Optimism of the will

If there's one struggle that's looking on the up at the moment, it's the fight to get Ashwin Desai's job back at the Centre for Civil Society, where I work. Ashwin's one of few veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle who has neither self-destructed nor self-enriched. Click here for a fine interview with him in Z Magazine, and here for an excerpt from his excellent We are the Poors. The uncompromising honesty of his analysis might explain why, now, he's being banned from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, as the University refashions itself as a credentialing institution for the middle classes.

Here's the story.

Ashwin applied for funding earlier this year to undertake research on the history of race and sport in South Africa. He's clearly got the skills; his scholarship on the politics of poverty in Durban, his deep engagement with anti-apartheid struggle, and his history of research on sport in South Africa – including co-editing “Blacks in Whites - A century of Cricket Struggles in KwaZulu-Natal” - clearly mark him as qualified for the job. But the Vice-Chancellor, Malegapuru William Makgoba, instructed the selection committee at the University of KwaZulu-Natal not to consider Ashwin's application. Makgoba also prevented Ashwin from coming back to campus even as an unpaid honorary fellow.

Why?

It goes back to struggles in the post-apartheid academy, in which Ashwin fought against the then barely-reconstructed managerial forces at the University of Durban-Westville. In 1996, in a move that saved many of his fellow protesters their jobs, Ashwin made an agreement with the Vice Chancellor of UDW under which he resigned, and submitted to being banned from entering the campus. He then taught at the Workers College in Durban for a number of years, as well as continuing his activism, most famously with the Concerned Citizens Forum.

In 2003, Ashwin was appointed to the position of an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Natal's (UN) Centre for Civil Society. The University of Natal, clearly, had no objections to his appointment. Further, Saths Cooper, the then Vice-Chancellor of the UDW, lifted the ban against Dr. Desai from entering UDW. In 2003, the predominantly Indian UDW and largely white UN were merged to form the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

So this is where it gets odd. For a while, Ashwin was free to work on campus. But then, towards the end of this year, the university administration began to grumble. The source of the trouble was rather quickly identified as William Makgoba, the Vice-Chancellor, who had got it into his mind that, actually, the old banning order was in fact still valid, despite its being rescinded by his predecessors. So Ashwin became a persona non grata on campus. The Vice Chancellor made clear that if he wanted his job back, he’d need to supplicate in front of the university senate, and they would deliberate on it, with the matter being kicked to committee and, in the best case scenario, Ashwin getting six months back pay and no job. Makgoba’s tactic is, however, nonsensical – there are no grounds for demanding that Ashwin submit before the university senate, because he has done nothing that would demand such a move.

The question, then, is why the Vice Chancellor would want Ashwin out, and why he’d be prepared to draw such attention to himself to do it. Two answers suggest themselves. One traces Makgoba’s appointment to the Vice-Chancellorship to his connections with the ANC, and understands that he is the drone of the Ministry of Education, at which are employed a number of people against whom Ashwin protested while at UDW. This answer, in other words, sees Ashwin’s persecution now as the cold revenge of old adversaries.

The second answer lies in the Vice-Chancellor’s proposed R27 million (US 4.3 million) cut of staff salaries and bonuses next year. It’s going to be hard for Makgoba to make these cuts without staff discontent, and he may believe that Ashwin, ceteris paribus, is the only man with the right sort of experience to lead the fight against the management. In this, the Vice-Chancellor is mistaken. There are many among the staff who are prepared, and wise enough, to take him on. Tying up Ashwin with bureaucracy is a profoundly ill-advised move. Ashwin has already moved his research money elsewhere, and there are many folk among the staff who are prepared to take on the administration. Makgoba seems to have shot himself in the foot here. But he’ll only find out when staff get back from the holiday break in January. And when they do, the staff will have words. Of course, Makgoba’s tactic will be to buy the union leadership off, as he did last year. If he succeeds with this tactic two years in a row, it’s the union membership, not leadership, that deserves a good kicking. As President Bush tried to say a little while back – fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

These reasons for Makgoba’s behaviour are neither comprehensive nor mutually exclusive. But there’s a enough truth in both to be deeply worried. And many have already expressed their concern by writing to the Vice Chancellor. Among them, are David McDonald , The Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa , Issa Shivji and Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Noam Chomsky, Michael Albert, Naomi Klein, and Avi Lewis.

