On 2021-01-20 22:44, { brad brace } wrote:
thanks for these links Dmytri -- I'd appreciate hearing of others from
others... /:b
Thanks Brad, I can recommend one recent text, this one touches on a lot
of the strategies I think we need to take to heart.
https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-34-paulo-freire-and-south-africa/
---
Paulo Freire and Popular Struggle in South Africa
November 9, 2020
Paulo Freire was a radical educator from Brazil whose work was tied to
struggles for human freedom and dignity. He constantly experimented with
and thought about how to connect learning and teaching among the poor
and oppressed with the radical transformation of society. For Freire,
this meant struggling for a world where everyone counts equally and is
treated with dignity — a world in which economic and political power are
radically democratised.
This dossier, which draws on interviews with participants in a range of
struggles in South Africa, shows that Freire’s ideas have been an
important influence in the Black Consciousness Movement, the trade union
movement, and some of the organisations associated with the United
Democratic Front (UDF). His ideas remain influential today, from trade
unions to grassroots struggles.
From Brazil to Africa
Freire was born in Recife, a city in north eastern Brazil, in 1921.
After his university studies, he became a schoolteacher and began to
develop an interest in radical approaches to education, including
projects to teach adult literacy. Freire saw the role of community and
worker organisations and struggles as vital in the formation of the
critical conscience that is required to overcome the domination and
dependence of the oppressed.
In Freire’s early works, he wrote that the fundamental goal of radical
pedagogy is to develop a critical conscience in individuals. The method
of dialogical engagement that he developed from the 1950s onwards became
an emancipatory and progressive alternative to the dominant school
programmes sponsored by the US government through agencies such as the
United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an
organisation that is notorious for backing coups against elected
governments in Latin America and elsewhere.
In 1964, the Brazilian military seized control of the country with the
backing of the United States and imposed a brutal right-wing
dictatorship. Freire was among the many people arrested by the
dictatorship. After seventy days in prison, he was released and forced
to leave the country.
During his years in exile, he continued to carry out his practical work
in other countries in Latin America, such as Chile, where he wrote his
most important book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and developed adult
literacy programmes. He also had significant contact with African
freedom struggles. During this time, he visited Zambia, Tanzania,
Guinea-Bissau, Sao Tome and Principe, Angola, and Cape Verde. He met
with The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the
Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo), and the African Party for the
Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). He developed adult
literacy programmes in Guinea-Bissau, Tanzania, and Angola.
Freire read extensively about colonisation and its effects on the
people, including the writings of African revolutionary intellectuals
like Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. He felt a special connection to
Africa and wrote that ‘[a]s a man from north-eastern Brazil, I was
somewhat culturally tied to Africa, particularly to those countries that
were unfortunate enough to be colonised by Portugal’.
Freire was also deeply critical of the capitalist system, which exploits
and dominates the bodies and minds of the oppressed, and is a major
force generating the material and ideological conditions that shape the
domination of consciousness. This domination — which, of course, is
entwined with racism and sexism — can seep into our being, our actions,
and the way that we see the world. Freire argued that learning to fight
to overcome domination is difficult but essential political work that
requires constant learning.
Freire’s emphasis on the importance of dialogue as the basis for
critical consciousness, and his stress on the essential role of popular
struggle and organisation, both became important tools in grassroots
struggles in Brazil during the 1970s and 1980s. In this period in Latin
America in general, and Brazil in particular, popular education became
synonymous with popular movements that used it as their main educational
strategy, uniting political practice and learning processes.
In 1980, Freire returned to Brazil, where he became active in the
Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores). When the party took control
of São Paulo (one of the largest cities in the world) in 1988, he was
appointed as the city’s secretary of education. He remained in this
position until 1991. He died in 1997.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
In 1968, whilst he was in exile in Chile, Freire wrote Pedagogy of the
Oppressed. During that year, youth revolts took place around the world.
In France, where the revolt was most intense, many young people began to
look at the intellectual work produced in the armed struggles against
French colonialism in Vietnam and Algeria —including Fanon’s work on the
Algerian revolution. This turn to Fanon influenced Freire too. In 1987,
Freire recalled that ‘[a] young man who was in Santiago on a political
task gave me the book The Wretched of the Earth. I was writing Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, and the book was almost finished when I read Fanon. I
had to rewrite the book’. Freire was deeply influenced by Fanon’s
radical humanism, his thinking about the role of university-trained
intellectuals in popular struggles, and his warnings about how an elite
among the oppressed could become new oppressors.
