Category: Special Topics

b2 Focus.

Mandela's Reflections: Or, The Whale

Nelson Mandela’s incarceration in 1964, under a life sentence threatening two decades of work and his personal well-being as a forty-six-year-old South African political activist, coincided with the escalation of Lyndon Johnson’s genocidal aggression in Vietnam. Johnson’s campaign of implacable violence fomented the end of his catastrophic political career, four decades of the greatest criminal venality in American history. Barely three years out of office, Johnson died in January 1973, a prisoner under constant FBI and CIA scrutiny on his ranch in Texas, a tortured remnant of his formerly dominant persona.

Against that bitter reckoning, Nelson Mandela’s ninety-five years have just begun their journey toward explication. To a rare degree, given evidence recently within our grasp, his life was astonishingly transparent. It stands now as it conducted itself over seven public decades, in absolute contrast to the obfuscations of power and the exploitation of nameless others that define administrative state energy since the onset of the American Civil War. That difference represents one measure of the ongoing obscenity inflicted upon American citizens under the rubric of “security.” Despite the loss and theft of documents, Nelson Mandela’s life is and was, more rather than less, available to public accounting. In sharp contrast, the American state apparatus has regularly operated as a command center for the creation and elaboration of crises of increasingly contradictory kinds. This insidious (virtually unopposed) gambit reached its pinnacle to date with the construction of 9/11 events that successfully installed a civil, military, interinstitutional, and commercial ethos of essentially impregnable global surveillance. The danger of such self-authenticating corruption is obvious. The American empire is on a perpetual war footing. It strikes without constitutionally mandated authority. Eisenhower’s prophesy has been realized and echoes across the last half century with the ironic jolt of truth-telling farce.

The degradation of originating constitutional ideals, with legal safeguards for presumed innocence, is now a de facto modus vivendi. The term crisis is inadequate to categorize our massively alienated social condition. The idea of citizenship is under siege in America. Financial establishments are aware of this, cynically wagering on odds that “enlightened” self-interest constructs from the exfoliating demise.

Nelson Mandela’s courageous life in South Africa provides a complex narrative that holds too many anomalies to derive direct and immediate circumstantial contrast. One feature of the difference involved, however, goes to the heart of political viability—of sustainable communal and institutional practices. The tattered remainder that divides Mandela’s successful work to dismantle apartheid—mapped out piece by piece with impeccable vigilance in his diary and notebook entries (in prison letters, often sequestered, and notes of conversations during his governing years)—and Lyndon Johnson’s exemplary abuse of institutional rationality, professional courtesy, traditional common sense, and a massively compliant legal system resides in the long enduring loss of America’s shared covenant in which common interests are not subordinated to (or defined as) private controlling and acquisitive interests. That loss can be measured quite literally by the distance between the unwavering humanity of Mandela’s career, despite suffering, crafted day by day (as we now see in recently published texts), which opposed and skillfully mocked habits of paranoid secrecy and vengeful murderousness that, during the decades their lives overlapped, mortally unraveled Lyndon Johnson.

I view Nelson Mandela’s complex personality, with its spiritual and political rigor, as a concrete embodiment of astute secular understanding that includes a calculus of human disaster. The moment has long been with us when the most economically ascendant and aggressively militarized nation on the planet must look beyond its parochial horizon toward any region or social practice where injustice confronts its own terror. Power terrorizes overtly or by acquiescence with failure to intervene. Inevitably, it petrifies from the audacity of its pride: sclerotic earnestness, self-righteous rhetoric, self-verifying insularity, self-destructive protection.

These are errors of identity that Nelson Mandela purged from his life’s work. The force of his example cannot be appropriated to distant shores, certainly not to our own. Nonetheless, it carries the splendor of his once-marginalized insight and temporarily thwarted persuasion, compassionate and humble, wary yet suffused with humor, animated by gentle sarcasm and continual self-scrutiny. Critical energy finds a uniquely self-deprecatory élan in Mandela’s life work, suffused with something very much akin to Antonio Gramsci’s devotion to “the long war of position.” In the vacuum of national and global leadership circumscribing our current collective bewilderment, we might seek (as Melville noted) “the one warm spark in the heart of the Arctic crystal.” Without undue idealizing, but with something that approaches amazed and profound respect, I hold Mandela’s legacy of what Nietzsche called intellectual conscience as a spark worth dwelling with. I suspect its warmth derives from the scrupulous meanness of stubborn mental tenacity, partly, no doubt, from a habit of self-calibrating reflective candor and partly from the sheer good luck that ferociously enabled humane karma sometimes earns.

-Jim Merod

November 8, 2014
Mandela's Reflections: Nelson Mandela on Nightline; or, How Palestine Matters

Mandela’s funeral was on December 15, the same day that final votes were cast for the American Studies Association resolution answering “the call of Palestinian civil society for a boycott.” That resolution also “supports the protected rights of students and scholars everywhere to engage in research and public speaking about Israel-Palestine and in support of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.”

