Category Archives: South Africa

Say No to Racism

Dans presque chaque match du foot de FIFA, il y a toujours près des avertissements de Sony et d’Heineken qui encadre le terrain du football une phrase simple en anglais : « Say No to Racism. »  J’ai trouvé un lien sur le site officiel de FIFA qui illustre ce point et comment cette organisation lutte contre le racisme.

Vous pouvez voir sa philosophie ici. http://www.fifa.com/aboutfifa/worldwideprograms/footballforhope/news/newsid=518183.html

Un peu d’histoire entre FIFA et la campagne contre le racisme avec « Anti-Discrimination Day » :

http://www.fifa.com/newscentre/news/newsid=518198.html#fifa+anti+discrimination+days

Finalement, je trouve l’histoire de Tokyo Sexwale qui était un prisonnier politique en l’Afrique du Sud pour deux décennie pendant l’apartheid mais maintenant est un ministre du même pays. Voici, ce qu’il a dit sur le sujet du racisme pendant le Confederations Cup.

http://www.fifa.com/confederationscup/news/newsid=1075261.html

La Coupe du Monde et le Racisme

 

Pour ajouter à la post de Zachary, il y a beaucoup de discussion sur Internet maintenant au sujet du football et racisme en Afrique du Sud parce que les gens se demandent si la Coupe du Monde peut y augmenter la tolérance. J’ai trouvé un article intitulé « World Cup will exclude many South Africans » dans Ethiopian Review qui parle un peu de ce sujet :

 http://www.ethiopianreview.com/news/55779.

 L’auteur dit à la fin : “It remains to be seen whether sport’s ability to undermine racism or xenophobia can have a lasting effect on South African society.”

 Qu’est-ce que vous en pensez?

 Pour voir l’opinion de l’ONU (“No Room for Racism At This Year’s Soccer World Cup”), cliquez ici.

Césaire, Fanon, and the Anti-Apartheid Movement

In our explorations of the works of Fanon and Césaire, we have focused primarily on the way these thinkers influenced anti-colonial movements in the francophone world. But these thinkers had a deep influence on thinkers and social justice movements across the rest of the globe as well. Fanon for instance was often cited by the leaders of the American Black Power movement for his ideas on nationalism, and his notions about gaining autonomy through violent struggle became deeply influential to the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara.

And then there was South Africa. While colonial empires crumbled in the 1960s, South Africa remained firmly in the hands of its white minority government, which ruled through a vicious system of racial exclusion called “apartheid,” an Afrikaans term for separation. From its inception in 1948, apartheid gave rise to forceful dissent among the 90% of the South African population that the system excluded from political participation.

As South African anti-apartheid activists developed their arguments against the repressive system, they drew upon a global reservoir of work on oppression and colonialism. As a 20 year old in exile in England in the mid 1960s, Thabo Mbeki, who would one day become president of South Africa, “imbib[ed] the Africanist canon” including Aimé Césaire, Marcus Garvery, Malcolm X, and Frantz Fanon, according to his biographer Mark Gevisser. For his girlfriend’s birthday in 1965, Mbeki (apparently not much of a romantic) gave her a volume of African poetry that he inscribed, “The African poet Senghor is undoubtedly the leading negritude poet in Africa. The godfather of them all is Aimé Césaire, the giant.” For Mbeki and other anti-apartheid activists in exile, thinkers like Césaire and Fanon became a lifeline, a connection to an international struggle against racism and injustice.

Meanwhile, back in South Africa the militant black consciousness movement also felt the influence of thinkers like Fanon and Césaire. Steve Biko, the sharply intelligent, charming figurehead of the movement, wrote extensively about “the struggle,” all the time echoing the ideas of his two Martiniquan forefathers. In 1970, for instance, he published an article entitled “Black Souls in White Skins,” a scathing denouncement of the inferiority complex forced upon black South Africans by the apartheid system. And echoing Césaire he wrote, “’black consciousness’ has to be directed to the past, to seek to rewrite the history of the black man and to produce in it the heroes who form the core of the African background.”

It is clear then that the works of francophone anti-colonial writers helped shape the course of a global black politics, and in South Africa helped to sustain a decades-long movement for basic human rights. If anyone else knows of other movements influenced by Fanon and/or Césaire, I would definitely be interested to hear about them. Feel free to post in the comments.