Do drop a line to Makgoba and let him know what you think. He’s at

Professor M.W. Makgoba
Howard College Campus
University of KwaZulu-Natal
Durban 4041
South Africa

fax: +27-31-262 1873

Update
You can now sign an online petition in support of Ashwin Desai here.

Update #2
Zackie Achmat, nominated for the Nobel Prize last year, Chair of the Treatment Action Campaign, has written in support of Ashwin here.

Update #3
As people trickle back to work, the number of signatures on the petition is on theup. Do sign if you haven't already. I'm not usually a fan of online petitions, but this is almost certainly a case where your signature will make a difference - our vice-chancellor is very sensitive to international opinion. And Makgoba has been sent two more letters, from Dennis Brutus and the Combined Staff Association of the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Update #4
From Richard Pithouse, on Jan 19th, who writes:

Last night there was a fantastic meeting in Wentworth - supported by people from Sydenham, Abahlali baseMjondolo, Meerbank, Chatsworth (Westcliffe) etc, etc. There was a petition against the banning of Ashwin Desai and lots of people spoke about their deep appreciation of Ashwin's commitment to struggles in Wentworth. Hundreds of people signed the petition last night and it will be taken door to door now. Des D'sa said that he's aiming at thousands of signatures.

In other news, Rhodes University has asked Ashwin to move his work on sport there, with the anticipation that "your presence on campus will add greatly to the critical intellectual environment that we are attempting to foster at Rhodes."

Update #5
The debate drags on, with Makgoba behind a shield of technicism. He took his dog and pony show to SAFm today. You can find a transcript of the show here. Makgoba's "I can't do anything about it, I'm just a bureaucrat" line is disingenuous, and it is pierced very effectively by this letter from UKZN's biggest union, the Combined Staff Association (COMSA).

Make Capit a dirty word

News from Retort

you can't even mention the words "socialist" or "socialism" in comments on Salon blogs any more. For why? It's the Scunthorpe problem: the words contain the brand name for a Viagra-type medication -- Cialis. So the unresticted global capitalism of the spammers' economy has finally made it impossible even to mention an alternative.

The irony is that, invariably, there's more to socialising than sex. Unless you're doing it with an American spelling.

Do they know it's Christmas?

The Independent carries news of how Geldof, Bono et al hijacked the Make Poverty History campaign. Seasoned Class Worriers will, of course, have seen this coming a mile off (the hijack, not the audit). A better sense of what's happening in poverty this Christmas can be found through
this article, from two women in the Kennedy Road Informal Settlement in Clare Estate. Endemic structural violence, poverty and sexism aren't anything that our fading pop-star heroes have yet addressed. And we know better than to give them time.

Stop All the Clocks

Birjinder Anant is dead. Hear him here, read him here, see him here.

I can't help feeling that if Birj is gone, nothing now can ever come to any good.

What science fiction?

I've been following Chris' advice, and reading the judgement in the Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District case. It's fantastic, and far funnier than it has a right to be. There's something I need a hand with, though. Here's the background, from the John Jones' judgement:

Indeed, the assertion that design of biological systems can be inferred from the “purposeful arrangement of parts” is based upon an analogy to human design. Because we are able to recognize design of artifacts and objects, according to Professor Behe, that same reasoning can be employed to determine biological design. (18:116-17, 23:50 (Behe)). Professor Behe testified that the strength of the analogy depends upon the degree of similarity entailed in the two propositions; however, if this is the test, [intelligent design] ID completely fails.

Unlike biological systems, human artifacts do not live and reproduce over time. They are non-replicable, they do not undergo genetic recombination, and they are not driven by natural selection. (1:131-33 (Miller); 23:57-59 (Behe)). For human artifacts, we know the designer’s identity, human, and the mechanism of design, as we have experience based upon empirical evidence that humans can make such things, as well as many other attributes including the designer’s abilities, needs, and desires. (D-251 at 176; 1:131-33 (Miller); 23:63 (Behe); 5:55- 58 (Pennock)). With ID, proponents assert that they refuse to propose hypotheses on the designer’s identity, do not propose a mechanism, and the designer, he/she/it/they, has never been seen. In that vein, defense expert Professor Minnich agreed that in the case of human artifacts and objects, we know the identity and capacities of the human designer, but we do not know any of those attributes for the designer of biological life. (38:44-47 (Minnich)). In addition, Professor Behe agreed that for the design of human artifacts, we know the designer and its attributes and we have a baseline for human design that does not exist for design of biological systems. (23:61-73 (Behe)). Professor Behe’s only response to these seemingly insurmountable points of disanalogy was that the inference still works in science fiction movies. (23:73 (Behe)).

