Neither Slaves Nor Victims, Neither Innocent Nor Saviors: Black Consciousness and the call to re-define ourselves.

THE ANC AS BOLSHEVIKS

“The Workers and Peasants Government has decreed that Kronstadt¹ and the rebellious ships must immediately submit to the authority of the Soviet Republic. Therefore I command all who have raised their hand against the Socialist fatherland to lay down their arms at once…Only those surrendering unconditionally may count on the mercy of the Soviet Republic… Simultaneously I am issuing orders to prepare to quell the mutiny and subdue the mutineers by force of arms.”

–Leon Trotsky
Commander-in-Chief of the USSR’s Red Army, 1921

“Already the idea was beginning to emerge among some circles… that the BCM [Black Consciousness Movement] could consolidate itself as, at worst, a political formation to replace the ANC [African National Congress] and, at least, a parallel movement enjoying the same legitimacy as the ANC. It was of primary importance that we should deny our opponents any and both of these possibilities.”

- Oliver Tambo

Oliver Tambo, and the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the ANC, in the spirit of the Bolsheviks, interpreted the Black Consciousness Movement as fundamentally an ‘opponent’ of the ANC – something to be carefully controlled, rather than as an offer. While they did not unleash the wrath which had earlier been directed at the Pan-African Congress (“whose complete collapse would help to limit the possibilities of the counter-revolution”²) their critique of the BCM was utterly tainted by the assumption that it could become a threat to ANC’s monopoly on being a ‘legitimate’ representative of the liberation struggle. This arrogant – almost paranoid – politics was rooted in the unquestioned assumption that the only possible path to ‘liberation’ lay in a vanguard party seizing state power. Within the Bolshevik tradition, the participation of broad sections of the oppressed in attacking the oppressive state and establishing new institutions is not desirable in and of itself, but only on the condition that the rebellious populace is simultaneously subservient to the authority of the vanguard party.

Therefore, Black Consciousness, a politics rooted in black people establishing an autonomous identity, (and the institutions needed to realize such autonomy) is rejected as mere rebellion. Tambo writes that, “the fact that the popular rebellion (of 1976) did not become an insurrection pointed up limitations in Black Consciousness ideology. There had been a lack of political direction to guide the outbreak of collective anger in the townships… Whatever the strengths of the upsurge they lacked a strategy and tactics which could only be found in the leadership of the ANC.”³As a result of the ANC’s insistence on monopolizing the terms of the struggle against apartheid, many important contributions of Black Consciousness have been undermined, eclipsed, and misnamed.

DUAL POWER

“Dual power recognizes that waiting until after the insurrection to participate in libratory political and economic relationships means postponing our liberation; it is as senseless as waiting until after the insurrection to begin reorganizing society…
The great task of grassroots dual power is to seek out and create social spaces and fill them with libratory institutions and relationships. Where there is room for us to act for ourselves, we form institutions conducive not only to catalyzing revolution, but also to the present conditions of a fulfilling life, including economic and political self-management to the greatest degree achievable. We seek not to seize power, but to seize opportunity vis a vis the exercise of our power.”

- Brian Dominick⁴

“One must immediately dispel the thought that Black Consciousness is merely a methodology or a means towards an end. What Black Consciousness seeks to do is to produce at the output end of the process real black people who do not see themselves as appendages to white society.”

- Steve Biko

Black Consciousness politics spring out of the basic poverty (economic, but principally psychological and social) of black South Africans under apartheid. The assertion is that the brutal strictures of white supremacy create a situation in which black people are not fit to participate as equals within a society that grants dignity to all human beings. According to Steve Biko, “the black man has become a shell, a shadow of a man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity.” Biko then uses this analysis to example an intriguing paradox. He writes, “This is the first truth, bitter as it may seem, that we have to acknowledge before we can start on any program of changing the status quo… The only vehicle for change are these people who have lost their personality.” By naming blacks as the ‘only vehicle for change,’ Biko therefore names the restoration of dignity to blacks as a necessary pre-condition for revolutionary change in South Africa. Perhaps most importantly, Biko is insisting that black people themselves must “pump back life into his empty shell.”⁵ Dignity is not something that can be granted from above. The simple transfer of state power to a black political party will not (can not, and has not) address the fundamental hollowing and degradation of black people under white power.

Mark Sanders’ essay on Black Consciousness⁶ draws our attention to the stress Biko and other Black Consciousness thinkers put on acknowledging and confronting the ways in which black people are complicit in their own oppression. Biko seeks to “remind (the black man) of his complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused and therefore letting evil reign supreme in the country of his birth. This is what we mean by an inward-looking process.” According to Sanders, “assuming responsibility in this way , becoming an agent instead of a victim, is as crucial to Black Consciousness as it was to Karl Marx when, in Capital, he ‘attempted to make the factory workers rethink themselves as agents of production, not as victims of capitalism.’”⁷ But Biko is taking Marx a step further. He is saying not only that oppressed people are (potentially) agents of their liberation, but also – and necessarily – agents of their own subjugation. It is exactly the acute attention to moments of complicity that gives Black Consciousness its explosive power. Someone that believes they ‘deserve better,’ may well fight for improvements in their life, but ultimately someone ‘else’ is responsible for bringing about that improvement. Someone that knows they are being degraded because they allow themselves to be, protects their dignity not with ‘rights,’ but with resistance, with rage. In Biko’s rather prophetic essay “On Death,” he writes, “If they want to beat me five times, they can only do so on condition that I allow them to beat me five times. If I react sharply, equally and oppositely, to the first clap, they are not going to systematically count the next four claps, you see. It’s a fight… If you allow me to respond, I’m certainly going to respond. And I’m afraid you might have to kill me in the process even if it’s not your intention.”⁸

