Unisa principal and vice-chancellor Professor Manla Makhanya says Unisa is providing a space 'to return to the promise of our common destination'.
“The clouds of uncertainty in South Africa’s university sector are gathering and the gale force winds of socioeconomic and political challenges are testing the very foundations of our society,” said Unisa principal Mandla Makhanya in his opening address during the seventh Es’kia Mphahlele memorial lecture outside Polokwane in Limpopo last week Friday evening.
Makhanya emphasised the urgent need for knowledge centres such as universities to provide intellectual spaces for public reflection.
Unisa, according to Makhanya, is poised to provide a forum for inter-generation conversations that have largely been lacking or superficial, and events such as this one, which “provide spaces for us to apprehend the meaning of the moment and how we can return to the promise of our common destination.”
“The late Es’kia Mphahlele spent most of his life producing knowledge that sought to apprehend the character of our society and explore avenues of resolving some of our challenges. It is, therefore, fitting that we have come to immortalise and invoke the spirit and memory of this intellectual giant and worthy ancestor as we reflect on the challenges and opportunities that have engulfed our young, fledgling democracy,” said Makhanya.
Reflecting on the status quo in the higher education sector, Makhanya said, “We live in an era of various permutations of fallist movements — from #FeesMustFall to #RhodesMustFall and #InsourcingMustFall. We live in as era of great frustrations and great expectations which require of us to be imaginative and reflective as we seek to understand the nature of challenges and identify sustainable solutions. Unisa is called upon to live up to the promise of its vision statement: ‘the African university shaping futures in the service of humanity’.
Makhanya noted that, “At no point in history has there been such a compelling historical moment for universities and the rest of the society to rise up and join forces in responding to the challenges of our time and to deepen democracy.”
He asked rhetorically how a society like South Africa, which produced intellectual giants like Mphahlele and political icons such as Nelson Mandela, has on many fronts regressed to the level now witnessed, and within such a short space of time.
A model graduate
Makhanya said Mphahlele, a Nobel laureate, pursued his dreams under the most difficult of circumstances.
“Mphahlele was a Unisa alumnus — having done all of his graduate studies at Unisa — and one of the first black Africans to have graduated with a master’s degree cum laude. And if one thinks of the notion of “graduateness”, that is, the qualities and competencies that Unisa would like its graduates to have acquired through their studies, then of course, we must assert that in Professor Es’kia Mphahlele we have been spectacularly successful, because the late Prof. Mphahlele is precisely the kind of graduate that we aim to produce.”
Intellectual legacy
Unisa chancellor Justice Bernard Ngoepe says the Es’kia Mphahlele Memorial Lecture is the “particular event in which I enjoy the warmth of the community with which I have a bond that is a constant reminder of who I am and where I come from.”
Ngoepe asserted the importance of the scholar as “the father of African humanism”.
“For Mphahlele, African humanism is a way of life which is embedded in our proverbs and aphorisms and oral poetry, and in the way our elders spoke to us. “It is this insight to African humanism, into the nature and practice of ubuntu, one may suggest, that resulted in such insightful social critique, which is reflected both in his literary works and his social commentary, particularly the latter.
“In 1998, Mphahlele warned: “We should stop showing off to the world as a unique democracy fashioned out of incomparable racial harmony and reconciliation. This posturing from a high moral ground can easily make us overlook the domestic task ahead of us.”
Ngoepe went on to say, “As we speak, our universities are in disarray, and this is a situation which is mirrored in much of our government and our parliament. It would seem the ‘posturing from a high moral ground’ has been just that — posturing.
“Our recent actions and behaviours have been premised on greed and self-interest, and not on ubuntu. And in its self-negation, of who and what we are, we have fractured our identities, and, I would suggest, also lost a little bit of our soul, to the extent that many of us are overt or covert tribalists, ethnicists and xenophobes. We have learnt, somewhere along the way, to hate and to exclude the other. We have turned upon ourselves.
“Yet in this cacophony, in this lack of direction and common purpose, the voice of Es’kia Mphahlele remains for all time — clear, prescient and truthful, an ever-present reminder of who and what we are. Time and time again, Es’kia Mphahlele brings us back to what is really important — our sense of community — and in so doing, he compels us to revisit our own sense of humanity.”
Ngoepe suggested that South Africans should return to the wells of wisdom and insight that have been left by the like of Mphahlele and others, and drink deeply.
“Mphahlele’s words have not only immortalised the man, but more pertinently, the message. He was one of those rare humans with substantial intellectual gifts, and which he exercised with passion and commitment.”
Ngoepe concluded his remembrance with a warning: “I am compelled to remind us all that we are the custodians of the voices and legacies of our visionaries, and it is our responsibility to ensure that their voices continue to speak the truth to power, that there are not subverted for agendas to negate their very essence and truth, and that they do not fall silent in the maelstrom of social and political expediency.”