Being Black in the World PDF
Preview Being Black in the World
Being-Black-in-the-World Being-Black-in-the-World N. Chabani Manganyi Published in South Africa by: Wits University Press 1 Jan Smuts Avenue Johannesburg 2001 www.witspress.co.za Copyright © Chabani Manganyi 2019 Annotations © Grahame Hayes 2019 Foreword © Garth Stevens 2019 Afterword © Njabulo S. Ndebele 2018 First published 1973 by Spro-Cas/Ravan Press Wits University Press edition 2019 The publishers gratefully acknowledge permission from African Sun Media to republish the afterword, which first appeared in Ndebele, S.N. ‘Being-black- in-the-world and the future of blackness’, The Effects of Race, edited by Nina G. Jablonski and Gerhard Maré. Stellenbosch: African Sun Media, 2018, pp. 89–105. http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/12019093689 978-1-77614-368-9 (Paperback) 978-1-77614-369-6 (Web PDF) 978-1-77614-370-2 (EPUB) 978-1-77614-371-9 (Mobi) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permis- sion of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978. Project manager: Simon Chislett Copyeditor: Danya Ristić Proofreader: Lee Smith Cover designer: Hybrid Creative Typesetter: MPS Typeset in 10.5 point Crimson Contents Foreword by Garth Stevens vii Introduction 1 1 Who Are the Urban Africans? 8 2 Black Consciousness 20 3 Us and Them 32 4 Being-Black-in-the-World 46 5 Nausea 57 6 Reflections of a Black Clinician 65 7 The Meaning of Change 87 8 Postscriptum – ‘African Time’ 97 References 107 Glossary 113 Afterword by Njabulo S. Ndebele 115 Index 143 Other Works 155 Foreword Writing a foreword to a seminal text that is being re-published in a different historical moment demands acute sensitivity and a delicate balance. On the one hand, there is the need to be faithful to the authorial voice and preserve the essence of the original text. On the other hand, it is also important to ensure that the text is appropriately framed and located, with perspicacity, for a new generation of readers, even though the authorial voice and textual content originated in a different temporal moment. This was the task confronting Grahame Hayes, Roshan Cader and myself, as an editorial collective working on the re-publication of N. Chabanyi Manganyi’s Being-Black-in-the-World, which was first published in the turbulent political period of 1973. Four primary coordinates propelled and guided an approach to this project. First, many of us as scholars in the arts, human- ities and social sciences had been re-engaging with Manganyi’s work over several years because we believed him to have been an undervalued critical black intellectual and scholar in South Africa. Many of us were committed to having him appropri- ately located and recognised within fields such as art, litera- ture, psychology, political science, anthropology and so on. vii BEING-BLACK-IN-THE-WORLD Second, since 2015 South Africa’s political landscape had seen a groundswell of calls for decolonising universities, curricula, social institutions, notions of science and art, and a recalibration of what constitutes the canon across most disciplines. The syner- gies between Manganyi’s Being-Black-in-the-World and these decolonising calls for an interrogation of the legacies of coloniality on forms of knowledge, subjectivity and power were patently clear, even though Manganyi was much less known as a public intellectual in comparison to the likes of eminent figures such as Stephen Bantu Biko. Third, this particular iteration of the decolo- nial turn in South Africa had prompted a re-reading of key black intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Biko and, to a different degree, Manganyi. While a number of writers had written about Manganyi’s work in the contemporary moment (e.g. Boonzaier and Kessi, 2016), it is Njabulo S. Ndebele’s (2018) instructive interpretive essay, ‘“Being-Black-in-the-World” and the Future of “Blackness”’, that reveals the prescient nature of Manganyi’s thinking in the 1970s. In my discussions with Grahame Hayes, he characterised Ndebele’s essay as ‘a timeous piece that is a marvellous demonstration of how to read Being-Black-in-the-World in 2019, that is simultaneously engaged, historical, critical, and yet preserves the essence of much of the 1973 original’ (Stevens, 2019). Given the quintes- sential nature of this essay, it has been included as an afterword in this re-publication. Fourth, it is rare to have the opportunity to engage with an author more than four-and-a-half decades after he penned a seminal manuscript, and so we were intent on hearing Manganyi’s own reflections on the text, its major influ- ences, its intentions then and its potential meanings now. I have included reflections from my conversations with Manganyi, which took place at his home. Our conversations centred on his reflections on the background to writing the text, and what viii N. CHABANI MANGANYI he thought of the complexities of the text re-circulating in a contemporary moment. What this allowed for was a contemplation of how this text is located within Manganyi’s oeuvre, its place within the historical context of its birthing and production, and the major influences that came to shape it. In addition, it offered us provocations about how well texts travel across time, space, histories and contexts, and the relevance of texts such as these to our contemporary world. Manganyi’s intellectual contributions have spanned almost five decades, within his home discipline of psychology, but also in literary studies, philosophy, education, history, politics, art and aesthetics. Some of his most notable texts include Mashangu’s Reverie and Other Essays (1977); Looking Through the Keyhole (1981); Political Violence and the Struggle in South Africa, edited with André du Toit (1990); Treachery and Innocence: Psychology and Racial Difference in South Africa (1991); On Becoming a Democracy: Transition and Transformation in South African Society (2004); Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist: A Memoir (2016); not to mention his biographies on Gerard Sekoto, Es’kia Mphahlele and Dumile Feni. At the risk of presenting an oversimplified characteri- sation and periodisation of his oeuvre, it can nevertheless be said that Manganyi’s work has traversed several genres. His earlier interests were clearly more clinically focused in relation to psychological understandings of embodiment, but increas- ingly these evolved into work on the body and its intersections with experiences of alienation within a racist world. Stories of alienation and existential crises also opened up the terrain of the life story genre in his writings, and these were gradu- ally crystallised in fictionalised autobiographies, biographies and memoirs. While these developments were partly a result of specific disciplinary exposures that occurred at particular ix
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