“Nangu umfazi omnyama” – Hier kommt die schwarze Frau! Über neue Protest­be­we­gungen in Südafrika An den Südafrikanischen Universitäten verschaffen sich junge Feministinnen Gehör. Dabei geht es nur vordergründig um die Abschaffung von Studiengebühren.

http://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/nangu-umfazi-omnyama-hier-kommt-die-schwarze-frau-neue-feministische-protestbewegungen-suedafrika/

Derzeit lässt sich in Südafrika etwas Bemer­kens­wertes beobachten, von dem nur wenig in der deutsch­spra­chigen Presse zu lesen ist. Im Kontext der anhal­tenden Proteste der Jugend gegen die Regie­rung und das Establish­ment, und zwar insbe­son­dere von Studie­renden, findet zugleich ein Aufstand junger Frauen statt. Deren Proteste richten sich nicht nur gegen Studi­en­ge­bühren, ein nach wie vor koloniales Bildungs­system und die korrupte herrschende Klasse, sondern gegen das patri­ar­cha­li­sche System insge­samt, was den Sexismus in den eigenen Reihen einschliesst.


#RhodesMustFall-Proteste, Quelle: www.thedailyvox.co.za


A statue of Cecil John Rhodes was removed from Univer­sity Of Cape Town on 9 April 2015 after concerted student protest. Quelle: Tony Carr, flickr.com

So erklärte Mbali Matan­dela letztes Jahr im März in der renom­mierten Wochen­zeit­schrift Mail & Guardian: „When the Rhodes Must Fall movement began UCT feminists quickly called a meeting with its leadership. They were not going to let their voices be drowned out. After the movement’s first meeting, myself and a small group of black, radical feminists decided that we needed to stake our claim in talks about the univer­sity and its insti­tu­tional racism.” Ziel der studen­ti­schen #RhodesMustFall-Bewegung war zunächst die Entfer­nung der Statue von Cecil Rhodes vom Campus der Univer­sity of Cape Town (UCT) als ein Symbol der Koloni­al­ge­schichte und der Apart­heid sowie der fortwäh­renden weissen Dominanz in Südafrika.

Südafrika ist noch immer bis in die feinsten gesell­schaft­li­chen Poren hinein vom Rassismus geprägt, wie sollte es auch anders sein, denn schliess­lich liegt das Ende der Apart­heid noch nicht einmal eine Genera­tion zurück. Dazu kommen, bei aller hausge­machten Misswirt­schaft und Korrup­tion, die Auswir­kungen des globalen Kapita­lismus und das Erbe der Apart­heid auch in wirtschaft­li­cher Hinsicht. So regelten unzäh­lige Gesetze den Zugang zum Arbeits­markt, zu Bildung und Ausbil­dung und privi­le­gierten als weiss klassi­fi­zierte Menschen in jeder Hinsicht. Die neue Regie­rung hatte 1994 keines­wegs ein prospe­rie­rendes Land mit einer gesunden Wirtschaft übernommen, sondern u.a. einen absurd aufge­blähten Staats- und Verwal­tungs­ap­parat, mit Ämtern und Behörden parallel und exklusiv für jede der gesetz­lich festge­legten „Rassen­gruppe“.

Humanity beyond the Regime of Labor: Antiblackness, Indigeneity, and the Legacies of Colonialism in the Caribbean

JUNE 6, 2014
tags: Africa, antiblackness, Caribbean, Indigenous sovereignty, labor
by Shona N. Jackson
https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/humanity-beyond-the-regime-of-labor-antiblackness-indigeneity-and-the-legacies-of-colonialism-in-the-caribbean/

