South Africa: Apartheid Petty and Grand, Old and New Is Evil
By Ayanda Kota, 26 April 2012
The Unemployed People’s Movement (UPM) was formed in August 2009 to respond to the crisis of unemployment and the commoditization of essential services in a society dominated by corruption and greed. As Steve Biko said, we blacks are tired of standing at the touchlines to witness a game that we should be playing. We want to do things for ourselves and all by ourselves. This is a realisation that we are the protagonists of our lives and nobody will free us but ourselves; we – the unemployed – will have to be our own liberators.
Despite celebrations of freedom on 27 April every year, severe and widespread poverty persists. Our education system is in tatters, the future of many black kids has been declared futureless. Unemployment is sky rocketing, wasting the talents of many young people who are condemned to a life of permanent poverty. Many black people continue to lack access to electricity, clean water and proper sanitation. Many are terminally under nourished. All these things are happening when the elite and the government officials are living affluent lives. The president has just built a mansion in Enkandla to the tune of more than R400m. Malema has also built a house to the tune of R16m. Every weekend the elite host parties and weddings that cost no less than a million while the people they claim to represent go to bed on an empty stomach and live in absolute poverty. They do not find this morally troubling. They have no conscience, otherwise they would not have killed Andries Tatane and many other activists; they would not shoot us with rubber bullets when we protest because they have neglected us. The prophetic Biko was spot on again when he once said ‘Tradition has it that whenever a group of people has tasted the lovely fruits of wealth, security and prestige it begins to find it more comfortable to believe in the obvious lie and accept that it alone is entitled to privilege.” It is this prestige and wealth that forms a hard shell around their consciousness so that they do not see that it is fellow human beings suffering in the poverty around them. Karl Marx put it in a different tone: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce”. Apartheid was a tragedy, but our economic apartheid is a farce. Indeed history repeating itself. We are repeating the disaster of the post-colonial regimes that Fanon attacked fifty years ago.
We live in a society where the unemployment rate is said to be 23% while the truth is different. Our government is committed to propaganda. The real unemployment rate is closer to 40%. Read more »
“A Place in the City” — Documentary on South Africa’s Shack Dwellers Movement
journeymanpictureson Jun 14, 2010
More than a decade after apartheid ended millions of South Africans still live in basic home-made shacks. We hear from the inhabitants as they eloquently argue their case for real citizenship rights.
The shack dwellers movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, began in 2005. Their slogan is ‘Talk to us, not about us.’ ‘It’s not that people like to live in shacks. No one will ever want to live in these conditions but they need to be close to their work’ explains S’bu Zikode, Abahlali’s elected leader. However, the group has not been welcomed by the ANC. They’ve been met with aggression rather than with negotiations. Police shot Mariet Kikine with six rubber bullets at a peaceful demonstration. ‘I’m not stopping to fight the government for my rights. Now they’ve made me brave.’ In the build-up to the 2010 soccer World Cup, Durban shack dwellers fear they will be bulldozed out of the city, or arrested. ‘This new legislation makes it a crime to build shacks or resist demolition and eviction.’ But the shack dwellers are determined not to give up.
Apartheid is a Crime, Not an Analogy
[It may be that most war criminals do not talk much about war crimes and international law, for obvious reasons. But this is not true for imperialists, who, along with their dictatorial friends and Zionist allies, carry out the largest crimes against humanity, yet arrogantly claim the mantle of "humanitarian" wars and occupations "to spread democracy and justice." The US and Israel do not submit to the authority of international law, or of the International Criminal Court, which they nevertheless invoke against defiant warlords, bullies, and petty criminals who refuse to serve imperial designs. In fact, the Iraqi regime, however much their roots were as puppets of the US occupation, were unwilling to further extend the immunity of US soldiers from prosecution for war crimes, under Iraqi law. And this was the reason for the withdrawal of US troops--and why the "democratic" claims of the US ring hollow, around the world. So, too, are the claims of Israel to be "the only democracy in the middle east"--far too many know the history of the removal of Palestinians from historic Palestine--ethnic cleansing--and of Israeli's apartheid "double standard" toward Palestinians, to even consider that phony, arrogant, and racist claim. This article by Joe Catron in Ma'an breaks this down. -- Frontlines ed.]
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Palestinians being searched by Israeli troops at one of the countless "check-points" that block the movement of Palestinians across historic Palestine
By Joe Catron, Ma’an | March 4, 2012
As Israeli Apartheid Week unfolds around the world, apologists for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people scramble to defend their chosen regime’s system of racism, ethnic cleansing, and occupation, against the charge of apartheid.