Freire would write many books in the years to come, but it is Pedagogy
of the Oppressed that quickly became and has remained a revolutionary
classic. This book has had a powerful impact on popular movements around
the world and remains the best introduction to Freire’s ideas.
In a talk given in Durban in 1988, Neville Alexander, who was an
important radical intellectual in many fields, including education,
explained that: ‘[f]or Freire, the decisive difference between animals
and human beings consisted in the ability of the latter to reflect
directly on their activity. This ability is, for him, the unique
attribute of human consciousness and self-conscious existence and is
what makes it possible for people to change their situation’. In other
words, for Freire, all people are capable of thought, and critical
thought, undertaken collectively, is the basis of organisation and
struggle.
Freire argued that oppression dehumanises everyone — both the oppressed
and the oppressor — and that emancipatory forms of politics — the
strivings of the oppressed for freedom and justice — are, ultimately, a
demand ‘for the affirmation of men and women as persons’. He would write
that ‘[t]his, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the
oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well’.
But, for Freire, there is a danger that the person who is oppressed and
wants to be free can come to believe that, to be free, she or he must
become like the oppressor: ‘Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to
be men is to be oppressors’.[1] Freire believed that political education
during a struggle is important in order to help prevent the elites among
the oppressed from becoming new oppressors, warning that ‘[w]hen
education is not liberatory, the dream of the oppressed is to be the
oppressor’.
For Freire, the point of freedom is to allow everyone to be fully human;
the struggle for freedom must end all oppression. It must be for the
liberation of everyone, everywhere, and not just for some. But, he said,
there are many different reasons why the oppressed do not always see
this clearly. Sometimes the oppressed do not see that they are oppressed
because they have been taught to believe that the way things are is
‘normal’ or is their fault. For example, they are taught to believe that
they are poor because they do not have enough education, or that others
are rich because they have worked harder. Sometimes, they are taught to
blame something else (such as ‘the economy’) or someone else (such as
‘foreigners’) for their poverty.
True liberation must start by seeing clearly how things really are. For
Freire, this is why radical and collective questioning, discussion, and
learning are so important. He argued that, by thinking carefully and
critically about how things really are (our actual lives and
experiences), we can come to see oppression more accurately so that we
can fight more effectively to end it.
The political work of encouraging critical thinking about our situation
does not mean encouraging people to just criticise everything; it means
always going beyond how things seem by constantly asking questions —
especially by asking ‘why?’ — to understand the root causes of why
things are the way they are, especially things we feel strongly about.
Asking questions allows people to draw on their own lived experience and
thinking to find their own answers to the question of why they face
situations of oppression or injustice. This is very different from
traditional education that tries to fill the (apparently empty!) heads
of the learners with knowledge that the powerful teacher thinks they
need. Freire wrote that ‘[p]rojecting an absolute ignorance onto others
[is] a characteristic of the ideology of oppression’. He called the
model of education that assumes that the teacher has all the knowledge
and the students have none the ‘banking’ concept of education and
likened it to a teacher making deposits into an empty bank account.
Freire wrote that:
The man or woman who proclaims devotion to the cause of liberation yet
is unable to enter into communion with the people, whom he or she
continues to regard as totally ignorant, is grievously self-deceived.
The convert who approaches the people but feels alarm at each step they
take, each doubt they express, and each suggestion they offer, and
attempts to impose his ‘status,’ remains nostalgic towards his origins.
This is very different from many political education programmes
organised by NGOs or small sectarian political groups which assume that
the oppressed are ignorant and incapable of thought and that they will
bring knowledge to the people. Freire argued that ‘[l]eaders who do not
act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not
organise the people — they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor
are they liberated: they oppress’.
Freire also realised that people cannot change situations of oppression
and injustice on their own. This means that the struggle for liberation
must be collective. He suggested that what he called an ‘animator’ could
help. An ‘animator’ may come from outside the life situation of the poor
and oppressed but plays a role that helps to encourage the thinking and
the life and strength of the people who are in that situation. An
animator does not work to assert their own power over the oppressed. An
animator works to create a community of inquiry in which everyone can
contribute to developing knowledge, and the democratic power of the
oppressed can be built. To do this effectively requires humility and
love; it is crucial that an animator enters into the lives and world of
the poor and oppressed and, in doing so, enters into a true dialogue as
equals.
