To Resist All Degradations & Divisions: An interview with S’bu Zikode

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To Resist All Degradations & Divisions
S’bu Zikode interviewed by Richard Pithouse

Tell me something about where you were born and who your family were.

I was born in a village called Loskop which is near the town called Estcourt. It is in the Natal Midlands. I was born in 1975. I have a twin sister, her name is Thoko. We are now the last born. I have two other sisters. I also had a brother who passed away so I am the only son.

And when we grew up, very early, at the age of 7 years, when Thoko and I started school, our parents separated. We grew up with mother who used to work as a domestic worker. She would mostly be at work and we would remain with her sister most of the days. We did not have mother close to us. She would come once a month. And then we grew from different hands. When we were doing primary school we went to more than four schools. My mother would be away and it would be hard for her to support us so we grew up with different families. They were all good to us.

When I look back I can see that that helped me a lot; learning at different schools, living with different relatives.

Where was your mother working?

In Estcourt, in town. From town to Loskop, today you are paying R9. The distance is 32 kilometres. She would come once a month.

That must have been very difficult for the children.

Ja, very difficult. Very difficult.

How was she treated by the people she worked for?

No, they were quite good people. Sometime we would visit her and I remember that they bought me a bike. They were good people. The problem is this system where so many women have no choice but to leave their homes and wash and clean for other families.

When I was older they also found me a job. When I was at school they found me a job too. I was working with their boys as well, in one of the bottle stores, pushing trolleys. They’d call me over the weekends and I’d do some temporary jobs.
But you were well looked after by the wider family.

Yes, and when I was doing Standard Three I joined Boy Scouts. I had the opportunity to go on camps and other trainings and I learned a lot about manhood. Scouting was about training future men, future citizens. I was lucky to be appointed as a leader and to have the opportunity to attend even more trainings. I remember one of the trainings that I attended in Pietermaritzburg, Lexden .

I went to Lexden as well!

Ey, you know! The Patrol Leaders’ Training Unit! There was a lot of growth and learning. It was winter time. I can remember very vividly, it was difficult. And you had to decide whether to continue with this or to resign from being a Boy Scout. I remember when I returned back to the school and reported to the principal, because I would report directly to the principal who knew more about Scouts, he laughed a lot and I knew that he knew exactly what was going to happen. He asked me if I would still continue and I said ‘Ja’. A lot of lessons I learnt from there, from the hardship. It was preparing me for the worst to come and I have seen it in recent years. I am sure that I was shaped and made to be able to face the challenges that we are now facing.

But it wasn’t just the hardship at Lexden. It was also the focus on responsibility and involvement in the community. I remember the Scout Motto: ‘Be Prepared’.

And there was also a Scout Promise; that you promise to do your duty to God and to your country, to help other people at all times and to obey the Scout’s Law. I was still young and fresh at that time. I learnt the Scout’s Law. A Scout’s honour is to be trusted, a Scout is loyal, a Scout’s duty is to be useful and to help others, a Scout is a friend to all and a brother to every other Scout, a Scout tries his best to do at least one good turn to somebody every day.

The things that I do today, for me are something that grew up in myself; my understanding of society, the social context, what the expectations are and what kind of society we are looking for.

So there was no politics but leadership was in my veins. Even at the high school level I was invited to start a Scout’s movement at my school, which I did because I was growing with other boys, and then there was also a demand from the girls to start their movement. I only met the Girl Guides at the jamboree. The jamboree is a big event that brings all the Scouts and Guides together. It is one the happiest days of your life as a young person to get to meet all different people from different spaces. It’s like the WSF ....(laughing).

The Jamboree took place in Howick, at the Midmar dam. It was mostly outdoor activities and this is how I became interested in the outdoor environment. There was a lot about how the environment is a heritage to the cherished and protected - to be enriched by our future generation - and I became very interested in plants and animals.

After the jamboree we sought the assistance from other schools to form the Girl Guides. We had seen all these boys working together, learning skills that were unknown in the community and the girls demanded the same. They had seen their brothers growing and wanted the same pride. It really shaped me a lot.
At the high school level I became more interested in ideas. I found that I could grasp things quickly and easily, especially in English and History. The teachers would often ask me to read ahead to prepare the lesson. I remember vividly how I was asked to learn about the Voortrekkers – how I learnt that to the dictionary. I had to analyse the meaning of each word all by myself ahead of others. I remember how I had to start by cutting this word Voortrekkers and to understand the word ‘voor’ and then ‘trekkers’. Doing all these analysis it slowly became clear that we were learning about the Boers who travelled or came first in Natal. But, still, I was lucky to be given this opportunity because I learnt how to analyse things on my own and then to share the ideas. History was really about remembering dates and I found that I had a good memory.

Things were positive. I was still too young to understand the outside politics, even the family related stuff, what problems were at home. And I was fortunate in being able to finish high school, from Standard Six right through to Matric, in one high school. But in the primary school it was really difficult being circled in one family.

When you were growing up in Estcourt it was the time of the transition with Mandela being released and the ANC being unbanned. Did you think about politics much or was there much politics happening around you?

There was a lot of fighting, heavy fights. I remember my friend was shot just in front of me when we were together in a rural farm - you know these plantations where crops such as mealies get planted and grow very high with grass in times like autumn. In summer, as the grass began to grow very high, there was this fighting and shooting. Sometimes the army would boost the other side. In politics and fighting I was not involved but in the area where I stayed there was a strong presence of Inkatha. And in the Zulu tradition we believe that you do not run away in times of war. This was also the culture of Inkatha. So when there is a gunshot they would quickly mobilise and everyone goes - every man and every boy. It’s compulsory. You were not asked whether you joined the party or not but you had to defend your vicinity, your surroundings. So we were involved in that way knowing that the fight was between Inkatha and the ANC. Mostly from the ANC side there would be soldiers hiding, and also shooting. You would think that you’d be fighting the other side only to find that you are fighting the army because the army would also be taking sides. They made it clear that they were not there to make peace. So, I mean, I was involved in that battle in the real fighting, in the life and blood of that time. The only way to free oneself was that one would hide when one gets shot. When someone needed an ambulance you could quickly assume that responsibility of facilitating first aid and calling or waiting for the ambulance to come. That could be a way out of the battle.

At school there wasn’t much politics but I used to take part in the debates. Formal debates were mostly on politics but the idea was to learn to speak English - that was the whole point. But obviously the speeches that we wrote - I remember that we often learnt more from Lucky Dube, from Mzwakhe Mbuli, and so a lot of our quotes were generated from their music and poetry. It had a lot of politic. Although we were still young to understand the outside world a clear message would come. There was also the study of Ubuntu . It was learnt at school at that time. But when we fought, when were involved in the fight, our lives were completely independent from politics.

Scouting was also a completely non-political movement, although there were a lot of accusations from outside. People were calling us Gatsha’s sons because you wear this khaki uniform which was nearly the same as the IFP uniform at that time. But we did not balk because we had nothing to do with that.

A year later when I finished school the fight was also involved at my school. I remember that some of my friends had to pull out of school because of the fighting. But in my day it didn’t reach the schools. We also felt that politics was outside the school, it was something that was difficult to understand. I remember the content of the debates; the concepts and arguments were shaped by that. But we were more judged by the fluency of the language.

But we would fight the battles that we didn’t understand. The mobilization tactics that were used, by the nature of being Zulu you were forced to join Inkatha. I do not remember any membership cards or even how they looked like but you would never be asked. You would be forced to come out and fight. We didn’t know what we were fighting. Many people were killed at that stage. At that stage we attended a lot of funerals. In our culture we were not supposed to be attending funerals as children but it became a normal thing to attend funerals. If you didn’t attend those funerals you would be accused of siding with the other party - with the ANC. It was just a difficult and confusing situation. I mean we were still very young to understand. I strongly feel that a lot of people died for no course, they did not know what they were fighting for, except that they were forced to go to war bare handed - no strategy, no politic, no ideas, no education. I strongly feel a lot of innocent died for nothing.

I remember that you once said to me that that some of our politicians, people on both sides of the ANC and IFP divide, can only understand politics in terms of killing. The history of all this killing is usually told in a very simple way with all the good people in the ANC and all the bad people in the IFP – but there were warlords on both sides.

I remember even the terminology of Scouting, how it was used in the fighting. There would be a group of volunteers, amongst a group of men, who would volunteer to launch an aggressive attack and the terminology that was used was that they were scouts. And then we’d know for sure that the next day there would be mourning and blood, there would be dead bodies. My understanding was that to be well known, to be well respected as a person who is fighting, who is struggling for the country, you had got to kill. It was not only that you had to defend your community – you also had to be aggressive, to launch some attacks on the other side. You become known like that, you become respected.

The other dirty thing that used to happen, that used to influence the whole thing, was that if you are a school boy you would be perceived as an ANC member. So to be well recognised and well respected you must not got to school, you must not have a bath, you must not be involved with water, and you must not be smart. You must become a nasty and clumsy person. I don’t know where this idea came from but a lot of smart people with tranquillity were killed not because they were members of the ANC but because they looked good, because they looked different from the others, the ones doing the fighting. From that time it was when I began to think that this was just about killing. The only reality is that people were dying. People did not know what they were dying for, what they were fighting for or what they were killing for. Even elderly people in the struggle did not understand politics. If such people were to be interviewed now I’m not sure if they could say clearly what they were dying for, being killed for.
As Zulus we were encouraged not to hide, not to run away. Instead we must face the war. What became clear was that the IFP did not have guns. Most people who had guns were ANC members. With shields and sticks it was quite difficult to fight people with guns.

I’ve talked so much about the IFP because I was in Loskop, a stronghold of the IFP. I remember also going to Wembezi, a township in Estcourt, and a lot of people were shot in our presence.

I know that a similar strategy was used on the other side. A group of people would be trained to attack. You know those massacres that are often referred to - they were part of a well planned fight. But this fight also killed innocent people and those that were killed did not know what they were killed for. Once a son was suspected to have been involved he was killed – being suspected was what you died for. That was the horrible situation. I cannot imagine how some of the people who are now in government, with blood in their hands, have never regretted.

As Zulu people you were mostly respected for being a good fighter. It was the whole initial tradition – that being a good fighter gives you respect. As a good fighter you would be given a position as a commander of an aggressive group – that was the whole idea. When there were these mass attacks it was always organised. When there were funerals, where there were services, prayers, or any other traditional gatherings - a lot of people together - they were just seen as an opportunity to kill people. What counts is how many people were killed. That was the whole idea. When people praised themselves they talked about how many people they had killed, not about why they were killing, not about any politics.

Because of the South African history you still ask yourself if people in power are now matured to really understand politics. They assume that if we don’t have similar ideas to them that automatically make us enemies. I doubt if people are yet in the position of understanding politics. If you do not agree with my ideas then you must die. I am sure that it is going to take time for people to understand that politics is about ideas, about discussion, should be about love and passion for one’s country, so any tactic should be about how to serve the world better, how to win minds and heart of the majority. It is going to take even longer for people to understand that those debates should be open to everyone, that a real politics is not about how many people you are willing to arrest, threaten or kill; that a real politics is not a fight to be able to abuse state power but that a real politics is in fact about how many people you are willing to listen to and to serve – and to listen to them and to serve them as it pleases them, not yourself.

When did you first come to Durban?

I began matric in 1996 and that was also the year that I first came to Durban. During the weekends and when the schools were closed I stayed with my brother-in-law in Moore Road, in Glenwood. There’s a flat behind Berea Centre, 264, it’s called Cardigan Mansions. He was paid well. He was working as a mechanic. I worked temporary in Victoria Street in one of the stores that sells clothing, its called Smileson’s. And I worked for City Girl’s stores in Greyville, in Game City Centre. I spent a lot of years working for City Girl stores.

How was it to be in Durban compared to Loskop?

Ja, it was peaceful. I was living in this rich area, Glenwood. It was different. From work I’d go directly to the flat. I had no friends in Durban. As such life isolated me away from ordinary people a lot of thinking began. I began to realise how poor I was.

And university?

Well I finished my matric that year and I did well, but not as well as had been expected. There had been a lot of hope for me at the school but, you know, as you grow you begin to reflect back on things, you come to be aware of a lot of things. When you begin to reflect on the environment a lot of things begin to disturb you, to disturb your intelligence. It was also the time when I realised how I had survived the very trying circumstances over the past few years.

And obviously there was never any guidance at school so it was very difficult to proceed with tertiary education. But the following year I was fortunate to be admitted at the former UDW, the University of Durban-Westville as it used to be called. I enrolled for law. All I wanted was to become a lawyer.

Why Law?

In school a lot was said about teaching and being a policeman for the boys and a nurse for the girls. Those were the only chances and that is why we have a lot of teaches nurses, and policemen. I was encouraged at school to be a teacher but I decided to differ.

What was it like to be student?

I was not under any parental care so it was difficult. When I arrived here I had no friends. It was hard to imagine how life could be so difficult. My brother-in-law gave me a place to stay but obviously I was not his burden so I could just appreciate his accommodation. My studies were a separate deal that was beyond his burden.

I was very lonely. It was not interesting at all because I was still new in the institution without knowing anybody. It was difficult to get used to the institution and I was a very shy person; in fact when I grew up I never used to talk. Through the Scouting thing then I began to slowly become more confident. Even people who sometimes see me on the TV often don’t believe it, that that man used to be so quiet in the class and now he can talk everywhere.

When I saw the challenges of being grown up that’s when I began to realise that in fact school days were the happiest days of my life. I didn’t want to stress people. I had to find ways of surviving. With school it was completely different. Now I had to study and I had to think of all of this, financing my studies, accommodation, and food. And so I had to withdraw from the university and continue working as a security guard.

In 1997 a teacher went on maternity leave at my school and they wanted me to stand in. They wanted me because the well respected Circuit Inspector had promised me after coming back from Lexden that should I fail to proceed with tertiary education he would find me a school to teach. This was public commitment and promise in a gathering full of teachers, parents and scholars. I was highly congratulated for this personal commitment of a Circuit Inspector. They looked all over for me but by the time they found me it was too late – and so I carried on working as a security guard. I was all by myself.

Being a security guard, how was that?

No, that was terrible. I was still young. The people that I was working for were robbing me, sometimes they wouldn’t pay me. I was like earning R500 a month, sometimes this guy would give me R300. I was just well grown up, having dropped from school and then being treated like that. It was difficult but of course when I found this job at the petrol station it was much better. So even today I listen when Mashumi shares his stories of being a security guard.

Was the work dangerous?

It was. It was, ja. There were organised groups, like shoplifters, in town. They would go into the store together. One of them would keep you busy and the others would start stealing. Some of those shops, like City Girl, would have this alarm, so I would just stand by the door and watch people passing because each garment would have this alarm. That was much better. After the security job I was employed at the petrol station.