In 1970, the late Caribbean historian Elsa Goveia wrote that what unifies Caribbean society and culture is the subordination of blacks. It is a claim that has been roundly ignored within contemporary political and cultural work that seeks to frame Caribbean cultures in terms of survival, continuity, transformation, and the embrace of blackness. Goveia’s words, however, are as true today as they were then. Blacks were brought in to work on Dutch, French, British and other plantations because they were seen as the absolute lowest point of humanity. They could not be redeemed, even as Gentiles, as the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas strove to do for Indigenous peoples within the Spanish territories in the 16th century. This anti-blackness became foundational for the societies that ultimately emerged from colonialism.
However, this anti-blackness cannot be understood apart from the subordination of Indigenous peoples in early Empire, under colonialism, and ultimately in postcolonial nationalism throughout the Caribbean. Most writers and theorists tell us that blacks had to be brought into the Caribbean because its Indigenous peoples disappeared or were too weak to work on plantations. This uncritical argument, that the disappearance of Indigenous peoples was the reason for the introduction of black, and later indentured labor, hinders us from seeing how these two causalities are in fact irrevocably yoked.
Hegel illuminated this yoking most clearly by writing that, while Indigenous peoples were a disappearing presence in the New World, blacks were more “susceptible” to European cultures. For Hegel, the acculturation of blacks (made possible by their forced removal from Africa and enslavement in the Americas) was essential for their mobility within the Eurocentric hierarchy of human life, and labor was their route to salvation. When blacks left the plantations and sought political freedom they, significantly, argued that their labor in the colonies (read: greater proximity to European culture and economy) justified the ways in which they articulated their freedom. Specifically, they argued that, through their labor, they had not only transformed the land to produce contemporary societies, economies and cultures but they had transformed themselves into the rightful owners of the colony. This position with regard to work is also very clearly articulated in early post-independence documents put forward by formerly indentured peoples, who claimed that their labor “saved” the colonies after blacks literally left the work behind; thus, they too had a right to both inherit and rule.
Indigenous peoples, on the other hand, were not similarly humanized through labor nor did they transform “terra” into property or state. Thus, they could not claim the product of labor, i.e. the colony and the eventual nation-state that would emerge, to retroactively cement the freedom of the formerly enslaved and indentured. By essentially embracing and transforming the very terms of their subordination – labor for Europeans – blacks affirmed Hegel’s conception that they could only be human by engaging with Western society. They also affirmed Marx’s belief that the rationalization of European forms of labor was the true source of social and individual freedom. For Hegel, Africa was a land of “childhood” that had to be left behind because it was deemed unproductive for European humanity and society. Thus when blacks were forced to labor out of Africa, they could officially begin the work for European humanity and the transformation of global economic systems into fully capitalist ones.
By affirming work as the basis for their humanity, blacks have affirmed European political and social structures, specifically those that they were first the objects of as enslaved peoples and later inherited post slavery. They affirm anti-blackness by valorizing blackness as that which performs labor for European humanity and, thus, for the humanity of the black self. By representing Indigenous peoples as outside of colonial history, as prior to Black history, and as the ultimate ‘other’ to blacks because they can’t be called Creoles – since they could not perform the labor required to become so – blacks preserve anti-blackness in two forms. First, they preserve it in their antagonism to Indigenous peoples, who are literally scripted as the new zero sum of humanity. They are the new “black” that has to be overcome (read: continually enacted death and disappearance) in order for modern blacks to become fully human. Second, they simultaneously preserve the principle of black inferiority which split blackness into what was redeemable through engagement with Europe and what could not be redeemed, that which was always outside and thus had the most potential to threaten this new basis for humanity: modes of sovereign belonging that did not and do not derive from an identity in labor. Blackness thus exists as a bifurcation: that which can be represented within modernity and that which is both prior and an alternate to modernity.
To be anti-black is also to be fundamentally anti-Indigenous. It is a rejection of indigeneity (both in the New World and in Africa) as incompatible with the epistemic terrain of European modernity, its social and political structures, representative frames, and transformative processes. It is a rejection of what blacks were prior to their forced removal from Africa and of what Indigenous peoples still are precisely because they were never fully able to be represented as colonial or postcolonial laborers. It is a rejection of those dimensions of black belonging in the New World that do not comfortably articulate with state power.
I therefore call those of us who are truly committed to decolonization to reject labor as a humanizing basis, as the basis for claims to political and material right. I’m not arguing that black enslaved labor does not matter. It matters profoundly, as do the ways in which Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean and Latin America are made to function as a disenfranchised and impoverished laboring underclass within globalization. However, what I am suggesting is that when labor is turned into the basis for our right to rule we articulate what is fundamentally anti-Indigenous or anti-native in both the old and new worlds. Even anticolonial discourses that deploy blackness as a transracial and transnational term for representation and organizing are insufficient when they are singularly oriented toward labor.

As blacks, as Caribbean peoples, we must reject anti-blackness in all its manifestations. We must recognize that an embrace of the regime of labor is always Hegelian, pro-capitalist (even where it is socialist) and necessarily anti-black and anti-Indigenous. We must seek solidarity with Indigenous peoples, not solely as equal citizens, not solely as Creoles—both of which require them to affirm modes of indigenizing based on labor—but as legitimate prior occupants who do not trace their humanity or their sovereignty through modern forms of coercive labor. We must stop regarding this other and prior basis for humanity as a threat. We must recognize the links between its disavowal and that of poor, disenfranchised blacks, especially those whose bodies are overdetermined by the discourses of criminality.
We must stop using poverty, political disenfranchisement, and denials of sovereignty as weapons against Indigenous peoples. We must stop making returns to Africa—the Africa that is in the Caribbean and outside—that evacuate the continent of anything other than consumable cultural forms. We must reject the mystification of Indigenous relationships to land and recognize the complex and evolving, pre-colonial social and political systems that Indigenous peoples developed and which they seek to restore through claims for sovereignty and land rights. We must recognize the complex spiritual returns to and transformations of Africa in the Caribbean and their potential to offer a new basis for citizenship outside labor, what N. Fadeke Castor calls “spiritual citizenship.” We must find a way to actively engage and writ large the political and social forms Indigenous citizenships and modes of social being can offer. It is ultimately the only way in which we can fully recover the diverse modes of the human from their subordination within the time-space of Eurowestern empire.

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Shona N. Jackson is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University. Born in Guyana, she is the author of Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean (Minnesota 2012).

«Die Schweizer betrieben sozusagen einen Sekundärimperialismus»

Es ist ein neues historisches Trendthema: Die Schweiz und der Kolonialismus. Forscher Christof Dejung über Sklavenschiffe, Missionare und Schweizer Grossunternehmer, die mit den Briten wetteiferten.

Latin@s in the World-System: Decolonization Struggles in the Twenty-First Century

Contributors Immanuel Wallerstein, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Agustin Lao, Lewis Gordon, James V. Fenelon, Roberto Hernandez, James Cohen, Santiago Slabosky, Susanne Jonas, and Thomas Reifer. By the mid-twenty-first century, white Euro-Americans will be a demographic minority in the United States and Latino/as will be the largest minority (25 percent). These changes bring about important challenges at the heart of the contemporary debates about political transformations in the United States and around the world. Latino/as are multiracial (Afro-latinos, Indo-latinos, Asian-latinos, and Euro-latinos), multi-ethnic, multireligious (Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, indigenous, and African spiritualities), and of varied legal status (immigrants, citizens, and illegal migrants). This collection addresses for the first time the potential of these diverse Latino/a spiritualities, origins, and statuses against the landscape of decolonization of the U.S. economic and cultural empire in the twenty-first century. Some authors explore the impact of Indo-latinos and Afro-latinos in the United States and others discuss the conflicting interpretations and political conflicts arising from the "Latinization" of the United States.