans, University of Pretoria
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/60976
2016-06-15T09:31:13Z
2016-06-15T09:31:13Z
Strategic lessons South Africa’s students can learn from the leaders of 1976
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/126544/original/image-20160614-22383-bci5v9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Soweto schoolchildren protest against Afrikaans in 1976.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.aamarchives.org/file-view/category/44-apartheid.html?start=20">Anti-Apartheid Movement Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford UK</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>This month forty years ago, thousands of Soweto school children took to the streets to <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising">protest</a> the racism and inadequacy of Bantu Education. That moment has come to symbolise the role that young people have played and can play in shaping South Africa’s political discourse. It remains a touch point for student activists today. </p>
<p>The marches in June 1976 took shape around a unifying issue of immediate importance to the students: the imposition of Afrikaans as a teaching medium in black classrooms, whose curriculum was dictated by the then Department of Bantu Education. </p>
<p>Images from the march are filled with posters proclaiming “<a href="http://www.gutenberg-e.org/pohlandt-mccormick/archive/detail/DSCN2080.jpg.html">To Hell With Afrikaans</a>” and “<a href="http://www.gutenberg-e.org/pohlandt-mccormick/archive/detail/DSCN1817.jpg.html">Vorster and Kruger are rubbish</a>”. This refers to John Vorster, the prime minister of South Africa and one of apartheid’s architects, and his police minister <a href="https://www.google.co.za/search?q=jimmy+kruger&rlz=1C1CHWA_enZA634ZA634&oq=Jimmy+Kruger&aqs=chrome.0.0l6.804j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8">Jimmy Kruger</a>. </p>
<p>The juxtaposition of these claims is an important one. It speaks to how Soweto children began to straddle the space between local and immediate concerns and a national political agenda. This enabled them to transcend the issues of their classrooms and rejuvenate the struggle against apartheid on a national, and indeed international, scale.</p>
<p>Forty years later South Africa is again in the midst of a political movement led by students - this time on university campuses across the country. Today’s student activists are often compared to the generation of 1976. In mass marches through Johannesburg and Pretoria the form of their protest has prompted the <a href="https://www.enca.com/south-africa/fee-must-fall-protest-reminiscent-1967-uprising">comparison</a>. </p>
<p>In their articulation of ideologies like <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/The_meaning_of_Black_Consciousness_by_Ranwedzi_Nengwekhulu.pdf">Black Consciousness</a> they echo some of the key thinkers of that period. But their <a href="https://theconversation.com/south-african-student-protests-are-about-much-more-than-just-feesmustfall-49776">protests</a> remain largely constrained by the campuses on which they happen. In light of these struggles, it is useful to consider how the students of 1976 tackled similar problems.</p>
<h2>The Afrikaans issue</h2>
<p>The <a href="http://africanhistory.about.com/od/apartheid/a/AfrikaansMediumDecree.htm">Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974</a> declared that in black schools across South Africa Afrikaans must be used equally with English as a medium for teaching non-language subjects like mathematics and social sciences. </p>
<p>Students and teachers alike struggled to teach and learn in a language for which they were ill-trained and ill-equipped with textbooks and other materials. </p>
<p>Historian Helena Pohlandt-McCormick has written that the Afrikaans medium policy “<a href="http://www.gutenberg-e.org/pohlandt-mccormick/PM.c5p3.html">embodied everything that was wrong with Bantu Education</a>”. She points to its disregard of sound pedagogy, and, more importantly, of the voices of the parents, teachers, and learners on whom it was imposed. </p>
<p>By the middle of the 1976 school year, students had organised themselves in individual protests. Many focused on the imposition of Afrikaans, others addressed student-teacher relations and corporal punishment at individual schools.</p>
<p>They were inspired and encouraged to connect these issues to the broader political system by a range of influences in their homes, communities, and classrooms. Among these were university students who had been “conscientised” through the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/definition-black-consciousness-bantu-stephen-biko-december-1971-south-africa">Black Consciousness Movement</a> and expelled from rural “bush” universities during waves of protest in 1972 and 1974. The most prominent of these was <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/abram-ramothibi-onkgopotse-tiro">Ongkopotse Tiro</a>.</p>
<p>After Tiro was expelled from the University of the North (today the <a href="http://www.ul.ac.za/">University of Limpopo</a>, outside Polokwane), where he was a prominent student leader and Black Consciousness proponent, he took up a job teaching history at Morris Isaacson High School in Soweto.</p>
<p>Though he was fired in 1973 and killed in exile in Botswana in 1974, some of his students, including <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/teboho-tsietsi-mashinini">Tsietsi Mashinini</a>, became key leaders in the 1976 uprising. </p>
<h2>Addressing structural oppression</h2>
<p>Tiro and other young teachers encouraged their students to connect the particular grievances of their own situation – the inequities and injustices of Bantu Education – to the structural oppression meted out by the apartheid state. </p>
<p>This was a lesson students brought to their organisation of the protests on 16 June, and one that played an increasingly important role in the weeks and months that followed. Students in the Soweto Students Representative <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/soweto-students-representative-council-ssrc">Council</a> (which compromised many of the student leaders who had organised the June 16 march) called for their parents to stay away from work, and to boycott white-owned shops and products. By August the committee focused its energies on organising a student and worker stay away for the end of the month. According to Sibongile Mkhabela, a member of the SSRC, this was intended to achieve </p>
<blockquote>
<p>more than only a march. […] This was the day to hit the <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books/about/Open_earth_and_black_roses.html?id=MP4wAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">white economy</a>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A few months later students rallied their families to participate in a Black Christmas to mourn those who had been killed by police since June. </p>
<h2>June 16 forty years later</h2>
<p>University students of 2015-16 have some key things in common with their 1976 predecessors. They have changed the tenor and shape of political discussion around education in South Africa, more effectively than any other single movement since 1994.</p>
<p>They have re-interrogated the ideologies that animated students in 1976. Their engagement with <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-bikos-black-consciousness-philosophy-resonates-with-youth-today-46909">Black Consciousness and Biko</a>, with <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-fanon-continues-to-resonate-more-than-half-a-century-after-algerias-independence-43508">Fanon</a> and with <a href="https://theconversation.com/sobukwes-pan-africanist-dream-an-elusive-idea-that-refuses-to-die-52601">pan-Africanism</a> has led to a movement to <a href="https://theconversation.com/decolonising-the-curriculum-its-time-for-a-strategy-60598">decolonise</a> universities’ faculty and curricula. </p>
<p>But today’s students have struggled to move their activism beyond universities. Not withstanding significant gains in the movement to end the exploitative practice of <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2016-01-13-three-reasons-why-feesmustfall-protests-will-continue">outsourcing jobs on campuses</a>, for which the Fallist movements of 2015-16 deserve a great deal of credit, student movements today have yet to create enduring alliances with workers outside the university, or with school students. </p>
<p>Beyond shared ideology, the 1976 generation, and, perhaps even more so, the university students of the early 1970s who taught and inspired them, may offer some strategic lessons. </p>
<p><em>The author is co-editor of <a href="http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/students-must-rise/">Students Must Rise: Youth Struggle in South Africa Before and Beyond Soweto ‘76</a> published by Wits University <a href="http://witspress.co.za/">Press</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/60976/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anne Heffernan's position is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She observed and participated in the October-November 2015 FeesMustFall protests. </span></em></p>
Forty years after the students uprisings of 1976, South Africa is again in the midst of a political movement led by students.They have changed the tenor and shape of political discussion around education.