The ANC criticizes what Biko refers to as the ‘inward-looking process’ that Black Consciousness necessarily produces. The NEC policy statement of 1973 states that, “it is in struggle, in the actual physical confrontation with the enemy, that the people gain a lasting confidence in their own strength… it is through action that people acquire true psychological emancipation.” Certainly one cannot regain self-confidence – a sense of inherent worth – merely by thinking about it, or talking about it. White supremacy is a set of tangible, material relations – in addition to ideology – that must be actively dismantled. But it is too narrow a definition of “action” to speak only of direct, physical confrontation with the ‘enemy.’

For example, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), in Mexico, demonstrates a clear alternative to the Bolshevik/Guerrilla war vision of revolutionary transformation. As an armed force in open rebellion against the Mexican state, the Zapatistas offer protection to communities that would like to declare themselves “autonomous” from the present regime. In order to receive armed protection from the EZLN, a community must build their own institutions to care for the sick, educate the young, administer justice, etc. The ‘bad government,’ which fails to (or flatly refuses to) genuinely meet the needs of oppressed peoples, must be replaced by institutions the people themselves craft. This is a politics of Dual Power. The revolutionary forces, rather than single-mindedly focusing on seizing state power, focus instead on replacing and superseding the state, in the process of actively confronting the reigning order. The Black Consciousness Movement showed signs of moving black South Africans in the direction of a dual power revolution – or, at the very least, further towards a self-governing populace than the vanguardist policies of the ANC could have, or did, produce.

Far from being ‘rebellious’ – in the sense of being solely destructive, or reactionary, or narrow-minded – the Black Consciousness Movement had that glimmer of tremendous possibility that all insurrections carry. In the moment of insurrection, people who have always been voiceless, mere ‘shells’ of human beings, demonstrate their capacity to govern all the affairs of daily life, and often with a level of cooperation, justice, and even beauty that are not conceivable within the grind of ‘normal’ life. In addition to building separate all-black political organizations, (and thereby asserting the ability, and the ‘right’ of blacks to step away from white liberals) the Black Consciousness Movement also created a number of health clinics and other social institutions to meet the needs of the black community. Had these initiatives been given room to continue – rather than being marginalized by the self-proclaimed vanguard – South Africa after the resignation of the National Party might be in much better shape. Rather than relying on the scant resources and good will of the ANC government, it could be possible that the majority of South Africans would see themselves as the most important factor in ‘reconstruction & development.’

THE TERMS OF INTEGRATION

“If they are true liberals they must realize that they themselves are oppressed, and that they must fight for their own freedom and not that of the nebulous ‘they’ with whom they can hardly claim identification.”

- Steve Biko

“We shall need to see our efforts not so much as attempts to right wrongs on behalf of the blacks, as to set our society free from the lies on which it is built.”

- Nadine Gordimer

Oliver Tambo sees a ‘limitation’ in BCM “describing the entire white population of our country as ‘part of the problem.’”⁹ In fact, the influence of Black Consciousness on white articulations of struggle and freedom was one of its main contributions. Both the ANC and BCM saw the end goal of liberation struggle as a nonracial society in which those-now-white and those-now-black co-exist on political, social and economic terms of equality and dignity. But there are important differences in the terms of integration, the means by which nonracialism can be achieved. These differences tend to b oversimplified to the point of slander, whereby it is assumed that the ANC treats whites with respect, and Black Consciousness simply attacks and condemns them. This slander – and the related marginalization of BCM ideas – allows for nearly fifteen years of ‘liberation’ in which the broad outlines of white privilege established during and before apartheid remain roughly intact; whites have been integrated into the new democracy without having to significantly confront their own values, nor the plunder of the nation which has allowed them such ‘comfort.’¹⁰ Cecil Rhodes is left in his Hitler pose, overlooking the company gardens, and a few blocks away he has been fused together with Nelson Mandela¹¹, as if the two represent roughly equivalent – and benign – worldviews.

Alternately, Black Consciousness invited whites to reconfigure themselves as neither innocent nor saviors, as neither entitled to their present status nor excluded from human interactions with the black majority of South Africa. SASO, the all-black South African Student Organization formed to avoid the paternalism of the majority white National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) was created, in Biko’s words, “to remove (the white man) from our table, strip the table of all trappings put on it by him, decorate it in true African style, settle down and then invite him to join us on our own terms if he liked.”¹² According to Sanders, “this is eventually what happened. By the mid-1980s NUSAS was taking its direction from the black leadership, which had developed since 1976.”¹³

