The catalytic pre-colonial research project at the Centre for African Studies
I started working for Ntsebeza (a sociologist and anti-apartheid activist who was the Director of the Centre for African Studies (CAS) from 2012) when he appointed me as a research fellow in 2013, tasked with organising the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) pre-colonial historiography catalytic project. After a couple of years with the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative, I returned to CAS in 2016 to continue the NIHSS research projects with him. The pre-colonial research project was introduced by the then Minister of Higher Education, Blade Nzimande, in 2012 and intended to open up new avenues for the humanities and social sciences and to strengthen their role in South Africa. The key focus of this ministerial initiative was the development of methodologies that would take forward the historiographical study of the pre-colonial eras in southern Africa in new, relevant and innovative ways. My own work is historiographical and methodological in nature, and our first research collaboration on pre-colonial historiography commenced in late 2013 and led to the publication of the first volume of the CAS Rethinking Africa series. Our initial task was to catalyse research through the establishment of a network of scholars and researchers in provinces in South Africa and to organise a national conference at CAS which would question the notion of the ‘nation state’ as a construct and therefore investigate the region’s history before not only the seventeenth century (with the Dutch settlement at the Cape), but also before the eleventh century:1 how is history researched and written?; who writes indigenous African history? (Ntsebeza 2018, 4); and what would a transformed curriculum look like?
This research project spoke to Ntsebeza’s interdisciplinary scholarship, which offered significant research and curriculum transformation capacity to the field of African Studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT). It is within this area of his scholarship that research collaborators in historiography could draw on his reputable work on land and democracy in South Africa. This work has always been impressive and had a deep impact because of his research methodology steeped in Gramscian praxis (as ongoing in the everyday and reflective) within decolonised Africanist research frameworks that foreground the local realities.
The March 2014 conference was held at UCT and turned out to be disappointing as most scholars who attended were predictably white male historians and archaeologists who have, in a structural representative sense, dominated this area of scholarship for over a century. This presented a formidable colonial knowledge trap in both method and content. The pertinent questions for our time could clearly not be answered in the limiting intellectual constitution of the conference. We found ourselves yet again in a familiar recycling and repackaging of old colonial ideas: knowledge and knowledge production about the past steeped in inappropriate Eurocentric theoretical impositions on African indigenous realities. We had to find a deliberate way out instead of capitulating yet again to what is considered academically ‘safe’ in historically white universities in South Africa so long after apartheid. This was when Ntsebeza got us back to the drawing board to strategise intellectually. How could we possibly escape the resilient colonial epistemological paradigms (such as extinction discourse)2 in creating new paths in southern Africa’s pre-colonial historiography that South African scholarship had been burdened with for so long?
Ntsebeza commissioned a second volume of Rethinking Africa which offered indigenous stories of the Khoi and San people (de Prada-Samper 2017). This volume makes a crucially important contribution to the significantly marginalised indigenous knowledge archive in southern Africa. The stories told by the San people of the Northern Cape are stories of land and landscape that have survived for hundreds of years into the present and are undoubtedly vital contributions to decolonising the pre-colonial archive. They tell us more than just the limited interpretations offered by conventional historians or by predominantly white archaeologists with their imposed interpretations of rock paintings and stories of land on behalf of the people themselves. Nevertheless, despite the strengths of the contributions to this second volume, it remained within the colonial paradigm of white male scholars presenting the stories shared by indigenous people about their pre-colonial past. This was a challenge that had to be addressed as there had to be a defining shift towards indigenous self-representation if new decolonised methodologies and knowledges were to be realised. For this reason, Ntsebeza remained troubled and restless in his pursuit of the decolonial in both content and representation in terms of what CAS could offer in what was new, self-representative, decolonial, relevant and innovative – putting community voices and knowledges at the centre, while not excluding other scholarship.
His strategic focus, particularly as a researcher, to address these questions was through interdisciplinary historiographies (non-Western methodologies through which to engage our past), which started with the NIHSS pre-colonial catalytic project. Critical engagement with historiography in South Africa was crucial to investigating the roots of both democratic and undemocratic processes of power, as continuities and discontinuities – dialogues and oral narratives of past traditions on power and democracy from the people’s perspectives – mattered. Ntsebeza recognised that scholars had to work beyond the limiting confines of disciplinary frontiers and their fixed methodologies to access knowledges pertinent to answering the haunting questions regarding attaining economic, political and social justice in our present.
