With the Chairman Hjof By My Side, ‘The Future’s So Bright…’

the future’s so bright, i’ve gotta wear shades…

Pigs and Mountains

For Love of God and Father: popular rebellion and the trappings of nationalism

“Take politically rightless, socially subordinate, economically vulnerable youths; educate them in numbers beyond their parents’ wildest dreams, but in grotesquely inadequate institutions; ensure that their awareness is shaped by punitive social practices in the world beyond the schoolyard – and then dump them in large numbers in the economic scrap-heap.”

- Colin Bundy

“On 23 March 1985 in KwaNobuhle Uitenhage, police shot and killed 21 people. Angry residents retaliated by necklacing¹ a staunch community councillor and his three sons. Thereafter every known house of a policeman and informant was attacked and burned. The necklacing method subsequently spread to other areas of the country.”

- Truth and Reconcialiation Committee report, vol. 2

“To the South African and even international public, much of what youths and adults were doing remained hidden – confined to the private world of the township – except for the occasional report of a spectacular event. What outsiders saw instead was the enacting of a more public… theatre. Nationalism provided the central organising storyline for this display… It sought to present townships as symbolic spaces from which an undifferentiated mass of the suffering and helpless deserved to be liberated.”

- Belinda Bezzoli

By 1985, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa had exploded upwards and outwards, in a number of different directions, based on numerous visions of both the tactics and goals of liberation struggle. The Black Consciousness Movement (as well as a number of economic and political changes following the student uprisings of 1976) helped to set in motion a situation in which “a decentralised, localised, radicalised community-based politics took root.”² The emergence of student boycotts – which spanned many months and included the participation of tens of thousands of young people throughout the country – came in a context of a massive increase in trade union activity, the establishment of an ANC-affiliated, legal, mass organization³, a widespread desire in the black community for armed resistance, and a corresponding exceleration of the apartheid state’s methods of brutal repression of the black population as a whole. These different factors converged to create a climate in which both the aspirations and meanings of liberation were up for grabs, and yet, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, the movement would be neatly packaged and consumed globally as a pallatable story of ‘national liberation.’

Having been carefully isolated from the daily lives of the white population that benefited from and voted for apartheid – through both subtle and brutal forced removals – the black townships and homelands of South Africa sought methods to make their resistance visible to the outside world. The state’s decision to turn towards fascist methodology to survive – ’state of emergency,’ infiltration, torture and assassination – added both urgency and difficulty to attempts to register opposition broadly and clearly. For the exiled leadership of the ANC, a tension developed between the growing need for ‘a people’s war’ – widespread ‘ungovernability’ – inside South Africa, and international symbolic and material support for the end of apartheid. Chris Hani, speaking as a representative of the armed wing of the ANC⁴, answered the question ‘why the necklace?’ by explaining that, “the necklace was a weapon devised by the oppressed themselves to remove this cancer from our society, the cancer of collaboration of the puppets. It is not a weapon of the ANC. It is a weapon of the masses themselves…” Images of black bodies set alight made international news, but wasn’t the kind of imagery that would lead the good, first world liberal to call for an end to apartheid. Much more helpful, as far as international image was concerned, were notions like ‘father Mandela’⁵ showing ‘the children of Africa’ the way to freedom. People on the outside saw what they wanted to see, and also certain choices were made within the movement that allowed the story of ‘liberation’ to be told in a certain way.

Belinda Bezzoli asserts that the movement adopted methods of ‘theatricality,’ complete with ’scripts,’ ‘props,’ ‘acting techniques,’ ‘elaborate staging,’ including “backstage directions, and actual performances given.”⁶ To make this claim, Bezzoli looks closely at the mass funerals that develop as the ’state of emergency’ murders staggeringly high numbers of township youth. Funerals as a means of Nationalist protest have developed in a number of different countries that face military occupation, and a certain set of common characteristics have unfolded. Mass, politicized funerals in Palestine, Northern Ireland, and South Africa (etc.) are possible both because these communities view the levels of state brutality as altogether unacceptable, and the British, Zionists, and Boers⁷ all flatly deny the legitimacy of the colonized claims to nationhood – so these funerals develop an intensely national character. Most simply, this can be seen in the coffins of the dead being wrapped in the banned flags of the colonized. So the death becomes not simply the murder of the individual, but an assault on the nation itself.