In 1972 SPRO-CAS (the Special Program for Christian Action in Society) published a book entitled “White Liberation” in which an acceptance of Black Consciousness politics is the basic starting point for a politics crafted by and for whites. In an essay entitled “the white problem” Clive Nettleton insists that “the changes which black consciousness must inevitably bring will affect whites no less than blacks.” That is to say, Nettleton assumes that black people must, increasingly adopt Black Consciousness as a worldview and methodology and he assumes, then, that the blossoming of confidence amongst blacks will force whites to confront, as Biko puts it, “the one problem which they have, which is one of ’superiority.’”¹⁴ Refusing the choices of ignoring or actively suppressing Black Consciousness, Nettleton encourages whites to “try to create a white consciousness… which will enable them to act, rather then react. This would necessitate a change in the meaning of ‘whiteness’ to render possible an eventual meeting of blacks with whites. Domination by whites is the essential feature of such meetings as do at present take place. In a changed consciousness on the part of both blacks and whites lies the only possibility for a just and peaceful solution of the conflict inherent in the present situation.”¹⁵ Even if Gordimer, SPRO-CAS and others are on the radical fringe of white society, their attempts to acclimate themselves to the teachings of Black Consciousness speak volumes to the potential of Black Consciousness to influence white society generally.

Unlike the ANC’s ‘four nation thesis,’¹⁶ Black Consciousness rejects wholesale any biological concepts of race, stressing instead the social dynamics of power and privilege that produce ‘white’ and ‘black’ as distinct and antagonistic categories. Furthermore, whereas the post-apartheid policies of ‘reconciliation’ allow whites to be ‘victims’ of ‘human rights violations’ ‘perpetrated’ by the armed struggle¹⁷, Black Consciousness demands that both blacks and whites interrogate themselves in terms of their complicity in oppression. In other words, whites are offered integration into a majority black country, but not by assuming that their white identity is static, or natural, and not without being accountable for their ideas and actions which have wreaked havoc on that same majority.

REJECTING PASSIVITY, REJECTING THE VANGUARD

“Now we can only generate a response from white society when we as blacks speak with a definite voice and say what we want.”

- Steve Biko

In refusing to silently comply with white attempts to erase their humanity, activists in the Black Consciousness movement set off a series of explosions – some subtle, gradual, others unavoidably massive – within South Africa. Despite its rebelliousness, its failure to be easily categorized and the way it squirms its way out of obeying the marching orders of the Bolshevik party, Black Consciousness remains capable of inspiring both blacks and whites to reject passivity and to strive, instead, towards the fundamental human needs of dignity and autonomy.

 

1 Fighting on the slogan, “All power to the soviets, not the parties,” a broad alliance of anarchists and leftists in Kronstadt rose up in rebellion against the newly formed Bolshevik state. Their rebellion centered around freedom of the press, release of socialist and anarchist prisoners, establishment of communal housing broadly within the city, and principally centering power fully within the hands of the Soviets – workers’, neighborhood, peasant, etc. councils – rather than within the state apparatus. In short, they fought for a broadening of “democracy,” in the sense of self-governance at all levels of society. Trotsky did lead troops to crush the rebellion, to disarm the population, and to dismantle those institutions established by the so-called “mutineers.”

2 Tambo, O. (1987). Preparing for Power: Oliver Tambo speaks. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books.

3 Tambo, O. (1987). Preparing for Power: Oliver Tambo speaks. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books.

4 Published online as “An Introduction to Dual Power Strategy.” Can be found at: http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2002/09/2403.shtml

5 Biko, S. (1978). I write what I like. London: Bowerdean.

6 Included in: Sanders, M. (2002). Complicities: the intellectual and apartheid. Durham: Duke University Press.

7 Sanders is here quoting Gayatri Spivak.

8 Biko, S. (1978). I write what I like. London: Bowerdean.

9 Tambo, O. (1987). Preparing for Power: Oliver Tambo speaks. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books.

10 See Grunebaum and Henri: “Where the mountain meets its shadow: a conversation on memory, identity and fragmented belonging” published by the Direct Action Center for Peace & Memory.

11 “Mandela Rhodes Place” is a five star hotel in the central business district of Cape Town.

12 Biko, S. (1978). I write what I like. London: Bowerdean.

13 Sanders, M. (2002). Complicities: the intellectual and apartheid. Durham: Duke University Press.

14 Biko, S. (1978). I write what I like. London: Bowerdean. I have changed the tense of this quote from past tense to present tense.

 

15 SPRO-CAS (1972). White Liberation. Johannesburg: Raven Press.

16 The four nations being the four racial categories established by apartheid: White, Indian, Coloured, and African. Though these were all nominally based in biological notions, apartheid’s ‘racial classification board,’ which every year re-defined the racial status of hundreds of people, proved their own fiction.

17 Again, see Grunebaum and Henri: “Where the mountain meets its shadow: a conversation on memory, identity and fragmented belonging” published by the Direct Action Center for Peace & Memory.

 

Squawkier Sax

been playing saxophone a few times a week, mostly just to let the crazy squawky-ness heal my anxiousness, or sadnesses, or confusions…

The Curse of Being Reasonable

The Curse of Being Reasonable

“South African capital still lacks any clear vision of an apartheid-free capitalism, let alone how to bring it about. But that does not mean that it won’t be able to live profitably when others finally end it.”

  – Gavin Williams¹

“The future will only contain what we put into it now.”

