A Visit to Kings College, Cambridge

What a legacy I've received from my university friend Archie Mafeje! And it wasn't just his political mentoring I'm talking about.

I visited him twice in the 1960's at King's College, while he was studying there for his PhD. More than 50 years later, even though I'd invited myself, I was treated like an honored guest - all because of the photograph I have of him, which I'd scanned and sent to the University at the request of Tamsin Starr. She contacted me on behalf of The Black Cantabs Research Society, who wanted to have a photo exhibition of black graduates from Cambridge to counteract the mass of portraiture around the university, which is largely of white men and monarchs.

I was given my own personal guided tour by her, mischievously photographed on various illustrious senatorial thrones, interviewed for almost 2 hours by an academic in the Department of Social Anthropology and finally invited to High Table as the guest of the interviewer, who is a Fellow of the College.
It was an extraordinary day.




     

The Fellow who offered to host me was Dr Perveez Mody - a petite Indian woman who does research into love marriages in India. Even before I met her, when we were corresponding, I knew we would get on well. Why? Because she understood immediately that my big question about dining at High Table was sartorial. What was I going to wear? I was not going to spend days trying on dresses when I never wear them. Did I have to pack an extra pair of shoes? She reassured me - it was just before Easter so it would not be formal. Whew!

A Photograph of Archie

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My first post on this blog in 2011 was about an exhibition that Andrew Banks mounted of Archie Mafeje's university life in Cape Town. Because the article had photographs of him, I have been contacted ever since by people wanting to use them. This one below is hanging up at the Department of Social Anthropology at Kings College Cambridge!

Last year 3 different people wanted pictures. Some were even prepared to pay for them.

But I didn't take the photograph! I wonder if someone could tell me whom it might have been? There were pavement photographers in the city who took pictures of people walking - mostly in Adderley Street - although I think this one from 1961 of Archie with Welsh Makanda, was taken in Darling Street.  The photographer would give you a ticket and you could collect the pictures some days later after they were developed. You were not obligated to buy them.

Archie and I used to meet together between the stacks of Jagger library - the main campus library. There were not many places that a black man and a white woman could meet in those years! On one occasion I noticed he had one of those tickets. (I had perhaps a half-dozen street pictures of myself at that time that I had collected.)

Rhodes Had To Rise in Order to "Fall"

Photograph by Tony Carr

In an ironic twist the Rhodes statue which was finally removed from the grounds of the University of Cape Town (UCT) this week - 9th April 2015 - had to be "lifted" in order to "fall". But it could have fallen :
 the occupiers of "Azania House" (the administration building) could easily have arranged it if vandalism was their intention. It clearly wasn't. There was much more at stake - the conscientizing of the whole academic community - not only at the University of Cape Town but nationwide. I think all those critics I have just read on the news24 website who were disgusted by the students' behaviour yesterday should realize this.

Furthermore, I watched on video as one young man bashed at Rhodes' carved face with a wooden plank, while another tied a bucket with red paint round his head and I wondered what was happening for them. It was as if they wanted to  destroy forever the greedy colonialist vision that his gaze over the Cape flats symbolized - the installation of white hegemony from Cape to Cairo. It's scary for many people to see this. But actually it's human to feel rage at centuries of injustice and at present humiliations. Its just that so few of us have ever been allowed to express this kind of rage, we get scared by it. I once saw some enlightened parents give their angry little boy a plastic baseball-bat to go hit against a tree. What was so different last Thursday afternoon? Its not just children who feel rage - we all do. By the time we are adults it's usually suppressed and our bodies pay the price. So if a couple of young men expressed their violent rage by bashing at Rhodes' head, I for one, am grateful to them - no-one was hurt in the process - they got to feel empowered and it was the perfect moment to savor their victory.

Photograph by Tony Carr

 Every young person should have that feeling at some point in their lives! I doubt they will ever forget what they did and what was achieved by the Rhodes Must Fall campaign.

Many of the occupiers of Azania House slept in the conference room named belatedly to honour Archie Mafeje. Having known Archie, who wrote from experience about white liberal hegemony at the universities of Southern Africa, I think he would've been pleased to have played a role in this first big step to effect a change, but he would in no way be satisfied with it....

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.