boundary 2

Tag: apartheid

  • Mandela's Reflections: Meditations and Interventions from the b2 Collective

    Mandela's Reflections: Meditations and Interventions from the b2 Collective

    Editor’s Note
    from Paul Bové
    _

    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.

  • Mandela's Reflections

    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.

    Nelson Mandela

    Editor’s Note from Paul Bové

    Preface by Anthony Bogues

    Mbu ya Ũrambu: Mbaara ya Cuito Cuanavale / The Cry of Hypocrisy: The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

    Discomforts by Hortense Spillers

    The Mandela Enigma by Wlad Godzich

    Mandela, Charisma, and Compromise by Joe Cleary

    Nelson Mandela on Nightline; or, How Palestine Matters by Colin Dayan

    Or, The Whale by Jim Merod

    Malaysian Mandela by Masturah Alatas

    Mandela, Tunisia, and I by Mohamed-Salah Omri

    Nelson Mandela by Ruth Y. Y. Hung

    Mandela Memories: An African Prometheus by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

    Nelson Mandela: Decolonization, Apartheid, and the Politics of Moral Force by Anthony Bogues

    Mandela’s Wholeness, Perhaps Infinite by Dawn Lundy Martin

    [untitled] by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

    Mandela’s Gift by Sobia Saleem

  • Mandela's Reflections: [untitled]

    The bitter lesson that we have learned since the middle of the twentieth century is that national liberation is not a revolution. The world is full of postcolonial civil strife or class/gender apartheid. The era of national liberation movements has given us heroes; but after liberation, without experience and practice of freedom, the postcolonial polity sank back into situations which provoked Assia Djebar to cry out in Algerian Whites, “O Frantz, the wretched of the earth again!,” now in the context of internal civil violence. Nelson Mandela joins the rank of the genuine heroes we have inherited from unbroken confidence in national liberation. As Fernand Braudel has taught us, we cannot ignore the longue durée—the old perennial structures that continue to operate beneath, beyond, and above the narrative history that we tend to prefer. In the postcolonial world, hero worship and ancestor worship stand in the way of the production of the will to social justice. Those of us interested in building postcolonial democracies think that these heroes should be slowly and carefully transformed into teaching texts. In the case of Nelson Mandela, the strongest teaching element is the unconditional ethical—the risky imaginative activism that dares to say yes to the enemy. If one enters the protocol of the heroic life with critical intimacy, reading its text as the symbolic telling us about the subject’s relationship to the imaginary—the greatest collective imaginary of colonial oppression being precisely the dream of liberation—it is possible, again with the greatest care, not to exclude the cronyism and the economic betrayal but to point at it as the transformation of the longue durée into historical symptomaticity of even the most extraordinarily heroic among us, to make the hero a human warning for those of us who are merely human without the heroism. This is a transformation of the imitatio Christi idea of role model, today emphasized in faith-based leadership initiatives. We cannot forget that this is the substance of the greatest genre the world has seen, not confined to Hellenic culture alone: tragedy, the tragic hero of history. It is with the greatest respect that one places today the figure of our brother Nelson Mandela in that teaching gallery.

    I asked Paul Bové if I could use my example of using Nelson Mandela as a teaching text that comes from ten years ago—there to undo the longue durée of the color line of caste—and he agreed. I quote myself, then:

    Two girls, between eleven and fifteen years of age, show me what they are being taught in primary school. It is a piece about South Africa. They have absolutely no clue at all what the piece is about, as they don’t about any piece in the book, about any piece in any book. They tell me their teachers would go over the material again the next day.

    The next day after school, we meet again. Did the teachers explain? “Reading poriyechhe,” is the answer—an untranslatable Bengali phrase for which there are equivalents in all the major Indian languages, no doubt. “They made us read reading” would perhaps convey the absurdity? Any piece is a collection of discrete spelling exercises to be read in a high drone with little regard to punctuation. The scandal is that everyone knows this.

    After the girls’ answer, I begin to explain. If the older girl was just frustrated by not grasping at all what I was trying to explain, the younger one, the strikingly intelligent one, faced me with that inexorably closed look, jaws firmly set. No response to repeated careful questions going over the same ground, over and over again, simplifying the story of Nelson Mandela further at every go. These are students who have no concept or percept of the neighboring districts, of their own state of West Bengal—because they have arrived at Class Four through neglect and no teaching. How will they catch the reference to Africa?