“The apartheid analogy is fatally flawed,” the Jerusalem Connection’s Shelley Neese writes. The David Project’s David Bernstein says, “The apartheid analogy is specious and absurd.” The Anti-Defamation League has even circulated an old report: “The Apartheid Analogy: Wrong for Israel.”
These commentators are right, but not for the reasons they claim. An apartheid ‘analogy’ is fatally flawed, specious, absurd, and wrong for Israel because apartheid is not an analogy, but a crime as well-defined in law as embezzlement or kidnapping.
The most relevant statute, the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, perhaps muddies the waters by stating that “the term ‘the crime of apartheid’ … shall include similar practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern Africa.”
But it goes on to define exactly what those and other “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them” are.
Most will sound familiar to anyone who follows news from Palestine. The ban on “arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial group or groups” should bring to mind Hana Shalabi, Khader Adnan, and 307 other administrative detainees held indefinitely without charges, evidence, or trials. This is further to the 4,078 Palestinian political prisoners sentenced by military courts or facing the imminent prospect, all under occupation laws no Jew will ever face.
The prohibition of “measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country” could have been meant to describe discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Read more »
ANC accused of airbrushing allies and rivals out of anti-apartheid struggle
South Africa’s ruling party said to be rewriting the past to give itself the starring role as it celebrates its centenary
On the legacy of colonialism and the struggles against oppression today
[Nearly 50 years after the death of Frantz Fanon, the author of "The Wretched of the Earth," this essay traces his legacy and relevance in the oppressive realities and struggles today. Nigel Gibson, the author of this essay, presents a profound review of the reality of the imperialist stamp on the countries and peoples who have won national independence--but not social or human liberation. The thinking and orientation of Frantz Fanon contributes much to people who are inexorably driven to challenge their ongoing oppression in the so-called "post-colonial" world. The essay is long, but deserves attention from all whose lives and possibilities are framed by these questions. -- Frontlines ed.]
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50 years later: Fanon’s legacy
by Nigel C Gibson
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/78860, Issue 564, 2011-12-21
When I was asked by Dr. Keithley Woolward to address the question of Fanon’s contemporary relevance, I was reminded of a blurb on the back of my recent book Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo which reads, ‘This is not another meditation on Fanon’s continued relevance. Instead, it is an inquiry into how Fanon, the revolutionary, might think and act in the face of contemporary social crisis.’ My comments today should be considered in that spirit.
Frantz Fanon
‘Relevance’ from a Latin word ‘relevare’, to lift, from ‘lavare’, to raise, levitate to levitate a living Fanon who died in the USA nearly 50 years ago this coming Tuesday in cognizance of his own injunction articulated in the opening sentence from his essay ‘On national culture’: ‘Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it’ (1968 206). The challenge was laid down at the opening of this year of Fanon’s 50th (as well as the 50th anniversary of his ‘The Wretched of the Earth’) which began with revolution or at least a series of revolts and resistance across the region, known as the Arab Spring.
Fanon begins ‘The Wretched’, as you know, writing of decolonisation as a program of complete disorder, an overturning of order often against the odds willed collectively from the bottom up. Without time or space for a transition, there is an absolute replacement of one ‘species’ by another (1968: 35). In a period of radical change such absolutes appear quite normal, when, in spite of everything thrown against it, ideas jump across frontiers and people begin again ‘to make history’ (1968: 69-71). In short, once the mind of the oppressed experiences freedom in and through collective actions, its reason becomes a force of revolution. As the Egyptians said of 25 January: ‘When we stopped being afraid we knew we would win. We will not again allow ourselves to be scared of a government. This is the revolution in our country, the revolution in our minds.’ What started with Tunisia and then Tahrir Square has become a new global revolt, spreading to Spain and the Indignados (indignants) movement, to Athens and the massive and continuous demonstrations against vicious structural adjustment, to the urban revolt in England, to the massive student mobilisation to end education for profit in Chile, to the ‘occupy’ movement of the 99 percent.
And yet, as the revolts inevitably face new repression, elite compromises and political manoeuvrings, Fanonian questions echoed across the postcolonial world become more and more timely. (How can the revolution hold onto its epistemological moment, the rationality of revolt?) Surely the question is not whether Fanon is relevant, but why is Fanon relevant now? Read more »
South Africa: “Fighting for Our Right to Work – Organising the Unemployed”
Jeanne Hefez, Pambazuka
20 October 2011
Organising the unemployed is a full time job – one the Unemployed People’s Movement in South Africa is making it’s own. Jeanne Hefez talks to UPM organisers about the challenges they face.
