One of Africa’s most distinguished writers and thinkers will be speaking at UCT’s Baxter Theatre tomorrow at 5.30pm.
I invited Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o to South Africa as part of an initiative I have started with funding from the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
The idea is to work with local universities in hosting distinguished lectures on the questions that our students have been raising about the decolonisation of our universities.
Cornel West
I had initially wanted to do this as a summer school at the university but, alas, that was not to be.
The institute gladly stuck with me, and we reformulated the idea into a series of distinguished lectures across the country.
Thankfully, the Institute for Creative Arts at UCT has grabbed the opportunity with both hands and included it in the Great Big Questions series.
Next in line is the distinguished literary scholar Homi Bhabha, to be followed by the doyen of African American Studies at Harvard University, Henry Louis Gates jr.
I would also like to bring over Danielle Allen, the first black woman university professor in the history of Harvard – the title of university professor is held by only two dozen among the hundreds of full professors at Harvard.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, whose concept of intersectionality has been distorted out of recognition – basically as a way to muddy the waters when it comes to discussions of race in the academy – is also a guest.
Zakes Mda
There are many others: Thandika Mkandawire of the London School of Economics, whose book on African intellectuals is a must-read for anyone interested in the topic, and Lani Guinier, whose The Tyranny of the Meritocracy is a masterful critique of the definition of the concept of merit, particularly the privileging of well-off students by the use of standardised tests in admissions.
And, of course, my dear brother and good friend and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Cornel West, who has just returned from Harvard after being chased out by former Harvard president Larry Summers and his fellow conservatives.
West is proof that you cannot deny talent. But why, you may ask, have I thought about bringing these individuals, and why Ngugi wa Thiong’o to kick off the series? First, South African higher education is incredibly alienated from its own surroundings. We need to push back against the notion that Africa has nothing to offer the world of scholarship.
Some years ago, as director of the Steve Biko Foundation, I approached the former UCT vice-chancellor with the idea of hosting the Steve Biko Memorial Lecture at the university.
Thandika Mkandawire
Indeed, the lecture was given by the likes of Njabulo Ndebele himself, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Zakes Mda. I continued by inviting people such as Wole Soyinka and Kwame Anthony Appiah.
These lectures can inspire our students, and broaden their intellectual horizons. Some of these lectures have been collected into books, including Ngugi’s seminal article on the genius of SEK Mqhayi, which was included in his book Something Torn and New.
If Ngugi wa Thiong’o can see value in the writings of Mqhayi, what stops our own colleagues from doing so? If Gates jr was able to build the best African-American Studies department in the world, what stops us from doing so by using the cultural and political patrimony as learning materials in the classrooms - from the perspectives of black writers such as Tiyo Soga, William W Gqoba, Sol Plaatje, Magema Fuze, Nontsizi Mgqwetho, Phyllis Ntantala, BW Vilakazi, HIE Dhlomo and RRR Dhlomo?
These individuals provided first-hand critiques of the political, economic and cultural impact of colonialism on African people.
They had something to say.
Ntantala wrote about the intersection of race, class and gender long before intersectionality was in vogue.
The second reason in bringing Ngugi wa Thiong’o is, of course, that he wrote the seminal text, Decolonising the Mind, which highlights the importance of valuing and using African languages.
How can we as academics speak about merit, for example, when we do not understand the languages spoken by the vast majority of the people in the country? How effective can we really be in interpreting social action when, as sociologists, anthropologists, historians and philosophers, we do not have the foggiest idea what the majority of people are talking about in our everyday encounters?
I cannot say for sure what Ngugi will be talking about, but it will not be the first time he has spoken at UCT, and it will not be the last time that he would have made an impact on our imagination.
After his talk on Mqhayi, I vowed to do something about Mqhayi’s legacy. The opportunity came when one of my students, Jonathan Schoots, asked to do his Master’s degree with me.
I challenged him to look at the writings of Mqhayi.
His thesis on the Sociological Imagination of SEK Mqhayi earned him a PhD spot at the University of Chicago, where he is continuing to delve into African intellectual history. I make this point to say that white scholars and students at UCT and other universities have more to gain than to lose by embracing African intellectual history.
But I also hope that many of the black students can find value in these historical figures instead of always limiting themselves to the writings of Frantz Fanon, whose works are influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism, as if black people had nothing to say.
Intellectual mimicry is just as bad among black scholars as it is among white scholars.
We need new and inventive ways of making sure that decolonisation begins at home.
And that takes me to the third and final point.
The bar for so-called standards in higher education was set under the days of apartheid, and our universities have become complacent in competing against each other within that framework.
That is what happens whenever any social system is based on a tiny minority of its population - it can only operate sub-optimally because it is not utilising the full potential and talents of its people.
Imagine, for example, what a centre for biography could do in producing completely new knowledge in this country.
Imagine what a centre for the study of apartheid could do to generate research on the various aspects of apartheid, and bring that into conversation with studies of slavery and colonialism in other parts of the world.
Suffice to say, we have not even begun to scratch the surface of the deep mine of historical and social knowledge that we possess.
Universities should be leading the charge in that process, not resisting it.
For that to happen will require the kind of visionary leadership we have seen elsewhere in the world, largely in response to student initiatives.
Students were at the forefront of the intellectual revolution that took place in Europe in the 1960s and led to the re-imagination of the disciplines and the emergence
of fields such as cultural
studies.
The departments of black studies at the Ivy League universities in the US were born directly out of student protests, starting at Harvard in 1968 and spreading to Yale, Columbia and Cornell universities.
The leadership of those universities had the foresight to provide the kind of institutional responses we have not seen in this country.
Forty years later, those institutions are producing cutting-edge research on questions of race, ethnicity, gender and identity, attracting scholars from all over the world.
Change, in other words, is to be embraced, not feared.