frank talks – on voting for divide & rule (5)

(I’ve been away and gave my copy of I Write What I Like to someone I met along the way. Wonder what the recipient’s making of my many pencil-notes in the book’s margins and the underlined and marked sections… Anyway, I’ve just laid my hands on another copy, so now the task can be resumed. Initial time-frames don’t apply anymore though 😛 )

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With reference to Chapters 13 (Lets talk about Bantustans) & 16 (The Righteousness of our Strength).

In both chapters Biko explains his denunciation of the Bantustans (homelands for black people set up by the white apartheid state). He articulates what many thought and felt but were too afraid to say: bantustans were farcical homelands established to pacify an oppressed black majority by providing people with land; the y were established to further the state’s objective of ‘divide & rule’ (bantustans were ostensibly for black people divided along ethnic lines) and finally the state hoped through its puppet bantustan leaders to accommodate dissident black voices (some bantustan leaders would denounce racist apartheid ideology, albeit with ineffectual consequence).

Above: Mangasotho Buthelezi, the then-homeland leader of the bantustan called Zululand; “left behind” in the post-94 SA political landscape.

The reality as Biko points out of course, is that in the year he writes (1976) 20% of the population controlled 87% of the country’s land; while 80% controlled only 13% of the land.

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Chapter 16 provides a section of the transcript of the court case in May 1976, in which Biko defends his own and SASO’s non-recognition of the Bantustans as well as the promulgation of a democratic “one man one vote” system of governance for the country. The exchange in court between Biko and the prevailing judge (Boshoff) is interesting because Boshoff appears genuinely interested in trying to understand (and seemingly accommodate) Biko’s unorthodox view of one-man-one-vote for the entire country and not in separatist black Bantustans and white SA. This is of course a rather sadistic “interest” given that it is the very judiciary that indicts Biko for these views, and the same ‘justice system’ that will eventually murder Biko.

Here is some of the exchange:

Judge Boshoff: Well. are you prepared to say that there is one man, one vote in the other countries?

Biko: Yes, I am. I want to say quite frankly that the military in Africa tends to play a very important part in politics. The military in Africa tends to often decide to declare the election and the election is some kind of coup, okay, but then you get situations throughout the world where there is chaos. You get in Italy a government resigning virtually every two months. You can’t help it.

Judge Boshoff: Yes, because there you have one man, one vote? You see, that is the trouble.

Biko: Now I think we share the belief of one man, one vote, with the government, because when they set up the bantustans they gave one man, one vote, to the Transkei, to Zululand, to Bophuthatswana and so on. They don’t say to people only those who can… [?] …may vote. It is a one man, one vote. Suddenly they are mature enough to…

Judge Boshoff: I am interested in whether it is going to work, that is why I am asking you, do you think it is going to work?

Biko: It seems to be working, it seems to be working in the the Transkei.

Judge Bishoff: Well, the transkei is just starting. It has just started. But do you think it will work in the transkei?

Biko: I think one man, one vote, could work. I doubt the Transkei itself will work. [Laughter]

Judge Boshoff: Yes, but now why do you say that?

Biko: I think that…

Judge Boshoff: Why do you say one man, one vote will work, and that the Transkei won’t work> I mean it is is inconsistent ideas?

Biko: No, you may find that My Lord, If Matanzima decides to take the issue of the Transkei Independence to a referendum, there will be a beautiful vote, people voting earnestly without force, but they may reject the concept of an independent Transkei.

Judge Boshoff: They may reject it?

Biko: They may reject it, yes.

Judge Boshoff: Yes well, that is another matter, and will you say that is – will you blame one man, one vote for that?

Biko: I will blame – no. I will blame apartheid. I will say the Transkei has not worked, one man, one vote has worked.

(pp142-143)

frank talks – don’t move the way fear makes you move (4)

In the chapter entitled “Fear – An Important Determinant in South African Politics” Steve Biko describes how the white colonialist and settler has since his arrival, secured a position of privilege and wealth for himself. He did so through the use of violence and fear. But the fear he tried to induce, flipped back onto himself. The fear creeped into the white man’s bones because he knew that his actions were bound to induce rage, too.