Freire wrote that:
[T]he more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into
reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This
individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world
unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into
a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself
the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the
oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history,
to fight at their side.
In genuine dialogue, both the animator and the learners from among the
oppressed bring something to this process. Through this dialogue, and
through careful, collective, and critical reflection on lived
experience, both the learners from among the oppressed and the animator
come to be ‘conscientised’; in other words, they come to really
understand the nature of oppression. But, for Freire, it is no good to
just understand the world; ‘[i]t is necessary that the weakness of the
powerless is transformed into a force capable of announcing justice’.
This action against oppression must always be tied together with careful
thinking (reflection) on action, and what has happened as a result of
action. Action and reflection are part of an ongoing cycle of
transformation that Freire, following Karl Marx, called ‘praxis’.
The Importance of Freire’s Thought in South Africa
Paulo Freire was the key theoretician if you like. But we needed to
bring Paulo Freire back from Brazil to the South African context. We
knew nothing about Brazil of course except what we were reading. I don’t
know of any similar text that we could have used in South Africa then as
a way of understanding and engaging the South African context.
— Barney Pityana, a leading intellectual in the Black Consciousness
Movement
Though Freire visited many countries in Africa, the apartheid state
would not have allowed him to visit South Africa. However, he does
discuss South Africa in his books and describes how South African
anti-apartheid activists came to see him to talk about his work and what
it meant in the South African context. Many of the organisations and
movements involved in the anti-apartheid struggle used Freire’s thinking
and methods.
The Black Consciousness Movement
Although the apartheid state banned Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
underground copies circulated. By the early 1970s, Freire’s work was
already being used within South Africa. Leslie Hadfield, an academic who
has written about the use of Freire’s work by the Black Consciousness
Movement, argues that the Pedagogy of the Oppressed first arrived in
South Africa in the early 1970s via the University Christian Movement
(UCM), which began to run Freire-inspired literacy projects. The UCM
worked closely with the South African Students’ Organisation (Saso),
which was founded in 1968 by Steve Biko, along with other figures like
Barney Pityana and Aubrey Mokoape. Saso was the first of a series of
organisations that, together, made up the Black Consciousness Movement
(BCM).
Anne Hope, a Christian radical from Johannesburg and a member of the
Grail, a Christian women’s organisation committed to ‘a world
transformed in love and justice’, met Freire at Harvard University in
Boston in 1969, and then again in Tanzania. After she returned to South
Africa in 1971, Biko asked her to work with the Saso leadership for six
months on Freire’s participatory methods. Biko and fourteen other
activists were trained in Freirean methods in monthly workshops. Bennie
Khoapa, a significant figure in the BCM, recalled that ‘Paulo Freire …
made a lasting philosophical impression on Steve Biko’.
Between these workshops, the activists went out to do community-based
research as part of a process of conscientisation. Barney Pityana
remembers that:
Anne Hope would run what essentially was literacy training, but it was
literacy training of a different kind because it was Paulo Freirean
literacy training that was really taking human experience into the way
of understanding concepts. It was drawing from everyday experience and
understanding: what impacts it makes in the mind, the learning and
understanding that they had.
For some of us, I suspect it was the first time that we came across
Paulo Freire; for me it certainly was, but Steve, Steve Biko was a very
diverse reading person, lots of things that Steve knew, we didn’t know.
And so, in his reading he came across Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the
Oppressed and began to apply it in his explanation of the oppressive
system in South Africa.
Echoing Freire’s argument that it is only the oppressed who can liberate
everyone, the BCM emphasised the importance of black people leading the
struggle against apartheid. Freire had also stressed that, ‘[w]ithout a
sense of identity, there can be no real struggle’. This, too, resonated
with the BCM, which affirmed a proud and strong black identity against
white supremacy.
The movement drew directly on Freire as it developed a constant process
of critical reflection, part of an ongoing project of conscientisation.
Aubrey Mokoape, who had a background in the Pan-Africanist Congress
(PAC) and became an older mentor to the students who founded Saso,
explains that the link between Black Consciousness and
‘conscientisation’ is clear:
The only way to overthrow this government is to get the mass of our
people understanding what we want to do and owning the process, in other
words, becoming conscious of their position in society, in other words …
joining the dots, understanding that if you don’t have money to pay …
for your child’s school fees, fees at medical school, you do not have
adequate housing, you have poor transport, how those things all form a
single continuum; that all those things are actually connected. They are
embedded in the system, that your position in society is not isolated
but it is systemic.
