ARS NOTORIA

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 5a Govan Mbeki, 1910 - 2001 The main item today is Chapter 7, “The New Offensive: The ANC after 1949”, from “The Struggle for Liberation in South Africa” by Govan Mbeki, published in 1992 (download linked below). Right at the beginning of this chapter Mbeki recalls the joint ANC/CPSA protest against the Suppression of Communism Act on 1 May 1950 and the subsequent massacre of 18 people on that day by the National Party regime that had come to power in 1948. Consequent to this, 26 June 1950 was observed with a stay-away as Freedom Day. This Freedom Day was observed again when the Defiance of Unjust Laws campaign was launched in 1952 and again in 1955 when the Freedom Charter was adopted on that date at the Congress of the People in Kliptown. This is something to remember in what is now called “Heritage Month”. 26 June - our original Freedom Day, having to do with protests against the banning of the Communist Party - is not a Public Holiday in S

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 5 Moses Kotane, 1905 - 1978 The African National Congress of South Africa is sometimes called “Africa’s Oldest Liberation movement”. This series will not attempt a comprehensive sampling of the abundant South African Revolutionary writing. So we will look at four for the time being, starting with Moses Kotane and going on to Govan Mbeki, Oliver Tambo and “Comrade Mzala” (Jabulani Nxumalo). The first is a letter, the next is a book chapter, the third a radio broadcast script, or transcript, and the fourth an article for the ANC publication “Sechaba”. It is a mistake to think that Kotane’s famous “Cradock Letter” (download linked below) was the origin of the Africanisation of the Communist Party of South Africa. The well-known Black Republic thesis, imposed on the South African Party by the Comintern, was far earlier (1927-1928). From soon after its founding in 1921 the CPSA had been a majority-black Party, though this was not always reflected in

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 4 Amilcar Cabral, 1924 - 1973 South Africa's  Heritage Day , 24 September, bequeathed to us by a process of horse-trading with the IFP, falls by chance on the anniversary of the day that Guinea-Bissau unilaterally declared its independence in 1973, nine months and four days after the assassination by agents of the Portuguese colonial power of the country's outstanding revolutionary leader, Amilcar Cabral . The download linked below is Amilcar Cabral’s speech on National Liberation and Culture . This speech was originally delivered on February 20, 1970 as part of the Eduardo Mondlane Memorial Lecture Series at Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York - that is more than forty years ago. Yet it is as fresh and relevant as if it had been written yesterday, and based on an appraisal of our present circumstances. Foreign domination “can be maintained only by the permanent, organized repression of the cultural life of the people concerned,”

Brother Mario

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 3a` Frantz Fanon Frantz Fanon, 1925 - 1961 The extraordinary co-incidence of dates between Frantz Fanon and Patrice Lumumba, both born in 1925 and both deceased in 1961, highlights the precociousness of Fanon’s critique of the post-colonial regimes which had so recently, from his standpoint, come into existence. Please download the essay “Pitfalls of National Consciousness” via the link given below. This essay was published in the book “The Wretched of the Earth’ in French in 1961 and in English translation in 1963. The title of the book is a direct quotation from the song, the “Internationale”, written by Eugene Pottier during the Paris Commune of 1871, the lyrics of which in the original French begin: “Debout, Les Damnés de la Terre!”. Les Damnés de la Terre was the title of Fanon’s book and it is translated as “The Wretched of the Earth”. Fanon is so intelligent and so witty that it is easy to be so charmed by him that critical faculties are

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 3 Patrice Lumumba, 1960 Patrice Lumumba, 1925 - 1961 This third part of our African Revolutionary Writers’ Series is dedicated to the “Uhuru Years” that followed the 1960 “Year of Africa”, when sixteen countries seized their independence, one of which was Congo, now DRC. In this part we feature Patrice Lumumba’s short, powerful  Congo Independence Day speech of 30 June 1960 (download linked below). In the Western Imperialist literature the independence of all of these countries has been recorded as a “granting” (for example: “Congo was granted independence by Belgium”). This contradictory view of what really happened during the greatest change in the 20 th Century - the National Democratic Revolutions in the former colonial countries - mirrors the theme of Frederick Douglass’s most famous speech, ( “If there is no Struggle, there is no Progress” ) where Douglass says that “power concedes nothing without a demand”. It is the revolutionary subjec

SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Thursday September 23 2010 Activists launched a petition against the government's new labour reform act in Tenerife's capital Santa Cruz on Thursday. By James Tweedie Campaigners gathered in front of the famous Flower Clock in García Sanabria park for the press conference to launch the Citizen's Manifesto, backed by a wide range of trade unions, residents' associations and the United Left party. A hand-painted banner read: “No To The Labour Reform – General Strike!” Spain's Socialist Party government faces a national general strike over the legislation on Wednesday September 29, coinciding with similar actions against EU-imposed austerity measures in other European countries. The labour reform law, passed by parliament on September 9, makes it easier for employers to make staff redundant or to sack them for absenteeism. Under the legislation statutory redundancy pay has been reduced from 45 days' wages per year of service to 33 days, or e

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 2a Albert Lutuli, 1898 - 1967 Chief Albert Lutuli was President-General of the African National Congress from 1952 until his death in 1967. In 1960, the year of the Sharpeville massacre, Lutuli (sometimes "Luthuli") was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Our sample of his work is his Peace Prize lecture, delivered in Stockholm, Sweden (download linked below). This speech fits in well with the theme of the second part of our course, highlighting the first batch of victories of the African independence struggles in the period immediately following the Anti-Fascist World War of 1939-45. In the same year of 1960 alone, 16 African countries achieved independence, so that 1960 is sometimes called the “Year of Africa”. In future iterations of this course we would hope to have material from Paul Robeson and W E B Du Bois in this part, helping us to recall the worldwide uprising of internationalist political will for the end of direct colonialism,

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 2 George Padmore 1903 - 1959 George Padmore was born in Trinidad, in the West Indies. After studying in the USA he spent four or five years, from 1929, based in the Soviet Union, heading the Negro Bureau of the Communist International of Labour Unions (Profintern, Red International of Labour Unions, or RILU). This organisation held a First International Conference of Negro Workers in Hamburg, Germany on July 7-8, 1930. South Africans W Thibedi and Moses Kotane were elected to the Executive Committee of the organisation at this conference. In London from 1934, Padmore teamed up with his contemporary and fellow-Trinidadian C L R James , forming the International African Services Bureau. Padmore organised the 5 th Pan-African Congress , in Manchester, England, in 1945. This famous Congress was also attended by Kwame Nkrumah, W E B Du Bois, and Jomo Kenyatta, among others, including a young Norman Atkinson, who later became a Labour member of

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 1 Toussaint L’Ouverture 1743 - 1803 Toussaint L’Ouverture – Toussaint the Opening – was the leader, both military and civilian, of the slave revolt in the French West Indian colony of “Saint Domingue”, which is now the Republic of Haiti. Toussaint brought his country to the brink of independence. The constitution of which he was the author (download linked below), though not the constitution of an independent republic, was enough to lead to his capture, transportation to France, and death in captivity two years after its publication. Toussaint’s successor, Dessalines, did achieve independence, though on harsh terms that crippled the country with “reparations” to the French Republic, one of the great scandals of history. C L R James  wrote a famous work about the Haitian revolution, calling the book “ The Black Jacobins ”. The title was a reference to the bourgeois take-over of the Great French Revolution that had taken place a few years earlie

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 1 Frederick Douglas, 1848 Frederick Douglass 1818 - 1895 The first part of this ten-part series on African Revolutionary Writers covers the period from slavery to Imperialism. The slave trade begun with the first Portuguese ships that passed Cape Bojador on the coast of Western Sahara in 1434, bringing them South of the Sahara for the first time. They immediately took slaves. These, the first slaves of the bourgeoisie, were sold to Spanish colonists on the Canary Islands, where the original inhabitants (the Guanches) had already been enslaved and worked to extinction. The triangular slave-trade pattern: Portugal - Africa - Canary Islands - was soon afterwards scaled up to Britain - Africa - West Indies (or alternatively Brazil or North America) – the Atlantic Slave Trade that took African slaves across the ocean via the “Middle Passage”, and brought back sugar, tobacco, cotton and other plantation-grown commodities, to Europe. Christopher Colu