What interests me in this chapter is how Biko speaks of the fear provoked by the police. Now, in the 1970’s (which is when he was writing this), the police were largely white policemen and women. They were in all senses a police force. They were employed by a white apartheid state. They represented the interests of this state and ruled the streets with sjamboks (batons), bullets and a bad attitude. Biko says:

Unlike in the rest of the French or Spanish former colonies where chances of assimilation made it not impossible for blacks to aspire towards being white, in South Africa whiteness has always been associated with police brutality and intimidation, early morning pass raids, general harassment in and out of townships and hence no black really aspires to being white (84).

The material effect of a police state of bad cops was that “No average black man can ever at any moment be absolutely sure that he is not breaking a law”; and…”The philosophy behind police action in this country seems to be ‘harass them! harass them!'”.

There was a very small minority of black policemen – but it was a sight to see and certainly not common. The people saw such policemen, understandably, as sell-outs of the worst kind – state enforcers of oppression against their own people; against themselves. In fact here’s how Biko speaks of the black police:

…I must state categorically that there is no such thing as a black policeman. Any black man who props the system up actively has lost the right to being considered part of the black world: he has sold his soul for 30 pieces of silver and finds that he is in fact not acceptable to the white society he sought to join. These are colourless white lackeys who live in a marginal world of unhappiness. They are extensions of the enemy into our ranks (86).

Just two decades after Biko wrote this, the police force would undergo dramatic change – during the 90’s there’d be a mass recruitment of black officers into the new democratic police service.

Thin Blue: The Unwritten Rules of Policing South Africa by Jonny Steinberg details two unwritten rules that apply when it comes to policing in current-day SA. 1. Township communities see policemen as upwardly mobile ladder-climbers who aspire to a middle-class lifestyle but can’t afford this on a policeman’s salary; who live beyond their means as a result; who are thus bribe-able or corruptible or can be intimidated. Which leads to 2… There are spaces where the police are granted permission to police; and spaces where they are not. If you’re a policeman, you generally understand which space is which and when.

The ‘harass them! harass them!’ philosophy behind policing has shifted from white cops harassing black people – to bad cops harassing vulnerable people. Where the spaces are generally safe to police (eg domestic incidences) bad cops tend to harass the most vulnerable in that context (mostly this is the black woman but could also be depending on the situation the white woman or the gay black man etc). Where the space is not safe to police, where permission has not been granted, a spectacle unfolds. It’s street theatre with no written script. The police pretend to police, the ‘villains’ pretend to believe the police are policing.

Then of course…there are always exceptions to such unwritten rules, or, new rules are forged and broken all the time as the permissable parameters of policing shift.

Links – Walking the thin blue line between law and disorder, Governing and policing go hand in hand and Book Exerpt: Thin Blue by Jonny Steinberg

know thyself

“Men have no knowledge of their own lives: they see them and act them out via ideological themes and ethical values.

In particular they have an inadequate knowledge of their needs and their own fundamental attitudes; they express them badly; they delude themselves about their needs and aspirations except for the most general and the most basic ones.

And yet it is their lives, and their consciousness of life; but only the philosopher, and the sociologist informed by the dialectic, and maybe the novelist, manage to join together the lived and the real, formal structure and content.

Thus ideology is at one and the same time within everyday life and outside of it.”

– Henri Lefebvre, Critique of everyday life (volume I)

frank talks – on liberals, racism & consciousness (3)

In a talk delivered to a student conference in Cape Town, 1971, Biko explains why, in a society of the totality of white power, white liberals and leftists can’t claim identification with the struggle of black people. He details how privilege protects white liberals, how they are born into privilege and how, behind its invisible shield, the white liberal and leftist can be a seemingly radical and confusing enigma – particularly to the black man who has imbibed inferior consciousness. In a system that is premised on bestowing privilege to a few chosen people (classified ‘white’) and lesser privileges to gradations of ‘other-than-white’ people (variations of ‘black’) – it is impossible then for the privileged man to presume to identify with, struggle with and be the holder of knowledge over how freedom ought to be won – for the oppressed.