The outcome of a ground-breaking 2017 national conference was our jointly edited third volume of Rethinking Africa (Bam, Ntsebeza, and Zinn 2018). In the foreword, Ntsebeza emphasised the important breakthrough by the conference and the volume in recognising the role of organic intellectuals at the university (ibid., 7) and the importance of school education. The conference also made a key contribution to African Feminist Studies, dedicating the five chapters of its first section to female historians (four of them black Africans), which was pathbreaking in terms of decolonising South African historiography. The second section is dedicated to the challenges of praxis, through community engagement in both the Eastern Cape and Western Cape. Our volume was written with the conscious intention of promoting methodologies that could decolonise colonial methodologies and historiographies. Notable in this intention is the opening chapter by African female historian Nomathamsanqa Tisani, long ignored by white scholarship, who coined the notion of Ukhuhlambulula in a historiographical context ‘as a consciousness that should imbue all those in search of new epistemologies and pedagogies’ which prompts us ‘to ask innovative research questions’, develop ‘indigenous frameworks’, and ‘create new frameworks for self-definition’ (ibid., 31). Pamela Maseko, African linguist and close research collaborator with the late Neville Alexander, wrote about the pertinence of ‘contesting assumptions and reimagining women’s identities in (African) Xhosa society’ (ibid., 35), and language as a lens to interpret the past through the perspective of the speaker – hence the importance in decolonising scholarship in Africa of exploring linguistic evidence for understanding pre-colonial social relations (ibid., 53). Nomalanga Mkhize (a former doctoral scholar of Ntsebeza) argued for the incorporation of Xhosa texts into mainstream historiography (ibid., 72). This was followed by Babalwa Magoqwana’s seminal thesis on centring African feminist Ife Amadiume’s Africa’s matriarchal heritage and embodiment of knowledge to help us in what and how we teach (ibid., 87).
These key theoretical African feminist contributions on decolonising historiography led into the praxis section, with work by Ntsebeza’s former doctoral student Fani Ncapayi on Xhalanga district, including engaged research with youth in interpreting rock paintings, followed by a chapter by Bam, Van Sitters and Ndhlovu which offered practical examples on how we could start practically to develop decolonising epistemologies (ibid., 169) troubling the 1652 paradigm which is entrenched in heritage and tourism in the new South Africa (ibid., 175). For instance, practical ways in which equitable community partnerships could be established to produce new relevant knowledge, such as challenging the state’s political role in heritage ‘tourism’ (ibid., 157). Through this work on the ‘pre-colonial’, I got to know the depth of Ntsebeza’s scholarship and its implications for building strong democratic communities in South Africa.
Ntsebeza’s engagement with Mafeje
Ntsebeza is never one for essentialisms and exclusions of any kind – always looking to engage with good ideas (regardless of with whom) above anything else, and always making this point.
In working closely with him, I’ve come to know his infinite fascination with ideas that matter in bringing transformation in the material conditions of the poor and landless, forged by his humility in dialogues with communities. Shivji speaks of Gramsci’s ‘humility of a school teacher’ (Shivji 2018, 397), which rings true also for Ntsebeza. His scholarship success is grounded in decolonising African Studies, and he has worked systematically not to establish CAS in the image of centres in the global North (Shivji 2018, 399).
It came as no surprise when Ntsebeza chose to publish his paper on what we can learn from Archie Mafeje (Ntsebeza 2016) at a revolutionary time in student and worker politics in the South African higher education landscape. By then, many South Africans were deeply disillusioned with the African National Congress (ANC) ruling party and the country had been rocked by waves of protests for over 20 years. In this article, Ntsebeza wrestles in very concrete terms with Mafeje’s Gramscian argument (the primacy of local lived realities in theorising the universal) on the ‘nomothetic’ and ‘idiographic’ enquiry, as particularly illustrated in his critique of the ‘articulation of mode of production’ discourse of white South African Marxists (Mafeje 1981). Ntsebeza’s article cuts incisively to the Eurocentric essence of this discourse (Ntsebeza 2016, 921–922) which was predominant in higher education humanities studies in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, informing mainstream university curricula in various political economy and related studies.
In his humble and erudite manner, Ntsebeza strikes me as one of the few black intellectuals who know of and appreciate the work of the Trotskyite Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), founded in South Africa in 1943. Ntsebeza could therefore offer an insightful analysis with rare intellectual sophistication – an approach rooted in his own praxis of the teachings of Mafeje (who comes from this NEUM Marxist intellectual and ideological tradition). One of the hallmarks of his work is the ease with which Ntsebeza works through complex ideas, testing them in African realities and hence not ‘getting lost in abstraction’ (Mafeje 1981, 124). We see an example of this in his scholarship on the role of chiefs in South Africa’s supposed democracy (Ntsebeza 2005). His analysis in this case study was crisp, straightforward and sharp – stripping a contemporary sociology of all its post-colonial jargon that often detracts from the essence of the matter and its uncomfortable truths, by asking pointed questions about the ‘undemocratic’ chiefs, imposed and not elected by communities, as purportedly ‘democratic’ in post-apartheid rural South Africa (see, for instance, Ntsebeza 2020). Ntsebeza’s work on chiefs, land and democracy shows appreciation of innovative engaged scholarship strategies to try to answer and find solutions for the formidable economic and political challenges we face in an ongoing and complex capitalist global order in which post-apartheid South Africa remains structurally trapped due to the political economy complicities of the new black African ruling-class elite.