Anne Heffernan, Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow NRF Chair: Local Histories, Present Realties., University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/59604
2016-05-23T13:59:33Z
2016-05-23T13:59:33Z
Decolonising universities isn’t an easy process – but it has to happen
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123175/original/image-20160519-30711-1n6lbg5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Students want colonial symbols, such as this statue of Cecil John Rhodes, gone from their universities. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Nic Bothma</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>South African universities have become protest sites. Beginning in 2015 and continuing this year, students have organised against colonial symbols, fee structures, worker exploitation and sexual violence. The anger displayed during these protests speaks directly to students’ frustration with the slow and skewed transformation of society at large – and in the academy particularly.</p>
<p>Universities have been under enormous pressure to increase access for black students, who were historically kept out of higher education or pushed into institutions reserved for “non-whites”. There’s a drive to promote equity and to become “internationalised”.</p>
<p>At the same time they’re dealing with <a href="http://www.sabc.co.za/news/a/0e47a0804a3cd210af40efa53d9712f0/SA-universities-under-extreme-financial-pressure-20151017">massive</a> financial constraints. Most universities have been able to <a href="http://www.dhet.gov.za/DHET%20Statistics%20Publication/Statistics%20on%20Post-School%20Education%20and%20Training%20in%20South%20Africa%202013.pdf">increase access</a> for black students. But they have not spent adequate resources and time reviewing the cultures and curricula of these institutions. Students’ demands, then, coalesce under the rallying call for decolonisation - of symbols, aesthetics, language, culture, knowledge, representation and more.</p>
<p>What is meant by decolonisation in South Africa’s current context? What should the process entail, especially in relation to the curriculum, teaching and learning? Universities are grappling with these and other questions on a number of platforms. Our own institution, the University of Johannesburg, has hosted three well-attended panel discussions about decolonisation. These have thrown up some interesting, challenging ideas that hold important lessons for all universities.</p>
<h2>A long history</h2>
<p>Calls for the decolonisation of countries, institutions, the mind and of knowledge are not new. They emerged from global anti-colonial liberation movements. They found expression in the <a href="http://www.padeap.net/the-history-of-pan-africanism">Pan Africanist</a>, <a href="http://www.blackpast.org/gah/negritude-movement">Negritude</a>, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/black-consciousness-movement">Black Consciousness</a> and <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=FvgJhJdQOaEC&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=african+renaissance+movement&source=bl&ots=VMYmyJFuON&sig=pWyfSlNcIIphjoOxqcISjqA921k&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjq1tGg3uXMAhXpB8AKHTqVCpkQ6AEIUTAK#v=onepage&q=african%20renaissance%20movement&f=false">African Renaissance</a> movements. </p>
<p>Universities, too, have long been at the centre of decolonisation debates. Discussions have been held for decades about the space for African indigenous knowledge systems and the role of African philosophy. Several theories and areas of study have sprung up from these debates: critical race theory, post-colonial studies, <a href="http://www.sas.upenn.edu/%7Edludden/ReadingSS_INTRO.pdf">Subaltern studies</a> and feminist theories from the global South. There were attempts particularly at the universities of Dar es Salaam and Makerere in the 1970s to provide alternative epistemologies. The University of Cape Town also engaged with the issue of decolonisation during the 1990s when <a href="http://www.bdlive.co.za/opinion/columnists/2015/04/07/anger-over-rhodes-vindicates-mamdani">Professor Mahmood Mamdani</a> was appointed as chair of African studies. </p>
<p>Scholars within these thought systems have critiqued the dominance of western epistemology, methodology and scholarship. They’ve railed against the silencing of the ‘Other’ – particularly African scholars. They’ve objected to what theorist <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/academic-professional/sociology/Southern-Theory-Raewyn-Connell-9781741753578">Raewyn Connell</a> calls the rendering of Africa as “a place to learn about and not from”. </p>
<p>Given this long history of debate, thought and agitation for change, why are universities lagging so far behind? Part of the answer may lie in a comment Puerto Rican Professor of Ethnic Studies Nelson Maldonado-Torres made during one of our institution’s panel discussions. He noted that the very act of decolonisation generates anxiety. It unsettles one’s sense of well being and belonging. It calls identities and the project of enlightenment into question.</p>
<h2>It’s not about replacement</h2>
<p>The South African academy is experiencing this unease right now. It manifests in several ways. Many students and staff simply refuse to engage with the debates at all. Some staff ridicule students’ demands for a multiplicity of knowledge systems by denying that these systems exist or debunking them as inferior to western theories and systems. Many academics have <a href="http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2016-04-22-letter-to-the-editor-appeasing-the-uct-taliban/#.VxuzeXeEbqC">responded</a> to calls for an African-centered curriculum by saying this would render South Africa’s universities <a href="http://www.biznews.com/thought-leaders/2016/05/04/rw-johnson-ucts-critical-choice-go-private-or-become-another-turfloop/">parochial</a>. </p>
<p>This last point may, in certain instances, be the case. But then one can make the same claim about so much of the work that emanates from the West. What’s important is to expose students to different forms of inquiry and to enable them to think critically about all forms of knowledge production. </p>
<p>Decolonisation of knowledge demands that universities revisit their curricula and include – not in uncritical ways – epistemologies, texts and scholarly work that have been previously excluded or marginalised. During this process of inclusion, academics must also explain why certain forms of knowledge and values have been privileged; the academy’s assumptions about what constitutes knowledge, and the impact that this has had.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.uwc.ac.za/Biography/Pages/Desiree-Lewis-.aspx">Professor Desiree Lewis</a> of the University of the Western Cape, who spoke on one of the panels, pointed out that it’s not enough to simply replace one body of content with another and keep the power relations and teaching and learning processes as they have been. </p>
<p>Knowledge is hybrid and interactive. It is imperative that universities examine the relations between knowledge and power. The reluctance to do so, we would argue, stems primarily from a fear of the unknown. Lecturers are worried about needing to reskill to be able to deliver a new curriculum. Academics have not reached this place voluntarily or through consensus: students are pressuring us to reflect on how we teach, and this is forcing us to rethink and revise what the academic project should be. </p>
<p>Students must play a central role in the decolonisation of knowledge. They need to participate in the attempts to revisit how and what is taught. </p>
<p>The journey ahead for the academy will be a long and unnerving one, but it has to be undertaken. The consequence of not doing so is to continue to be complicit in the reproduction of social and cognitive injustices; to condemn students to be perpetual consumers of knowledge. In fact, students have pointed out that if knowledge isn’t decolonised academics, too, will remain perpetual consumers rather than creators and authors. </p>
<h2>Asking new questions</h2>
<p>Universities need to be asking a new set of questions about the nature of society, the kind of students they want to produce and the best paths for achieving this. </p>
<p>When students question the 1994 transformation and reconciliation project, they in effect are asking academics to revisit the paths to political, social and economic development in this country so that they address the needs of a future generation. Part of the purpose of a university is to think through these broader societal challenges and to provide students with access to alternative ways of envisioning the world and interpreting their experiences.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/59604/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Calls for the decolonisation of countries, institutions, the mind and of knowledge are not new. In South Africa, these changes are crucial and long overdue. But they must be carefully thought through.
