a riddle

What do you see?

frank talks – saso & liberalism (1)

Schools and universities under Apartheid South Africa were segregated along imposed racial and ethnic lines. In the 1960’s there were white tertiary institutions and black ‘University Colleges’. The white universities also had smaller non-white or black sections of their campuses. An Editor’s note by Aelred Stubbs to this edition of I Write What I Like (p6) briefly elaborates on how the state’s forced ethnic organisation of black tertiary educational institutions took form:

The ‘University Colleges’ were the ethnic institutions established by the Nationalist government, eg. at Ngoye for the Zulus, Turfloop for the Tswanas and Sotho, the takeover of the formerly non-ethnic Fort Hare (where many leaders of the independent African countries were educated) for the Xhosas, Belville for the Coloureds, and Durban Westville for the Indians.

If you want to know what’s going on in this post, check this out first.

In the early 1960’s there were various abortive attempts at founding non-white student organisations. The same thinking for wanting to start such student organisations underpinned the formation of SASO , which would be launched in 1969 under Steve Biko’s leadership:

One of the most talked-about topics was the position of the black students in the ‘open’ organisations like NUSAS and UCM. Concern was expressed that these were white-dominated and paid very little attention to problems peculiar to the black community. In fact some people began to question the very competence of pluralistic groups to examine without bias problems affecting one group especially if the unaffected group is from the oppressor camp. It was felt that a time had come when blacks had to formulate their own thinking, unpolluted by ideas emanating from a group with lots at stake in the status quo. (p11)

The National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) was a recognised union of student organisations at the time. It had a majority white student membership with strong bases at white universities (Natal, UCT, WITS, Rhodes). It had no presence at the black ‘University Colleges’ around the country – nor were black students at these campuses allowed by the authorities to organise under its auspices.

After matriculating in 1965 Biko registered as a medical student in 1966 at the ‘non-European’ section of Natal University. He became an active member of NUSAS, but remained unhappy with how the organisation did not and could not represent the interests of black students. NUSAS’ objective of organising on a multiracial basis translated into the reality of a white-based organisation representing white students – and sometimes speaking for black institutions – where it had no presence.

Biko (and SASO as the organisation he would later lead) go to great lengths to explain the need for separate organisation:

Any move that tends to divide the student population into separate laagers on the basis of colour is in a way a tacit submission to having been defeated and apparently seems an agreement with apartheid. (SASO communique released July 1969; p13)

The fact that the whole ideology centres around non-white students as a group might make a few people to believe that the organisation is racially inclined. Yet what SASO has done is simply to take stock of the present scene in the country and to realise that not unless the non-white students decide to lift themselves from the doldrums will they ever hope to get out of them. What we want is not black visibility but real black participation. In other words, it does not help us to see several quiet black faces in a multiracial student gathering which ultimately concentrates on what the white students believe are the needs for the black students. (Biko, p5)

While, as a matter of principle, we would reject separation in a normal society, we have to take cognisance of the fact that ours is far from a normal society. It is difficult not to look at white society as a group of people bent on perpetuating the status quo. (p13)

Non-white students from around the country needed to find other ways of ‘coming together’. In 1967 Christianity provided that opportunity.

The ‘respectable’ University Christian Movement (UCM) was formed in 1967 on black campuses and did little politically to provoke the suspicions of black authorities on those campuses. It gave black students from disparate locations across the country the opportunity to converge. At a UCM Conference in Stutterheim, 1968, forty student ‘militants’ from the main black ‘University Colleges’ grouped as a caucus and agreed on the need for a nationally representative black students organisation.

A group of black students at Natal University (University of Natal Black – UNB), which included Biko, was asked to “continue investigations” into such a black students organisation. In December 1968 a representative conference was held at Marianhill, Natal where SASO was formed. In July of 1969 the South African Students Organisation (SASO) would be officially inaugurated at Turfloop University with Biko being elected as its first president.

As the first representative non-white students’ organisation, with continuing recognition of NUSAS as the official student union, SASO met with resistance from many quarters. From more ‘militant’ sections it was deemed conformist and from sections within NUSAS, too ‘militant’. Biko’s opinion on this is particularly unequivocal:

It seems sometimes that it is a crime for the non-white students to think for themselves. The idea of everything being done for the blacks is an old one and all liberals take pride in it; but once the black students want to do things for themselves suddenly they are regarded as becoming ‘militant’”. (4)

Interesting too is the 1969 SASO policy formulated around the Afrikaanse Studentebond – a “culturally inclined organisation operating predominantly at the Afrikaans medium Universities. It lays stress on Calvinism and Afrikanerdom as criteria for membership.”

