Originally published in New Frank Talk 13, March 2013


On 8 January 2013, Harvard International Review published an article by Heinrich Böhmke, the Social Movement Hustle, on its online journal.  Within hours, John Comaroff, a Harvard Professor of Anthropology mailed the editor opposing the publication.  The article was removed within a day.  The correspondence below, between Böhmke, Comaroff, editors of the Review and even Harvard’s security department makes for a fascinating study in censorship and a lively expose of academic hypocrisy.  

  1. Download that edition of New Frank Talk 13
  2. Correspondence between Prof John Comaroff and Heinrich Böhmke
  3. Correspondence between Harvard International Review and Heinrich Böhmke
  4. The Social Movement Hustle
  5. Introduction – Athi Mongezeleli Joja and Andile Mngxitama
  6. Abahlali base Mjondolo Press Statement regarding Mzonke Poni


1. Correspondence John Comaroff / Heinrich Böhmke

From: Comaroff, John <jcomaroff@fas.harvard.edu>
Date: Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 12:18 PM
Subject: “The Social Movement Hustle”
To: “contact@hir.harvard.edu” <contact@hir.harvard.edu> Cc: Nigel Gibson

Dear Colleagues:

As a member of the Harvard faculty whose research specialism is South Africa, I am deeply disturbed to discover that you have published “The Social Movement Hustle” by Heinrich Böhmke. This essay, which contains innumerable inaccuracies and, flatly, prejudicial untruths, was circulated among scholars of southern Africa some time ago. It is widely regarded among the most responsible and objective of them as scurrilous, to say the very least. Clearly, Mr. Bohmke has a number of axes to grind. Many of the allegations made in the essay are of questionable foundation. At the very least, the Journal, if it is to protect its scholarly reputation, ought to invite a response from a scholar such as Richard Pithouse or Kerry Chance, who is an ACLS professorial fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology here at Harvard, and who wrote her University of Chicago Ph.D. on the subject of AbahlalibseMjondolo. In addition to endangering the good standing of the journal and of the name of Harvard University—which, as a colleague, I take very seriously—the publication of this piece will raise questions of good faith among many South African intellectuals.

Very best,
John Comaroff

Professor, African and African American Studies
Professor, Anthropology
Oppenheimer Research Fellow
Harvard University
260 Barker Center
Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
______________________________________________________________________

From: Heinrich Böhmke Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2013 2:29 AM
To: Comaroff, John
Subject: The Social Movement Hustle
2013/03/19
8:39 PM

Dear Professor Comaroff

I have been provided with your letter to the Harvard International Review. In it, you criticize their decision to publish my article, The Social Movement Hustle.

As you are aware, this article was published in HIR’s online edition on 7 January 2013.
At midday on 8 January 2013 you contacted the journal saying that you are ‘deeply disturbed’ that my views were aired. You stated that the good standing of HIR and Harvard University itself, was endangered. You went on to suggest that questions about HIR’s good faith may be raised by its publication of my piece.

Strong words indeed, especially coming from a senior member of the Harvard Faculty and addressed to the undergraduate editor concerned.

A few hours later, the article was deleted.

I have engaged in a fascinating exchange of emails with Michael Mitchell, the editor of HIR. We considered his rationale for the deletion. At the end of this exercise, it was apparent that your letter had the desired effect of causing the removal of my article. To be fair, in addition to mentioning complaints about the content, Mr. Mitchell advanced two technical reasons for deletion. However, these quickly fell apart when subjected to logical and legal scrutiny.

In your complaint you make the claim, as if it flows from your personal knowledge, that my essay ‘contains innumerable inaccuracies and, flatly, prejudicial untruths.’ I wonder if you are aware that the HIR editing process took seven full months and that my article received the nit-picking attention of two experienced HIR fact-checkers who demanded sources for every allegation I made.
You do not disclose to Mr. Mitchell on what basis you make this judgment of my article. I suspect you simply relied upon the say-so of researchers advancing a different narrative about social movements in South Africa to mine. These would be the researchers whose methods, analysis, findings and conduct I strongly criticize in my paper. With your emphasis, elsewhere in your letter, on the values of responsibility and objectivity, the very least you might have done was send an email, checking if I had any reply.

The result is that you have obtained the deletion of my article based on information supplied by persons with a personal interest in suppressing it. That is, protecting academic reputations hitched to a narrative of particular movements, which I argue is demonstrably inaccurate.

You describe yourself to Mr Mitchell as one whose research specialism is South Africa. You say of my piece: “It is widely regarded among the most responsible and objective of [South African scholars] as scurrilous, to say the very least. Clearly, Mr. Bohmke has a number of axes to grind”. You are either ignorant of work by other South African scholars making the same points about the social movement hustle as me, or else you are not telling Mr Mitchell the whole truth. My style may be unique but the substantive misgivings expressed by other scholars are no less hard-hitting. If you are interested I could supply you with a bibliography of their work.
There is, of course, a third option. Perhaps what you are really saying is that anyone sharply critical of the celebratory narrative of Abahlali is, per se, not a ‘responsible and objective’ scholar, whatever that may mean.

I am perturbed that you did not take Mr Mitchell into your confidence about your potential conflict of interest. You mention Kerry Chance in the context of her being just another scholar at Harvard who should, at the very least, be used to rebut my work. You fail to disclose the true nature of your relationship with her. Are you not her academic supervisor and friend? And does she not have a book coming out soon, the method and findings of which are directly contradicted by what I have to say? Maybe you ought to have introduced yourself to Mr Mitchell not as a disinterested, if ‘disturbed’, Harvard Faculty expert but as someone with an indirect interest in isolating my critique.

There is a very important phrase in your letter. You tell Mr Mitchell that, “at the very least”, space should be provided for a rebuttal. You presume to nominate the scholars who would be up to the task. A question arises. If rebuttal is second-prize or, as you say, ‘the very least’ that the editor should do to satisfy you that he is not squandering Harvard University’s reputation, what is first prize?

The answer seems clear. You achieved it.

In case I have ‘misunderstood’ you, I point out that since the act of censorship you triggered, you have said and done nothing about the deletion of my article. Is that the way it will remain?
Once you consider the issues more deeply, you will find that the fancies of the writers you champion have been punctured not only by other scholarly work in South Africa but by political and historical events on the ground. When you cast me as the lone, wayward critic of the social movement hustle, you push aside the views of many grassroots activists, a small portion of whom I quote in my paper. They raise similar, harsher concerns about the social movement research by which you swear.

How dare you use your privileged position at an Ivy League institution in the North to effectively silence one side in a real political disagreement among South African activists? You put forward no counter-arguments. You just pull institutional levers. If criticism coming from a relatively empowered person like me can be erased so quickly, what hope is there for the similar views of others ever seeing being published?

Incidentally, this is the style of those whose work on movements you support. Apart from decontextualised and bald denials, the academics you cite have never addressed the specifics of my criticism.

So many ironies confront us. One is that John Comaroff, the tireless fustigator of the judicialization of social struggles, weighs in against a writer who has shown that this is at the core of the political strategies of movements like Abahlali, notwithstanding their occasional ‘strident rage’. The recent article by Jean Comaroff, with whom you often write, is another. She brilliantly identifies the disquieting features of populism under late liberalism. Many of these features have raised their head in South African social movements. Those who bring these facts to light are vilified in terms you actually trumpet but which Jean Comaroff disapprovingly describes in her paper.

I think, on reflection and with the passage of time, you will realize that this intervention on behalf of an increasingly dubious narrative of social movements in South Africa, advanced by an increasingly derided school of researchers was ill-advised. It is almost as if social movement ethnographers must still confront the issues Development Studies dealt with ten years ago. The business of augmenting the voices of the poor can quickly degenerate into the creation of briefcase social movements, as vociferously guarded as meal-tickets usually are.

It is not only Harvard and the Journal’s reputation that has been endangered by your conduct. More precious to many of us who have read and appreciated your earlier work, you have endangered your reputation as a one of the supervisors-of-choice for students wanting to do truly critical work on the South African political scene.

Regards Heinrich Bohmke

______________________________________________________________________

On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 10:15 AM, Comaroff, John <jcomaroff@fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
Dear Mr Bohmke:

Thank you for your email. What I wrote to the editors of HIR is that I was disturbed by the publication of your article without an invitation of a response of those about whom you wrote negatively in it. I never suggested that the article be removed or suppressed in any way, but that the editors invite others to react to it, including — but not exclusively — those whom you attack. I still believe that to be the ideal situation. When the editors wrote back to me, they stated: “The article in question has permanently been taken down from the website for many reasons, including those that you have cited.

Fundamentally, the article was in violation of the contract that we establish with all of our authors prior to publication, and was ultimately an unauthorized upload.” I am not sure what the “many reasons” are, in addition to my own — which, I believe, were echoed by others; nor d I know what the “violation of contract” with you was. I have listened carefully to critiques of your piece before from several sources, both interested and disinterested, and remain persuaded that this essay would be strengthened by further evidence — especially of points alleged to be inaccurate and untrue. In short, a substantive debate, with full disclosure of expert evidence on all sides, would seem desirable. Given your desire to criticize those of whose actions you disapprove, and to defend those who offer a counter-critique, I would imagine that you would welcome such a debate.

As to your comment that “the very least [I] might have done was send an email, checking if [you] had any reply.” That, I believe, is the editors’ job, editors who, no doubt, were aware that, as you state, your “article received the nit-picking attention of two experienced HIR fact-checkers who demanded sources for every allegation I made.” If that was indeed the case, and I am not suggesting otherwise, I would have imagine that they would have responded further to both you and to me to invite further conversation.

In the event, I still stand by my original view: I have never called for censoring the publication of your essay. I continue to believe that it would be better aired and properly responded to.

Sincerely, John Comaroff

______________________________________________________________________

From: Heinrich Bohmke Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 3:13 AM To: Comaroff, John
Subject: Re: The Social Movement Hustle

Dear Professor Comaroff

As I tried to outline in my first letter to you, there are real and significant outcomes attending the debate around the social movement hustle in South Africa. A range of activists have engaged in intense discussions here locally since at least 2006 about the state of organisations, their ideological orientation and the knowledge produced about them. Problematic features included questions of elitism, white power, gatekeeping, the appropriation of the ‘voices of the poor’ and the construction of self-serving and triumphalist narratives about social movements by some activist-researchers. These narratives have lost their grounding in fact. They sometimes even cover destructive and politically deplorable acts with the cloak of radical struggle. Since 2011, it is about selling a dead parrot.

Repeated attempts to bring up these debates in academic forums were quickly silenced. There are many who can attest to this happening to them. Many others still have been too afraid to write against a powerful left-liberal academic orthodoxy and the powerful networks that support it, stretching all the way over to Ivy League universities.

My own attempts to reveal and uproot these practices have been constantly attacked, mostly through back room whisper campaigns in which debate is further skirted.
You seem to be joining this style of critique, perhaps unwittingly participating in the silencing of voices that do not toe the still dominant, although untenable, academic line about movements such as Abahlali and the UPM.

From your letters I see that your position regarding my article, outlining the hustle, has significantly shifted. First you asserted that my article ‘contains innumerable inaccuracies and, flatly, prejudicial untruths’. Its publication, in the first instance, threatened the journal and Harvard’s reputation. You went on to say that my essay was generally scurrilous and without foundation. You were deeply disturbed that it was published at all.

Now, it is an essay that ‘would be strengthened by further evidence’. My arguments have become worthy of ‘a substantive debate, with full disclosure of expert evidence on all sides’. You are disturbed only by the fact that there was no rebuttal.

I would suggest that the reason for your shift in position and tone is that your complaint to HIR has come to light. You are taking defensive measures to insulate yourself from accusations of censorship. This is perfectly understandable, if disingenuous.

Incidentally, I was not told by anyone at HIR who complained about me. Mr. Mitchell advised that complaints were sent to him in private and he even refused to disclose their content. You will therefore understand my complete disadvantage in mounting any reply to my mysterious detractors before the article was pulled. In these circumstances, I think the decent thing to do was to cc me (as you did a fellow complainant, Nigel Gibson) when complaining to HIR.

You will recall that when I criticized you for not making the substance of your complaint known to me you said, ‘That, I believe, is the editors’ job… I would have imagined that they would have responded further to both you and to me to invite further conversation’.

You should know that the editor to whom you complained has flatly contradicted you. Mr Mitchell says: “Professor Comaroff forwarded your email on to me for review. He expressed great concern that his private correspondence with me had come into your possession. He reiterated to me that he regarded this correspondence as private and confidential, and as I had stated to you throughout our exchange, I was and am not at liberty to disclose private correspondence with you”.

How was a conversation to occur, mediated by editors, if you placed Mr. Mitchell under the obligation of secrecy when you wrote to him? It truly pains me to say this given your public, academic standing as a progressive scholar unafraid of intellectual exchange. However, it appears that, in private interactions, you are content with secret denunciations of those with whom you disagree, using the full weight of Harvard University institutional power to suppress what they say. Worst of all, it appears that you lack the grace to admit it.

I don’t think your now casting yourself as a proponent of my article being aired and thoroughly debated really works. Aside from what I have said above, this is not consistent with the language of your complaint. You have yet to explain what you meant to convey when you told Mr Mitchell that ‘at the very least’ there should be a rebuttal. What was first prize?
Also, if your attitude to my article was genuinely that it ought to be ‘strengthened by further evidence’ and debated, it makes no sense for you to have already come to such censorious conclusions about it containing ‘innumerable inaccuracies’ and ‘prejudicial untruths’. (Innumerable? Could you name one, or some or many?)