Mandela’s service and burial took place at his home at Qunu, the village where he grew up in the Eastern Cape. In the heavy rain, with an interpreter signing nonsense, the booing of Jacob Zuma, and the stolid parade of dignitaries—except for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who refused to attend—the scene was set for the transformation of flesh into icon. It is not easy to strike at the mask, to dig behind the figure cultivated by political elites who have so much to gain from such mystification.

• • • •
After twenty-seven years in prison, Mandela was at last freed after continued black resistance and a successful boycott against apartheid South Africa. Ted Koppel hosted Mandela on June 21, 1990, just four months after his release, at City College of New York in Harlem for a conversation cast as a “Town Meeting with Nelson Mandela.” Broadcast on ABC’s Nightline, it commemorates, if that is the right word, Mandela’s first visit to the United States.

Whereas politics usually demands a certain amount of playacting, if not outright dissimulation, the appearance of Mandela on this stage destroys any such pretense. His candor, resoluteness, and fierce intelligence are instructive for academics caught up in the morass of invective and abuse that has followed their support of the ASA resolution.

The controversial sticking point, then as now, is the Palestinian struggle. The interview occurred during the First Intifada, an uprising against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories: the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. What is most striking in watching the interview now is the calm and restraint, even good humor, that Mandela maintains in what often seems Koppel’s deliberate staging of confrontation, his condescending attempt to question Mandela’s credibility, to trivialize his cause.

Koppel turns to Mandela’s support for the Palestinians, particularly Arafat’s PLO, and questions what this means for his Jewish supporters. As if proud to pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat, as if certain that the sounding of the word “Israel” in a town hall meeting will unsettle the gravitas of the man before him, Koppel introduces Ken Adelman. A neoconservative Republican political analyst at the Institute for Contemporary Studies and later a champion of the “war on terror” and the war on Iraq, he is the first to challenge Mandela.

Adelman wonders how Gaddafi or Castro or Arafat can be Mandela’s “models of leaders of human rights” and admonishes, “You’ve met over the last six months three times with Yasser Arafat.” Mandela explains that political analysts make the mistake of thinking “that their enemies should be our enemies.” Then, without the slightest apprehension, he intones, “Yasser Arafat, Colonel Gaddafi, Fidel Castro support our struggle to the hilt.” His voice rises and deepens on that last word.

Koppel prepares us for another question with a nod to those he calls “some distinguished guests” who are “very concerned.” Mandela acknowledges Henry Siegman, then executive director of the American Jewish Congress and now an outspoken critic of Israel. After reminding Mandela of the commitment of Jewish organizations to the struggle “against apartheid, against racism, against injustice in South Africa,” Siegman adds that he must “express profound disappointment” with the answer that Mandela gave to the previous question. It suggests, he adds, “a certain degree of amorality.”

Mandela puts the record straight: “We are a liberation movement which is fully involved in a struggle to emancipate our people from tyranny.” He adds, “We have no time to be looking into the internal affairs of any country.” Later, he will trap Koppel in this expectation of a double standard. Why, he asks, should he be expected to be drawn into the internal affairs of countries such as Libya or Cuba but not in the internal affairs of the United States? With unerring precision, he then confronts the question of Palestine, the reach of Israel, and the meaning of resistance.

Not interested in labels or easy dichotomies, Mandela has no trouble acknowledging the disproportionate representation of Jews in the South African liberation struggle or his closeness with them. Nor does he question the right of Israel to exist. But he gravely rejects Israel’s “right to take the territories they conquered from the Arab world, like the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank.”

Finally, Koppel lectures Mandela about political expediency, warning him that he has said some “controversial things, not the kinds of things necessarily that a very political man says.” He suggests that he might have alienated some in this country who have “within their hands, within their power, either to continue sanctions against South Africa or to raise those sanctions, to lift them.” Mandela says he does not understand what he means. In an oblique reference to the Jewish lobby, Koppel hints at the “close alliance between the Jewish population and the black population, in the civil rights struggle. There is likely to be a rather negative reaction to some of the things that you have said.” Mandela comes forward without hesitation in words more analytical than polemical:

It would be for us a grave mistake to consider our attitude towards Yasser Arafat on the basis of the interests of the Jewish community. We identify with the struggles of the Jewish people and their persecution right down the years. . . . But that does not mean to say that the enemies of Israel are our enemies. We refuse to take that position. You can call it unpolitical, or a moral question, but for anybody who changes his principles depending on whom he is dealing with, that is not a man who can lead a nation.

