Re: <nettime> The List needs a new Topic

[Dmytri Kleiner <dk@telekommunisten.net>]

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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