Would a person sincerely wishing to promote ‘substantive debate’ with ‘full disclosure of evidence on all sides’, write like this?
It seems to me you did not anticipate your complaint coming to light. As we say in these parts, Professor, you were pulling a move and you got caught. The rest is sophistry.

Regards
Heinrich Bohmke

______________________________________________________________________

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 11:12 AM, Comaroff, John <jcomaroff@fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
Dear Mr. Bohmke:
Would you kindly explain to me how my letter to the editors of HIS “came to light,” as you put it? They claim not to have shared it with you, so I am curious to know how, by what means, you obtained it. If you are as open and transparent as you insist that I be, you will no doubt tell me. For your edification, none of this has anything to do with my being “caught” — whatever that means — although I do find your particular mode of rhetoric, polemic, and ad hominem castigation, which hints very strongly of the arts of litigious strategy, at once both interesting and disingenuous. From one so well versed in sophistry as yourself, I take it as rich being tarred with the same term. Sophistry, that is. And for one who casts himself as silenced and censored, you appear to be remarkably articulate and widely heard.

As it happens, I assumed that your article already was out in hardcopy as well as on line, so I had no idea that it would or could be pulled. In short, you are accusing the wrong person of attempting to do that, since I did not even know that it was possible. Nor have I become a “protagonist” of your article. I still find it distasteful, and problematic, on a number of grounds. What is the “next best thing,” the “first prize?” you ask, intimating, as you are wont, to suggest something nefarious? You too might have asked me before casting aspersions, again something that appears to be your stock in trade. What I had in mind, actually, was a full edition on social movements by HIS, broadly representative of a range of scholarly positions on the topic. Whether the editors should or would have wished to invite you to contribute is their business, not mine. You also appear to have twisted my comment about the editors responding to you, implying that I suggested that it was their responsibility to do so. I did not. You asked why I did not write to you. My burden of my answer was that it was not my responsibility to do so: if the editors thought that engaging you in the correspondence was appropriate, it was their decision to make. That, plainly, was my intention. If you choose to read it otherwise, it is your misreading.

As it happens, just as I find your arguments problematic, I do not necessarily agree with those against whom you pit yourself and take to task. You have no idea what my substantive position on social movements is, nor what I think about what you call “the hustle.” Because I find your essay problematic does not mean that I concur with another “side” in the matter. The fact that you reduce the “argument” to two sides and assume that anyone who may be critical of you must by definition be for an imaginary “other side” is simplistic in the extreme; worse, it reeks of the kind of Schmittian rhetoric that the likes of George Bush was so fond of: are you for me or them. As it happens, the answer is neither in any simple sense. You are very quick to make accusations, Mr. Bohmke: the way you have done so in respect of me makes me wonder about your polemical writings about others as well. You speak of my relationship to Kerry Chance: as it happens, and as she would tell you if you asked her, I have been critical of her position on the politics of Abahlali; I also have trained students who are wont to take a position closer to yours than hers. What does that make of your accusations? And why do you presume to divine what I think without — as you so delicately put it of me — asking?

I have not changed my position on your essay. I continue to think of it as deeply flawed. I would have told you that had you sent it to me pre-publication, in a collegial fashion, and asked me to comment on it. (You are quick to accuse me of not writing to you, but do not seem to have thought of the reciprocal.) Again, since I did not know that it could be pulled, it would not have occurred to me to suggest it — whatever my thoughts about whether it should have been published at all. It is NOT therefore inconsistent that I should have later called for a proper scholarly discussion and responses to your paper to be published in HIS. As to “further strengthening it,” it is appropriate, when essays are accompanied by critique that the original author be permitted to adduce further facts and arguments; such is conventional journal editorial practice. What, precisely, is wrong or inconsistent about that? I have never as you allege — once again, allegations, allegations — shifted in position. It seems to me that you wish to portray yourself as the object of suppression and mistreatment. Is this part of your argumentative strategy against those whom you are so anxious to excoriate? And who, exactly, does your work serve? Is it not self-serving? Just a question from a curious academic, well versed in the rhetorical politics of South Africa.

In sum, while I admire the vigor and the skill of your sophistry and rhetoric, it is you, Mr. Bohmke, who may easily be “caught.” A few less accusations, a little less inference, more care not to twist quotation to the advantage of your construction of things might make one more sympathetic to your case. As it happens, the tone and content of your last two letters have convinced me to be even more wary of your claims and modes of argument than I was before.

______________________________________________________________________

Heinrich Bohmke
To: “Comaroff, John” jcomaroff@fas.harvard.edu
Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 9:48 AM

Dear Professor Comaroff

Despite the sharpness of our exchanges, I feel like we are making progress in understanding each other.
You object to the hints of ‘litigious strategy’ in my letters to you. While this has its drawbacks, it is unfortunately necessary when one must pierce evasions, semantic slides, ex post facto rationalisations and misrepresentation held out as nuance. By the end of this letter you will appreciate why it is, regrettably, the only way to obtain straight answers and accountability from a practiced academic.

I am not going to swap insults with you about who is the more complete sophist. My purpose here is to convey my genuine misgivings about the explanation for your conduct that you have offered, to test that explanation and then to move on. For what it is worth, my esteem for your body of work is undiminished. It is just John Comaroff, the writer of private complaints, of whom I want to get the measure.

We got off on the wrong foot. From my perspective, this is because you slated my article in a communication that you wanted kept private and confidential. I said this was bad form and asked why, if your intervention was meant to facilitate debate, you did not also inform me directly of the nature of your complaint.

You gave a reply but say I have misrepresented it. You now clarify yourself thus:
You asked why I did not write to you. My burden of my answer was that it was not my responsibility to do so: if the editors thought that engaging you in the correspondence was appropriate, it was their decision to make. That, plainly, was my intention. If you choose to read it otherwise, it is your misreading.

You have not properly taken account of what Mr. Mitchell says on the subject. He tells me that you wrote to him after receiving my letter. You were upset that your complaint, which you made privately and confidentially, was in my possession. Can you explain how the editors could ‘engage me in the correspondence’ that you wanted to be kept private and confidential? This point does not flow from some fancy legal footwork. It is a straightforward contradiction in what you say.

Either Mr. Mitchell is lying and you have always been content that the editors ‘engage me in the correspondence’ or you are lying. I cannot see any other avenue out.

You go on:
I continue to think of [the article] as deeply flawed. I would have told you that had you sent it to me pre-publication, in a collegial fashion, and asked me to comment on it. (You are quick to accuse me of not writing to you, but do not seem to have thought of the reciprocal.)
Why on earth would I have written to you before I published? I am not aware of any recent work that you have done on South African social movements. Our paths have not crossed before. I do not mention you or cite your work. You are a ‘big name’ but not that big.

I don’t think you can seriously equate my not writing to you before publication for comments on my article to your not writing to me when criticizing my already published article. These are totally different situations, only one of which realistically generates collegial obligations.
You berate me for assuming, like George Bush (eina!), that one is either for or against a position. This is simplistic. I should not assume that just because you criticize me that you are for an imaginary other side.

Before I characterized you as being in any particular camp, let us remind ourselves what you already had to say about me.

You said my article contains ‘innumerable inaccuracies and, flatly, prejudicial untruths’. It was scurrilous. You stated that I ‘clearly have a number of axes to grind’. The publication of my article, in the first instance, threatened Harvard’s reputation and that of the Journal. You also said I was not taken seriously by any real scholar in South Africa.
In other words, as far as scholarship on the subject of social movements is concerned, I am basically in a camp and side of my own.

So, this whole episode actually starts with your aspersion-casting, over-simplification and setting up Schmittian camps in terms that exceed anything I have said to and about you. You also do it behind my back.

In the same breath you go on to punt, as necessary correctives, the work of Richard Pithouse and Kerry Chance; two of the most problematic researchers as far as the ‘hustle’ is concerned. Let me assure you, there is nothing ‘imaginary’ about their being in one intellectual and programmatic camp as far as the Abahlali canon is concerned. It is fair to say that they operate in caucus much as Frances Fox – Piven recommends activist-academics should. But to you they are part of that group of ‘objective’ and ‘responsible’ scholars whose writing on social movements should be aired. To trump it all, you cc your complaint about me to Nigel Gibson, another scholar whose tent is pitched so close to Mr. Pithouse’s it leads to embarrassing footnotes.

So, let there be no mistake, in this matter there is a camp and if I am to be panned for a lack of nuance in stating what is perfectly obvious, so be it. The real issue is your location.

What kind of a person do you think I would be, from what Olympian vantage point would I need to view your conduct in this matter, not to see you in the same camp as those who cry ‘slander’ whenever the social movement hustle is exposed? You may have intellectual quibbles with some of them, but the effect of your private actions and teamwork in this matter has stood you, however temporarily, beneath a banner that is known only too well in South African activist circles.

To round off this point, let us return to George Bush. He is a Manichean guy for sure. But would George Bush be wrong to draw a conclusion about the affinities of a professor who trashes an article criticizing Al Qaeda, recommends the urgent inclusion of the views of the Shoe Bomber and Khalid Sheik Mohammed and carbon copies bin Laden?

You deny that what you really wanted was the deletion of my article. You say that first prize for you in making your compliant was to propose a special HIR edition that would include a broad range of voices on social movements. You say you were going to make this proposal to HIR ‘later’. Would that be with my article deleted in the meantime, until such time as the editors decided whether to run the proposed edition? Any reason you did not state your preferred outcome up front in your letter of complaint? Would that not have made sense if it were indeed first prize? How much later were you going to be in making this proposal? Have you already sent this proposal to HIR or is it still coming?

I also note that your intention to, at some later date, approach HIR with an idea for a social movement edition was not mentioned in your initial letter to me. I want to believe you but I am afraid the overall impression one gets from your letter to the editor is that you wished to chill rather than encourage the debate I had already initiated by getting published.

At this moment you may feel the hints of litigious strategy. You may feel that I am unfairly casting aspersions. I think a neutral but curious person, reading your own account of yourself, having tried to get to grips with what you are actually saying beneath the bombast, will see how necessary and enlightening a hard look is in sifting the truth from the tall tale.

At the end of your letter you say: “As it happens, the tone and content of your last two letters have convinced me to be even more wary of your claims and modes of argument than I was before”.
But, Professor, you utterly rubbished me and my work even before you heard from me. My piece and I were infinitely bad. How much more wary could you possibly now be? No. You did not start out along the road to deletion as a disinterested don, above the fray and concerned only with balance and debate. The true situation is that, if not ideological and intellectual, then certainly personal and professional positions have long been staked out. Your pretense to the contrary does you no credit.

And where does the actual, substantive debate around the representation of social movements go now? You say that you feel I am well heard: I wonder in which forum you think that is the case? If we survey the literature it is very clear the perspective that is well heard in relation to social movements in South Africa is that of your fellow complainants. One has only to have a cursory look at the pile of international journals, chapters, full-length books, interviews and newspaper commentary from activist-academics producing dubious knowledge about movements and a politics that is even worse, to understand the weight of the problem. I understand that you do not like my article and the things I have to say in it. However, I daresay you should be aware by now that the general critique is not going away nor is it the product of a lone and wayward writer with axes to grind. There is a very real and important debate here, with real political consequences, which would probably benefit from the insights of John Comaroff, the intellectual, some time.

Regards
Heinrich
P.S. Mr Mitchell also asked how your private and confidential complaint came to my attention. He has accused me of illegal access to Harvard’s ‘digital infrastructure’. It may get unpleasant. To avoid duplication, I will, with his permission, copy you into the correspondence so far.

______________________________________________________________________

On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 1:28 PM,
Comaroff, John <jcomaroff@fas.harvard.edu> wrote:

Dear Mr. Bohmke:

Yes, perhaps we are beginning to understand each other better. I am about to board a long-haul flight, so I am compelled to respond briefly to what has become my daily missive from you. Thank you for your effort to clarify both your positions and mine.

Since time is limited, please forgive me for responding in a point-by-point manner to your various paragraphs. I am happy to agree about not swapping further insults. You will, however, understand my rhetorical reaction to the substance of your rather abrasive style in approaching me. It did not lack in accusations, you will, I am sure, concede — although I am sure, too, that you will see them as justified. I see my response in the same terms.

1. We got off on the wrong foot. From my perspective, this is because you slated my article in a communication that you wanted kept private and confidential. I said this was bad form and asked why, if your intervention was meant to facilitate debate, you did not also inform me directly of the nature of your complaint.

— Yes, we did get off on the wrong foot, and I regret that. Please allow me to give an account from my perspective and, as you expect of me in respect of your perspective, try to understand mine; I shall avoid litigious rhetoric, since I do not think it helpful . On hearing of the publication of your essay, and seeing the text, I wrote a brief letter to the editors of HIR making plain my objection. I simply assumed that that communication was confidential; I never specifically asked for it; letters of that sort generally are. BUT I also assumed that the editors might ask me for further clarification of my views, and for further detail; such is common practice in the academy. I also assumed, as one does, that they, the editors, might have communicated with you, and that some sort of correspondence might have ensued. Again, that is the usual procedure with journals and correspondence of this kind; direct communication with an author is not, at least not in my experience. After all, as I told you before, I actually thought that the article had already been published in hardcopy as well; it never even occurred to me that it could be pulled. What I asked for, I repeat, was that the people you criticized — this essay, after all, is less a scholarly analysis than a personal criticism of, some would say attack on, named persons — be given an opportunity to reply. In the circumstances, is that not reasonable? Or do you believe otherwise? Would you prefer to silence them, as you claim to have been silenced? In short, had the editors asked that my objections be communicated to you, which they chose not to do — I can only assume because they had other reasons to be concerned about the essay, as I later found out — I would have taken the time to write a full critique of the essay, and been perfectly happy that it be sent on to you. So, again, your presumptions about my wishing peremptorily to have your article removed are simply wrong.