But the ANC flag draped over coffins is not all that marks a procession of 40,000 in Soweto as a ‘nationalist’ demonstration. In fact, the basic fact of mass burials, attended by huge portions of the townships, is an issue that is struggled out within the community. “Cars with megaphones would travel the streets before each event, calling upon people to attend,”⁸ and youth militants would sometimes carry weapons to ‘persuade’ people to attend. While the young coerced attendance, adults built official committees to govern the events, stipulating “that only ordained ministers would be allowed to speak, that there must be no banners or singing of freedom songs, and that coffins should not be carried on people’s shoulders, but conveyed in vehicles.” Through the fusion of youth militancy and adult conservatism, “a new type of crowd emerged – a larger one, more subject to ritualised control and more predictable in its behavior.” In this space, “the metaphorical portrayal of the township – and by extenstion, the nation itself – as a ‘family’ living out a tragic drama” emerged. The family’s “children were killed; its elders mourned them. Its defenders were the forces of moral good – the churh, older patriarchs and matriarchs. Its worth was sustained in its nobility in suffering.”⁹ But this was by no means a seamless process.

While young people were learning how to build barricades, throw stones and petrol bombs, undermine infiltration, studying revolutionary struggles and forging alliances across racial lines and with organizations of workers¹⁰, adult leaders such as Boesak and Tutu¹¹ were trying to encourage them while explicitly restraining their passions. Tutu, for example, told a mass meeting, “We as your parents know that we have failed to lead you. We know that you are brave. But I want to ask you one favour, go home peacefully and the SACC will take your grievances to the authorities.” Now, given the overall political climate, one cannot empathize with the rage of the youth in being told to be ‘peaceful’ and to allow the parents to ‘take their grieavances to the authorities.’ Tutu couldn’t see that his – and many others’ – failure to lead the youth was not something that had only happened in the past, but something that was ongoing, and the bitterness remained. After attempting to stop Tutu from leaving the mass meeting, a group of youths are reported to have told him, “as soon as you leave here we will deal with the police in our own way because they are merciless.” Despite the fact that such spectacular internal conflicts were expressions of real and deep differences between tendencies within the liberation movement, Bezzoli claims that the expression of such differences was carefully contained. “People who ‘over-act’; who ‘break ranks’ by performing outside of the agreed script; who parody the performance… must be ‘disciplined’ in order to sustain a unified image.’”¹² In other words, militant, radical, ‘utopian’ politics are reduced to images of ‘wayward’ youths, who are excessively violent¹³, and whose ‘immediatist’ demands speak to their inability to actually lead ‘the nation’ to freedom, in the way that the ‘good reverend’ of course can.

Nationalism persists in our telling of the past, and our struggles today, because other, more radical notions are clumsier, harder to encapsulate on a TV screen, newspaper photo, or bumper sticker. If we are not members of families, and national groupings, governed by benign fathers, protecting virtuous women and peaceful youngsters, and backed by both God and State, then who are we? Will crowds of people gather to demand the life of ambiguities, relentless questioning and re-defining that a politics which rejects the nation-state and all its trappings beckons?

1 The phrase necklacing refers to placing a tire around the neck of a person (sometimes dead, sometimes alive) and setting the tire on fire.

2Bundy, C. (1987). Action, comrades, action! The politics of youth-student resistance in the Western Cape, 1985.

3The United Democratic Front, or UDF, claimed over 500,000 members (and 2 million ’supporters’) by 1987.

4Umkhonto We Sizwe, or Spear of the Nation, or MK.

5What really seems to have made ‘a killing,’ both figuratively and financially, especially (but not only) outside of South Africa, are the countless ‘touching’ stories of white people doing next to nothing to commit treason against racialism, which is then turned into a glowing narrative of ‘deep transformation’ brought about by the likes of F.W. DeKlerk, Mandela’s jailer, members of the apartheid security forces turned-christian, and so on. And then, in these stories, what is so touching and fatherly about Nelson Mandela is that he accepts being so easily equated with such paltry, offensive efforts at ‘reconciliation’ and ‘forgiveness.’