- Graffiti, France, May 1968

The Freedom Charter, drafted in 1955 by the Congress of the People, has been described as a minimum set of demands, towards the abolition of apartheid. Up against a brutally repressive regime, it may be necessary to declare a set of minimum demands, a list of basic necessities for a decent society. Still, there is a risk that minimum demands become the boundaries of what is possible, over time. This is a problem of success, for sure, but all the same a problem.

Looking back, 50 some years later, on the Freedom Charter, and evaluating its usefulness as a tool of the liberation struggle, one must say, first off, that it does delineate many of the tangible changes which have been brought about since 1994. ‘The People’ do govern: black people have been granted the right to vote, hold office, write the laws and serve as judges in the South African government. With the charter as a guide, the new constitution has repealed “all laws which discriminate on grounds of race, colour or belief,” established “free, compulsory, universal” education, granted everyone “equal right to use their own languages,” and grants South Africa more ‘human rights’ than many nations in the world. But that’s not all that should be said. The Freedom Charter also falls short of what it could, and even should, be. It sets boundaries, more than it explodes them. It makes us dream less, not more. It’s very reasonableness is a curse.

The concept of ‘equal rights’ sounds well enough – and is even relatively easy to attain – but it’s not much of a remedy for structural injustices. Apartheid used Power – police, soldiers, legislators, judges, architects, city planners, teachers, etc. –  to determine where people live, work and socialize, and how they move between those spaces. How to re-shape the social landscape and destroy the apartheid design? The ANC recognized the need for actively dismantling the infrastructure of apartheid; as such, the charter, “went as far as its drafters could reasonably have gone in a socialist direction.”² The sections of the Freedom Charter which stand out as ’socialist,’³ speak of nationalizing “the banks and monopoly industry,” and re-dividing the land “amongst those who work it to banish famine and land hunger.” Seizing land and industry are the only tools the charter gives the new state to implement broad programs of social welfare and to disrupt the patterns of (racially-codified, or otherwise) capitalist accumulation. As both land redistribution and nationalization threaten a massive exodus of rich people and industry, reactionary white violence, and CIA/IMF/World Bank destabilizing measures, neither have been done in South Africa since ‘94⁴. “Whereas in the 1950s the Charter was criticized for being too socialist, today it is more often criticized for not being socialist enough.”⁵ The changes needed in South Africa are not necessarily ’socialism’ per se, but it will certainly take a lot more than ending ‘discrimination.’

The Freedom Charter claims that in the new South Africa, “the aim of education shall be to teach the youth to love their people and their culture, to honour human brotherhood, liberty and peace.” Sounds pretty nice, but as an antidote to schooling which carefully separated the so-called four ‘national groups’⁶ and systematically inculcated inferiority amongst the blacks and superiority amongst the whites, the words stand relatively hollow. We can’t possibly believe that suddenly flooding blacks into white schools will produce a new value system within the curriculum, unless white schools are assumed to have taught something other than apartheid. What are the mechanisms to train a massive corps of black teachers, to re-train or fire white teachers that are stuck in racist pedagogy? The Freedom Charter only offers that “teachers shall have all the rights of other citizens.” As for the problem of white people buying their way out of attending de-segregated schools the charter has nothing at all to say. The sentence “adult illiteracy shall be ended by a mass state education plan,” is the only pragmatic suggestion the charter makes in terms of dismantling inequality within education.

While the charter makes some poetic proclamations around “houses, security and comfort,” it is hardly an outline for uplifting the millions of people living in shacks or for racial integration. Similar to the charter’s promises of nationalization and land redistribution, the section on housing now serves as a political liability for the ANC, as people’s hopes of the party being a vehicle for economic justice are being eroded. Statements such as “Rent and prices shall be lowered, food plentiful and no-one shall go hungry” are ‘pie-in-the-sky’ of the worst sort, and should have never been included in the charter. The claim that, “Slums shall be demolished, and new suburbs built where all have transport, roads, lighting, playing fields, creches and social centers” is encouraging in its specificity, but still leaves a lot of room for error. The cynical aesthetics of the N2 Gateway Project⁷ demonstrate the potential weaknesses of promising to demolish slums and replace them with utopias. Furthermore, giving everyone, “the right to live where they choose, be decently housed, and to bring up their families in comfort and security” brings to life a cruel paradox. The sentence simultaneously is a necessary blow against apartheid era forced removals and yet allows whites to remain in the more than decent housing that forced removals stole for them. If the people living in Joe Slovo and Delft⁸ are any indication, the right to live where one chooses is greatly desired, but this right is also a get-out-jail-free card to whites who want to resist integration and justice. 

Those of us who struggle for liberation don’t always lose, but how we win can make for quite a mess. Once we’re in a position to do something other than fight, the question becomes, “what is it that we said we wanted?” The better our answer to that question, the better our chances of actually creating a ‘liberated’ society. It’s vital that the demands our movement produces now – as oppressed people – have the capacity to generate tangible answers, clear ideas on how to solve entrenched social problems. Totally poetic slogans such as, “live without dead time,” and “beneath the paving stones, the beach,”⁹ are inspiring and valuable, but don’t serve to instruct much. While we shouldn’t in any way abandon the ability – even, the ‘right’ – to articulate seemingly ‘impossible’ political demands, we must avoid politics which are so beautiful that they’re of no use. Perhaps even more dangerous are those political demands that are so clear, and so possible, that they are actually impotent. For example, the call and response slogan, “Power!” “To the People!”¹⁰ doesn’t hardly begin to answer the question of what, actually, to do. Even if seizing power were, in and of itself, desirable – an extremely dangerous notion¹¹ – there’s still no sense of what uses ‘Power’ will be put to. Sometimes the clearest instructions are the most deadly.