Cheryl Hendricks, Professor of Political Science, University of Johannesburg
Brenda Leibowitz, Professor of Teaching and Learning, University of Johannesburg
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/57256
2016-04-07T04:33:48Z
2016-04-07T04:33:48Z
Can the ANC survive the end of South Africa’s heroic epoch?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/117728/original/image-20160406-28970-1ahuksm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Posters depicting the ANC in happier times.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>South Africa’s governing African National Congress <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/index.php">(ANC)</a> has gone through episodic crises in its century of existence. Right now, the media and commentariat are seized with debate about whether or not it is <a href="http://www.heraldlive.co.za/anc-crisis-talks-zuma/">in a crisis</a> and whether it is as serious as any other.</p>
<p>The party has survived tumultuous times, including a major split that resulted in the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/pan-africanist-congress-pac">Pan Africanist Congress</a> (PAC) in 1959 as well as friction in the post-democratic era. The <a href="http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/carolus-kasrils-and-others-join-call-for-zuma-to-step-down-20160406">present crisis</a> differs because the party has governed the country for more than 20 years and faces different threats such as clientelism and patronage.</p>
<p>History should serve as a sombre warning to the ANC of what might happen if it does not manage leadership rivalries within its ranks. Though the party has won between <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2014-05-11-the-partys-over-anc-sees-decline-in-support">62% and 68% of votes</a> cast in every election since 1994, history does not guarantee any party predestination to govern for ever.</p>
<h2>The tumultuous 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s</h2>
<p>During the 1920s, ANC members were demoralised and dropped out when <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/african-national-congress-timeline-1910-1919">their delegations</a> to the British government and <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1914-1920/paris-peace">Conference of Versailles</a> elicited no support for their opposition to the <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv01538/04lv01646/05lv01745.htm">Natives Land Act</a> and other racist laws. So big was the loss in numbers that the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/organisations/industrial-and-commercial-workers-union-icu">Industrial and Commercial Workers Union</a> overtook it as the largest black organisation in the country.</p>
<p>But by the end of the 1920s the ANC had again became the largest as administrative incompetence and corruption, as much as repression, saw the union collapse.</p>
<p>The publication of the draft <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv01538/04lv01646/05lv01784.htm">Native Trust and Land bill</a> in the mid-1930s saw the ANC’s fortunes again take a turn for the worse. The <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/world-and-african-history/all-africa-convention">All-African Convention (AAC)</a> swiftly grew in size to outnumber the ANC. The rump of the AAC constituted itself in the 1940s as the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/organisations/non-european-unity-movement-neum">Non-European Unity Movement</a>. But it alienated and expelled many in repeated dogmatic schisms.</p>
<p>During the 1940s the ANC rejuvenated itself organisationally when it founded its <a href="http://www.ancyl.org.za/">Youth League</a>. It also got a new lease on life ideologically with its <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=4474">African Claims</a> manifesto. It peaked with 100,000 members during the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/defiance-campaign-1952">Defiance Campaign of 1952</a>. After that, state repression started to gradually grind it down, though it remained the largest black political party.</p>
<p>A split over ideology and tactics saw the formation of the PAC in 1959. This split was perhaps the most serious in ANC history; the PAC attracted crowds perhaps one-third the size of those attending ANC meetings, until both parties suffered banning and repression in the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/state-emergency-declared-after-sharpeville-massacre">1960 State of Emergency</a>. </p>
<p>During the harrowing decades of underground and exile only a few small cells of ANC and PAC veterans managed to evade and survive within South Africa. <a href="http://www.jacana.co.za/book-categories/current-affairs-a-history/the-anc-underground-in-south-africa-detail">In exile</a>, the ANC maintained pre-eminence, with solidarity support from communist parties, western socialists, trade unions and liberals, plus the <a href="http://www.politicsweb.co.za/news-and-analysis/the-anc-and-the-soviets">Soviet-led</a> bloc of communist governments, and many African governments.</p>
<p>By contrast, the banned PAC enjoyed US support for only four years, then <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv02424/04lv02730/05lv03188/06lv03214.htm">Chinese support</a> on a small scale. It also won some support from a minority of black power activists abroad, some tiny western Trotskyist circles, and only Libya and Iran.</p>
<p>Exile is usually a harsh environment for political parties, few of whom can remain viable longer than a decade or two. The ANC however remained organisationally intact.</p>
<p>By contrast the PAC was torn asunder in exile by perpetual <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hf-4CN94vmsJ:www.disa.ukzn.ac.za/webpages/DC/slapr93.4/slapr93.4.pdf+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=za">splits and schisms</a> until it lost any organisational coherence. The <a href="http://azapo.org.za/azapohistory/azapo-and-bcma-historical-background/">Black Consciousness Movement of Azania</a> in exile remained marginal in number.</p>
<h2>Democracy heralds a sea change</h2>
<p>Democracy resulted in a sea change in the ANC. Before its <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/fw-de-klerk-announces-release-nelson-mandela-and-unbans-political-organisations">unbanning in 1990</a> no-one could expect any personal gain from joining the ANC. To the contrary, members could only expect victimisation at work, harassment from the municipal authorities, and banning orders, house arrest, detention without trial, torture or assassination. As a result only highly committed idealists joined the ANC.</p>
<p>Today the heroic epoch is over. Many idealists remain, but they sit alongside careerists, floor crossers and <a href="http://www.gov.za/tenderpreneurship-stuff-crooked-cadres-fighters">tenderpreneurs</a> – businesspeople who enrich themselves through government tenders, often dubiously. In short, the ANC has become a normal political party. One consequence is that splits and factions are today less connected with policy ideals than with the system of <a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africa-why-economic-freedom-is-proving-to-be-the-ancs-undoing-48339">patronage</a> and clientelism.</p>
<p>Mobilisation is usually aimed not at any policy, but at getting a patron elected who will try to divert tenders to political donors. This is at its bloodiest in municipal politics, where <a href="http://www.rdm.co.za/politics/2016/02/29/political-assassinations-are-on-the-rise">assassinations number in the dozens</a>, especially in the KwaZulu-Natal province. The stakes are indeed high. A ward councillor is paid ten times the average wage in a township.</p>
<p>For example, policy divergence was an escalating symptom, rather than the cause, of the expulsion of <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2012-02-29-julius-malema-expelled">Julius Malema</a> from the ANC Youth League and his subsequent launch of the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/founding-economic-freedom-fighters-eff">Economic Freedom Fighters</a>. The mutual accusations of corruption between Zuma and the pre-expulsion Malema underscore the stark facts of their political patronage networks.</p>
<p>The current media debate on the probability of Zuma not lasting out his term of office as ANC leader until 2017 and as South African president until 2019 is flawed by one methodological failing. South Africans and their media are prone to either canonise a politician as a saint, such as Nelson Mandela, or demonise him as a monster, as Zuma. Leadership counts big-time, but such over-personalisation of politics fails to spot the system of patronage and clientelism.</p>
<p>Removing Zuma and replacing him with another is unlikely to replace the spoils system of inappropriate cadre deployment, nor tenderpreneurship. Replacing Thabo Mbeki with Zuma did not end these problems. Zuma’s successor as president will be hard pressed to face down those demanding payback. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/117735/original/image-20160406-28950-v1wntj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/117735/original/image-20160406-28950-v1wntj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/117735/original/image-20160406-28950-v1wntj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/117735/original/image-20160406-28950-v1wntj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/117735/original/image-20160406-28950-v1wntj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/117735/original/image-20160406-28950-v1wntj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/117735/original/image-20160406-28950-v1wntj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Patronage and corruption have become rampant under President Jacob Zuma.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Mike Hutchings</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What now?</h2>
<p>So far Zuma’s supporters have outvoted his rivals in the ANC, and often purged them from executive structures. One consequence could be larger numbers of abstentions from former ANC voters in the coming <a href="http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/pebble.asp?relid=21869">municipal elections</a>.</p>
<p>ANC membership numbers tend to peak during election campaigns (up to one million) and slump between elections. Whether this pattern will hold remains to be seen. The ANC nevertheless remains by far the largest political party in the country. There is not yet any sign of a seismic shift in this balance of power.</p>
<p>On the other hand, there are flashing red lights that the ANC party bureaucracy has deteriorated to the level where it battles to perform even the simplest of everyday tasks, such as issuing membership cards. And there is growing anger at appointments driven by <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2012-07-12-anc-cadre-deployment">cronyism</a> that lead to dysfunctional schools and sewage treatment plants.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/57256/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Keith Gottschalk is an ANC member. He writes this in his professional capacity as a political scientist. </span></em></p>
Democracy resulted in a sea change in the governing ANC. In the past, only highly committed idealists joined the party. Today’s splits and factions are about patronage and clientelism.