2. You gave a reply but say I have misrepresented it. You now clarify yourself thus:
‘You asked why I did not write to you. My burden of my answer was that it was not my responsibility to do so: if the editors thought that engaging you in the correspondence was appropriate, it was their decision to make. That, plainly, was my intention. If you choose to read it otherwise, it is your misreading.
You have not properly taken account of what Mr. Mitchell says on the subject. He tells me that you wrote to him after receiving my letter. You were upset that your complaint, which you made privately and confidentially, was in my possession. Can you explain how the editors could ‘engage me in the correspondence’ that you wanted to be kept private and confidential? This point does not flow from some fancy legal footwork. It is a straightforward contradiction in what you say.
Either Mr. Mitchell is lying and you have always been content that the editors ‘engage me in the correspondence’ or you are lying. I cannot see any other avenue out.’
— When I say you misrepresented me, it was because you claimed that I had said that the editors had a responsibility to communicate my concerns to you. I said no such thing. I said that it was their decision how to deal with the matter; as I infer from what they have said, mine was not the only intervention that they received — and there were other things, which I am not party to, that they were concerned about. Yes, I did write to Mr. Mitchell afer receiving your letter, for just the reasons stated above. There is no mystery about that, nor a denial. Of course the editors could have engaged you in correspondence on receiving my missive without; in fact, I believe that they did. Had they chosen to do so, they could have informed you that there had been objections to your essay. You would then, I am sure, written to ask what they were. And I, as I have said, would have written a substantive document. It is perfectly straightforward. I have known any number of such cases in the past from editorial boards on which I have sat. Again, you have made a mountainous mystery of a molehill. There is no contradiction, there is a conventional procedure. You however, chose to short circuit the process by somehow obtaining my letter and communicating directly with me. You still, of course, have not been open and honest about how you obtained it. But that is another matter. Mr. Mitchell is not lying and, given your prodigious intellect, you must surely see another avenue out. And if you did not previously, I have just explained it to you.

3. You go on:
I continue to think of [the article] as deeply flawed. I would have told you that had you sent it to me pre-publication, in a collegial fashion, and asked me to comment on it. (You are quick to accuse me of not writing to you, but do not seem to have thought of the reciprocal.)
Why on earth would I have written to you before I published? I am not aware of any recent work that you have done on South African social movements. Our paths have not crossed before. I do not mention you or cite your work. You are a ‘big name’ but not that big.
I don’t think you can seriously equate my not writing to you before publication for comments on my article to your not writing to me when criticizing my already published article. These are totally different situations, only one of which realistically generates collegial obligations.
— No, your would not have sent the essay to me before publication. And, no I do not think of myself as a “big name.” The point that I was making was purely rhetorical and ironic. Again, given your quickness of intellect and capacious interpretive skills, I assumed that this would have been clear. The point that I was making was quite different, and I have reiterated it above: that there is a conventional procedure, mediated through editors, involved in critical reactions to papers (already) published in their journals. I was, and would again, communicate by those means. I have published for some forty years, been subjected to a great deal of critique, much of it perfectly reasonable, and never, to my knowledge, in the form of a letter from a critic directly written to me. I have had letters written to journal editors about my work, even essays, that have then eventuated in critical responses published about my work — to which I have then responded. It seems to me, I repeat, that you have a very different modus operandi in mind where you are concerned, different, that is, from usual academic engagements.

4. You berate me for assuming, like George Bush (eina!), that one is either for or against a position. This is simplistic. I should not assume that just because you criticize me that you are for an imaginary other side.
Before I characterized you as being in any particular camp, let us remind ourselves what you already had to say about me.
You said my article contains ‘innumerable inaccuracies and, flatly, prejudicial untruths’. It was scurrilous. You stated that I ‘clearly have a number of axes to grind’. The publication of my article, in the first instance, threatened Harvard’s reputation and that of the Journal. You also said I was not taken seriously by any real scholar in South Africa.
In other words, as far as scholarship on the subject of social movements is concerned, I am basically in a camp and side of my own.
— Well, for one thing, is this an article about social movements, or a polemic against Abahlali and its white protagonists. If it were about “social movements,” — recall your title — how about taking on, fully and substantively, say, the Social Justice Coalition, Equal Education, TAC, etc. As you well now, since it has a long history in the blogosphere, there are allegations out there that you have an axe to grind against Abahlali owing to your own history with it in respect of the CCF. I, of course, would not judge the truth or falsity of these claims; certainly, as you know, you have been accused of a vendetta against Abahlali and one other social movement — again, I do not judge rightly or wrongly. Your earlier essays on these movements are easily available on the web and from what I can tell, widely read and reacted to, for and against. Should you not be candid about this. Have you not got an axe to grind? For one who has been silenced, the 9,900 google entries under your name suggest otherwise. The burden of your writings on the web are very clear. They reiterate strong claims against Abahlali without, to my knowledge, declaring your own past relations with that movement. What is more, as you know, there is also lively debate, in the public sphere, over your characterizations of that movement. In short, all this has a long history. One need not be in any “camp” to be aware of all this. Perhaps the place to begin is not, as is your wont in the matter, by assuming a political battlefield in which you are pitted against a powerful other “side” — which may or may not exist, since I know plenty of scholars and public intellectuals who take neither — but with the problems raised by this article of yours, and your previous writings on the subject of Abahlali — not, note, “social movements.” Sometimes one might look to one’s own work to understand where battles lie. I certainly have had to in the past. Are you prepared to do the same in the present?

5. So, this whole episode actually starts with your aspersion-casting, over-simplification and setting up Schmittian camps in terms that exceed anything I have said to and about you. You also do it behind my back.
— No, the episode starts with an essay published by HIR. It is you who accused me of taking sides, you who cast aspersions. I reacted to a scholarly article, not to a person — against whom I have no axe to grind and for whose intellect I have considerable respect, despite our disagreements.

6. In the same breath you go on to punt, as necessary correctives, the work of Richard Pithouse and Kerry Chance; two of the most problematic researchers as far as the ‘hustle’ is concerned. Let me assure you, there is nothing ‘imaginary’ about their being in one intellectual and programmatic camp as far as the Abahlali canon is concerned. It is fair to say that they operate in caucus much as Frances Fox-Piven recommends activist-academics should. But to you they are part of that group of ‘objective’ and ‘responsible’ scholars whose writing on social movements should be aired. To trump it all, you cc your complaint about me to Nigel Gibson, another scholar whose tent is pitched so close to Mr. Pithouse’s it leads to embarrassing footnotes.
— I did not punt Pithouse and Chance as correctives; please do not make unjustifiable inferences. Pithouse is somebody you attack directly, Chance’s work by implication. I could and should have named others. And, in a broader debate, would. The point, I repeat, is that you attack them and, by implication, Chance’s work. Would you deny them a right of response? On what grounds? After all, as I said, yours is a very particular sort of ad hominem polemic, not simply a polite analytic argument of ideas. As a lawyer, would you not give a defendant an opportunity to respond. That has nothing to do with “correctives.” It has to do with democratic discourse, which I know that you fervently support.

7. So, let there be no mistake, in this matter there is a camp and if I am to be panned for a lack of nuance in stating what is perfectly obvious, so be it. The real issue is your location.
— No, the real issue is not my location. It is yours: how about locating yourself honestly, in your writings, in the political field of which Abahlali is part, and in which you, in the past, were a significant player whose positions changed. My location is plain. I do not hide it.
8. What kind of a person do you think I would be, from what Olympian vantage point would I need to view your conduct in this matter, not to see you in the same camp as those who cry ‘slander’ whenever the social movement hustle is exposed? You may have intellectual quibbles with some of them, but the effect of your private actions and teamwork in this matter has stood you, however temporarily, beneath a banner that is known only too well in South African activist circles.
— What kind of person do I think you would be? Well, someone who might try to understand that your work may be evaluated, and in this instance seen as problematic, by any intelligent human being without a political axe to grind. Your work dismisses social movements — of which, by the way, Jean and I have often been quite critical — tout court by allegedly “exposing” a hustle. Your previous writings on the topic have not convinced all your readers of this, nor of the fact that you are writing of South African social movements, beyond Abahlali at all; and I am not thinking of the narrow band of Durban-centric academics who seem to be within your primary horizon. In short, you need no Olympian vantage point, simply the same vantage as all of us whose writings are frequently challenged, in my case — and you should credit the possibility, in yours as well — from many quarters at once. Perhaps we all need slightly greater humility in the face of challenge and critique, and not always leap to explanations of concerted political opposition. The world of Durban may appear to you as the world at large; from outside it looks rather small and often parochial.

9. To round off this point, let us return to George Bush. He is a Manichean guy for sure. But would George Bush be wrong to draw a conclusion about the affinities of a professor who trashes an article criticizing Al Qaeda, recommends the urgent inclusion of the views of the Shoe Bomber and Khalid Sheik Mohammed and carbon copies bin Laden?
— Come on, you know that this is a hyperbolic and false analogy. Amusing, yes. Serious? No. Unless, of course, you are comparing Abahlali to Al Quaeda, and Pithouse, Chance et al to the show bomber and Khalid Sheik Mohammed. You cannot really mean that, and it would be demeaning to us both to pretend that you do.
— You deny that what you really wanted was the deletion of my article. You say that first prize for you in making your compliant was to propose a special HIR edition that would include a broad range of voices on social movements. You say you were going to make this proposal to HIR ‘later’. Would that be with my article deleted in the meantime, until such time as the editors decided whether to run the proposed edition? Any reason you did not state your preferred outcome up front in your letter of complaint? Would that not have made sense if it were indeed first prize? How much later were you going to be in making this proposal? Have you already sent this proposal to HIR or is it still coming?
I also note that your intention to, at some later date, approach HIR with an idea for a social movement edition was not mentioned in your initial letter to me.
I want to believe you but I am afraid the overall impression one gets from your letter to the editor is that you wished to chill rather than encourage the debate I had already initiated by getting published.
— Wrong and wrong again. I said that I did not even know that the deletion of your article was possible, that that did not even cross my mind. If you are going to argue with me, kindly do not misrepresent or caricature what I have said. In my subsequent letters to the editors, I suggested — the next day, as it happens, since it is you who are casting aspersions now, you who are throwing around words like “bombast,” in hinting that I wished to defer the matter, to chill the debate, all without evidence, all by inference — that they do something inclusive on the general topic. You may ask them to confirm it. I also suggested, if you must know, that they might want to offer an explanation for why the article was pulled.

10. At this moment you may feel the hints of litigious strategy. You may feel that I am unfairly casting aspersions. I think a neutral but curious person, reading your own account of yourself, having tried to get to grips with what you are actually saying beneath the bombast, will see how necessary and enlightening a hard look is in sifting the truth from the tall tale.
— No, I do not think that a neutral person would find a tall tale here. I think that they would find something quite different, But then of course you would not agree.

11. At the end of your letter you say: “As it happens, the tone and content of your last two letters have convinced me to be even more wary of your claims and modes of argument than I was before”.
But, Professor, you utterly rubbished me and my work even before you heard from me. My piece and I were infinitely bad. How much more wary could you possibly now be? No. You did not start out along the road to deletion as a disinterested don, above the fray and concerned only with balance and debate. The true situation is that, if not ideological and intellectual, then certainly personal and professional positions have long been staked out. Your pretense to the contrary does you no credit.
— Who said that you were “infinitely bad”? Certainly not me. Again, allegations without foundation underneath the litigious rhetoric. I do not know you, and have no interest in rubbishing you. Actually, I believe that I would enjoy arguing intellectually with you about substantive matters, although not about people. I was responding to a particular piece of your work. Can you credit that? How much more wary: very. After all, I have now had direct experience of your misrepresenting me and things that I have said in this correspondence; indeed, I could go line by line, but I have neither the time nor the inclination. Besides, this is a correspondence between us. You tell me, as in the para above, what I did and did not do. On what evidence is this? I do not think that your piece is about a debate at all. It is, as I have said, a particular sort of ad hominem attack, made from an not-fully disclosed position. And thank you for speaking of my position as “a pretence.” It rather makes my point.