The ’socialism’ of states such as Poland create full employment (“There shall be work and security!” says the Freedom Charter) but at such a great cost to human dignity that the outpouring of worker’s rage cannot be stopped, even with the imposition of martial law¹². Then again, other radical notions which have a ‘cleaner record,’ (take, for example, the classic idea of a ’soviet,’ a ‘workers’ council’) remain inspiring partly because they’ve never survived for very long.

So, what remains is neither a simple nor a light question. The question is as difficult to ask as to answer, and goes a little something like: How to make demands which are both attainable and also assume more demands will be needed; that is to say, demands that empower people to be demanding¹³?
This is a question all of us intent on a radical restructuring of society must grapple with.

1Williams, G. (1988) Celebrating the Freedom Charter. Transformation 6: Durban.

2Williams, G. (1988) Celebrating the Freedom Charter. Transformation 6: Durban.

3Specifying the right to form trade unions is a liberal demand, and the charter doesn’t even give these unions the right to strike, something liberal states definitely allow.

4Officially proclaiming the 1913 land act null and void and assisting in the transfer of some amount of white owned land to black hands is hardly “re-dividing the land to those who work it,” and couldn’t even stop white governing councils to extend 50 and 100 year leases to white farmers in 1993, nor could it stop the one million farm dwellers that have been evicted since the transfer of power.

5Williams, G. (1988) Celebrating the Freedom Charter. Transformation 6: Durban.

6White, Indian, Coloured, and African. These divisions were drafted by the Nationalist Party and accepted as fact by the Congress of the People (itself made up of the African National Congress, South African Indian Congress, the Coloured People’s Congress, and the all-White Congress of Democrats). The language of ‘National Groups,’ runs through the charter, and stands as the weakest point in the ‘equal rights’ logic system as a) allowing whites ‘equal rights’ in the economic sphere continues entrenched patterns of inequality and in the social sphere gives them outlets to avoid de-segregation and b) the entire construction of ‘national groups’ is meant only to make the black population easier to dominate by fostering division. Africanists present at the Congress criticized the charter for allowing for alliances between the national groups (an obvious necessity) but didn’t question the existence of these groups. The Black Consciousness Movement explicitly rejected both the formulation of national groups (seeing the principal divisions of power in South Africa as between ‘black’ and ‘white’) and the allowance of ‘national’ or ‘minority’ rights to whites.

7The N2 Gateway Project seeks to evict all of the people living in ‘informal settlements’ within sight of the highway, bulldoze their homes and replace them with government housing, much of which will only be affordable to the middle class. The evictions, re-settlement schemes, and new construction are all being resisted by the squatter communities: www.westerncapeantieviction.wordpress.com. All the same, it would be nice, the project presumes, if this all could be completed by 2010 when thousands of tourists pour into town from the airport on the N2.

8 Two communities – some 25,000+ people – facing (and resisting) eviction as part of the N2 Gateway Project.

9Graffiti in France, May 1968.

10Amandla! Awethu!

11Jacques Depelchin speaks of the lack of a choice between Capitalism and Communism being based on the fact that, “both are totally focused on seizing State power… politics is not Power.”

12See, Simon, H. (1983) Poland 1980-82; Class Struggle and the Crisis of Capital. Detroit: Black & Red. Simon’s analysis is that Polish ‘Communism,’ is merely an expression of Capital, and that the Solidarity movement is first and foremost a mass wildcat general strike, which both the Capitalists (the Communist Party) and the Unions attempt to co-opt in various ways, none of which fully contain workers’ rebellion.

For a very much under-stated summation of these points, Gavin Williams states that, “The view of socialism as state ownership of the means of production, central planning and a strategy of industrialization under the direction of a vanguard party is an impoverished one which has led to political repression of workers and peasants and, increasingly, to unresolved economic crises.”

13Suttner and Cronin, in speaking of the prospects of successful land redistribution in South Africa, assert that, “such matters will surely depend on the degree or organization, mobilization and consciousness in the countryside.” Perhaps the inability to stress people’s active participation in their own liberation, and the corresponding over-reliance on state power, is the greatest flaw of the freedom charter.

Family Life in Hillcrest

my trip to durban was about visiting with my friend carey, whom libby and i met on our trip to south africa and august. carey lives with her partner brendan, and her children liam and jembe. i enjoy and appreciate all four of them very much, and found it a very comforting and engaging visit all around. the boys are home schooled (though they’re planning on going to school next year; a big decision that we talked a lot about) and so they’re really bright, and open to engaging with adults, and pretty self-sufficient. it was fun to have some of their boy energy, doing things like making muffins and then eating the whole tray in less than an hour. we also played chess, and cards and watched a bunch of simpsons episodes. i also had really in-depth, wonderful discussions with carey and brendan. brendan was one of thousands of white men who refused to serve in the apartheid military, and though he faced jail time for his refusal, he went to his draft meeting to express his rejection publicly, and campaigned to make his objections to apartheid broadly known. he is a strong, strong, personality, rooted in a beautiful and fierce love of his country, and a willingness to try and oppose the horrible excesses of racism and war here. and carey is so compassionate and thoughtful, and really listens well to all i want to share with her, she asks wonderful questions, and shares many great stories of her life in this country and things she has learned. carey took to me to one of the most beautiful places i’ve seen in south africa, with lush rolling hills and mountains, and we sat on the edge of a cliff and watched the sun set and the clouds moving across the sky in opposing directions, and we talked. she steadily plugs away at her business, http://www.rootzcreationz.co.za/ which produces and distributes african craft work at fair trade rates, so that 25 some africans earn their living for their art.