For a moment, Mandela’s answer silences Koppel. In a sudden pause that lasts for quite a while, we view Mandela’s attentiveness to Koppel, so motionless, as if he had been turned to stone, and we realize that the game is over. Mandela remarks gently in a kind of serene and twinkling wonder: “I don’t know if I’ve paralyzed you.”

The more obvious the attack, the more eloquent is Mandela’s response, the vivid display of what it means to think thought through without easy answers. This drama of veiled threat and selective questioning became in the presence of Mandela something utterly absolute in its appeal to all to understand what it might mean to commit to justice and equality—wherever these are found.

Remember that Mandela remained on a terrorist list in the United States until 2008. It was not simply, as Koppel later reflected, that he had to take his friends where he found them, as if scraping the bottom of some bucket reserved for those who had no power. But rather, for Mandela, the struggle for rights and freedom from stigma and oppression mattered, to stand with, in Steve Biko’s words, “a legitimate place in the world.”

The day after Mandela’s death, on December 6, in Ramallah, dozens of Palestinians were injured and one detained as Israeli forces used tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets to disperse crowds commemorating Mandela and protesting against the Israeli occupation. Mandela would have been pleased that the two acts, tribute and struggle, joined together in the place he knew so well.

In these quiet days after the New Year, let us also know again the fact of apartheid and the memory of Mandela, whose portrait adorned posters in Gaza during a candlelight memorial on December 8. The posters read:

APARTHEID: Wrong in South Africa
Wrong in Palestine
Free Palestine
Boycott Israel

-Colin Dayan

November 8, 2014
Mandela's Reflections: Mandela, Charisma, and Compromise

As the cases of Ireland, Algeria, Palestine, and South Africa will suggest, settler colonies vary widely in history and circumstance, but the problems of decolonization in such formations are invariably obdurate. In Ireland, neither the moderate parliamentary Home Rule Party, which led the campaign for devolved independence within the British Empire before World War I, nor the republican separatists, who led the guerrilla war for Irish independence after Easter 1916, had any strategy adequate to deal with the resistance of the Ulster unionists, descendants of the original sixteenth- and seventeenth-century plantation settlers, to a united Ireland. Thus, nationalists would prove more or less helpless to respond when the British government established the partitioned state of Northern Ireland in 1921. The grievances of the Irish nationalist minority within that new polity were thereafter allowed to fester untreated for half a century until, in the late 1960s, “Ulster” erupted in a war that would lacerate it for nearly thirty years.

In Palestine, the Palestinian national movement, faced by an inflow of Jewish settlers from Europe demanding their own state, was ultimately confounded by this challenge. A US-imposed UN General Assembly Resolution of 1947 set the terms for a grossly unequal partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states; in the war that followed, somewhere between 700,000 and 1 million Palestinians were dispossessed as the new State of Israel was formed. This Palestinian exodus into the Arab states bordering Israel created nearly intractable problems for all the parties involved and has made the consequent Palestinian plight one of the scandals of Israeli history and of the American world order. After the National Liberation Front (FLN), under Ahmed Ben Bella, came to power in Algeria in 1962, it is estimated that over 800,000 settlers of European origin fled Algeria for France, some 200,000 other pieds noirs also leaving over the next decade. Pariahs of a disgraced French imperialism, the plight of the pieds noirs elicited little sympathy anywhere, but their fate served as a warning to any minorities that might resist the creation of an Arabized Algeria.

Of the situations cited above, only Mandela and the ANC managed to wrest a new state from the clutches of a dying colonialism without either expelling the settler population or conceding to ethno-territorial partitions. The enormity of that achievement, torn from a situation in which the circumstances of much of the black African population were infinitely worse than that of nationalists in Northern Ireland, and at least as bad as those of Palestinians in Gaza, must be wholly acknowledged. Mandela’s charisma and humane vision for a multiracial South Africa may have been significant to this success, but the conditions that enabled that outcome were historical, not personal. Unlike the Northern Irish unionists or the Zionists in Palestine, neither the white South Africans nor the Inkatha movement had any external great imperial power to hand to act as guarantor for any contemplated partitioned state. The implosion of the Soviet Union after 1989 incentivized all parties in South Africa to negotiation and reduced the risk that any secessionist state would find a Cold War–style backer. Likewise, the fact that the ANC was able to achieve its aims by largely nonviolent protest and pressure owes less to Mandela’s restraint than it does to the fact that despite the infamous “colour bars,” black labor had always remained crucial to the South African settler economy. As Mouna Younis has argued in Liberation and Democratization: The South African and Palestinian National Movements (2000), black proletarianization in apartheid South Africa created modes of organization more effective than older “traditional” ethnic formations and allowed black workers some scope for economic leverage and political pressure. The contrast with Palestine, where the Zionist movement’s commitment to a “Jewish labor only” policy succeeded in eliminating Palestinians almost wholly from the developing settler economy, is instructive. The Palestinians who remained within Israel after 1948 were reduced to a minority, while those in the West Bank and Gaza or beyond have always lacked any real capacity to exercise economic leverage on Israel. Thus, the Palestinians were never positioned to look to a democratization-from-below of the oppressor state to solve their problems in the way black South Africans could do, and while some might have proposed a binational state, they were in no position to advance it without an unforthcoming Israeli assent.