It is therefore unsurprising that in the aforementioned article on what we can learn from Mafeje (Ntsebeza 2016), with its emphasis on critically engaging with our local material and political realities, Ntsebeza reflects on the #RhodesMustFall and important subsequent #FeesMustFall student movements of 2015 and 2016 – the latter presenting the identifiable revolutionary moment when students and workers united against outsourcing on their campuses. In this critical reflection of the impact of national capitalism on university education, Ntsebeza noted the importance of understanding Mafeje in an NEUM context (Ntsebeza 2016, 924), and the role of its leading African intellectual I. B. Tabata (political mentor to Mafeje), who wrote the pivotal letter to Nelson Mandela on the serendipitous date of 16 June 1948. Tabata noted to Mandela that it is not about what members think of an organisation, what matters are the programmes and principles of an organisation. Ntsebeza gave his own emphasis to the latter aspect of political organisation, critically rejecting populism in favour of what can be described as ‘revolutionary morality’. He goes on further to discuss Mafeje’s use of the notion of Pan-Africanism as a desired revolutionary ‘hegemony’, as borrowed from Gramsci, which would resolve the exploitation and oppression of the indigenous people (ibid., 931). It is with this intellectual excitement that Ntsebeza writes about the transformation possibilities offered by the student–worker–parent alliance in 2016 with #FeesMustFall (ibid., 933); that it is through our material conditions (the idiographic) that we theorise to inform the nomothetic (ibid., 935). Ntsebeza singled this out as the ‘key lesson’ to learn from Mafeje for scholars in contemporary ‘post-colonial’ Africa. Ntsebeza’s 2016 article on Mafeje and its link to Gramscian thought is significant. It came after four years of his own recognised praxis in the field of transforming higher education through community engagement in South Africa in the CAS space. This brought together organic intellectuals and civic activists in a university space often delinked from the people’s sites of knowledge production, where critical political and economic questions are addressed.
The impact of Marikana and the student protests of 2015
In working with pre-colonial historiography, Ntsebeza’s revolutionary intellectual restlessness around the limitations of conventional scholarship had found natural resonance with the student protests of 2015 and 2016 (Ntsebeza 2018, 6). The UCT campus erupted for months as students questioned the ongoing coloniality in the curriculum, colonial symbols, and the capitalist exploitation of workers. It was the overwhelming dissatisfaction of the youth with the vastly unequal material conditions of the ‘post-apartheid’ South African reality that was speaking loudly and that could no longer be ignored in the aftermath of the Marikana massacre of 2012. During this time of communities supporting the protesting students and workers on campus, Ntsebeza opened the doors of the CAS gallery even wider for public dialogues on pressing issues of our time. This gesture was in keeping with his practice as an activist scholar over his lifetime. He brought this practice to CAS under his directorship, consciously ensuring as the A.C. Jordan Chair that the diverse communities (especially workers and unemployed people) could freely use the gallery for important dialogues on the pressing social, political and economic issues in our society at large.
The hallmark of these dialogues facilitated by Ntsebeza is the principle of egalitarianism in knowledge production in a Freirean sense of ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ (Freire 1972): the community as equals in dialogue in these knowledge production processes and the importance of humility for scholars in that knowledge production interaction (i.e. the dialogical process3 in which archives are decolonised from the outset). Notably, Ntsebeza’s dialogical approach at CAS since 2012 echoed what was happening on the ground outside university walls in South Africa at the time.
Critically engaging with Khoi and San community partnerships
The National Khoisan Dialogue Commission held on 16 April 2013 highlighted the need for community-driven rather than top-down research projects, with a focus on oral history and engagement with youth. One of the outcomes of this dialogue was to engage the Department of Basic Education in establishing a more inclusive South African history curriculum. Ntsebeza’s praxis fits with the now globally established practice whereby indigenous communities themselves determine the research questions and framework. An example of this is the persistent questions the community asked in the regular dialogues in the CAS gallery and seminar room about the limitations of Western archaeological methods. These include critical questions about the sites identified for excavations and the exclusive scholarly processes involved, ‘disrespectful’ treatment of sacred objects and human remains, and interpretation of strata as evidence of land occupation.
The San and Khoi community networks challenged what they considered the limited possibilities for knowledge production and research that these Western-based research methodologies could offer to both historiography and archaeology, and asked whether African Studies as an interdisciplinary area of research was ideally placed to trouble our assumptions of valid knowledge and valid research methodologies. What do archaeologists know through vertical excavations in confined sites that they select without even asking the local people about their knowledge? Similarly, how could they interpret rock paintings with assumed certainties as scholars who are delinked from local communities and their often-long pasts and intangible cultural connections to these sites? Research methods which take people’s local intergenerational knowledges seriously are believed to demystify knowledge translation learning for communities through making the methodology transparent to participants in a collaborative research approach. In these processes, open-ended draft questions are workshopped, thereby building knowledge creation partnerships, bridging the gap between the community, heritage practitioners and academics. Such research, it is believed, adds value to communities’ knowledge systems, leading to enhanced confidence, skills development and subsequent impact on policymaking and implementation (e.g. by default enhancing monitoring and evaluation of civic services) by the communities themselves. Instead of top-down research, with academics as the sole beneficiaries in the process (through research articles, conferences and funding), communities benefit in tangible ways by gaining increased capacity and agency (e.g. through networks, partnerships, knowledge validation, leadership and influence, skills development and training, and evidence for cases to be argued regarding community needs).