Keith Gottschalk, Political Scientist, University of the Western Cape
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/56943
2016-04-04T04:23:42Z
2016-04-04T04:23:42Z
The town where hip-hop is healing South Africa’s broken youth
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/117083/original/image-20160401-6825-nqps30.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Imin'esisdenge crew performing at Vukani in Grahamstown.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Azlan Makalima</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>A large body of research shows that in South Africa’s black townships, a youth <a href="http://jmm.sagepub.com/content/15/1/11">masculinity</a> dominates, probably best captured by the <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/subgenre/gangsta-rap-ma0000002611">gangsta</a> hip-hop term “<a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/03/30/who_invented_swag_and_swagger_jay_z_soulja_boy_brand_nubian_.html">swagger</a>”. It involves a highly sexualised, aggressive manner, sporting the latest consumer goods, and not being averse to violence, alcohol abuse and drugs – basically how hip-hop functions universally. What is less commonly known is that there is an “underground” hip-hop movement in South Africa promoting an alternative lifestyle.</p>
<p>I spent a year in 2014 hanging out with hip-hop artists in the townships of <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/places/grahamstown">Grahamstown</a> in the <a href="http://www.southafrica.info/about/geography/eastern-cape.htm#.VvpiS-J97IU">Eastern Cape</a> province. Most of them have been performing since the mid-2000s. </p>
<p>“We don’t do swagger,” says local hip-hop artist Dezz. He detests the “<a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2011-10-28-burn-after-wearing-township-kids-hottest-fashion-statement"><em>izikhothane</em></a>” subculture in which young men parade with consumer goods and then destroy these. While it gives them a certain status, it does not value “people with nothing”, he says. </p>
<p>In Grahamstown they rap about these people with nothing, praising their resilience for surviving hunger, crime and being looked down upon by others.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iJKjOR5FqOg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Rapper Zion Eyes describes the difficulties of living in poverty.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Spreading the message of black consciousness</h2>
<p>There is something of a religious zeal to these hip-hop artists. Posters at their events make it clear that no alcohol is allowed. Their songs celebrate family and the “narrow path” of morality. Many are vegans. Their central message, however, is not church, but <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/defining-black-consciousness">black consciousness</a>. They invoke struggle heroes like <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/stephen-bantu-biko">Steve Biko</a> and <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/thembisile-chris-hani">Chris Hani</a> in their lyrics. </p>
<p>Hip-hop artist XNasty, considered the father of hip-hop in Grahamstown, has been promoting Biko’s message for many years. Society is still broken due to apartheid and its legacy of racism and economic oppression, he says. It’s a psychic wound that has festered since apartheid times and has been transferred from parents to children. Parents in many poor townships have been told for so many years that they are “nothing” that this sense of uselessness has been internalised in a sense of nihilism, XNasty explains. </p>
<p>Many of the hip-hop artists complain about being vilified when they try and be different. Young people experience a particularly South African “<a href="http://www.convictcreations.com/culture/poppy.htm">tall poppy syndrome</a>”. Many of the hip-hop songs describe how others will “drag you down”, suggesting that you think you are better than others if you start doing hip-hop, if you stop drinking or if you question people’s involvement in crime.</p>
<p>The hip-hop artists explain this negativity in terms of black consciousness – people here are broken, and they don’t realise how they are destroying each other. They suffer a feeling of constant judgment by the rest of society, and so they judge others.</p>
<h2>‘Re-animating the human’</h2>
<p>In response, hip-hop in Grahamstown refuses to judge, and hangs onto hope. Local rapper Azlan raps about gangsters who return to prison, and implores people to see them as human. “People need to try and imagine how we can help that gangster to change, so he can be a human being, like you and me,” he argues.</p>
<p>“If you are not working you are useless,” says rapper Ithalalenyeni. Others describe how you are taunted to “go back to the village” if you wear unfashionable clothes or do not have a sophisticated mobile phone.</p>
<p>The politics of hip-hop here is about recognising humanity in a space of deep dehumanisation. It invokes public intellectual <a href="http://wiser.wits.ac.za/users/achille-mbembe">Achille Mbembe</a>’s call to “<a href="http://jwtc.org.za/volume_4/achille_mbembe.htm">re-animate the human</a>” in South Africa. South Africans carry the dehumanisation of apartheid and are now confronted with the double dehumanisation of <a href="http://www.globalissues.org/article/39/a-primer-on-neoliberalism">neo-liberalism</a>, according to Mbembe. </p>
<p>Sociologist <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674009929">Michèle Lamont</a> argues that the symbolic boundaries that divide a society into “people like us” and those that are considered inferior are part of a nation’s culture. In France, with its long history of the revolution, Catholicism and socialism, symbolic boundaries are less harsh than in the US, and people are more inclined to think of the working class as “people like us”, she argues.</p>
<p>In South Africa, slavery, colonialism and apartheid have probably resulted in some of the harshest symbolic boundaries in the world, questioning black people’s basic humanity for centuries. Hip-hop here is about overcoming these persistent symbolic boundaries by celebrating the humanity of ordinary township residents. </p>
<p>Hip-hop artists rediscover obscure words in <a href="http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/language/about/isixhosa.html">isiXhosa</a>, read books on history and politics, and work these into their lyrics. They develop rich cultural metaphors celebrating traditions. They reclaim a black intellectual culture. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0VCTwW5IenM?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Imin'esisdenge’s video shows how Grahamstown rappers find inspiration in a proud African past.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These hip-hop artists also spend hours mastering complex media software. They write songs about overcoming hardship. They recruit new members and keep these young teens away from crime. They dream of success, but also of transforming the communities in which they live.</p>
<h2>Building empowered communities</h2>
<p>The academic literature exploring the <a href="http://lindatheron.org/pathways-to-resilience/research-media-coverage-of-pathways-to-resilience-project-south-africa/">resilience</a> of young people is, to my mind, too focused on helping individuals do better than expected in precarious, dangerous environments. It does not focus on those young people who are trying to do more than simply survive – those who are also trying to change their environments.</p>
<p>Inspired by Biko, the hip-hop artists in my study are doing exactly that. They are not waiting for politicians, they say, but trying to do things for themselves. The annual <a href="http://fingofestival.co.za/">Fingo Festival</a> that happens during the <a href="https://www.nationalartsfestival.co.za/">National Arts Festival</a> in Grahamstown is just one of the ways they do this. </p>
<p>XNasty and a few other <a href="https://thinkfest.wordpress.com/category/fingo-festival/">local musicians</a> decided they were not content simply to join in the criticism that the National Arts Festival has too small a presence in the townships and does not offer a platform for local artists. Instead, they did something about it. Their dreams and hard work in fund-raising paid off. Since 2011 the Fingo Festival offers a week-long programme combining local hip-hop acts, National Arts Festival shows and in-depth community discussions.</p>
<p>For these young people, Biko’s central message is that black communities should claim back the right to re-imagine their own future – and then start doing exactly that.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/56943/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alette Schoon has received funding from Microsoft, as well as Rhodes University and the Andrew W Mellon foundation to support her research into the digital and mobile practices of hip-hop artists.</span></em></p>
Hip-hop artists do it differently in a town in one of South Africa’s poorest provinces. Eschewing the archetypal hip-hop lifestyle, Grahamstown’s rappers propose a surprising alternative.