    Into the second hour, sitting on the floor in that darkening room, I tried another tack. Forget Africa, try shoman adhikar—equal rights. We were locked together in an effort to let response emerge and blossom with its own energy. Perhaps an hour and a half into the struggle, I put my hand next to the bright one’s purple-black hand to explain apartheid. Next to that rich color, this pasty brown hand seemed white. And to explain shoman adhikar, equal rights, Mandela’s demand, a desperate formula presented itself to me: ami ja, tumi ta—what I, that you. Remember, this is a student, not an asylum seeker in the metropole, just two students, accepting oppression as normality, understanding their designated textbook.

    The next morning, I asked them to set down what they remembered of the previous day’s lesson. The older one could call up nothing. The younger one, the more intelligent one, produced this: “ami ja, tumi ta, raja here gachhe”—what I, that you, the king was defeated. A tremendous achievement in context, but, if one thinks of all the children studying under the West Bengal Board, including the best students from the best schools in Kolkata, with whom these girls are competing, this is a negligible result. I have no doubt that even this pitiful residue of the content of the lesson is now long lost and forgotten.

    –Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

  • Mandela's Reflections: Nelson Mandela: Decolonization, Apartheid, and the Politics of Moral Force

    Nelson Mandela was one of the world’s most important twentieth-century political prisoners. At a moment when world politics was in the throes of the “Cold War,” Mandela’s imprisonment focused much of the world’s attention on the authoritarian racial system in South Africa—apartheid.

    At the beginning of the twentieth century, the white settler country, the Union of South Africa, became independent. By then, South Africa was a society where all the processes of colonialism, its ways of life, its forms of rule, its ideology of white and European supremacy, its construction of African ethnic groups into “natives,” making them nonhuman, had congealed into a specific historical form. As Njabulo Ndebele writes about twentieth-century South Africa, “Everything [in South Africa] has been mind-bogglingly spectacular: the monstrous war machine developed over the years; . . . mass shootings and killings; . . . the mass removals of people; . . . the luxurious life-style of whites. . . . It could be said, therefore, that the most outstanding feature of South African oppression is its brazen, exhibitionist openness.” Apartheid was a regime of death and murder, and as Antjie Krong tells us, deaths were often “so gruesome as to defy the most active imagination.”

    Murder_at_Sharpeville_21_March_1960It was against this regime of white racial domination, death, and murder that Mandela began his political life. During that life, he was a radical member of the ANC Youth League, a member of the South African Communist Party, an advocate of peaceful confrontation, then of armed struggle. In his early political life, Mandela was an African nationalist with a radical anticolonialist outlook who belonged in the late 1950s and ’60s to that historic cluster of African anticolonial figures. At the same time, he was a courageous figure, one who took physical risks.

    For years, the armed wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the nation), had its headquarters in South Africa, until a South African police raid captured the leadership. At the famous Rivonia trial after the raid, the leadership, including Mandela, all expected to be sentenced to death. Instead, they were sent to Robben Island.

    There, during a period Mandela calls the “dark days,” he developed a practice of politics in which moral force was the critical element. The struggles he waged for the dignity of prisoners on Robben Island, the relationships he developed with racist warders, turning them from foes into his “honor guard” when he was allowed to meet his lawyers, were the result of an extraordinary practice of a politics in which human dignity was deployed against brutality, where there was the constant effort to construct a kind of politics in which moral force would force oppression to yield ground. It was the kind of politics in which, as he says, “we fought injustice to preserve our own humanity.” This is a form of politics in which creating a dignified, unbroken self is the most profound of political acts done under the most adverse of conditions.

    This kind of politics has a long history in anticolonial and antiracist political practices. Mandela’s practice of politics as a moral force led him to attempt to produce a process of reconciliation and, if possible, justice once the apartheid regime ended. Forgiveness was not a personal matter; rather, it was a political calculation of great risk. Could the politics of moral force bend the beneficiaries of the apartheid regime into themselves taking the risk, not of support for the ANC but of doing the necessary work to build a new South Africa? Nearly twenty years after the 1994 election, which ushered in political equality, this remains one of the unanswered questions of South Africa.

    In the politics of moral force, the political personality is central. Mandela was well suited for this role. He had devoted his life to ending the system; he had been jailed for his beliefs and his political practice; he had suffered and therefore had the moral authority to turn that suffering into a political force of change.