12. And where does the actual, substantive debate around the representation of social movements go now? You say that you feel I am well heard: I wonder in which forum you think that is the case? If we survey the literature it is very clear the perspective that is well heard in relation to social movements in South Africa is that of your fellow complainants. One has only to have a cursory look at the pile of international journals, chapters, full-length books, interviews and newspaper commentary from activist-academics producing dubious knowledge about movements and a politics that is even worse, to understand the weight of the problem. I understand that you do not like my article and the things I have to say in it. However, I daresay you should be aware by now that the general critique is not going away nor is it the product of a lone and wayward writer with axes to grind. There is a very real and important debate here, with real political consequences, which would probably benefit from the insights of John Comaroff, the intellectual, some time.
— Of course you are well heard. Your writings are well circulated on the web, as I said. All my students have read it, unsolicited by me — students today are voracious web consumers, as you know — and most have taken (a wide variety of) positions about it. Do you only measure voice my quantity? You are a very skillful writer and have the sort of style that commands attention. You would, I expect, be disingenuous to say otherwise. More to the point, where does the substantive debate on social movements go now? For one thing, across all of South Africa, and away simply from Durban, to include the very many voices, across the political and scholarly spectrum, who have something to say on the topic. They are, I believe, much more polyphynous, and interesting, than you might wish to think. And if they cannot quote Fanon and do not know Badiou, this is no sin. Many of them wish to be heard, and have something valuable to say — without being prejudged.
Sincerely,
John

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From: Heinrich Bohmke Date: Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 10:11 AM Subject: Re: The Social Movement Hustle To: “Comaroff, John” <jcomaroff@fas.harvard.edu>

Dear Professor Comaroff
I trust you are sufficiently revived from your travels to undergo another missive from me. An end is in sight.

I have to keep reminding myself of the contents of your first, private letter to Mr Mitchell. You said:
‘As a member of the Harvard faculty whose research specialism is South Africa, I am deeply disturbed to discover that you have published “The Social Movement Hustle” by Heinrich Bohmke. This essay, which contains innumerable inaccuracies and, flatly, prejudicial untruths, was circulated among scholars of southern Africa some time ago. It is widely regarded among the most responsible and objective of them as scurrilous, to say the very least. Clearly, Mr. Bohmke has a number of axes to grind’.
You do not report these impressions. You own them.
These are not the words of someone whose objective is merely to ensure that the other view is heard. They are the same words circulated in private emails among Abahlologists, for example Richard Pithouse and Kerry Chance, the purpose of which is to discredit me while avoiding debate. Which is what was going to happen here again; that is, until your complaint came to light.
We cannot take the issue forward of what you were trying to achieve by complaining in these terms. You thought, you say, the article was also published in hard copy and thus, logically, censorship was not your purpose. It was certainly the effect.

Incidentally it is not the first time your name has come up in the context of rebuttal. In August 2010, an email was circulated in which the name of ‘the Comaroffs’ was put forward as a guarantee of the unassailable correctness of Kerry Chance’s work on Abahlali; something we now know is subject to some caveats.
You are still fudging the question of how the poor editor of HIR could have made the contents of your private complaint known to me. You say that if he had asked you for further critique of the article, some sort of conversation might have ensued. It is not convincing, especially given how adverse your judgments were. When you complained to Mr Mitchell it was, as you say of my work, ‘less a scholarly analysis than a personal criticism of, some would say attack on, a named person.
You have to see the irony?
You have demonstrated the necessity of speaking bluntly and with some enmity when you observe something you think is a scandal. With me, the scandal is the social movement hustle and with you it is the way I write about the topic. I do, though, make my ‘scandalous’ claims openly. I also justify and source them. You have still to name even some of the ‘innumerable’ untruths you say I tell.

It’s strange to see your suggestion that I may actually be the censor here. You ask whether Dr. Chance and Mr Pithouse I would prefer “to silence them, as you claim to have been silenced?”
The issue cannot be fudged as my not wanting engagement. That’s silly. It does not arise. Organising a rebuttal did not require the removal of my piece.
On the subject of both Abahlali and Mr. Pithouse being offered the space to actually engage my arguments, there is a Huffington Post piece that chronicles their aversion to debate and preference for private denunciation in terms strikingly similar in content to yours. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/khadija-sharife/barefoot-or-branded-polit_b_783444.html .
At the risk of flogging a dead horse, you say
‘Of course the editors could have engaged you in correspondence on receiving my missive without; in fact, I believe that they did. Had they chosen to do so, they could have informed you that there had been objections to your essay. You would then, I am sure, written to ask what they were. And I, as I have said, would have written a substantive document. It is perfectly straightforward. I have known any number of such cases in the past from editorial boards on which I have sat. Again, you have made a mountainous mystery of a molehill. There is no contradiction, there is a conventional procedure’.
On your own rendition of ‘conventional procedure’, I have been quite hard done by. I repeatedly asked Mr Mitchell to let me know about the complaints so that the process you describe could begin.
For example on 14 January 2012 I ask him:
‘Perhaps in closing this particular chapter, you would be kind enough to answer two specific final enquiries. May I have copies, redacted if strictly necessary, of the complaint/s made about my article’.
By 20 January 2013, I was practically begging:
‘If you insist on shielding the identity of the complainants, would it really be too much to ask that you provide a full summary of what was said about the article so that I may at least have the right to know and perhaps de-fortify your decision to delete’.

Mr. Mitchell still refuses to provide any complaints, in any format, with or without names, so that the ‘conventional procedure’ you describe may commence. He says his word is final. As a man interested in fostering academic debate within Harvard, perhaps you should have another private word with him.

On what basis do you conclude that I ‘short-circuited’ normal process by ‘somehow obtaining’ your private correspondence? That sounds perilously close to an accusation of wrongdoing. Your complaint to HIR circulated for some time already, long before I saw it. It was being used, I am informed, as a bit of a rallying cry: ‘did you see Comaroff weigh in against Bohmke’? As to the source, either you forwarded your complaint on to others or Mr Gibson, whom you carbon copied, did so. I took no steps in ‘obtaining’ your letter. A concerned recipient gave it to me.
I have just a few more points to make, unfortunately in the he-said, she-said format. In talking about taking sides you say:
‘As you well now, since it has a long history in the blogosphere, there are allegations out there that you have an axe to grind against Abahlali owing to your own history with it in respect of the CCF. I, of course, would not judge the truth or falsity of these claims …’
You did judge. Please reread your letter to Mr. Mitchell. It has no nuance or openmindedness.
You say:
‘how about locating yourself honestly, in your writings, in the political field of which Abahlali is part, and in which you, in the past, were a significant player whose positions changed. My location is plain. I do not hide it.’
I have openly and honestly located myself in my writings as a prior romanticizer of social movements. In ‘The Branding of Social Movements in SA’ I devoted whole pages to the topic. Beyond that, you might want to question what you actually know about this ‘past’ in which I was a ‘player’, especially if your information comes from those whose academic reputation will be affected by the acceptance of my current position.
You say:
‘Perhaps we all need slightly greater humility in the face of challenge and critique, and not always leap to explanations of concerted political opposition. The world of Durban may appear to you as the world at large; from outside it looks rather small and often parochial.’
This is an excellent point and very well made. Friends have made it too.

Let me say this. Your complaint to the editor did not warrant a humble reply. It was not above-the-fray. You walked through the isinama grass. You did not offer scholarly challenge and critique. You certainly did not succeed in transcending the rather small and parochial world of ‘Durban’ gossip. For someone situated in the ‘world at large’, this is the greater pity.
But let that not detract from your good advice. My work has shortcomings in that some readers want to zoom out into a broader theoretical discussion. I have tried to make it clear that the hustle happens in various forms elsewhere, in similar ways. I think the value of my writing is the level of local detail, onto which broader theoretical points may be attached. Hopefully, by others who are adept at this sort of thing. A careful, generous reader of my stuff will see that this is not about Abahlali or the UPM (I have written about the APF and Egyptian civil society too). It is about the disconcerting ways in which ‘radical’ movements function as part of advanced liberal governance and the ideas, people and events that facilitate this. The hustle is problematic in its destructive effects.

Despite being a player, it would be wonderful if you did use your influence to assist writers, as you say, “across all of South Africa, and away simply from Durban, to include the very many voices, across the political and scholarly spectrum, who have something to say on the topic”. The more light shone the better. Off-hand, I can think of five or six scholars who would contribute, besides those who you have recommended. Perhaps you might even consider contributing some material. The hustle is mainly history and its exposure is complete everywhere but in academia. However, there are important lessons to be drawn about the actual workings of a ‘new humanism’ purportedly beyond ‘the state’ and enunciated by the ‘voices of the poor’.
Regards HB
P.S. This just in. On 25 January 2013, Abahlali in the Western Cape sent out the following email:
‘The Provincial structure of Abahlali baseMjondolo in the Western Cape would like to clarify to all friends, supporters, and other interested parties that our former chairperson, Mr Mzonke Poni, is no longer an active member of our movement.
We would like to warn all movements, NGOs, charities and other organisations not to engage with Mr. Poni on the assumption that he is somehow still connected to our movement and with any of our affiliated communities such as QQ Section. He should not be given donations or other gifts that are meant to go towards AbM or any of our affiliate communities.’
Abahlali is itself, (scurrilously), suggesting that a leader once acclaimed in Abahlali research is, in fact, a hustler.
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From: “Comaroff, John” <jcomaroff@fas.harvard.edu>
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2013 07:54:07 -0500 To: Heinrich Bohmke Subject: RE: The Social Movement Hustle

Dear Mr. Bohmke:
For a start, may we move beyond surnames and titles at this point. The formality is both un-me and un-South African, and, I suspect, un-you. So,
Dear Heinrich, if you will permit:
I think that, by now, we have traded our contrasting and contesting interpretations — and, yes, allegations — sufficiently for the conversation to have become repetitive; I have no intention of repeating my thoughts and intentions yet again, and there is no need for you to do so either. Whether we agree, believe each other or not, is, I suspect, not going to change with yet further iterations of largely the same points; we each believe that we have consistent positions in the matter. May I suggest that we break out of this, then, by allowing me to speak, in person, to the editors of HIR; this in pursuit of a solution that may be equitable to all concerned. (They have asked to meet with me to consider how to proceed, so they will not be averse to this.) They are indeed sovereign, and can decide what to do, but I think that a Solomonic solution of some sort may be possible, and the best outcome; it is certainly consistent with what I have said up to now about my own intentions. And with the content of the final paragraph of your latest email. I can, alas, only meet with them late in the week as I teach today and Wednesday, and have protracted encounters with the medical profession scheduled for Tuesday and Thursday. But I shall attempt to see them on Friday.
Let me offer just two comments by way of clarification, one to clarify an impression that you obviously have of me, the second, scholarly, arising from your post-script.

The first is this. You appear to believe that I have deliberately circulated my email/s in this matter to a network of people with whom you seem to assume that I am personally acquainted. For the record, while Kerry Chance is my former student, and is now a colleague at Harvard, I have never met Nigel Gibson personally, although I have exchanged two emails with him about this matter (see below); he is a friend of my daughter and son-in-law, both academics, but, to my knowledge I have never encountered him personally. I have only ever met Richard Pithouse once, when he presented a paper to the African Studies Workshop at Chicago, and only met S’bu Zikode, when he gave a (rather compelling) lecture to students in Cape Town. I have not met, nor do I communicate with any other of the network of which you speak. Ironically, in this matter, I have not exchanged an email with Kerry Chance about it either, until this morning, when I wrote to ask her whether she had been involved at all. (I was in South Africa for the past 6 weeks, she largely in Pennsylvania, where her stepfather dies.) And, as I said, I have exchanged just two emails with Nigel Gibson, who wrote to alert me to the publication of your essay; I wrote back to him, and copied him in confidence with my email, although he asked if he could share it with one other person, also in confidence — to which I agreed. My second email to him came after you wrote to me, and after I heard from the HIR editors: I wrote to ask him, again in confidence, if he had circulated my email. He said that he had done so only to the person about whom he had asked permission. That is the sum total of all emails between me and others: in sum, three, two to Mr. Gibson, and one to Ms. Chance, this morning. So if it is the case that my email has been circulating “the same words circulated in private emails among Abahlologists” it is news to me, all the more so since I scarcely know the people involved and am not in correspondence with them — beyond ongoing, intermittent email contact with Ms. Chance, rarely over Abahlali. And I had no idea that an email circulated in August 2010 that “was put forward as a guarantee of the unassailable correctness of Kerry Chance’s work on Abahlali.” I would never, ever guarantee the “unassailable correctness” of anyone’s work, not even my own. Yes, I support my students to the greatest degree that I can; that is part of my ethical responsibility as a teacher. But,as anyone will tell you, I am also usually their most acute critic. So if this is the case, if this email circulated, it was not with my connivance – or knowledge.

The second point, on the postscript. It is no surprise to me that Abahlali on the Cape — many of whose actions and strategies I have certainly not approved — has suffered corruption in its leadership ranks. Almost every organization has, from the state and the ANC through SAFA and SA Rugby to most local councils, churches, schools. Goodness knows, the SA press would have to stop publishing if all this type of activity would have to end, and that echelon of the legal profession caught up in scandal commissions would be out of work. But I think that, analytically, onehas to separate ordinary financial corruption from many other activities that would fall under a broad definition of “hustle,” which branding is of course, but only in a specific sense being, in these times, both legal and an axiom of contemporary neoliberal economies. Hustle includes practices conducted in the hidden pursuit of ideological agendas (in the mode of “means justifying ends”), the over-zealous pursuit of career advancement, in the effort to deal with even with perceived moral or theological imperatives (as in many megachurches), even the effort to make sense of one’s own affective desires. And many other things besides. Hustle, in short, is what the logicians call a polythetic category, and the phenomena that make up polythetic categories are very difficult to explain within a single analytic compass. In short, and this is the point, all these various things, these various forms of “hustle” have rather different determinations, causes, effects, a fact that, it seems to me, needs accounting in analyses of the “social movement hustle.” I am not even sure how one actually defines that category, if the ordinary, unsurprising corruption you describe is to be included along with, say, social movement branding, the use of social movements from both within and outside for (various) ideological ends, etc etc. This, it seems to me is a fundamental point to be fully addressed in any serious discussion of the phenomenon.
Regards,
John
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From: Heinrich Bohmke Date: Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 10:02 AM
Subject: Re: The Social Movement Hustle
To: “Comaroff, John” jcomaroff@fas.harvard.edu
Dear John
Thanks for your notes on hustling. I raised the accusation made by Abahlali against Mzonke Poni, its former leader in the Western Cape, not to moralize about corruption. It was to show how the hustle invariably ends – the organic hero deviates from the script and is able to be discarded. He is discarded in terms that, coming from me, would be labeled as ‘scurrilous’.
This correspondence has indeed run its course. For me, it has not been ploughing the sea shore. I’ve been instructed in how Theory from the South actually works and how reliant the whole operation is on Mastery, String Pulling and Expurgation in the North.

