Archie Mafeje: Scholar, Activist and Thinker

Introduction

1 Dani W Nabudere Introduction Introduction In many ways, Archie Mafeje was one of the African intellectual pathfinders. He contributed immensely to the African peoples’ search for self-understanding, self-determination and political emancipation as they struggled against alienation and misrepresentation. He did this through his role as an African scholar, intellectual, thinker and academic. In this role, Mafeje did an excellent job and left a heritage which future young scholars and thinkers will have to complete. His attempts in this direction were not single-handed. He was one among many intellectuals who defended Africa’s ‘civilisational’ achievements and succeeded in asserting and defending the African identity and Africanity. The defender of the African role as the original occupiers of the Cradle of Humankind, and hence the originators of civilisation, was the great African scholar and researcher Professor Cheikh Anta Diop of Senegal. He made his defence in his various books, especially in African Origin of Civilisation: Myth or Reality, which he published in 1974. The other outstanding scholars included Professor Joseph Ki-Zerbo of Burkina-Faso, whose research in African history became part of the UNESCO research project on the ‘General History of Africa’. He was one of the authors, and he edited the first volume. The European enslavement and colonisation of Africa was about the control of knowledge about Africa. Africa became the battleground for the production of knowledge regarding Africa and the rest of the world, for it became apparent that the determination by imperialist powers to gain control over African human and natural resources was, at grassroots level, a struggle for political power and control over the human minds they tried to colonise. It was a struggle by the imperialist ‘self’ to dominate the colonised ‘other’, the ‘other’ in this case being the Africans and other oppressed peoples of the world. The Palestinian academic, Edward Said, once observed that when the British ruling class tried to assume political power over Egypt, it did so by first establishing British ‘knowledge of Egypt’. He argued that initially the British were not principally concerned with military or economic power but rather with ‘their knowledge of the Orients’, including Egypt, because this was conceived to be a form of power. Their objective was to have sufficient knowledge about the ‘distant other’ in order to be able ‘to 2 Africa Institute of South Africa Archie Majefe: Scholar, Activist and Thinker dominate it and (exert) authority over it’. This, in effect, meant denying autonomy of knowledge over the object of domination since to do so would have recognised the existence of knowledge of the object over itself. The object’s existence could only be recognised, in the words of the colonial representatives, ‘in as much as we know it’. Therefore, in recognising the academic and intellectual contribution of Archie Mafeje and his political role in trying to change that perception of ‘the other’, we also celebrate the African peoples’ struggle for their identity, self-knowledge, self-control and self-emancipation, without which the struggles of Africa’s intellectuals would have been in vain. This struggle in the field of knowledge will continue until Africa and humanity as a whole are fully emancipated from the remnants of Euro-centricity and Western intellectual dominance against which Mafeje fought so hard. Therefore, this monograph will identify key issues affecting the theoretical and practical state of the social sciences and the humanities as Mafeje perceived them, both at the level of academia and the level of political activism. In other words, to understand Mafeje and his academic and intellectual contributions, a blueprint of his academic accomplishments must be combined with his political thought and his activism, both in academia and in the political field. In short, his roles as a thinker and as an activist are examined. This is essential if one is to highlight the importance of social science research within the socio-political transformation of Africa. Indeed, it is here that we begin the journey of understanding Mafeje’s contribution to the African academic and political struggles. In doing this, we will find that although Mafeje was born in South Africa, he came to see himself more as a Pan-African and was more at home in Egypt than in South Africa. Kwesi Prah, who knew Mafeje for over two decades, has described him as a cosmopolitan with a vibrant and sublime cosmopolitanism ‘that was rare’, and at the same time someone with ‘almost effortless worldliness’.1 His academic record seems to prove that...