(a) We uphold the right of any group to want to perpetuate their culture via this sort of organisation.

(b) Where this promotion of a group culture implies cultivation of racist tendencies then the ‘right’ becomes a negative right like the right to kill. (p15)

In his observational notes from his tour of black campuses, Biko highlights three features of the student movement based on “discussions at student body meetings…and with small groups of individuals outside local leadership circles”: (no dates provided but presumably this would’ve been around 1970?)

First, is the “steep decline in the intensity of the ‘morality’ argument” (which he called the old approach). In other words he found that less people were vehemently opposed to a “segregated” approach being used in organising:

These people realise now that a lot of time and strength is wasted in maintaining artificial and token nonracialism at student level – artificial not in the sense that it is natural to segregate but rather because even those involved in it have certain prejudices that they cannot get rid of and are therefore basically dishonest to themselves, to their black counterparts and to the community of black people who are called upon to have faith in such people.

Second, was that whilst students were now quite harsh in their criticism of the old approach and very sure about what they did not like about it, they “lacked a depth of insight into what can be done.” He claimed this to be:

…a tragic result of the old approach, where the blacks were made to fit into a pattern largely and often wholly, determined by white students. Hence our originality and imagination have been dulled to the point where it takes a supreme effort to act logically even in order to follow one’s beliefs and convictions.

And third, is his observation of how students aligned their struggle with the emancipation of their communities:

The students realise that the isolation of the black intelligentsia from the rest of the black society is a disadvantage to black people as a whole.

In July 1970, Barney Pityana succeeded Biko as SASO president. At this point Biko was elected chairman of SASO publications and so began his series of articles under the topic I Write What I Like in the SASO newsletters under the pen-name Frank Talk. The first, Black Souls in White Skins? takes issue with how white liberalism manifests under an apartheid regime. It is unsparingly honest.

‘There exists among men, because they are men, a solidarity through which each shares responsibility for every injustice and every wrong committed in the world, and especially for crimes that are committed in his presence or of which he cannot be ignorant.’

This description of ‘metaphysical guilt’ explains adequately that white racism ‘is only possible because whites are indifferent to suffering and patient with cruelty’ meted out to the black man. Instead of involving themselves in an all-out attempt to stamp out racism from their white society, liberals waste lots of time trying to prove to as many blacks as they can find that they are liberal.

Of course much more is said that has uncanny bearing on the present. Reading it again has left me considering the evolving nature of Biko’s liberalism – his attack on “leftists and liberals” that is. (Why leftists?)

In a world where neo-liberalism has taken centre-stage, have racism and white liberalism just found refuge in more nouveau hide-outs: behind the backs of a new black elite? Even protesting on the street? While back at the ranch the passport of white privilege is discreetly hidden, top shelf, corner; just in case?

We’ll get to “We Blacks” next…(Chapters 6 – 10)

shakespeare’s sister

Link: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. The e-book is available here.

king of the who?

Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government… 😉

From Monty Python & The Holy Grail made in 1975; that’s 33 years ago…

we write what we like: biko revisited

So it’s decided. Thanks to some kind encouragement, this space once a week from today will say something about Steve Biko’s I Write What I like.

If you happen upon this post, you’re invited. I’m tagging no-one, nor am I sending out word. Just pull in if you have something to say. All you have to do is lay your hands on a copy of the book – sorry that there are no free on-line reads.

The target for next Tuesday is the first 28pages and 5 essays: 1.Biographical summary 2.SASO-it’s role, its significance and its future 3.Letter to SRC presidents 4.Black campuses and current feelings 5.Black souls in white skins?

