Afrika, My Music. Es'kia Mphahlele
my cause when I lost the Sovenga post. Government officials refused to answer their questions. The university administration, Rector and all, let it be known that the then Minister of Education and Training had turned down its unanimous decision to appoint me. The Minister refused to give reasons. He promised, though, that he would veto any appointment Ezekiel Mphahlele might be given by any university or other institution under his control. Someone in the university administration came out with it at last: it was not the policy of the central government to let blacks chair departments like English.
I began to understand why the university had not been seen to put pressure on the Minister to take the man they wanted – though they believed, according to their statements in the press, that my academic qualifications were “unimpeachable”. What was harder to understand was whey they had staged that farcical interview at Pretoria University in the first place.
The interview! The atmosphere is weird. The Registrar – a Mr Steenkamp – gives me a curt nod as I enter the room, and motions me to my seat. The committee is sitting on a platform, I on the floor level. The platform is lit up, I sit in a kind of semi-gloom. The committee consists of the Rector of the University of the North (the late Dr Kgware); Professor Leighton, head of English at the Rand Afrikaans University; Professor Sebaga, head of English at Pretoria University; Professor Mativha, head of Venda at the University of the North; Professor Pretorius, head of History at the same place.
Only the men from Pretoria and the Rand ask academic and pedagogical questions. The African professor restricts himself to one question, which does not give rise to discussion: do I think African languages are important enough for us to continue to teach them?
The Rector asks what I understand by university autonomy and academic freedom in relation to the University of the North. Dr History asks why I have come back to seek employment in an institution that is a product of a system of education I had attacked before I left the country? Why have I come back to a country whose whites are racist as I describe them in the subtitle of a poem of mine? What position would I take if the students rioted?
We tell whites at least a million lies a day in this country. First, because we must survive, second, because they themselves already live a big lie. Lying to the white man who employed me or who processed my life was a natural thing to do before I left South Africa. I learned to be relatively at ease with whites abroad, and I did not have to lie in order to survive. I could sell my labour on the best market. In the process I either unlearned or tucked away in some corner of the subconscious the impulse to tell a white man lies. It is no effort for me to tell the appointments committee in front of me the truth about my views on the matter raised.
It is only after I have left the Senate room that it occurs to me that I have repeatedly talked about the “independent states north of the Limpopo river” to distinguish them from South Africa. Academic freedom and university autonomy? A university should be accorded the universal right to develop its own curricula in a way that reflects the culture in which it is operating, and in turn feed something into that culture so that it does not stagnate. An African university must express African culture even if white expatriates still teach in it. I should like to think also that a South African university will feel constrained to work towards a future that will make the concept of “separate development” irrelevant; that curricula and syllabuses can express a culture striving towards a synthesis that will be truly African.
An African university should be manned by the people best equipped, in the context of today’s separateness, to perceive and promote the black man’s aspirations. As soon as possible we should employ an increasing number of Africans. But Africanisation should not mean merely employing more African teachers; curricula and syllabuses should increasingly be Africa-based, instead of constantly singing the triumphs of Western civilisation. For instance, African literature should be the starting point from which we can fan outwards. The English department should become a department of literature, the integral part of which would be comparative literary studies. And the more obvious principles: a university should promote freedom of inquiry, freedom of speech.
I cannot help but read mischief in Dr History’s question about my return. It seems to suggest that I am unique. I merely answer: I wanted to return to my ancestral home – South Africa; I want a meaningful cultural context to work in; I want community. I left the country because I was banned from teaching: I did not skip the country nor leave on an exit permit. If I had continued to teach I would still have opposed Bantu Education. Who loves everything the government of his country does? My return has ultimately nothing to do with whether I like the system or not. I have always believed that the democratic ideal should accommodate political dissent. How about that, Dr History?
Students rioting? I would not encourage it. But after saying this, I should point out that students want a representative council (I have heard of one that was banned at Sovenga) that can be respected and accommodated by the administration. Candid debate must be allowed for and listened to seriously. How about that, Dr History?
As a parting shot, Dr History asks how members of the Congress for Cultural Freedom will view my return to a country they have repeatedly condemned. I answer that I had not thought it necessary to institute a referendum on whether or not I should return.
Booby traps, booby traps … Intellectual integrity, where is your home, where is your sanctuary? I later learned that stock questions about academic freedom and university autonomy were part of the repertoire on these occasions.
A white man from the University of South Africa was appointed. If God moves like a crab, as we say in our languages, what simile would be fitting for the way the South African government works? After this, I was invited by heads of departments at two other “ethnic” universities to consider the possibility of joining their departments. I was agreeable. Somewhere along the line internal negotiations struck bedrock. Some top university official teetered on the edge of the cliff and then turned round to tell my promoters that he was afraid the government would not approve … We often fail to see the strings by which the bantustan puppet moves in the floodlights, but the full-bodied dancer – how can that escape us?
I stop to contemplate a serenity I have rediscovered in the northern Transvaal landscape. I realise how cosmopolitan, how suburban my family’s lifestyle has become; for better, for worse we have become bigger than our urban ghetto beginnings. The bonds that have held us to the original African experience, though, have remained intact during our travels. We still feel a strong identity with our ancestors: the living dead who are the spiritual dimension of our reason for returning. Come back native son, native daughter come back!
In the last year I have been reacquainting myself with the smell and texture of the place. A changed human landscape in many ways, one that is still changing but essentially still real to me. Pockets of African urban life have broken into the idyllic rural scene. Boys no longer herd cattle and goats: instead, they go to school regularly. Women still carry water on their heads for long distances, either from a river or from a communal pump. Just as they used to fifty years ago when I was a boy and, of course, for centuries before. Field husbandry has diminished considerably owing to the disruptive impact of the migrant-labour system and the lack of good land. Those who come back to live here go in for small-scale commercial ventures or into professional and administrative jobs. What else could there be in the midst of all this rural poverty?
Yes, a changing human landscape, but still essentially rural, though now Mirage aircraft from the military bases further north come whizzing and piercing through space overhead every so often. From the southern urban complex, echoes of another turbulence and pain come to my ears like the sound of ocean breakers staking a claim on the shore. The imagination is straining for the meaning of this confluence: super-tensed birds of steel from the north, the painful south and its turbulence down there, and between them, this pastoral serenity and I, who have in the last twenty years become thoroughly suburban. So much so that, because I could live anywhere I liked abroad if I could afford it, I wonder now that I am back home what slum living would be like.
A poem is straining to be born. It was Vinoba Bhave, the Indian mystic, who said: “Though action rages without, the heart can be tuned to produce unbroken music …” Super-tensed jets, political noises, the power drills of the south and their tremors, the wanderer returned