leaders
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a taxi dashboard, cape town, 2008
frank talks – on liberation and death (8)
You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can’t care
anyway.
We believe that in our country there shall be no minority, there shall be no majority, just
the people. And those people will have the same status before the law.
Biko in Chapter 18 – Our Strategy for Liberation outlines what’s needed for liberation. Unity amongst the oppressed. Unity amongst black organisations in the face of white domination. Inter-generational unity. Vanguard leadership. People’s power.
He explains how the system rules by physical violence and psychological fear. Change, he says, can only come about –
…as a result of a programme worked out by black people – and for black people to be able to work out a programme they needed to defeat the one main element in politics which was working against them: a psychological feeling of inferiority which was deliberately cultivated by the system. So equally, too, whites in order to be able to listen to blacks needed to defeat the one problem which they had, which was one of ‘superiority’.
In response to whether he believes an egalitarian society means a socialist one, he says –
Yes, I think there is no running away from the fact that now in South Africa there is such an ill distribution of wealth that any form of political freedom which does not touch on the proper distribution of wealth will be meaningless. The whites have locked up within a small minority of themselves the greater proportion of the country’s wealth.
If we have a mere change of face of those in governing positions what is likely to happen is that black people will continue to be poor, and you will see a few blacks filtering through into the so-called bourgeoisie.
Our society will be run almost as of yesterday. So for meaningful change to appear there needs to be an attempt at reorganising the whole economic pattern and economic policies within this particular country.
He discards the creation of what he calls ‘artificial’ minorities and majorities in an egalitarian society –
We see a completely non-racial society. We don’t believe, for instance, in the so-called guarantees for minority rights, because guaranteeing minority rights implies the recognition of portions of the community on a race basis.
We believe that in our country there shall be no minority, there shall be no majority, just the people. And those people will have the same status before the law. So in a sense it will be a completely non-racial egalitarian society.
The final chapter of the book On Death is particularly poignant in light of the fact that it recounts an interview with Biko some months before his final detention and own death/murder.
In it he posits the fear of death, an irrational fear, as a final barricade to personal liberation.
You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can’t care anyway. And your method of death can itself be a politicising thing. So you die in the riots. For a hell of a lot of them, in fact, there’s really nothing to lose – almost literally, given the kind of situations that they come from. So if you can overcome the personal fear of death, which is a highly irrational thing, you know, then you’re on your way.
He recounts his own experience of being interrogated by the security police in this context – how he really remained “unbothered” by threats of being killed, how he told his torturers this, how it bothered them more than it did him, how he told them he would use their “rough stuff” methods of interrogation as evidence against them; and that…
…if you guys want to do this your way, you have got to handcuff me and bind my feet together, so that I can’t respond. If you allow me to respond, I’m certainly going to respond. And I’m afraid you may have to kill me in the process even if it’s not your intention.
Links: On this day 12 September 1977: Steve Biko dies in custody and I Write What I Like
born wild
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To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
From Auguries of Innocence by Blake
pic: Lesotho
frank talks – from Azania to America (7)
On the 1 December 1976 Steve Biko hurriedly wrote a memorandum to US Senator Dick Clark whom he was to meet. Clark was visiting Lesotho as chairman of the Senate Sub-Committee for Africa.
The memo was hurried because Biko had just been released from 101 days spent in solitary confinement where he had no access to books or newspapers. He was detained under the notorious Section 6 of the Terrorism Act.
Chapter 17: America’s Policy towards Azania reproduces Biko’s memo in which he details America’s support for the racist state through its own imperialist policies – including the arenas of sport and culture.
At this stage of the liberation process we have become very sensitive to the role played by the World’s big powers in affecting the direction of that process. In a sense America – your country has played a shameful role in her relations with our country. (p158)
Biko outlines “minimum requirements” that Carter’s America should adopt to exert “influence” on the state – primarily through its foreign policy, trade embargos and the recognition of black leaders in Azania and Namibia.
Mr Carter will therefore no doubt be aware that he takes up power at a time when American influence in Africa has become of particular significance. If he stands on the sides of those whose righteousness may not be doubted – he shall have used the tremendous influence that America has legitimately and usefully. If on the other hand he assists those who are trying to keep the clock still, then America will have irreparably tarnished her name in the eyes of black people in this country. (p161)
The memo fell on deaf ears.
frank talks – black is beautiful (6)
“The concept of integration, whose virtues are often extolled in white liberal circles, is full of unquestioned assumptions that embrace white values. It is a concept long defined by whites and never examined by blacks. It is based on the assumption that all is well with the system apart from some degree of mismanagement by irrational conservatives at the top.
Even the people who argue for integration often forget to veil it in its supposedly beautiful covering. They tell each other that, were it not for job reservation, there would be a beautiful market to exploit. They forget they are talking about people.