At the CAS annual Neville Alexander Commemoration event of August 2017, leaders within the San and Khoi network raised the issue of the transformation of the university to achieve community-driven decolonised education and solutions to ongoing economic and political problems. Of the current San and Khoi traditional structures, activists and several civic activists as ‘organic intellectuals’ engaged in the event. One example was the calling for the restoration of erased indigenous knowledges and languages (as related to Ntsebeza’s scholarship on land and democracy, and its positioning within pre-colonial historiography, all from the people’s perspective). The community raised these questions in the context of the land the university occupies where the campus was historically located, such as the evidence of slave burial sites. There was also a demand for contentious land and language questions and related issues around ‘indigeneity’ that the community felt had to be openly debated. The community who came to ask questions in 2017 – its often apartheid-essentialist aspirations4 notwithstanding and at times disconcerting to anyone (as Ntsebeza himself) grounded in the non-racial struggles of the United Democratic Front (UDF) of the 1980s – was raising crucially important related contestations around ‘tribe’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘indigeneity’ and ‘tradition’.
Dialogues that followed were frequent and tense as Ntsebeza, in true Gramscian–Freirean dialectic style, welcomed debate and contestations, not holding back on anti-racist and non-racial principles and morals – however volatile, messy, conflictual, downright disconcerting and difficult at times these dialogues turned out to be. Examples were the questions of who arrived first, who was more indigenous, and who was ‘purer’ as a ‘race’ and therefore had exclusive rights to land in the Cape region. At the time, in 2018, there was a Khoi nationalist movement campaigning, through King Calvin Cornelius lll as their leader (Motsai 2018), to declare the Cape a Khoi sovereign republic, and which gave the national government five days to vacate the Western Cape. This network, which had the support of the white right-wing Freedom Front Plus, participated in the dialogues at CAS among a diverse group of indigenous activists with various opposing views. Some of these community members (including chiefs) had a long history with the non-racial UDF of the 1980s as anti-apartheid freedom fighters and civic activists, and others emanated from the apartheid collaborationist tradition. Debates among community members around ‘race’ and ‘authentic tribal leadership’ frequently flared up in threats of physical violence in the gallery and seminar space.
This strategic engagement with essentialist ontological assumptions of the southern African ‘pre-colonial’, that communities that organise around ‘race’ tend to bring into contemporary identity mobilisation in ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa, speaks volumes for Ntsebeza’s deeply revolutionary astuteness in navigating formidable social and political complexities as an organic revolutionary intellectual. In my close research collaboration with Ntsebeza, I have learned that he not only avoids essentialism at all costs, but is also not a Marxist purist – yet he is unwavering in his principled approach to critically engage the issues that confront us in our deeply troubled society in the everyday, in whatever form they present themselves. The pre-colonial, for Ntsebeza, is plainly not just about safely reinterpreting the past, as in the proverbial historiographic ‘from below’ (a term we borrowed from historical scholarship in the West and which we used in the Peoples Education Movement in the 1980s), but about starting with provocative and difficult questions from our troubled and muddled African present. An example is to engage critically with communities with the assumed natural existence of ‘tribes’ in predetermined and ongoing static cartographies of ‘place’ – the Zulus were always ‘here’ and the Khoi and San always belonged ‘there’. These assumptions inform present post-apartheid government policies and legal frameworks for claims to traditional leadership. Community claims to land that trouble these tribalised cartographies are often marginalised or dismissed. This upfront historiographical approach in questioning these assumptions, embedded in interdisciplinarity and organic community engagement in our local lived reality, provided the vital decolonial context of dialogues with such troubled communities.
