From Marielle Franco to Fikile Ntshangase
An Apartheid Studies approach to Understanding the Problem of Living with Harm and Living in Harm’s Way
I'm headlining the 2023 Black November Conference at the University of Rio De Jainero. My paper, "From Marielle Franco to Fikile Ntshangase: An Apartheid Studies approach to Understanding the Problem of Living with Harm and Living in Harm’s Way", draws on the seminal examples of two assassinated African women, Fikile Ntshangase and Marielle Franco, to reflect on the existence, persistence, prevalence and virulence of apartheid in Brazil and South Africa.
On October 22, 2020, 63-year-old grandmother Fikile Ntshangase was cutting onions for the evening cooking at her rural home in Ophondweni, in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, when three gunmen burst in and shot her six times. Ntshangase died in front of her teenage grandson and his two friends. She had been fighting against the expansion of Tendele Coal Mining’s open-cast coal mine – the largest African producer of anthracite, used in steel production – near her home. No one has yet been brought to justice for Ntshangase’s assassination. Marielle Franco was murdered in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on March 14, 2018, for her fight against state impunity, police brutality, and extrajudicial killings.
This paper utilises the notions of living with harm, living in harm’s way and the crime scene, drawn from Apartheid Studies (AS) for a reflection on the worlds of Ntshangase and Franco and how such worlds are suffused with apartheid, most of it so commonplace that it has become undetectable. AS is an emerging field from the global south which utilises the notion of “apartheid” as a paradigm, theoretical framework, and forensic methodology by which to understand the persistence and remanence of harm amongst the oppressed. The approach defines apartheid as the persistence of harm and proposes that harm persists when oppressors invoice the costs of oppression on the oppressed themselves, causing, on the one hand, the quantum superposition of crime scenes and daily life and, on the other hand, the going-on-holiday of oppressors. To end the persistence of harm in human society, the oppressed must default on their “invoices”. Ntshangase and Franco exposed the initial conditions of this lifegiving default.