Alette Schoon, Lecturer (Television), Rhodes University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/56466
2016-03-21T08:54:34Z
2016-03-21T08:54:34Z
Colourism: #unfairandlovely proves it remains a universal slight on humanity
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115573/original/image-20160318-4432-3hv32r.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sisters Mirusha Yogarajah (left) and Yanusha Yogarajah, who started the #unfairandlovely campaign with Pax Jones.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BCRNan_EMcB/?taken-by=unfairandlovely_">Pax Jones/Instagram</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Over the past few weeks the <a href="http://paxjones.com/unfairandlovely">#unfairandlovely</a> campaign started by black photographer <a href="http://mashable.com/2016/03/11/unfair-and-lovely-campaign/#dFbHdGb9ESq5">Pax Jones</a> and sisters <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-35783348">Mirusha and Yanusha Yogarajah</a>, from the <a href="http://www.utexas.edu/">University of Texas</a>, has taken off on social media. It has set <a href="https://twitter.com/search?f=images&vertical=default&q=%23unfairandlovely&src=tyah&lang=en">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/unfairandlovely_/">Instagram</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/UnfairAndLovely/?fref=ts">Facebook</a> abuzz. </p>
<p>The first women to be featured in the campaign were of Indian origin. But dark skinned women from across the world quickly took to social media to affirm their beauty against the dominant mantra that fair is lovely. <a href="http://www.self.com/trending/2016/03/the-unfair-and-lovely-campaign-is-embracing-darker-skin-tones/">According</a> to Jones the campaign emerged organically out of a series of photographs that she took with a view to combating the “under-representation of dark skinned people of colour in the media”. </p>
<p>Discrimination against people based on the tone of their skin, a phenomenon called “<a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2013/10/colourism-why-even-black-people-have-problem-dark-skin">colourism</a>”, is evident across the globe. It happens everywhere from <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35261748">Thailand</a> to <a href="http://www.self.com/trending/2016/03/the-unfair-and-lovely-campaign-is-embracing-darker-skin-tones/">Sri Lanka</a>, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/24/dark-skin-india-prejudice-whitening">India</a>, <a href="http://fairnessclub.com/">Pakistan</a>, <a href="http://www.iol.co.za/lifestyle/style/beauty/the-dark-side-of-skin-lightening-1103381">South Africa</a>, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/05_may/01/white.shtml">England</a> and the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/20/light-girls-skin-bleaching-phenomenon_n_6503630.html">United States</a>. In places like <a href="http://www.ibtauris.com/Books/Humanities/History/Regional%20%20national%20history/African%20history/In%20the%20Name%20of%20the%20People%20Angolas%20Forgotten%20Massacre.aspx?menuitem=%7BEF0E1ED2-7796-49DB-A6EA-B3DC9E30B2C4%7D">Angola</a> and <a href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/524-damming-the-flood">Haiti</a> it has taken on an intensely political form. There lighter skinned people have privileged access to some forms of political and material power.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hYjHixQ9Ns4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">British soul singer Laura Mvula deals with the travails of dark skinned beauty on her 2013 song “That’s Alright”</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Yellow bone experience</h2>
<p>In South Africa light skinned African women sometimes find themselves referred to as “yellow-bones”. These women have often report their experiences as being double edged. On one hand they are praised as beautiful but at the same time they are also subject to stereotypes and <a href="http://www.destinyconnect.com/2015/01/20/light-skinned-girls-open-up-about-discrimination/">derogatory</a> remarks. But in the main colourism means that light skin is seen as desirable and dark skin as undesirable.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115574/original/image-20160318-4443-1u03afx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115574/original/image-20160318-4443-1u03afx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115574/original/image-20160318-4443-1u03afx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115574/original/image-20160318-4443-1u03afx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115574/original/image-20160318-4443-1u03afx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115574/original/image-20160318-4443-1u03afx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115574/original/image-20160318-4443-1u03afx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Indian actress and film director Nandita Das, who started the ‘Dark is beautiful’ campaign.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Jean-Paul Pelissier</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Colourism is a complex phenomenon. In <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/murali-balaji/not-caste-in-color-dispel_b_4243013.html">India</a> it is often argued that the preference for light skin pre-dates British colonialism and is evident as far back as the <a href="http://www.ancient.eu/The_Vedas/">Vedas</a>, a collection of hymns and other religious texts composed in India centuries before the birth of Christ. But at the same time the desire for light skin in India cannot also be divorced from the <a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/how-does-indias-caste-system-work">caste system</a>, the country’s North-South <a href="http://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/the-great-divide/201412">divide</a>, the impact of colonialism and the manner in which capitalism has exploited these prejudices via the beauty industry. In India the hegemonic desirability of light skin has been challenged by campaigns such as “<a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/bollywood/news/Why-Nandita-Das-doesnt-like-being-called-dusky/articleshow/21477821.cms">Dark is beautiful</a>” spearheaded by actress <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0201903/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm">Nandita Das</a>. </p>
<p>There are some commonalities between South Asian communities across the world but there are also major differences. What it means to be Indian is very different in different diasporic Indian communities. In places like England or the US, South Asian communities often still retain strong ties with India. As a result their issues around colourism are frequently similar to those in the Indian context, although local forms of colourism and racism are also shaped by understandings of the significance accorded to skin tone in other communities. </p>
<h2>Links with India</h2>
<p>The majority of South African <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/history-indians-south-africa-timeline1654-2008">Indians</a>, mainly descendants of indentured workers, have very little direct connection with India. Social, religious and cultural practices, as well as cuisine, have developed independently. While there are some overlaps with the Indian experience in terms of the desirability of light skin tones there are also important differences that have developed according to the local political and social context. </p>
<p>In South Africa the matter of skin colour is often classed and shot through with very localised understandings of differences between North and South Indians. For many, including myself growing up at the end of apartheid, colourism was not always a significant presence in our families. In my case this was a direct result of my family’s thinking, and the impact of the Black Consciousness <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/introduction-black-consciousness-movement">movement</a> in <a href="https://www.lonelyplanet.com/south-africa/kwazulu-natal/durban">Durban</a> in the early 1970s.</p>
<p>But there are also South African Indian families in which colourism is <a href="http://darklovelyandsouthasian.tumblr.com/post/29471713797/born-in-south-africa-and-of-south-indian-origin">intensely felt</a>. In some cases it can even result in discrimination within the intimate space of the family and, as a result, significant personal trauma.</p>
<h2>Hair Texture and Facial Features</h2>