    The April 1994 election in South Africa was a twentieth-century watershed. When Mandela walked out of jail that day in 1992, the joy many experienced was an acknowledgment that, at long last, the final bastion of racial oppression that had accompanied colonial power was at an end. Mandela was central to that drama, and he represented both the end as well as the possibility of a new beginning. That currently what was seen in South Africa as this exceptional moment of possibility has now stalled gives us all pause and should be generative of new thinking. But in that moment of 1994, in that moment when it seemed that Africa would lead the world in a new way of politics and rule, would redefine politics—in that moment, we remember a possibility, and in that memory we have hope.

    I met Mandela twice, once in Jamaica and then again in South Africa on the eve of the 1994 general election. It is the second meeting that stays with me. Late at night in a Johannesburg hotel, he recalled the highlights of the struggle against the apartheid regime. There was nothing about him, not one story of self, in the recounting. Instead, he talked about the young people who were in rebellion in the townships, about Chris Hani, the African general secretary of the South African Communist Party, who had then just been recently assassinated, and about the support given to the ANC and the general Southern African liberation movements by Cuba. The most searching segment of the discussion that night was his preoccupation with the question, what would become of the ANC after the elections? In the room, we were all aware of the fate of twentieth-century national liberation movements in political office, and so there was a robust debate about what could be done in order to ensure that the ANC would not go down that path. This was Mandela the party leader thinking about the possible future of the political party he led. When he left us that night, those of us in the meeting knew that we had been in the presence of a rare political figure, whose every fiber had been honed by one of the central questions of politics, of all politics—how do we construct a just and equal association of humans into a polity?

    –Anthony Bogues

  • Mandela's Reflections: Mandela Memories: An African Prometheus

    I first met Mandela in 1991 in Johannesburg, at the offices of the ANC during my visit to South Africa, while a guest of the Congress of South African writers, who had invited me to talk at various community centers to share ideas and experiences in the unfolding postapartheid democratic process. Mandela had just resumed the presidency of the ANC after twenty-seven years in prison. I could never have imagined that my very first engagement in the country would be with the legend of that struggle.

    Mandela had been part of my literary and political imagination since his days as the Black Pimpernel who, time and again, made a fool of the pursuing apartheid police. A Makerere student at the time, I had just read Orczy’s novel The Scarlet Pimpernel, set during the French Revolution, and it was easy to equate the French reign of terror with apartheid’s and Mandela with the Percy character, the master of disguises and elusive moves. The real Mandela of the Rivonia trial, Robben Island, and worldwide celebrity added to the legend. He had been the subject of poetry, politics, and popular performance. In London, I had worked with the ANC in exile, even met with the hardworking Oliver Tambo, his legal partner, the one that held together a party then dubbed terrorist by the West. So Mandela’s name was always in the horizon of my being, and now, at last, I was going to meet the man.

    I did not know what to expect. For some reason, despite the pictures of his sweet self coming out of prison after twenty-seven years, despite, indeed, the current pictures of the man in the world press, I still thought I would see the young lawyer Mandela, hair parted in the middle, slightly puffed cheeks, of long ago, really of his pre-Pimpernel days. I met a lean, dark-suited gentleman, his height dwarfing mine.

    Was he going to talk about his prison days, ask me about Kenya politics, or simply voice his dreams for a South Africa whose leadership he would soon assume? He didn’t. He talked mostly about books, what African writers had meant to him and his fellow political prisoners, how books had played a role in buoying up their spirits. Books, yes, books and more books. I felt as if through me he was talking to all writers of the world and history.

    We sat at eye level, one on one, but I didn’t realize that he grew on me by the second, a towering presence because he did not try to be towering. Before I knew it, an hour and a half had gone; he was ready to receive the next visitor.

    What stayed with me, as I left for KwaZulu Land, was his soft introspective tone. An incident in my first workshop at a library would make me revisit the tone. The itinerary was clear: after the library event a few miles from Durban, we were to drive to the graveyard of Albert Luthuli, the former president of the ANC, to pay respects to his memory. I was in the midst of telling the Kamĩrĩthũ3 story, the community open-air theater that I had been part of, the involvement of workers, small farmers, the landless, the jobless, and the power of an awakened consciousness, when suddenly I saw a commotion in the audience. The ANC chief of security who had accompanied us hurried out of the room, unbuttoning his jacket. They had arrested an Inkatha gunman about to enter the hall. They disarmed him in the nick of time.