And working at the petrol station?

Well in 1997 I met Sindy. We were working together at the petrol station. She had good parents. Her mother is still working here at Tollgate, in Manor Gardens. She is working for nice people. In Sindy’s family there are ten of them, eights girls with two brothers. She was staying with her mother there in Tollgate and came to work in Springfield Park. She had also finished her matric and then had to find a job. With us, in our growth, the most important thing was to finish matric then the other stuff, well, that would be an additional luck.

When did you come to the Kennedy Road settlement?

Before I came to the settlement I lived in Umlazi. It was difficult to travel with trains. And, also, I had no friends there. It was difficult, it was difficult. The in 1999 I started living here in Elf Place. Because I was working at the Springfield Park Service Station station, it is just here, opposite Makro. But I couldn’t pay my rent. I would just work for the rent. You don’t get paid much at the petrol station. As a patrol attendant you earn like R200 a week.

Then I was promoted to cashier and then they started teaching me computer at the back office. That’s how things moved. After five years we moved to the PetroPort, in Queen Nandi Drive which is on the N2 Freeway, just before the Gateway Shopping Mall.

What was it like when you first came to the settlement?

Well when I was still attending at the UDW and passing the shacks I hadn’t known what the shacks were looking like so I couldn’t believe it. Later when I was working at the petrol station and living here in Elf Place it was easy to use the spaza shop here in the settlement and life was quite good. Obviously I could feel shame that people were living this life because I did not believe that one day I would be living here. It was tough. But coming here to use the shops I began to meet people and then as the rent was going high we started talking to people and I found a place to rent here.

I remember that we started renting here at R80, it was R80! (Laughs) In Elf place the rent was R600 a month and we had to share the rent with other people living there. We ended up having to pay R200 a month. So this was much better. We had our own place and we could even save some money. When we came here we were much relieved. Life was much better because we could live close to work and schools at an affordable cost.

But I told myself that this was not yet an acceptable life. Although I didn’t know politics that much I felt that the community did not do enough to struggle for housing, for toilets, enough water. It was not acceptable for human beings to live like that and so I committed myself to change things.
What kind of organisation was there in Kennedy Road at that time?

Well the chairperson at that time was Jarphas Ndlovu. He had been chairperson for like 6 years. There were no elections.

Meetings would be called and one or two people would be known to be the committee but one man would do everything – that’s how it used to work. Only one man was respected in the community. Everything had to be reported to him. There was no committee meeting. Community meetings would sometimes be called but not committee meetings. I involved myself and attended these meetings but only to find that only one man was talking and that people were failing to cope with the politics and development issues that were being spoken about. They were not given the information that you need to participate. Even the committee, if they would go meet with City they would just stand outside, while he was inside. He would also meet with the ratepayer’s association on his own. He had some shops, and he rented out some shacks. People feared him. You know that old tradition of the Indunas. There is a kind of respect but it is not a democratic respect.

I realised that if the community was going to be able to participate in their own development then we would have to create a democracy in the settlement, to elect a committee. It made no sense that we were voting for politicians to sit in parliament but in our own communities we still had to listen to Indunas.

What was the political affiliation of the Induna?

He was an IFP. But the settlement was always made by different groups of people.

It was difficult to get rid of the old leadership. We mobilised the young people. We started with youth activities, like clean up campaigns, and then when the people were mobilised we struggled to force that there must be elections, that there must be democracy.

How did people respond?

They were well relieved. After that first democratic election, it was in 2000, we restructured everything in terms of democracy. We had a lot of discussions about democracy.

Was that when you were first elected as chairperson?

Yes.

How old where you?

I was still young. 25.

And what was your political affiliation?

When I came here I was not interested in party politics. I had begun to hate party politics from what I had learnt from the IFP while I was still at home. For me politics was a dirty game. And there wasn’t really much interest in politics in the settlement. Most people just saw it as this dirty game.

But these guys from outside, led by Mabeneza, started to come to the settlement, to organise meetings, campaigning for the ANC. That’s when I became interested because of the way that they were engaging and approaching the young people. They were saying that we could mobilise ourselves for a better life. We had all seen the transition to democracy at the national level. The ANC was the party of Mandela. But at the local level what I liked was what I hadn’t had since my school days – an opportunity to meet other young people and to engage. And it was also a platform to engage on political matters which was an opportunity to work for the changes that I was looking for.

And seeing that the ANC was in government I thought that it could be an easy tool to transform this community. I thought that the ANC would be a platform for the shack dwellers and that it would be able to deliver.

As residents of the informal settlements, we were considered as temporal communities. There was an inference that we were not entitled to full citizenship in this area. We thought that all we had to do to secure our place here, here in the city, was to take the initiative to support the ANC.

So in 2002 I joined the ANC and was elected to the Branch Executive Committee (BEC). The following year I became the Deputy Chairperson of the ANC branch in Ward 25.

For some years I was in the BEC. The reality is that we did not understand politics. Baig was brought in from the outside, imposed from the top. He was not known to the community. But because he was an ANC we did not question that. We did not question the wisdom of the party and so we did not worry about it that much although it was clear that there wasn’t any fairness, any democracy.

This wasn’t like Inkatha when I was growing. I wasn’t made to do it. I was very active. I did it because I had my own ideas, because I thought that we should mobilise the people for a better life. But I was mobilising for the party and we made compromises for the party. Of course we discovered that mobilising for the people and mobilising for the party is not the same thing.

How did the break with the ANC come about?

Well a lot was happening. Former housing minister Dumisani Makhaye introduced the Slums Clearance programme with a budget of R200 million. A Slums Clearance committee was set up in partnership with the eThekwini Municipality, it included a number of wards. I was also elected to that committee. Kennedy Road was one of the communities that was meant to benefit from this programme. There was a settlement down there by the bridge, it was called eVukani. Those people were moved to Welbedacht. Some of the people from the Quarry Road settlement were moved to Parkgate. I remember taking a tour to Parkgate with the Slums Clearance committee. It was before the houses were built there, it was still sugarcane.

That is when I became conscious, that is when I became a conscious activist. I remember when we were getting into this microbus from the metro with nice air conditioning. I remember how we were told to get into those kombis but not told where we were going. I remember as we went past all those bridges that you pass as you leave the city. The further away we moved the more worried I was. We had been very excited but the comrades all became quite as we went further and further away from the city. We became very shocked. Then we arrived at a farm and we were told that this would be where our houses would be built.

Even today I do not understand the link between the BEC of the ANC and the development that took place. These projects had never been discussed with the BEC. Even when the minister announced the Slum Clearance programme it had never been discussed at the branch level. It was a top down system, a completely top down system. For this reason I continue to question the relevance of the BEC. I continue to see it as nothing but a way for the party leaders to control the people. The only job of the BECs is to keep branches vibrant for elections. They are not there to bring about development, they are not there for any political education or political discussion. They are not there to take the views of the people up. Rather they are there for people to be enslaved and to remain slaves for the benefit of those that have been ruthless enough to rise up.

All of us in that committee had hope. We had a good heart to see change in our communities. But we did not know how politics worked. The first problem was that we had been promised that Kennedy Road would benefit but when it didn’t it was hard to question that within the ANC structures.

When the promises became lies we felt that we had been used – just used to keep the people loyal while they were being betrayed. We had been used so that the people in power could fulfil their own ambitions, their own project. We were used as ladders so that they could climb up over the people to their positions. They way the system works makes it impossible for people to call their leaders into account. The resources are there but the system allows leaders to only think for themselves. There is no mechanism for accountability. There is always budget for elite projects but each and every year nothing is spoken about how to achieve real change for ordinary people.

When did you become a police reservist?

When I was working at the petrol station. I was ordered to work at least eight hours a month and to attend some police courses at the Edgewood College. I did a lot of volunteer work in the charge office there. I worked for, like five years, as a reservist. This was part of the decision I had made to fulfil my duty to my country.

I was forced to this. It was not that I liked to be a policeman. I was still new at the settlement and I arrived at the charge office and saw a women crying. She had a baby on her back. I asked her why she was weeping outside and she said that she had been chased out because she couldn’t speak English. I asked her to come inside with me and I translated. I was touched and angry - worried about how many poor people like her would not be assisted because they could not speak English. That’s when I took the decision to become a reservist. I thought that with my English I could ensure that people would have their dignity respected.

It wasn’t easy. There were interviews and tests. But when I finished it all I was never given a chance to learn at the charge office. I was just made to cook for the prisoners and to dish out for them. I was annoyed. I became to be suspicious and conscious about what was happening at the police station. The Superintendent wasn’t Nayager at that time – it was Senior Superintendent Marais.

I remember our first march on the police station – it was in 2005, that march where we were saying ‘release them all or arrest us all’. Superintendent Marais met with Baba Duma, Chazumzi – I still have minutes of that meeting. Shortly after that march Marais left and Nayager came.

Was the racism the same?

Oh yes. It wasn’t just the senior officers. The racism was just a normal thing. It was an Indian police station – not a police station for everyone. As an African you were treated like a servant, like dirt. I could not stand it. I made a small contribution where I could. Because, you know, people are victimised and go to that police station and are just further victimised by this racism at the hands of the law. When I could I helped people but I could not transform the station. I was a victim there myself. It was quite difficult. I resigned from the police force in 2004 because of the racism. It blocked every possibility for bringing about some little progress. The only time that I ever got to do anything there beyond being a servant was during weekends where there was family violence or students having parties, any kind of noise or fight. I would be deployed to deal with drunkard Africans. It was believed that they would understand me better than any Indian police men.

But, you know, those experiences did help me.

So, given that you’d been a police reservist, and that you were on the BEC of the local ANC did the road blockade in 2005 come as a surprise?

No, it wasn’t a surprise. The Kennedy Road Development Committee (KRDC) shaped this. In 2004 the KRDC declared that 2005 would be the year of action. We said that we were tired of this, tired of all of the lies and deeply disappointed with the previous engagement with the City. We would not compromise our future because of our loyalty to the ANC. So the road blockade was not a surprise but what did become a surprise was to see a protest becoming a movement, to see other settlements joining us.

In 2004 there were road blockades and protests all over the country and these protests became even more common in 2005. Were people in Kennedy Road inspired by what they saw in the media?

In my personal experience no. It really came from a very personal experience of betrayal. But I always asked myself how it was that 2005 became a national year of action. I am not too sure with others but for me it was not that one read about other road blockades and became motivated. The anger here in Kennedy Road was growing and growing – it could have gone in many directions but people decided to block the road.

How was the day of the road blockade?

It was good. We were all so full of anger that there was no regret. It was difficult to turn against our comrades in the ANC but we weren’t attacking them personally. We wanted to make them aware that all these meetings of the ANC - the BEC meetings, the Branch General Meetings, they were all a waste of time. In fact they were further oppressing us in a number of ways. They were just there to keep the ball rolling up until the next election. Our job as local leaders was just to mobilise people for the ANC.

It had become clear that the only space for the poor in the ANC was as voters – there was no politics of the poor in the ANC. The road blockade was the beginning of a politics of the poor.

As you know I first came to Kennedy Road the day after the road blockade. People had just tried to march on the police station and had been beaten back. The settlement was occupied by the police and there was a very strong sense of people being on their own. That must have been a heavy weight to carry.

Ja, definitely. That was not easy. But we had to stand firm. That was the reality.

I had no idea that a movement would be formed, no idea. And I didn’t know what form would be taken by the politics of the poor that became possible after the road blockade. I didn’t know what impact it would have. That is why it is quite difficult when I get interviewed. Most people think that this was planned – that a group of people sat down and decided to establish a movement. You know, how the NGOs work.

There has been a lot of analysis and interpretation of the movement – sometimes we read it in papers. But all we knew was that we had decided to make the break. To accept that we were on our own and to insist that the people could not be ladders any more; that the new politics had to be led by poor people and to be for poor people; that nothing could be decided for us without us. The road blockade was the start. We didn’t know what would come next. After the blockade we discussed things and then we decided on a second step. That’s how it went, that’s how it grew. We learnt as we went. It is still like that now. We discuss things until we have decided on the next step and then we take it. Personally I have learnt a lot.

There was a tremendous collective excitement and pride in the beginning. Did you share that? Or were you, as a leader, under too much pressure?

Ja, although I was very angry with everything from a political point of view, very angry with the way the ANC was treating the people, very angry with their policies, I felt very confident when we began to rebel. I found my inner peace. The real danger when things go wrong like this is being silence. When you voice out, cough it out then you can heal. You can find this faith in yourself. There is all this frustration and humiliation. Humiliation from the way you are forced to live and humiliation from the way you are treated. When it is expressed it is like taking out a poison. You become free to act and you become angry and that anger is the source of an incredible energy.

So even though we didn’t have the houses we had found our voice. We didn’t have all the answers. But the fact that we had built this platform, that on its own was a very remarkable progress.

Was it difficult to move from being one settlement in rebellion to linking up with other settlements and building a movement?

No, it wasn’t difficult to link up with other settlements. From my experience in the ANC, and on the BEC, I knew people in the other settlements, and we were all having similar problems so it was actually easy to build up this movement.
You had worked with the ANC, the BEC and their councillors.

Now you were leading marches at which the councillors were being symbolically buried. Was that difficult? Were you under a lot of pressure?

Not really. Of course things were said and threats were made but I was very confident because I knew that I was now fighting for what I strongly believed was right. And of course we were not alone. When you are thousands you are not intimidated. So, iregardless of politics, of who said what, we just carried on. And for me personally I had nothing to lose. My involvement with the ANC, my position on the BEC, had done nothing for the people. In the party you make compromises for some bigger picture but in the end all what is real is the suffering of the people right in front of you. In fact it had become a shame. To say that ‘enough is enough’ is to walk away from that shame. Instead of the party telling the community what to do the community was now deciding what to do on its own.

The only pressure came when people were arrested. And in the first arrest there were two teenagers amongst the 14 that were taken to Westville Prison so there was also pressure from the parents.

Today you have over ten thousand paid up members and many more supporters. When the decision was taken to form the movement, that was on the 6th of October 2005, just after the Quarry Road march, did you have any sense of what they movement would become?

No, not that much. But what I knew, what I was aware of, was that the coming together of these settlements would turn us into a collective force. That it would strengthen the rebellion that was started in Kennedy Road. I didn’t have a picture of how the movement is now. But I understood what democracy should be about and that our voice would become more louder the more we are. I knew that it would become a heavy political force.

