How many Mayosis must be martyred before UCT deals with its toxic racism?
Liberal duplicity kills black people slowly, with a smile on its face
● The late Bongani Mayosi was the most accomplished scholar of our generation. I am talking about those of us who were born in the 1960s, came of age in the ’70s and graduated from university in the ’80s.
However, by focusing on his intelligence we run the risk of missing out on his intellect.
Intelligence, as Richard Hofstadter wrote, is an “excellence of mind”, but in a fairly limited area of expertise. Intellect, on the other hand, involves the critical, creative, contemplative side of the mind.
I was fortunate to have first-hand experience of Mayosi’s intellect. I had hardly arrived on campus at the University of Cape Town (UCT) when he and his wife, Nonhlanhla, invited me and my wife, Siphokazi, to dinner at a seaside restaurant. Maybe it was the great food or the drinks or his magnetic personality, but I remember telling my wife that the guy ought to be UCT’s next vice-chancellor.
That dinner was to be followed by many others. Almost every month Mayosi gathered the handful of black professors at UCT at his favourite restaurant in Pinelands. Our group consisted of Lungisile Ntsebeza, Sakhela Buhlungu, Evance Kalula, Elelwani Ramugondo and Mpiko Ntsekhe.
There could be no confusion about the intellectual leader of the group. Mayosi possessed the presence and the authority that automatically drew others to him. He also had a great sense of humour. In one of our meetings he joked that if a bomb were to hit the restaurant, the entire black professoriate at UCT would be wiped out. It was a wry but powerful commentary on the dearth of black professors at the university.
The last time we met was at the airport in Cape Town. I was on my way to Harvard University for my sabbatical and he was returning from one of his African trips. When I landed in Boston I received from him a paper he had just published on the history of black doctors.
In it, he wrote about the pioneering role of SA’s first black doctor, William Anderson Soga, son of the greatest black intellectual of the 19th century, Tiyo Soga. The younger Soga read for a doctor of medicine, focusing on climate, nutrition and the epidemiology of diseases including rheumatic fever and TB. Mayosi also specialised in those areas, and placed his project to produce 1,000 PhDs in that context: “We are building on the remarkable doctor of medicine degree of William Anderson Soga by raising a new generation of scholars in medicine on a large scale.”
Medicine was clearly a historical calling for Mayosi, and his practice an example of what sociologist C Wright Mills called the sociological imagination. As he put it in that paper, “medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing other than medicine on a large scale. Our generation of medical doctors accepts the responsibility to play a public role, which may require direct political action from time to time.”
This is why I find it so upsetting to hear that students were calling him a sellout, which is also what they did to me when I protested against their rude treatment of Ngugi wa Thiong’o during his public lecture at UCT in March 2015. When I pointed to the lack of respect, they accused me of “ageism” — yet another borrowing from the European culture they claim to deplore.
But Mayosi was perhaps too kind-hearted to fight back against the nihilism that masquerades as radicalism in SA. One of the most despicable developments of this faux radicalism is the labelling of Nelson Mandela a “sellout” by young people who were born into freedom and privilege.
Nonetheless, it is also disingenuous and cynical to use the conduct of the students to divert attention from UCT’s underlying racist toxicity. It is no coincidence that it is black academics who die or leave the university in droves, while our tormentors continue to stalk our departments.
In some ways Mayosi’s death reminds me of Steve Biko’s death. But, unlike apartheid’s brutal murderers, our tormentors greet us with an effusive smile in the morning, question our very humanity during the day, and bid us good night at the end of the day. In the loneliness of our homes we sink into depression, anxiety and insomnia.
One of my saddest memories at UCT was when a group of senior white academics belittled Buhlungu, the former dean of humanities, at a faculty meeting. I often wondered how the man must have felt when he got home.
I escaped Mayosi’s fate by taking a sabbatical at Harvard. When that ended I chose to take unpaid leave rather than return to the racist hellhole that had become my place of work. And when that ended I resigned. I have often wished Mayosi had taken a similar course of action.
For their own cynical reasons, the university’s leaders twice refused his request to resign. Apparently they wanted to avoid the embarrassment of a resignation by such a highly accomplished black academic. The liberal duplicity that Biko identified five decades ago kills black people in a different way — slowly, with a smile on its face.
Students and the university administration alike should use Mayosi’s tragic death to reflect on the black existential condition at UCT.
To the students I urge Cornel West’s words: “There is a difference between trashing other people, and criticising other people.” Of the university community I ask: what more evidence than Mayosi’s tragic death do you need to wake up to the toxic racism of UCT? How many more dead black bodies will it take?
As we seek answers to Mayosi’s death, we must not allow the search to blind us to the need to document his achievements. In his e-mail about the first black doctors, Mayosi made a suggestion I now find painfully ironic: “As promised, please find attached the short paper I wrote on the early black doctors. There are several who would be interesting subjects for deeper biographies — I would be interested on your take on this idea.”
Little did he or I know that he would soon have to be the subject of such a historical biography, as a shining inspiration for our children for generations to come.