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WITS University Press - N. Chabani Manganyi

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107 pages

English

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This intriguing memoir details in a quiet and restrained manner with what it meant to be a committed black intellectual activist during the apartheid years and beyond. Few autobiographies exploring the ‘life of the mind’ and the ‘history of ideas’ have come out of South Africa, and N Chabani Manganyi’s reflections on a life engaged with ideas, the psychological and philosophical workings of the mind and the act of writing are a refreshing addition to the genre of life writing. Starting with his rural upbringing in Mavambe, Limpopo, in the 1940s, Manganyi’s life story unfolds at a gentle pace, tracing the twists and turns of his journey from humble beginnings to Yale University in the USA. The author details his work as a clinical practitioner and researcher, as a biographer, as an expert witness in defence of opponents of the apartheid regime and, finally, as a leading educationist in Mandela’s Cabinet and in the South African academy.

Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist is a book about relationships and the fruits of intellectual and creative labour. Manganyi describes how he used his skills as a clinical psychologist to explore lives – both those of the subjects of his biographies and those of the accused for whom he testified in mitigation; his aim always to find a higher purpose and a higher self.

Sujets

Littérature Africaine

Autobiography

Psychology

Biography

Social Activists

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Publié par	WITS University Press
Date de parution	01 mai 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781868148639
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist
Award from the Psychological Society of South Africa in recognition of the author’s contribution to the field of psychology.
Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist
A Memoir by N Chabani Manganyi
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg, 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Copyright © Chabani Manganyi 2016
Published edition © Wits University Press 2016
Photographs of the installation of the chancellor and vice chancellor © University of the North 1992
All other photographs © Chabani Manganyi 2016
First published 2016
978-1-86814-862-2 (print)
978-1-86814-863-9 (EPUB)
978-1-77614-074-9 (Mobi)
978-1-86814-865-3 (PDF)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
All images remain the property of the copyright holders. The publishers gratefully acknowledge the publishers, institutions and individuals referenced for the use of images. Every effort has been made to locate the original copyright holders of the images reproduced here; please contact Wits University Press at the above address in case of any omissions or errors.
Edited by Pat Tucker
Proofreaders: Lisa Compton and Alison Lockhart
Index by Sanet le Roux
Design by Fire and Lion
Printed and bound by ABC Press, South Africa
Contents
Award from the Psychological Society of South Africa
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Preface
1 Early Days in Mavambe
2 Baragwanath Hospital and Beyond
3 A Place Called Umtata
4 Curiosity Did Not Kill This Cat
5 In the Soup: Courtrooms and Witnessing
6 The Psychology of Crowds
7 Justice and the Comrades
8 Working for a Higher Purpose
Notes
Appendix
Index
Photographs
Acknowledgements
S everal relatives, including my late mother and father, teachers at several schools and academics at various universities made notable contributions to my well-being, to my academic and professional development, and to my success throughout my working life. Some of them are acknowledged at appropriate points in the text which follows.
My concern here is to acknowledge the support and encouragement of a number of colleagues at my home university and elsewhere. At the University of Pretoria, where I have spent the longest span of my working life – from September 1999 until now – Professor Robin Crewe and other senior colleagues supported my life-writing research programme, coupled, in recent years, with my appointment as a Senior Fellow of the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.
At Rhodes University Professor Catriona Macleod, without knowing it, set in motion a series of events which led me to think back to the nerve-racking mid-1970s, when I wrote a fictionalised memoir in the US. The public lecture at Rhodes University, which she invited me to present in 2008, inspired me to undertake the arduous task of researching and writing this full-scale intellectual autobiography.
Opportunities for discussions as well as for the writing of sections of this book were made possible by invitations from Professor F Geyer and his colleagues at Stellenbosch University during my numerous working visits as a Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), especially in 2012. During the course of my 2012 visit to STIAS, Professor David Attwell, a South African friend and colleague, currently at York University in the UK, and I held numerous discussions on life writing, complemented by a STIAS discussion of the central themes of this book. He is one among a list of colleagues who read through earlier manuscript versions.
Helpful comments and encouragement were graciously offered by professors André du Toit of the University of Cape Town and Grahame Hayes, formerly of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Special attention was paid to the ‘Justice and the Comrades’ chapter by three high court judges – Judge Bernard Ngoepe, Judge Phineas Mojapelo and Judge George Maluleke – and by one of our country’s pre-eminent academic lawyers, Professor Christof Heyns of the University of Pretoria. A version of the appendix was first published in Die Suid Afrikaan , published in December 1987, issue 12, page 31–34 .