The Church
In 1972, Biko and Bokwe Mafuna (who had been part of the training in
Freirean methods) were employed as field officers by Bennie Khoapa.
Khoapa was the head of the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and
the Christian Institute’s Black Community Projects (BCP) and had also
been trained in Freirean methods. The BCP’s work was heavily influenced
by Freire. Both the BCM and the Christian Churches in South Africa drew
on liberation theology, a school of radical thought which Freire had
both been influenced by and contributed to. Rubin Phillip, who was
elected as deputy president of Saso in 1972, and went on to become an
Anglican archbishop, explains that:
Paulo Freire is considered one of the founders of liberation theology.
He was a Christian who lived his faith in a liberating way. Paulo placed
the poor and oppressed at the centre of his method, which is important
in the concept of the preferential option for the poor, a trademark of
liberation theology.
In South Africa, ideas drawn from liberation theology were — together
with the black liberation theology developed by James H. Cone in the
United States — a powerful influence on various currents of struggle.
Bishop Rubin recalls that:
The one thing I took away from our conversation was a need to be
critical thinkers. … Liberation theologians allude that theology, like
education, should be for liberation, not domestication. Religion made us
subservient, has made us lazy to use our critical faculty and connect
knowledge to our everyday reality. So, education for him is about …. a
critical way of life and about connecting knowledge to how we live.
The Workers’ Movement
The Black Consciousness Movement included workers’ organisations like
the Black Workers’ Project, a joint project between the BCP and Saso.
The workers’ movement was also influenced by Freirean ideas through
worker education projects that started in the 1970s. One of these was
the Urban Training Programme (UTP), which used the Young Christian
Workers’ See-Judge-Act methodology, which had influenced Freire’s own
thinking and methodology. The UTP used this method to encourage workers
to reflect on their everyday experiences, think about what they could do
about their situation, and then act to change the world. Other worker
education projects were started by left students in and around the
National Union of South African Students (Nusas). Saso had split from
Nusas in 1968 but, although largely white, Nusas was a consciously
anti-apartheid organisation that was also influenced by Freire,
primarily through members who were also part of the UCM.
During the 1970s, Wages Commissions were set up at the University of
Natal, the University of the Witwatersrand, and the University of Cape
Town. Using the resources of the universities and some progressive
unions, the Commissions helped to set up structures that led to the
formation of the Western Province Workers’ Advice Bureau (WPWAB) in Cape
Town, the General Factory Workers’ Benefit Fund (GFWBF) in Durban, and
the Industrial Aid Society (IAS) in Johannesburg. A number of left
students supported these initiatives, as did some older trade unionists,
such as Harriet Bolton in Durban. In Durban, Rick Turner, a radical
academic whose teaching style was influenced by Freire, became an
influential figure among a number of students. Turner was committed to a
future rooted in participatory democracy and many of his students became
committed activists.
David Hemson, a participant in this milieu, explains that:
Two particular minds were at work, one [Turner] in a wood and iron house
in Bellair; and another [Biko] in the shadow of the reeking, rumbling
Wentworth oil refinery in the Alan Taylor residence. Both would become
close friends and both would die at the hands of the apartheid security
apparatus after bursts of energetic writing and political engagement.
Both were influenced by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and
these ideas and concepts infused and were woven into their writings
striving for freedom.
Omar Badsha was one of the students who was close to Turner and
participated in setting up the Institute for Industrial Education (IIE).
He recalls that:
Rick Turner was very interested in education, and like any intellectual
we began reading, and one of the texts we read was Paulo Freire’s book
that had just come out not so long ago at the time. And this book
resonated with us in the sense that here were some valuable ideas about
teaching and an affirmative way of teaching – taking into account the
audience and how to relate with the audience.
In January 1973, workers across Durban went on strike, an event that is
now seen as a major turning point in worker organisation and resistance
to apartheid. Hemson recalls that:
Out of the dawn they streamed, from the barrack-like hostels of
Coronation Bricks, the expansive textile mills of Pinetown, the
municipal compounds, great factories, mills and plants and the lesser
Five Roses tea processing plant. The downtrodden and exploited rose to
their feet and hammered the bosses and their regime. Only in the group,
the assembled pickets, the leaderless mass meetings of strikers, the
gatherings of locked out workers did the individual expression have
confidence. The solid order of apartheid cracked and new freedoms were
born. New concepts took human form: the weaver became the shop steward,
a mass organised overtook the unorganised, the textile trainer a
dedicated trade unionist, the shy older man a reborn Congress veteran, a
sweeper a defined general worker.