I have seen you wind around every which way: from half apology, full-frontal hostility, donnish haughtiness, flattery, self-flagellating prostration and playing Polonius. There was even the suggestion of a geographical palliness in your last mail, which I cannot help but think was invoked to try to occlude the power that you have accumulated as an Ivy League professor and which power certainly stiffened the censor’s arm.

All in response to, what was for you, the unforeseen exposure of how power is wielded on the backstairs of Harvard to support a particular narrative of SA social movements. This narrative is increasingly seen as defective and damaging in South Africa to a substantive intellectual debate as to who and what confronts this drift to authoritiarian neo-liberalism over here. But no matter. As far as ‘scholarship’ is concerned, Harvard commands the field.
Regards HB


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2. Correspendence: Harvard International Review / Bohmke

Janet Eom
Sun, May 27, 2012 at 10:39 PM

To: Heinrich Bohmke

Dear Heinrich,
I hope you have been well. I apologize for the delay in getting back to you.
Thank you very much for your submission. I thoroughly enjoyed reading your work and believe that our readers will find it equally interesting – it is a fascinating, relevant, and powerful topic that you write about.
Please look at my edits that I have made in the attached document. I have also inserted comments in the margins, highlighted in pink. Please look at these comments and make the appropriate changes, or if you disagree with them, please let me know.
I also would suggest removing the two sidebars, the first one on the Students for Social Justice and the second one on White Skin, Black Masks. This will help to cut down on the length of the piece and allow us to fit it into publication standards.
Please review and let me know if you have any questions. Once you are done, could you send me back your updated version?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best,
Janet
______________________________________________________________________

Heinrich Bohmke
Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 4:32 AM

Hi Janet
Any news on publication of the piece I submitted and you so very kindly edited?

Regards
HB
______________________________________________________________________

Janet Eom
Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 6:59 PM
To: Heinrich Bohmke

Dear Heinrich,

Yes, I hope you are well – thank you very much for checking in. We apologize for the delay due to some cycle backups on our end. Your article has been published here: http://hir.harvard.edu/youth-on-fire/the-social-movement-hustle?page=0,0
We had to shorten a little more text because the article was already over 4000 words when our word limit is restricted to no more than 3100 words.
It was a great pleasure working with you. Please let me know if you have any more questions.
Happy New Year!

Best,
Janet
______________________________________________________________________

Heinrich Bohmke
Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 10:23 AM
Harvard International Review eics@hir.harvard.edu Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 2:50 AM
To: Heinrich Bohmke

Dear Heinrich,

Thank you very much for alerting me to your correspondence with Professor Comaroff. As you may well have anticipated, Professor Comaroff forwarded your email on to me for review. He expressed great concern that his private correspondence with me had come into your possession. He reiterated to me that he regarded this correspondence as private and confidential, and as I had stated to you throughout our exchange, I was and am not at liberty to disclose private correspondence with you.

I am further dismayed to find that in your correspondence with Professor Comaroff you indicated to him that I had shared his email to me with you. As you know, I did not ever share that email with you. Only three people in the Harvard International Review, myself included, saw Professor Comaroff’s email, and I have confirmed that none of us have shared it with you.
As such, I am forced to conclude that you obtained Professor Comaroff’s email via unauthorized and illegal access to our email account. Before I can proceed with any further discussion of this matter, I insist that you explain how the email came into your possession. You will, I’m sure, understand that unauthorized access to our email accounts constitutes a grave violation of the security of our digital infrastructure which, if confirmed, would warrant a full response on the part of the Harvard International Review.

I look forward to your speedy clarification of this urgent matter. Regards,
Michael Mitchell
Editor-in-Chief
Harvard International Review 59 Shepard Street, No. 205 Cambridge, MA 02138
http://hir.harvard.edu
______________________________________________________________________

To: Harvard International Review <eics@hir.harvard.edu>

Dear Mr Mitchell
Thank you for your letter.
I did not tell Professor Comaroff that you gave me his letter of complaint. I stated that his letter to HIR was provided to me. I did not say by whom.
I further told Prof. Comaroff that you and I discussed your reasons for the deletion of ‘The Social Movement Hustle’. By the end of our discussion, the technical rationalizations had fallen apart. This left the complaints from Harvard Faculty as the sine qua non of the deletion. You will see that I say to him that you ‘mentioned’ these complaints. Nowhere did I state that you provided them to me. Having found out that Prof Comaroff was the author of one of these complaints, I noted that it had had the desired effect of deletion.

A more careful reading of my letter would have both prevented your scolding by Prof. Comaroff and your own dismay at me.

There is no need to jump to conclusions of unauthorized and illegal access to HIR emails to explain how I came upon Prof Comaroff’s complaint. That is rather dramatic and, shall we say, scurrilous. You would do well to apologize and withdraw your ‘conclusion’ that I ‘obtained Professor Comaroff’s email via unauthorized and illegal access to [your] email account’.

The truth is rather more prosaic and obvious. The Comaroff people have been circulating his complaint among each other for some time already. You yourself know that he forwards correspondence to third parties. You also know that Professor Comaroff cc’ed his complaint to Nigel Gibson. It was forwarded to someone who did not like what was going on and it came to my attention.

I do not owe you this account but provide it in a collegiate spirit meant to help us resolve the real issue of my censorship.
I think your conduct as an editor leaves much to be desired, especially your ill-founded and hasty recourse to a very serious allegation against me. However, I recognize that, to some extent, you are yourself a victim of the high-handedness of academics lined up behind the social movement hustle.

To put your mind at ease, I encourage you to ask your risk management and audit services department at Harvard to take a look. They can tell if there has been any breach of logical security of the server system, in particular the unauthorized access by anyone of your mail server or account.

Kindly provide me with the information about dispute resolution or complaint procedures external to HIR to which you and/or the journal are subject.
Regards
Heinrich Bohmke

______________________________________________________________________

Heinrich Bohmke
Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 6:21 AM
To: Harvard International Review <eics@hir.harvard.edu>

Dear Michael
You wrote asking for my speedy clarification of an urgent issue. I provided this clarification, speedily.
I agree that the issue is urgent.
Please may you reply to my clarification and the full contents of my last letter to you with the same diligence you ‘insisted’ upon from me.
Regards
Heinrich Bohmke
______________________________________________________________________

From: Heinrich Bohmke Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2013 2:06 AM
To: Yung, James C; McDermott, Gail Elizabeth Subject: Request for an IS audit

Good Day,
I write about the possible need for an IS audit of the email accounts of the Harvard International Review, a journal falling under the umbrella of the Harvard International Relations Council, an undergraduate campus group using your mailserver.

If you do not have jurisdiction over these entities, I am sure you will advise with whom this issue should instead be raised.

Briefly the facts are as follows: I am a researcher based in South Africa. I submitted an article to the Harvard International Review for publication in their online journal. It was published on 7 January 2013.

On 8 January 2013, Professor Comaroff of Harvard’s Anthrolopolgy department
(jcomaroff@fas.harvard.edu) complained about the article in an e-mail sent to this address, contact@hir.harvard.edu. He seems to have cc’ed it to one other person, Nigel Gibson, also a member of Harvard Faculty.

Professor Comaroff’s complaint was circulated, (by forwarding) to other persons either by himself or Nigel Gibson. It was eventually shown to me by a legitimate recipient. I have since been exploring both with Professor Comaroff and Mr Mitchell, the editor-in-chief of the journal whether the content of the complaint and manner in which it was dealt with constitutes academic malpractice. That is another issue.

Mr Mitchell, the editor in chief is convinced however that I illegally obtained Prof Comaroff’s complaint. He says:
“I am forced to conclude that you obtained Professor Comaroff’s email via unauthorized and illegal access to our email account. Before I can proceed with any further discussion of this matter, I insist that you explain how the email came into your possession. You will, I’m sure, understand that unauthorized access to our email accounts constitutes a grave violation of the security of our digital infrastructure which, if confirmed, would warrant a full response on the part of the Harvard International Review.”

As you will know, this is a very serious accusation. Fortunately it is also, I would imagine, one that is easily either verified or discounted by a digital forensic expert.

I have invited Mr Mitchell to withdraw his allegation but he has failed thus far to do so. In the circumstances, it seems appropriate both to allay his unfounded fears or else to expose wrongdoing on my part, to investigate these allegations.

Although, I know on the face of it that might seem like just another frivolous spat between intemperate academics, I don’t think it will consume much time or resources.
I ask because the accusation and implied threat of legal action by Mr Mitchell, an editor-in-chief of a reputable Harvard University journal, is not something that I think it is fair to have hanging over me.
Regards
Heinrich Bohmke
______________________________________________________________________

McDermott, Gail Elizabeth Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 9:41 PM To: Heinrich Bohmke Cc: “Yung, James C”

Dear Mr. Bohmke

I can certainly appreciate your upset regarding the matter you described.
In all likelihood, any breach that may have occurred would have been brought to the attention of my office. Since we have not been notified of a breach of this nature, we do not feel an audit is required at this time.

I hope you are able to find a reasonable way to resolve the situation. If I can be of further assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Best Gail
Gail McDermott
Director Risk Management & Audit Services
1033 Massachusetts Avenue, Third Floor
Cambridge, MA 02138

______________________________________________________________________

Heinrich Bohmke
To: “McDermott, Gail Elizabeth” Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:41 PM
Cc: “Yung, James C”

Dear Gail
I am disappointed that you are not able to investigate and thus discount the allegations made.
However, I understand your decision from a risk management point of view. If no one from the Harvard International Review complains of a breach, I suppose it deprives you of a reason to spend time and resources on an audit.Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Regards
Heinrich
______________________________________________________________________

Heinrich Bohmke
Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 6:58 AM
To: hirc@hcs.harvard.edu
Cc: eom

Dear Sir / Madam

I am informed that the Harvard International Review is a program run under the auspices of the International Relations Council.
I write to you to bring to your attention what I – and other scholars with whom I have discussed this issue – consider to be the poor conduct of the editor-in-chief of the Review, Michael Mitchell.

There are two issues. The first relates to his deleting an article of mine after being published in the January 2013 online edition. Subsequent correspondence with Mr Michael reveals a troubling level of disingenuousness, a deep misunderstanding of established scholarly practices, a willingness to blame other HIR staff for the fiasco, a refusal to answer pertinent questions about dispute resolution mechanisms openly and honestly and then a sudden abandonment of his responsibility to account for serious accusations he made to the end of our correspondence.

The second issue relates to his making these unfounded and serious allegations against me. Following correspondence from Professor John Comaroff, Mr Mitchell came to the ‘conclusion’ that I had illegally obtained access to the HIR’s email accounts. As instructed by him I ‘urgently’ replied to his ‘conclusion’. Ten days have passed and despite an invitation and a reminder for him to either withdraw the allegations or have them tested through an internal IS audit, he has not taken either of these steps.

The result is that the editor-in-chief of the HIR has, without foundation, accused me of criminal misconduct, refused to apologise or institute the simple investigatory steps that would discount his allegation. The limbo in which I am left is unfair, to say the least. If you are amenable to advising whether there is any form of redress or accountability, I will place before you the full correspondence between Mr Mitchell and I so that you may evaluate whether his conduct was up to scratch.

I will also provide you with correspondence from Harvard’s Risk Management and Internal Audit section where they decline to launch an IS audit which I sought to trigger. I do not want to burden you with correspondence that you are not able or interested in addressing at this stage though.

If you do not have oversight powers, please advise how one may take up the twin issues I have sketched above. I am not interested in invoking formal disciplinary, legal or other procedures at this stage but rather to obtain redress within the spirit of collegiality, openness to intellectual exchange and fair play to which Harvard is at pains to say it subscribes.

By way of closure, this is not an administrative matter, it cuts to the heart of HIR’s reputation as a quality publication.

Regards
Heinrich Bohmke

P.S. Since Mr Mitchell apparently wishes to cut off communication with me, I am sending this to the senior copy-editor at HIR, Janet Eom, so that the Review may stay abreast of these developments.

______________________________________________________________________

From: Janet Eom Sender:
Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2013 20:36:24 -0500
To: Heinrich Bohmke ReplyTo:
Subject: Clarification

Dear Heinrich,

I received your email from yesterday about a couple issues you brought up. I passed it on to Michael Mitchell, our editor-in-chief, who will be writing to you sometime soon.

Michael has been keeping me updated on his communications with you in resolving this matter, and I would like to take this opportunity to offer some clarification of my own.

