The Archie Mafeje Exhibition

In October 2010, I was involved in an exhibition which travelled to 3 South African universities and will eventually be housed at Walter Sisulu University.  It is an exhibition about Archie Mafeje as a young man. A history professor from UWC, Andrew Bank, in researching the work of South African women anthropologists, became interested in the collaborative relationship that UCT Professor Monica Wilson developed with her student and researcher, Archie Mafeje in the early 60’s. He first interviewed me about him sometime in early 2009. I had written a page about how I’d known Archie and what I valued about him for a special issue of CODESRIA Bulletin, issued after he died, entitled “A giant has moved on: Archie Mafeje (1936-2007)”, honoring his life and scholarship. It was as a result of what I wrote there that Andrew contacted me.

I probably first met Archie in 1958 in the company of other left-wing students.
I hovered around the Modern World Society – the communist front on campus. Archie, aligned with the Unity Movement, was critical of them but he never said exactly where he was coming from politically. In discussions he would engage and interrogate so that I was forced to question my assumptions. I was new to all these ideas and I was fortunate to have a private political education from him because he seemed to like talking and listening to me. He was a political touchstone for many people. I couldn’t fully appreciate the privilege I had in being specially chosen in this way because of the racism I carried, although the obvious envy of some other women on the left helped. I knew he was brilliant but I couldn’t really admit to myself how handsome he was or that I was attracted to him. I did know that he would be an important figure. I teased him that I would keep his letters so that they could be published after the revolution. He was pleased – “How romantic and sweet!” he wrote. And how prescient I was - about his importance – not about the revolution unfortunately! And I did keep them.

Archie is famous for more reasons than I know, not being a sociologist. One of the first is the book on Langa that he co-authored with Monica Wilson in 1963. Another is that he disowned and repudiated the whole field of social anthropology as being a colonialist enterprise engaged in ‘othering’ Africans and African experience. He is also famous at UCT for the controversy about being refused posts for which he applied in the 60s and the 90s. One of these occasions in 1968 led to a student sit-in at the University.
Anyone wanting to know more can start with Francis Wilson’s citation on the occasion of the awarding of a posthumous Honorary doctorate to Professor Mafeje at UCT in 2008. If you want to read an extraordinary article by him, utterly relevant for today and well into the future, you can find it on a Latin-American blog entitled: "Democratic Governance and New Democracy in Africa: Agenda for the Future."

In reflecting on my relationship with Archie as a student in my late teens and early 20’s, the part that is hard to articulate is what it felt like to revere and be educated about the world by a black man, in an atmosphere in which he would be treated with arrogance, contempt and fear by almost everyone who was white. We became friends but we only ever met on campus. We would meet in the alcoves between the stacks of Jagger Library and talk softly. Once we walked in the grounds of Rhodes Memorial and sat on some big stones there. He reminded me that we could be arrested for doing that under the Immorality Act. My mother got to hear that I was being seen around campus with a black man. For her to hear about it would’ve required quite a long grapevine – people noticed such things in those days. And there were spies on campus so Archie’s remark about being arrested was not beyond the realm of possibility, especially if the Special Branch wanted a pretext to silence him for other reasons.

So what’s it like to be interviewed and featured in something that is a historical project about events that happened 50 years ago? A bit sobering because it tells me I must be getting old, but also very enlivening because remembering requires a partial reliving of the events from my youth. To quote David Hare from “Berlin/Wall” - “the young have fantasies about the future but the old have fantasies about the past”.

Aug 1961: Archie(on right) with Welsh Makanda in Cape Town