“I am not sneering at the liberals and their involvement. Neither am I suggesting that they are the most to blame for the black man’s plight. Rather I am illustrating the fundamental fact that total identification with an oppressed group in a system that forces one group to enjoy privilege and to live on the sweat of another, is impossible.” (p70)

It is not possible for the same reason that in a system of slavery, the master cannot cannot fight for the freedom of slaves, nor can he ‘free’ slaves or presume to tell slaves how they should go about fighting for their freedom.

Here’s what the master can do. He can denounce the system of slavery. He can acknowledge how this system privileges him as a master and that it bestows benefits upon him by virtue of his ordained position as master. What he can do is stop the perpetuation of slavery in his own life. And here’s the thing…he must work from that which he knows, that which he was born into. He can challenge other masters who look to him complicitly for reassurance. He can grapple with how master is one part of the dialectic of slavery and in so doing, acknowledge how he must strive to kill the master in himself. With the killing comes the death of privilege, of superiority complexes and other perversities of mental slavery. There can be no slave without master and vice versa. He can do all this before considering himself to be in the position of saying to the slave “do this” or “do that” to free yourself. The slave will do what needs to be done to free herself from slavery. Just as the master must do what needs to be done to free himself from masterdom. This does not mean that the slave and master cannot work together, cannot find common cause for fighting the system of slavery. But each must fight from that which he  and she knows.

“The liberal must fight on his own and for himself. If they are true liberals they must realise 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.” (p720)

The aside above about the slave-master dichotomy is not Biko. But it helped me understand what he might have meant, in 1971. If the problem is white racism, why do white liberals insist on talking to blacks? If the problem is slavery, why do liberal masters insist on counseling their slaves?

“As it is, both black and white walk into a hastily organised integrated circle carrying with them the seeds of destruction of that circle – their inferiority and superiority complexes.”

In many ways we have moved beyond Biko’s time and beyond the particular  nature of the system he  describes- but in too many other ways we carry with us those seeds of destruction. According to Biko, these seeds “arrest progress”. They make us deny a simple truth – that integration does not necessarily equal freedom.

On black consciousness – “…we shall lead ourselves, be it to the sea, to the mountain or to the desert…” (Biko quoting an anonymous ‘black student’; p73).

Black consciousness was a reclamation of pride in being what a racist system had decreed inferior. It was the realisation for Biko that “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed” (p74). It necessarily meant a new consciousness.

Biko also recognised that –

“Because of the tradition forced onto the country, the poor people shall always be black people. It is not surprising, therefore, that the blacks should wish to rid themselves of a system that locks up the wealth of the country in the hands of a few. No doubt Rick Turner was thinking of this when he declared that ‘any black government is likely to be socialist’ ” (p68).

No doubt. The character of our colonial-capitalist state was to make use of enslaved and then a migrant black labour force. A system of segregation propped up the capitalist regime. Logically then, to defeat apartheid meant undoing our particular capitalist mode of production, of black wage labour and white private ownership. No doubt this is where we were headed.

* From Chapter 11: White Racism and Black Consciousness

all work & no deviance

the last few weeks have left me with little sleep, and the two ends at which i burn my candle are now close to meeting in a dissipating centre. i think they call it burn-out? i dream about sleep when i’m awake, and i fear not waking when i sleep. i’m immune to being woken by people who give up on me too easily. their sympathy does me no good when they ‘let me be’ and so i am, and just go back to sleep. i set a million alarm clocks to go off around me. i know their chimes, their tone of tick and i can automatically, in semi-conscious states, hit their  individual “off” switches, no problem.  so dextrous am i at this that i have to play new tricks on myself. i now ensure that i sleep in uncomfortable positions so that when the final alarm fails to rouse, an aching arm, neck, leg or back will. masochistic maybe, but it’s worked so far. i have two more days to go before finishing off what i’ve been working at…then i’ll get back to what i was meant to be doing here. i don’t like this kind of excess. it’s too routine, too one-dimensional. i need music and sunshine, laughter, people, dance and movement, to read and write what i like again and to cook vegetable curry…this all work and no play shit doesn’t do it for me; in some ways it does but not really, not essentially.

tick tick tick

no time for writing.

will catch my breath on the weekend and post then.

au wé.

in just a little while

and that’s all there is to say today.

strangers in the familiar world

“The point of departure for the ‘vis comica’ peculiar to Chaplin is therefore the simplicity of a child, a primitive and a wonderfully gifted barbarian, suddenly plunged (as we all are at every moment) into an everyday life that is inflexible and bristling with ever-new difficulties, some foreseeable, others not.

