Public Intellectuals in South Africa

Keyan Tomaselli, Pfunzo Sidogi, Anna-Marie Jansen van Vuuren, Carolyn Hamilton, Rory Du Plessis, Luvuyo Mthimkhulu Dondolo, Katlego Chale, Chris Broodryk

Description

This edited book is on neglected public intellectuals in the arts and humanities, and journalism who gave voice and presence to those who have been marginalised and silenced in South African history.
Edward Said described a public intellectual as someone who uses accessible language to address a designated public on matters of social and political significance. The essays in Public Intellectuals in South Africa apply this interpretive prism and activist principle to a South African context and tell the stories of well-known figures as well as some that have been mostly forgotten. They include Magema Fuze, John Dube, Aggrey Klaaste, Mewa Ramgobin and Koos Roets, alongside marginalised figures such as Elijah Makiwane, Mandisi Sindo, William Pretorius and Dr Thomas Duncan Greenlees.

The essays capture the thoughts and opinions of these historical figures, who the contributors argue are public intellectuals who spoke out against the corruption of power, promoted a progressive politics that challenged the colonial project and its legacies, and encouraged a sustained dissent of the political status quo. Offering fascinating accounts of the life and work of these writers, critics and activists across a range of historical contexts and disciplines, from journalism and arts criticism to history and politics, it enriches the historical record of South African public intellectual life.

This volume makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates about the value of research in the arts and humanities, and what constitutes public intellectualism in South Africa.

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Prismatic Nature of Public Intellectualism — Chris Broodryk

Chapter 1 Recalibrating the Deep History of Intellectual Thought in the KwaZulu-Natal Region — Carolyn Hamilton

Chapter 2 Elijah Makiwane and Early Black South African Public Intellectualism — Luvuyo Mthimkhulu Dondolo

Chapter 3 Black Art Criticism in The Bantu World during the 1930s — Pfunzo Sidogi

Chapter 4 In Conversation with the Nation: Sowetan’s Maverick Editor Aggrey Klaaste — Lesley Cowling

Chapter 5 William Pretorius and the Public Intellectualism of the Film Critic — Chris Broodryk

Chapter 6 Cultural Policy and the Arts: Mewa Ramgobin and Public Dialogue — Keyan G. Tomaselli

Chapter 7 ‘Kaalgat Critique’: The Public Intellectualism of Koos Roets as Afrikaans Satirist — Anna-Marié Jansen van Vuuren

Chapter 8 The Public Intellectualism of Artivist Mandisi Sindo — Katlego Chale

Chapter 9 The Janus-Faced Public Intellectual: Dr Thomas Duncan Greenlees at the Institute for Imbecile Children, 1895–1907 — Rory du Plessis

