Archive for December, 2011
by Adele on Dec 23rd, 2011
In the following excerpt from Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa, Franco Barchiesi describes the changing place of the black worker in South African society and the rise of trade unions following the fall of apartheid:
Until the last decade of the twentieth century, racial domination has shaped the lives and employment experiences of the vast majority of South African workers. The realm of production was indeed crucial in determining the status of blacks as second-class citizens. The National Party government, rising to power in 1948 with its program of apartheid, subjected non-whites to a particularly harsh and pervasive system of labor control at a time when most African colonial regimes opted for labor reforms and stabilization. Within four decades, black workers would become protagonists of popular resistance. As a response, the racial state mimicked late colonial experiments and tried to tame labor militancy by making work an avenue to limited social entitlements for the disenfranchised majority. The failure of that project was decisive in the collapse of apartheid and left the ANC, triumphant in the first universal suffrage elections of 1994, with the task of responding to black workers’ expectations of social redress.
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- Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa edited by Franco Barchiesi
EAN: 9781869142155
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by Adele on Dec 22nd, 2011
In the aftermath of COP17, Patrick Bond, author of Politics of Climate Justice, expresses his disappointment at the outcomes of the conference, which, according to him, contributed to turning the Kyoto Protocol into a “soul-deprived, brain-dead, heartless climate-policy Zombie” and allowed the carbon markets to crumble:
Looking back now that the dust has settled, South Africa’s COP17 presidency appears disastrous. This was confirmed not only by Durban’s delayed, diplomatically-decrepit denouement, but by plummeting carbon markets in the days immediately following the conference’s ignoble end last Sunday.
Of course it is tempting to ignore the stench of failure and declare Durban “an outstanding success,” as did SA environment minister Edna Molewa.
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by Adele on Dec 21st, 2011
In the following article, Full Circle Magazine‘s Joey Volschenk speaks to the courageous Mbu Maloni whose life story is retold in the inspirational book Nobody Will Ever Kill Me. While Maloni believes that “every street child has a story to tell”, it was the death of a close friend that led him to “put pen to paper”:
The American Novelist James Arthur Baldwin once said that “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” This statement has never held any significant meaning to me but that was until I met a rather brave and inspirational young man named Mbu Maloni, the author of Nobody Will Ever Kill Me.
At age 18, Mbu has faced and lived through more hardships than most individuals his age. Born in Graaff-Reinet on 18 January 1993, Mbu tells the story of a child left to fend for himself.
“My mother couldn’t find a job. So we had to move to Cape Town when I was five.”
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by Adele on Dec 13th, 2011
Fresh from the disappointing denouement of COP17, Patrick Bond, author of Politics of Climate Justice, says that the victims of climate change ought to be compensated.
In an article co-written with Michael Dorsey for Pambazuka News, Bond says that the Kyoto Protocol’s one possible vehicle of compensation, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), is “dangerously dysfunctional”:
Africa is being cooked by climate change, and those causing the crisis should compensate the victims. This is probably the only hope for any top-down action at the Durban COP17 this week, with the Green Climate Fund design committee co-chaired by Trevor Manuel now searching for the US$100 billion promised by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Copenhagen two years ago.
One dangerously dysfunctional vehicle for delivering money to Africa is the Clean Development Mechanism, the CDM, which was included in the Kyoto Protocol as a way for Third World projects to get resources. But it isn’t delivering the goods, for a variety of reasons that mean Durban should host a rethink.
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by Adele on Dec 12th, 2011
Issue 561 of Pambazuka News is specially dedicated to Frantz Fanon, as 2011 marks the 50th anniversary of his death and the 50 years since the initially publication of Wretched of the Earth. In this special edition, a wealth of authors discuss how the ideas of Frantz Fanon continue to permeate our lives and live on through the revolutions we’ve seen happen over the past 12 months.
One of the contributors to the issue is Nigel C Gibson, author of Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo, whose article, entitled “Living Fanon: The rationality of revolt”, we featured earlier this year. In “Living Fanon: The rationality of revolt”, Gibson reflects on Fanon’s interpretations of post-colonial politics in light of the revolutions in North Africa.