6Bezzoli, B. Nationalism and theatricality.

7Forgive the cheap-shot at the Boers, I understand that english speaking whites both collaborated with and laid much of the ground work for apartheid.

8Bezzoli, B. Nationalism and theatricality.

9ibid. all quotes this paragraph from Bezzoli.

10and, crucially, debating exactly how to do these things.

11Allen Boesak, a rev. and leader in UDF, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

12ibid. again, this paragraph draws on Belinda Bezzoli.

13Of course, there were certainly excesses brought about by the ‘people’s war.’ And if necklacing itself is not an ‘excess,’ (and it really is, i think) than certainly some of the victims of necklacing did not need to die, just as the thousands of people the apartheid government was able to capture and kill through infiltration died unnecessaily.

The Chairman Hjof Learns of a Most Ridiculous New Sport

The Chairman Hjof Takes a Backseat to the Landscape

oh wait… here’s a landscape photo that puts the chairman back into his rightfully prominent place…

and, for good measure, here’s jan at the top of the world…

finally, the chairman gets us into a nice pose…

The Chairman Hjof and Friends Eat Chocolate Together

Chairman Hjof Conquers the Most Ridiculous Maontain!

Oh, Chairman, we do love you so…

Climb that maontain boldly!

meanwhile, nearby, a small boy helps his little sister climb a little mountain…

Class Analyis and the Most Ridiculous Lies

“Despite the distortions at the top, the nobility of socialism’s basic objectives inspired millions upon millions to devote themselves selflessly to building it on the ground.”

• Joe Slovo, South African Communist Party (SACP), 1989

“The essence of the matter is that we have learned quite gradually to be ashamed of the party to which we belong, this party which enjoys the notorious distrust of the people, which holds people in political tutelage day in and day out, and which still feels obliged to lie about the most ridiculous trivialities.”

• Rudolph Bahro, Bolshevik Party, 1934

Thinking about ‘class’ has been forever tainted by the excesses and brutalities of ‘existing socialism.’ It was Marx that developed a set of tools to understand society in terms of material relationships of alienation and exploitation, and it was the marxists themselves who  soured the teachings to the point where successive mass uprisings were necessary to overthrow the various ’socialist’ states. “Despite the advantage of over 40 years of a monopoly of education, the media, etc., the parties in power could not find a significant section of the class they claimed to represent (or, for that matter, even a majority of their own membership) to defend them or their version of socialism.”¹ In places like Albania, reminders of marxist dictatorship – even the public transport infrastructure – were torn apart piece by piece, and wherever possible, the dictators themselves were summarily executed².

Nonetheless, Marxist apologists remain, and though hundreds of thousands of outlawed and murdered anti-capitalist critics of Marxism have written and acted for alternate visions of ‘communism³,’ the so-called ‘communists’ remain largely unwilling to reconsider any of their failed viewpoints. Pallo Jordan, writing in 1990, rejects Joe Slovo’s reassurances that the SACP has ‘gotten over’ their flirtation with Stalinist values and practices, and insists that, “South African Communists would do well to turn to the works of the anti-Stalinist Marxists and Communists,”⁴ and, by implication, to question many of the stances taken by the SACP over the last decades. But even Jordan plays the same kind of games that made the Bolsheviks such a foul group of tyrants in the first place, and that ruins the self-criticism of men like Slovo in South Africa. In outlining the various repressive acts of Lenin and the rest of the leaders of the new USSR – principally crushing the anarchists and thousands of others in the ‘left opposition’ to a one-party ‘workers’ state’ that “makes labor not into a joy but into a new slavery”⁵ – Jordan insists that, “what we are dealing with is necessity.”⁶ Only Fascists say that Fascism is a necessity.