There has been a lot of academic speculation, much of not researched at all, about where the politics of Abahlalism comes from. Some people have said it comes from the popular struggles of the 1980s with their stress on bottom up democratic practice, others have said that it comes from the churches with their stress on the dignity of each person, others have said that it is something completely new. Where do you think that it comes from?

When things go wrong silence speaks volumes. Silence is the voice of the defeated, people whose spirits have been vandalized. It is a big danger to be silence in times of trying circumstances. Condemning injustice, calling it by its real names, and doing this together; that on its own does a lot. That on its own is a kind of change, a lot of change.

The movement comes from recognition of this danger in conjunction with our cultural beliefs. It is a common sense that everyone is equal, that everyone matters, that the world must be shared.

My understanding is that this common sense comes from the very new spirit of ubuntu, from the spirit of humanity, from the understanding of what is required for a proper respect of each person’s dignity, of what they are required to do.

Our movement is formed by different people, all poor people but some with different beliefs, different religious backgrounds. But the reality is that most people start with the belief that we are all created in the image of God, and that was the earliest understanding of the spirit of humanity in the movement. Here in the settlements we come from many places, we speak many languages. Therefore we are forced to ensure that the spirit of humanity is for everyone. We are forced to ensure that it is universal. There are all kinds of unfamiliar words that some of us are now using to explain this but it is actually very simple.

From this it follows that we can not allow division, degradation – any form that keeps us apart. On this point we have to be completely inflexible. On this point we do not negotiate. If we give up this point we will have given up on our movement.

It is not always clear what that should be done. We are not always strong enough to achieve all of our demands. This is one reason why we are sometimes quite flexible in our tactics. Sometimes we are blockading roads, sometimes we are connecting people to water and electricity, sometimes we are forcing the government to negotiate directly with us instead of the councillors, sometimes we are at court having to ask a judge to recognise our humanity.

The collective culture that we have built within the movement, that pride of belonging to this collective force that was not spoken about before, becomes a new concept, a new belief - especially as Abahlali in its own nature, on its own, is different to other politics. It requires a different style of membership and leadership. It requires a lot of thinking, not only on what is read, but on what is common to all the areas. Therefore learning Abahlalism demands, in its nature, the form that it takes. It doesn’t require one to adopt some ideas and approach from outside. When you pull all the different people together and make sure that everyone fits in, that it is everyone’s home, that’s when it requires a different approach from normal kinds of politics and leadership. By the nature of its demand it requires a direct flexibility of thinking, able to deal with its uniqueness. It gives us the strength to support each other, to keep thinking together, to keep fighting together.

From what I have seen Abahlali is original but it is also natural – it gets generated from different people, with different ideas, who have grown up in different places, in different levels of space. Putting all this together requires its own genius. It’s not the same like other movements that take their mandate and understanding from ordinary politics.

It requires learning the demands that come from all the areas – its nature demands the form that the movement takes. It doesn’t require one adopting some other ideas and approach from outside. Then when you pull all the demands together and try and make sure that the movement is everyone’s home it requires a different approach from normal kinds of politics. By the nature of its demand it requires a direct flexibility to be able to deal with its uniqueness. The movement is not like an NGO or a political party where some few people, some experts in politics, sit down and decide how other people should be organised, what they should demand and how.
Other movements take their mandate, or their understanding, from what has been read. We did not start with a plan – the movement has always been shaped by the daily activities of the people that make it, by their daily thinking, by their daily influence. This togetherness is what has shaped the movement.

I am not too sure where our ideas would come from if there was no daily lives of people, a living movement can only be shaped by the daily lives of its members. I strongly believe that. This is where we formulate our debates and then our demands. We are going to court on Tuesday – winning or losing will affect how we go forward. It is the environment that we breathe in that shapes how we carry our politics forward. But it is who we are, human beings oppressed by other human beings, that directs our politics.

My next question was going to be: “What is your understanding of a living politics?” but I think that perhaps you’ve just answered that.

No, that is a simple one because we are all human beings and so our needs are all, one way or the other, similar. A living politics is not a politics that requires a formal education – a living politics is a politics that is easily understood because it arises from our daily lives and the daily challenges we face. It is a politics that every ordinary person can understand. It is a politics that knows that we have no water but that in fact we all deserve water. It is a politics that everyone must have electricity because it is required by our lives. That understanding – that there are no toilets but that in fact there should be toilets - is a living politics. It is not complicated; it does not require big books to find the information. It doesn’t have a hidden agenda – it is a politics of living that is just founded only on the nature of living. Every person can understand these kinds of demands and every person has to recognise that these demands are legitimate.

Of course sometimes we need formal expertise – we might need a lawyer if we have an eviction case, or a policy expert if we are negotiating with government. But then we only work with these people when they freely understand that their role is to become part of our living politics. They might bring a skill but the way forward, how we use that skill, if we use that skill, well, that comes out of a meeting, a meeting of the movement. By insisting on this we have found the right people to work with.

You’ve also spoken about a living communism before. Can you tell me what you meant by that?

For me understanding communism starts with understanding community. You have to start with the situation of the community, the culture of the community. Once you understand the complete needs of the community you can develop demands that are fair to anyone; to everyone. Everyone must have equal treatment. And obviously all what needs to be shaped in the society must be shaped equally and fairly. And of course if everyone is able to shape the world, and if we should shape it fairly, that means that the world must be shared. That is my understanding. It means one community, one demand.

To be more simple a living communism is a living idea and a living practice of ordinary people. The idea is the full and real equality of everyone without exception. The practice, well, a community must collectively own or forcefully take collective ownership of natural resources - especially the water supply, land and food. Every community is rightfully entitled to these resources. After that we can think about the next steps. We are already taking electricity, building and running crèches, insisting that our children can access the schools. We just need to keep going.

Again I do not think we should be thinking away from ordinary people, having to learn complicated new ideas and ways of speaking. Instead we should approach the very ordinary people that are so often accused of lacking ideas, those who must always be taught or given a political direction. We need to ask these people a simple question: ‘What is needed for your life, for your safety, for your dignity?’. That simple question asked to ordinary people, well, it is a kind of social explosion. From that explosion your programme just develops on its own.

Of course a struggle always starts in one place, amongst people dealing with one part of the human reality. Maybe they are, like us, living like pigs in the mud, strange pigs that are also supposed to survive constant fires. Or maybe they are being taken to Lindela or maybe they are being attacked from the sky, being bombed. You have to start with what is being done to you, with what is being denied to you.

But for me communism means a complete community. It does not mean a community that is complete because everyone in it thinks the same or because one kind of division has been overcome. It means a complete community that is complete because no one is excluded – a community that is open to all. It means a very active and proactive community – a community that thinks and debates and demands. It is the universal spirit of humanity. Obviously this starts with one human life. We know that if we do not value every human life then we would be deceiving ourselves if we say that there is a community at all.

We are communists here in the mud and fire but we are not communists because of the mud and fire. We are communists because we are human beings in the mud and fire. We are communists because we have decided to take our humanity seriously and to resist all degradations and divisions.

You have suffered in this struggle. You have lost your job, you’ve been arrested, slandered, beaten. Why do you think that the state reacted so badly to the emergence of Abahlali baseMjondolo?

I think that it is because the system is such that it makes it impossible for equality. It makes sure that it divides in order to retain the status quo. It has created its own empire for its own people that matter to it, that are accountable to it. The system itself makes other people to be less, to be not important, not to matter.

What I was trying to do was to invade their territory and to show that we all have the power to do it.

It is a capitalist system and it is also a political system in which the few dominate the many. So it has to make certain people better than others, to be privileged over others. If you want to join the winning team then you have to fight. And it’s not easy. They want us to think that we can never beat them and that the only hope is to join them. But the system makes these different layers and it makes it very difficult, almost completely impossible for a certain layer to penetrate. That’s where the issue of blood and death first comes in. This is a very strong empire.

If you decide not to join the winning team, if as a poor person you decide to change the whole game, well, then you are invading their territory, territory that is too good for you. They will first ask ‘Who the hell are you?’. That is always the first question – from the councillors, the police offers, the officials, the politicians, everyone. And if you have an answer, well, sometimes intelligence is not enough. Blood and death come in again. And when you are challenging the system rather than trying to get inside it there are still these layers. Even if you pass the first layer it will ensure that you do not reach the next layer where clever people belong, people who count. If you are born poor it is taken that you are born stupid. But if you invade their territory you don’t find clever people. You find that it is greedy people and ruthless people who seem to count. You find that they want to control the world. They will defend their greed. I am very clear that if you try to pass into the forbidden territory you will have to pass certain tests, certain difficulties.

I always wonder how the system can divide people. I always say that the strongest thing that the system can do is to be able to divide people which is why we all struggle in our own confined dark corners, separated from one another. At the end of the day we are the majority, not the system. But it is such that it manages to divide us, to divide our struggles. This is why the big question that most people ask is ‘how few hands can remote so many people?’. Those few people in the system are able to remote the world. How do they do this? How can hundreds of people remote millions? The answer is the division of our struggles. That is why I understand why Kennedy was such a big threat. The collectivity that we built, first within Kennedy, and then between the settlements that formed the movement; on its own it is a threat to the system.

When I was growing up it was the Cold War. Although I did not understand it properly then this struggle for global supremacy affected individuals, people’s neighbours, families. Moscow was struggling for power with Washington and children were fighting and dying in Loskop.

It is interesting that we send comrades to this WSF with a clear message that another world is necessary, necessary as a matter of urgency. We hear that everyone agrees that another world is possible. This is good but that no one has ever asked when this will happen, when we will all take a collective step towards this change.

I am not too sure at what stage our own intellectuals will understand the system and why ordinary people still don’t have a way of changing the society. I still wonder at what stage a new communism will become necessary. I don’t know when it will become clear that poor people themselves can and must come up with a new living, an autonomous life, a completely independent stance where a new order would be about alternative ways of living and working instead of trying to compete with each other or limiting our demands to the return of what is already stolen. But it is possible. Already the struggles of the poor have created a situation where everything is done in the name of the poor. The state, the NGOs, academics, the churches, the World Bank all of them are saying that what they are doing they are doing for the poor. Now that the poor themselves are saying ‘not in our name’, now that we are saying that we will do things for ourselves, that we will think and speak for ourselves and that we will keep going until we find our own way out and a new society is born we have opened a real space for discussion. Our first duty is to keep this space wide open. Our second duty is to encourage as many people as possible to take their place in this new space.

But it is interesting that some people are already living according to the values of the new society where one person cannot eat up while other people’s children have not eaten. Some people, like Mr. Jagarnath in Reservoir Hills, is already doing this as a business man.

Intellectuals are also called upon to serve our little world. It is difficult to analyse and change the world, to change its format, to turn it upside down. I always remember Bishop Rubin Philip’s speech when he said that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. It is easy to say it, and it’s acceptable to most people, but it’s not easy to make it real. But to be realistic we must start from where we are, with what we have, from our families, by teaching our children, and then to our schools, to our little neighbourhoods and communities before we say anything at the world level like the WSF. We must not fool ourselves and produce ideas that are not grounded in any soil.

Its one thing to explain why the state reacted so badly to Abahlali but why do you think that some NGOs reacted so badly? Was that a shock?

It was a shock but for me it was a learning. I have learnt that your enemy will not only be the state. We found a situation where people that we expected to be comrades were turning on us. But I began to understand why. When you talk of capitalism it is really not only the state. It is obviously a system, it’s a system that creates its own empires. These spaces may say that they are on the side of the poor but they accept the rules of the state. They also accept the basic logic of capitalism because they are spaces that are accountable to their own interests and that protect their own interests.

So in the NGO sector you find the same system. It’s everywhere. I mean, it’s in the social movements. People have their own spaces and they protect their own interests. There are all kinds of spaces. Obviously Abahlali has created its own space where it is able to protect its own interests, our dignity, where we can do our activities without fear.

The NGOs are not all the same. But in the NGO sector I see a lot of empires. An individual can create his own empire so that he can be ruler for life.

For many people around the world Abahlali is best known for the position that it took against xenophobia. How did the movement come to take the position that equality must be universal?

This is a bigger question, a question of people who are in this world. But we’ve already talked about ubuntu, communism and what makes a complete society. It is true that this could be in the sense of belonging. But belonging where? It could be in one country but it could also be in the world - that it is acceptable for everyone in the world to live freely without any boundaries, without any colour or any other restrictions.

Obviously if you were to talk about a just society then it is the human culture, ubuntu – that makes a complete human being. The culture, where a person comes from, the colour - this does not count. Therefore it was clear for Abahlali that we have to take a very strong side in defending human life - any human life, every human life. It is acceptable and legitimate that one person protects another. It is as simple as that.

There are no boundaries to the human life. Therefore the attack on people born in other countries, the so called foreign nationals – it was inhuman. It was very easy to take a position on this.

Obviously you have got to look at the perpetrators of this, at their intelligence, their conscience, their consciousness - their intelligence really. What ever they say about their reasons for the attacks clearly shows how the world was corrupted. People breathe a poisonous air. They get caught up, in their whole life, in a way of living where you turn an eye to one another. It is a terrible situation. This is a very big challenge for South Africans who have lived most of their life during apartheid, whose teaching was about boundaries, segregations - that not everyone was a human being. At that stage only whites were considered to be human by the system. A proper opposition to that system would reject its segregations completely and insist that everyone is human. But some of the opposition to that system has been about fighting to take a place in that system, not doing away with it. So now black people have turned on other black people, against their brothers and sisters. It is a disgrace. This is one of the damages the past laws have installed in some people’s minds. A lot needs to be done to change the mindsets of those whose frustration is unsound.

The other thing that has really attracted attention was the decision that Abahlali took in 2006 not to vote. How do you understand this decision?

I think that it was a very practical decision in our politic. For a number of years we have voted but not seen any change. In 2006 Abahlali realised that we have power. We had always been asked to shout ‘Amandla! Awethu!’ but refraining from voting was a way of showing that Amandla is ours. Basically we had decided not to give our power away. It has a simple message – that we had no confidence in politicians and that we believed that we could empower ourselves - that we really do believe that the people shall govern.

It was also a tactical action; a warning to the government that if they exclude us from shaping the country then we will exclude ourselves from giving them support. And it has been a way for us to start thinking about our own alternative governance.

Has the formation of the Poor People’s Alliance last year given you hope?

Well I was just explaining that the strength of capitalism is how it has managed to divide our struggles. So if we are able to come together, not just nationally but also internationally, then I think that we are on a good track. This is the only way that it will really become possible to face and to contest the system. None of us will succeed on our own.

What has been the most difficult thing for you about being involved in Abahlali, and what has been the best thing?