    My workshop ended abruptly. Our visit to Luthuli’s grave was canceled. All those present, including an American envoy, drove in a convoy back to Durban. It was then that I realized that my driver was an ANC security officer, and he told me that his own brother had been murdered by thugs, allegedly Buthelezi’s men, the week before.

    After Durban, it was down to Port Elizabeth, in the Eastern Cape. I visited the humble home of one of the ANC cadres. He was a father who seemed to embrace the warmth of his family in gratitude, as if it had been a gift he had not expected. Then later, he took me to the back of the house. He did not show it to me, but he pointed to where his AK-47 was hidden. I think he saw himself as a soldier on leave, or enjoying a temporary cease-fire with the enemy. He could be called to arms at any time, and he could never, of course, be sure of a safe return to his family.

    The two incidents brought home to me the meaning of Mandela’s introspective tone. The country was literally on the verge of a bloodbath, and he knew it. He held the key to its stability; despite his calm demeanor, this must have weighed on him.

    But Mandela held the nation together, the four years that he was president, guided by the realization that there is no room for vengeance in good politics. It was easier to tear down than to build. Even in serving one term, he showed his faith in the ANC and the people.

    I would meet Mandela again after my 2003 Steve Biko Memorial Lecture. The meeting was in Johannesburg again, this time in the offices of his foundation. By then he had left office, the first black president of a Free South Africa, and Thabo Mbeki had taken over as the second. He was different this time, a bit more effusive. He talked about the contribution of Cuba and African states to the struggle. He talked a little about his continuing contact with leaders of the world, Bush and Blair in particular. He reminisced over Biko, paying tribute to the role of the black consciousness movement and indeed that of the other political parties in the liberation, mentioning Robert Sobukwe by name. Again, so generous in his inclusiveness. The question of his giving the Steve Biko lecture came up, and indeed he gave one, the following year.

    As we were leaving, he stood up and placed his hand on my shoulder. Thus we walked to the door, he leaning on my shoulder. I told Xolela Mangcu, my host, how touching that was: he walking us to the door, his hand on my shoulder, a gesture almost reminiscent of the image of his long walk to freedom. Xolela laughed. Sorry, nothing personal; he does that with people. For support. Yes, he was clearly more frail than the first time we met, but his spirits were still up, once again his charisma and his towering presence commanding awe and respect rather than demanding it.

    The third time we met was in 2004, when he, Ali Mazrui, and I were to be accorded honorary doctorates to mark the renaming and relaunching of the former University of Transkei as Walter Sisulu University. Walter Sisulu, an ANC stalwart, was also Mandela’s political and spiritual mentor. My wife, Njeeri, and our two children, Mumbi and Thiong’o, were less excited about my doctorate than the fact that they were going to meet Mandela. It was an emotional moment for me because I was returning to Kenya for the first time after twenty-two years of forced exile.

    Alas, we never met up with him: he was down with something, he could not make it to the ceremony, and he would be given his robes at his home. But a few days later, we had the pleasure of visiting his birthplace, Qunu, where now he will rest forever.

    His passing on, though expected, shocked me: at the back of my mind was always a hope that the man who had cheated death many times would once more rebound. He remains a towering figure in African and world politics.

    When Mandela was released from prison, captured in the iconic picture of his walking hand in hand with Winnie Mandela, I wrote an article in Gĩkũyũ, “Kũngũ Baba Mandela” (Welcome home Father Mandela), because I could not see myself recording this moment in any but an African language. I compared him to mythic figures, Prometheus in particular. For like Prometheus, he had been chained to a rock for bringing to humans the knowledge of fire, really, the secrets to energy and light. He had survived, and now, at ninety-five, he had passed to join other heroes and heroines of history and myth.

    Blessed Peace, Mandela
    translated from the Gĩkũ yũ

    Even those that then called him a terrorist
    Now acclaim him a freedom fighter

    Those that once wanted him gone
    Are now shedding tears that he’s gone

    It is said that truth never dies
    It cannot be buried in a hole

    They tried to kill it with bullets
    They wondered how did it escape?

    They put it in chains
    They sent it to Rob’em Island
    They made it break stones twenty-seven years
    They tortured it to make truth give up hope
    They tried all to make truth surrender to lies

    They did not realize it was the body breaking stones
    That truth cut thru the handcuffs and barbed wires long ago
    That it was truth that guided the armed struggle
    Singing that which had been sung by other seekers of freedom

    You can send us to exile and prisons
    Or confine us to islands
    But we shall never stop struggling for freedom . . .