I dedicate this book to my wife and members of our extended family as well as to my late parents, Hlekani and Dumazi Manganyi.
Foreword
C habani Manganyi is a writer of great prominence and, within particular academic circles, highly considered and revered as an elder statesman of academic psychology in South Africa. In his quiet and unassuming way, he has produced an impressive body of work since his first publications in the early 1970s. His early work tended to focus on the experience of being black in apartheid South Africa, and his highly influential 1973 publication Being-Black-in-the-World caught the attention of a nascent anti-apartheid and critical psychology readership. However, it seems that his style of writing is too discursive, literary, and urbane for it easily to have found a place in the rather restrictive discourses of much academic psychology.
During the early years of his work as a practising psychologist Manganyi knew what it meant to put psychology to work in the service of ordinary black South Africans who were oppressed and exploited by a racist and unyielding government. His quest in these early writings to liberate black subjectivity could well be taken up by the proponents of the de-colonisation project in contemporary South African affairs and institutions of higher learning.
Manganyi’s thinking and research has always kept up with the times, and in the 1990s and early 2000s he published important work on political violence and the vicissitudes of the transition to democracy. Besides his contribution to the life of ideas he has also unselfishly given his expertise and wisdom to public institutions in South Africa. Since 1994 he has held highly prestigious appointments in educational and academic spheres: as director general of the national Department of Education (under Minister Sibusiso Bhengu), as vice chancellor of the University of the North, as vice chancellor (1999–2003) and then as vice principal (2003–2006) of the University of Pretoria, and as chairperson of the Council on Higher Education (CHE).
Manganyi’s intellectual pursuits have not been limited to the narrow confines of psychology. He has written three biographies, the first published in 1983 was on Es’kia Mphahlele, the novelist and literary theorist, which was followed in 1994 with a biography of the painter Gerard Sekoto who spent most of his adult years in exile in Paris, and most recently (2012) on artist Dumile Feni (1939–1991). Those on Sekoto and Feni are significant works that have contributed to the recovery of two major South African artists, whose exiled status could easily have resulted in a lack of recognition of their work.
Manganyi has now turned his craft of biography writing on himself, with the publication of this memoir, Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist . This text is more than an autobiography of a black psychologist, because Manganyi’s work and writing has not only been of a psychological nature. His memoir is also a story of apartheid in its ‘glory years’, in the period of its decline and demise, and of the last 20 years of democracy. His memoir offers us a view of a man who has throughout his life pursued an independence of thought, and who has had a profound respect and love for the life of the mind.
Since the early 1990s the South African literary scene has witnessed an outpouring of auto/biographical writing, mostly from, or on, political activists. Fewer have come from the pens of intellectuals, so this memoir is particularly welcome as both a history of ideas and an account of a scholar’s struggle against injustice and oppression.
Grahame Hayes
March 2016
Preface
W hat follows hereafter is the story of how I became a man, a citizen and a scholar.
A significant precursor in the history of this autobiography is a lecture I presented at Rhodes University in 2008 at the invitation of Professor Catriona Macleod, then head of the psychology department. The lecture followed my selection as the first recipient of a Department of Psychology award termed the ‘Psychology and Social Change Project’, an initiative
in which prominent members of the psychology community in South Africa are honoured for their contribution to social change in the country. The aim of the project is to acknowledge people who have gone beyond the traditional bounds and contributed, through intellectual, professional and personal labour, to social change and the field of psychology in South Africa.
The department’s Certificate of Acknowledgement stated that the award was made in recognition of a ‘sustained and excellent contribution to social change and the field of psychology in South Africa’. As sometimes happens at ceremonies of this kind, I was asked to give a public lecture when I accepted the award. I chose an autobiographical theme and used the opportunity of my engagement with the psychology community at Rhodes University to examine the opportunities and challenges I had encountered as a clinical psychologist in apartheid South Africa. 1
By that time much had happened in my life beyond the demands of my position as the first African clinical psychologist in our country. For understandable reasons, the account given in the Rhodes lecture and the more substantive one given in this autobiography leave out matters which might be of interest to a wider audience. Among them are the rewarding one-and-a-half years I spent in the 1990s as the founding executive director of the Joint Education Trust, a Johannesburg-