What science fiction has Behe been watching? When hapless, and usually soon-to-be-devoured spacefarers find something complicated, their line of argument doesn't proceed

1. There is something complex here
2. Humans didn't build it.
3. Therefore God did.

Invariably it's more along the lines of

1. This is far too complex for us to have built it, though we can sort of see quite how well designed it is
2. We don't have this level of technology. Yet.
3. Captain, there's something else down here.
4. Captain?

In other words, even the science fiction films depend on some sort of baseline for design skill. And hypotheses about the desires and motivations about designers are revealed, bloodily, in the ninety minutes subsequent to discovery of complicated and alien things.

Or is there a SciFi movie that I'm forgetting?

Africans should emulate Punjab's example

At nearly all our childhood tables, we were fed the following non sequitur: “eat your greens! there are children in Africa who are starving!”. In Africa, at least, the lesson is a little more accurate “eat up! there are children in India who are dying of hunger!”. In the gruesome arithmetic of famine-related deaths, there are indeed more in India than Africa. Which makes today’s news all the more chilling.

In Indian newspapers today, we read of the premier of KwaZulu-Natal, S’bu Ndebele, who has just spent the past two weeks imbibing the wisdom of the subcontinent. The Indian papers are very pleased with Ndebele’s visit, because at the end of all his journeying, he has become convinced of the sorts of things that Indian pundits have been saying all along. The headline in today’s Financial Express: ‘Africans should emulate Punjab's example’. India rocks, and if only they were more Indian, Africans wouldn’t be in half the trouble they’re in now.

So what, exactly, has Ndebele learned? Well, in his own words

Too many of our people are literally starving in a province that is arguably the most fertile in the country. We can benefit a great deal from the province of Punjab in India where the state has succeeded in turning the rural poor into a thriving and growing state economy and has become the `food basket of India'.

Although he might like us to interpret his words as meaning that “a green revolution in KwaZulu-Natal will make the poor richer”, it’s hard to do this for the very good reason that, in Punjab, precisely the opposite has happened. A quick visit to those bomb-throwers at the United Nations Development Programme paints an unflattering state of post-green-revolution agriculture in Punjab. You can read the details here, but the upshot - of increased levels of suicide, poverty, and environmental degradation despite an initial promise of exactly the opposite - have been snappily summarised as a “Green Revocation”.

At another level, it’s important not to gloss Ndebele’s words. In Punjab, the state has indeed succeeded in “turning the rural poor into a thriving and growing state economy”: turning the poor into the ground like so much manure, grinding them into the soil, but for the greater benefit of a growing state economy.

Perhaps, though, Ndebele has learned a different lesson. With a number of land claims in KwaZulu-Natal piling higher, and beginning to fester, perhaps the benighted premier has come up with a way to pour lime on the rot. As SS Gill, at the Punjab Agricultural University, notes, the Green Revolution acted as a substitute for land reform. Although the question of an insurgent and armed peasantry is far from the South African political agenda (compare with the Naxalites), the demands for redistribution, over a decade after the end of Apartheid, have become fairly central. In 2005, there were nearly 900 protests by poor people in South Africa demanding, in the words of the South African government ‘service delivery’. But these protests, at least in the ones I saw, were calls for far more – for service delivery? Sure – water, electricity and the odd toilet would be nice. But also dignity, recognition, land, and some say in the future. This was, after all, what the struggle was for, and the ANC government’s failure to deliver on its promise is something of which it is becoming increasingly aware. So what better, under the circumstances, than the distraction of a technological production fix (for a few people) in rural areas. And, for the rest? Well, Ndebele picked up another lesson in India too.