Finally, while Mandela’s and the ANC’s capacity to articulate the vision for an ethnically plural South Africa must be saluted, the bargain necessary to secure the consent of the white settler community clearly had its Faustian dimension. Territorial fissure and civil war were successfully averted, but the social compact that eased the ANC’s transition to hegemony preserved so much of the country’s wealth in the hands of the white elite that the social fissures between rich and poor may well prove a disaster in historical storage. Many Americans now revere Mandela as a kind of sunnier-tempered Abraham Lincoln, a national savior who preserved the South African union as Lincoln did the American. The tragedy of the post-Civil War United States and of South Africa today is that history seemed to decree to statesmen in both cases that any determined attempt to advance equality between the black and white populations and to secure a well-integrated state were incompatible goals. Thus, in the postbellum United States, saving the union dictated that the reconciliation of the Northern and Southern elites took precedence over redress of the plight of the black poor, who had to wait. In South Africa, today, the white and black elites have also agreed to share power, and the black poor are again compelled to wait. As the cases of Northern Ireland, Israel-Palestine, Algeria, and the United States all in their distinct ways demonstrate, the waiting of those excluded from history’s grand bargains may last a long time but rarely lasts forever.

-Joe Cleary

November 8, 2014
Mandela's Reflections: The Mandela Enigma

Nelson Mandela has been an enigma to me. I have read his autobiography and many of his speeches, listened to him on tape, and watched him on television, all the time wondering how someone becomes Nelson Mandela. Jean-Paul Sartre explained how Gustave became Flaubert because of his early identification as “the idiot in the family,” but it took him three volumes and thousands of pages, and he still left the job unfinished. Most accounts of the great figures of history focus on their sense of self and their sense of mission. Mahatma Ghandi, who is often invoked in discussions of Mandela, provides the best example of such an account: the epiphany on the train in South Africa, when he understands the nature of racial and political oppression and his growing sense of being endowed with a spiritual mission to carry out political liberation. The lives of these figures seem to fit preexisting narratives and allow us to consider them with equanimity since they comfort our expectations, exceeding them only in magnitude but not in nature or scope.

This is not the case with Mandela. To be sure, he starts out with a pretty good pedigree as a member of a royal family, but he is the product of a morganatic union and thus cannot inherit any titles, privileges, or honors. There is no evidence that he resented this status, or rather the lack of it, and it would be unwarranted speculation to suggest that he derived a sense of justice or an ambition to affirm his value from it. If anything, the evidence points to the fact that he was comfortable with his standing in the family, retaining his links to it and returning to it even in death.

So what made him tick? And even more important, what made him the outstanding figure he became? Determinists who assert that the actor matters far less than the agent, and that the latter’s agency derives from a conjunction of forces, would find it difficult to maintain their clever distinction. Their approach is based on the assumption that anyone else thrust in the same situation would do as well differing only in idiosyncratic ways. Even the most stubborn of them would find it impossible to equate Mandela with the featureless “anyone” of their equations.

This leaves us with the oldest differentiating factor of all in discussions of exceptional figures: character. Character evokes notions of honor, will, integrity, moral rectitude, strength, resolve, steadfastness, courage, fidelity, and so on. It would not be too difficult to sketch a portrait of Mandela by combining these traits and adding a few more personal ones, such as his sense of humor or his patience. Other aspects would be more difficult to include: his undeniable spirituality devoid of any appeal to Providence or any other transcendental.

The invocation of character may be satisfying, but it may also mask a deeper problem. Mandela at no time displayed two features associated with character: amour propre, self-interest and self-possession. He was not selfless; he was indifferent to the notion of the self. A telling exchange occurred between him and a journalist who charged him with inconsistency when he failed to publicly condemn the Burmese junta whom he had earlier excoriated for its treatment of political prisoners and specifically Aung San Suu Kyi: “That was prisoner Mandela,” he replied. “But this is President Mandela. And President Mandela is a prisoner of the Office of the President.” What is remarkable about this reply is that the author of The Long Walk to Freedom continues to consider himself a prisoner. His actions and statements are constrained now as they were then, in fact perhaps even more now than they were then. Mandela is not engaging in casuistry here; he is telling us about his relationship to history.