Questioning about people, place and assumed cartographies provided a new methodological approach which gave impetus to the developments that followed to transform even the university in its ‘deep architecture’ (and the land it occupies). This had an impact specifically on the Naming of Buildings Committee (NOBC) under the Deputy Vice Chancellor’s Transformation (Professor Feris, of Khoi and San heritage who, representing the university’s senior management, had participated in the Neville Alexander Commemoration event in August 2017). At the end of 2017, Feris and the Chair of the NOBC (Advocate Norman Arendse) approached CAS (through the NIHSS pre-colonial project) to lead on the renaming of Memorial Hall to Sarah Baartman Hall through getting buy-in from the national and southern African traditional structures and self-identified Khoi and San descendant communities.5 This process involved huge numbers of participants (well over 100 nationally, including representatives of traditional structures and civic activists) in early 2018 and developed through various highly contested community consultation processes in the CAS gallery and seminar room over a period of nine months between 10 March and 10 November. Right from the start at the 10 March gathering, it was made clear by the community that support for the renaming is conditional and should be linked to curriculum and research transformation. Further, any use of the Eastern Cape Khoi woman’s name to replace that of the infamous colonial and imperialist ally of Rhodes (Jameson) had further non-negotiable transformation implications. One was the promotion of the use of erased indigenous African languages in the Cape (such as ancient Khoekhoegowab, linked to the earliest form of Cape Afrikaans spoken by 1595).6 Along with this would go the restoration of associated erased indigenous knowledges of plants as part of transforming the ‘deep architecture’ through fostering community knowledge partnerships with CAS.
This dialogue process on the ‘pre-colonial’ would turn out to be a first for the historically white UCT, as the impact of the pre-colonial historiography project under Ntsebeza’s leadership proved to reach far beyond narrow scholarship. The community questions about land, spatiality and naming remain subject to ongoing debate and contestation (as they should at any university). However, an important paradigm shift occurred, even if only symbolically, in that questions can be openly asked and contested about land and landscape, and that transformation in how we understand land and belonging is important. The implementation of the catalytic pre-colonial historiography project, in this wider sense, provided African communities in their diversity at CAS with the understanding that they could become a tangible part of the historically white university space and contribute to new knowledges and their creation of infinite possibilities in how we could reimagine an African higher education democracy. The tactical consolidation of community dialogues with the Khoi and San-identified communities and organised structures led to our subsequent co-designed founding of the A/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum (a coalition of 12 civic organisations and Khoe and San structures) at CAS by October 2018 (CAS 2022). CAS scholars Gertrude Fester and June Bam and the community leaders initially shared the role of chairing the Forum meetings, which were regularly attended by Ntsebeza, senior leadership and other academic staff.7
The process leading up to the founding of the Forum occurred around the same time as the second pre-colonial catalytic conference co-hosted with NEUM scholar activist Allan Zinn at the Nelson Mandela University (NMU) Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy (CANRAD) in March 2017. The strategy behind moving from Cape Town and UCT to Gqeberha8 and NMU was to attract a diverse group of interdisciplinary scholars and more specifically both established and emerging African scholars. This strategy evidently worked as the conference attracted diverse black and African feminist scholars, organic intellectuals, civic activists, and San and Khoi community leaders. Debates were brutally frank, rigorous and intense in the aftermath of the 2015 and 2016 #RhodesMustFall protests. No one was holding back in a dynamic dialectical engagement on what is to be done in decolonising pre-colonial historiography and in answering more adequately the questions that could not be sufficiently addressed due to the knowledge and research incapacitation presented by the predominantly white conference in 2014.
The founding of the Forum and the San and Khoi Unit (established during the Covid-19 pandemic in September 2020 with me as acting director) was therefore profoundly epistemological (focused on how we view knowledges and where they reside inclusively) rather than embedded in only superficial post-colonial identity politics (as often erroneously assumed by Western scholars who study indigenous social movements). To illustrate, out of these frank dialogues the vision and mission of the Unit that emerged was to:
Become a leading unit of its kind at one the leading higher education research-intensive universities in Africa through innovative socially engaged research partnerships in Khoi and San studies.
Produce, in partnership with the A/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum and other diverse community and local, regional and global stakeholders, research output in support of and in alignment with the interdisciplinary CAS intellectual project on developing African endogenous philosophies and epistemologies in the southern African region and in the global South.
Develop capacity-building strategies in research partnerships with organic intellectuals and communities to produce new and relevant African knowledge.
Support research and writing skills development in deficient research areas through strengthening endogenous research methods and the establishment and ongoing development of a San and Khoi heritage archive based on southern African minoritised languages and their entanglement; embracing terminology and indigenous knowledge as diverse in interpretations and as part of ongoing socially engaged research contestation and necessary debate.
Commit to producing regular knowledge and research outputs of international standing and scholarly rigour within the current higher education framework within UCT as a ‘research intensive’ institution.
Be guided by indigenous knowledge systems law and associated responsibilities on data protection against Eurocentric exploitation.
Develop a decolonial African philosophy on research methodology (e.g. the importance of deep listening to the oral tradition of knowledge – drawing on the work of Black Consciousness activists, the late Steve Biko and his fellow activist Eugene Skeef) and research ethics in a co-design process with communities towards the establishment of an informed and relevant ethical research methods framework.
Host regular community cultural events, exhibitions, webinars, conferences and seminars (CAS 2024).