This habit of evading responsibility for criminal acts of repression and/or simple failures of strategy has become firmly entrenched within Marxist Parties. In the telling of their own history – for example, the history of the liberation struggle in South Africa – “defeat may simply be ignored; defeats may be rationalized as the exclusive result of external factors on the assumption that there was nothing that the liberation organisations could have done differently; defeat may be presented as only an apparent failure disguising a real advance; or finally defeat may be naturalized as a necessary moment in the progress of every revolutionary movement to its ultimate goal.”⁷ One can easily see the appeal of adopting such an attitude. When something goes wrong, isn’t it nice to be able to say, ‘external forces were to blame,’ rather than, ‘we fucked up’? But such evasive tactics on the part of the leadership of the liberation organisations has left us impoverished in our attempts to understand both the struggles which got us to this point, and where to go from here.

While Marxist analysis rejected the liberal proposition that capitalism “left to its own devices would dissolve white domination”⁸ (because racialism is ‘irrational,’ and therefore not profitable, goes the theory) they disagreed about the “real political possibility of a future de-racialised capitalism replacing apartheid.”⁹ Turns out, the answer is yes, and no. There has been no fundamental disruption to the capitalist system in South Africa, (even, it’s worth noting, many of the basic features of reserving wealth and ownership amongst the white minority) despite the fact that the entire legal apparatus of racially codified labor controls has been abolished. The ‘National Democratic Revolution,’ (spearheaded by the ANC, and backed by the SACP for decades) has not been able (or willing¹⁰) to take the necessary steps to reorganize the economic structure of the country in ways that would redress – in any meaningful way – the systemic theft of colonialism and racial capitalism. Here Fine’s warning about the apartheid state remain relevant: “to wait for a state reform which does not seek to entrap the very forces to which concessions are made is to wait forever.”¹¹

Furthermore, the constitutional removal of race-based barriers to social and economic equality does not, and cannot, equate to burying the categories of inferior and superior human beings that apartheid dedicated so much effort to creating. Racial thinking, racial legislation and racial terror all contributed to conditions of massive (white) capital accumulation and simultaneous massive degradation of the (black) working class. The Marxists are correct to analyse and name these processes. They are equally correct to seek out and name the forms of workers’ struggle that confronted and undermined the power of the apartheid system; that is to say, the power of class struggle. However, the major blindspot of all class-based analysis is that it simply refuses to believe that “the illusion of race has been turned into the reality of power… [and] is a line which necessarily runs through each individual.”¹² Race served capitalism, and race was, is, a power in and of itself.

Race was concocted in the interests of systems that were brutally oppressive on many levels, and the brutality of race tends to outlast transitions to new systems. What we know is that capitalism can adapt to race-as-sheer-terror as well as it can adapt to more subtle forms of racial inequality. What we don’t know is whether ‘communism’ has the capacity the bury not only¹³ class exploitation, but also the division of humanity into racial groups. As long as the ‘most ridiculous’ lies of the socialist ‘experiment’ are held dearly by present-day anti-capitalists, we’re likely to never find out.

1Slovo, J. (1989). Has socialism failed? SACP paper.

2Romanian dictator, Caeucescu, and his wife could not escape execution for example, though others, like Pol Pot, were able to die ‘peacefully.’

3Here I use this term very loosely, to give room to anarchists (of many varieties), council communists, operaists, the situationists, the ‘frankfurt school,’ and various other individuals and groups that oppose or at least criticize authoritarianism and vanguardism, while still opposing the state and capital.

4Jordan, P. (1990). The crisis of conscience in the SACP. Transformation #11.

5Temporary Revolutionary Committee of Kronstadt, as quoted in Jordan, P. (1990). The crisis of conscience in the SACP. Transformation #11.

6Jordan, P. (1990). The crisis of conscience in the SACP. Transformation #11.

7Fine, R. (1990). The antimonies of neo-Marxism. Transformation #11.

8Wolpe, quoted in, Fine, R. (1990). The antimonies of neo-Marxism. Transformation #11.

9Fine, R. (1990). The antimonies of neo-Marxism. Transformation #11.

10Though some pro-capitalist policies of the present government certainly seem intentional (rather than mistaken) the ‘external forces’ are severe, and so it does seem that the ‘ability’ to redistribute wealth is not so simple as a moral look might like to believe. Of course, without a willingness to oppose capitalism, one can’t blame ‘external forces’ for things staying the same, now can they?