The day when I had to choose from no choice. Ok, losing the job was the second aspect of it. The first aspect of it was that I was given a choice, to either align myself with the eThekwini people, with City Hall and, you know, to have a career, opportunities or to remain with the poor. Offers were made to me. They ask you some questions the main one being ‘What is it that you want in order to keep quiet?’ They always see it as an individual trouble maker. Remember when Mabuyakhulu said that ‘Zikode must educate his people’. That’s the belief that they had. They can’t understand that I am educated by the people. But when you have four children growing here in the mud and the fire...

But I have no regrets. Working with people is not easy. And it’s not just dealing with your enemies, even working with your comrades, trying to satisfy everyone is not easy. The time and the energy that is involved create a real pressure. But aside from that I have peace of mind, the inner peace.

I am more informed than I was, I am more vigorous then ever before. I am more vigilant and conscious than ever before. There is a lot of variety of things in life, more than just the politics. I have no regrets.

And the best thing?

All the victories we have won. I don’t just mean victories in court, or evictions that have been stopped, or water and electricity connected. I am talking about seeing comrades becoming confident, being happy for knowing their power, knowing their rights in this world. Seeing comrades gaining a bit of respect, seeing people who have never counted being able to engage at the level at which they struggle is now fought. Young comrades are debating with government ministers on the radio and TV! Seeing the strength of the women comrades in the movement. Seeing poor people challenging the system, because its not just about challenging Bheki Cele or Mabuyakhulu, it’s about challenging the whole system, how it functions.

Would you like to say a little more about the strength of the women comrades in the movement?

Well I am very satisfied and proud to see how some of the Abahlali settlements are chaired and led by women. This is evident in Siyanda A, B and C sections in Newlands in Durban. This is also evident in Motala Heights in Pinetown, in Joe Slovo and other settlements. From the very beginning women have been elected to the high positions of leadership in the movement and it is impossible to imagine the movement without the strength of women comrades. The Abahlali office itself is headed by a young woman, Zodwa Nsibande, who has earned herself a high respect from both men and other women for her role in connecting the movement and the outside world. But there are also many projects that don’t get the same public attention and most of these projects, such as crèches, kitchens, sewing, bead work, gardening and poetry are run purely by women.

The strength of women comes from the fact that women are expected to carry our love, not only for their children and husbands but for the communities too. Women are raised to be sensitive and caring. We are all told that a home that has a woman is often warm with love and care. A person that is given responsibility for this love and care will fight like a lion to protect her home and her family. It is not surprising that women are often in the forefront of struggles against eviction, for toilets, for electricity and against the fires. Sometimes in Abahlali women feel that men are very slow and too compromising.

Over the years many women have faced arrest and police beatings. Women have confronted police officers, landlords, shack lords, BECs, councillors, NGOs, academics – everyone that has to be confronted in a struggle like this. The fact that Abahlali women have given away fear and decided to confront the reality of life tells us that there is something seriously wrong with our governing systems – that another world is necessary. Women don’t risk their safety when they have children to care for unless they have a very good reason for doing so. The fact that women have stood up to and faced the barrel of guns during our protests is an indication that indeed another world is possible because without women nothing is possible and without courage nothing is possible. Our hopes are dependent on the courage of women.

We know that in the past that in times of any war women were never and under no circumstances touched by the physical pain associated with any war. But today poor women are shot by the same police who are meant to protect them by law. I wish to salute the role that our mothers are playing in not only raising us under these trying circumstances but in also having to face this violence from the state while fighting for a better world for us. Their motherly does not count because they are not the wives of the politicians and of the rich.

But we know that their strength changes their subjectivity to vulnerability putting them in the forefront of our struggle. We know by nature that their tears can never be ignored by a natural person for ever and ever.

I know that it’s a Sunday night and your family are waiting for you. This will be my last question. What does it mean for you when you say that Abahlalism is the politics of those that don’t count, the politics of those that are not supposed to speak.

I think that I have a clear understanding of this. I know from my own personal experience how I came to have enemies that I did not have because now I am speaking. When you are quiet, when you know your place, you are accepted and you are as safe as a poor person can be. But the moment you start talking you become a threat.

When one talks about the politics of those that do not count one must start from the fact that the system makes it impossible for everyone to count. If ordinary people counted it would collapse immediately. The way to hide the fact that ordinary people do not count, and that the system depends on this, is to ensure that ordinary people are taken as being unable to think and therefore unable to say anything intelligent. We are supposed to be led.

The politics of those that do not count makes no respect for those who are meant to think for everyone else, to lead. This turning the tide, when the life turns one at the front and takes him to the back, it is like you are doing a chaos because you want to do away with the status quo. You want to be innovative, you want to be creative, you want to live your life but it seems that the only way is to undermine those who have led the way. So you do not accept that someone must be a slave and work for someone else. No boss will find this acceptable. You do not accept that someone must be a good boy or a good girl, an obedient follower who does not think and act for themselves. No politician will find this acceptable. They will fight up until those tides are turned back. So we must face the difficulty of this politics.

The understanding is just that simple. In order for those who count to defend their own territory someone should not talk, someone should just be led, someone should not question, someone should just be a beneficiary of those particular services that are meant to be given.

The moment that you begin to question then you are threatening the system. You are not supposed to do that, and your intelligence and capability are not supposed to allow you to voice or to take the space. The system keeps people separate. If you want to unite and to make a culture that people should be equal then you are invading the space that is forbidden to you, you are threatening the system.

That’s very powerful. Thank you.
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Ranciere 2 - Preface to the new Hindi translation of 'Nights of Labour'

Sarai

PREFACE

The Indian reader who opens this book in 2009 will no doubt think it is a strange thing. How can these stories of nineteenth-century French lockmakers, tailors, cobblers and typesetters be relevant to the information revolution, the reign of immaterial production or the global market?

This question, it should be said, was already present for the French reader who opened this book twenty-seven years ago. We did not speak yet of globalisation, nor of the end of the proletariat, of history or of utopia. Quite the contrary: France had recently elected a combined socialist and communist government, which proudly laid claim to the traditions of Marxism and of working class politics. And it is in this context that the book seemed to run counter to its own time, and became difficult to classify.

The author was a professional philosopher who had struck his first blows, in the 1960s, by participating in the theoretical enterprise of Louis Althusser, who wished to rebuild Marxist theory. Now, instead of offering philosophical theses, he was telling stories about the French working class of the nineteenth century. And he offered nothing by way of Marxism – no analysis of the forms of industrial production, of capitalist exploitation, of social theories or of class struggles or worker movements. His workers, moreover, were not “real” workers; they were artisans from olden times, dreamers who dabbled in poetry and philosophy, who got together in the evening to found ephemeral newspapers, who became intoxicated by socialist and communist utopias but for the most part avoided doing anything about them. And the book seemed to lose itself in the aimless wanderings of these people, following the dreams of one, or the little stories others recounted in their diaries; the letters they wrote about their Sunday walks in the Paris suburbs, or the everyday concerns of those who had left for the United States to try out their dream of fraternal communalism. What on earth were readers to do with these stories in 1980?

The question is not, therefore, one of geographical or temporal distance. This book may seem untimely in an era that proclaims the disappearance of the proletariat, but it also seemed so in the previous era, which claimed to represent the class that had been united by the condition of the factory and the science of capitalist production. Let me put it simply: this book is out of place in a postmodern vision for the same reasons that it was already out of place in a classical modernist vision. It runs counter to the belief, shared by modernism and postmodernism alike, in a straight line of history where cracks in the path of time are thought to be the work of time itself – the outcome of a global temporal process that both creates and destroys forms of life, consciousness and action. This book rejects this because, despite its apparent objectivity, such an idea of time always places a hierarchy upon beings and objects. The belief in historical evolution, said Walter Benjamin, legitimises the victors. For me, this belief legitimises the knowledge that decrees what is important and what is not, what makes or does not make history. It is thus that the social sciences have declared that these little stories of workers taking an afternoon walk, or straying far from the solid realities of the factory and the organised struggle, have no historical importance. In doing so they confirm the social order, which has always been built on the simple idea that the vocation of workers is to work – “and to struggle,” good progressive souls add – and that they have no time to lose in wandering, writing or thinking.

This book turns this idea of time on its head. In the grand modernist narratives of the development of productive forces and of forms of class consciousness, this book sees a way of diverting the intimate energy of the very struggles they claim to represent, and re-attributing it to the order of time that was struggled against.It
sees such narratives as a way of reinforcing the power of those who believe they have a masterful, external perspective on the history in which they declare everyone else to be collectively imprisoned. This idea of imprisonment, and this position of mastery, had found their radical form in the project of Louis Althusser that I had participated in. For this project, the agents of capitalist production were
necessarily caught in the ideological traps produced by the system that held them in their place. That is to say that our project itself trapped them in a perfect circle: it explained that the dominated were kept in their place by ignorance of the laws of domination. But it also explained that the place they were in prevented them from knowing the laws of domination. So they were dominated because they did not understand, and they did not understand because they were dominated. This meant that all the efforts they made to struggle against their domination were blind, trapped in the dominant ideology, and only intellectuals, who were capable of perceiving the logic of the circle, could pull them out of their subjection.

In the France of 1968 it became abundantly clear that the circle of domination was held in place in fact by this so-called science. It became clear that subjection and revolution had no other cause than themselves and that the science that pretended to explain subjection and inspire revolution was in fact a part of the dominant order. It is with this lesson in mind that I undertook in the 1970s the long period of research in the labour archives that culminated in this book. On the way, many surprises awaited me. I set out to find primitive revolutionary manifestos, but what I found was texts which demanded in refined language that workers be considered as equals and their arguments responded to with proper arguments. I went to consult the archives of a carpenter in order to find out about more about the conditions of labour; I first came upon a correspondence from the 1830s where this worker told a friend about a Sunday in May when he had gone out with two friends to enjoy the sunrise over the village, spend the day discussing metaphysics in an inn, and end it trying to convert the diners at the next table to their humanitarian social vision. Then I read documents in which this same worker described an entire vision of life, an unusual counter-economy which sought ways to reduce the worker’s consumption of everyday goods so that he would be more independent of the market economy, and better able to fight against it. Through these texts, and many others, I realised that workers had never needed others to explain the secrets of domination to them, and that the problem they faced was having to submit themselves, intellectually and materially, to the forms by which it inscribed itself on their bodies, and imposed upon them gestures, modes of perception, attitudes and language. “Be realistic: demand the impossible!” the protesters cried in 1968. But for these workers in 1830, it was not about demanding the impossible but making it happen themselves: of appropriating the time they did not have, either by spying opportunities in the working day or by giving up their own night of rest to discuss or to write, to compose verses or to work out philosophies. These hard-won bonuses of time and liberty were not marginal phenomena, they were not diversions from the building of the worker movement and its great ideals. They were a revolution, discreet but radical nonetheless, and they made those other things possible. They comprised the work by which men and women tore themselves away from an identity forged for them by a system of domination and affirmed themselves as independent inhabitants of a common world, capable of all the refinements and self-denials that previously had been associated only with those classes that were released from the daily concern of work and food.

It is the necessity of acknowledging this revolution which gives to this book its unusual form. The book plunges us directly into workers’ words, in all their forms – from personal confidences and everyday anecdotes to fiction composed in diaries to philosophical speculations and programmes for the future. It does not seek to impose any differences in status, any hierarchy between description, fiction or argument. This does not arise from some fetishistic passion for the lived. This is generally the excuse for a division of roles in which the people are made to speak in order to prove that they do indeed speak the language of the people, which allows the poor to have the experience of the real and the flavour of the everyday in order to better reserve for itself the privilege of creative imagination and analytical language. It is precisely this division between the language of the people and literary language, between the real and fiction, between the document and the rgument that these “popular” texts call into question. We will never know if their memories of childhood, their descriptions of the working day or their accounts of their encounters with language are authentic. A narrative is never a simple account of facts. It is a way of constructing – or deconstructing – a lived world. The learned philosopher and the child of the people go about it in the same way. In the third book of Plato’s Republic, Socrates asks his interlocutors to accept an unlikely story: if some people are philosophers and legislators while others are workers, it is because the gods mixed gold into the souls of the first group and iron into the souls of the second. This outlandish tale is necessary in order to give consistency to a world in which differences in condition must be accepted as differences in nature. The worker narratives presented here are like counter-myths, narratives that blur these differences in nature. This is why it was so important to me to unravel the mesh of words, in which narrative, dreams, fiction and argument are all part of the same enterprise, in order to upset the order of things that puts individuals, classes and forms of speech in their place. There is no popular intelligence occupied by practical things, nor a learned intelligence devoted to abstract thought. There is not one intelligence devoted to the real and another devoted to fiction. It is always the same intelligence.

This is the message proclaimed in the same historical period by Joseph Jacotot, a teacher who broke with all tradition. While his contemporaries wanted to give the people just the instruction that was necessary and sufficient for them to adequately occupy their place in society, he called them to free themselves intellectually in order to demonstrate the equality of all intelligences (1).

In the very diversity of their expression, the workers whose stories are told in this book demonstrate precisely this equality. In order to show the subversive power of their work I needed to break with the conventions of the social sciences for which these personal narratives, fictional writings and essays are no more than the confused expression of a social process which only they can know. I needed to remove the conventional labels from these texts – of testimony, or symptoms of a social reality – and to exhibit them as writing and thought that worked towards the construction of an alternative social world. That is why this book renounces the
distance of explanation. It attempts instead to weave a sensory fabric of these texts so that their radical energy may resonate again in our own time, and threaten the order which gives categories to times and forms of speech. And this is the reason why our severe theorists and historians decided that this book was literature. The issue for me was to recall that the arguments of philosophers and
intellectuals are made of the same common fabric of language and thought as the creations of writers and these proletarian narratives.

This is also why I am not afraid that this book will suffer too much from distances of time, place and language. For it does not simply tell the story of the working class of a far-off time and place. It tells a form of experience which is not so far away from our own. Contemporary forms of capitalism, the explosion of the labour market,the new precariousness of labour and the destruction of systems of social solidarity, all create forms of life and experiences of work that are possibly closer to those of these artisans than to the universe of hi-tech workers and the global bourgeoisie given over to the frenetic consumption described by so many contemporary sociologists and philosophers. In our world, just as in theirs, the
challenge is to obstruct and subvert the order of time imposed by a system of domination. To oppose the government of capitalist and state elites and their experts with an intelligence that comes from everyone and anyone.

It remains for me to offer my warmest thanks to the editors and translators who have made it possible for the voices of these anonymous people, forgotten for so long, to speak in an Indian language, and so to encounter new voices with which they may mix and extend their appeal.

