Raj Patel has set up a campaign page with the latest news on Ashwin's battle for reinstatement here.

24 February 2006: More on the Desai case

Letters from the Mail and Guardian

Desai is our Sartre
I read with horror the bile spewed by Malegapuru Makgoba against Ashwin Desai in your last edition ("Truth is often less sexy than sensation"). Makgoba uses innuendo to name the alleged unaccountable "mafia" that abused public resources and kept no records. He names Saths Cooper, under whose management records weren't kept. Then, under the cloak of condemning the racialisation of the Desai matter by the media, he promotes his own dangerous, narrow and reactionary Africanist chauvinism.

He points to a pro-Desai campaign by unnamed Indian journalists, with the implied corollary that African journalists would be on his side if only they had the same access to information, which they've been denied.

In the same vein, he mentions the names Cooper, Desai, Govender and Habib next to a throwaway comment about an Indian cabal. Very little is left to the imagination. This is intellectual gangsterism of the highest order.

It's a sad day that UKZN, which helped birth one of the most potent liberation philosophies -- Black Consciousness -- is now turning into a den of tribalism promoted from the top.

It's sad indeed that an intellectual and academic of Desai's calibre, who has inspired a whole generation of young thinkers to side with the poor and speak truth to power, has to be subjected to such slander and victimisation.

Desai is our Sartre. Instead of persecuting him, Makgoba should say, like Charles de Gaulle when it was suggested that Sartre be jailed for his pro-Algerian independence activities against French colonialism: "You do not arrest Voltaire." The French are richer for it. -- Andile Mngxitama, Johannesburg 

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Makgoba suggests that reporting on the Desai case has been racialised. But the only writer, white or black, in print or on radio, to conjure the spectre of "anti-African Indians" or "anti-Indian Africans" is Makgoba himself.

Perhaps he wants to tell us something, but finds it more expedient to lay his prejudices at the door of journalists. -- Raj Patel, Centre for Civil Society, UKZN

2 January: the return of the blacklist

Any reader who still thinks that universities are enclaves of tolerance should read Raj Patel's account of the attempts by the University of KwaZulu-Natal to prevent one of their departments from re-appointing Ashwin Desai.

As Raj writes, 'Ashwin's one of few veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle who has neither self-destructed nor self-enriched.'

Desai is probably best known in Britain for his book We are the Poors, the greatest contribution made by any South African to the Seattle movement.

I think Ashwin is wrong to speak of 'the poors' in place of 'the workers'. In passages, he glorifies not spontaneity but disorganisation. His politics are not mine.

But Ashwin is a major public intellectual, worthy of jobs far more senior than the one from which he is banned.

Follow the story here. There's also an electronic petition for Ashwin here.