11ibid.

12ibid.

13To be fair, none of the ’stripes’ of communists have really demonstrated an ability to bury capitalist relations for more than a brief window, and the ‘communist’ states may well have perfected capitalist modes of production.

slave ships. flooding the national memory.

slave ships.
human cargo hauled across land and water,
hurled beneath the gaze of people-owners, beneath the deck, beneath the lash, beneath the sea.
sold, without mother, father, brother, sister, husband, wife or child.
sold to work alien land, under the command of aliens, speaking in tongues that, praise the lord, covenant chains, profit and conquest over dignity, brotherhood, home.
sold again.
taken away again.
torn apart, torn away again.
down the river, down into the bowels of the master’s bed, and always piled atop his bankroll.
the child is a product for another man’s enrichment,
the mother is a womb, giving birth to products, things, which she can never claim to possess.
decades of sundays spent working towards buying humanity from the man that first denied it.
decades, made of months, made of weeks, made of seven days of toil, spent.
spent years, spent body, spent heart, spent
enduring the indignity of being torn apart from one’s self, and one’s kin,
and struggling to buy it all back from thieves.

*

slave ships.
make-shift boats, rafts, planks – floating trash drifting
through streets abandoned,
streets left to flood with the misery of the hated, of the destitute, of the desperate.
white flags, gunshots, prayers, even screams
go unnoticed,
passed over by men with orders to protect the centers of commerce from the starving,
or are answered by force.
human cargo hauled across land and water,
confined, contained, controlled,
kept waiting, waiting, waiting
for the walls to collapse, for the roof to come caving in, for the sun to burn away, once again,
the hopes of basic human decency in an alien land.
when the water resides,
when the dead have sunk beneath the rubble,
when the resistant have been brought back to ‘order,’
the soldiers become saviors
and the hated, the destitute, the damned
are shipped off,
taken away again.
torn apart, torn away again.
down river,
new orleans, the port of entry and the auction block,
once again disperses black bodies throughout the nation
without mother, father, brother, sister, husband, wife or child.
decades spent claiming to wash away the sins of a nation that, praise the lord, became an empire
through the endless toil of its slaves,
spending day after day in servitude,
serving a basic definition of humanity, a notion of ‘we the people’
that would drown their children
in days, weeks, months, years, centuries of toil,
only to sell them, again, on national tv, as free people – though hated and damned -
one way tickets to alien lands.
sold out by a nation in which the indignity of being torn apart from one’s self and one’s kin
endures.

**

“As a society, we live with the unbearable by pressuring those who have been traumatized to forget and by rejecting the testimonies of those who are forced by fate to remember… We impose arbitrary term limits on memory and on recovery from trauma: a century, say, for slavery; fifty years, perhaps, for the holocaust; a decade or two for Vietnam; several months for mass rape or serial murder… But attempting to limit traumatic memories does not make them go away; the signs and symptoms of trauma remain, caused by a source more virulent for being driven underground.”

Susan Brison1

Those individuals and groups that attempted to help heal the trauma caused by hurricane Katrina were startled to find that many of the ’survivors’ of the storm told many stories – not (only) of wind and rain and flooding but – of slavery2. The memory of families intentionally being torn asunder by slave traders and masters was reignited by the callousness of the u.s. government’s dispersal of the New Orleans population throughout the nation.

In the weeks following Katrina, families were loaded onto buses without being told the destination3, and thousands of people were therefore cut off from their kin. The insult of this was aggravated by the government’s unwillingness to assist people in finding their folk. But why does this experience spark memories of slavery? None of the evacuated population of New Orleans had any experience of having been enslaved, and likely the vast majority didn’t even have any living kin who were emancipated. Susan Brison claims that, “memories of traumatic events can be themselves traumatic: uncontrollable, intrusive…” Furthermore, Brison tells the story of an Israeli couple – neither of whom survived Nazism – “literally jump[ing] at the sound of a German voice shouting instructions at a train station in Switzerland.”4 In other words, social memory of suffering and violence cannot be rationalized or neatly explained; when and where people express their grief or their rage in response to oppression cannot be predicted, or restrained.