There is no reference to self, or its current political sound-bite version, “core values.” The constant prisoner status is a contingent condition, and the possibilities inherent in it, though limited, are further constrained by other contingencies. Mandela was giving the journalist a lesson in reading: read your circumstances, and if you apply some intelligence to this action, you will be capable of the type of discernment that makes action possible.

Intelligence, reading, and discernment are, in my view, the keys to Mandela’s enigma, and to his uniqueness.

-Wlad Godzich

November 8, 2014
Mandela's Reflections: Discomforts

Some things rest uneasy on the mind: In a pinch, how prepared would I be, for instance, to live by the protocols of nonviolence? And if you extirpate the pinch, how would a commitment to such principles alter my behavior from what it is right now? At the rebirth of the South African state, Nelson Mandela’s determination to pursue a course of peace rather than vengeance stunned the world as forcefully as the violence that maimed it had kept him imprisoned on Robben Island for over two decades. The new South Africans called apartheid terror’s aftermath “truth and reconciliation,” as had occurred among former Yugoslavic political actors a few short years before. At the death of Nelson Mandela on December 5, 2013, three of the twentieth century’s exemplary figures converged on our collective memorial sense of what remains, apparently, difficult to achieve, and that is to say, the daily mobilization of Gandhian Satyagraha—and at the commencement of our terrible winter this year and always, everywhere, the threat of war, there they were—Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela, reminding us across cultures of that unease on the mind. No pabulum here; no straight down the middle; no squirreling away from the point.

To get more firmly to the matter for some future interrogation, we might juxtapose a few impression points:

1. In Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63 (1988), Taylor Branch opens the fifth chapter, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott,” with a story set in Nagpur, India, December 1955: James Lawson, a young black American theologian, is teaching at a Methodist missionary school near the town and had gone to India to study Gandhian nonviolence. The Nagpur Times, soon after the historic meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, reported that “thousands of Negroes were refusing to ride segregated buses in a small American city” (143). Lawson read the news, rejoiced in it, as Branch tells the story, and would soon meet MLK at Oberlin when he (Lawson) returned to the United States to participate in the fledgling movement and become one of King’s most creative “lieutenants” in the application and adoption of nonviolence to the US scene.

2. In an early biographical study of Gandhi’s life (The Life of Mahatma Gandhi), Louis Fischer points out that Gandhi, in 1906, amends his cousin’s Sadagraha (“firmness in a good cause” [84]) to Satyagraha in founding a term to name the Indian movement against the South African government’s unfairness to Indian citizens of the Transvaal. Apparently a neologism, Gandhi’s term combines satya, or “truth,” “which equals love,” and agraha, or “firmness or force.” “‘Satyagraha,’ therefore, means truth-force or love-force” (84).

Nearly a century later and, ironically, in a proximate theater of action, truth and reconciliation appear to make possible the rebirth of a nation-state once devoted to racial and racist hierarchy. Are truth and reconciliation a distant and mimetic response to Satyagraha, and how related are both iterations of praxis to what we know as nonviolent action in the United States? In its robust insistence, this complex of ideas, unlike the usual commemorative gesture, confronts us with the possibility of transformative action—an opening in the chain of necessity?—and to act, according to James Baldwin, is to be in danger. In this case, one might well want a way out.

-Hortense Spillers

November 8, 2014
Mandela's Reflections: Mbu ya Ũrambu: Mbaara ya Cuito Cuanavale

Rĩrĩa meetaga Mandela na ndundu yake imaramari
Meetaga Verwoerd na Vorster na Botha arũĩri wĩyathi

Rĩrĩa mendagĩria abathendi matharaita ma kũratha andũ airũ
Kiumba yaheyaga arũĩri wĩyathi matharaita ma kwĩgitĩra

Rĩrĩa Obama ageithia Castro mathikoinĩ ma Mandela
O arĩa maheyaga abatheindi mĩcinga makoiga mbu

Kaĩ mariganĩirwo atĩ Mbaarainĩ ya Cuita Cuanavale
Reagan na Thatcher maanyitĩte Abathendi mbaru?

Atĩ tiga nĩ ũhootani mũnyite mbaru nĩ Kiumba kĩhaaroinĩ kĩa Cuito Cuanavale
Mandela angĩathikirwo njeera gacigĩrĩra ka Robben, tene?

The Cry of Hypocrisy: The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale
(translated from Gĩkũyũ)

While they hated Mandela as a commie and terrorist
They hailed Verwoerd Vorster and Botha as freedom fighters

While they armed apartheid to defeat the struggle
Cuba armed the real freedom fighters to defend the struggle

And when at Mandela’s funeral Obama shook hands with Castro
They who used to arm apartheid cried foul

Have they forgotten that at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale
Reagan and Thatcher sided with Apartheid?

That but for the Cuba backed victory at Cuito Cuanavale Mandela’s funeral would have been on Robben Island years earlier?

-Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

November 8, 2014
Mandela's Reflections: Preface

Very few political figures in the late twentieth century evoked hope in the way that Nelson Mandela did. In conventional representative politics, figures fleetingly emerge who inspire the possibility of the new and then flicker before adjusting to the “real world.” It is not that Mandela did not adjust. (For example, after his trip in the 1990s to Davos and the world economic conference, he proposed changing the ANC’s economic transformation program to a market-based one.) Rather, it is that no matter what adjustments were made, one got the sense his reasons were tactical, not overarching and strategic. Moreover, it is clear that as a political figure he embodied the possibility that justice could be done differently. Whether that is so is still an open question. Mandela faced several conundrums: Would power yield itself without radical confrontation? What would be the consequences of such confrontations? How to create profound social and political change and usher in the new order, and on what grounds of politics could this occur within the complex logic of making attempts to effect change by acting in humane ways? For historical and contingent political reasons, he may have acted in a way that made an attempt to find a novel way, but his commitment of using force of a different kind to make a new society resonated with many in a world where the mythos of the unencumbered self and market fundamentalism is the common sense of our times.

No other figure of the last twenty years of the twentieth century drew to his cause and commitments so many people across the world.

The personal and political vignettes represented in this dossier are a very modest attempt to think about the man and his time. They range from poetry to explicit political reflections on this figure. The collection ends with a poignant piece from a young person who, told about our efforts, was moved to write and send us her pages. While this dossier does not cover everything, two things are clear. First, that Mandela was an iconic figure in the world. We are aware how power re-creates and attempts to absorb such figures, gutting them of their radical meaning. This has happened, and continues to happen, with Mandela. But, second, in our contemporary moment, current struggles are still deeply linked to the struggle for which he spent twenty-odd years in prison—the struggle to be treated with dignity and equality as a human being. It is the latter which will shape the complex legacy he left behind.

-Anthony Bogues

November 8, 2014
Mandela's Reflections: Editor's Note

Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013. Tony Bogues, a member of the boundary 2 Collective, was in South Africa, watching the endless coverage of the news and of Mandela’s life. Bogues had met Mandela during his time with the Jamaican government of Michael Manley, and he has spent considerable time working in South Africa, especially in Cape Town, on questions of freedom, archives, African and African Diaspora intellectual history, and political thought.

At least one generation of intellectuals had stood against apartheid and reflected on Mandela as a political figure of freedom and liberation. Mandela never produced anything equivalent to the political writings of a Gramsci, Fanon, or Césaire. Because of the media and the global support for the struggles he led, Mandela acquired a resonance with effects across the globe. His career, with all its changes, posed challenges for thinking about politics.

It seemed right that boundary 2 should take notice of Mandela and his influence. We decided to gather responses to Mandela as a political figure. b2 issued a call for very brief papers from several spots on the globe and from different generations. Our contributors have given us reason to feel this attempt was a success.

-Paul Bové

November 8, 2014
The Mouse That Roared: The Democratic Movement in Hong Kong

an essay by Arif Dirlik
~
In 1997, the British government handed Hong Kong over to the People’s Republic of China(PRC) after 150 years of colonial rule. Some observers at the time could not but wonder if Hong Kong would be absorbed and remade by the behemoth to the north, or transform with its proverbial dynamism “the motherland” that already was undergoing radical change. The popular uprising under way in Hong Kong is the most recent indication that the question was not an idle one. The answer is yet to come.

Hong Kong investments and technology played an important part in the 1980s in laying the ground for the PRC’s economic take-off. The “special economic zones” that were set up in Guangdong province at the beginning of “reform and opening” as gateways to global capitalism (while keeping the rest of the country immune to its effects) were intended to take advantage of the dynamic capitalism of neighboring Hong Kong. And they did. To this day, Guangdong leads the rest of the country in industrial production and wealth. It also heavily resembles Hong Kong with which it shares a common language and, despite three decades of separation after 1949, common cultural characteristics. Hong Kong has continued to play a crucial part in the country’s development.

It has been a different matter politically. Since the take-over in 1997 the leadership in Beijing has left no doubt of its enthusiasm for the oligarchic political structure that was already in place before the end of colonial rule. The many freedoms and rule of law Hong Kong people enjoyed were less appealing to a regime that preferred a population obedient to its strictures and a legal system more pliable at the service of Communist Party power. Already in the 1980s, Hong Kong people’s doubts about unification with the “motherland” were obvious in the exodus of those who could afford to leave to places like the United States, Canada and Australia. The exodus speeded up following the Tiananmen tragedy in 1989 which put to rest any hopes that reforms might open up a greater space for political freedoms. The colony practically disqualified itself as any kind of political inspiration for the Mainland with the enthusiastic participation of Hong Kongers in the Tiananmen movement leading up to the June Fourth massacre, and annual commemorations thereafter of the suppression of the student movement. In the early 1990s the Party under Deng Xiaoping settled on the example of Singapore as a model more attuned to its own authoritarian practices.

