Afropessimism and the rituals
Frank B Wilderson discusses Afropessimism, his memoir that analyses structural violence
People who approach racial slavery as just an event in the past will experience Frank Wilderson III’S book, Afropessimism, as a violation. In his own words, they will encounter “Afropessimism as though they are being mugged rather than enlightened; that is because they can’t imagine a plantation in the here and now”. Yes, even in the here and now of South Africa.
Set in Minneapolis, New York and Johannesburg, Afropessimism was released on April 7. This was two months before the streets of Minneapolis were set ablaze as a result of the video recorded lynching of a Black man, George Floyd, whose brutal murder was beamed on to our screens and played on repeat across the world. At that time, the author could not have known that a harrowing scene around the corner would fit into the book’s agenda like a hand into a glove.
In 1991, Wilderson, who grew up in Minneapolis, was the second African-american to be elected into the official ranks of the ANC. (The first was Madie Hall Xuma, who was the president of the ANC women’s league in 1943.)
Wilderson is professor and chair of the African-american studies department at the University of California, Irvine. He is a poet, filmmaker and the multi-award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (2008), and Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (2010).
The title of his third book also refers to a school of thought that critiques civil society’s naturalised dependency on anti-black rituals of violence. Amid the current international Black Lives Matter protests that are leading to the toppling down of the statues of slavers and imperialists, the Mail & Guardian interviewed Wilderson on his latest book and the genesis of Afropessimism as a field of thought. This is part one of a three-part interview that will be published in full online.
Zamansele Nsele: You were born in New Orleans and raised in Michigan and Minneapolis, Minnesota. In your adult life you move to South Africa in the late ’80s, during a time of intense political upheaval. You become a card-carrying member of the ANC and you get involved in its armed wing — Umkhonto wesizwe (MK). Can you tell me about your political activities in South Africa during this period?
When I came to South Africa in 1989, I joined the ANC as a normal cadre (either December 1991 or early January 1992). I later became an elected official in the Hillbrow/berea branch; then I was elected to the five person ANC subregional executive committee for Johannesburg and the 16 townships that surround it.
At the same time, I was a member of the ANC regional peace commission. In the commission we worked to document the atrocities committed by [FW] De Klerk’s security forces and the IFP [Inkatha Freedom Party]. I did this work at the peace commission but, covertly, it was linked to MK. In MK we smuggled rifles into the townships in the Vaal Triangle and to the East Rand area so that our people could combat the police, the SADF [South African Defence Force] and the IFP.
I was also on the executive of the Workers’ Library, a communist library and resource centre where anybody with any affiliations — whether you were Pan-africanist, whether you were non-affiliated, whether you were a Charterist — anyone could attend the communist seminars. We would bring people like Ronnie Kasrils or people from the PAC [Pan Africanist Congress of Azania] to speak.
In addition to that, I was elected to the executive committee of Cosaw [Congress of the South African Writers], where I was nominated by Nadine Gordimer to take her position on the executive board. And I worked as the assistant director of an NGO [nongovernmental organisation] project (run out of Khanya College), where I organised and conducted political education workshops for members of the civics.
On the other side, I was involved in Umkhonto wesizwe’s covert operations in psychological warfare and secret propaganda. Even though I was not thoroughly trained as an MK soldier, I was brought into this group because, ideologically, they appreciated my input. This MK cell had about four of six people in that group who had been students at Wits University, where I had started off as a lecturer. From 1992 to 1994 we lent what I would call unattributable support to the movement (plausible deniablity was key).
The dream was to delink the [South African] economy from Western capitalism, so that we could set up a more or less a bartering system between South Africa and the frontline states; to become self-sufficient and that would mean reneging on [the] IMF [International Monetary Fund] and World Bank loans [of] the apartheid government. Number one, this also meant returning the land to Black South Africans. Number two, it meant putting the Reserve Bank into the hands of the ANC when we came to power. It would mean nationalising the banks and nationalising the mines.
Those dreams were squashed by Western intervention and by the moderate wing of the ANC, which became dominant largely due to two macro reasons and events: first, the fall of the Soviet Union and, second, the assassination of Chris Hani and the purging of Winnie Madikizelamandela and the “ultra leftists” in the ANC (which included the capitulation of [trade union federation] Cosatu and the [South African Communist Party] Central Committee). It was the external forces of anti-blackness, but it was also the internal complicity of a moderate section of the ANC that became dominant.
So how did South Africa’s political transition shape your experiences during this period and lead to the inception of Afropessimism?
Well, I began to realise that South Africans suffer from capitalism in very important ways, but they also suffer from anti-blackness in essential ways. Anti-blackness is the essential grammar of South African suffering. I really didn’t think of that until years later when I was back in the United States and I was able to look back on what had happened in South Africa in the 90s.
When I arrived, in 1989, the dollar equalled R2.63. By 1997, the rand had fallen to almost half its value to the dollar. The woman I was married to in South Africa, Kamogelo, said something towards the end of our marriage. She said that the rand’s freefall (which continues to this day) was because the currency was no longer seen as white money — post-94 it was Blackened in the eyes of the world. I was still a dedicated Marxist, so I offered a purely economic analysis to answer her observation.
What I realised later when I was in the US, when I began to work with Saidiya Hartman, David Marriott and Jared Sexton, is that I was thinking about the devaluation of the rand through rational Marxist terms, but that doesn’t work.
Even though the country had not changed the structure of its economic base significantly, the mask of Blackness meant that the world now saw South Africa as a Black space and so the currency experienced one of the constituent elements of social death, which is “general dishonour”. I am still an anticapitalist. I teach Karl Marx’s Das Kapital every year. I am not throwing out the baby with the bath water, but Black people suffer essentially through social death.
In 2002, I was speaking with Saidiya and we did an interview in a journal called Qui Parle, and I was telling her a story about teaching at Khanya College in Johannesburg. I was teaching Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born to students between the ages of 18 and 25. Remember that these are students who had been politically active members of Cosatu, and members of ANC Youth League. They thought that tomorrow — whenever tomorrow was going to be, in two or three years time — they believed that tomorrow we would be triumphantly rolling down the streets of Pretoria in Soviet tanks having commandeered the entire country.
I was telling them about the day after Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is a novel about neocolonialism and its operations through the centres of the civil service. Throughout the novel, what is described is the social death of the people in Ghana and the ways in which we go from colonialism to neocolonialism with a Black face.
The students were very angry with me, because I was saying to them that this is a novel that dramatises