Jacques Rancière

(1) See Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Stanford
University Press, 1991 continue reading

Ranciere 1 - excerpt

paysanxxi

What is first at stake is the configuration of the possible. This also means what is first at stake is the distribution of the capacities. The struggle is between opposing ways of understanding the relation between the particular and the universal, the relation between the present and the future. The same goes, you know, for instance when networks of mostly anonymous social actors oppose the rational policy of the immigration quotas decided by our governments, when they oppose it with another idea of who can be counted as a member of our national communities.

The collective intelligence of emancipation is the collective capacity at work in those scenes of conflict. This collective intelligence has nothing to do with high-tech virtuosity. What it sets to work rather is the capacity which is common to that virtuosity and to the virtuosity that allows for instance the immigrant worker to cross all the geographical and legal boundaries, all the material and symbolical boundaries in order to prove that he is a French worker similar to any other French workers, if we take the example of France, and I think that this may prove a form of universalisation, a struggle for the universal, stronger, sometimes, then many discourses on universal values.

So, what is at stake is the common capacity of those different virtuosity, their common capacity to shift places and identities to break through the distribution of places, identities and competences in order to reframe the given situation of the capacity of producing a new configuration of the visible, the intelligible and the possible by implementing the capacity of anybody. That is the kind of universality the politics is about: the capacity of anybody. The political subject is not a part of the social structure, an element of the process of production. It has to come as a supplement to the distribution of powers, places, functions, and identities that make up a society, a supplement to the distribution of the capacity. But what comes as supplement to the distribution of capacity is undistributed capacity, the capacity of anybody, or rather the capacity created by the collectivisation of the power inherent in the equality of anyone with any other one. I called it “the part of the uncounted” or “the part of those who have no part”. It was sometimes misinterpreted as the power of the excluded. But what it truly means is the power of anybody, no matter who, the qualification of those who have no specific qualification. I think that investigation of this power, maybe more fruitful for the sake of artistic and political invention today by the endless denunciation of the power of the beast. The endless unmasking of the ghost.

Universality has been for long associated with the demonstration of the power of necessity. It might be time to explore its conjunction with the powers of contingency, with powers of indifference to difference that don’t amount to the equivalence of anything with anything, but with the empowerment of the capacity of no matter who.

Thank you. continue reading

Under Siege: A poem by Mahmoud Darwish

Under Siege

Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time
Close to the gardens of broken shadows,
We do what prisoners do,
And what the jobless do:
We cultivate hope.

***
A country preparing for dawn. We grow less intelligent
For we closely watch the hour of victory:
No night in our night lit up by the shelling
Our enemies are watchful and light the light for us
In the darkness of cellars.

***
Here there is no "I".
Here Adam remembers the dust of his clay.

***
On the verge of death, he says:
I have no trace left to lose:
Free I am so close to my liberty. My future lies in my own hand.
Soon I shall penetrate my life,
I shall be born free and parentless,
And as my name I shall choose azure letters...

***
You who stand in the doorway, come in,
Drink Arabic coffee with us
And you will sense that you are men like us
You who stand in the doorways of houses
Come out of our morningtimes,
We shall feel reassured to be
Men like you!

***
When the planes disappear, the white, white doves
Fly off and wash the cheeks of heaven
With unbound wings taking radiance back again, taking possession
Of the ether and of play. Higher, higher still, the white, white doves
Fly off. Ah, if only the sky
Were real [a man passing between two bombs said to me].

***
Cypresses behind the soldiers, minarets protecting
The sky from collapse. Behind the hedge of steel
Soldiers piss—under the watchful eye of a tank—
And the autumnal day ends its golden wandering in
A street as wide as a church after Sunday mass...

***
[To a killer] If you had contemplated the victim’s face
And thought it through, you would have remembered your mother in the
Gas chamber, you would have been freed from the reason for the rifle
And you would have changed your mind: this is not the way
to find one’s identity again.

***
The siege is a waiting period
Waiting on the tilted ladder in the middle of the storm.

***
Alone, we are alone as far down as the sediment
Were it not for the visits of the rainbows.

***
We have brothers behind this expanse.
Excellent brothers. They love us. They watch us and weep.
Then, in secret, they tell each other:
"Ah! if this siege had been declared..." They do not finish their sentence:
"Don’t abandon us, don’t leave us."

***
Our losses: between two and eight martyrs each day.
And ten wounded.
And twenty homes.
And fifty olive trees...
Added to this the structural flaw that
Will arrive at the poem, the play, and the unfinished canvas.

***
A woman told the cloud: cover my beloved
For my clothing is drenched with his blood.

***
If you are not rain, my love
Be tree
Sated with fertility, be tree
If you are not tree, my love
Be stone
Saturated with humidity, be stone
If you are not stone, my love
Be moon
In the dream of the beloved woman, be moon
[So spoke a woman
to her son at his funeral]

***
Oh watchmen! Are you not weary
Of lying in wait for the light in our salt
And of the incandescence of the rose in our wound
Are you not weary, oh watchmen?

***

A little of this absolute and blue infinity
Would be enough
To lighten the burden of these times
And to cleanse the mire of this place.

***
It is up to the soul to come down from its mount
And on its silken feet walk
By my side, hand in hand, like two longtime
Friends who share the ancient bread
And the antique glass of wine
May we walk this road together
And then our days will take different directions:
I, beyond nature, which in turn
Will choose to squat on a high-up rock.

***
On my rubble the shadow grows green,
And the wolf is dozing on the skin of my goat
He dreams as I do, as the angel does
That life is here...not over there.

***
In the state of siege, time becomes space
Transfixed in its eternity
In the state of siege, space becomes time
That has missed its yesterday and its tomorrow.

***
The martyr encircles me every time I live a new day
And questions me: Where were you? Take every word
You have given me back to the dictionaries
And relieve the sleepers from the echo’s buzz.

***
The martyr enlightens me: beyond the expanse
I did not look
For the virgins of immortality for I love life
On earth, amid fig trees and pines,
But I cannot reach it, and then, too, I took aim at it
With my last possession: the blood in the body of azure.

***
The martyr warned me: Do not believe their ululations
Believe my father when, weeping, he looks at my photograph
How did we trade roles, my son, how did you precede me.
I first, I the first one!

***
The martyr encircles me: my place and my crude furniture are all that I have changed.
I put a gazelle on my bed,
And a crescent of moon on my finger
To appease my sorrow.

***
The siege will last in order to convince us we must choose an enslavement that does no harm, in fullest liberty!

***
Resisting means assuring oneself of the heart’s health,
The health of the testicles and of your tenacious disease:
The disease of hope.

***
And in what remains of the dawn, I walk toward my exterior
And in what remains of the night, I hear the sound of footsteps inside me.

***
Greetings to the one who shares with me an attention to
The drunkenness of light, the light of the butterfly, in the
Blackness of this tunnel!

***
Greetings to the one who shares my glass with me
In the denseness of a night outflanking the two spaces:
Greetings to my apparition.

***
My friends are always preparing a farewell feast for me,
A soothing grave in the shade of oak trees
A marble epitaph of time
And always I anticipate them at the funeral:
Who then has died...who?

***
Writing is a puppy biting nothingness
Writing wounds without a trace of blood.

***
Our cups of coffee. Birds green trees
In the blue shade, the sun gambols from one wall
To another like a gazelle
The water in the clouds has the unlimited shape of what is left to us
Of the sky. And other things of suspended memories
Reveal that this morning is powerful and splendid,
And that we are the guests of eternity.

by Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Marjolijn De Jager continue reading

Greece: A letter to students

Struggle News, December 16 2008

An open letter to students by workers in Athens, against the background of the social upheaval following the police shooting of a young boy.

A letter to students

Our age difference and the general estrangement make it difficult for us to discuss with you in the streets; this is why we send you this letter.

Most of us have not (yet) been bald or big-bellied. We are part of the 1990-91 movement. You must have heard of it. Back then, and while we had occupied our schools for 30-35 days, fascists killed a teacher because he had gone beyond his natural role (that of being our guard) and crossed the line to the opposite side; he had come with us, into our struggle. Then, even the toughest of us got to the streets and riot. However, we didn’t even think of doing what you easily do today: attack police stations (although we sang “burn police stations…”).

So, you’re gone beyond us, as always happens in history. Conditions are different of course. During ‘90s they passed us off the prospect of personal success and some of us swallowed it. Now people cannot believe this fairy tale. Your older brothers showed us this during the 2006-07 students’ movement; you now spit their fairy tale to their faces.

So far so good.

Now the good and difficult matters begin.

We’ll tell you what we’ve learned from our struggles and our defeats (because as long as world is not ours we’ll always be the defeated ones) and you can use what we’ve learned as you wish:

Don’t stay alone. Call us; call as many people as possible. We don’t know how you can do that, you will find the way. You’ve already occupied your schools and you tell us that the most important reason is that you don’t like your schools. Nice. Since you’ve already occupied them change their role. Share your occupations with other people. Let your schools become the first buildings to house our new relations. Their most powerful weapon is dividing us. Just like you are not afraid of attacking their police stations because you are together, don’t be afraid to call us to change our life all together.

Don’t listen to any political organization (either anarchists or anyone). Do what you need to. Trust people, not abstract schemes and ideas. Trust your direct relations with people. Trust your friends; make as many people as possible in your struggle your people. Don’t listen to them when they’re saying that your struggle doesn’t have a political content and must seemingly obtain. Your struggle is the content. You only have your struggle and it’s in your hands to preserve its advance. It’s only your struggle that can change your life, namely you and the real relations with your fellowmen.

Don’t be afraid to proceed when confronting new things. Each one of us, as we’re getting older, has things planted in their brains. You too, although you are young. Don’t forget the importance of this fact. Back in 1991, we confronted the smell of the new world and, trust us, we found it difficult. We learned that there must always be limits. Don’t be scared by the destruction of commodities. Don’t be scared by people looting stores. We make all these, they are ours. You (just like we in the past) are raised to get up every morning in order to make things that they will later not be yours. Let’s get them back all together and share them. Just like we share our friends and the love among us.

We apologize for writing this letter quickly, but we do it swinging the lead from our work, secretly from our boss. We are imprisoned in work, just like you are imprisoned in school.

We’ll now lie to our boss and leave work: we’ll come to meet you in Syntagma sq with stones in our hands.

Proletarians continue reading

What is postcolonial thinking?

Eurozine, September 2008

An interview with Achille Mbembe

The faults in Europe's universalism, especially when confronting its colonial history, have nurtured a variety of critical perspectives in the West. Talking to French magazine Esprit, theorist Achille Mbembe says that postcolonial thinking looks so original because it developed in a transnational, eclectic vein from the very start. This enabled it to combine the anti-imperialist tradition with the fledgling subaltern studies and a specific take on globalization, he says.

Esprit: "Postcolonial theory" is present in Africa, India, Great Britain, Australia and the United States, but hardly at all in France. Can you tell us what it is all about and what lies behind it? How, in particular, does it differ from anti-western and third-world currents of thought?

Achille Mbembe: What's known in the English-speaking world as "postcolonial studies" and "postcolonial theory" is characterised by its heterogeneity, so what constitutes its originality cannot be summed up easily in a few words.

Perhaps I'd better start by making clear that it has little to do with the caricature of "third-worldism" projected by the chorus of penitents in France. In truth, it's a way of thinking that derives from a number of sources and that is far from constituting a system because it is in large part being constructed as it moves forward. That's why it would in my opinion be an exaggeration to call it a "theory". It derives both from anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles on the one hand, and from the heritage of Western philosophy and of the disciplines that constitute the European humanities on the other. It's a fragmented way of thinking, which is both a strength and a weakness. In spite of its fragmented nature there are some forms of reasoning, and some arguments, which distinguish this current of thought and which have made a major contribution to alternative ways of reading our modernity.

To begin with I'd draw your attention to the critique, not of the West per se, but of the effects of cruelty and blindness produced by a certain conception – I'd call it colonial - of reason, of humanism, and of universalism. This critique is different from that once made by the existentialist, phenomenological and post-structuralist movements in post-war France. Of course, it is chiefly concerned with the issue of self-creation and self-government. But its approach is not wholly confined to the problem of the "death of God" à la Nietzsche. It differs in many respects from the Sartrean idea of "man without God" taking the place vacated by the "dead God", and hardly subscribes either to Foucault's notion that "God being dead, man is dead too".

On the other hand, it does put its finger on two things. Firstly, it exposes both the violence inherent in a particular concept of reason, and the gulf separating European moral philosophy from its practical, political and symbolic outcomes. How indeed can the much-trumpeted faith in man be reconciled with the way in which colonized people's life, labour and world of signifiers got sacrificed so unthinkingly? That is the question Aimé Césaire poses in his Discourse on Colonialism, for example.

Secondly, postcolonial thinking stresses humanity-in-the-making, the humanity that will emerge once the colonial figures of the inhuman and of racial difference have been swept away. This hope in the advent of a universal brotherly community is very close to Jewish thought – as projected by Ernst Bloch at least, or even Walter Benjamin – minus the politico-theological dimension.

That said, the postcolonial critique operates on several levels. On the one hand, like Edward Said in Orientalism, it deconstructs colonial prose: that is to say the mental set-up, the symbolic forms and representations underpinning the imperial project. It also unmasks the potential of this prose for falsification – in a word, the stock of falsehoods and the weight of fantasizing functions without which colonialism as a historical power-system could not have worked. In this way it reveals how what passed for European humanism manifested itself in the colonies as duplicity, double-talk and a travesty of reality.

Indeed, colonization never ceased telling lies about itself and others. As Frantz Fanon explains so clearly in Black Skin, White Masks, the procedures for racializing the colonized were the driving force behind this economy of duplicity and falsehood. In postcolonial thinking, race is the wild region, the beast, of European humanism. To borrow Castoriadis's terms on racism, I'd say that the beast puts it more or less this way: "I alone possess value. But I can only be of value, as myself, if others, as themselves, are without value".

Postcolonial thinking aims to take the beast's skeleton apart, to flush out its favourite places of habitation. More radically, it seeks to know what it is to live under the beast's regime, what kind of life it offers, and what sort of death people die from. It shows that there is, in European colonial humanism, something that has to be called unconscious self-hatred. Racism in general, and colonial racism in particular, represents the transference of this self-hatred to the Other.

There is a second level in the postcolonial critique of European humanism and universalism which, if the term had not given rise to so many misunderstandings, could be called biopolitical. The face of Europe which was experienced by the colony (and before that, under slavery, by the "plantation"), and which gradually became familiar, was far from being that of liberty, equality and fraternity. The totem which colonized peoples discovered behind the mask of humanism and universalism was not only deaf and blind most of the time, it was also, above all, characterized by the desire for its own death, but insofar as this death was necessarily conveyed through that of others, it was a delegated death.