Here are two articles from Issue 561:
“Living Fanon: The rationality of revolt” by Nigel Gibson:
What better way to celebrate, commemorate and critically reflect on the fiftieth year of Fanon’s ‘The Wretched of the Earth’[1] than with a new North African syndrome: revolution – or at least a series of revolts and resistance across the region. Fanon begins The Wretched writing of decolonisation as a program of complete disorder, an overturning of order – often against the odds – willed collectively from the bottom up. Without time or space for a transition, there is an absolute replacement of one ‘species’ by another (1968:35). In a period of radical chance such absolutes appear quite normal, when, in spite of everything thrown against it, ideas jump across frontiers and people begin again ‘to make history (1968: 69-71). In short, once the mind of the oppressed experiences freedom in and through collective actions, its reason becomes a force of revolution. As the Egyptians said of January 25th: ‘When we stopped being afraid we knew we would win. We will not again allow ourselves to be scared of a government. This is the revolution in our country, the revolution in our minds.’[2]
“Fanon’s enduring relevance” by Ama Biney:
Fifty years since the untimely death on 6 December 1961 of Frantz Fanon, he continues to have immense relevance in our times. His writings were focused on the dialectics of the colonised and the coloniser during the era of the 1960s. Whilst that era has passed, new forms of colonialism between Africa and the former colonial powers, or Africa and the developed world, now manifest in the 21st century.
Fanon had a clear grasp of the problems confronting emerging African states. The core themes pervading his radical perspective forged from his role as a scholar, psychiatrist and political activist are: The indispensability of revolutionary violence to decolonisation, class struggle in Africa, neocolonialism, alienation and his profound commitment to freedom. What he would make of the myriad socio-economic and political problems facing Africans and people of African descent today with the intellectual tools of analysis he bequeathed is the focus of this article.
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by Adele on Dec 8th, 2011
As COP17 is steadily drawing to a close with an agreemement to be passed on Friday, Patrick Bond, author of Politics of Climate Justice, predicts some of the “sleazy” outcomes:
What, now, are the prospects for a climate deal by Friday at the UN climate summit in Durban?
The biggest problem is obvious: COP17 saboteurs from the US State Department joined by Canada, Russia and Japan, want to bury the legally-binding Kyoto Protocol treaty. Instead of relaxing intellectual property rules on climate technology and providing a fair flow of finance, Washington offers only a non-binding ‘pledge and review’ system.
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by Adele on Dec 7th, 2011
Tying in with the environmentally significant 17th Conference of the Parties (COP 17), taking place at the Durban International Convention Centre, last night Ike’s Books played host to the launch of five new titles relating to climate change: Politics of Climate Justice and Durban’s Climate Gamble by Patrick Bond, Earth Grab edited by Sylvia Gar, Nnimmo Bassey’s To Cook a Continent and African Awakening by Firoze Manji
The verandah at Ike’s was crowded with Durban left-wing stalwarts, as well as a number of international visitors. Patrick Bond, political economist and head of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, facilitated the event while also having two of his own works in the line up – Politics of Climate Justice, which he wrote while on sabbatical in Berkeley last year, and Durban’s Climate Gamble: Playing the Carbon Markets, Betting the Earth, a collection of essays of which he is the editor.
After speaking briefly about these two texts, Bond introduced Sylvia Gar from Uruguay, editor of Earth Grab: Geopiracy, the new Biomasters and Capturing Climate Genes. Gar expressed her concern that companies are “grabbing the earth” through new technologies and warned her audience that it is ‘much worse than we believe’.