The same reasons that made the regime suspicious of Hong Kong people for their “lack of patriotism” due to the legacies of colonialism have made Hong Kong into an inspiration as well as a base for radical critics of the regime struggling for greater freedom and democracy on the Mainland. The take-over of 1997 was under the shadow of Tinanmen, but even so few would have imagined at the time that within two decades of the celebrations of the end of colonialism and “return” to the motherland, protestors against Beijing “despotism” would be waving British flags. Once the initial enthusiasm for “liberation” was over, Hong Kongers rediscovered as the source of their “difference” the colonial history which in nationalist historiography appeared as a lapse in the nation’s historical, a period of humiliation remembered most importantly to foster nationalist sentiment. PRC democracy activists such as the jailed Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo have drawn the ire of the regime for suggesting that Hong Kong’s freedoms and democratic sentiments were legacies of colonial acculturation that Mainlanders had missed out on.

Current protests have their origins in a consciousness born of the anxieties provoked by the prospect of unification in the 1980s and 1990s, and even though both the Mainland and Hong Kong have changed radically in the intervening period, the Hong Kong identity that assumed recognizable contours at the time is a fundamental driving force of the protests. The immediate issue that has provoked the protests—call for universal suffrage in the selection of the chief executive and legislative council of the Special Administrative Region—harks back to the Basic Law of 1984 agreed upon by the British and the PRC as a condition of unification. The Basic Law stipulated that Hong Kong would be subject internally to its own laws for fifty years after the take-over under a system of “one country, two systems,” with its own chief executive and a legislature elected by an election committee representing various functional constituencies in a corporatist arrangement. The arrangement openly favored the corporate and financial ruling class in Hong Kong which in turn was prepared to align its interests with those of the Communist regime in a mutually beneficial relationship. The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) was something of a political counterpart to the “special economic zones”—an exception that was granted not to compromise national sovereignty but as an act of sovereign power. In all matters pertaining to governance and the law, the SAR would be accountable to the National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing. Hong Kong was granted representation in the NPC which, like all representation in that body, has served more to consolidate central control than to allow for the democratic airing of public opinion and grievances.

“One country, two systems” was an unstable structure. It was important to the PRC for patriotic reasons to put an end to the colonialism at its doorstep and retrieve territory lost a century and a half ago. But some compromise with the departing British was unavoidable given the strategic importance to the new project of development of the global corporate and financial hub that was Hong Kong. The autonomy granted to Hong Kong was subject to the good faith of the Beijing government. What might happen if the PRC no longer needed this hub seemed like a remote contingency in the 1980s, but already by the 1990s there was talk of the rise of Shanghai as a competitor. It is not out of the question that the present unrest which may undermine faith in Hong Kong as a corporate and financial center is not entirely undesirable to the regime now that preparations have been completed to launch a new financial center in Shanghai.

A similar uncertainty attended the issue of governance under the system. The Basic Law held out the possibility of democratic government and universal suffrage in Hong Kong subject to circumstances to be determined by the NPC. It nourished hopes in democracy, but reserved for Beijing final say on when and how democracy was to be exercised. There were no guarantees that full democracy would be granted if Hong Kongers invited the displeasure of the government in Beijing—or circumstances within the country made it undesirable. This is the immediate issue in the current protests (along with public dissatisfaction with the current chief executive, Leung Chun Ying who, like his two predecessors since 1997, is widely viewed as a Beijing puppet). To Hong Kong democracy advocates, the offer of universal suffrage is a mockery of the promise of full democracy when the choices are limited to candidates carefully selected by an electoral commission packed with Beijing loyalists.

The take-over in 1997, and the circumstances of its negotiation, had one very significant consequence that in likelihood was unanticipated: the politicization of Hong Kong society. Hong Kong long had a reputation as a cultural and political “desert.” The British colonial regime was successful in diverting popular energies to the struggle for everyday existence, and for those who could, the pursuit of wealth. At the height of the Cultural Revolution on the Mainland in 1967, labor disputes erupted into riots against the colonial government led by pro-Beijing leftists. But sustained political activity dates back to the negotiations surrounding the take-over, especially the mobilization instigated by the Tiananmen movement in Beijing. Politics over the last twenty-five years has revolved around the assertion of a Hong Kong identity against dissolution into the PRC. As a new political consciousness has found expression in the efflorescence of a Hong Kong culture in film and literature, the latter has played no little part in stimulating political activity. Ironically, while the goal of “one country, two systems” was to ease Hong Kong into the PRC, the very recognition of the differences of Hong Kong from the rest of the country would seem to have underlined the existence of a Hong Kong identity that differentiated the former colony from the rest of PRC society.

