Imperative to develop the next generation
Professor Xolela Mangcu underlines the need for more non-fiction from black writers
Described on the night as “the person to feed the minds” by programme director Dr Somadoda Fikeni, keynote speaker Professor Xolela Mangcu from the University of Cape Town did not disappoint, with his thought-provoking and hard-hitting concepts and research.
Mangcu brought to the evening his extensive knowledge about the dilemmas and inspirations of both local and international writers, as well as discussion about the future of education.
“The African-American writer Gwendolyn Brooks once observed that black writers have a double burden, the roots of which go back to slavery when black people had to affirm their humanity through demonstrating the ability to read and write.
“The ability for a slave to reason and write was regarded as beyond his or her reach and they were conveniently described as sub-human. Slaves thus wrote to demonstrate their membership in [the] human community.
“In the process they developed their own figurative language, using a range of rhetorical tropes including allegory, puns, metaphors and most importantly, signifying, which means interrupting the standard meaning of words in English — saying something while meaning the opposite, using words as a decoy to resist and ultimately to undermine their oppressors’ communication regime.
“The political struggle started as a literacy struggle”.
Mangcu said this resistance was not limited to slaves: “As the progress of Euro-megalomania spread its tentacles around the world and with the colonisation of Africa, black people outside America also found that they had to demonstrate their belonging in a community through the ability to write and read. Literacy and tradition became part and parcel of our position as human beings.
“The disjuncture between the promise of equality through education and of salvation through the Christian faith and their actual experience became the motivation for liberation movements.”
Mancgu stressed that the primary writing vehicle for Africans was fiction, through which they could find ways of relaying what they wanted, avoiding exposure to the brutality of the regime and recording the communication of their own people.
“To talk about Es’kia Mphahlele, we have to talk about him in a properly historical way. He described his writing as impacted by the volatile socio-political forces of the day, encompassing apartheid laws. But Es’kia makes an admission I would like to linger on, as I want to put it out there as challenge to universities and black people at large.
Mangcu said that Es’kia writes: “There was very, very little nonfiction in what we wrote. There was little non-fiction whose intention was to sharpen our political consciousness. The heavy hand of censorship from the proprietor’s office saw to that. Those among us who listened to the people’s exhortations in speech and song caught the mood and recorded it in our fiction. We did not apply our minds at all to theoretical questions of cultural identity ... political writings did not, as a result, seem necessary, even as a desperately necessary mode of expression.”
Mangcu said: “While I recognise the role fiction has played in the long dark journey in our history, we should do more non-fiction. We should now have nothing to fear. No [more] need for decoys or guerilla action.
“Black people are no more than consumers of theories that have been developed by the white academy. Starting with the transition to democracy in the early 1990s there was an over-reliance on white academics for policy ideas and solutions. As a young graduate, I was appalled by the way the ANC looked to white academic experts post-apartheid at every turn.
“White academic Eddie Webster