‘There is no third force, political party or communist academic behind our struggle. It is oppression at the hands of the African National Congress that has driven us into the rebellion of the poor. We are in rebellion because we are being forced to live without dignity, safety or hope.’ (Unemployed People’s Movement)
How do you keep members interested in a movement with no resources or immediate solutions at hand? What can you offer discouraged members when you are unemployed yourself, and when local politicians have consistently turned down your demands, including the most basic ones?
Unemployment is structural and rampant, and organising the unemployed is a fulltime job. As Ayanda Kota, chairperson of the UPM in Grahamstown, says, ‘We are living in a radically unjust society. We live below the poverty line. We live in shacks with no electricity and running water. If RDP houses were built they are now crumbling down due to poor workmanship and corruption. Our democracy means the progress of the few while the majority of people are left behind to starve for death. We talk about our situation in our dusty and at times muddy street corners, in our shacks.’
To organise the unemployed means going to informal settlements every day to inform people about their conditions and rights while trying to address the bigger struggles at hand. It means giving back hope, a sense of dignity and purpose to the dismayed. According to the UPM, the poor need help from a third force to organise. Bheki Buthlazi, a coordinator in Durban, explains how he strives to interest people in joining a network of individuals afflicted with the same problems. ‘People need to be reminded that they have a right to decent work and a right for a guaranteed income even if unemployed, that it’s a fight we need to coordinate in order to be more powerful. As people, we have a right to work, and it’s all too known that jobs are only given to people who are connected through corruption and nepotism.’ Read more »
South Africa: “Occupy Grahamstown!” – statement by the Unemployed Peoples Movement
[Another step for the worldwide movement against capitalism with its illegitimate wealth and authority, this time in South Africa. Abahlali baseMjondolo, (Unemployed Peoples Movement) has issued this call: "...our state is rotten to the core. Until we can build enough people's power to be able to discipline the state from below we will have to treat it as what it is, a vehicle from the predatory elite to feed off society....The capitalists in Europe are saying that the people must pay for the banks to be recapitalised. We say that it is time to stop all public subsidies for the rich. We say that it is time for the banks to recapitalise the people. Abahlali baseMjondolo has correctly insisted that the poor were made poor by the same economic system that made the rich rich." -- Frontlines ed.]
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13 October 2011
Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement — “Occupy Grahamstown! Recapitalise the Poor!”
As a movement of the poor we have taken great inspiration from the rebellion that has spread from Tahrir Square in Cairo to Syntagma Square in Athens, the Puerta del Sol in Madrid and now Liberty Plaza in New York. Our comrades in Students for Social Justice have been just as inspired by the growing spirit of rebellion that is jumping, like a fire, from country to country.
On Saturday we will occupy Grahamstown. The students will march into town from the Botanical Gardens. We will march into town from the township and the squatter camps. We will meet on the square at the Cathedral. We will turn that square into a people’s university, a people’s kitchen and a space of people’s power. Our aim is to bring the rebellion of the poor, the rebellion that has put thousands and thousands on the streets of South Africa in recent years, into dialogue with this global rebellion. The alliance between organised students and the organised unemployed is strong in Grahamstown. Together we can build strong foundations for the struggles to come. Read more »
South Africa: Remember the Black Consciousness Movement, and the 1977 Murder of Steve Biko
Steve Biko
“It is better to die for an idea that will live than to live for an idea that will die” — Steve Biko
South Africa: ‘Biko Lives!’, 34 Years Later
Khadija Patel
15 September 2011
Like Che Guevera, Steve Biko is the poster child for revolution. His face adorns the T-shirts and posters of a generation who may know nothing of his teachings except that his is a face with some erstwhile significance. Thirty-four years after his death, Steve Biko is an icon but he is also a lot more than a trifling symbol of an ancient idea. Khadija Patel talks to Steve Biko scholar, black consciousness thinker and organiser, co-editor of ‘Biko Lives!’ and publisher of the journal ‘New Frank Talk’ Andile Mngxitama about Biko’s legacy.
Andile Mngxitama
On 11 September 1977, apartheid police loaded Steve Biko in the back of a pickup truck. Tortured, dehumanised, naked and restrained in manacles, he began the 1,100km trek to Pretoria where he would purportedly be imprisoned in a facility with medical amenities. So severe were the injuries Biko sustained at the hands of the police during his detention that he died shortly after his arrival at the Pretoria prison. It was 12 September 1977. State officials claimed his death was the result of an extended hunger strike, but an autopsy revealed multiple bruises and abrasions, and that he ultimately succumbed to a brain haemorrhage from the severe injuries to the head. To everybody outside the state apparatus, it was clear that Biko had been brutally clubbed by his captors. It was Helen Zille, back when she was just a journalist, as well as Donald Woods, another journalist and close friend of Biko, who eventually exposed the shocking truth behind Biko’s death.
