The Mail & Guardian has a feature on Kader Asmal, who is leaving politics to take on a post at the University of the Western Cape in Bellville. Asmal’s peripatetic career in opposition to the Apartheid state and in support of democracy took him to Bellville in 1994, where he lectured at UWC after he returned from exile. Asmal’s career has blended academic and activism and politics in vital ways and one wishes for him a long career at UWC.
A number of stories caught my attention this weekend. Here are a few of them, with brief commentary as appropriate:
The Makana Football Association, which operated surreptitiously on Robben Island among the political prisoners has achieved recognition from FIFA, the sport’s governing body. A feature film, More Than Just a Game, starring Tsotsi’s Presley Chweneyagae, is to be released in South Africa in the next few weeks.
Thabo Mbeki recently has been stepping up his advocacy of a trilateral free trade area between South Africa, India, and Brazil. Mbeki believes that this trade bloc will give these leading nations in the developing world a stronger hand in trades with the World Trade Organization and will focus on addressing poverty and underdevelopment in the three countries and within the regional spheres that they dominate.
The Mail & Guardian’s “ZA @ Play” has an interview with Mark Gevisser, the respected observer of South African politics whose forthcoming book Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred is highly anticipated. The interview is fairly anodyne, truth be told, but the book should stand as a definitive early treatment of Thabo Mbeki’s life if it can avoid the pitfalls of polemicism and advocacy to which virtually all of the books on Mbeki up to now have succumbed.
Finally, a bit of a controversy has enveloped one of my old stomping grounds, Rhodes University. Last year Anne Warmenhoven submitted a doctoral thesis to Rhodes’ psychology department, which approved the dissertation and granted Warmenhoven the PhD. Her topic is the late disgraced former Proteas captain Hansie Cronje. But the dissertation apparently is nowhere to be found, apparently because members of Cronje’s family only agreed to speak with Warmwnhoven under conditions of secrecy. Obviously this goes against every principle of academic freedom and openness, not to mention ideals of transparency that are supposed to be a hallmark of the New South Africa.
Your faithful scribe is in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas where I am participating in the US Army Combat Studies Institute’s symposium on Warfare in the Age of Non-State Actors. I gave a presentation on policing in contested states using the South African security forces in the Apartheid era to explore implications for future policies across the globe. This will, I hope, explain the relative silence this week. I will post as I can, even if only to provide links.
Historians of Africa have long tilted against some of the hoariest, most insidious false assertions made about Africa. Three men who were giants in their fields and in Western intellectual life generally embody the representation of Africa as a land without history, and thus as a land unworthy of attempting to understand. In the eighteenth century the Scottish philosopher David Hume said, “I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There scarcely ever was a civilised nation of that complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in action or in speculation. No ingenious manufacture among them, no arts, no sciences.” In the nineteenth century the German philosopher Hegel similarly dismissed Africa when he blithely asserted, “Africa is no historical part of the world.” In 1963 Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who ought to have known better, repeated this calumny when he dismissed Africa as having “no history” but rather “the unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.”
Of course we know these assertions not to be true. By any definition, even the most rigid, Africa has a long, vibrant, and varied history. And of course for those of us engaged in contemporary or modern history, Africa provides a rich tapestry of sadness and loss, hope and promise, a chronicle of human frailties and human strengths, of humankind’s capacity to inflict severe harm or to attain dizzying heights.
Even the seemingly more innocuous version of the libels of Hegal and Hume and Trevor-Roper, the idea that African history is somehow different from that of the West because the written word supposedly eluded the continent and its people and thus shrouded the vast landscape from the Cape to Cairo in epistemological darkness is the stuff of mythology, not reality. Recent discoveries throughout Africa, but centered in the ancient center of learning at Timbuktu, help to demonstrate that Africans have long had a written record, even if that record is not as vast as in some other parts of the world. Discoveries in recent decades have accumulated so quickly that some hope that Mali’s Timbuktu will become the site of a new library akin to the legendary lost library at Alexandria. We can see some of these discoveries through an online exhibition sponsored by the Library of Congress and through a multimedia presentation courtesy of The New York Times.
The vast panoply of African history is increasingly available to all of us. One wonders what Hegel or Hume or Trevor-Roper might have to say about a continent they little understood and barely knew but felt free to dismiss in light of what historians have continued to prove in recent decades. No longer can serious people accept their “unedifying gyrations” and authoritative assertions. History is about nothing so much as change over time. There is a certain glorious irony that history itself has shown how much has changed to refute those who disavowed African history.
Morgenie Pillay, the Andrew Mellon lecturer in the department of politics and international studies at one of my old stomping grounds, Rhodes University, and a visiting doctoral research scholar at the London School of Economics asks (and tries to answer) an important question in The Mail & Guardian: “Why are there so few up-and-coming new career black academics at South African institutions?”
Her answers (and the question is legitimate — according to South African statistics (2004/05) 69.8% of the master’s/doctoral degrees in the country are held by whites) ? Funding, opportunity, and of course racism, either latent or covert. There may be additional factors at work as well. For example, for high-talent strivers, academia might not seem as lucrative as the private sector or as significant as government. Another answer might be that South Africa is still dealing with the lag time of the PhD process. It takes a long time to earn a PhD. Perhaps those students still in the pipeline will help close the gap. A final possibility is that the gap may well be closing. I’d be curious to know the percantages among adcademics who were black in 1987 and 1997 to get a sense of change over time. Nonetheless, Pillay has identified a significant gap that South Africa’s universities in particular must address.