Prior to co-founding the Forum and Unit, we rolled out the first co-designed free certificated foundational Khoekhoegowab course,9 with communities as the core beneficiaries (including youth, unemployed people and mothers). This was historic for the Western Cape and South Africa. To date, over 200 community members have completed this course (including online during the Covid-19 lockdown), the last cohort comprising diverse unemployed township youth (Swingler 2020). The course focused on the heritage context, the language lost and basic vocabulary, with an emphasis on getting those receiving the UCT certificates to teach others the language in the townships – thereby building further capacity in the community themselves with the limited resources required for such teaching. The hugely popular course attracted especially young mothers, and the certificate also assisted unemployed youth to access employment in the tourism and heritage sector.
In January 2020, just before lockdown, we held a NIHSS pre-colonial catalytic conference at CAS as a knowledge production collaboration in partnership with A/Xarra. This conference built on the vexing questions raised in Bam, Ntsebeza, and Zinn (2018). Meeting one of the desired outcomes (the formation of knowledge partnerships with organic intellectuals) of the March 2017 conference at NMU, 33 papers were presented over two days on interdisciplinary themes, including on the Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Act, human remains, reburials and community engagement, historiography and oral history, and land reform and democracy. Key relevant questions emerging from praxis were discussed: what are the new methods through which we can produce knowledge on the long durée of history by bringing knowledges on the margins to the centre? How could these new knowledge production methodologies help us with the vexing issue of San and Khoe identities and their yet unwritten histories in an increasingly fractured present, with its implications for land and democracy in southern Africa?
In partnership with CAS, the A/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum and the San and Khoi Unit set up several research commissions in a co-designed dialogical process. Community members also joined as guest speakers in African Studies classrooms on pertinent issues such as language, identity, African political economy, decolonial theory and practice, public culture and the African Studies Archive. The research commissions worked across all faculties and disciplines. Ntsebeza has participated regularly in these commissions and the journey has been thought-provoking, as the workshops uphold academic rigour and inclusivity as guiding principles to develop human capacity in support of UCT’s Vision 2030. However, as with everything else, the impact of Covid-19 lockdown disrupted this important work.
The passing of the Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Act (2019) (South African Government 2019) led to the fragmentation of networks within the Forum and communities in the immediate years that followed. Suspicions and mischief were spread by rumoured state intelligence agents and supporters of the developers of the Amazon headquarters on the local ‘sacred’ indigenous Liesbeeck River floodplain, which involved shared private-university-owned land. The smear campaign targeted scholar activists in the San and Khoi Unit, including the acting director, civic activist and veteran UDF anti-apartheid activist and Professor in Public Health, Leslie London, and lead activists against the development, Tauriq Jenkins and Khoekhoegowab teacher Bradley Van Sitters (Kretzmann 2022). Both Jenkins (as the community-elected/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum Chair) and Van Sitters (who was admitted to the Master’s degree in Pan African languages through the Recognition of Prior Learning pathway at CAS)10 were by then UCT staff members in the Unit. These destructive campaigns were clearly aimed at breaking down the hard-won trust between scholars and the community, as the source of the defamation campaigns could not be identified and threatened the stability of the established San and Khoi Unit at CAS. Corrupt state agencies targeted vulnerable communities after the pandemic to score quick material wins of all kinds. The Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Act seemed a Trojan horse. In addition, the lack of community access to campus during lockdown for over two years was aggravated by devastating unemployment and countless deaths.
Added to the catastrophe was the suspicious and devastating UCT campus fire of 18 April 2021 which destroyed the African Studies Library and Collections, days after the San and Khoi Unit and/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum successfully audited the collections held there which they found of interest to their campaigns for restorative justice. The Forum was represented on the university’s transformation structures, including the Collections Committee. The hard work invested in the community partnership before Covid-19 was now under significant threat. At the end of 2021, the San and Khoi Unit began collaborating closely with alienated factions of this community and with Ntsebeza to sustain this important knowledge and research partnership and to strengthen its weaknesses and fault lines that had been exposed during the Covid-19 lockdown. We restarted open community dialogues in the CAS seminar room when lockdown was lifted and campus reopened for communities, and re-established the key research programmes on land and feminist studies. The oral archive of the/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum will be restored in partnership with UCT Libraries to preserve access for communities for at least another 40 years. Again, at this challenging moment, Ntsebeza did not disappoint in protecting the important intellectual project at all costs, despite formidable setbacks.