Thirty-four years later, Helen Zille is the leader of the Democratic Alliance, the opposition party taking the fight to the ANC, and Biko haunts the political subconscious of the “new dispensation”.
“Steve Biko… we say Biko lives. Steve Biko lives,” insists Mngxitama, “The biggest mistake of the apartheid regime was to think they could kill him and his ideas.” Mngxitama believes Biko himself understood the need for longevity in his ideas when he wrote, “It is better to die for an idea that will live than to live for an idea that will die.” Steve Biko is certainly more than a T-shirt. His were ideas that galvanised the struggle against the apartheid and a realisation of self-worth among black people themselves. Read more »
South Africa: In Durban, its all about “Writing on the Wall”
Writing on the Wall
Tuesday, August 16th, 2011
by Samora Chapman, images by Karen Logan
It was an icy Sunday morning. A handful of graffiti writers gathered to paint what everyone thought was a legal wall on Sydney Road, downtown Durban. The event had been organised weeks earlier and was openly publicized on various social networks. It wasn’t an ordinary graffiti jam. They were gathered to paint the name of a 17 year old kid, a comrade artist, Wesley Fischer aka Eiy5, who was hit by a steaming 18 wheeler truck and killed nearly five years ago.
You wouldn’t know any of this had you read the papers yesterday, although it was widely reported.
The Natal Mercury frontpage barked the headline: “Graffiti gang caught red-handed”
While Paul Kirk reported in the Citizen that: “Seven men, believed to be among South Africa’s most destructive and lawless graffiti vandals, were arrested in Durban yesterday – while allegedly in the middle of a vandalism spree.”
The situation on the ground was a little different from the salacious and hysterical tone of these newspaper reports. Imagine a group of creative Durban youths, assembled on a sidewalk on a Sunday, sipping quarts, listening to beats, doing what they love, remembering a lost homey.
Suddenly a massive squadron of Metro cops and private investigators swoop and bundle them into the backs of police vans, while they were busy choosing the best colours to blend against the cold grey sky. Another fine example of Durban’s war on public art.
Truth is, no sane graffiti writer would stand in broad daylight in the middle of the industrial Durban downtown painting a piece illegally. Durban law enforcement has come down hard on illegal graffiti of late, and two of the artists are already on 5 year suspended sentences. It’s not like they’d risk jail to brazenly paint a wall in broad daylight. Instead this was a group of graffiti artists whose intention was to uplift a dilapidated, crime-ridden area with a graffiti mural, to honour a friend’s memory.
The wall in question has been layered with paint for the past five years. It was legalised so long ago that any permission slip has long since been used as a mull-pad or crumpled up and drop kicked into an ally. Although the group had received permission from the wall’s owner previously, it now appears that the wall had been leased from the municipality and so permission was not the individual’s to give. The idea was, nonetheless, that this was a legal arrangement.
Furthermore, the majority of these writers are the older generation and are not the kids who are bombing the city at present. The kids who are bombing were dossing in their mom’s pad that Sunday morning, wrecked from being up all night getting loose with fat cap tags. I would know. The cats who were arrested were up at 8am doing a burner legal wall with full colours and sketchbooks in hand. Only to be accosted, harassed, humiliated and dragged off to the pits. Depicted as a gang in the media, and treated as flight risks.
They were not going on a city-wide orgy of destruction. It was not a covert, midnight “gang” operation and they are certainly not the most destructive and lawless graffiti vandals in the country. Read more »
South Africa: Metalworkers Demonstrate As Strike Season Starts
South African workers demonstrate (file photo).
Radio France Internationale (Paris)
by Jean-Jacques Cornish
5 July 2011
South Africa’s strike season has begun with thousands of engineering and metalworkers taking to the streets of the country’s main cities in support of wage demands.
Refineries were set to stop work Tuesday, with negotiations going on in other sectors.
More than 110,000 of them are out demanding a 13 per cent wage hike. Employers have countered with an offer of seven per cent.
The strike was called by the National Union of Metalworkers (Numsa) after wage negotiations broke down. Read more »
Durban, South Africa: Municipal Security and Shack Dwellers Clash in the Kennedy Road Settlement
3 July 2011–Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Statement
Municipal Security and Shack Dwellers Clash in the Kennedy Road Settlement this Morning
Attempt at Armed De-electrification Successfully Resisted
This morning Municipal Security Guards arrived at the Kennedy Road shack settlement and began disconnecting people from electricity. The community had previously negotiated an understanding with the Municipality that they would not send their security guards into the settlement to disconnect. However this morning this agreement was violated and the people resisted the disconnections. There was a confrontation,rubber bullets were fired and stones were thrown. A young man was shot in the chin with a rubber bullet at close range. A road blockade was then organised following which both the SAPS and the Metro Police arrived on the scene. But the attempt to disconnect people from electricity was successfully resisted. Read more »
The Freedom Charter of the South African Apartheid Struggle: What happened to it?
