Ndumiso Mdayi @mbira_tafari Twitter profile | Pikagi

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Ndumiso Mdayi

@mbira_tafari

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Afropessimism. AmaNgqosini. AmaNzotho.

South Africa (occupied Azania)

https://t.co/20rxKN9Q9p

Joined December 2015

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

In his reading of Wilderson in Lacan Noir, Marriott makes this point: “For in fact there is no nation, no policy or praxis that has not been affected by anti-blackness. There is no concept of modern reality that escapes it, for all reality is the legacy of slavery.” (122)

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

5 months

I have just realised while listening to Thandiswa Mazwai, Simphiwe Dana and Freshly Ground, that Zabalaza, Zandisile and Nomvula were all three released in 2004.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 months

“Black Studies produces more texts that carry lasting impact and significance across shifts in political and social technologies than any other field” Patrice D. Douglass

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 months

I've been saying it, that 1994 in this land of Mandela must be read as Saidiya Hartman's nonevent of emancipation

@ali_naka

African

2 months

Apparently Apartheid Ended

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 months

The Year Afropessimism Hit the Streets?: A Conversation at the Edge of the World Aaron Robertson Talks to Frank Wilderson III

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The Year Afropessimism Hit the Streets?: A Conversation at the Edge of the World

It is difficult to imagine a new world that holds anything as promising as the smiles of Jacob Blake and his children. The summer is hot and long. I hear a story of a young woman in Portland who jo…

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 months

The Violence of Presence (2013)

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 months

Dr. Fanon will always be famous.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

Humanism has always expected of black scholars to either conform or expand its principles and values, hence there is disdain for Afropessimism – something which, at once, thinks against and away from humanism, which does not affirm or even dream of an alternative humanism.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 months

I compiled this list about three years ago, for beginners who were curious about Afropessimism.

@AfropessAzania

Afropessimism: Azanian Perspective

@AfropessAzania

3 months

Afropessimism reading list for beginners

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 months

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

Latest piece, on the (re)invention of the township.

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The reinvention of the township?

In On antiblackness and readiness to heal, we have seen how the township in South Africa is a site of violence, a concentration camp, where our choices of living or dying are determined externally.…

1blackspace.wordpress.com

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

Afropessimism

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

I think the end of the world (as we know it) will not necessarily come through our desire for the world to end, because that same desire is born out of a need for relief.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

If in the imaginary register the black identifies with whiteness, of which gives a unified image of the once lacking or fragmented black body, then when it comes to black “men”, the only way they could assert their manhood is through identification with white patriarchy

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 months

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

This is not to downplay the murder of black men by the state, but point out that when black men are murdered, they do not die as men.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

1 year

@Qhawe___L I think most gifted people are prone to escapist overindulgence. At the same time, I don’t think many of them do realise that by healing themselves from such, they are also healing their elders who have had a similar problem.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

It is beautiful that Joy James characterized the university as a zone of extraction, that gives no security to blacks, where blackness is consumed and black thought a commodity.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 months

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 months

Wilderson's ex-wife, Kamogelo, tried to explain to him that the South African Rand was losing value simply because it is now seen as a black currency. This was when Wilderson was still a staunch Marxist.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 months

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

Seeing videos of white people shooting at protesting black people with live ammunition, it is a reminder that in this country and in the world, the white body embodies authority and law, whereas the black body embodies criminality and savagery.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

When Fanon writes about how the racial epidermal schema takes the place of the shattering corporeal schema... when we encounter antiblack violence, then that marks a loss of bodily integrity and therefore a loss of gender.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

In conversation with Wilderson, this is how Marriott describes his work: “I’m not here to communicate anything. I’m not here to mean anything. For me, blackness does not mean shit. It puts into doubt, into question, everything. That’s why it is slaughtered, terrorized,

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

“Post-apartheid apartheid” is academic bullshit. People must decide, at once, whether they think we are still under apartheid or not.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

After sharing with friends that Afropessimism argues that blackness is not simply historical, but a permanent state of (social) death, one of them asked if blacks would ever wake up from such death, this is how I replied:

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

I’ve grown to see love through its capacity to hold us when we fall, so it is then more about holding and being held, especially in this world where it even becomes increasingly difficult for us to breathe;

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 months

The most misread too.