Bond then invited Joel Covel, editor of prominent social journal Capital, Nature, Socialism and contributor to Durban’s Climate Gamble, to address the crowd. According to Covel, ‘we are delusional if we think COP 17 is going to make a difference in our economy’. He noted that, although he ‘rails against the psychopath polluters who make the big environmental choices,’ the real purpose of creating literature like this is to ‘go on and do what must be done which is to give this crisis the attention it deserves and break the cycle of exploitation.’ Covel argued that, although this particular collection celebrates Durban’s environmental struggles, an unprecedented revolution is necessary if we want to chance the whole world.
Next up was renowned social activist, Ashwin Desai, one of the major contributors to Durban’s Climate Gamble, who offered many thought-provoking statement. He told activists in the audience they have to be ‘serious about civil society as an antidote,’ questioning the NGOs which rely so much on funding that they forget how to organise. He said that, instead of ‘delivering a constituency to the ruling classes’, we should ‘f*ck them up’. In closing, Desai referred to Hans Christian Andersen’s story, The Emperor’s New Clothes, warning that ‘civil society is not what it says it is’.
Last up was Nnimmo Bassey, Nigerian grassroots activist and author of To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa. Bassey emphasised his belief that Africa is not a lost cause, referring, in particular, to the on-the-ground activism of rural women who ‘will one day rise up and take their destiny’. He warned that, if polluting nations postpone curbing their emissions for another decade, Africa will ‘be evacuated of its citizens’. Bassey proposed that activists connect and learn from one another, forming a united front against so-called “Biomasters”. Each chapter of To Cook a Continent contains ‘snatches of poetry’, culminating in a poem he wrote about Shell’s extraction of oil in Nigeria: ‘we thought it was oil/ but it was blood’.
The launch of these books heralded a much-needed discussion around climate change in Africa, which one hopes will continue to remain in focus once COP17 concludes on Friday.
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by Adele on Dec 6th, 2011
The University of Cape Town‘s Monday Paper has put together an unofficial glossary of climate change terms for those uninitiated and confused by COP17 (that’s short for the “17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”), which is currently taking place in Durban.
So, get acquainted with AOSIS, BAP, SIDS, G77 and G-8 (not, “like a G6″) with this helpful list.
For more on the implications of climate change, take a look at Politics of Climate Justice and Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society by Patrick Bond.
CDM – Clean Development Mechanism. A project-based emissions trading system under the Kyoto Protocol that allows industrialised countries to use emission reduction credits from projects in developing countries that both reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote sustainable development.
COP – Conference of the Parties to the Climate Convention. The supreme body of the Convention. Currently it meets once a year to review the Convention’s progress. The word ‘conference’ is not used here in the sense of ‘meeting’ but rather of ‘association’, which explains the seemingly redundant expression “fourth session of the Conference of the Parties”.
DC – Developing country.
EIT – Economy in transition. EITs typically include the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (eg Poland), the former Soviet Union (eg Russia), and Central Asian Republics (eg Kazakhstan).
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by Adele on Dec 5th, 2011
The Encyclopaedia for South African Arts & Heritage (ESAACH) is giving away three copies of SA Lit Beyond 2000 by Margaret Lenta and Michael Chapman. In order to stand a chance of winning, ESAACH has asked for your participation in their 15-minute survey to evaluate the usability of their website.
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by Adele on Dec 2nd, 2011
The Siyazama Project enables rural traditional craftswomen from KwaZulu-Natal to express their concerns about AIDS and all of its complexities through their beautiful beaded cloth dolls and beadwork.
The project and its producers communicate and spread awareness on HIV/AIDS through creative workshops, local and international exhibitions, museum collections, publications and on-going research activities. Project leader, Kate Wells, has compiled Siyazama: Art, AIDS and Education, an attractive, full-colour book to illustrate the main collaborators’ role in Siyazama to date.
‘The Siyazama Project effectively melds the arts, public health and the power of social networks into a culturally sensitive and strategically effective challenge to the AIDS epidemic in South Africa. This is what arts and health is all about.’ – Gary Christenson, M.D., University of Minnesota and President of the Society for the Arts in Healthcare.
About the editor
Kate Wells is an Associate Professor and Senior Graphic Design Lecturer at the Durban University of Technology.
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