    Mandela Madiba Rolihlahla of Thembu and African clan
    Your body that has gone to rest under the shades of holy peace

    The truth they tried to shoot down with bullets
    The truth they put in hand and leg chains
    The truth for which they put you in jail and detention
    That truth lives on among the people forever
    In the hearts of all fighters for truth and justice the world over

    ___
    2. Parts of this article have been published in the Standard (Kenya); and the Sunday Independent (South Africa).

    3. For more on Kamĩrĩthũ, see my books, Decolonizing the Mind and Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary.
    ___

    –Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

  • Mandela's Reflections: Malaysian Mandela

    At secondary school in Singapore in the mid-1980s, we read Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. One word I will always associate with that novel is shantytown. The teacher told the class that shantytowns “were sort of like our kampongs.” But I knew even then that a kampong was not the equivalent of a shantytown. Kampong is the Malay word for “village,” and it evokes the image of traditional wooden houses with atap roofs surrounded by coconut trees, now depicted in watercolor paintings and epochal postcards. The shantytowns of Paton’s novel, on the other hand, were makeshift shacks that black people had put up as a temporary solution to the housing shortage in Johannesburg. They were constructed out of metal sheets, cardboard, sacks, and other discarded materials. And they were disease-infested and crime-ridden.

    With the coming of Chinese and Indian migrant labor to Singapore when it was a British colony, kampongs mushroomed all over the island, each flaunting their own ethnic character. There were Malay, Chinese, and Indian kampongs, but they were not the result of forced racial segregation.

    I think I know what my teacher meant, though. To her, kampongs had that same run-down, squalid look of the shantytowns, not the look of modernity that the Housing Development Board of Singapore, postindependence, wanted to project with brand new high-rise residential flats. But unlike some of the white voices in Paton’s novel calling for South Africa to be divided into white and black areas, the Singapore government wanted to demolish the kampongs and relocate their residents to HDB flats where people of all ethnicities would live together.

    It was also around this time that I began to hear the word apartheid more frequently. Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment for his fight to end apartheid was very much in the news. The newsreels showed scenes of livid Mandela supporters in the streets, pounding the air with their raised, clenched fists demanding his release. Singapore, where the Chinese migrant population had become the majority, had had its fair share of racial riots in the 1950s and ’60s. So to see what would be a repeat of Singapore’s worst nightmare made me sit up and pay attention. Apartheid was a new word for newsreaders, and there was some confusion over the way it was pronounced. Aparthighed, aparthayed, a-par-tide, aparteed, apart-hate. Apa tight. But that did not influence my sense of the uniqueness of the term.

    Years later, Mandela took on a somewhat different significance, this time in neighboring Malaysia, a country where the ethnic mix was just like Singapore’s, except that in Malaysia the Malays were the majority, not the Chinese. Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, incarcerated on charges of sodomy and corruption, was being proclaimed the “Malaysian Mandela” after his release from prison in 2004.

    Was Anwar not embarrassed by the comparison? Mandela was in prison for twenty-seven years, Anwar six. Most embarrassing of all, Mandela’s struggle and sacrifice eventually led to the end of apartheid. But did Anwar’s jail term eventually lead to the reformed, corruption-free Malaysia he claimed he so desired, in which there were no longer racial policies designed to benefit his own community, the Malays? Did it lead to an operation similar to mani pulite in Italy, which exposed corruption in connection with the wealth of the ruling class?

    It is understandable why Anwar would be fashioned after Mandela. If a jailed activist can overthrow the government of his country, win the Nobel Peace Prize, and become premier of his nation, so can a Malaysian. Not just any Malaysian, perhaps, but Anwar Ibrahim. Moreover, “Malaysian Mandela” sounds much better and less resonant of a colonial mentality than “Malaysian Jimmy Carter.” Never mind that Mandela himself would have never called himself a “South African Anwar.”

    Once in a while, educated Malaysians of all ethnicities, many of them Anwar supporters, will say that racialism in Malaysia is “apartheid-like,” even though Malaysians, like Singaporeans, have never known what it means to not be able to vote because of their race or to live in segregated areas. They seem to have been unable to come up with a suitable word to describe the political and institutional racism of their country.

    What Nelson Mandela and the Afrikaans word most associated with him—apartheid—mean for Malaysia has, paradoxically, less to do with the nation’s race problem than with its lack of imagination as embodied in the personality cult effect of Anwar Ibrahim.

    Unhappy, the beloved country that steals a hero.

    -Masturah Alatas

  • 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