A reflection on Ntsebeza’s dialectical approach
Having embraced the difficulties in these close research collaborations I shared with Ntsebeza as ‘teaching moments’, in the face of devastation caused by a global pandemic I increasingly realised the steadfastness of his intellectual activism and its great value for building a democracy. It is in this work with Ntsebeza that is witnessed an engagement with what Marx meant in his debates with Bakunin on ‘the source of revolutionary consciousness’ and ‘the relationship between intellectuals and the masses’; that is, the merging of theory and practice – the necessary dialectical ‘synthesis’ (Boggs 1979, 7). It is in these exciting collaborations that is found concrete meaning to a philosophy of praxis in a local African reality (in essence, the merging of Gramscian and Mafeje-ist thought). Whatever the challenges may be, Ntsebeza’s work engages the intellectual project in what Boggs terms the ‘organic process of revolutionary transformation’ (Boggs 1979, 8), because as noted similarly by Boggs in scholarship on Gramsci, for Ntsebeza, ‘the theoretical was always linked to the collective struggle’ (ibid.). Ntsebeza’s dialectical approach to co-design knowledge formation with working and unemployed people has always struck me as being at all times mindful and critical of the assumed vanguardist role that Marxist intellectuals tend to play when engaging communities, always encouraging innovative ideas that would progress democratic change and especially the eradication of poverty in South Africa. Education and community dialogues are hallmarks of revolutionary work through which problems in society can be solved by engaging the local and lived material experiences. Like Gramsci, Ntsebeza prompted communities in the dialogues to build their own knowledges and theories on these lived experiences as organic intellectuals, but upholding the important principle that inclusion of the previously marginalised, such as San and Khoi communities, does not imply a new exclusion of others, such as claims to ‘purest indigeneity’ and ‘primary belonging’ – against ‘the Nguni’ (as popularly stated by reactionary forces within the indigenous movement who were rallying around decades of apartheid-enforced racist thinking and profoundly influenced by colonial divide-and-rule tribalised strategies, for instance).
In this instance, Ntsebeza’s intellectual standpoint, deeply rooted in his background as a community educator, came to the fore – building on his early activism in his bookshop in Cala during the most oppressive years in a former tribalised Bantustan with fascist chiefs who collaborated with the apartheid regime against the people. He further consolidated his anti-tribal and anti-fascist scholarly pursuits as an educator and researcher at adult colleges. Coben (1995, 37–38) notes Gramsci’s emphasis on the education of adults as part of a larger political strategy to counter the hegemony of oppressive institutions, which includes countering imperialist imposed cultures, as reflected in Gramsci’s interest in historical linguistics (ibid., 40). For Ntsebeza, restoring indigenous languages as a lens through which the complexities of the pre-colonial shared past can be interpreted is therefore key in the vision and mission of the newly established department of African Studies and Linguistics at UCT. As in the case of Gramsci, Ntsebeza sees revolutionary strategies as educational, intellectual and moral (ibid., 40).
But Ntsebeza is not dogmatic nor does he indulge in Eurocentric mimicry; his reference to Gramsci’s work in learning lessons from Mafeje’s scholarship is similar to Stuart Hall’s emphasis on not dogmatically applying theory from elsewhere in local contexts (Hall 1991) – wherever one is located in the world. Ntsebeza’s intellectual standpoint and socially engaged research methodology with communities in lived African local realities therefore also compels a critical engagement with both Gramsci and Mafeje. That is the nature of his admirable erudition. As Hall (1986, 5) points out, Gramsci’s work gets us to constantly question ‘the adequacy of existent social theories for interpreting contemporary social problems’. Ntsebeza works with what Hall terms an ‘open’ Marxism with which communities and scholars engage in the field to be capacitated to ask and develop new relevant questions and theories in new material and political realities.
Although Ntsebeza’s lived African reality in Cala is far removed from Gramsci’s Sardinian and Turin working-class movement of early 1900s Europe, there are shared intellectual interests in the lived experiences of the ‘rural’ oppressed and what Hall articulates as understanding ‘the complex relations between city and countryside’ (Hall 1986, 59). Like Gramsci, Ntsebeza bore the brunt of fascist incarceration as a political activist against Bantustan and apartheid fascism, and could therefore identify deeply with the struggles of the oppressed. Like Gramsci, Ntsebeza offers analysis of the complex in very simple and sophisticated ways, cutting to the essence of the key issues at stake in discourse on society’s problems and possible solutions. In Ntsebeza’s work is found therefore an emphasis on the importance and relevance of Gramsci’s intellectual work which Hall refers to as ‘everyday practical consciousness, common sense’ (Hall 1986, 20) – even though he suggested that some would simplistically consider the Gramscian approach as ‘Eurocentric’ (Hall 1986, 27).
How do we therefore rethink universities, teaching and research in this contemporary engagement for decolonisation worldwide? These are the kinds of questions also asked recently by Msila (2022) on the role of university intellectuals. How do we bring communities, their complex and often contradictory lived experiences, indigenous languages and indigenous knowledges to the centre – without essentialising or romanticising such decolonial scholarship in Africa or in the global South? Mazrui (2003, 140–143) critiques the African university as a conduit for Western culture rather than grounding research in conditions in Africa.
In reflecting on Ntsebeza’s cultural work as part of his decolonial praxis, it is beneficial to reflect on Adeleke’s study (Adeleke 2012, 57) of Amílcar Cabral’s ‘anti-hegemonic’ epistemology in contesting the dominant cultures – often embedded in the symbols and colonial imposed heritage cultures in university landscapes. These anti-hegemonic epistemologies could be viewed as possible avenues for escaping poverty (Adeleke 2012, 59) – it is not simply about engaging in the production of critical knowledge. For instance, Nzongola-Ntalaja describes the struggle in the Congo against Belgium’s colonial suppression and the role of organic intellectuals who did this through self-theorisation without studying Western classics, but by simply translating ordinary people’s feelings into political ideas (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2012, 38–39).