@MlamuliSA

Prof Mlamuli Hlatshwayo

3 months

Name a better text. 🤞🏽❤️✅

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

10 months

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

1 year

Patrice Douglass’s reading of Saidiya Hartman goes beyond blacks inhabiting gender; it shows us how blacks are rather possessed by gender.

@blackleftaf

Dr. CBS

1 year

Stop comparing other oppression to Black oppression. The analogy is almost never apt or clarifying, and when it pertains to ascriptive categories like sex or gender, it tends to obscure that Black people also inhabit those categories.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 months

Here is a response to Lewis Gordon’s anti-AP sentiments:

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The lysis of these morbid methods, pt. 2

un-responsive Jejune Prelude: In an ironic (see Marriott, 2023) move we find a path from the first part that operates through an engagement with Gordon’ Critical Reflections on Afropessimism. Throu…

afropessazania1.wordpress.com

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

8 months

“what makes afro-pessimism so singular a movement is its awareness that blackness can never be distinct from the dispossession that possesses it at the level of being.” David Marriott

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

People are taking a moralistic stance and condemning violence as if exploitation of workers and poverty are not forms of violence.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

What’s been happening in these Twitter spaces confirms what Marriott means by blacks sharing an antiblack unconscious with nonblacks; in a psychic community where blacks and nonblacks bond over blackness.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

We’re currently working on this

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

Afropessimism reading list for beginners 1. “We Blacks” (Steve Biko) 2. “The Fact of Blackness” (Frantz Fanon) 3. “The Position of the Unthought” (Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson) 4. “Biko and the Problematic of Presence” (Frank Wilderson) 5. “Onticide” (Calvin Warren)

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

“I don’t understand or have read anything on AP, but here’s what I think”

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 months

Wilderson's ex-wife, Kamogelo, tried to explain to him that the South African Rand was losing value simply because it is now seen as a black currency. This was when Wilderson was still a staunch Marxist.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

1 year

“Black Studies is the rupture that has the potential to destabilize all subjective and objective modes of reason.” Patrice D. Douglass

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

This whole BMS chaos reminds me of Curry’s facebook post, where he said he disagrees with Wilderson on the ontological problem. Well, he HAS to, because the premise of BMS is precisely an assumption of ontology.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

1 month

As messed up as apartheid was, it wouldn't have been possible without settler colonialism, and the racial slavery underlying that settler colonial structure. Apartheid evils (segregation etc.) were only possible because of a priori dispossession and dehumanisation of Africans.

@tboydaflame

D A F L A M E

1 month

DO NOT EVER REDUCE APARTHEID TO JUST A FORM OF RACISM. Its legacy of social and economic inequality continues to this day. They segregated our people by race, denying Black South Africans basic rights and freedom.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

And when the object of desire is unobtainable, the disappointment and frustration are turned inward, to self and other blacks.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

White people have never been associated with death, they have always associated themselves with life, they fear death, they fear a politics of death. Their encounter with death will then mean the end of the world as we know it.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

Impossibility of liberation is not AP. Wilderson does say, that whereas workers and postcolonial subjects need to be liberated in the world, the black needs to be liberated from the world instead. Hence Wilderson’s work is centred on capacity to both end and make world. Go read.

@phethani4

Silences in NGO Discourses

3 years

Two important points were made that will take us 4 hours back 1. That there is no possibility of black liberation or way out of blackness 2.We weren't human, we are currently not human and we will never be human. Two positions I am at odds with which are foundation of AP thought

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

But this makes sense. ANC is safeguarding the interests of the white settler ruling class, same interests which are not in contradiction with the make up of South Africa.