Current protests have focused attention on issues of governance. Far more important are the social tensions and the economic transformations that lend urgency to protestors’ demand for political recognition and rights. One important indication is the part young people—teenagers—have played in the protests. Joshua Wong, who has emerged as a leader, is seventeen years old, which means that he was born in 1997, the year of the take-over.

The generation Wong represents has come of age in a society subject to deepening social and economic problems. The wealth gap in Hong Kong is nothing new, but as elsewhere in the world, inequality has assumed critical proportions with increased concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite allied with Beijing. Since 1997, the experience of marginalization has been intensified with the inundation of the city by Mainlanders with their newfound wealth which has increased prices of commodities, put pressures on public services––including housing, health and education––and introduced new cultural fissures. Some Hong Kong businesses prefer Mainland customers on whose business they have come to be dependent. In the 1990s, Mainlanders living in Hong Kong used to complain about the prejudice they suffered from Hong Kongers with their pretensions to superior cultural sophistication. That has been reversed. Even the most uncouth Mainlanders are likely to look down on Hong Kongers for not being authentically Chinese, which typifies PRC attitudes toward Chinese populations elsewhere. While Hong Kongers complain about “locusts” from the North, a very-unConfucian Beijing University professor descended from Confucius refers to Hong Kongers as “bastards” contaminated by their colonial past. The central government in Beijing, sharing the suspicious of southerners of its imperial predecessors, is engaged in efforts to discourage the use of Cantonese while instilling in the local population its version of what it means to be “Chinese.” We may recall that the present protests were preceded two years ago by successful protests against Beijing-backed efforts to introduce “patriotic” education to Hong Kong schools. It is not that Hong Kong people are not patriotic. They are very patriotic indeed. But their patriotism is mediated by their Hong Kong identity, a very product of the take-over that Beijing would like to erase.

The upheaval in Hong bears similarities to “Occupy” movements elsewhere in the economic issues that inform it. It also has its roots in the special circumstances of Hong Kong society, and its relationship to Beijing. The movement may be viewed as the latest chapter in a narrative that goes back to the 1980s, the emergence of a neoliberal global capitalism of which the PRC has been an integral component, and the Tiananmen movement which was one of the earliest expressions of the social and political strains created by shifts in the global economy. The demands for democracy in the protests are clearly not merely “political.” Democracy is important to the protestors not only as a means to retrieving some control over their lives, but also to overcome inequality. The authorities in Beijing are quite aware of this link. A Law professor from Tsinghua University in Beijing who also serves as an advisor on Hong Kong affairs just recently announced that democracy would jeopardize the wealthy who are crucial to the welfare of Hong Kong’s capitalist economy. It may seem ironic that a Communist Party should be devoted to the protection of wealthy capitalists, but that is the reality of contemporary PRC society that the protestors are struggling against.

The protests are also the latest chapter in the formation of a Hong Kong identity which assumed urgency with the prospect of return to the “motherland” in the 1980s. This, too, is a threat to a regime in flux that finds itself threatened by identity claims among the populations it rules over. It seems superfluous to say that allowing the people of Hong Kong the self-rule they demand would have adverse consequences in encouraging separatism among the various ethnic groups already in rebellion against the regime, and further stimulate democracy activists among the Han population. Hitherto pro-Beijing Guomindang leader in Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, has recently voiced his opposition to unification under the “one country, two-systems” formula.

It would probably take something of a miracle for the protest movement in Hong Kong to achieve its stated goals. Rather than risk a Tiananmen style confrontation, the authorities have taken a wait-and-see attitude, waiting for the movement to spend its force, or opponents to force it to retreat. There are signs already that the movement has run its course in clashes between the protestors and members of the general public weary of the disruption of life and business. It is suspected that the attackers included members of Triad gangs. Whom they might be serving is, for the moment, anybody’s guess.

What the next chapter might bring is uncertain, to say the least. It is unlikely that a movement that has been in the making for two decades will simply fade away into oblivion. The problems it set out to resolve are very real, and offer little sign of resolution, and the movement has proven its resilience through the years. The distinguished scholar of Hong Kong-Mainland relations at the City University of Hong Kong, Joseph Cheng Yu-shek,who is also an advocate of democracy, stated in a recent interview that, “All the protesters here and Hong Kong people know it is extremely unlikely the Chinese leaders will respond to our demands…. We are here to say we are not going to give up, we will continue to fight on. We are here because as long as we fight on, at least we haven’t lost.”

October 29, 2014
"Malaysia's Dog Issue" by b2 writer Masturah Alatas

Masturah Alatas, a boundary 2 contributor, has written about the ‘I want to touch a dog’ event in Malaysia for CounterPunch. You can read “Malaysia’s Dog Issue” here.

October 27, 2014