Like Adeleke, Ntsebeza constantly reminds colleagues that to be taken seriously they must retain and sustain their ‘legitimacy as scholars’ (Ntsebeza 2012, 60) by challenging Eurocentric historiography (ibid., 61), by vigorously attacking distorted ideas in disciplines, and by getting closer to lived realities and interpretations of the people (ibid., 62). Adeleke makes the important point that Walter Rodney (2018), as an organic intellectual, for example, wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (originally published in 1973) for the masses (ibid., 67) – not simply for university scholarship and peers. Ntsebeza knows the importance of being taken seriously at universities and in public intellectual life as a revolutionary force, drawing on his own research and its impact on land and democracy policies for South Africa, as in his seminal work (Ntsebeza 2005). Such academic rigour is key to revolutionary staying power, especially in historically white higher education institutions.
Ntsebeza’s intellectual work of necessity transverses disciplinary frontiers; complex, diverse and ranging beyond the work with which most scholars are familiar. In experiencing this wider intellectual prowess, I’ve also been fortunate to embark on a post-retirement collaboration with Ntsebeza on archiving the CAS dialogues with the public and community since 2012, and going back even further to archive dialogues from 2008. In this collaboration, in which he also mentors post-doctoral fellows at CAS, I’ve also come to know Ntsebeza as a revolutionary librarian, in how he strategises ‘refiguring the archive’ – in very poignant circumstances after the devastating UCT fire of 2021. Ntsebeza’s creative approach to the tragedy was impressive: not to mourn the huge irreplaceable losses in archived and institutionalised African knowledge, but to cleverly design a strategy of resistance and survival and to see the opportunity in that loss through a digitisation project of the archived CAS dialogues with UCT Library and Information Sciences. Raber (2003, 51) speaks of the ‘critical engagement with library and information science as a Gramscian approach to countering hegemony and facilitating democratic participation, as a site of resistance’; that librarians could therefore be organic intellectuals. In this way, librarians engage in counter-hegemonic strategies. Ntsebeza recognised in the otherwise distressing and suspicious tragedy a revolutionary opportunity for CAS in ‘centering African ontological experiences’ (Adesina 2008, 133) as captured in the archive of dialogues; thereby ‘contesting alterity and affirming endogeneity’ (ibid., 135) in the Mafeje sense. These archives also bear testimony to public engagement dialogues in the gallery in the years that CAS was under his directorship, to ‘trouble and decolonise terminologies’ (ibid., 149) by foregrounding African languages and meaning. As a result of this work and mentorship, within the next 40 years, the CAS archive of dialogues, events, exhibitions and seminars will be available uncensored in a digital archival platform for future scholars interested to get insights into debates of our times at CAS and their relevance in engagement with communities to find solutions to South Africa’s problems so many decades into ‘democracy’.
I have learned in working with Ntsebeza that important and relevant socially engaged research at CAS for social justice comes with complex difficulties but also the necessary scholarship humility. Such work includes embracing the safety risks (including death threats and threats of violence from opposing forces) and knowing that one could rely on Ntsebeza’s steadfast protection in those challenging circumstances. Scholars involved in decolonial praxis at CAS (such as on environmental justice in taking on major global corporate capital) were not alone in their plight. Working in dangerous contexts, as in the case of campaigning against foreign mining interests by the Xolobeni community in the Eastern Cape, these scholars could turn to Ntsebeza for mentorship on ‘staying power’ in the university as an institution with often contradictory interests in land and capital. There are many historical complexities with inevitable legacies in the present in South Africa that often put intellectuals in compromising and risky situations. In reflecting on such shared challenges for revolutionary African intellectuals in contemporary times, Shivji warns of the ‘mercenaries of imperialism and their hirelings [who] have murdered revolutionary intellectuals over the continent’ (Shivji 2018, 400).
Shivji (2018) draws distinctions between the ‘revolutionary intellectual’, ‘public intellectuals’ and ‘organic intellectuals’. I would not be tempted to place Ntsebeza’s scholarship singularly in any one of these categories, because his scholarship encompasses a dynamic intersection of all three. What matters is not these labels or categories when reviewing the impact of a leading African intellectual’s work, but rather recognising that although, as Shivji (2018, 396) contends, ‘intellectuals are purveyors of all kinds of ideas’, it is the systematisation (my emphasis) of counter-hegemonic ideas that matters (see Shivji 2018, 296). In this, Ntsebeza’s revolutionary organic intellectual work leaves a historic legacy for CAS and UCT that should be sustained in South Africa and the continent far beyond his ‘retirement’.