It would be fitting to give this forgotten hero's name to UCT's Jameson Hall, writes Xolela Mangcu.
I love coming to Harvard. I am here at the invitation of Jackie Bhabha of the Centre for Health and Human Rights in the School of Public Health to speak about race and reconciliation in South Africa.
I have my favourite haunts and rituals here.
There is the obligatory stop at the Harvard Co-op for a coffee and bagel with cream cheese, and at the Pizzeria Uno across the road.
I would not be seen touching those things at home. In short, I get to eat badly without my wife’s admonishing eye.
At the bookshops I am like a little child in a toy shop.
The co-op has a section of works by the Harvard faculty that could be a shop in its own right.
However, things have not been the same since Jacob Zuma fired Nhlanhla Nene as finance minister. I have to multiply every dollar by 15 before I even think of buying anything.
I am lucky to be here when Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison is delivering the distinguished Norton Lecture Series at the Sanders Theatre.
The last time I was here Henry Louis Gates jr was handing out the WEB Du Bois Awards to television producer Shonda Rhimes, the architect David Adjaye, film producer Harvey Weinstein, award-winning director Steve McQueen, President Barack Obama’s closest adviser, Valerie Jarrett, entertainment mogul Oprah Winfrey, singer Harry Belafonte, and civil rights activist John Lewis.
Only Henry Louis “Skip” Gates could build a constituency of such stars around an intellectual project.
Morrison’s lectures are hosted by the Mahindra Institute, whose director is the distinguished literary scholar Homi Bhabha.
I later get a chance to meet Bhabha in his office – it helps of course that he is married to my hostess, Jackie.
The meeting is uncannily reminiscent of one I had with Wole Soyinka in 2005, with a similar intention of inviting him to South Africa.
I can remember Soyinka hollering in his baritone to Gates across the passage: “Hey, Skip, this fellow here thinks he can bring us over to South Africa to talk about Nelson Mandela.”
Well, I am planning to be just as lucky with Bhabha as I was with those guys.
Bhabha generously gets me in the reserved section of the auditorium. Quite frankly I would have been happy to be just inside the room to witness Morrison’s “performance”, which is how Bhabha appropriately characterises her presentation.
It was more like an out-of-body experience. I have not seen anyone get such a rapturous standing ovation before they have even begun speaking, and then to proceed to exceed expectations.
Morrison begins her lecture by recounting an experience she had with a white colleague during her time as editor at Random House. The colleague complained that black people did not buy books. Morrison shot back that it might be because the industry was not publishing books that black people thought were worth buying.
This experience got her to write her Pulitzer-winning book, Beloved, about a woman who kills her little children to save them from slavery.
Morrison tells us her fiction allowed her to use her imagination to bring the children to life so they can tell us exactly what they think about their experience.
The moral of the story is that we cannot really “narrate the other” – they must speak for themselves.
Morrison is, of course, also funny. When a fawning member of the audience asks what gives her the greatest joy, she quips: “Sex” – and “writing, of course”.
At which point the distinguished scholar, Charles H Long, who is sitting next to me, hollers: “Same difference.”
Morrison’s story reminds me of the tale about Nongqawuse.
Here, too, we have lived with the lie that in a moment of collective madness the Xhosa killed all their cattle after taking instructions from a 13- year-old girl, Nongqawuse.
Apparently Nongqawuse convinced them this sacrificial action would ensure “the dead will arise” – as the historian Jeff Peires puts it – and bring an end to all their misery. That was all a hoax and death covered the land.
However, historical evidence has since shown that the Xhosa were not being irrational when they killed their cattle.
The killings were an act of political rebellion by people who were tired of the British taking their cattle from them. They reasoned that if they were not going to keep their cattle, then it was just as well that no one should have them.
The point is that it has often been too easy and even tempting to dismiss black people’s responses to their oppression as irrational without allowing them to narrate their own stories.
The great Robert Sobukwe described the right to narrate our stories as “the right to call our souls our own”.
And that brings me to the renaming of university buildings. I know the students at my university have decided to rename Jameson Hall “Marikana” in honour of the miners who were massacred.
However, like Morrison, I am exercising the imaginative licence to suggest that the miners may agree with me that the time to honour Sobukwe is long overdue and that it may be most fitting to name a university building after him.
After all, there is no more articulate statement of the decolonisation of our universities than that which Sobukwe gave as head of the student body at the Completers’ Social at the University of Fort Hare in 1949.
He observed rather prophetically: “After the college has been in existence for 30 years the ratio of European to African staff is four to one.
“And we are told that in 10 years’ time we may become an independent university. Are we to understand by that an African university predominantly guided by European thought and informed by European staff?
“I said last year Fort Hare must be to Africa what Stellenbosch (University) is to the Afrikaner. It must be the barometer of African thought.”
Honouring Sobukwe would show that we do not have to wait for the government to correct what Njabulo Ndebele once described as the double injustice Sobukwe suffered – in life he was a lone prisoner and in death a forgotten hero.
South Africans celebrate, without even mentioning his name and that he called for this, the date on which Africans marched against the pass laws.
In my book, Becoming Worthy Ancestors, I described this as an act of “evidentiary genocide”. It’s like celebrating the “march on Washington” without mentioning Martin Luther King jr.
To punish Sobukwe the apartheid parliament enacted the “Sobukwe Clause”, which allowed them to renew his imprisonment in a house all by himself on Robben Island for six harrowing years.
They offered to release him to his old teaching post at Wits University if he promised not to cause trouble. He refused each time.
By the time they released him he had almost forgotten how to talk.
I cannot imagine a greater symbolic gesture for UCT than replacing Jameson’s name with that of Sobukwe. Now there is a freedom fighter and an intellectual we may look up to with inspiration as we make our way to the library.
The poet Don Mattera called him the Bright Morning Star.
Steve Biko is said to have once walked into a room in which Sobukwe was present and to have exclaimed: “Tyhini no Thixo u-lapha” (Wow, even God is here).
The time to honour Sobukwe is here.
It could be a historic act of symbolic justice.
* Mangcu is professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Sunday Independent