Archie Mafeje: Scholar, Activist and Thinker

Conclusion

100 Africa Institute of South Africa Conclusion Conclusion The author was tasked by the Africa Institute of South Africa (AISA) to write a paper to launch a Mafeje Memorial Lecture Series in order to commemorate his academic and intellectual contribution, especially in his struggle to debunk colonial structural functional Anthropology as a discipline for understanding ‘the other’ amongst whom the African was prominent. The brief was to deal with the relevant issues affecting the practical and theoretical state of the social sciences in Africa and highlight the importance of social science research in the socio-political transformation in South Africa and the rest of the African continent. Later a larger monograph was commissioned, detailing Mafeje’s academic work and its contributions to African scholarship. As requested, the author has demonstrated that indeed Mafeje was a great scholar, thinker and political activist – not for the purposes of acquiring power but for the aim of ‘speaking truth to power’. His research and political activism ever since the ‘Langa days’ have been directed at discovering what he believed to be the truth even when he was utilising the very tools of alienation that he was questioning. He continued his ‘speaking truth to power’ throughout his career, never accepting what was popular but investigating that which made what was popular ‘to be popular’. We can see this philosophical orientation on the issue of culture. Although he accepted culture as a basis for creating knowledge, he nevertheless also put it aside and tried to interrogate it and discover the ‘key issue’ within it, which he then focused on. For instance, we have seen that although Mafeje talked of ‘cultural revivalism’, he nevertheless warned of its negative and positive sides. He was always trying to find what was the key element in that ‘dialectic’ which was the most ‘forward looking’. This is why when it came to his own country, South Africa, he could not accept what was considered the most ‘popular’ national movement – the African National Congress – but instead worked for some time with the Unity Movement, which he judged to be more critical in developing a national democratic programme for South Africa. Even then, he seemed to have stepped aside from it to pursue a more ‘Africanist’ research and political agenda, with which he appeared to have closed his life project. 101 Conclusion Dani W Nabudere Mafeje was exceptional in that right from the 1960s, when he was refused the position of lecturer at the University of Cape Town, he did not bend his knees and accept the indignity that had been imposed on him. He continued to work with energy and commitment to his project as an independent researcher and thinker. His political activism was linked to his intellectual work, and he never joined populist organisations just for their sake. This included his role in the academic and professional bodies to which he belonged from time to time in order to promote his ideas. In these endeavours he exhibited a commitment to scholarship, and was against shoddy work. Whatever he did, he handled it with rigour and academic thoroughness, always criticising those scholars he met if they did not take issues seriously. In his last days, Mafeje seemed to be frustrated by the attitude shown to him when he returned to his country. The mainstream political actors in South Africa regarded him as having been a divisive figure, and having avoided ‘unity’ in the furtherance of the struggle against apartheid. He also felt that his work was under-estimated by these powers, and even when they came to recognise the indignity that he suffered in Cape Town in the 1960s and tried to mend fences, he refused to accept the apology until after his death when his family accepted it on his behalf. This may also explain why Mafeje had not been convinced that the earlier invitations for him to return to South Africa and work at the universities and research institutes were genuine. He also felt insufficiently challenged and engaged when he finally accepted to come and work in these institutions – dying a very frustrated man. He found himself extremely lonely in the last years of his life, as he found no intellectual engagement that could have activated him to be a meaningful contributor to the practical side of South Africa’s socio-economic transformation. Perhaps this is the sad side to Mafeje’s life story, but the image that he leaves us with, as an academic and intellectual community, is that...