In his first films Chaplin takes up battle – a duel which is always different and yet always the same – with objects, everyday objects: an umbrella, a deckchair, a motorbike, a banana skin…Always surprised, always delighted by the strangeness and richness of things, always awkward when faced with ritualized practices (essential behaviour, necessary conditioning), Chaplin captures our own attitude towards these trivial things, and before our very eyes. He makes it appear suddenly amazing, dramatic and joyful.

He comes as a stranger into the familiar world, he wends his way through it, not without wreaking joyful damage. Suddenly he disorientates us, but only to show us what we are when faced with objects; and these objects become suddenly alien, the familiar is no longer familiar (as for example when we arrive in  a hotel room, or a furnished house, and trip over the furniture, and struggle to get the coffee grinder to work).

But via this deviation through disorientation and strangeness, Chaplin reconciles us on a higher level, with ourselves, with things and with the humanized world of things.”

– Henri Lefebvre, Critique of everyday life (volume 1)

cells of curfew & consciousness

Our city is a cell
Children’s faces
Are replacing
Flower pots on
Window sills.
And we are waiting.

From our bars
Of boredom
We enter
A spit race
The one whose spit
Reaches farther
Is freer

Links – Curfew by Ibtisam Barakat from Poets for Palestine – an anthology of 48 poems and works by Palestinian poets, hip-hop and spoken word artists.

frank talks – we blacks (2)

In chapter 7 (Fragmentation of the Black Resistance) Biko refers to how the Apartheid (and colonial) state accommodated dissidence by allowing for black people to ‘organise’ in separate political ‘parties’ – very much articulated along ethnic and racial lines.

Black people joined in an attempt to voice rejection of the system (no other autonomous form of organising was legal or recognised). Such parties (set up by the system) would always be harmless threats to a system that gave it legitimacy. It was in fact a strategy by the state to fragment and so more easily control black people. Matanzima and Guzana in the Transkei and, in Biko’s era, the Coloured Labour Party – all spoke to broad anti-apartheid sentiments. But, in organising as separatist, ethnic parties, they in fact deepened the racial fissures amongst the oppressed.

Of the Coloured Representative Council (CRC), he says:

Further operation within the system may only lead to political castration and a creation of an ‘I-am-a-Coloured’ attitude which will prove a set back to the black man’s programme of emancipation and will create major obstacles in the establishment of a non-racial society once our problems are settled.

…

Black people must recognise the various institutions of apartheid for what they are – gags intended to get black people fighting separately for certain ‘freedoms’ and ‘gains’ which were prescribed for them long ago.We must refuse to accept it as inevitable that the only political action the blacks may take is through these institutions. (p42)

Aspects of ‘African Culture’ (Chapter 8 ) clashed with ‘colonial ‘Anglo-Boer’ culture, resulting in the subsuming (rather than fusing) of the former by the latter .. here Biko paints a picture of African cultural notions of living (African communal living & attitudes to collective property), sharing, communicating, joint agricultural farming, collective suffering and/or prosperity (meaning ‘poverty’ for some & not others was not a phenomenon), mental attitudes and approaches to life and its complexities (simplistically put: where Westerners want to fix, Africans accept paradox and duality more readily) and finally, approaches to religion and mysticism.

I like the reference to culture – to a way of living, of being and to the real fusions of cultures – where fusion and not dominance happens that is.

Myself, I’m a fusion of so much, and cannot anymore romanticise culture in a way that elevates one way of being over another or see any of it as static. My bearings steer me toward a communal that also accommodates the individual and freaky. What do you say?

Now I want to play this…but can’t find an mp3 of the album version, so ignore the corny youtube graphics; the listening’s better.

(Next week’s Chapters 11 to 15 – on Black Consciousness)