It was also a place where law had nothing to do with justice but, on the contrary, was a way of starting wars, continuing them and perpetuating them; and above all a place where wealth was but a means of exercising over others the right of life and death. As a result it could be said of postcolonial thinking that it is not a critique of power as usually understood, but of force – a force that is incapable of transformation. Once again it is Fanon who has analyzed, better than anyone else, this kind of necropolitical force which, in passing through fiction, becomes sick of life or else, in an act of permanent reversion, takes death for life and life for death. That's why the colonial relationship fluctuates constantly between the desire to exploit the other (seen as racially inferior) and the temptation to eliminate him, to exterminate him.

What – thirdly - characterises postcolonial thinking is entanglement and concatenation, unveiled chiefly through its critique of identity and subjectivity. From this viewpoint it is opposed to a particular Western illusion, that there can be no subject other than in the circular, permanent referral to oneself, to an essential and inexhaustible singularity. In countering this, postcolonial thinking stresses the fact that identity arises from multiplicity and dispersion, that self-referral is only possible in the in-between, in the gap between mark and demark, in co-constitution. In this situation colonisation no longer appears as mechanical and unilateral domination forcing the subjugated into silence and inaction. Quite the reverse – the colonized person is a living, talking, conscious, active individual whose identity arises from a three-pronged movement of violation, erasure and self-rewriting.

Moreover, as Ghandi himself suggested, the universalization of imperialism cannot be explained by the violence of coercion alone: it was a consequence too of the fact that many colonized people agreed, for more or less valid reasons, to become consciously complicit in a fable which they found attractive in a number of respects. The identity of the colonized and of the colonizer was shaped by the intersection between ellipsis, disengagement and renewal. Postcolonial thinking endeavours to analyse this vast area of ambivalence and the aesthetic reasons behind the confusion and its paradoxical effects.

This is perhaps the moment to point out that postcolonial thinking, the critique of European humanism and universalism, is not an end in itself. It is carried out with the aim of paving the way for an enquiry into the possibility of a politics of the fellow-creature. The prerequisite for such a politics is the recognition of the Other and of his or her difference. I believe that this enrolment in the future, in the interminable quest for new horizons for man through the recognition of the Other as fundamentally human is an aspect of this thinking that is all to often forgotten. It is a constituent part of Fanon's quest, of Senghor's in the Poetical Works during his imprisonment in a German camp (Front Stalag 230), of Edward Said's meditations at the end of his life or, more recently, of Paul Gilroy's considerations about the possibility of convivial life in a henceforth multicultural world (Postcolonial Melancholia). The same note is struck in much Afro-American thought, confronted as it is with the difficulty of reappropriating the heritage of slavery and racism, with organising them in the service of the resistance of the dominated without however falling into the trap of racialization and race glorification.

One last point. What constitutes the political strength of postcolonial thought is its enrolment in the historic social struggles of colonized societies and especially its rereading of the theoretical praxis of what we call liberation movements. So it is a way of thinking which, in several respects, still believes in the postulate that the only true learning is the leaning that aims to transform the world. It is a way of thinking that belongs to the being-subject, to the being-for-itself, to the manner in which the dialectic of master and slave, of colonist and native, might be transcended. Finally, if postcolonial thought today is the preserve of British and American academic institutions and of English-speaking intellectuals, it should not be forgotten that this current was largely inspired by French thinking. I've mentioned Fanon, Césaire and Senghor; I could have added Glissant and others too. Today, certain works of African francophone literature have taken their place among the canonical texts of postcolonial criticism.

But added to this is the influence of French thinkers of Otherness like Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Levinas and many more besides; also the contribution made to postcolonial thinking by the analyses of Foucault, Derrida, and even Lacan. It's therefore a way of thinking that in several respects is very close to a peculiarly French approach to reasoning, so it's rather paradoxical that, because of its cultural insularity and the narcissism of its elites, France has cut itself off from these new ventures in world thought.

Unfortunately it looks as though absolutely nothing can be salvaged from the post-war French critical tradition, in spite of the well-known fact that it placed centre-stage not only the phenomenon of Nazism, but of colonialism too. It's as if the colonial event belonged to another age and another place, and as if it had absolutely nothing to teach us about how to understand our own modernity, about citizenship, about democracy, even about the development of our humanities. As a result France finds it difficult not to speak solely about itself: contemporary French thought is no longer capable of speaking about the Other, even less to the Other; it prefers, in the good old colonial tradition, to speak in the place of the Other with – we know – catastrophic results, as during the urban riots recently, and on the occasion of the surreal debate about the benefits of colonization.

A way out of third-worldism

Esprit: Can a link be established between globalization and postcolonial thought?

AM: It can be said that postcolonial thought is in many respects a globalized way of thinking, even if initially it does not use that term. In the first place, it shows that there is little disjunction between the history of the nation and that of the empire. The Napoleon of the restitution of slavery and the Toussaint Louverture who represented the revolution of human rights are dual aspects of the same nation and the same colonial empire. Postcolonial thought demonstrates that colonialism itself was a global experience which contributed to the universalization of representations, techniques and institutions (in the case of the nation state, even of merchandise of the modern kind). It shows that this process of universalization, far from being a one-way street, was basically a paradox, fraught with all sorts of ambiguities.

Moreover, where the Atlantic is concerned, the "colony" was added to another power-formation, the "plantation", a key unit of an earlier age which could be called the age of proto-globalization. The postcolonial critique shows that our global modernity needs to be viewed in context well before the nineteenth century, starting with the period when the merchandization of private property was conducted hand-in-hand during the slave trade with that of people. The age of the Atlantic slave trade is also the age of the great migrations, even if they were carried out under duress. It was the age of the forced intermixture of populations, of the creative fission in the course of which there arose the creole world of the great contemporary urban cultures.

It was also the age of the great planetary experiments. As Paul Gilroy shows in The Black Atlantic, and as do historians like Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (The Many-Headed Hydra: Slaves, Sailors, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic), it was the moment when people, torn from the land, blood and soil, learned to imagine communities that transcended the bonds of land, blood and soil, forsook the comfort of repetition and invented new forms of mobilisation and transnational solidarities. Before colonies became the great laboratories of modernity in the nineteenth century, the "plantation" prefigured already a new consciousness of the world and of culture.

Alongside these historical factors there exist other levels of connection of a theoretical nature. This is particularly the case where a dialogue starts to take shape between postcolonial thought and Afro-modern thought, in the United States and the Caribbean especially. This Afro-modern thought is one of interconnections and of the in-between. It maintains that an appeal to the world can only truly be made where, by force of circumstance, one has been alongside others, with others. Under these conditions "returning to oneself" is above all "leaving oneself", leaving the night of identity and the lacunae of my little world. So here we have a way of reading globalization that rests on the radical affirmation of the density of proximity, of displacement, even of dislocation. In other words, consciousness of the world arises from the actualization of what was already possible in me, achieved through my encounter with the lives of others, my responsibility towards the lives of others and towards seemingly distant worlds and, above all, towards people with whom I have apparently no connection: the intruders.

Esprit: To what extent can the development of this current of thought be explained by the historical and political situation? It's doubtless no accident that the current emerged after the failure of postcolonial nation-states. Isn't the problem today the reconstruction of politics?

AM: This question requires a lengthy answer. It can be said that there were three cardinal moments in the development of postcolonial thought. Anti-colonial struggles were its starting point. These struggles were preceded and accompanied by extended reflection upon themselves by the colonized – a reflection on the contradictions arising from their dual status as "natives" and imperial "subjects"; an examination of the forces that enabled them to resist colonial domination; debates on the relationship between "class" factors and "racial" factors. The discourse then centred on what may be called the politics of autonomy, that is, to adopt Vincent Descombes's terms, the ability to "say I", to "act independently", to acquire citizen status and, thereby, to participate in the universal. In the French-speaking African and black diaspora tradition, Césaire, Fanon, Senghor and many others, including novelists and people of action (trade unionists and political leaders), have written the canonical texts of this period.

Next comes the second moment, which I would situate around the 1980s. It is the moment of "high theory", and its high point was the publication by Edward Said of his major work, Orientalism – a work he extended and clarified a few years later in The World, the Text and the Critic and in Culture and Imperialism. It was Edward Said, a stateless Palestinian, who laid the first foundations for what was gradually to become "postcolonial theory", in the sense this time of an alternative form of knowledge about modernity and a separate academic discipline. One of Said's decisive contributions was to show, in opposition to the Marxist doxa of the period, that the colonial project was not reducible to a simple military-economic system, but was underpinned by a discursive infrastructure, a symbolic economy, a whole apparatus of knowledge the violence of which was as much epistemic as it was physical. The cultural analysis of the discursive infrastructure and of the colonial imagination would gradually become the very subject of postcolonial theory and give rise to severe criticism from intellectuals in the Marxist and internationalist tradition like Aijaz Ahmed (In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures), Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism), and Benita Parry.

In the Indian context, three other thinkers would help widen the breach opened up by Said. First up was Ashis Nandy, who in The Intimate Enemy advanced the proposition that colonialism was, above all, a psychological affair; that, as such, the struggle against colonialism was both a material and mental war, and that in any case the resistance to colonialism, and the nationalism that was its corollary, were forced to operate in the terms defined beforehand by the West. It was Nandy who, well before the rest, facilitated Fanon's passage into India. At the same time he introduced psychoanalysis into postcolonial discourse while at the same time opening up a dialogue between that current of thought and Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of the Enlightenment. Then there was Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, an Indian academic and translator of Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie, and author of a famous text that has since become a classic (Can the Subaltern Speak?) and of a summa entitled Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Finally there was Homi Bhabha, editor of the symposium Nation and Narration and author of The Location of Culture and of a commentary on Fanon.

It was during the 1980s, too, that a start was made on forging links between postcolonial thought and several other currents of distinctive pedigree. Suffice it to mention two, the merit of which was to offer a historiographical foundation to what, up till then, had chiefly consisted of the analysis of literary texts. First of all, subaltern studies, a current of historical thought that arose in India, developed a critique of nationalist and anti-colonial historiography while at the same time trying to recover the historical voices and capabilities of decolonization's rejects (peasants, women, the untouchable caste, the underprivileged, inferiors) through a revision and selective rereading of Marxism (see in particular Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe). Because of the pride of place accorded to the "voiceless" and the "powerless", a good part of the initial theoretical inspiration of the subaltern-studies school derives from Gramsci. But the "translation" of Marx into non-European languages and contexts was aimed above all at understanding why, in India, the anti-colonial struggle led not to a radical transformation of society but to a sort of "passive revolution" characterized by the return of "communalism", that is, in the last resort, to an anti-nationalist scenario.

On the other hand there is a whole Afro-modern current of thought which developed around the shores of the Atlantic and which took this oceanic and transnational formation as its basic unit of analysis (notably Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic). Its proponents are Afro-American, Black-British and Afro-Caribbean intellectuals, and its central concern is the rewriting of the multiple histories of modernity at the meeting point between racial factors and factors of social class. In that perspective, this Afro-modern current is just as much interested in the question of diasporas as in the procedures by which individuals are subjugated to ignominious categories blocking all access to the status of subject in history. Such is the case particularly with confinement in a race.

From this viewpoint W.E.B. Dubois, author of The Soul of Black Folks, is the Afro-American thinker who has offered the best analysis of the effects of the "sombre veil of colour" in which people of African origin have been confined in the New World. He highlights the fact that such a "veil" not only covers the individual forced to wear it, but makes him or her unrecognizable and incomprehensible, prey to a "double consciousness".

This current of thought is also alert to the themes of the "liberation of minds" and of memory in conditions of captivity (religion, music and the performing arts in particular) and to the issue of dispersion (diasporas), as well as to what Glissant calls the "poetics of connection". Artistic and aesthetic experience occupies a central place in this current. In discussing slave songs, "old, mysterious songs through which the soul of the black slave spoke to people", Dubois says that "those who walked in darkness, in olden times, sang songs of grief – because their hearts were weary". Paul Gilroy, too, takes up the theme of black music, in his analysis of jazz and reggae.

As can be seen, the postcolonial current is an intellectual constellation the strength and the weakness of which have their origins in its very fragmentation. Being the product of the circulation of knowledge between different continents and across different anti-imperial traditions, it is like a river with multiple tributaries. What gives it its strength in English-speaking universities is not only the radicality of its eclecticism; it is above all because it has managed to decentre the question of the humanities. Thanks to its anti-systematic syncretism, its creative syntheses, its recourse to hybrid methods, its insistence on cultural and epistemological pluralism, even its generally intelligent and fertile misreadings, it has made possible the installation of other questions and other forms of knowledge at the very heart of the academy.

The third moment is marked by the central phenomenon of our epoch, globalization, that is the generalized expansion of trade and its grip on the totality of natural resources, of human production, in a word of living in its entirety. It seems to me that in these circumstances the literary text alone can no longer be the sole archive of choice. But critical reflection on contemporary forms of life-instrumentalization can gain in radicality if it accepts that slavery and colonization – capitalism's old and recent formations – need to be taken seriously. It's clear, indeed, how constant was the refusal, in the way colonial capitalism functioned, to institute the sphere of the living as a limit to economic appropriation. As for slavery, it was a mode of production, circulation and distribution of wealth grounded in the refusal of institutionalization in any domain whatever of the "non-appropriable". From every point of view, the "plantation", the "factory" and the "colony" were the principal laboratories in which experiments were conducted into the authoritarian destiny of the world that we see today.
Reinvention of the subject

Esprit: Is the postcolonial era both the hope of an exit from an inhuman world – with consequences in terms of religion – and a time of necessary reinvention?

AM: To my mind it's the era both of the end and of reinvention, starting with the reinvention of what has suffered the most damage, the body. But it's also a time of fresh struggles. In the context of extreme poverty, of extreme racialization and of the omnipresence of death, the body is the first to be affected, the first to be hurt. Fanon had already drawn attention to this at the end of his first book Black Skin, White Masks, where he turns to his body and utters this prayer: "Oh my body, make of me a man who asks questions".

As is clearly shown by the example of South Africa on its emergence from apartheid, nothing can be reinvented unless one is capable both of glancing backward and of looking forward, because if what began in blood ends in blood the chances of a new beginning are lessened by the haunting presence of the horrors of the past. Put another way, it is difficult to reinvent anything if one simply repeats against others the violence once inflicted on oneself. There is no "good violence" that can follow on automatically from "bad violence" and be legitimized by it. All violence, "good" or "bad", always sanctions a disjunction. The reinvention of politics in postcolonial conditions first requires people to depart from the logic of vengeance, above all when vengeance wears the shabby garb of the law.

