The Philosopher and His Poor: The Poor-Black as Object for Political Desire in South Africa

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Notes

1. This quote is from the transcripts of the video recording I filmed of questions to which S'bu Zikode was responding to after his Wolpe Lecture in July 2006 at University of KwaZulu-Natal.

2. This position was highly criticized, to say the least, and discredited by vicious rumours circulated that implied that I was part of a cabal of disenfranchized outsiders, in a conspiracy to destroy the movement because of a personal vendetta. This is of course ridiculous. Instead, the ‘conspiracy theories’ have conveniently sidestepped the substantive critique around race, gender and power that stretches far beyond just AbM. Unfortunately, this has made any serious and transparent discussion fraught for many years between all parties. For my part, I am neither anti-AbM nor pro-CCS, and these simplistic categorizations are unhelpful. I do believe in a certain amount of reflexivity and critical inquiry.

3. I am indebted to the excellent analysis by Phadi and Pakade (forthcoming) on their personal experiences in the role of the Black Native Informant and objectification in White academia.

4. There has been discussion on this topic by various people relating to various movements, including activist-scholars such as Mondli Hlatshwayo, Dale McKinley, Desai (2006), Naidoo (2010) and Levenson (2012).

5. I do not have space to discuss the implication here, but reading can be found in Hartman (1997) and Sexton (2008), among others.