F-indulgence
relayed in conversation taking on a more literary form in print.
In “A Love Letter to the Blackman Who Fathered Me” Gqola pays tribute to the man she described to me as “gentle, laid back and indulgent” but “no pushover”.
She recalls a childhood moment of politicisation, but she is essentially expanding on how her “precociousness” crashed against his indulgent streak.
It is a beautiful moment, rendered more tender by the fact that Gqola, in conversation, is not interested in exceptionalising her father as an anomaly.
Raised by a father who was an organic chemistry professor at the University of Fort Hare and a mother who was a nursing sister at a hospital in Alice, Gqola grew up with the idea of black excellence being pretty much ubiquitous in the panoramic (at least to a child), self-contained world of a university campus.
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t grow up in Fort Hare and have it allow me to take for granted the things I took for granted as a black girl,” she says.
Growing up with two female siblings of a similar age and a brother who was eight years younger, Gqola never knew the humiliation of gendered chores and games until the prepuberty awkwardness of higher primary school. By that time, her upbringing had insulated her to an extent.
To some degree, the book is a celebration of the black scholarship that her new career path seeks to resuscitate. Gqola, as most educators would know, understands how younger people need examples.
“Fort Hare is home, right?” she says when asked about her move to take a post at the institution as a dean of research.
“You can grow black scholarship anywhere but I can’t see how we can continue to do this work in white institutions. I can’t see how we can see decades of black institutions going down and pretend that it doesn’t mean anything. The pain [of decolonising within white institutions] is important but we have to start somewhere.”
Although Reflecting Rogue is not quite an experimental opus, it does find Gqola revelling in the joys of writing, mulling over phrases and finding new ways of tinkering with lifelong black obsessions such as colourism. But there is a sense that Gqola is driven by an urgency that won’t let her get carried away by indulgent experiments in lyricism.
In this case, the subtitle speaks volumes. Gqola, in how she synthesises various feminisms and anchors these with her own lived experiences, has a beautiful mind indeed.