<p>Colourism is also sometimes evident among the <a href="http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/in-south-africa-after-apartheid-colored-community-is-the-big-loser/?_r=0">Coloured</a> community in South Africa. It predates apartheid, has endured after the end of apartheid and extends beyond a concern with skin tone to include hair texture and the shape of facial features. In Durban, where some historically Indian and coloured communities are in close proximity, ideas about skin tone have taken on multiple influences.</p>
<p>Because different black communities have shaped each other’s ideas about beauty and colour in South Africa our experience cannot be reduced to an offshoot of the Indian or American experiences. And while there are certainly subtle and at times not so subtle issues around skin tone, the situation here is not nearly as bad, as, say, in India, Pakistan or Thailand. In fact it could be argued that the situation in South Africa is better than in the US and the United Kingdom. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115575/original/image-20160318-4415-1cub9x1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115575/original/image-20160318-4415-1cub9x1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=798&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115575/original/image-20160318-4415-1cub9x1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=798&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115575/original/image-20160318-4415-1cub9x1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=798&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115575/original/image-20160318-4415-1cub9x1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1003&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115575/original/image-20160318-4415-1cub9x1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1003&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115575/original/image-20160318-4415-1cub9x1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1003&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">South African black consciousness leader Steve Biko.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As <a href="http://mg.co.za/">Mail & Guardian</a> editor <a href="http://mg.co.za/author/verashni-pillay">Verashni Pillay</a> noted in a recent <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2016-03-14-unfairandlovely-how-growing-up-in-africa-helped-me-own-my-skin-colour">piece</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Africa has experiences its own share of colourism and the horrors of skin bleaching. Phrases like ‘<a href="http://livemag.co.za/real-life/colourism-media/">yellowbone</a>’ to describe fairer skin black women don’t help. But the writing of Steve <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/stephen-bantu-biko">Biko</a> and a growing sense of black pride makes it easier to embrace darker skin in South Africa.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Skin Lightening Products</h2>
<p>Skin lightening products have been <a href="http://city-press.news24.com/News/dying-to-be-white-20160220">banned</a> in South Africa since 1992. In India crass <a href="http://qz.com/219698/these-skin-lightening-commercials-will-infuriate-you-and-should-shame-indias-ad-industry/">adverts</a> for skin lightening products are ubiquitous – a fact that invariably shocks South Africans of all races.</p>
<p>In South Africa colourism is not simply a story of the continuance of colonial and apartheid racial practices, or influences from <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/find_out/guides/2003/bollywood/newsid_2683000/2683799.stm">Bollywood</a> and Hollywood. It is a story of how all of these influences coalesce. </p>
<p>South Africa’s colourism is also a story of how the political innovation of the Black Consciousness movement in the early ‘70s - often carried into <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/">ANC</a> politics - has freed many people from colourism. But at the same time it is also a story of discrimination within and between black communities that has evolved and survived after oppressive laws have been revoked.</p>
<p>And as the #unfairandlovely campaign has proven, colourism sadly remains a universal slight on humanity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/56466/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Vashna Jagarnath does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Colourism - or discrimination based on the skin tone - manifests in different ways across the world. In the main it means that light skin is seen as desirable and dark skin as undesirable.
Vashna Jagarnath, Senior Lecturer, History Department, Rhodes University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/50930
2015-11-25T04:37:10Z
2015-11-25T04:37:10Z
Why Africa’s professors are afraid of colonial education being dismantled
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102498/original/image-20151119-18448-1snimx8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Will academics keep standing on the sidelines while students dismantle symbols of colonialism like the statue of Cecil John Rhodes?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Mike Hutchings</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>A series of student protests in South Africa has thrown up a number of questions. Many of these are linked to the problem of decolonising institutions. And at least one implicates the country’s professoriate by asking: how do academics transcend Western knowledge systems and ways of learning in African universities?</p>
<p>This needs an urgent answer. The professoriate - not bureaucrats or administrators, but those who are at the coal face of academia - should provide thought leadership. But aren’t the students and their supporters asking too much from the professoriate? I pose this question because a large proportion of African university teachers are cut from the cloth of Western knowledge. As the philosopher Kwame Nkrumah observes in his book <a href="https://marxistnkrumaistforum.wordpress.com/karl-marx-the-poverty-of-philosophy/kwame-nkrumah-consciencism-philosophy-and-ideology-for-decolonisation/">Consciencism</a>, African intellectuals and professors are:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>…anointed with a universalist flavouring which titillates the palate … so agreeably that they become alienated from their own immediate society.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How, then, does a professoriate change the essence of its edifice?</p>
<h2>Edifice of professorship</h2>
<p>In most South African universities the professoriate is still almost <a href="http://www.news24.com/Archives/City-Press/Where-are-our-black-academics-20150430">entirely white</a>. This is despite ongoing calls for “transformation” in the higher education sector - that is, in part, a change in the make-up of student bodies and the professoriate to better reflect the country’s demographics.</p>
<p>However, being white does not necessarily mean being anti-transformation. In the same way, being black is not synonymous with transformation. There are white professors whose sense of transformation is more remarkable than that of some black professors. So, reference to black and white is beyond pigmentation. It is, in the logic of the Black Consciousness <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/defining-black-consciousness">philosophy</a>, about a state of mind: ideas and attitudes that ought to underpin a strategic gaze to transformation. </p>
<p>This is not to underplay South African universities’ transformation imperative. The point I am making is simple: transformation of higher education generally in Africa and specifically in South Africa requires a professoriate with a decoloniality posture. Today, the transformation of higher education is increasingly being pursued through the prism of decoloniality.</p>
<p>But the continent’s professoriate is schooled largely in the white tradition. This imprinted the culture of whiteness in its making, which is not surprising. Western education in Africa as we know it is designed to <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=ffkFRTj1WIwC&pg=PA502&lpg=PA502&dq=western+education+proselytizing+africa&source=bl&ots=9abf0vj_Qb&sig=x23LeI75FY4AvjDTGkZPmYVul3I&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjOsbKlrJ7JAhWKcBoKHX9mChcQ6AEINDAH#v=onepage&q=western%20education%20proselytizing%20africa&f=false">proselytise blacks</a>. African academics may be reluctant to repudiate their very make-up.</p>
<h2>Creating a black professoriate</h2>