In the print edition of today’s Indian Express, Ndebele is reported as being “very impressed with the Taj Mahal and would use the knowledge of India to attempt similar cultural projects in Kwazulu-Natal.” We’ll forget that, during the struggle against Apartheid, the kinds of Zulu cultural nationalism for which Ndebele has become a patron, were actively fought by the ANC, in much the same way that the Congress party – nominally ‘secular’ has puppeted chauvinism and xenophobia since its inception. More than that, Ndebele announced that “Various projects will be developed at a technical level to enable to mutual aim of linking islands of knowledge to the mainland of need”.

It’s a striking image. S’bu Ndebele: stranded in a sea of ignorance, cast off the shores of need, building bridges from the dry land of knowledge to the dry land of, er, need and then, um.

Okay. As a metaphor it doesn’t really hold together. But as intent, it does just fine. It flags South Africa’s brave new world – technicist and, therefore, nationalist too. One in which the culture is removed from work, where knowledge is removed from the people, and where capital gets to control both, in technological transformations to agriculture, and in little cultural theme parks, where heritage can safely replace history.

If these are the lessons that Ndebele has picked up from the Congress Party in India, then he’s learned well.

The Rise of the Machinima

As ever, Wikipedia has the good stuff when it comes to breaking news about techie innovation. Machinima is the net's newest fad (though by the time you read this, it will no doubt have been overtaken, and rendered obsolete, by several others). Still, if it produces thought-provoking representations, such as this one, of the recent Parisian uprisings, then it deserves a full and long life on the web.

Incentivising Tlön

It's assessment time in the South African academy. To understand how the hard work of supervision, learning, teaching, writing, reading, research, administration, public service, peer support and review are all combined into an assessment of your net worth, you need two things: a system of logic, and a standardised calculus on which to apply it. The logic is summarised well by Jorge Borges in his discussion of mathematics on Tlön.

The geometry of Tlön comprises two somewhat different disciplines: the visual and the tactile. The latter corresponds to our own geometry and is subordinated to the first. The basis of visual geometry is the surface, not the point. This geometry disregards parallel lines and declares that man in his movement modifies the forms which surround him. The basis of its arithmetic is the notion of indefinite numbers. They emphasize the importance of the concepts of greater and lesser, which our mathematicians symbolize as > and <. They maintain that the operation of counting modifies the quantities and converts them from indefinite into definite sums. The fact that several individuals who count the same quantity would obtain the same result is, for the psychologists, an example of association of ideas or of a good exercise of memory.

This extract, from Borges' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a philosophical classic, a challenge to all that is sacred in reason, a freedom from the violence of Euclidean thinking, a spear in the side of Baconian science. It's also precisely the training you need in order to be able to shear from yourself any vestiges of 'old thinking', and undergo the conceptual revolution that is the South African Post-Secondary Education assessment process. In addition to the logic of Tlön, you'll need the following table of definite numbers to really appreciate the beauty of SAPSE mathematics.

CATEGORY	NO. OF PRODUCTIVITY UNITS
Refereed Conference Proceedings	4
Journal Editorial	8
Accredited Journal Article	60
Chapter in Book	15
Edited Book	15
Creative Contribution (Local)	15
Creative Contribution (International)	50
Graduating Course Work + Research Masters Student (with ≥ 50% dissertation component NRF approved)	6
Graduating Full Dissertation Masters Student	12
Graduating Doctoral Student	60
Patent	80
Book (entire)	100

So, let's learn together. Public service, undergraduate lecturing and any other activity not explicitly mentioned are, obviously, 'null spaces'. In the spaces that matter, we see that supervising a full dissertation masters is worth almost as much as a performance at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Cape Town, which is worth three times less than a Karaoke performance in an armpit bar in Sheffield, which is worth a little less than a peer reviewed journal article. But two journal articles are worth more than a book.

Borges doesn't write about the kinds of incentive structure that Tlön's geometry sets up. But I bet it's not half as fucked up as the South African academy.

A Man Who Will Do What He Must

The new English textbook for XI graders in Pakistan contains a meditation on leadership. The Pakistani Government's National Book Foundation said the order of the first letters in each line was entirely coincidental. Read here. Another fine story from the Forum of Inqiliabi Leftists.