Prishani Naidoo. (Photograph courtesy of Ahmed Veriava)
May humanity speak.
May humanity listen …
Each country,
Each city,
Each countryside,
Each house,
Each person,
Each is a large or small battleground.
On the one side is neoliberalism with all its repressive power and all its machinery of death;
On the other side is the human being.
For Prishani Naidoo every space and terrain was a battleground. But these were not battlegrounds marked by constant and constructed violence, conflict and destruction; rather, they were framed by a willingness to always listen and learn, fierce but inclusive and reasoned intellectual engagements and debates, the conscious defence and practising of progressive principles and values, and the embracing of diverse possibilities for radical change both personal and political, specific and systemic.
Born and raised into a world of political thought and struggle
Prishani was born in 1973 in Durban but almost immediately moved to Port Shepstone, where she spent her first 11 years, attending a state-aided ‘Indian’ school. The family then moved back to Durban in 1984, where Prishani attended the private, all-girls Catholic school of Lonsdale, from which she matriculated in 1990 at the age of 17. She describes her journey of conscientisation and politicisation during those formative, early years of life:
I grew up in a family that was political … my father was the first general secretary of the revived Natal Indian Congress [NIC] in the ‘70s in Durban. But just after I was born [he was] threatened with banning, then left the NIC but still maintained links. So I grew up in a family that was connected politically and that was always active [as well as] with friends of theirs – many of whom were from the BC [Black Consciousness] movement … things always being organised, fought against … [and this was linked] to my own experience as a black South African growing up under apartheid, feeling oppression in various ways and being conscientised through that experience. (Naidoo and McKinley 2010, 4)2
Dutifully ‘armed’, Prishani then became involved at an organisational level in 1989 while in Standard 9. She threw her youthful energy into setting up ‘our own ANC branches in the Durban Western areas’ (ibid., 4), soon becoming the general secretary of her local African National Congress (ANC) Youth League branch (with later-to-be ANC Youth League president and national minister Malusi Gigaba as chairperson). In her local ANC branch there were many high-profile party and union leaders such as Alec Erwin, (‘Small’) Jay Naidoo, Pravin Gordhan and Fatima Meer. In Prishani’s words, these were ‘people I looked up to growing up, [but I] … also learnt very quickly of the dangers with being so in awe of these big names and not knowing for myself and … following rather than trying to think through for myself’ (ibid., 4).
After a short one-year stint at the University of Durban-Westville, where she joined the South African National Students Congress (SANSCO was the forerunner of SASCO), Prishani moved to Johannesburg and entered Wits University. There, she ploughed through two-and-a-half years of medicine before deciding she ‘hated it’ (ibid., 2), switching over to do a BA with English and Sociology majors, subsequently graduating in 1998 with an Honours in comparative literature.
Throughout, Prishani was active in and a leader of SASCO (as well as in the Wits Students Representative Council), describing herself ‘in those first few years [as] very much within the Congress tradition … a defender of that history … always abid[ing] by organisational discipline, being uncritical … until I … felt my own voice completely silenced’ (ibid.), largely as a result of her growing criticism and opposition to the implementation of the ANC Tripartite Alliance’s neoliberal macro-economic policy (GEAR).
It was in those mid to late 1990s that I first met Prishani and her partner Ahmed Veriava. As I would find out later, when you saw or heard one of them, the other always seemed to be in close mental and physical proximity. At the time I was a full-time staffer at the South African Communist Party (SACP) as well as chairperson of the SACP Greater Johannesburg District, and had come to give a talk to SASCO Wits and engage in discussion related to GEAR and working-class struggles against its growing impacts.
After my relatively brief engagement with Prishani, I immediately liked her; not only was she incredibly intelligent, she was candidly and critically forthright, yet in a way that made me feel as if we had been good comrades for a long time. Even if I was not her ‘adversary’, Nicolas Dieltiens – fellow activist and close friend of Prishani’s – has succinctly captured Prishani’s general and unique gift: ‘Prishani would take on her adversaries with argument and reason when the struggle was most difficult or confrontational’.3
Of ideological, organisational and intellectual movements
Like many other activists on the South African ‘left’ during those days, Prishani soon became (in her own words) ‘disillusioned’ with her experiences in the ANC Alliance. She began her search for ‘other ways of acting politically’ (Naidoo and McKinley 2010, 6) and seeking out new spaces for her work and activism. This saw her doing basic trade union education particularly with women, at the independent Khanya College and then becoming gender programme coordinator, first at the Heinrich Böll Foundation and back at Khanya again in the early 2000s for a short stint. For many years after, Prishani was active in the Indymedia collective and then also joined Ahmed and two other comrades/friends to start a small collective – ‘Research and Education in Development’ – which carried out contracted research projects.