This is white man’s integration – an integration based on exploitative values. It is an integration in which black will compete with black, using each other as rungs up a step ladder leading them to white values. It is an integration in which the black man will have to prove himself in terms of these values before meriting acceptance and ultimate assimilation, and in which the poor will grow poorer and the rich richer in a country where the poor have always been black.
We do not want to be reminded that it is we, the indigenous people, who are poor and exploited in the land of our birth. These are concepts which the Black Consciousness approach wishes to eradicate from the black man’s mind before our society is driven to chaos by irresponsible people from Coca-cola and hamburger cultural backgrounds.” (pp100-101)
“We must accept that the limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” (p100)
Above from – Chapter 14: Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity
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The BPC-SASO Trial of 1975 (which dragged on until December 1976) saw Steve Biko as the primary testifier – and ironically provided him an opportunity to be heard after three years of being banned. Chapter 15 – What is Black Consciousness provides an extract from the court transcripts in which Biko gives evidence.
The transcript is something else. I’m once again struck by Biko’s phenomenal patience in taking the time to explain to a racist court the A-B-C of how white supremacy corrupts the soul and how the desire for something other than such corruption is obvious. The irony of it all is of course that this is a court that will not be convinced by evidence. It is evidence in fact that will indict Biko. No doubt he knew this.
He gives evidence on how language (and particularly English) functions to negate metaphor and complexity in African life; how language and associated normative values presribed to its words are not innocent. In this context he explains how the slogan “black is beautiful” is adopted by the Black Consciousness approach to challenge “the very deep roots of the Black man’s belief about himself” and how it challenges “the way women prepare themselves for viewing by society…the way they dream, the way they make up…” –
“They sort of believe I think that their natural state which is a black state is not synonymous with beauty and beauty can only be approximated by them if the skin is made as light as possible, and their nails are made as pink as possible and so on. So in a sense the term ‘black is beautiful’ challenges exactly that belief which makes someone negate himself.” (p115)
* wellen schwappen-wappen schwellen: the philosopher stoned
Although the first rausch stood morally high above the second, the climax of the intensity is indeed increasing. This is to be understood more or less in the following way: the first intoxication loosened and lured the things out of their customary world while the second rausch soon placed them in a new one extensively underlying this interstice.
Concerning the continuous digressions in hashish. First of all, the inability to listen. However disproportionate this seems in relation to that boundless benevolence towards others, it is nonetheless actually rooted in it. Before one’s [conversation] partner has barely opened his mouth, he disappoints us immensely. What he says lags endlessly far behind what we would so gladly have credited him with and believed him capable of had he remained silent. He disappoints us painfully in his unresponsive attitude towards that greatest object of all attention: ourselves.
As for our own distracted, abrupt switch from the subject under discussion, the feeling that corresponds to the physical interruption of contact can be explained thus: we are endlessly allured with whatever we are directly engaged in discussing; we fondly stretch out our arms towards whatever we have a vague notion of. Barely have we touched it, however, than it disappoints us corporeally: the object of our attention withers away under the touch of language.
It ages in years, our love has completely exhausted it in a single instant. Thus does it rest until it seems to become alluring enough to lead us back to it.
I was so pleased to have found this online translation of Benjamin’s On Hashish but now wonder about how good the translated text is…
A New Yorker article The Philosopher Stoned quotes the same passage, translated, as:
“What we are on the verge of talking about seems infinitely alluring. We stretch out our arms full of love, eager to embrace what we have in mind. Scarcely have we touched it, however, than it disillusions us completely. The object of our attention suddenly fades at the touch of language.”
Nonetheless here is the site (also not recently updated) – with many more links to philosophical and related texts from the Pansophist Bibliothek et al
Click the pic above for details on On Hashish.
* Translated from German the phrase is Waves are splashing – Crests are swelling
to find truth in a pair of shoes
A Pair of Shoes, Vincent van Gogh, 1885, oil on canvas
“There is nothing surrounding this pair of peasant shoes in or to which they might belong – only an undefined space. There are not even clods of soil from the field or the field-path sticking to them which would at least hint at their use.
A pair of peasant shoes and nothing more.
And yet.
From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and the richness of the soil. Under the soles stretches the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls.
In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining worry as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death.” – Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, 1935.
strike the pose – defiance in imaging
“We encounter something new and strange… her eyes cast down in such indolent, seductive modesty, there remains something that goes beyond testimony to the photographer’s art, something that cannot be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there, who even now is still real and will never consent to be wholly absorbed in art.” – Walter Benjamin, A Small History of Photography (1931)
bumper sticker for obama
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– Cree Indian saying
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a take on capital’s crisis in the usa
Here’s a socialist take worth watching on the US crisis in capitalism by Richard Wolff.
Wolff traces the evolution of capitalism over 150+ years in the States and presents an explanation of its current crisis (the biggest he’s seen in his lifetime). He then provides briefly (maybe too briefly), a socialist alternative that includes regulation plus ‘democratising enterprise’. It’s the latter part of the alternative that I find interesting – particularly as it relates to how we perceive and value ‘work’.
niteflyer's pozi 