Magashe Titus Mafolo: A natural and an original South African intellectual. Photo: Kagisho Mafolo
As a pipsqueak who was a relatively new communicator to the reputedly Apollonian Presidency of Thabo Mbeki circa 2002, I finally yielded to the importunate urgings of Bheki Khumalo, the then spokesperson, screwing up enough courage to meet the political advisor whom the former wished for me to know.
I shuffled into a sparsely furnished office luminous with the presence of a bespectacled, imposing figure whose appearance evoked a spectre of a staid African scholar but who, thankfully, immediately dissolved one’s stage fright with his sincere guffaws, disarming personability and agreeable manner. This was my first encounter with Titus Magashe Mafolo, affectionately called Bro Ti in the private office.
After the introductory rituals and some obligatory, ice-breaking but probing questions of an intellectual kind from the man who wielded a deft, impeccable pen for the president, I immediately began to sense the gravitas of the office I was going to work for.
What struck me keenly at first blush about the personality of President Mbeki’s political advisor and principal speechwriter was his invitingly amiable disposition, sociability and imperishable humility. My Tembisa social provenance took a shine to the man, instantly disposing me favourably to his easy-going township manner and his every-brother aura.
As a principal speechwriter, Bro Ti needed a dedicated capacity for support during the punishing processes of speechwriting mechanics. When I arrived at the Presidency, a brilliant writer named Lisa Combrinck in the speechwriting position was resigning and would be replaced by an equally capable Dr Ramola Naidoo, who herself would leave the Presidency a few years after.
I was fortunate enough to succeed Dr Naidoo, albeit the very thought of serving as Director: Speechwriting reporting to such a colossus as Bro Ti during the presidency of President Mbeki was itself a daunting prospect.
As luck would have it, all turned out fabulously in my budding career as a communicator and speechwriter in the highest office located in Sir Herbert Baker’s mausoleum.
The first thing Bro Ti did was orient me to the literary aesthetics and some idiosyncrasies of President Mbeki’s writing style.
“Chief, you may already be aware that the president does not split an infinitive,” advising me about an ‘uncommon practice’ which was well noted among both the general readership/audience and the literati alike.
“Chief—President Mbeki, i.e.—avoids certain culturally loaded diction, such as ‘majesty’ and ‘monumentality’. And occasionally his mind is inscrutable. He prefers words such as ‘efforts’ to ‘endeavours’, for instance.”
What I was expected to know upfront being in that office was the meat and potatoes of South African politics.
Bringing his personal thoroughness and verve to bear on his intellectual practice in the office, Bro Ti studied the president’s political thinking up to the minutiae and could pick up even the slightest Eurocentric subtleties embedded in our quotidian use of language. Colonial languages were configured such that they served as expressions of cultural bias and the manifestation of the colonial unconscious.
Yet, horribile dictu, Bro Ti recently noted with consternation the social and mainstream media lies peddled by this one abrasive, blowhard and puffed-up ‘political analyst’ that he used to be President Mbeki’s speechwriter. Appalled, Bro Ti penned a rejoinder in which he exposed this quack ‘who masquerades as having been a speechwriter for President Mbeki when he has never, ever written a sentence for the former President.’
When Bro Ti drew my attention to this disgraceful behaviour, I responded that it was in the nature of self-preening, posturing poseurs, usurpers and perjurers to erase others from history for purposes of self-aggrandisement, whether personal or racial, the same way the biological Africanity of Nilotic Pharaonocracy has suffered historical erasure. The irony of it all is that this is an individual who wrinkles his nose at the ethical deformity of the governing party’s behaviour with Patrician certainty!
Bro Ti was a writer beau ideal who could mobilise the English language with stunning grace. Over time I have come to see the business of writing as generally divided into two streams: the functional writers and the elegant writers. Bro Ti epitomised both cultures with supreme facility; he was as much functional as he was elegant in his writing! For good measure, he possessed such versatility as a writer that the drafts he composed for the president were virtually indistinguishable from the latter’s writing in style, syntax, diction and nuance! It was staggering!
I had an inkling about President Mbeki’s inimitable writing style from my reading and had already read somewhere Louis Nkosi’s essay likening the president’s habitually embedded clause to that of the Afro-American public intellectual and savant, James Baldwin. But my grasp was still way too unserious to measure up to the rigours of the office.
So, with time I got the hang of the drafting process, even though saying I really nailed it would be drawing a long bow. As I eased into this intellectual milieu of the office at his knee, I came to learn firsthand that Bro Ti possessed a startling intellectual, language and writerly prowess which defied his humble biography as an offspring of proletarian social origins in the impoverished township of Phelindaba, which he fondly called ‘Pheli’. Yet, wired with intellectual and personal humility, he never let his feet run faster than his shoes!
My lasting memory of him is that he was an individual approaching polymathy. Besides a personality emanating from the most refined configurations of South African townships’ existential experience predicating our sociological imagination, Bro Ti was at once a bibliophile (lover of books) and a bibliophage, a devourer of books! He read widely and closely, impelled by a critical attitude that yielded an impressive intellectual range.
The result of these exacting intellectual habits of mind was the ability to fight shy of predilection for absolutes: thinking, observing and judging the world in black and white, especially in political terms. He embraced the revolutionary African nationalism of the ANC and yet employed Marxist categories to discern reality. This intellectual attitude occasioned a formidable epistemology of alterity that sought to uphold counter-discursive order centred on Africa as a primary mode of historical consciousness.
As if his thought process obeyed the promptings of the Marxist cultural scholar Fredric Jameson’s injunction ‘always to historicise’, Bro Ti not only dived into historiography but blasted further off into deeper antiquity, an epistemic competence generally inaccessible to many intellectuals. He mastered Ancient Egyptian history, the greatest civilisation of High Antiquity, coming round to the appreciation that this African culture imaged the intellectual history of Europe.
Nor did he flinch from the epistemic counterpunches of the defenders of globalised Eurocentric metaphysical grounding held up by the likes of Guy MacLean Rogers, a professor of Greek and Latin and history, and Mary R. Lefkowitz, a professor in the humanities. For him historical representation is a contested epistemic space in which the dominant shape the essentials of the human narrative– their way!
As the cunning of history would have it, Bro Ti and I met again at DIRCO, where he was a political advisor and I, a speechwriter for Minister Pandor. Again, the crossing of our paths held out animating intellectual and political prospects. What a beautiful reunion!
The last time I spoke to Bro Ti before he passed away was about two weeks ago when he called me to announce the next book he was working on and to invite me to read a speech he had just delivered at the funeral of a friend who, like me, was a jazz fanatic. He was keen that I see the context in which he spoke about jazz and society.
Our mortality is certain but contingent. Bro, Ti was a servant of the people and an intellectual of the first order! Go well, Bro Ti; you’re a mensch. Yours has been a life worth living!
Tlhabane Dan Motaung worked at the Presidency from 2002 to 2017. He is now the premier’s speechwriter in the Gauteng Provincial Government