Why revisit Biko? Because I think he has more to teach us now than possibly in the time he was writing… The more has everything to do with  trying to understand what makes him a threat to those who hanker after power. Also simply, because I’ve been wanting to, and a blog seems a suitable space to process the reading, to instil a discipline that it happens and to invite participation. Let’s see.

marxism 2008: solving power

no cracks when capital’s in crisis

Part 3 of 4 (alex callinicos)

the people and the party

Part 4 of 4 (callinicos)

* From Marxism 2008 – Holloway & Callinicos debate strategies for changing the world.

marxism 2008: ask while we walk

a multiplicity of paths

Part 1 of 4 (john holloway)

we are the wild horse

Part 2 of 4 (holloway)

*From Marxism 2008 – Holloway & Callinicos debate strategies for changing the world.

out with the old: a new blog theme

I sojourned for a couple of days to painstakingly reload problematic images and then decided to upload an altogether new theme. I find reading light on black gentler on the eye… i hope you do too, whoever you may be gentle-reader.

Booting the old theme forced me to revisit the purpose of this blog and of blogging – as I suspect many have done and will continue to do.

This blog started as an attempt to “just write” about film in order to think through what I am writing for the completion of a paper. I’ve diverged massively from the intended objective. But then, and in retrospect, I’ve chosen one of the most dispersed platforms – web 2.0 – to try and focus my thoughts!?

So, for now, niteflyer’s pozi is a discursive space that interprets the world and how we live in it. It dreams toward creating another world and finding the possibilities for that. The pozi is still a nomad’s domicile in very many respects – a tagline I’ve decided (for better or worse) to introduce.

The header image is a picture taken on a phone camera – it’s chicken wire on glass, the sun behind. A friend liked it so I thought it worthy of use. Turns out, I kind of like the multi-meanings and textures it lends itself to here. But I won’t tire you with any of that; feel free instead to project your own interpretations onto it.

As always, namaste.

answers & questions within

“There is no longer a front, no demarcation line, the enemy sits in the heart of the culture that fights it. That is, if you like, the fourth world war: no longer between peoples, states, systems and ideologies, but, rather, of the human species against itself.
—
I don’t believe that there are predominantly good or evil cultures-there are, of course, disastrous diversions, but it is not possible to separate the one from the other. Evil does not retreat in proportion to the advance of the good. Therefore the concept of progress is, outside of the rationality of the natural sciences, in fact, problematic. Montaigne said: “If the evil in men were eliminated, then the fundamental condition of life would be destroyed.
—
You know, in reality one would have to turn the whole debate on its head. The exciting question is not why there is evil. First there is evil, without question. Why is there good? This is the real miracle.”
Link: – Jean Baudrillard interviewed by Der Spiegel (2002) in IJBS

emancipation from & through story

What is the cumulative effect of repeatedly conservative and prejudicial media coverage on the collective consciousness?

I’m no psychologist but it doesn’t take a PHD to appreciate the impact of story on our imaginations, our fears, our desires – that become our beliefs, our actions and our identities. Story can heal as powerfully as it can act in the service of war and destruction.

The popular media regale us with hackneyed plot-lines, the same old villains and insidiously familiar heroes.

On 10 July this month the Irish Independent published a column that expressed extreme xenophobic, racist and ultra-conservative sentiments toward Africans in particular. It is fascist storytelling dressed up as independent news.

I won’t reproduce the pollution in this post – but if you wish, you can read the column here, and more about the notoriously conservative columnist here.

A friend sent me the piece from the UK a couple of days ago. Media workers and activists in Europe and Ireland fear the impact of stories like this on attitudes towards immigrants – particularly toward Africans.

*The Irish Independent is published by Independent News & Media (INM) which also publishes a range of well-known newspaper titles in South Africa.

Meanwhile the Immigrant Council of Ireland (ICI) will lay an official complaint saying the publication of the column amounts, essentially, to hate speech. Ja well… the columnist is a repeat offender well-protected by the corporate media, so I wouldn’t hold my breath for an outcome.

Forgive a tired mind with no energy for analysis tonight. Instead I ask what kinds of stories are we, you, reading, watching, listening to, believing, re-telling, re-living and resisting?

What are we weaving instead of this?

Incoming Links:

• Roma Life and Death in Italy

Fatima & Ahmed’s son Ridwan Laher linked here saying, “Al Jazeera carried a report tonight that covered the drowning deaths of two Roma (Gypsy) children on a beach in Italy. I heard the reporter say that four Roma children had entered the water and wave swells caused two to drown. This is a tragedy made worse by the fact that the incident hardly caused a stir among the Italian sunbathers. In fact, most of them just carried on enjoying themselves as the two dead children, aged 11 and 12, lay unattended for an hour...Read more here