It was during these years that Prishani (along with Ahmed) became actively involved in the newly formed social movement, the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF). Prishani threw herself into the difficult and taxing activist work of trying to help build an ideologically heterogenous, socially inclusive and radically democratic/bottom-up movement of the broad working class. Not surprisingly, she gravitated towards the educational terrain, guiding the APF research committee in producing two excellent participatory action research reports on the militant struggles of APF community affiliates against water privatisation in the form of the forced introduction of prepaid water meters. Much of this and subsequent work within the APF against neoliberal commodification of almost everything formed the basis of Prishani’s 2010 PhD thesis, entitled ‘The Making of “The Poor” in Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Case Study of the City of Johannesburg and Orange Farm’.
Throughout Prishani’s APF years, she consistently centred the principled practice of never taking anyone or their views for granted and never substituting others’ knowledge with one’s own because of educational status/level, political experience or organisational position and ideological surety. Whether in the APF or in the many other organisational, intellectual and movement spaces and places within which she was involved, Prishani always tried to consciously construct terrains of equality and respect: in her own words, ‘to do things differently by confronting those different positions of power, and different hierarchies’ (Naidoo and McKinley 2010, 21).
In doing so Prishani was, in real practical terms, applying the foundational attributes of her intellectual, ideological, organisational and personal (guiding) frames. In a 2004 co-authored article on South Africa’s social movements, Prishani and I tried to capture the analytical and practical essence of this approach:
The continuities and contradictions of the theories and praxis of movements around issues of race, class and gender [must be] exposed and critically engaged rather than buried and conveniently rationalised. Here, there are no obligatory meta-narratives and conceptual frameworks … that must be adopted in order to impose false consensus and linkage. Instead, there is recognition of the realities that have been wrought by neoliberalism (as well as personal choice) and that have shaped the relationships between North and South, between rich and poor and between reformism and revolutionary possibility. (McKinley and Naidoo 2004, 21)
By 2008, Prishani felt the need to move onto a different terrain from which to apply those foundational frames. Even if with some serious reservations, she chose the academy, becoming a lecturer in the Sociology Department at Wits University. For the next 16 years Prishani traversed that terrain with incredible levels of energy, perseverance, acuity and passion (aided by her ever-present helpings of caffeine). It is impossible to capture the subsequent scope and impact of her research, writing, teaching, activism, mentoring and leadership, but it was as impressive as it was expansive.
Besides the incredibly long list of academic and activist publications, there were many inputs, keynote speeches, colloquia and artistic collaborations.4 There were also constant meetings, workshops and fora with students, activists and organisations, both in South Africa and internationally. This included her leading role in the ‘Fees Must Fall’ movement that arose at Wits and across the South African university landscape from 2014–16.
Before she was so suddenly taken, Prishani had been completing her first full-length book, The Subject of Poverty: Policy, Protest and Politics in South Africa after 1994. Her colleagues at the Society Work & Politics Institute (SWOP), which Prishani took leadership of in 2019, have best summed up the cumulative character and content of this part of Prishani’s life journey: ‘She carried with her a belief in forming spaces of equality, community, discussion and disagreement … [she was] committed to the work of reimagining and experimentation … and other ways to organise life.’5
A planter of seeds, a beautiful soul
Prishani held a special place in her heart and mind for the Zapatistas. Over the last 20 years or so she made several visits to Chiapas and collaborated closely with Mexican activists and academics. In their tribute soon after her passing, her comrades and friends at the University of Mexico’s Institute of Aesthetic Research crucially reminded us that ‘she planted so many seeds … [the] Zapatistas teach us that seeds are the most important presences for a future to come’.6
The seeds that Prishani planted were sheathed in the cores of her character: a razor-sharp intellect, critically incisive, informed, assured, reasoned and calm, all framed by an inner strength and steely determination. Like the movements and spaces she so determinedly engaged and tried to build and expand, Prishani’s seeds represent ‘a story in the making … a collection of different voices, experiences, traditions and practices that [can evince] a new kind of politics through diversity and … new ways of imagining possibilities for life, for struggle’ (McKinley and Naidoo 2004, 10).
In turn, those imagined possibilities – whether as applied to the political and/or personal – were infused with Prishani’s amazing capacity for empathy and nurturing. She understood that in order to personify and foster the kind of individual, movement, community, society and world that we desire and deserve, the foundations must be built on love and care. Hers was a beautiful human soul.
Hamba Kahle Prishani! Lifelong radical activist, feminist, intellectual and architect of struggle; tireless comrade whose passion and energy filled so many movements and lives; committed friend, sister, daughter, aunt and partner. You will be forever missed, but also forever celebrated and remembered.
Prishani Naidoo, 1 November 1973 – 23 December 2024. She is survived by her partner Ahmed, her parents, Dilli and Poonie, her sisters, Sanushka and Kalnisha, and her three nephews, Akhil, Kiran and Xolani.