<p>Tshilidzi Marwala, the deputy vice chancellor of the University of Johannesburg, <a href="http://www.dhet.gov.za/summit/Docs/Announcements/page%206.pdf">has agitated</a> for the making of a black professor. But what constitutes a black professor? In trying to theorise, it’s worth invoking Steve Biko’s explanation from his celebrated book I Write What I Like:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>…being black is not a matter of pigmentation – being black is a reflection of a mental attitude.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Black Consciousness philosophy introduces the concept of non-white, which means neither black nor white. This refers to the category of those whose “aspiration is whiteness”. Much of the African professoriate falls into this category, simply because its edifice is embedded in Western knowledge systems. What does this mean, in the context of Marwala’s pursuit? The making of a black professor is no easy task. It requires a revolution of the mind, which should draw insights from <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=z60udlv1F_cC&pg=PR7&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false">decoloniality theory</a>. </p>
<h2>A galaxy of scholarship</h2>
<p>There is a body of knowledge from which the decoloniality discourse could draw theoretical and philosophical insights to spawn African knowledge systems. This galaxy of scholarship includes the works of, among others, Archie Mafeje, Dani Nabudere, Cheikh Anta Diop, Molefi Kete Asante and Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane.</p>
<p>In Nabudere’s <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Oy3Ie8fGMpQC&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=nabudere+on+mafeje&ots=U85z6K784R&sig=4MraOHhsIKqL5nNGTlIwl5htjiw#v=onepage&q=nabudere%20on%20mafeje&f=false">words</a>, Mafeje “tried to deconstruct structural functional Anthropology and attempted to construct a new research methodology that was free from … colonially inspired disciplines, within the wide social sciences discourses”.</p>
<p>Nabudere himself <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?hl=en&lr=&id=v2jsIFo183cC&oi=fnd&pg=PA33&dq=Dani+Nabudere+indigenous+knowledge&ots=2Ew_-ocEZV&sig=esq3Q9NoLLr72EmvO-X4nr4zSbo#v=onepage&q&f=false">challenged</a> the colonial theorisation of Africa. He sought to mainstream indigenous knowledge systems. <a href="http://www.centerformaat.com/files/African_Origin_of_Civilization_Complete.pdf">Diop</a> situated the origin of civilisation in Africa and, in the process, nullified German philosopher G.W.F Hegel’s contention that Africans do not have history.</p>
<p>Asante, meanwhile, aggregated pan-African thoughts into <a href="http://www.asante.net/articles/1/afrocentricity/">Afrocentricity</a>. He described this as a paradigm that represents</p>
<blockquote>
<p>a revolutionary shift in thinking proposed as a constructural adjustment to black disorientation, decentredness, and lack of agency.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/41066769?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">Magubane </a> is best known for his work that untangled the political economy of race and class in South Africa. He also exposed the falsehood of colonial apartheid and liberal narratives of history. He asserted African perspectives in the centre of historical consciousness. </p>
<p>The works of these scholars are important for theoretical insights into decoloniality. </p>
<h2>Heed students’ calls</h2>
<p>But, how much does a professoriate engage with this body of knowledge in their curricula development endeavours? I am asking this question to caution against decoloniality becoming an ideological rhetoric for student activism rather than cause for knowledge revolution.</p>
<p>These questions are relevant because, as academic Ziauddin Sardar puts it, “the real power of the West is not located in its economic muscles and technological might. Rather, it resides in the power to define.” Those who refuse to conform are “defined out of existence”. Most African academics have accepted the definitions and prescriptions of the West as the template of their world outlook. This is a defeatist posture. Or perhaps it’s cowardice? </p>
<p>The professoriate must heed the multiple cues of the millennial generation’s activism, particularly when it comes to decolonising university curricula. If it doesn’t, it won’t be the West that defines Africa’s professoriate out of existence - it will be they, themselves.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/50930/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mashupye Herbert Maserumule received funding from the National Research Foundation for his post-graduate studies. He is affiliated with the South African Association of Public Administration and Management (SAAPAM). Maserumule is Chief Editor of the Journal of Public Administration.</span></em></p>
African academics are steeped in European knowledge systems and ways of teaching. There is a galaxy of African scholarship they can draw from to change this - if they’re brave enough.
Mashupye Herbert Maserumule, Professor of Public Affairs, Tshwane University of Technology
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/49306
2015-10-18T12:00:35Z
2015-10-18T12:00:35Z
Media feel pressure as divisions widen on the role of journalists in South Africa
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98723/original/image-20151017-25146-1uansg1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Journalists Thami Mazwai, left, and Jon Qwelane before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's special hearing on the media. They accused the white-owned press of colluding with apartheid.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This month marks the 45th anniversary of the clampdown on the press and the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. The day is known as <a href="http://www.apartheidmuseum.org/sites/default/files/files/BIKO%203b.pdf">Black Wednesday</a> and is also commemorated as <a href="http://www.gov.za/speeches/president-jacob-zuma-hosts-editors-and-senior-journalists-18-oct-15-oct-2015-0000">National Press Freedom Day</a>.</em></p>
<p>On October 19, South Africans <a href="http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/files/27747/12260524373Joe_Thloloe.pdf/Joe%2BThloloe.pdf">commemorate</a> the banning of the World, the Weekend World and the detention of their journalists in 1977. This was a time when the apartheid state restricted the media and controlled what could be reported. Also banned was <a href="http://www.iol.co.za/sundayindependent/remembering-qoboza-s-sense-of-duty-1.1594527#.ViI2CX4rLnA">Pro Veritate</a>, an ecumenical publication.</p>
<p>Today, the <a href="http://www.gov.za/sites/www.gov.za/files/images/a108-96.pdf">Constitution</a> guarantees unprecedented freedom of the media. But South Africans can’t agree on what journalism should be.</p>
<p>Recently, the editor of The New Age, veteran journalist <a href="http://www.tnamedia.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=142&Itemid=199">Moegsien Williams</a>, argued that the commercial press acts like a <a href="http://www.news24.com/Opinions/Media-acts-like-the-unelected-opposition-20150807">political opposition</a> because of the dominance of the governing African National Congress (ANC) in political life. </p>
<p>According to Williams, many journalists are closely identified with opposition parties. Another editor, Steven Motale, of The Citizen daily newspaper, publicly <a href="http://citizen.co.za/446139/446139/">apologised</a> to President Jacob Zuma for negative reporting about him.</p>
<p>On the other hand, certain journalist and union groupings have combined under the <a href="http://www.r2k.org.za/">Right2Know</a> campaign to protest proposals to regulate the media. In particular, they oppose suggestions of a <a href="http://www.r2k.org.za/2011/06/03/dlf-calls-for-overhaul-of-protection-of-information-bill-and-rejects-the-media-appeals-tribunal/">media tribunal</a>. </p>
<p>The Media Tribunal proposed by the ANC is designed as <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=11698">a “system of accountability”</a> to “ensure redress whenever the media infringes on the rights of others”. The ANC wants to revisit defamation law, and consider legislating the right of reply. The move is vehemently opposed by the <a href="http://www.sanef.org.za/news/entry/sanef_statement_on_anc_ngc_resolution_on_the_media_appeals_tribunal-15_octo/">South African National Editors’ Forum</a>. </p>
<p>Pressures on journalists can be insidious. <a href="http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/11766">One study</a> showed that reporters receive calls and text messages from government functionaries to pressure them.</p>
