Arts and Culture Minister Pallo Jordan has paid tribute to renowned academic Professor Archibald Monwabisi Mafeje, who died in Pretoria on March 26.
”The demise of a pioneering intellectual powerhouse will always be a great loss to a nation,” Jordan said in a statement.
Archie Mafeje was born in 1937 in the Eastern Cape, and began his schooling at a primary school in Peelton, near King William’s Town.
From primary school he went to Healdtown, an old and renowned Methodist boarding school, outside Fort Beaufort, where he matriculated in 1955.
His stay at Fort Hare University College was short because, like many other students of the day, he fell foul of the university authorities for political activism.
He obtained a BSc degree in biological sciences at the University of Cape Town in 1959.
He went on to earn a BA honours degree with a dissertation in urban sociology, studying under the supervision of Professor Monica Wilson, together with whom he published a book on urban anthropology, Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township, in 1963, when aged 26.
He was awarded his master’s degree, cum laude, in political anthropology in 1965, and granted a fellowship to study towards his PhD at Cambridge University, in the United Kingdom, to where he travelled in the spring of that year.
He became professor of sociology at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1969. From there he went to the American University in Cairo, from which post he returned home in 2000.
He also spent time as a visiting and working academic in a number of countries in Africa and Europe, as well as the United States.
Jordan said few can doubt that Mafeje played a pivotal role in helping the people of South Africa and the continent to understand themselves and their condition better, thus equipping themselves to take control of their destiny.
”He was widely acknowledged as a living repository of the political language, academic discipline and political commitment that proved so essential in struggle for African self-determination beyond the purely political sphere.
”With his passing, South Africa has lost a formidable intellectual whose contribution to the making of a democratic South Africa will be sorely missed,” Jordan said. — Sapa