@ewnupdates

Eyewitness News

3 years

Thabo Mbeki: If ANC fails, South Africa will fail too

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

The thing is, blacks are anti-black too. It is not capitalist universities that make them appear as such. The university is finally a theatre where their anti-blackness is on stage and is performed.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

For example, Steve Biko’s We Blacks is not necessarily an AP text, but it is nevertheless able to reveal to us some of the paradigmatic aspects of Black Consciousness, some of which many people overlook.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

It is not as if the analytic of Afropessimism is flawed. It just doesn’t give most people what they think they need: relief and a promise of redemption.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

White women, white homosexuals, white workers and poor white people always claim that their experiences of lack and exclusion are slavery (i.e social death) when they actually aren't, since they still continue to thread on the side of life.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

Some people hate Afropessimism more than they hate antiblackness.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

“Can the structural form of violence be delimited and, if so, how? In other words, can we conceptualize it and, if so, can that conceptualization be perceived, and can that perception be represented?” Jared Sexton. Unbearable Blackness (2015)

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 months

Every time I see anything on climate change, I wonder if people have ever read Axelle Karera's Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics, or they just don't care.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

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Ndumiso Mdayi

8 months

Dr. Fanon will always be famous.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

then this desire has been engendered by captivity, deportation and death. Loss affixes our gaze to the past, determines the present, and perhaps even eclipses a vision of the future.” Saidiya Hartman. The Time of Slavery.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 months

“Slavery as an ancient political system finds itself disfigured by blackness, as its structural components proliferate the constraints and definitive power of the master’s gaze beyond the reach of actual physical property status and proximity” Douglass & Wilderson

@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 months

The Violence of Presence (2013)

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Ndumiso Mdayi

3 months

I had to make this other lecturer understand how gender and sexuality are already constituted into the structure of antiblackness. This is something Spillers, Hartman etc. have already written on. Academics are just too lazy to read.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

“When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men, I say that intelligence has never saved anyone...” Fanon. BSWM (trans. C.L.M), p. 29

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

No longer feeling like I want to escape, I want things to end.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

That is, through fantasy and desire

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

1 year

What, in the libidinal economy?

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Ndumiso Mdayi

1 year

“Investments in gender at the level of individual experiences—of privileges and protections, of particular scales of violence, of particular experiences of gendered subjectivity—are paradigmatically unavailable to the Black.” Patrice D. Douglass

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

How is it that people still think anti-blackness is something that exists externally, elsewhere, and not something that also exists internally?

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

4 months

I'm home, sober and attempting to read this. I have questions that need to be answered.

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Ndumiso Mdayi

1 year

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

we put up masks to satisfy our desire for stability, coherence and sanity, but what happens when the masks fall off, and we are vulnerable, confronted with sadness, and mourning a loss of what could not become? Will love then hold us?

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

When we understand South Africa as an idea founded on the dispossession and conquest of Africans, and that sustains itself through black suffering and death, then whiteness is not contrary to the make-up of South Africa, and whites are therefore South African proper.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

“The black man, writes Fanon, has to obtain revenge for ‘the imago that had always obsessed him: the frightened, trembling Negro, abased before the white overlord.’” David Marriott. Haunted Life, p. 57

@phethani4

Silences in NGO Discourses

3 years

"At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude.” — Frantz Fanon, who died on this day in 1961.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

4 months

The tragedy of being black in this country is thinking that there is something you own.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

People of liberation astrology, I think this should be a good start:

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

Marriott gave us:

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

The antiblackness of native Americans can be read through the same lens as Gandhi’s antiblack Indian nationalism in South Africa, where the slave status of blacks was used as a means to justify their assimilation into whiteness. “Not white, but definitely NOT black.”

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 months

I want I read The Pedagogy of the Oppressed but I will first have to go through The Wretched of the Earth, because Paulo Freire had to rewrite sections of the book after Frantz Fanon published his.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

8 months

“the social life of black social death acts as a kind of index, or grammar, that defines both the possibility and the limit of black speech and existence [...]