Although Michael took down the article, the decision to remove it and the decision not to reinstate it were collective and were made through a discussion among our group of editors. I, as one of the editors, continue to hold that the contractual and substantive concerns which prompted us to decide not to publish the piece were valid.

I hope this helps to clarify some of the confusions regarding this matter, and I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Best,
Janet
______________________________________________________________________

Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 5:04 AM

Dear Janet
Thanks for your clarification. A few issues arise:
1. Did Mr Mitchell discuss his ultimate email to me with the collective?
2. Was it a collective ‘conclusion’ that I had gained unauthorized and illegal access to HIR’s email account?
3. Has the collective decided not to apologise and withdraw this allegation.
Regards
Heinrich

______________________________________________________________________

Harvard International Review Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 4:16 PM
To: Heinrich Bohmke

Dear Mr. Bohmke,

I apologize for my delay in responding to your previous emails; I was travelling.
Let me relieve you of your apparent concern: with your clarification as to how you obtained Professor Comaroff’s private correspondence, we feel secure in concluding that you did not employ any unauthorized or illegal access to our accounts to do so. As I’m sure you have nothing but the fully due respect for the privacy of confidential correspondence, I hope you will understand why we were obligated to respond with the inquiry that we did.

As a secondary matter, I must assure you that I have kept all relevant IRC personnel fully aware of my conduct in this affair and have received nothing but support from them.
Thank you for your patience; I look forward to the conclusion of our correspondence.

Regards, Michael Mitchell
Editor-in-Chief
Harvard International Review 59 Shepard Street, No. 205 Cambridge, MA 02138
http://hir.harvard.edu
______________________________________________________________________

Heinrich Bohmke
Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 10:35 AM
To: Harvard International Review <eics@hir.harvard.edu> Cc: Janet Eom

Dear Mr Mitchell

Thank you for your reply.
If your conduct in this matter has indeed received the full support of ‘relevant’ people, it follows that you have kept them updated on the content of all our communications.
Indeed Janet Eom confirms this on 7 February when she tells me, “Michael has been keeping me updated on his communications with you in resolving this matter”.
This, in turn, means that you have ‘published’ your allegation that I committed a criminal act in the wide legal sense that you so prefer.

Since this allegation was wrongfully made, you have collected a whole range of potential legal and academic malpractice problems, whether the ICR Board or your colleagues think so or not.
All I require is that, without cavil, you apologise for making the following allegation in your 23 January email to me.
“As such, I am forced to conclude that you obtained Professor Comaroff’s email via unauthorized and illegal access to our email account.”
I would have thought that apologising would have been the decent thing to do after you jumped, apparently on behalf of the Journal, to an unfounded and damaging conclusion about me.
Instead you offer this:
“As I’m sure you have nothing but the fully due respect for the privacy of confidential correspondence, I hope you will understand why we were obligated to respond with the inquiry that we did”.
Your attempts to evade responsibility are unbecoming. The issue is not my having due respect for the privacy of confidential correspondence. Nor, for that matter, did you only “inquire” into this. The issue is your making (and publishing) an allegation that I illegally hacked into your email account when this allegation is both false and recklessly made.

I certainly do not understand that you were obligated to respond as you did. Had you acted responsibly, you would have realized that Prof Comaroff’s complaint could just as well have found its way to me via persons to whom it was copied by Professor Comaroff himself. Indeed, this is what happened and you now accept this. Instead of being forced to reach conclusions of criminal activity on my part, you accept that it ought to have been apparent to you, on the face of the email itself, that other channels existed by which Prof Comaroff’s complaint entered the public domain?

Is there any reason you are not prepared to apologize?
Incidentally, Professor Comaroff tells me that normal editorial practice on your part, after receiving his complaint, would have been to let me have the essence of its contents. In other words, you were not prevented by confidentiality in facilitating a scholarly exchange. Personally, on this point, I do have some sympathy with you. Although you ought to have resisted illegitimate pressure to delete the article in the manner you did, I can see how you were frightened.

I will not burden our correspondence any further on the validity of your procedural pretexts for deletion. They are naïve and embarrassing and this much is apparent to any objective person who reads the correspondence and the concessions you make therein and then applies their mind to the underlying legal and scholarly issues.
In that regard, I note that there are people at ICR whose evaluation of your conduct you consider to be “relevant”. Please let me know who they are so that, in fairness, I may make representations to them too. I would imagine that you would have no problem with my motivating why they withdraw their support for your decisions and conduct during this saga.

Forgive my having italicized certain portions of this letter. It is to assist you in recognizing specific enquiries that I have made which deserve an answer.

Regards
Heinrich Bohmke
______________________________________________________________________

Harvard International Review eics@hir.harvard.edu Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 7:41 AM
To: Heinrich Bohmke

Dear Mr. Bohmke,

Please forgive the lack of clarity in my previous email. Certain misunderstandings seem to remain, and therefore, here I will be as clear as I can:
1) I withdraw my claim that you accessed HIR email accounts in an unauthorized and/or illegal manner.
2) I apologize for those claims, which proved ill-founded; in making them, I placed you under a regrettable duress.
3) I did not inform Janet, nor anyone else in the IRC, of my concerns about this, but did inform Janet that you and I were engaged in an exchange regarding your article.
4) I have kept the president of the IRC informed, who you seem to have already contacted.

Thank you very much, and I look forward to the conclusion of this matter.

Sincerely, Michael Mitchell
Editor-in-Chief
Harvard International Review 59 Shepard Street, No. 205 Cambridge, MA 02138
http://hir.harvard.edu


______________________________________________________________________

3. The Social Movement Hustle

Heinrich Bohmke, “The Social Movement Hustle,” published under the Youth on Fire issue (Fall 2012) in Web Perspectives

The African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa is the dominant political party. It will achieve election landslides for time to come. The Left inside the ruling alliance between trade unions, the Communist Party, and the ANC is reduced to positioning behind one or other faction seeking to reap the rewards of high office.

Into this breach have stepped “new social movements,” the radical face of civil society. The extra-parliamentary Left have gravitated to this project and shaped this construct. Social movements have produced a wealth of gushing academic pieces. In recent times there is the semblance of critique. But this is critique on the edges, contestations over research methodologies, and the subtleties and nuances of what constitutes resistance.

One gets little sense of how these poor peoples’ movements actually operate, few pointers as to why, in movements that are “deeply democratic,” espousing a “living politics” rooted in the “everyday life” of the poor, they invariably have a long-standing, singular male who possesses the nomenclature of white academics hovering in the background, occasionally emerging in public in a book or to bail the leader out.

Why is it that these leaders who rely on their own voice, their own resources, and who develop a politics from their immediate living conditions end up making strikingly similar press statements, quoting exactly the same theorists, adopting exactly the same political fads, and pointing out their enemies in the same style and words?

Why is it that social movements initially demanding very concrete, radical things within a militant repertoire of tactics are whittled down to one or two grandees asking for insertion into the mainstream?

The recent drama around Ayanda Kota, leader of the Unemployed People’s Movement (UPM) in Grahamstown, provides an opportunity to ask some questions about the operations of these movements. Behind the bluster and pose of an organic politics developed, as a matter of principle, in the shantytowns, what is actually revealed is enormous ideological and logistical influence by university-based mentors. The symbiosis is an ultimately, unhealthy one, producing false knowledge about how radical and powerful these movements are while simultaneously facilitating their contraction, political moderation, and irrelevance.

Ooze
In January 2012, a scandal oozed out of Grahamstown, seat of the Unemployed Peoples’ Movement, temporarily the most prominent in a long list of championable South African “social movements.” A local grassroots activist took a book from a University lecturer, who subsequently laid criminal charges. Cops arrested and beat the activist.

On websites patrolled by intellectual supporters of the UPM, it was noted that the lecturer was a Marxist. The book in question was the Communist Manifesto. The lecturer was white and privileged. The activist was black and wretched.

The lecturer is Argentinean sociologist, Claudia Martinez-Mullen, an opinionated woman with a history of struggle in her native land. She is active on the local political scene. The activist is Ayanda Kota, long-term president of the UPM and a founding member of the Democratic Left Front (DLF).

The DLF is a sort of pre-political party, made up mostly of middle-class intellectuals, seeking to unite activists within the South African extra-parliamentary Left. More NGO than mass movement, they wait impatiently for the masses to wake up and join them. Their eye, long term, is on trade unions who they regard as the pre-eminent organization of the working class, still misguidedly under the sway of the ANC.

For a country with South Africa’s population, the DLF is painfully low on mass support. For a country with South Africa’s demographics, the DLF is painfully light on Black leadership. It makes up for these impediments by discursively appropriating various “grassroots” protests that occur from time to time. The DLF also eagerly incorporates and profiles any organic leaders the protests produce. They are cover for what is essentially a fairly elite, ultra-left, and vanguard professoriate.

Written up, the UPM and its leadership assume a character that is quintessential of South African left knowledge production. In journals and in cyberspace, grassroots organizations such as the UPM are portrayed as pure, strong, and deep-rooted while they are actually weak, effervescent, and ideologically malleable on the ground. Leaders who are brave, but compromised and limited in real life are aggrandized as saints and sages. Those who question the incontinently romantic representation of South African movements are pilloried as racists and authoritarian.

This was the political scenery also in Grahamstown at the time of the unexpected arrest of Kota. That the DLF and University white left needed to defend Kota to the hilt was obvious. That the defense would be so intemperate was surprising. Martinez-Mullen was waging an “almost sadistic individual campaign against the UPM ever since it did not agree with her political views regarding participation in the May local government elections.” Kota’s assault was part of a co-ordinated campaign of state repression unleashed against DLF activists protesting against the “pro-capitalist ANC” all over the country.

The Book
Eventually, Martinez-Mullen revealed that in May 2011 Kota felt threatened by the ANC Youth League (ANCYL). He asked to stay at her house. She took him in for a number of days. When he left, he took the book and kept it without permission. She claims that she tried to get it back over a period of two months but that Kota ducked and dived. Promises to restore it or account for its loss were not honored. Eventually she went to the police. The police phoned Kota with an ultimatum to restore or replace the book. He did not respond.

The law took its slow course. An arrest warrant was issued in January 2012 and Kota was asked to come to the police station. The cops sought to place him under arrest. A curious sentence in the UPM press statement describes what happened just before the assault: “Ayanda raised his arm in an instinctive gesture of defense following which [constable] Zulu began to assault him with blows to the head”.

A January 2012 Cape Times report quoted others saying Kota became “arrogant” and “unpleasant” while Kota’s companion swears that the violence against him was unprovoked. Given the turn of events, Martinez Mullen withdrew the charges.
Martinez-Mullen explained that it was no ordinary book. She spent everyday at the side of former anti-apartheid activist, Robben Islander, and acclaimed poet, Dennis Brutus, prior to his death. Before he passed away, he gave her some books and inscribed them. In her words, these books were “beyond money.” It was one of these books that Kota took and refused to restore.
With Kota thumbing his nose at her, Martinez-Mullen had either to accept the theft or take legal steps. One gets the impression from her statement that Kota ceased being a comrade to her. It was more than his conduct with the book, as she questioned whether the UPM was run on democratic grounds at all and suggested that money was not accounted for properly.

Set-up
There is an important detail about Kota’s arrest. When Kota pitched up at the police station for this arrest, he came with a companion: prolific Wikipedia sock-puppet and social commentator, Richard Pithouse. Pithouse is the Max Clifford of a stable of social movements. Only his clients obtain coverage in master’s theses and journal articles more than the celebrity pages. Within hours of the arrest, a formidable publicity machine was in operation. As far as San Francisco, organizations were issuing “Release Ayanda Kota” petitions and decrying the police repression of his political cause.

However, some people in Grahamstown were skeptical. Rudzani Floyd Musekwa wondered whether Kota is “an authentic activist” or “a man who saw an opportunity for fame through controversy,” and whether he is ”being used to further the agendas of some academics.” He asked, “Who are these backers of Kota who are quick to politicize everything every time he is arrested?”
Others, who know Kota well, possess a wider, more resigned disquiet. They express astonishment at his metamorphosis into a social movement icon. They tell of a Kota whose politics is shadowed by income pressures, constant fund-raising, and pitch-changing to adapt to the audience. They speak of the grey, flexible area between hustling, politicking, and working that one does not see in Left accounts of the virtuous, grassroots leader.

A founding member of the UPM, Wycliff Mfecane, mentions money. He claims he left the UPM because of disagreements with Kota about the latter’s unaccountable use of funds, among other concerns. Another former UPM member, Mohammed Moraad, accuses Kota of fleecing him of R14000. He says he lent Kota money for organizational work only to find that Kota had been reimbursed from other sources, using the funds on himself. When Mohammed confronted Kota, he undertook to repay the money. It never happened. Their relationship soured and Kota moved on, as it turns out, to greener pastures in the Humanities Faculty of Rhodes University.

In mid 2010, Kota was discovered by a group of white academics at Rhodes who had enormous experience and skill at publicizing earlier, defunct movements. Kota and the UPM brand took off. One Grahamstown resident who wishes to remain anonymous says, “I’d see posters saying, ‘Ayanda Kota speaks on Fanon’ and say to myself, ‘Really?’”

She continues, “We weren’t happy with the way he was being supervised by whites, but at the end of the day we kind of decided not to interfere in a black man’s hustle”.

Kota’s flexible politics led to some strange happenings in Grahamstown. During the 2011 local government elections, the UPM essentially urged a no vote among blacks in the townships. “No Land, No House, No Vote” was their much footnoted slogan.