But the black diaspora brought about by Katrina didn’t tell their stories to a nation that was ready or willing to hear them. Aside from a few brief attempts at naming ‘race’ as a ‘factor’ in the national crisis that was Katrina, (most of them spectacular and shallow) the American memory of itself would not allow people to place Katrina within a centuries old history of negation and destruction of black bodies. The national memory of the United States is formed by a set of stories which make for a ‘cohesive’ understanding of American social and political values. Pierre Nora, in speaking of the national memory of France, describes the formation of a national memory as an inherently ‘authoritarian’ process, in which the state defines itself and forces that definition down into the ‘hearts and minds’ of its citizens. In both France and the USA, the state has attempted to create a certain kind of national unity by referring constantly to the revolution which brought the nation to life. Nora calls this a “permanent mobilization of the revolutionary memory against potentially destabilizing forces,” and against the “internal weaknesses” and “betrayals of principles”5 within the nation’s history.

In the case of the American Revolution6, the holding of millions of slaves while speaking of liberty has been a permanent barrier to a cohesive memory of who Americans are and what they stand for. In fact, this tension was enshrined within the US Constitution, which specifically made provisions for the perpetuation of slavery (and therefore the designation of ‘Negro’ or ‘Black’ as an inherently inferior social class). Further, the ruling in the 1857 Dred Scott case reinforced the negation of the humanity of blacks that the Constitution had earlier outlined7. That thousands of Blacks can be left to drown, to suffer inside the crumbling superdome, and to face the onslaught of the national guard, in 2005, demonstrates quite clearly that America is not yet willing to be held accountable for slavery, to grapple with the inevitable outbursts that must come to a slave-holding society.

In Brison’s framing, the national refusal to address the legacy of slavery amounts to a society-wide failure to listen, a systemic failure to heal. Brison asserts that, “narrating memories to others (who are strong enough and empathetic enough to be able to listen) empowers survivors to be able to gain more control over the traces left by trauma… the survivor is dependent on the listener in order to return to personhood.”8 The unwillingness to acknowledge the legitimacy of memories of negation leads to a social context in which oppression is the only available possibility. Despite their discomfort at seeing themselves portrayed so shamefully in their response to the hurricane, Americans, for the most part, squirmed out of all of the more damning implications of the disaster. Government response to the flooding – which many black survivors described as ‘genocidal’ policy – has largely been explained as ‘accidental,’ ‘misunderstood,’ or ‘unfortunate.’

The black body wading through the water on the tv screen remains voiceless. If we cannot hear her say that her ancestors were made into products, we cannot hear her tell of the continued denial of her humanity. But just as she is dependent on our sympathetic ear to finally come to life, we are bound to her silence as we force ourselves to plod on within a memory of ourselves and our nation that is – necessarily and always – a lie.

1Brison, S. Trauma narratives and the remaking of the self.

2This fact was recounted to me by a close friend who led a number of trauma support groups after the storm. From here forward, I am not substantiating my claims in regard to the hurricane, as the public record is extensive, and because this paper doesn’t require a detailed analysis of the truthfulness of events surrounding the hurricane, but rather an investigation of what the event means for individual and national memory.

3Or, if told of the destination, they were not offered any choice over which bus to board.

4Brison, S. Trauma narratives and the remaking of the self.

5Quoted in, Wood, N. Vectors of Memory: legacies of trauma in postwar Europe. New York: Berg Press.

6Of course, the French revolution is also plagued by the fact of the San Domingo revolution and what the establishment of Haiti says about the nature of French “liberte, fraternite, equalite.”

7In rejecting Dred Scott’s right to be speaking before the court, as a Negro, the supreme court ruled that the declaration of independence and constitution explicitly outline a government for and by whites only.

8Brison, S. Trauma narratives and the remaking of the self.

Waterfall

we took a really fun hike a couple of kilometers up a mountain to a waterfall, in the cedarberg wilderness, outside “algeria.”