anyway, visiting them feels like home, like a family space to me that totally embraces me. it was a good time, and i very much look forward to returning.

i did a bad job of taking photos of all the beautiful moments; many were missed. but here’s a few.

here they are, except carey is looking away. jembe is on the right, and liam is on the left. i made them this funny meal, which was vegetables with (vegi-)schnitzel sauce.

they have a pet pig, named phoenix, who eats all their compost.

this is the guest house, where i stayed.

they grow avocados in the backyard, among other things. carey’s parents grow bananas, as well.

Train to Durban

i took the train up to durban. it’s supposed to be a 36 hour ride, and took more like 40. i really loved it. i got time to read a novel, (“the late bourgeois world” by nadine gordimer, written in 1966 about radical whites in south africa and their relationships with the black movement) write letters, journal, listen to lots of music, and watch the scenery. the train goes up through the center of south africa, through the free state and then down to durban. it’d be faster to go along the coast, but the land in the center is a lot flatter, and the land along the coast was always reserved for the “natives” so there wasn’t any reason – from the british perspective – to run rail through there. also, while i’m talking trivia, in the 1920s, the union of south africa nationalized the rail as a way to deal with the “poor white problem.” in other words, they hired thousands of poor whites to work the rails. i stayed in a cabin with two old pensioners that came out of that time, working for decades on the rail, one man going far enough back to have been a mechanic for the old steam engines.

here’s our train, at the station in kimberley, where they have a museum about the railroad (i didn’t have time to go in; we only stopped for ten minutes).

this photo was taken as we approached the station in bloemfontein.

this view past barbed wire was the only real glimpse i got of bloemfontein. from word i get, bloemfontein has a reputation for being a harsh, particularly afrikaans, and particularly racist place to live.

i spent a lot of time in the dining car.

this was taken in kwa-zulu natal, a few hours from durban.

here’s one glimpse of what the hills look like around durban:

this is the karoo, the flatlands north and east of metropolitan cape town, and before kimberley. it reminds me of the prairie lands of the usa: big sky country.

but i love the big sky, and the red earth.

and a south african friend re-assured me that indeed, the sky actually looks different here. it’s beautiful.

115km Bike Ride

i did the ‘cape argus, pick n’ pay’ cycle tour, which goes from downtown cape town all the way just north of cape point (across the peninsula on the highway, then down the indian ocean coast, past simon’s town), and then back up, along the west coast to green point, in cape town. this was way further than i’ve ever biked before, and i was on a clunky bike for this sort of thing, so i almost gave up after 90km, but i’m glad i finished (and will stop complaining about it). i didn’t take a camera, so you’ll just have to believe that i did do the route by bike. but to supplement, i’m posting some photos of a journey that janelle and i took with her friends tracey and jes, along portions of the same route.

here’s me in front of the beautiful beach at nordhoek, along the atlantic coast.

looking up at nordhoek, with the beach behind, here’s janelle and jes in the shadow of chapman’s peak.

chapman’s peak is a steady incline that goes for 5km, and the rolls down for another 5k. it was, for me, the greatest accomplishment of the whole ride. very beautiful and inspiring to climb such a mighty incline.

at the end of the 5km roll down hill, you come into the posh little suburb called hout bay.

jes, tracey and janelle in one of my trademark artsy shots.

here’s my trophy, and my race shirt (thanks bill wetzel! the front of the shirt says, “I FOUND JESUS,” which brought about quite a bit of encouraging, giggly moments along the way).

Climbing Table Mountain

Jan, Janelle and I climbed Table Mountain. It was fabulous. Better than I could have imagined possible. Totally envigorating and awe-inspiring. I’m including a lot of photos to try and convey the wonder of it. There are many routes up the mountain, but we walked up Platteklip Gorge, which starts on the city side and goes up. It takes about an hour and a half to walk up (1067 meters). The various views of the city below along the way (and the mist and mountain top above) are stunning in and of themselves. But it’s nothing compared to the beauty up top. Somehow I imagined the top would be small, and barren, flat rock. But it’s actually three kilometers wide, full of beautiful rocks and plants, and from the top you can move back down the other sides, towards camps bay, and observatory, and the kirstenbosch botanical gardens. Wonderful.

Here’s Jan and I midway up the mountain.

Jan and Janelle Climbing.

Looking back at the city, towards the suburbs and devil’s peak, from the hike.

Here’s the view of the city bowl that can be seen from the top.

Looking down towards Hout Bay.

You can see ‘everywhere’ from here: down towards cape point, hout bay, the cape flats and the mountains on the other side of somerset west. I have walked, from the other direction, up to the lake in view here.

Janelle somehow accidentally figured out how to take a picture of Jan and I on top in black and white.

Victorious Janelle on top of the mountain.

