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 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 wellintentioned 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 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 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 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”. 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.”