That said, the struggle to escape from an inhuman order of things cannot do without what may be called the poetic productivity of the sacred. After all, what would Africa be without the sacred? Here the sacred represents the imaginative resource par excellence. The sacred is to be understood not only in relation to the divine, but also as the "power of therapy" and of hope in a historical context in which violence has touched not only material infrastructures but psychological infrastructures too, through the denigration of the Other, through the assertion of the latter's worthlessness.

It's this discourse – sometimes interiorized – about worthlessness that is challenged by certain forms of the sacred, the ultimate aim being to enable those who were on their knees to "arise and walk" at last. In these circumstances, the philosophical, political and ethical question is how to give support to this "ascent in humanity" – an ascent at the end of which person-to-person dialogue becomes possible and replaces commands delivered to the object.

Esprit: When you speak of this ability to be oneself, to say "I", to "arise and walk", are you thinking in terms of individuals, or of peoples and collective entities?

AM: Both. I'm referring to the task of learning again to envisage oneself as a universal source of meaning. Harm has been done to individuals quite as much as to communities. Liberation struggles always bring centre-stage people who emerge from a community and who are expert at scrutinizing the hour, keeping a weather-eye open, and shouldering on the community's behalf the question "When?". They are people who probe the night sky for a glimpse of the dawn and who lead the community towards the light. This was what Martin Luther King did, and Nelson Mandela, and Mahatma Gandhi – heroes for whom revolutionary asceticism began with the drive for self-transformation.

South Africa shows clearly that the injunction to "arise and walk" is addressed to all, to the oppressed of yesteryear and to their enemies. It is pseudo-liberationist to believe that it is enough to kill the colonist and take his place for relationships of reciprocity to be restored. South Africa enables us to see what it is in the politics of revenge that merely reproduces the Cain complex. What could lie beyond destruction and resentment can only be imagined in a painful confrontation with the questions, "What is to be done with the enemy? Who is my neighbour? And how can we answer in a responsible fashion for both?" That said, the desire for reconciliation alone cannot easily take the place of the radical demand for justice. In order to enable those who were on their knees not long before, bowed down under the weight of oppression, to arise and walk, justice must be done. So there is no escape from the need for justice.

Esprit: What do you think of the experience of the "Truth and Reconciliation" commission in South Africa?

AM: It was the path that had to be followed. I'm not saying that everything has been achieved. But people, blacks and whites, had to be wrenched from the jaws of the dog-mentality, the pig-mentality and the rabble-mentality that is so characteristic of racism in general. The cornerstone of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the notion of deliverance from self-hatred and from hatred of the Other. Indeed, what centuries of racism had done was to lead everyone to the narrow gate of the sepulchre. Having lived beside the sepulchre, people had to be brought back to life.

What the South African experience teaches us is that to make a fetish of the fact of having been a victim in world history often makes the person who has been prey to such a misfortune wish to shed blood, any blood; unfortunately, all too frequently, never that of the torturers but almost always someone else's, no matter whose. Because, in order to be able to function, the fetish requires endless sacrifices and thus fresh victims killed to appease the sacrificer-god. Central to the victimary economy is the desire for expiation: it takes the form of the spirit of vengeance - an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth – in line with the ancient monotheistic religions. Indeed, insofar as the transcendent is never grounded in one's own death, it has to be through the sacrificial killing of someone else that the sacred is established.

That was what South Africa sought, through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to avoid, and what distinguishes the South African experience from that of a country like Israel. Indeed, those states which define themselves mainly as victimary subjects often appear too as subjects filled with hate, that is subjects that can never stop miming death by sacrifice and inflicting on others all the acts of cruelty of which they were once themselves the expiatory victims.

Esprit: On the question of victims' memory, is there a specifically black dimension, of blacks and their history, different from that of the experience in India, for example? Or are these specificities transcended by reflection on these issues?

AM: First, a general answer. It doesn't seem to me that people in South Africa believe in a primary, endless mourning compared to which all other grief is merely pagan. People don't think, either, that in order for one's own suffering to be acknowledged it's necessary to deny the suffering of others and empty it of all human meaning. The issue of memory in South Africa is not about which human suffering should be sanctified and which suffering is basically only of incidental significance, of no value on the scale of lives and deaths that truly matter. Every human life is universal, as it every death. And what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has taught us is how to free ourselves from the addiction to the memory of one's own suffering that characterizes all victimary consciousness. Because freeing oneself from this addiction is the necessary condition for learning to speak a human language again and, potentially, to create a new world.

That said, apartheid consisted in establishing a total distinction between whites and everyone else (blacks, Indians and coloureds), in creating subdivisions within each of these groups, in translating these subdivisions into institutions and governmental technologies specific to each group, and in translating all of that into the geographical space by setting up Bantustans and by barring blacks from taking up residence in the cities. Before apartheid (which began in 1948), colonial ideology had in any case been based on the conviction that for "civilization" to advance it was necessary to wage war on the "inferior races". So there had, historically, been a specific way of depriving the blacks of their humanity. But in the vocabulary of South Africa, "negritude" included the Indians and the coloureds too: anyone who was not "white" was "black".

So I'd say that in contemporary South Africa the question of memory is posed in terms of a painful past, but also a past full of hope, which all protagonists try to accept as a basis for creating a new and different future. That presupposes the exposure of the suffering once inflicted on the weakest; that the truth, the whole truth, be told about their sufferings; that concealment, repression and denial be renounced in return for pardon, that is the desire on the part of everybody to begin everything again on the basis of a mutual recognition of humanity of each and every one, and of the right of everybody to life in freedom before the law.

What is striking is that a considerable part of the work of memorialization that is in progress is being carried out with this aim in mind. It translates, for instance, as the appropriate burial of the remains of those who died in the struggle, the erection of funeral steles where they fell, the consecration of trado-Christian religious rituals aimed at "curing" the survivors of anger and the desire for revenge, the creation of numerous museums and parks devoted to the celebration of people's common humanity, the encouragement of the arts, and above all the launch of policies of reparation aimed at making up for centuries of neglect (a roof, a school, a road, a clinic, clean water, electricity, and one person one vote).

As can be seen, the work of memory is inseparable from meditation on the way to interiorizing the presence of the physical destruction of those who have been lost and reduced to dust. Meditation on that absence, and on ways of symbolically restoring what has been destroyed, here in large part consists in giving the theme of the sepulchre its full subversive force. But the sepulchre is not so much the celebration of death as the reference to the extra bit of life that's needed to raise the dead which lies at the heart of a new culture that promises never to forget the vanquished.

So this is an approach which both embraces and transcends the question of specificity. It is not without its tensions and contradictions. The process is not complete. The tensions can be seen in the way the de-racialization of urban spaces, as well as of institutions and the economy, is being carried out. In any event the future, viewed from this angle, is not some sort of afro-centrism, but what I'd call afropolitanism – a way of being "African" open to difference and conceived as transcending race.

Memory and responsibility

Esprit: In your book, On the Postcolony. Studies on the History of Society and Culture, you mention Cameroon frequently. In current controversies in France victims competing with each other – blacks from West Africa, from Martinique and from other islands – are taking up different positions. They are very mindful of what is said about their memory.

AM: In many respects my book adopts a different approach from that of most postcolonial thinking, if only over the privileged position accorded by the latter to questions of identity and difference, and over the central role that the theme of resistance plays in it. There is a difference, to my mind, between thinking about the "postcolony" and "postcolonial" thought. The question running through my book is this: "What is 'today', and what are we, today?" What are the lines of fragility, the lines of precariousness, the fissures in contemporary African life? And, possibly, how could what is, be no more, how could it give birth to something else? And so, if you like, it's a way of reflecting on the fractures, on what remains of the promise of life when the enemy is no longer the colonist in a strict sense, but the "brother"? So the book is a critique of the African discourse on community and brotherhood.

So it can be said that it is concerned with memory only insofar as the latter is a question, first of all, of responsibility towards oneself and towards an inheritance. I'd say that memory is, above all else, a question of responsibility with respect to something of which one is often not the author. Moreover I believe that one only truly becomes a human being to the degree that one is capable of answering to what one is not the direct author of, and to the person with whom one has, seemingly, nothing in common. There is, truly, no memory except in the body of commands and demands that the past not only transmits to us but also requires us to contemplate. I suppose the past obliges us to reply in a responsible manner. So there is no memory except in the assignment of such a responsibility.

Esprit: What is postcolonial thinking's position with regard to Europe? Is it an anti-European current of thought, or does it adopt Europe's values? Shouldn't the reflections of the postcolonial school be understood, too, as reflections on the decentring of European thought?

AM: postcolonial thought is not an anti-European thought. On the contrary, it's the product of the encounter between Europe and the worlds it once made into its distant possessions. In showing how the colonial and imperial experience has been codified in representations, divisions between disciplines, their methodologies and their objects, it invites us to undertake an alternative reading of our common modernity. It calls upon Europe to live what it declares to be its origins, its future and its promise, and to live all that responsibly. If, as Europe has always claimed, this promise has truly as its object the future of humanity as whole, then postcolonial thought calls upon Europe to open and continually relaunch that future in a singular fashion, responsible for itself, for the Other, and before the Other.

But postcolonial thought is also a dream: the dream of a new form of humanism, a critical humanism founded above all on the divisions that, this side of the absolutes, differentiate us. It's the dream of a polis that is universal because ethnically diverse. It's what, in his poetical writings, Senghor hoped for: the "rebirth of the world", which he speaks of in his "Prayer to the Masks", for example.

The thinking of the postcolony, on the other hand, is a thought of responsibility and life, seen through the prism of what belies both. It is in the direct lineage of certain facets of black thought (Fanon, Senghor, Césaire and others). It is a thought of responsibility, responsibility in terms of the obligation to answer for oneself, to be the guarantor of one's actions. The ethics underlying this thought of responsibility is the future of the self in the memory of what one has been in another's hands, the sufferings one has endured in captivity, when the law and the subject were divided.

Postcolonial thought cannot fail to be valid for the relationship between Europe and itself. If one were to apply the postulates of postcolonial theory to France, for example, one would say that since the time of the slave trade and colonization there is no French identity or French heritage sites that don't simultaneously encompass the elsewhere and the here. In other words, the elsewhere is a constituent of the here, and vice-versa. There is no longer an "inside" cut off from an "outside", a past cut off from the present. There is a time, that of the encounter with the Other, which unfolds constantly and which consists not of scission but of contraction, winding and joining. Here, in any case, is a map of the subject and a geography that makes it possible to pose in another way the burning questions of the suburban ghettoes, the nation, even of immigration.

Esprit: Third-worldism is chiefly aimed at the United States. What is postcolonial theory's view about that?

AM: As far as I'm concerned the controversy is about the way in which, historically, successive US governments have claimed to build universalism and promote democracy on the basis of crimes that are presented as so many earthly fulfilments of God's law and divine providence. So it's the political theology of the American state that is what people have a problem with insofar as the god it invokes is a melancholy god, irascible and vengeful. Mercy has no part in his laws and precepts. He is a jealous and unforgiving god, swift to destroy and forever requiring human sacrifice.

This critique of the political theology underpinning American power-politics (hyper-hegemony) is absolutely necessary in the current climate. And in any case the best critiques of this theology come from the United States itself. How, indeed, can one claim to "make world" on the basis of a politics almost exclusively founded on a single question: Who is my enemy, mine, here and now, and how can I exterminate him?

So it's not the United States as such that people have a problem with, but an idea of politics and of the world that is closely associated with the history of the enemy – the enemy as an ontological, even theological entity in the sense that my enemy is, as a matter of principle, always the enemy of God – no more, no less – and the hatred I feel for him is, necessarily, a divine hatred.

I don't think one can "make world" on the basis of a relationship between human beings in which all idea of morality is suspended precisely at the moment when morality is constantly being invoked as acts of immorality and barbarism are being carried out. The global politics of the United States today is a politics that seeks to free itself from all constraints. In the name of security it seeks exemption from all responsibility. This politics of boundless irresponsibility must be subjected to a firm, intelligent and sustained critique.


Interview by Olivier Mongin, Nathalie Lempereur and Jean-Louis Schlegel

Published 2008-01-09

Original in French
Translation by John Fletcher
First published in Esprit 12/2006 continue reading

Damning the Flood

Mute Magazine, October 2008

By supporting NGOs instead of popular movements, is the left suppressing a radical politics in Haiti and elsewhere? And is it possible to defend a popular movement without deifying its leader? Richard Pithouse reviews Peter Hallward's new book on the containment of popular politics in Haiti.

The inequality of class, first universalised into a global Manicheanism in The Communist Manifesto, is not just complicated by gender, race and sexuality. There is also the fact that the globalisation of capital has always been accompanied by the violent division of the world into different kinds of spaces meant to be inhabited by different kinds of people. The unequal allocation of rights and resources across these spaces has always been held to match unequal capacities for thought, speech and action. Attempts at building solidarity across these divisions have often been insufficiently attentive to their objective material differences or too willing to treat claims about subjective difference as objective.

In the contemporary world the failure to attend to the objective difference of particular situations often results in the assumption that all struggles should aspire to the form that the anti-globalization movement has taken in the metropole. Amongst other problems this immediately renders the (usually) white Northern activist an automatic and universal expert on what a popular radicalism should really look like. A failure to attend to the subjective choices with which people confront particular situations often results in a reifying culturalism that sees struggle as a natural expression of cultural difference. It is inevitably complicit with some form of racism and often risks an inability to discern domination within a nation or movement.

Peter Hallward is a philosopher who has thought about the question of solidarity across the divisions that structure domination with a rare combination of subtlety and militancy. The themes that link his work on contemporary post-colonial theory, French philosophy and Haitian politics include a consistent stress on the fact that every one thinks and that thought is the subjective confrontation with specific objective situations. Hallward affirms the specificity of particular situations and affirms the subjectivity with which they are confronted and thereby “maintains the relation between subjective and objective (and between subjects) as a relation in the strict sense”.

He is committed to a prescriptive politics. He argues that genuinely political actions must elaborate universal principles (principles that hold for everyone), that for these principles to be meaningful they must be adhered to directly and immediately, that adhering to them is necessarily divisive and requires collective unity and a willingness to confront domination. In other words he proposes a politics of popular self-emancipation organised around popular intellectual work and consensual disciplined commitment. From the beginning his work has taken the view that, following Paulo Freire, “true generosity consists in fighting to destroy the causes which lead to false charity.”

Damming the Flood is a richly detailed account of the popular Haitian movement Lavalas (‘the flood’) in and out of power. There is a focus on how the movement was vilified and its president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, removed from office by the American military with considerable support from global civil society.