This was my favorite spot of all. There was absolute, total silence up here, the sky was amazing, I felt utterly content.

still see me?

Legislated Violence & Guerrilla War in the name of ‘Upholding the Law’

“The words ‘people of the United States’ and ‘citizens’ are synonymous terms,

and mean the same thing…

Can a Negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen?

It is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration; for if the language, as understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the declaration of independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted; and instead of the sympathy of mankind, to which they so confidently appealed, they would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation…”

• Chief Justice Taney

United States Supreme Court

(ruling against Dred Scott in Dred Scott V. Sanford, 1857)

“It is very difficult to go back to something that did not exist.

Before the Civil War, which was before Reconstruction,

there was slavery in the U.S.A…

I don’t have much to say about ‘Reconstruction’ because it did not happen.

The reality of American history is evidence of the failure.

If there was ‘Reconstruction,’ there would be no need for the ‘Civil Rights Movement.”

• Gregory Jenkins

“The struggle of the Black community (or non-’white’ communities) would be undertaken in the name of an imported law and model, which were betrayed, in the first place, by the first to import them.

A terrifying dis-symmetry.”

• Jacques Derrida

In April of 1964, as Nelson Mandela defended his stance of armed struggle against apartheid, the nonviolent ‘Civil Rights Movement’ in the US was just months away¹ from being granted the Civil Rights Act. The achievement of this bit of legislation marks the official re-stating, on the part of the government, of a set of guarantees established in the Constitution some ninety years previous. These legal guarantees could not have been made real during the 100 years following the Civil War because they went against the basic economic and political structures of racialized power within the United States, and particularly within the racial tyranny of Southern ‘Segregation.’ Within months of the Act being passed², the Government would prove its unwillingness to grant any significant re-structuring of Power during the Democratic National Convention; they would deny, on national television, any recognition of the sharecroppers that had built for themselves the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and made their way to Atlantic City to advocate for themselves. From that point forward, the movement would steadily turn away from the previously dear notions of ‘civil rights,’ ‘nonviolence,’ ‘the beloved community,’ etc. and towards increasingly radical articulations of the nature of the American system and the nature of struggle required.

Perhaps, given the timing of these developments, one can forgive Mandela for testifying to the Court about, “the independence of [America's] judiciary.” And yet, we would insult Mandela to assume that he is merely glossing over, or ignorant of, the actual structure of justice within the United States. Surely he must have known that US Blacks were barred from voting, holding political power, serving as judges, jury members or police officers up until (and after) 1964. Taking Mandela’s words to summarize the American situation in 1964, “the African³ people were not part of the Government and did not make the laws by which they were governed.” Therefore, the only plausible explanation for Mandela claiming that American⁴ democracy, “never fail[s] to arouse my admiration,” is that he actually believes that American democracy has an ‘independent judiciary’ and other democratic concepts, which can be divorced from, and stand above the realities of race. That is to say, Mandela seeks to bring about a situation in which the British/American versions of democracy supplant the rigidly codified racialism of the National Party’s democracy. In seeking an antidote to apartheid in the ‘rule of law,’ as exampled in Britain and America, Mandela fundamentally mis-characterizes Apartheid.

The architects of Apartheid – much like the architects of US democracy – strenuously sought to be simultaneously democratic and white supremacist. The two concepts were not only not antagonistic, they were co-dependant. Contrary to Mandela’s reading of the problem, the National Party did not disenfranchise Blacks out of a desire to reject democracy, but rather out of a desire to reject the humanity⁵ of Black people. Black people are not entitled to ‘equal rights’ within South Africa because they are simply not South African. Just as Chief Justice Taney clarified to Dred Scott in 1857, if the Whites were to include Blacks within their conception of ‘the people,’ their own democracy would be a farce, a sham, indefensible based on its own logic: “they would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation.”

The rebuke and reprobation that the Apartheid state accumulated over the years of Mandela’s imprisonment was rooted in people’s refusal – ‘at home and abroad’ – to accept the basic logic of Apartheid ‘citizenship.’ Such a refusal was necessary, and just. All the same, even as the Apartheid state introduced, “new and harsher laws, mobilize[d] its armed forces and sen[t] Saracens, armed vehicles, and soldiers into the townships in a massive show of force designed to intimidate the people,” and even as they justified “indiscriminate slaughter of [African] people,” as a legitimate response to rebellion, they had not, as Mandela claims, “decided to rule by force alone.” Surely a racial group consisting of less than 20% of the population that seeks to own 90% of the land must not shrink form using violence to achieve their ends. But the principles which the race-haters were willing to enforce with such tremendous brutality were fundamentally democratic ideals. Thousands of tons of paper were dedicated to legislating the intricate details of the peculiar tyranny that is ‘Apartheid.’ None of the ‘ideals’ of Apartheid could be made social fact through force of arms alone; it took the White Parliament, and their ‘independent judiciary’ to articulate the objectives that a nation of conscripts and an obscene arsenal would seek to implement. Those poor white fuckers that drove the Sarecens were motivated by the dream of a pure-White democracy, a country in which every white person is equal to every other⁶.