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

6 months

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

25 days

I am more for repossession, because both the ideas of restoration and expropriation of land legitimatize the existence of the state and put less emphasis on the fact that many governments, past and present, have actually been presiding over dispossession, genocide and conquest.

@LPatiwe

Lindokuhle Patiwe

25 days

True! Expropriation by definition recognizes that the land rightfully belongs to the current occupier of the land. It recognizes their right to the land. Restoration does not recognize the current occupier of the land as the rightful owner of the land. Key yet crucial difference.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

Zakiyyah Jackson on David Marriott’s book, On Black Men.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

1 year

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Ndumiso Mdayi

9 months

When I came back home, I used to feel so stuck, so much that Moten’s work on fugitivity made a lot of sense to me; that whole idea of a being on the run. I used to ask myself what it would take to escape the township, this site of violence.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

Zamansele Nsele once interviewed Frank Wilderson on AP

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

Natal alienation.

@Africa_Archives

Africa Archives ™

@Africa_Archives

3 years

“My father didn’t know his last name. My father got his last name from his grandfather and his grandfather got it from his grandfather who got it from the slave master. The real names of our people were destroyed during slavery.” —Malcolm X

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Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

...we would have also understood that there will be no moment of invention unless we break away from history and not make those same political calculations.

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Ndumiso Mdayi

2 months

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Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

Zamansele Nsele interviewing Frank Wilderson.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

“[B]lack suffering — especially in the figure of slain black bodies — indefinitely haunts the possibility of a post-apocalyptic political afterlife.” Axelle Karera. Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics.

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Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

I think we mostly think about trauma as event, like childhood sexual violence, murder of a parent etc. and not see how natal alienation screws over the black psyche and mothering, when birth is read as a continuation of black social death.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

The liberal urge to help clean up parliament, defending post-apartheid democracy.

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Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

I really enjoyed reading this.

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Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

It takes a more psychoanalytic approach, where the subject is made to see his true image; where the subject looks into a mirror and sees his true self, his dying/dead self and introduces a politics of the dead or dying.

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@mbira_tafari

Ndumiso Mdayi

3 months

“No figure of speech or figure of meaning can account for blackness and sexuality. . . neither sex, gender, object cause of desire or racial paradigms outside the regimes that create current antagonisms and fantasies” Salamawit Terrefe

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Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

What’s happening at UP reminds me of what Joy James said in a conversation with RAW, that the university is a zone of extraction that gives no security to blacks, it is where blackness is consumed and black thought a commodity.

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Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

Groupthink is one thing that AP folks don’t do, everyone is out there (here) figuring this whole thing on their own, from things that will make sense to them (through Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, settler colonialism, metaphysics etc) but we all land on the same conclusions.

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Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

If we agree that the black unconscious is a given and is antiblack, any desire for redemption comes as a product or an expression of that unconscious the black shares with nonblacks. A revolutionary moment, a leap, comes where and when there is frustration and absence of desire.

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Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

Sabine Broeck on gender and the abjection of blackness.

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Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

Ndumiso Dladla, “Racism and the Marginality of African Philosophy in South Africa” (2017)

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Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

“If Pan-Africanism has been animated by the desire for a ‘unity of sentiment and action’ between Africa and the diaspora, a return to the ancestral land, an abiding nostalgia, and unmet and perhaps unrealizable longings for solidarity throughout the black world,

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Ndumiso Mdayi

2 years

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Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

“[F]or Fanon (and in ways that recall Lacan) blackness must be understood not as a metonym of a lost object, nor as the material mark of a deprivation, but as the structure of a never-having-had. In particular, we must not confuse this structure with either loss or lack; (1/3)

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Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

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Ndumiso Mdayi

4 months

So bored, so I decided to read this over coffee.

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Ndumiso Mdayi

3 years

Pessimism is not nihilism, and Afropessimism is not traditional pessimism.

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