Back on the Rhodes University campus, Students for Social Justice, a largely
white students’ society, endorsed a candidate for ward councilor. He was one of their number, the affable Chris McMichael, and the SSJ ran his campaign.

McMichael’s election manifesto stated that if elected, half his salary would go into surrounding communities “with an eye to benefiting, in the most appropriate and relevant manner, those who are unable to meet their basic needs with dignity.”

While urging a no vote in the townships, Ayanda Kota was flexible enough to appear on posters urging people to vote for McMichael in the ward on the Hill.

Sometimes flexibility in Kota’s politics stretched a bridge too far. Professor Ashwin Desai, Director of the Centre for Sociological Research at the University of Johannesburg, who shared a platform with Kota, remembers him struggling through a speech on Fanon. “It was painful”, he says, “you could see he did not write the speech”.

Another disquieting example of political flexibility happened on March 21, 2011, Human Rights Day in South Africa. In one of Grahamstown’s townships, a group of mainly elderly women marched to a police station concerned about a spate of rapes in the area. Kota and some SSJ members arrived in “solidarity.” The previous day a student organization protested against Israeli government policies in Palestine likening these to apartheid. Kota was given these posters and brought them to the rape protest in the township. According to an SSJ member present, Kota handed these out to the grannies to be held aloft. Another observer states that marchers were told they were reenacting the famous Sharpeville march from which Human Rights Day derives. Photographs were taken and the township marchers were, for all intent and purposes, deeply committed anti-Zionists for the day.

With help from allies in the academy, the UPM and Ayanda Kota have indeed become savvy media operators. In this respect, Martinez-Mullen had the audacity of not knowing she was outgunned even before she took Kota on. Those subtle plays in contemporary South Africa that pit enduring white privilege against the political trump of blackness and which raise the specter of violence in support of property against the assumption of entitlement to redress are not available to a woman and foreigner like Martinez-Mullen. Laying a charge was a blunt and dangerous instrument with which to bring Kota to account. All it took was for the arrest to be violent, for an arm to be raised in “an instinctive gesture of self-defense,” and she was finished in the Left.

Denial
In time, the UPM issued a statement denying Kota stole the precious book. Martinez-Mullen lent it to him but he “mislaid” it. Kota tried to show the cops the text messages sent to Martinez-Mullen undertaking to replace the book. However, they recognized him as a leader of the UPM. That’s when the raising of his arms in an instinctive gesture of self-defense began.
According to Kota, Martinez-Mullen was after him for other reasons. She criticized him and the UPM for not being Marxist enough. She tried on several occasions to impose her ideology on the movement and was bitter at being rejected.

This pattern has played out in other parts of the country before. Old-style Leftists could not take the assertion of independence by Black grassroots leaders who thought and spoke for themselves. These Leftists resorted to “slander” if their attempts at control failed. Kota’s statement says this is why he stood accused of financial irregularity and undemocratic practice.

Kota’s rebuttal displaces the personal conflict about a book taken by a house-guest into a political realm in which one’s sympathies must be with him. Kota’s statement sets up a familiar narrative involving white ideologues forcing themselves upon expendable black “constituencies.” Kota’s statement thus proposes a handy and probable morality play that allows us to click our tongues at the predictable villains while avoiding disconcerting home truths in which all in the Left have been involved.

There is a pattern of white domination. The problem is that Kota’s statement is part of it. There is an unhealthy, insidious and disfiguring mentorship of black “grassroots” social movement leaders by their academic patrons, most of them white. It has caused social movements to become more media brand and academic fad than real social force. A feature of the branding of South African movements is that they become indelibly marked by the concerns, inclinations, animosities, political acumen, and even writing styles of their mentors. This is mainly because the definitive written tasks of the movement are almost always assumed by or delegated to the academic. This is why a UPM statement reads exactly like one coming from another social movement, Abahlali base Mjondolo, in distant Durban. They share mentors.

Ultimately, in its partnership with various students and academics, UPM hands do not hold the pen. Kota and Co. supply the plot line but the overall narrative is supplied by an academic with strong political and professional motives of his own. Speaking of a social movement that trended just prior to the UPM and which is serviced by a common academic, veteran social movement activist Mandla Sishi charges: “It is well known that Abahlali ‘s political world outlook has a close affinity and imprints of Pithouse’s world outlook and attitude about a number of strategic issues…”

It has happened before. In Mahmood Mamdani’s incisive Citizen and Subject, he writes about trade union organizing in South Africa in the 1970s and 80s:
“The division of labour between the black organizer and the white intellectual leader had a truly Leninist ring to it: the organizer worked full time, openly inside the union, and was subject to worker pressure and criticism; the intellectual operated from outside the union, in a structure not only external but also secret, remote from worker pressure.”

He goes on to quote a white intellectual, Mike Morris, allied to the union movement:
“Whites had the idea whites should not be dominant in the union…but it led to the worst manipulation, most vanguardist. Black full time organizers received directions from the outside. But whites were not paid, not controllable, couldn’t be hired or fired … Whites had a backup of whites, it was a secret to everyone except the front line.”

Though it may sound patronizing and evokes the colonial stereotype of easily duped black villagers, everybody involved in left organizing in South Africa knows about white intellectual mentorship and gatekeeping of many black organic leaders. It is obviously not race that determines the sway of academics in these encounters with movement leaders. It is the unequal power-relations at play. Kota himself credits a Professor Pedro Tabensky and a Mr. Richard Pithouse as “mentors,” each providing instruction to the UPM on the political imperatives for the movement. These imperatives do not arise “organically” nor are they shared by members of movements but flow from the particular theorists who excite the academic’s political fancy.
So what?

If the politics that emerges from this mythopoetic encounter between the white left and black poor is radical, so what? Neither side is pure or authentic but at least they spawn some resistance to the ANC and its anti-poor policies. It is a hustle with the best intentions.

Assuming the best intentions, the problem is that the politics produced by this hustle is impossibly grandiose and actually off-putting. First, the size and popularity of movements within their “strongholds” is grossly exaggerated. Nothing demonstrates this better than the precipitous decline of Abahlali base Mjondolo (a UPM sister organization), whose claimed thirty to fifty thousand membership disappeared overnight in 2009 when conflict broke out between rival linguistic groups in their Durban bastion. The “largest social movement in Africa” was routed.

The manner in which these movements are publicized sets off alarm bells too. Once again, Abahlali is a good example. Its impressive website is run by two middle-class academics, Richard Pithouse and Raj Patel, and has reflected their political and aesthetic tastes rather than the subjectivity of ordinary shack dwellers. Part of the branding of movements is also to play the victim of overblown claims of repression. The manner in which Ayanda Kota’s arrest was spun out is a good example.

Another problem is that in the factually strained attempt to hitch a social movement to the latest theoretical fad, huge empirical liberties are taken. We have seen movement leaders whose politics is actually quite conservative acknowledge the supposed influence of Frantz Fanon, Alain Badiou, and Steve Biko. This is more the wishful thinking of their academic supporters than the true character of these movements.

Perhaps the gravest effect of the unequal encounter between shackdweller and professor is the dilution of the social antagonism expressed by the movement in its early days. Under the tutelage of liberal academics, leaders become hitched to a doomed socio-economic rights legalism, palliative urban planning policy-making, or simply a demand for voice which government is able to satisfy.

The dilution of the movements’ politics is presented in convoluted prose that obscures the political regression at play. Although they sang a different tune before the academics arrived, social movements are cast as rising above mere protest for service delivery taking place in other parts of South Africa. They are Fanonian revolutionary subjects, concerned not with delivery of tangible social goods, but with the search for “human reciprocity and the relationships that develop through a rigorously democratic and inclusive movement.” New social movements espouse a “living politics” derived from the daily, democratic practices of the indigent in the shanties. They are the agents of a “new humanism” beyond race and class, “open to all,” and where every kind of genius may grow.

Having supped of this chicken soup, movements end up, at home, becoming NGOs and self-help co-operatives who hold an occasional set-piece march while their leaders go on speaking tours all over the world and, in the memorable words of Tom Sharpe, mau-mau the flak catchers on the poverty conference set.

Heavy Criticism
When Buntu Siwisa raised concerns about the romantic writing up of the Concerned Citizens Forum, an early social movement that flourished between 1999 and 2002, he was flatly ignored.
Activists from the Black Consciousness tradition drew attention to the imbalance of power in the encounter between white academic “supporters” and grassroots leaders. They wondered about manipulation and withdrew from this terrain. Their scorn was never published in an accredited journal and could thus be safely by-passed.

Other early eyebrow raisers, such as Prishani Naidoo and Virginia Setshedi, called out the nefarious influence of particular academics on movements such as Abahlali. They were attacked in conference papers and statements.

When University of Kwa-Zulu/Natal academic, Lubna Nadvi, argued on a listserv that movement mentors such as Pithouse were doing a disservice to Abahlali by their style of operation, Pithouse initiated University disciplinary procedures against her. He also sent a letter of demand threatening to sue for defamation. Nadvi stood her ground and Pithouse’s grievance collapsed, but she became persona non grata to Abahlali.

When, after eight years of activism and observation, Ashwin Desai raised doubts about Abahlali’s turn to law and questioned the role of its academics such as Pithouse and Raj Patel, Abahlali promptly issued a mentored statement in which it compared Desai to city manager, Mike Sutcliffe, both wishing to destroy the movement.

Researchers from overseas, such as Shannon Walsh, who spent much time with Abahlali but failed to tow the official line, also suffered thinly veiled denunciations. Walsh says, “When I raised pretty mild and comradely concerns about Abahlali’s academic gatekeepers and the negative effects they were having on the movement in Durban, I was derided and undercut through vicious slander and whisper campaigns. In my case, I was deemed a woman unable to think for herself, and therefore under the sway of men with the ‘real’ opinions that mattered. Or, I was attempting to ‘destroy movements’”.

Luke Sinwell, a critic of romanticization and skeptic of the anti-systemic nature of celebrated grassroots organizations was dismissed. His approach was not ethnographic enough and focused only on what movements actually say or do. He missed the resistance implicit in the “everyday life” of communities, the infrared rebellions not visible to the naked eye. To some extent, his fate is worst of all, buried alive in left-wing solipsism, sprinkled with misapplied James Scott, where the only known thing about the poor is their resistance.

People who question the representation of social movements in the academic literature are accused of “slander” or contempt for the poor. If the criticism comes from a white person, it is tinged with racism. As was the case with Martinez-Mullen, criticism comes from a regressive Left wishing to control or destroy these movements. The irony is that actual control of movements is achieved by those providing excessive praise and building up of individual leaders long after the movement itself has withered away.

There are even suggestions from movements such as the UPM that those questioning the way they are represented and the cops are one and the same thing. Statements like this coming directly from academics would immediately and rightly be condemned as anti-intellectual. From social movement leaders, they gain a rough authenticity that allows them to be footnoted as legitimate impressions.

What is not to be Done?
It is now obvious that the social movement project is increasingly part of advanced liberal governance. It creates discrete interlocutors for government, lightning rods amid the seething, ill-formed storm of discontent in South Africa. The role for outside academics concerned with fundamental social change is to recognize that civil society is the decanter where antagonisms subside into conflicts. Social movements, as the quintessential element of civil society, are the active ingredients of that process. Thus demands for brick and mortar houses are finessed into the in situ upgrading of permanent shack settlements in the name of the “right to the city,” or the illegal occupation of vacant land or taking of water transforms into naïve attempts to adjudicate socio-economic claims in court. In the worst case, movements become labor brokers policing the settlements (sometimes violently) with the promise of jobs from nearby employers.

Certainly in South Africa, social movements function now to underwrite a legal and political situation that, unfortunately, cannot provide for the majority of the population. As government’s priority becomes to turn unmanageable, society-wide antagonisms with the poor into predictable conflicts among citizens in particular townships, it is time to directly expose the idea of “social movements” as the core component of such a praxis of recuperation. Trade unions and the Communist Party cannot play this role with any credibility. They hold no sway with and cannot discipline the dangerous classes that the ANC can with its racial and nationalist whip. The “social movement project” is going to be used to fill this void and must therefore be confronted now, and not just because it is a playground for mainly white, middle-class humanities lecturers.

The lessons arising from a ten-year flirtation with rising and falling social movements in South Africa are mainly negatively prefigurative. The limits of a radical politics vested in the so-called “shackland,” among “the poors,” and at the point of reproduction are now clear. No amount of mythmaking or website maintenance can alter this fact. It might not have started out as a hustle but only a hustle can sustain the claim that South Africa’s much vaunted social movements are any longer a formidable and radical force in society. Any agent of radical social change that does arise in the future is unlikely to need websites to proclaim its size, lawyers to win its demands and academics to hone it ideologically.


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4. INTRODUCTION – Athi Mongezeleli Joja and Andile Mngxitama

New Social Movements Hustle.
The New Frank Talk editorial committee bumped into a delicious white scandal!
Dear reader, what you will find in these pages is the anatomy of white power revealed in all its splendid glory and gory strategies of self-reproduction. You will hear names of luminaries of the new struggles; petit thefts and police brutalities slightly exaggerated, all wrapped up around a journal published by the global giant Harvard University. Yes that Harvard, the real deal.

