Keynote speaker Professor Xolela Mangcu
Described on the night as “the person to feed the minds” by programme director Dr Somadoda Fikeni, keynote speaker Professor Xolela Mangcu from the University of Cape Town did not disappoint, with his thought-provoking and hard-hitting concepts and research.
Mangcu brought to the evening his extensive knowledge about the dilemmas and inspirations of both local and international writers, as well as discussion about the future of education.
“The African-American writer Gwendolyn Brooks once observed that black writers have a double burden, the roots of which go back to slavery when black people had to affirm their humanity through demonstrating the ability to read and write.
“The ability for a slave to reason and write was regarded as beyond his or her reach and they were conveniently described as sub-human. Slaves thus wrote to demonstrate their membership in [the] human community.
“In the process they developed their own figurative language, using a range of rhetorical tropes including allegory, puns, metaphors and most importantly, signifying, which means interrupting the standard meaning of words in English — saying something while meaning the opposite, using words as a decoy to resist and ultimately to undermine their oppressors’ communication regime.
“The political struggle started as a literacy struggle”.
Mangcu said this resistance was not limited to slaves: “As the progress of Euro-megalomania spread its tentacles around the world and with the colonisation of Africa, black people outside America also found that they had to demonstrate their belonging in a community through the ability to write and read. Literacy and tradition became part and parcel of our position as human beings.
“The disjuncture between the promise of equality through education and of salvation through the Christian faith and their actual experience became the motivation for liberation movements.”
Mancgu stressed that the primary writing vehicle for Africans was fiction, through which they could find ways of relaying what they wanted, avoiding exposure to the brutality of the regime and recording the communication of their own people.
“To talk about Es’kia Mphahlele, we have to talk about him in a properly historical way. He described his writing as impacted by the volatile socio-political forces of the day, encompassing apartheid laws. But Es’kia makes an admission I would like to linger on, as I want to put it out there as challenge to universities and black people at large.
Mangcu said that Es’kia writes: “There was very, very little non-fiction in what we wrote. There was little non-fiction whose intention was to sharpen our political consciousness. The heavy hand of censorship from the proprietor’s office saw to that. Those among us who listened to the people’s exhortations in speech and song caught the mood and recorded it in our fiction. We did not apply our minds at all to theoretical questions of cultural identity … political writings did not, as a result, seem necessary, even as a desperately necessary mode of expression.”
Mangcu said: “While I recognise the role fiction has played in the long dark journey in our history, we should do more non-fiction. We should now have nothing to fear. No [more] need for decoys or guerilla action.
“Black people are no more than consumers of theories that have been developed by the white academy. Starting with the transition to democracy in the early 1990s there was an over-reliance on white academics for policy ideas and solutions. As a young graduate, I was appalled by the way the ANC looked to white academic experts post-apartheid at every turn.
“White academic Eddie Webster made similar observations about the sharply unequal power relations and the sharp social distance between them. It was easy for white intellectuals to reproduce the apartheid division of labour where white intellectuals do the expert functions and black workers do the menial functions.
“We still find ourselves in this country in this condition and it seems to me that unless black people become part of the knowledge, we will forever be guided by the white academic, inevitably leading to frustration, because even the most well-intentioned academics write from their own perspectives, experiences and of their world.”
Mangcu said he was not surprised by the @rhodesmustfall movement, as this did not happen without context, as “these students are resisting the world adults failed to deconolonise, as well as demanding the mandate to transform the universities”.
“Their demands resonated around the country because it spoke of a latent sentiment of alienation that young people have from the culture of the country, which is particularly predominant in white universities. The people that teach them, the curriculum they study, books they read and the symbols around them tell them in unmistakable terms that the narrative of the revolution was a lie.
“Suddenly they realise the world was much more complicated than the narrative of reconciliation and racial equality on which they were raised as children of the black middle class. They begin to taste racism. All kinds of things happen in a university system that makes the black child a lesser person to the white child they grew up with in school.”
Mangcu said another reason why this issue of race is important, especially as related to the question of black writing, is because failure to pay attention to non-fiction has become an Achilles heel in South Africa’s democracy. “There are consequences for blacks not writing non-fiction works that expose such areas as government policy-making process and the impact this has on people’s lives.
“Mphahlele came to an appreciation of the political definition of racial identity after having been a strong critic of the concept of ‘Negritude’. However, he would soon be disabused of his non-racialism by his experiences of racism in the United States, where he began a journey into racial self-consciousness. So he packed his bags and came home. He wanted, needed, like so many intellectual forebears, to engage with modality from a sense of place.
“Our country and people remain captured by an anti-intellectual culture, which reduces intellect to something relegated down as a pastime. If we knew this history, we would perhaps do things differently in the struggle and know how to build as ourselves in a nation.
“We need to reinforce Es’kia’s call for some kind of institutionalised thinking. It is imperative we develop the next generation of South African intellectuals. We can talk as much as we like about Es’kia, but there is also a duty to honour him by doing what he requested.”
Feeding the minds
An astute intellectual and academic, Professor Xolela Mangcu hails from the same village that gave South Africa the legendary Steve Biko — Ginsberg township in the Eastern Cape.
Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Cape Town, Mangcu recently became an Oppenheimer fellow with Harvard University, and has held fellowships at the Brookings Institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Rockerfeller Foundation. He has also been published extensively, both as an author and a columnist.
Mangcu obtained his PhD in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University and holds an MSc in Development Planning and a BA (Sociology) degree from Wits University. Es’kia Mphahlele was one of Mangcu’s influences and he told delegates at the lecture that he was fortunate to “get to know and work with him”.