<p>It seems the country is more divided than ever on the media. However, this is yet another phase in a history of journalism that has always been conflicted, and where many journalists have passionately taken up their role. </p>
<h2>The halcyon days of black journalism</h2>
<p>Consider, for example, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/henry-mr-drum-nxumalo">Henry Nxumalo</a>, one of the greatest investigative journalists in South Africa. Nxumalo became famous as “Mr Drum” in the 1950s, when he worked for the iconic <a href="http://www.uj.ac.za/EN/Library/Documents/Drum%20-%20the%20making%20of%20a%20magazine%20by%20Anthony%20Sampson.pdf">Drum magazine</a>. Drum’s mix of celebrity, sport, jazz and township features made it popular. But it was also criticised for a lack of engagement in the politics of the early apartheid era. </p>
<p>Nxumalo, according to Drum editor (and much later Nelson Mandela’s official biographer) <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=VRdlAAAAMAAJ&q=anthony+sampson&dq=anthony+sampson&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEUQ6AEwB2oVChMIxPXQztLJyAIVRrgUCh2pFQjU">Anthony Sampson</a>, was the only reporter at the magazine with journalism experience. Nxumalo suggested Drum’s first big investigation: the abuse of contract workers at the <a href="http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/NAM/sophia/writers/maimane/maimaneS.htm">Bethal farms</a>. The story was a sensation, hurtling Drum into the spotlight. The magazine continued with investigations, adding substance to its generally light mix. </p>
<p>The Drum writers of the 1950s became well-known personalities in the townships for vividly portraying life under apartheid. <a href="http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,820505-2,00.html">The magazine</a> grew to be the largest circulation publication for black readers in South Africa.</p>
<p>It is not possible to say how Nxumalo would have described his role as a journalist. He was murdered while investigating a story.</p>
<p>But he put himself into extremely dangerous situations. In one case, he <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=BxsILFdm-7IC&pg=PA161&lpg=PA161&dq=Mr+Drum+goes+to+jail&source=bl&ots=fOi_OY7YUa&sig=9jW7orA7Y46hwAn-6ovr_lWf2Xc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAmoVChMIhLqPlvfGyAIVxusUCh0s4AJs#v=onepage&q=Mr%20Drum%20goes%20to%20jail&f=false">went to jail</a> to write about prison conditions. He also got a job at a farm where a worker had been killed. This type of journalism – immersion into the lives of the most exploited people of society – is rarely done today.</p>
<p>Drum, despite the perception that it was politically lightweight, was banned in the 1960s. The emphasis on social context in the writing was seen as dangerous by the apartheid state, even though the magazine did not particularly position itself as a “fourth estate” or “watchdog of government”. </p>
<p>Craig Charney <a href="http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10539/8510/ISS-71.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y">notes</a> that increasing repression destroyed the “Drum school”. By the mid-1960s, “dashing figures” such as Nat Nakasa, Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisane, Todd Matshikiza and Can Themba had disappeared due to banning, exile or death.</p>
<h2>Activist journalism v objectivity</h2>
<p>Drum is an early example of black journalists running foul of the state. In 1977, the World and Weekend World, owned by the Argus Company, had their own moment when they were <a href="http://www.apartheidmuseum.org/sites/default/files/files/BIKO%203b.pdf">banned</a> for reporting on the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising">1976 Soweto student uprising</a>.</p>
<p>When he became editor, Percy Qoboza had seized control of the newspaper from the Argus’s white editorial director and focused it on serious political content. The World and Weekend World gave space to <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/definition-black-consciousness-bantu-stephen-biko-december-1971-south-africa">Black Consciousness</a> ideas that were on the rise. </p>
<p>Charney’s research shows that, in the 1960s and 1970s, Black Consciousness activists courted black journalists, debating with them:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Are you a journalist first, or are you black first?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>They challenged the idea of objectivity, which was part of “professional” journalism. Professional values – impartiality, accuracy, fairness and providing all sides of the story – were enshrined in the codes of conduct of many newspapers. </p>
<p>But South African media served different communities. Scholars refer to three traditions in the print media – the English-language press, the Afrikaans press and the <a href="http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10539/8608/ISS-105.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y">black press</a>. </p>
<p>Afrikaans newspapers were closely aligned with the governing <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/national-party-np">National Party</a>, while English titles were allied to the English-speaking community. Black readership newspapers were owned by white corporations, making them a “captive press”.</p>
<p>Lynette Steenveld notes that these <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/#/doi/abs/10.1080/02560054.2007.9653361">“ethnic presses”</a> adopted a professional journalistic culture, but had separate political identities and community loyalties. Whereas in countries like the United Kingdom, journalists may have negotiated their role in relation to class or party politics, in South Africa, race and ethnicity have been inescapable factors for journalistic identity. </p>
<p>The other legacy that has influenced South African journalists is reporting during the apartheid struggle. As people rose up against the system, and the state responded with increasing repression, some white journalists questioned whether it was possible to be impartial in an unjust society.</p>
<p>An <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=6Z8JAAAACAAJ&dq=seeber+publishing&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y">alternative press</a> explicitly opposed the apartheid state. Their journalists came from mainstream presses, as well as from community and anti-apartheid publications. They redefined their roles away from “objectivity” towards <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=a5ROAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=resistance+press&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBsQ6AEwAGoVChMI8Pf9-tHJyAIVhlwUCh3gvgBx#v=onepage&q=resistance%20press&f=false">“advocacy journalism”</a>. Many aligned themselves with the anti-apartheid movements of the 1980s. </p>
<p>Although small, these publications had influence. They placed issues on the national news agenda and pushed the boundaries of what was discussed. They argued that the truth might not be served by “objective” approaches to reporting. A legacy of activist reporting persists among journalists today.</p>
<h2>The New South Africa</h2>
<p>The post-apartheid period has seen many debates about journalism. The print media has been accused of being complicit with apartheid, of being hostile to the ANC, of not telling “the African story”, of not transforming and of <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02560054.2007.9653361#abstract">racism</a>. The proposal of a media tribunal has been mooted several times. </p>
<p>While local passions flare, the global growth of social media promises to dramatically curtail journalists’ power. Across the world, journalists now compete with bloggers, community reporters, entertainment websites, and citizens posting to social media. </p>
<p>These writers are not bound by journalistic ethics and values. They cannot easily be held to account by governments. Journalists’ historical role of providing information and opinion is under threat from these global developments, even more than from an angry state. Renegotiating the role of journalism in these times may be the biggest challenge yet.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/49306/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lesley Cowling does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
South Africa seems more divided than ever on the media, as the governing ANC revives plans for a dreaded tribunal many fear would muzzle the press.
Lesley Cowling, Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.