In seeking to craft a democratic system that is utterly reliant on notions of racial supremacy, and systemic racial terror, Apartheid had a number of historical precedents – not the least of which is the United States of America. In attempting to counter such a system with a vision of a democratic society in which ex-slaves – or members of previously hated racial groups – could participate in governing their society, without race as a hindrance, Mandela had no historical precedent to point to, so he made some up. Or, rather, he chose to define – against the evidence – the democracy practiced in Britain (and their ex-colony, America) as the ‘revolutionary democracy’ that the ANC intended to bring about (and that Africans practiced before colonialism). By setting ‘Western’⁷ democracy as the standard to measure justice and progress against, Mandela also defines the acceptable boundaries and methods of struggle for Black South Africans.

Seeing themselves as the victims of a democracy which stubbornly failed to include them – rather than a democracy that was effectively white supremacist – the ANC had long attempted to passionately appeal to the White government for inclusion. This policy continued, despite the fact that it “had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation, and fewer and fewer rights,” and despite the turn to armed sabotage. In outlining various strategic acts of sabotage intended to “scare away capital from the country,” Mandela still defines the ultimate success as, “compelling the voters of the country to reconsider their position.” Again the White government – and the population that elects them – are the focus of attention. This emphasis on the White reaction to Black violence (and the corresponding need to have the acts of violence be “properly controlled”) is based on setting the goal at a “non-racial democracy⁸,” and therefore needing to shy away from, “any action which might drive the races further apart than they already were.”

Violent resistance to apartheid was inevitable, according to Mandela, both because the government legislated against all manner of nonviolent protest (strikes, participation in the ANC, PAC, and SACP, civil disobedience, even written appeals⁹) and because in the Black community, “for a long time the people had been talking of violence.” While the apartheid state had clearly escalated its methods of repression after 1960, it was the willingness on the part of the Blacks to resist violently that most stressed Mandela. He admits that, “our followers were beginning to lose confidence [in the ANC leadership and methods] and were developing disturbing ideas of terrorism.” Furthermore, “there now arose a danger that these groups would adopt terrorism against Africans, as well as Whites, if not properly directed¹⁰.” In the past, “the ANC had nevertheless always prevailed upon them to avoid violence and to pursue peaceful methods,” but the failure of peaceful methods had led to a situation where the general feeling amongst Black people had out-paced the intelligence and daring of their self-proclaimed leaders.

This tension is not unusual within social movements. On some level all social movements attempt to restrain and channel people’s anger, only to find themselves – eventually, necessarily – propelled out of their own failures by that very same anger. Within the Civil Rights Movement, the militancy (albeit nonviolent) of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee shook the established leadership out of their failed tactics of legalism, only to later be superseded by the explosive ideas and tactics of Black Power. In South Africa, the risk of ‘terrorism,’ arising in the townships and homelands would force the ANC to bring Umkhonto we Sizwe to life, and repeatedly in years to come, insurrection in the township would force the official leadership to take more and more radical stances in regards to armed struggle. Despite the fact that Mandela and the rest of the ANC hierarchy were belatedly catching up to the anger within broader society, they would always claim to be ‘properly controlling’ the struggle.

On November 28, 1980, ANC president Oliver Tambo would go so far as to sign a UN declaration stating the ANC’s intention to fight a properly controlled guerrilla war. In his words:

It is the conviction of the ANC of SA that international rules protecting the dignity of human beings must be upheld at all times. Therefore… in the conduct of the struggle against apartheid and racism… it intends to respect and be guided by the general principles of international humanitarian law applicable in armed conflicts.

‘The rule of law’ – without any racial ‘discrimination’ – is set as the ideal, and so therefore, the struggle itself must conform to ‘the rule of law.’

In and of itself, ‘the rule of law,’ is not an ‘ideal’ – it’s not worthy of admiration. The legalized violence of apartheid was not an aberration or an anomaly. Apartheid came to life after slavery, (the legal system of turning human beings into property) after the defeat of Reconstruction (and the incumbent legal infrastructure that would not only disenfranchise Black people, but would allow thousands of them to be publicly castrated, hung, and burned without recourse to the law for protection) and after National Socialism (with its legislation aimed at justifying the extermination of millions). To believe that democracy – whether of the kind practiced in ‘the West’ or the imagined ‘non-racial’ variety – is an ideal worth living and dying for, requires us to ignore these fundamental realities.

1Signed into law July 2^nd, 1964.

2August 24-27, 1964.

3Granted, American racialism was based on the stripping of African identity, the systematic obliteration of African-ness, to be replaced by Negro, the opposite of and subordinate to, White.

4The British system is the paramount example in Mandela’s words, but as he claims that the American system arouses “similar sentiments,” I am using his words about Britain interchangably.

5Here, as exampled by Taney, being one of ‘the people,’ in the eyes of the state, is synonymous with being a ‘citizen,’ and by implication, when the Apartheid state denies the possibility of Black citizenship, they simultaneously, and officially, deny Black humanity.

6It goes without saying that these equal and democratic whites have no peers outside of the white racial group.

7He is much more specific than ‘Western,’ in that he explicitly names two states, one explicitly Imperial, and the other only defined as an ‘Empire’ by its enemies.

8Again, Mandela imagines, or pretends, that this exists already in Britain and America.

9“The white power does not believe itself required to respond, does not hold itself responsible before the black people… It does worse: it does not even acknowledge receipt.” – Jacques Derrida

10Emphasis mine.