After the Durban Moment
The period in Durban before and during the 1973 strikes came to be known
as the Durban Moment. With Biko and Turner as its two charismatic
figures, this was a time of important political creativity that laid the
foundations for much of the struggle to come.
But in March 1973, the state banned Biko and Turner, along with several
BCM and Nusas leaders, including Rubin Phillip. Despite this, as unions
were formed in the wake of the strikes, a number of university-trained
intellectuals, often influenced by Freire, began working in and with the
unions, which made rapid advances. In 1976, the Soweto revolt, which was
directly influenced by Black Consciousness, opened a new chapter in the
struggle and shifted the centre of contestation to Johannesburg.
Biko was murdered in police custody in 1977, after which the Black
Consciousness organisations were banned. In the following year, Turner
was assassinated.
In 1979, a number of unions were united into the Federation of South
African Trade Unions (Fosatu), which was — in the spirit of the Durban
Moment — strongly committed to democratic workers’ control in unions and
on the shop floor, as well as the political empowerment of shop
stewards.
In 1983, the United Democratic Front (UDF) was formed in Cape Town. It
united community-based organisations across the country with a
commitment to bottom-up democratic praxis in the present and a vision of
a radically democratic future after apartheid. By the mid 1980s,
millions of people were mobilised through the UDF and the trade union
movement, which became federated through the ANC-aligned Congress of
South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) in 1985.
Throughout this period, Freirean ideas absorbed and developed in the
Durban Moment were often central to thinking about political education
and praxis. Anne Hope and Sally Timmel wrote Training for
Transformation, a three-volume workbook that aimed to apply Freire’s
methods for developing radical praxis in the context of emancipatory
struggles in Southern Africa. The first volume was published in Zimbabwe
in 1984. It was swiftly banned in South Africa but was widely circulated
underground. Training for Transformation was used in political education
work in both the trade union movement and the community-based struggles
that were linked together through the UDF.
Salim Vally, an activist and academic, recalls that ‘literacy groups of
the 80s, some pre-school groups, worker education and people’s education
movements were deeply influenced by Freire’. The South African Committee
for Higher Education (Sached) also came to be strongly influenced by
Freire. The Committee, first formed in 1959 in opposition to the
apartheid state’s enforcement of segregation at universities, provided
educational support to trade unions and community-based movements in the
1980s. Vally notes that ‘Neville Alexander always discussed Freire in
Sached — he was the Cape Town director — and in other education circles
he was involved in. John Samuels — the national director of Sached — met
Freire in Geneva’.
From 1986, the idea of ‘people’s power’ became very important in popular
struggles, but practices and understandings of what this meant varied
widely. Some saw the people as a battering ram clearing the way for the
ANC to return from exile and the underground and take power over
society. Others thought that building democratic practices and
structures in trade unions and community organisations marked the
beginning of the work required to build a post-apartheid future in which
participatory democracy would be deeply entrenched in ordinary life — in
workplaces, communities, schools, universities, etc. This was what was
meant by the trade union slogan ‘building tomorrow today’.
Though there were strong Freirean currents in this period, they were
significantly weakened by the militarisation of politics in the late
1980s, and more so when the ban on the ANC was lifted in 1990. The
return of the ANC from exile and the underground led to a deliberate
demobilisation of community-based struggles and the direct subordination
of the trade union movement to the authority of the ANC. The situation
was not unlike that described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the
Earth:
Today, the party’s mission is to deliver to the people the instructions
which issue from the summit. There no longer exists the fruitful
give-and-take from the bottom to the top and from the top to the bottom
which creates and guarantees democracy in a party. Quite on the
contrary, the party has made itself into a screen between the masses and
the leaders.
Paulo Freire Today
Freirean ideas continued to thrive after apartheid in some of the
fissures of the new order. For instance, in the early years of the
democratic dispensation, the Workers’ College in Durban, a trade union
education project, included some teachers who were committed to Freirean
methods. Mabogo More, a philosopher with a background in the Black
Consciousness Movement, was one of these teachers. He recalls that he
first came to know about Freire as a student at The University of the
North (also known as ‘Turfloop’) in the 1970s ‘through Saso’s concept of
“conscientisation” used during formation winter schools organised by
Saso. Later, S’bu Ndebele, a Turfloop librarian at the time, smuggled a
copy of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which, together with
Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, we surreptitiously read among
ourselves as conscientised students’.