Through this ogling in white affairs we see how White power now comes as resistance against the post 1994 ANC rule that ravages not only the bodies but souls of the blacks. The scandal is that it’s not only the ANC that is eating at the expense of blacks, but also the “friends of blacks” who provide solidarity and “amplify” the voices of the voiceless. We return again to what we blacks have known since the first black/ white encounter: white help kills. The problem has always been that black voices have no capacity to speak this truth and our evidence is no evidence in a reality over-determined by white supremacy. However, here we find evidence that would be hard to refute, – the white left are contemporary missionaries engaged in anti-black anthropological forays into black affairs and struggles to sustain two parallel worlds with devastating consequences for blacks in the final analysis. The one world is where open support for social movements happens; the other world is the reproduction of whiteness not just as agents of these “resistances” but literally creates them and feeds on them too. One struggles not to see a conveyer belt in some factory and a redirect site. Shackland! Nevertheless, a hierarchy of feeding from black suffering has been established. First, the white researchers, academics and their international connections; second, their anointed community black leaders. And somewhere in the distance maybe the communities may benefit. It’s a big maybe. It’s hustle mania!

You will read in these pages how whites who “elaborate” black struggles keep a tight control over blacks, and their fights over our souls. You will also see how through reward and punishment, the acceptable black struggle-figure is crafted, often appearing in the end as nothing but a desperate tragic figure caught up in the whirl wind of a massive hustle.

When Harvard pulled the essay, Bohmke unleashed a series of e-mails (they fall from a truck and we have them published here in full). Read the e-mail exchanges and see the extent of the networks of white power presiding over black suffering and the extent to which whites are prepared to go to defend their territories like they did when they cut Africa up in the great colonial plunder, whose impact we still feel in our flesh and bones.

In his previous essay in New Frank Talk, Andile Mngxitama described reading Heinrich Bohmke’s essay ‘The White Revolutionary as a Missionary’ as akin to “de-quilling a porcupine” that, “to feast, one must invariably suffer the pain of bloodied fingers first.” This irrefutable description doesn’t only reflect the laborious labour required in reading it, but also the devastating opprobrium against the white Left. And as suggested by the title, the white left isn’t only the griot of civil society; it also purveys and organizes ‘civil death’ of its much extolled black communities. He argues rather sternly. While trying to deal with the angst of new slave-catching missionaries, Bohmke abruptly turns and cautions against the new breed of ‘amaqhobhoka’. He argues that the most effective tool for instrumentalizing new forms of white hegemony is through the ‘black missionary’ because he or she “speaks the language.” The “black ally” is the structurally adjusted manager of both ‘civilization’ and the Left – he is the one who mfenguzas [hustles].

This brings us to the text at hand, The Social Movement Hustle. As if vicariously culled from the pages of the previous essay, this piece effervescently continues from where the previous one left off. In a rather journalistic, as opposed to the often-used academic fashion, this first essay traces the story of the Unemployed People Movement (UPM) leader, Ayanda Kota’s arrest in Grahamstown. Kota was allegedly arrested for stealing or having taken a book (with sentimental value to the owner) and not returning it. This debacle caused an outcry that resounded nationally and outside the country, with leftists calling for the freeing of Kota. You would have sworn that Kota had organized some illegal conspiratorial act or some vulgar looting. A little of manhandling by the police after being caught pissing in public can easily turn one into a political icon – a “revolutionary”, these days. Anyway before recapitulating the entire story; sift inside these pages.

What is interesting and perhaps central to this publication is the controversial pulling-off of Heinrich Bohmke’s essay ‘The Social Movement Hustle’ from the Harvard International Review, after publication. Bear in mind this occurs at the say-so of a few prominent people’s objections like Nigel Gibson and John Camaroff. This controversy then leads to Bohmke’s e-mail exchanges with one of Harvard’s prominent social anthropologists and intellectuals, Prof John Comaroff. Professor Comaroff wrote a letter of complaint to the Harvard journal pleading for its sake and the University’s credibility to reconsider airing the “scurrilous…of questionable foundation” essay. Not only does Bohmke have “a number of axes to grind”, his piece will also tarnish the reputation of the journal and Harvard for running its opprobrious expose of whites’ hypocritical proximity to the black agenda. It remains interesting how a white leftist academic, sitting on a managerial position of an Ivy-league institution, like a typical bureaucrat, uses his weight to police and remove at any slight provocation.

Yes, the piece already published, was recalled in a brazen act of censorship and gatekeeping. Bohmke you see, wrote outside industry accepted norms, so the gloves went off, the fascism of liberal academia was laid bare. If you write against the orthodoxy you are ‘illegal’. You can imagine what joy ran through the ranks of the NFT editorial collective upon stumbling on this white barbarism. We had our own little concerns; when Bohmke opens fire against fellow white gate-keepers, he doesn’t spare the black native assistant. “A white who fires at blacks, even as collateral damage, is not to be trusted”. But we had to ask the question as if in Django, if a white was to shoot Candi (a white man) and in the process cut down Stephen (the loyal black slave), would we cry for a house Negro? Our resistance collapsed at this point and we take full responsibility for the blacks who are going down with their white handlers. We wave our dismissive hand ala Biko when confronted with the woes of a homeland leader about Pretoria, back in the day. This is not being callous, this is being principled. Our concern here is not primarily to expose the lie of the “living politics” and construction of “bottom-up democracy” manufactured for publishing and academic promotion whilst outlawing and taming black resistance. Nor are we interested in discrediting the “social movement”, we don’t refute the brutality of the ANC-managed state against blacks; we take it to be its very design. We want to show the dangers of white tutelage of the new black resistance that must obliterate the ANC project.

For Bohmke the connection between the Kotas, their struggle and white academics remains to be that structured by certain tasteless self-interests. This triadic relation functions in ways where Kota is always the ‘pupil’ as Biko would say. Quite frankly the black conscious (BC) adherent was once heard saying a white man was his BC mentor. Now that will shake even the far right. Kota becomes, as text says, the black missionary used to further white agendas because he “speaks the language”, but he also gets his share. Observe this old transaction:
“In one of Grahamstown’s townships, a group of mainly elderly women marched to a police station concerned about a spate of rapes in the area. Kota and some SSJ members arrived in “solidarity.” The previous day a student organization protested against Israeli government policies in Palestine likening these to apartheid. Kota was given these posters and brought them to the rape protest in the township. According to an SSJ member present, Kota handed these out to the grannies to be held aloft” (see main text and cover photo).

From even the cold shores of slavery where blacks were piled unto each other in feaces-infested ships, a black slave-catcher or House Negro was always a present figure1. Biko, like Fanon died disorganized by this ironic, ‘willing’ participation of blacks in black oppression. But again, like Lewis Gordon, says, such black antiblackness in an antiblack world isn’t that “ironic”. But at the programmatic level Bohmke’s turn away from the typical black administrators, but toward the often-valorized grassroots movements, to its intellectual patrons and especially their acolytes, the so-called ‘organic intellectuals’ is more than crucial. Here we are catapulted to see the contaminatory effect of white leftists and their minions – something almost akin to a systematic contempt of black liberatory project couched as radical humanism.

This emanates from the old reality of political sabotage in the left in South Africa, which by the way has considerably morphed, not to change structurally but to retain its historical refusal to think ‘the black problem’. Of course this means securing apropos white supremacy. Doesn’t this remind us of Biko’s injunction that the white revolutionary’s disavowal of the black position is a calculated move against facing his or her own masochism?2 There’s a very strict parallel, if not interdependence, between civil society and the act of policing, in which civil society and its formations (the world predicated on white ethical demands) not only augments but also relies upon. In fact, the history of the left in South Africa since its expulsion in the 1920s Comintern, the so-called Independent Native Republic thesis, has structured itself around hegemonic subversion of the black agenda.

John Comarrof’s act here proves considerably this policing and co-optation of black liberatory politics. Also important to note is that not only do white Samaritans paradoxically gain back their white symbolic integrity of the now in-vogue problematised whiteness; they literally use it to animate their decadent lives. There is a sickening level at which white hypocrisy can be taken. These anthropologists (all whites involved in black affairs are anthropologists), valorize the “living politics” of blacks trapped in shacks and demanding the right to their shack, at best an RDP house. But when they think of living, they bathe in colonial opulence that literally has pieces of Africa as objects of pleasure and comfort. So far away are their actual lives from the hell-hole of shackland they feed off, that Prof Comaroff and his beloved Jean’s lifestyle attracted the attention of the South African magazine ‘House and Leisure’ whose front-page featured their Table Mountain 1883 Victorian house, built at the time for local bank managers. Yes, the same trajectory of comfort and dispossession continues. We can’t miss the magazine’s tag line “the pleasure of living now”. The pieces of artwork in this home are a collection of Africa, a colonial impulse: cut and own. The piece de resistance of their handsome
1 See Kwesi Kwaa Prah’s “Capitein: A critical study of the an 18th century African”.
2 See, Steve Biko interview with Gail Gerhard in From Protest to Challenge; and Frank Wilderson’s “Biko and the problematic of black presence” in Andile Mngxitama et al Biko Lives: contesting legacies of Steve Biko.

Study is a map specifically showing the dispossession, river boundary by river boundary, of Black people during the calamitous nineteenth century. Are dinner guests meant to appreciate that their hosts are of enormous, detailed erudition, sympathetic towards the Black condition and thus exempt from being just another old-moneyed, white liberal socialite couple? How is land grabbing turned into decoration? We wonder: would they exchange this house for a life in the shacks? Does it ever occur to them and their other friends that the very privileges of whiteness they were happy to splash in the pages of Home and Leisure are directly linked to the creation and the maintenance of shack hells?

Comaroff weighed in ways that can only be seen as unethical. His graduate students are in the Shackland industry and other sufferings of black South Africans that found themselves under attack from Bohmke. The Harvard system deals with Bohmke in some sort of cold-courtesy cautiousness which we believe wouldn’t be the case if the author wasn’t white, and is generally reminiscent of how they deal with transgressors. Kota remains in their good books by pandering to their demands and by not showing any sort of recalcitrance – to see ‘white’ as exactly outside of its purported goodness and confront it, you are in shit. Similarly, a comrade of Abahlali in Cape Town was recently shown the gates by whites. The people who project themselves as doing ethical politics, driven by bottom-up community democracy, didn’t show any of this to the ABM Cape Town’s Mzwakhe Poni. A young anthropologist, impatient for glory, recently went aggressive, writing a damning e-mail suggesting financial mismanagement on the part of Poni and sending it out under the names of black assistants (see e-mail attached). Poni tells of how this anthropologist (the Editorial Committee of NFT has established that it’s Jared Sachs. We got this information from other sources, not from Poni), had imposed his will and power upon ABM-CPT in a manner replicating the relationship ABM-Durban has with its white handlers mostly now at Rhodes University. Poni explains that he was never called to a meeting, he was never asked to answer to any charges; he only saw statements in the press. Upon further discussion with Poni, it becomes clear what was happening; ABM-CPT was too aware of its autonomy and Poni the problem, Sachs moved on him. The tragedy, as Poni says, is that ABM-CPT was killed by whites who “support” black movements.

So problems of the left in South Africa aren’t new with the emergence of the new social movements, but as Bohmke tried to show in his piece3, they are directly linked to how the theorization of the black liberatory project is always antagonistic and demands a political distance from whites; or, to use Enrique Dussel’s benevolent characterization: “certain incommensurability”. This is the story of all black political projects – white people don’t only enjoy being the problem, they also enjoy being remedial interlocutors to whom the racial antagonism is always left unaccounted for or selectively perused.

Now this is a unique experience and New Frank Talk, acting the political paparazzi, couldn’t let this discussion be a fun sitcom of few acquaintances and comrades: as socialist we pondered the idea of being true to our ideal of an egalitarian world and disseminate this exchange. A question will be asked, why the NFT bothers to publish these texts which at face value are like an irrelevant white-on-white strife. Our response is that just like Steve Biko focused his attention on the “white skins with black souls”, we understand that the first act of building a radical black project depends to a large extent on the expulsion of white liberals from the war-room. This piece contributes to our overall commitment to fighting white thought and white influence over black struggles, life, joys and sufferings. This because over and over again, white engagement in our struggle has produced only one outcome: benefit for them and defeat for ourselves. These benefits are not just material but also the “psychological wages of whiteness”, this comfort of knowing that you can enjoy all the privileges of whiteness without guilt because you are “friends of the blacks”. To be blunt, we don’t give a fuck what Bohmke’s projects and agendas are. All whites have nefarious agendas against blacks and we certainly believe he has one otherwise he wouldn’t be white.
Any serious imaginative labor around the black problem ignites the Fanonian “end of the world.”
Athi Mongezeleli Joja and Andile Mngxitama


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5. Abahlali base Mjondolo letter regarding Mzonke Poni

From: Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape <abmwesterncape@abahlali. org>
To:
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2013 10:57 AM
Subject: Clarification on role of Mzonke Poni in Abahlali baseMjondolo

The Provincial structure of Abahlali baseMjondolo in the Western Cape would like to clarify to all friends, supporters, and other interested parties that our former chair-person, Mr Mzonke Poni, is no longer an active member of our movement.

We would like to warn all movements, NGOs, charities and other organisations not to engage with Mr. Poni on the assumption that he is somehow still connected to our movement and with any of our affiliated communities such as QQ Section. He should not be given donations or other gifts that are meant to go towards AbM or any of our affiliate communities.

For any further enquiries please feel free to contact:
AbM Sec Gen Thembelani Maqwazima
AbM Dep Chair Mthobeli Qona —

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