[Wikipedia: "The Freedom Charter was the statement of core principles of the South African Congress Alliance, which consisted of the African National Congress and its allies the South African Indian Congress, the South African Congress of Democrats and the Coloured People's Congress. It is characterized by its opening demand; "The People Shall Govern!"....In 1955, the ANC sent out fifty thousand volunteers into townships and the countryside to collect 'freedom demands' from the people of South Africa....Demands such as "Land to be given to all landless people", "Living wages and shorter hours of work", "Free and compulsory education, irrespective of colour, race or nationality" were synthesized into the final document. The Charter was officially adopted on June 26, 1955 at a Congress of the People in Kliptown.....(Years of struggle against the apartheid regime ensued, until finally, the isolation of the South African regime led to the legalization of the ANC.)....The ANC came to power in May 1994. The new 'Constitution of South Africa' included in its text many of the demands called for in the Freedom Charter. Nearly all the enumerated concerns regarding equality of race and language were directly addressed in the constitution, although the document included nothing to the effect of the nationalization of industry or redistribution of land, both of which were specifically outlined in the charter."
Many former anti-apartheid activists have criticized the deals made with international capital and imperialist powers around 1994, as they contravene many of the sections of the Freedom Charter for economic equality. This video explores the enduring significance of the Freedom Charter, and its gap from the reality of post-apartheid South Africa.-ed.]
South Africa: “Where is the Freedom Charter?”
Frontlines ed.: This heartfelt question from the streets of South Africa, on the disappearance of the Freedom Charter–a central organizing and motivating set of concepts of the historic anti-apartheid struggle–brings to mind this poem by Langston Hughes, written six decades ago in 1951:
Harlem
By Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
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The Shackdwellers Movement in the Western Cape continues the struggle
Where is the Freedom Charter?
Lindela S. Figlan
Lindela S. Figlan
Before the government can use its muscle to pass the Protection of Information
Bill, let me ask a question. It is a very good question and all those who are
unhappy have got this question in their mind. Where is the Freedom Charter?
I remember that when I was still young, the comrades used to make me understand
it line by line. We were expecting our government to implement what is in the
Freedom Charter. But is this society the free society that we were fighting
for? If the answer is yes then why are the people that we are referring to as
our leaders deciding to ignore the Freedom Charter? Read more »
Haiti: U.S. Asks South Africa to Delay Aristide’s Departure
[This move--the latest in many such moves--to prevent the return of Aristide to Haiti is an eloquent clarification of the US' promotion of democracy in Haiti, and throughout the world. -- Frontlines ed.]
By REUTERS, March 14, 2011
The Obama administration said Monday that the former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide should refrain from returning to Haiti before the presidential runoff election on Sunday. A State Department spokesman, Mark Toner, said that Mr. Aristide, above, had the right to return, but doing so this week “can only be seen as a conscious choice to impact Haiti’s elections.” A delay, Mr. Toner said, would “permit the Haitian people to cast their ballots in a peaceful atmosphere.” He said the United States was asking South Africa, where Mr. Aristide has lived in exile since 2004, to delay his departure. Mr. Aristide’s lawyer, Ira Kurzban, said the United States “should leave that decision to the democratically elected government instead of seeking to dictate the terms under which a Haitian citizen may return to his country.”
World Imperialist Crisis drives new alignments: BRIC invites South Africa as African gateway
BRICS countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa
[A former Indian diplomat discusses the new international alignments and their political meaning. While his analysis needs to be assessed critically, the information he includes in this article is of value to all concerned with the political impacts of the world imperialist crisis.--Frontlines ed.]
China BRICS up Africa
By M K Bhadrakumar, Jan 4, 2011
There can be no two opinions that Beijing made a smart move. Its
decision to anoint South Africa as a new member of BRIC (Brazil, Russia,
India and China) will be projected as based on economic grounds, but
there are any number of other dimensions.
The decision was hugely significant politically, and its announcement
showed delightful timing – Christmas Eve. It also has vast geopolitical
potential and it is undoubtedly based on strategic considerations. The
choice of South Africa can even be spotted as a gutsy move to disprove a
prediction from Jim O’Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management
and guru of the BRIC concept, that Nigeria was better placed to make the
grade. Read more »