In 1994, More was able to attend a lecture by Freire at Harvard
University in the United States. He says that ‘Freire’s lecture was
fascinating and helped in modelling my teaching practice in line with
the precepts articulated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed’.
Today, a number of organisations remain committed to Freirean methods,
such as the Umtapo Centre in Durban. The Centre was started in Durban in
1986 as a response to the rise of political violence within black
communities. It has roots in the Black Consciousness Movement and its
work is explicitly based on Freire’s methodology.
Another organisation that uses Freire’s ideas is the Church Land
Programme (CLP) in Pietermaritzburg, which has its roots in the
liberation theology tradition and is closely linked to Bishop Rubin,
Abahlali baseMjondolo, and a number of other grassroots organisations
and struggles. CLP was established in 1996 in response to the land
reform process taking place in South Africa and became an independent
organisation in 1997. By the early 2000s, CLP realised that the struggle
against apartheid had not led to an end to oppression, that the state’s
land reform programme was not taking an emancipatory direction, and that
its own work was not helping to end oppression. Therefore, CLP decided
to incorporate Freire’s idea of animation and enter into solidarity with
new struggles.
Zodwa Nsibande, an animator with CLP, says that:
In our engagements, we let people think because we do not want to take
their agency. We ask probing questions to get people to think about
their lived experiences. We embrace Paulo Freire’s thinking when he said
that ‘problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the
process of becoming’. When we engage with communities using
problem-posing methodologies, we seek to give them their power.
Sibabuyisele isithunzi sabo, ngoba sikholwa ukuthi ngenkathi umcindezeli
ecindezela ususa isthunzi somcindezelwa. Thina sibuyisela isithunzi
somcindezelwa esisuswa yisihluku sokucindezelwa [We restore their
dignity, for we believe that when the oppressor oppresses, he takes the
dignity of the oppressed. We restore the dignity of the oppressed that
is taken by the cruelty of oppression].
In recent years, connections to the Landless Workers’ Movement, or the
Movimento Sem Terra (MST), in Brazil have reenergised the potency of
Freire’s ideas in South Africa. Formed in 1984, the MST has mobilised
millions of people and organised thousands of occupations of
unproductive land. The organisation has built close relationships with
the National Union of Metalworkers in South Africa (Numsa), the largest
trade union in South Africa, and with Abahlali baseMjondolo, the
country’s largest popular movement. This has meant that a number of
activists from Numsa and Abahlali baseMjondolo have been able to
participate in the programmes at the Florestan Fernandes National School
(ENFF), the MST’s political education school.
There are direct connections between activists’ experiences at the ENFF
and the establishment of political schools in South Africa, such as The
Frantz Fanon Political School built and managed by Abahlali baseMjondolo
on the eKhenana Land Occupation in Durban.
Vuyolwethu Toli, who is the Numsa JC Bez Regional Education Officer,
explains that:
The schooling systems in South Africa and throughout the world use the
banking method of education where there aren’t reciprocal or mutual
learning processes. The teacher, or whoever is facilitating, positions
themself as the dominant knowledge disseminator where they see themself
as having a monopoly of wisdom. As comrades responsible for popular
education in the trade union, we do not operate like this. We make sure
there is collective knowledge production and that all sessions are
informed by workers’ lived experiences. Our point of departure is that
worker knowledge informs the content and not the other way around. We
don’t believe in the banking method of education.
Freire’s ideas, first generated in Brazil, have influenced struggles all
over the world. Almost fifty years after they began to influence
intellectuals and movements in South Africa, they remain relevant and
powerful. The work of conscientisation is a permanent commitment, a way
of life. As Aubrey Mokoape said, ‘[c]onsciousness has no end. And
consciousness has no real beginning’.
[1] In reading Freire’s writings and his use of gendered language such
as ‘men’ to mean ‘human’, which was still common in the late 1960s, we
must undertake the intellectual exercise of entering into dialogue with
his gendered forms of expression with the aim of critical reflection and
developing emancipatory alternatives.
--
Dmytri Kleiner
@dmytri
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