Abstract
When I first arrived in South Africa in 1989, I was a Marxist. Toward the end of 1996, two and half years after Nelson Mandela came to power, I left not knowing what I was. This is not to say that I, like so many repentant Marxists, had come around to what policy wonks and highly placed notables within the African National Congress (ANC) National Executive Committee (NEC) called for then, a so-called “mixed economy”; a phrase that explained less than nothing but was catchy and saturated with common sense, thus making it unassailable. No, I had not been converted to the “ethics” of the “free” market, but I was convinced the rubric of exploitation and alienation (or a grammar of suffering predicated on the intensification of work and the extraction of surplus value) was not up to the task of (a) describing the structure of the antagonism, (b) delineating a proper revolutionary subject, or (c) elaborating a trajectory of institutional iconoclasm comprehensive enough to start “the only thing in the world that’s worth the effort of starting: the end of the world, by God!”3
Let us assume that black people receive the value of Absence. This mode of being becomes existence manqué—existence gone wrong. Their mode of being becomes the being of the NO.
(Lewis Gordon) 1
The biggest mistake the black world ever made was to assume that whoever opposed apartheid was an ally.
(Steven Biko) 2
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Notes
Lewis Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), 98.
Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (London: The Bowerdean Press, 1978), 63.
Aimé Césaire quoted in Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1952 and 1967), 96.
David Marriott, On Black Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 15 and 19.
David Hirschmann, “The Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa,” The Journal ofModern African Studies 28, no. 1 (1990): 16.
Kogila Moodley, “The Continued Impact of Black Consciousness in South Africa,” The Journal ofModern African Studies 29, no. 2 (1991): 246–247.
Anthony W. Marx, “Race, Nation, and Class Based Ideologies in Recent Opposition in South Africa,” Comparative Politics 23, no. 3 (1991): 317 and 319.
Ibid.
Ibid., 19.
Orlando Patterson, “The Constituent Elements of Slavery,” in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 10.
See Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203–229; Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001).
See Kaja Silverman, World Spectators (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 66.
Thomas Ranuga, “Frantz Fanon and Black Consciousness in Azania (South Africa),” Phylon 47, no. 3 (1986): 183.
Fanon did not view the Oedipus complex as constituent to the structure of Black suffering: “[A] black colonized family does not mirror the colonizing nation, neuroses arise not from within the kinship group but from contact with the (white) outside world.” Deborah Wyrick, Fanon for Beginners (New York: Writers and Readers Publishers, 1998), 43; Fanon, Black Skin, 142.
Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital (New York: Autonomedia, 1992).
Jean-Paul Sartre, Orphée Noir, preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache (Paris: Presses Univeritaires de France: 1948), xl, ff. Quoted in Fanon, Black Skin, 132–133.
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© 2008 Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel C. Gibson
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Wilderson, F.B. (2008). Biko and the Problematic of Presence. In: Mngxitama, A., Alexander, A., Gibson, N.C. (eds) Biko Lives!. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613379_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613379_6
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