Hallward’s basic argument is that as Lavalas developed into a formidable force in the late 1980s it began to constitute a serious threat to the US-backed Haitian elite. They responded to the election of Aristide to the Presidency in December 1990 with an attempted coup in January 1991 and then a successful military coup in September 1991. It left 5 000 dead. Aristide returned to office in November 2000 with 92% of the vote and disbanded the army at which point the Haitian elite, with strong support from elites in Canada, the US and France, began to wage an elaborate propaganda and destabilisation campaign against the Lavalas government. This was supported by many NGOs, including those on the left, and was followed by a military attack after which Aristide was removed from the country by the US military in February 2004. Lavalas supporters were then subject to sustained repression by occupying United Nations forces at a cost of several thousand more lives. Nevertheless resistance has continued.

Hallward takes the view that the objective constraints imposed on Aristide’s administrations by imperial power were severe and that there was no prospect for fundamental transformation. Nevertheless there were important innovations by way of a higher minimum wage, a literacy programme, a school building project, health care and so on. Even IMF statistics confirm clear progress in these areas. But Hallward’s analysis breaks with the economism of much leftism and he also takes symbolic and political movement as significant. For instance he takes seriously the political ramifications of Aristide’s choice to open up the swimming pool in the presidential palace to children from poor families. But the primary thrust of his assessment stresses that popular support for Aristide was never passive and was rooted in a network of grassroots organisations through which people could work for their own empowerment. It is also noticeable that the practical action taken by Aristide’s governments in support of the poor often found ways to combine material support with support for popular democratisation. For instance housing was not reduced to the provision of houses but included the development of town squares in shack settlements.

Hallward deals frankly with the problem of opportunism, a problem that every movement has to confront when it reaches the point of winning some access to or control over state resources. He also deals directly with the reality that any movement operating in a repressive environment in which its membership is generally criminalised is going to have to take on some of the judicial and security functions usually reserved for states with inevitable risks and inevitable condemnation. Nevertheless he concludes that “Over the last twenty years, Lavalas has developed as an experiment at the outer limits of contemporary political possibility. Its history sheds light on some of the ways that political mobilisation can proceed under the pressure of exceptional powerful constraints.”

Hallward’s claims about a campaign of demonization against Lavalals are persuasive. It is instructive to set aside Hallward’s arguments about this and apply Chomsky’s propaganda model to the recent history of Haiti by excluding highly disputed events and examining only those on which there is some agreement as to the basic facts, and comparing only those that can be as closely matched with others as is possible. It quickly becomes evident that, for instance, violence attributed to Lavalas has been systematically treated in a very different way in the elite media and civil society to that of other actors such as the Duvalier’s paramilitaries, the Haitian Military, the US Military, the anti-Aristide paramilitary groups, the United Nations and so on.

The fetishisation of leaders of popular movements has a sorry history and it is worrying that some of the solidarity work with Haiti seems to be more interested in deifying Aristide rather than supporting ongoing popular struggles in Haiti. Hallward describes his book “as an exercise in anti-demonization, not deification.” This seems fair – especially given that he is clear that Lavalas emerged from discussions amongst ordinary people in the shack settlements of Port-au-Prince and that its continued strength after Aristide’s kidnapping is rooted in the ongoing practice of similar discussions and the modes of grassroots militancy that they have engendered.

Aristide is an interesting theorist in his own right and his own thought provides as good a measure as any for measuring the value of moblisation. His political thought is rooted in liberation theology. For Aristide, who says that when we say God “We mean the source of love; we mean the source of justice”, liberation theology is “the Christian impulse that does not separate belief from action, that exasperates conservatives, and annoys so many people on the left who dream of realizing the happiness of others...without the others.” He is clear that the political movement that twice bought him to power begins from and is sustained in the ‘little church’, or what liberation theology in Latin America calls ‘base communities’. They are small groups that meet in their own neighbourhoods to discuss, on their own time and in their own language, their ideas about politics and society. The fundamental principle in the little church is that “All persons are human beings, and to be cherished.” The fundamental political task is to “fan the fire of hope and to turn it into a tool for the people.” This theological politics is not unwilling to take a side. Aristide has long been clear that the preferential option for the poor should be “total, unrepentant, intransigent” and that “If they [elites] do not wish to share fraternally...They must accept that it is they, not I and my colleagues, who are advocating war.” He’s also made it very clear that as people assume political agency “Liberation theology then gives way to a liberation of theology, which can also include a liberation from theology.” This is a politics of popular self-emancipation. It recommends, as Lavalas seems to have achieved, a form of organisation closer to that of a series of linked congregations rather than a party and rooted in the self-organisation of the poor.

Hallward argues that although “NGO administrators and left-leaning academics are often uneasy with what they see as a merely populist deviation” this popular power is necessary for any kind of meaningful challenge to domination. He has a point. As C.L.R. James noted in his history of the Haitian Revolution “It is force that counts, and chiefly the organised force of the masses…It is what they think that matters”.

Lavalas took state power under extremely hostile circumstances and sought to subordinate the state to society by demobilising the military while continuing to mobilise society. When Aristide was first elected President in 1990 he declared that “I will not be president of the government, I am going to be president of the opposition, of the people, even if this means confronting the very government I am creating.” He held to this position and ten years later wrote that people should “not confuse democracy with the holding of elections.”

The often hysterical demonization of Lavalas can easily be understood and slotted into a familiar pattern of imperial attempts to contain oppositional movement that includes the fate of Lumumba and Allende, the war against the Sandinistas and the attempted coup against Chavez in 2002. William Robinson provides a useful lens for this kind of analysis in the years after the Cold War. He argues that the US and its allies moved away from supporting dictators and that this shift was rooted in a recognition that support for dictators like Botha in South Africa, Marcos in the Philippines and the Duvaliers in Haiti had produced oppositional movements that were not only demanding the removal of dictators but also the popular democratisation of society. This recognition led to a shift in policy that saw the creation of liberal democracies as a more effective way of containing popular aspirations. There had been, Robinson argued, “a reconceptualization of the principal target in intervened countries, from political to civil society, as the site of social control.” Robinson quoted Bill Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot as observing that “Even after our [military] exit [from Haiti] in February 1996 we will remain in charge by means of USAID and the private sector.” In South Africa and the Philippines this worked well enough as the new regimes were enthusiastic about demobilizing the movements that had brought them to power. But in Haiti the Lavalas project was to subordinate the state to society via ongoing popular democratisation. This was unacceptable. The result was a return to political society as a key target of political control – a return to regime change.

But there is another aspect to the demonization of Lavalas which may be more discomforting for some on the left. Hallward elaborates a consistent critique of NGOs. His criticism of racist ideas about enlightened white charity, the role of NGOs in promoting the agendas of foreign governments and his critique of the limits of the human rights project all cover familiar ground. But his criticism extends to the explicitly anti-neoliberal NGOs that position themselves on the left. He is completely sceptical of their political effectiveness in opposing domination arguing that:

"Rather than organize with and among the people, rather than work in the places and on the terms where the people themselves are strong...[they]... organize trivial made-for-media demonstrations against things like the uncontroversial evils of neo-liberalism or the high cost of living. Such protests are usually attended by tiny groups of 30 or 40 people – which is to say, by nobody outside the organizers’ tiny circles."

However Hallward sees their support for regime change as a very significant in offering an appearance of some kind of legitimacy for the coup. His explanation of why the left NGOs would oppose a movement with tremendous popular support centres around an interview with a women’s rights activist who explains the NGO hostility to Lavalas in terms of class rivalry. “Foreign observers underestimate, she explains, the massive gap between elite (wealthy, French-speaking, internationally orientated) NGO professionals and grassroots (poor, Kreyol-speaking, neighbourhood-orientated activists. Aristide makes a similar point arguing that:

"Everything comes back, in the end, to the simple principle that tout moun se moun – every person is indeed a person, every person is capable of thinking things through for themselves. Those who don’t accept this, when they look at the nègres of Haiti – and consciously or unconsciously, that’s what they see – they see people who are too poor, too crude, too uneducated, to think for themselves. They see people who need others to make their decisions for them. It’s a colonial mentality, in fact, and still very widespread among our political class. It’s also a projection: they project onto the people a sense of their own inadequacy, their own inequality in the eyes of the master."

There is a fundamental difference between forms of left politics that propose alternative policy arrangements or ways of being without developing any capacity to force the realisation of their goals and those that actively develop popular power and alternative modes of community and are willing and able to confront domination collectively and directly. The former can be called the expert left and the latter can be called the popular left. The expert left tends to operate in the languages of imperial power, to be dependent on state or donor funding, to require certification from bourgeois institutions as a condition of entry, to be located on the side of the razor wire where the police offer protection and to organise via international travel and the internet.

It is not unusual for the expert left to be entirely unaware of the existence of a popular left even when it is a literal stone’s throw away. Discourse in the wrong language, in the wrong place, in the wrong philosophical matrix and, most of all, in the mouths of the wrong people is often just invisible to the expert left. This lamentable fact is never innocent of class and can be deeply racialised.

If the popular left reaches the point of being able to stage some sort of major interruption into bourgeois space it is not unusual for the elite left to be entirely unable to comprehend the rationality of that revolt. This is often predicated on an inability to comprehend the existence of grassroots intellectuals or grassroots political militants.

When the expert left is confronted with the concrete reality of the popular left via a direct demand for recognition and respect it is not unusual for the response to take the form of denial, paranoia, criminalisation and recourse to conspiracy theory in which the speech of grassroots militants can only be understood as manipulation by a rival elite.

In his essay on the Paris Commune Alain Badiou defines the left as “the set of parliamentary political personnel that proclaim that they are the only ones equipped to bear the general consequences of a singular political movement. Or, in more contemporary terms, that they are the only ones able to provide 'social movements' with a 'political perspective'.” He concludes that the decision of the communards to take public affairs into their own hands was a decision to break with the left and that a political rupture, a rupture with the logic of representation, “is always a rupture with the left.”

Badiou also agues that after Lenin concluded that the slaughter of the communards necessitated the development of a centralised, disciplined project aimed at seizing state power the party has been the mode by which the left has sought to organise popular politics. But Badiou does not address the new form that the official left has taken in most of the world – the NGO. The party is not dead. On the contrary it retains considerable power in places like India and in South Africa. And there are countries, such as Haiti or Brazil, where the church is also a contender for influence over popular struggles. But while there is a large critical literature on vanguardism and clericalism the critical literature on NGOs generally criticises NGOs that work for directly imperial agendas - such as the NGOs that work with the World Bank, USAID and so on - while valorising the left NGOs that operate in spaces like the World Social Forum. But in most of the world it is precisely the left NGOs that assume the right to give direction to social movements and to monopolise the resources that can mediate the development of international solidarity. Most of the left texts that seek to offer a global picture of the contemporary moment are based on the experience and thinking of these NGOs rather than the experience and thinking of popular movements. Most attempts at international solidarity are organised through these NGOs. Hallward’s book breaks decisively with this consensus and seeks direct engagement with popular politics.

Damming the Flood is rich with empirical detail and nuanced insight. Its author has paid close attention to the realities of the situation confronted by grassroots militancy in Haiti as well as to the key choices made within that militancy. One of the clearest contributions of the book is the concrete development of Hallward’s early theoretical work on the question of solidarity. An aspect of this that is developed with particular force can be formulated in terms of a choice confronting anyone wanting to develop solidarity across the brutal divisions of human existence: will that solidarity be with the expert left or the popular left?

Notes

i Peter Hallward Absolutely Post-Colonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific, Manchester: Manchester University Press,, 2001, p. 330.

ii Hallward Absolutely Post-Colonial, p. 335.

iii Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment London: Verso, 2007, Damming the Flood, p.314.

iv Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.Xxxv.

v Jean-Bertrand Aristide Eyes of the Heart Monroe: Common Courage Press, 2000, p.63.

vi Jean Bertrand Aristide Dignity, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996, p. 103.

vii Jean-Bertrand Aristide, In the Parish of the Poor: Writings from Haiti, New York: Orbis, 1990, p. 57.

viii Aristide, Dignity, p.49.

ix Aristide, In the Parish of the Poor, p.18.

x Aristide In the Parish of the Poor: Writings from Haiti, p.17.

xi Hallward Damming the Flood Haiti, p.318.

xii Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.137.

xiii C.L.R. James The Black Jacobins, New York: Vintage, 1989, p. 286.

xiv William Robinson Polyarchy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 291

xv Aristide, Eyes of the Heart, p.36.

xvi Robinson, Polyarchy, p. 68.

xvii Robinson, Polyarchy, p. 311.

xviii Hallward, Damming the Flood, p. 181-182.

xix Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.184

xx Cited in Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.342. This kind of situation is not at all unique to Haiti. See, for instance, the comments on NGOs from The National Convention Against Displacement & SEZs held at Bhubaneswa in India in 2007 at http://sez.icrindia.org/2007/06/27/bhubaneshwar-sez-convention-draft-declaration-on-sezs-and-displacement/ In South Africa there has been an extraordinarily hysterical, vicious and entirely dishonest set of responses from within the NGO left to the polite rejection of their authority by the popular left. The paranoia and ruthlessness of the NGO left in the face of autonomous popular mobilisation has rivalled that of the state. For an early comment on this see the statement by the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign at http://abahlali.org/node/3032

xxi Consider, for example, the inability of the letter campaigns in support of Amina Lawal in 2003 to comprehend that there was a project to defend Lawal within Nigeria and within Islam. See the statement against the letter campaigns at http://www.wluml.org/english/newsfulltxt.shtml?cmd[157]=x-157-18546

xxii Emilio Quadrelli developed an excellent analysis of this in an essay on the 2005 revolt in the Paris banlieaus. Quadrelli’s intervention simply contrasted interviews with grassroots militants with the pronouncements of the elite left who could see nothing but an inarticulate cry for help by the ‘socially excluded’. See ‘Grassroots Political Militants: Banlieusards and Politics’ Mute, 30 May 2007 http://www.metamute.org/en/Grassroots-political-militants-Banlieusards-and-politics

xxiii This is typical of all of the various forms of discourse by which a faction of the academic and NGO left in South Africa have tried to render explicit and constant rejection of their authority from popular movements as speech that does not count.

xxiv Alain Badiou ‘The Paris Commune: A political declaration on politics’ in Polemics, London: Verso, 2006, p. 272.

xxv Badiou, The Paris Commune, p. 289.

xxvi This is not to suggest that NGOs and academics are necessarily separate from and opposed to popular mobilisation. On the contrary these relations are a matter of choice and it is in principle perfectly possible for the NGO and the academic to work to support the popular left from within its practices, spaces, languages and structures. But when this is achieved the resulting project remains an instance of the popular rather than the expert left. Similarly an NGO that secures a constituency (or the appearance thereof) for its projects via some form of patronage and clientalism remains an instance of the expert left. continue reading