Reflecting on last week, which began with a joyous dinner with Wits colleagues Sharad Chari, Eric Worby, Reshmi Singh (among others), my wonderful cousin Claudia Gastrow, and good friend from UC-Berkeley Gillian Hart, followed the next day by a conversation with Eussebius McKaiser behind the kitchen of Café de le Crème at Melville in Johannesburg. Eusibius and my “bro-mance” began 15 years ago when he witnessed me lecturing with my youngest daughter (then several months old) in my arms. Our conversations afterward were memorable, and I’m so happy to learn about his achievements and having the opportunity for us to reflect on issues so important to so many: https://soundcloud/eusebius_mckaiser/eusebius-in-conversation-with Our wonderful conversation was followed by an afternoon at Afrika Freedom Station, where I caught up with, among others, my friend Zimitri Erasmus, who teaches sociology at Wits. The colleagues and students who gathered in that wonderful space, as well as simply people joining the conversation from the streets, made our 3 hours together such a joy. That was, however, not the conclusion of the day. Sista Zandi Radebe and Brotha Tendayi Sithole (who completed his dissertation accompanied by the birth of his son—a resounding congratulations!) joined us and took me to Soweto, where an extraordinarily enthusiastic community of people from so many facets of South African life—so many of the excluded—welcomed me for a nearly four-hour discussion of non-nonsense theorizing and, as my Rasta uncles and my deceased father would say, “reasonings. “ The rotation of listeners and questioners as the number of attendance continued to grow reveal what intellectual work means to so many black communities. While some people valorise detachment, the fact of the matter is that for us ideas are matters of life and death, a quest for intellectual nutrition, and many of us are starving. Speaking on Black Thought at Wits’ Centre for Indian Studies in Africa and the Humanities Centre the next afternoon was marked by, for me, something very profound: the turnout of the various black communities, many of whom disagree with each other on political issues and came from the poor and the affluent, the scholarly and the lay-thinker, the elderly and the poor, and on and on—in short, a large spectrum of South Africans including members of the Asian population, delighted and secure white scholars and some other white and Indian scholars about whom reflections on their negativity would require another context—in short, something rarely seen in South Africa: an actual, demographic reflection of the society in a meeting of thought. I was particularly struck by members of the underclass, who remained sustained by philosophical reflections over the course of nearly three hours and who joined other participants on the steps outside in conversation about issues they obviously care about so deeply. What an experience for an Afro-Jewish-Tamil-Chinese-etc.- man—in short, as I agree with Biko on this, Black man, no? That was not, however, the end of my week. After lecturing back at Rhodes, I had the honour and privilege of spending time with colleagues at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape as we reflected on what is involved in “Shifting the Geography of Reason.” So many thanks to Premesh Lalu, Suren Pillay, and Aidan Erasmus for organizing our meeting, and also to Heidi Grunebaum, Kelly Gillespie, and so many others who attended and posed such great questions. Heidi’s perceptive understanding of the complicated question I pose in terms of race-gender is a development for which I am so grateful: so many people go to talks but simply ignore what is being said as they seek an opportunity to assert orthodoxies. Heidi actually came to be surprised and to grow. Premish was also so in terms of his exploration of the concept of power linked to the grammatology I was outlining and its relationship to other developments in the human sciences. I was blessed in all this not only in terms of those who came to more than one of these gatherings—attested to by the presence of Mike Stainbank and Tendayi Sithole in Soweto and the session at Wits—but also the very gifted and global intellectual Sabelo Mcinziba (he really knows almost every one, and I look forward to the future in which I hope everyone will be reading him) and some time with the talented young journalist and historian Ben Fogel (whom I met some years ago at Thinking Africa at Rhodes). In short, a huge shout of appreciation from the depths of my soul to so many. Yes, South Africa treats Azania as palimpsest. We remind the world, constantly, that there is no light without darkness, no stand without foundation, and perhaps, as we reflect further, there may be possibilities beyond these markers of simultaneous old and new, new and old. The fantasies of exploitation and oppression is a world of profit without people—an absurdity warranting little indulgence but for the fact that it is constantly attempted. But even those of us fighting for dignity must remember the risk of failing to be properly self-critical. Such is the contradiction of struggles for freedom: they’re always, like the ear ring that marks the former enslaved, coexistent with continued work to be done. Survival shouldn’t mean looking into a mirror and seeing a stranger. Yes, the struggle continues, but as the Jazz songwriter reminds us, what waits for all of us is always more than we know. To anyone whose name I failed to mention—and there were so many of you that this is overdetermined—please don’t take it personally and accept my apology through simply sending a shout out so our correspondence will be the testament of our meeting and thought to come. While many intellectuals simply seek the approval of fellow experts, it is important to remember what ultimately makes thought sacred. I’m so pleased to see that so many who came my way so far in my time as the Nelson Mandela Visiting Professor in this beautiful and troubled country—which, as Mabogo More always reminds me, in spite of my birth in Jamaica and my living in the United States, is also my home and that of my childrens grandparents—embody this insight: what is the point of thought that fails to the lived-reality of actual people? What is the point of words that birth no deeds? The ethical face of at least this part of the universe or pluriverse calls upon us as each sister and brothers keeper.h I
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 15:53:38 +0000
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