Contributors

Index

Sujets

• Media Studies
• Social Science
• HISTORY
• Sociologie, société et politique
• África
• General officer
• Cultural studies
• History of Africa
• General
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776146925
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Public Intellectuals in South Africa
Public Intellectuals in South Africa
Critical Voices from the Past
Edited by
Chris Broodryk
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Compilation © Chris Broodryk 2021
Chapters © Individual contributors 2021
Published edition © Wits University Press 2021
First published 2021
http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/22021076895
978-1-77614-689-5 (Paperback)
978-1-77614-690-1 (Hardback)
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CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION   The Prismatic Nature of Public Intellectualism — Chris Broodryk
CHAPTER 1   Recalibrating the Deep History of Intellectual Thought in the KwaZulu-Natal Region — Carolyn Hamilton
CHAPTER 2   Elijah Makiwane and Early Black South African Public Intellectualism — Luvuyo Mthimkhulu Dondolo
CHAPTER 3   Black Art Criticism in The Bantu World during the 1930s — Pfunzo Sidogi
CHAPTER 4   In Conversation with the Nation: Sowetan’s Maverick Editor Aggrey Klaaste — Lesley Cowling
CHAPTER 5   William Pretorius and the Public Intellectualism of the Film Critic — Chris Broodryk
CHAPTER 6   Cultural Policy and the Arts: Mewa Ramgobin and Public Dialogue — Keyan G. Tomaselli
CHAPTER 7   ‘ Kaalgat Critique’: The Public Intellectualism of Koos Roets as Afrikaans Satirist — Anna-Marié Jansen van Vuuren
CHAPTER 8   The Public Intellectualism of Artivist Mandisi Sindo — Katlego Chale
CHAPTER 9   The Janus-Faced Public Intellectual: Dr Thomas Duncan Greenlees at the Institute for Imbecile Children, 1895–1907 — Rory du Plessis
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
T his edited volume was funded with assistance from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s grant for ‘The Public Intellectual in Times of Wicked Problems’, a research project hosted by the office of the Dean in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Pretoria.
I would like to thank the following individuals: Professor Vasu Reddy, Dean of Humanities, and Professor Maxi Schoeman, University of Pretoria, for supporting this volume; Heather Thuynsma, Communications Manager, Faculty of Humanities, University of Pretoria, for her skilful logistical support; Bianka Thom, University of Pretoria, for her editorial support; Roshan Cader, Wits University Press, for her guidance, support and patience throughout the development of the volume and the publication process; and the anonymous peer reviewers for their valuable feedback and insights.
The Archive & Public Culture Research Initiative ( http://www.apc.uct.ac.za/ ), University of Cape Town, hosted a colloquium titled ‘Public Life: Past, Present and Future’ on 7 August 2020, during which this publication and its contributors were put into conversation with the edited volume Babel Unbound: Rage, Reason and Rethinking Public Life (Wits University Press, 2020). This colloquium helped to streamline and crystallise several ideas in selected contributions in this book. I would like to thank the colloquium organisers Carolyn Hamilton and Lesley Cowling for their generosity.
Chapter Five , ‘William Pretorius and the Public Intellectualism of the Film Critic’, was partly developed through funding from the University of Pretoria’s Research and Development Programme.
Chris Broodryk
Pretoria
2021
Introduction: The Prismatic Nature of Public Intellectualism
Chris Broodryk
P ublic Intellectuals in South Africa: Critical Voices from the Past is aimed at scholars and researchers whose academic interests and activities link with the ideas and practices of public intellectualism. The book is intended to engage with those whose work in academia is politically committed, whose research on and in the various aspects of the humanities in South Africa is dedicated to speaking truth to power, and who help to give voice and presence to those figures who have been (and possibly remain) marginalised and even silenced in South African history.
This volume ranges in scope from public intellectualism in journalism to the idea of the public intellectual in mental health, to the ways in which the practice of art and the critical response to it are in themselves acts of public intellectualism. The aim of the volume is to provide incisive and insightful discussion and analysis of instances and practices of public intellectualism.
The ideas and arguments in this volume provide original research on key movements and figures in different histories of public intellectualism in South Africa. Each chapter offers a particular inflection on and demonstration of the public intellectual and their activities in South Africa as located in acts of journalism, storytelling, the arts and the larger context of the humanities. Taking the different historical contexts into account, the historical figures discussed in each chapter can be considered politically progressive.
For the most part, this volume follows the historical approach of Mcebisi Ndletyana’s African Intellectuals in 19th and Early 20th Century South Africa , which highlights how ‘material collected from oral tradition or orature tends be to complex’. 1 Equally complex, of course, was how African intellectuals straddled African and Western worlds. In Ndletyana’s account, ‘early African intellectuals were a product of the missionary enterprise and the British civilising mission’. 2 One of Ndletyana’s contributions to his edited volume focuses on Tiyo Soga (1829–1871), whose ideas were influential in both Black Consciousness and black theology. 3 Soga is also referenced in Chapter Two of this volume by Luvuyo Mthimkhulu Dondolo.
Njabulo S. Ndebele wrote in the foreword to Megan Jones and Jacob Dlamini’s Categories of Persons: Rethinking Ourselves and Others : ‘The space of expanding and interacting identities might just be the space for a future politics, one founded on and comfortable with the creative uncertainties of the interaction of multiple identities. The more varied the interactions, the more robust will be the politics founded on them.’ 4 It is our hope that this volume will inform constructive conversations around these identities and the ‘robust politics’ that follow from these discursive engagements.
SPEAKING OF DEMOCRACY: PUBLIC INTELLECTUALISM AS AN INTERPRETIVE PRISM AND ACTIVIST PRINCIPLE
In her book on South African writer J.M. Coetzee, Jane Poyner lists the influence of Greek thinkers (Aristotle, Socrates), as well as later thinkers outside the Western tradition (Edward Said, Arundhati Roy, Wole Soyinka) on the idea of (public) intellectualism. In South Africa, the acts of writing and of intellectualism ‘under the conditions of colonialism and then apartheid … have been profoundly politicized’ to the extent that speaking out against those in power might have led to punishment and prohibition. 5 Increasingly, the idea of the public intellectual has come to identify an individual who verbally or in writing speaks out against oppression, censorship and other mechanisms that serve to silence marginalised groups and individuals. These intellectuals take upon themselves an investment in democracy, where democracy is seen as a politically productive counter-position to authoritarianism and totalitarianism (consider, for instance, Pankaj Mishra’s book The Age of Anger: A History of the Present and its critique of India’s Modi regime). 6 As A.C. Grayling reminds us, ‘subverted democracy … is no democracy’, where ‘government is operated in the interests of only one part of the populace’. 7
In this current volume, the idea of the public intellectual is used as an interpretive prism for specific individuals, their public and the parameters of their context, and also of selected written and visual texts. In some contexts, though, the idea of the public intellectual is also meant to evoke an activist principle in which the political commitment of the intellectual is emphasised.
DEFINING PUBLIC INTELLECTUALISM
Poyner argues: ‘The intellectual, as Coetzee suggests, in supporting his or her own position with reasoned and rationed argument, is ready to accept the reasoned and rationed criticism of fellow intellectuals (and others), indeed, sees this as his or her social function: to criticize and be criticized while, importantly, imparting expertise or knowledge with the purpose of effecting change.’ 8
In defining and discussing the notion of public intellectualism, the ur-text is Edward Said’s renowned Representations of the Intellectual . 9 For Said, individuals such as James Baldwin informed his own work; Said found himself gripped by ‘a spirit of opposition’ activated in resistance to the political oppression of marginalised and minority groups. 10 Evoking Michel Foucault, Said maintains that the labour of the intellectual involves ‘a sense of the dramatic and the insurgent’, often linked to ‘reviving forgotten (or abandoned) histories’ and making ‘connections that were denied, to cite alternative courses for action’. 11 ‘Each intellectual,’ explains Said, following American sociologist Alvin Gouldner, ‘the book editor and the author, the military strategist and the international lawyer, speaks and deals in a language that has become specialized and usable by other members of the same field, specialized experts addressing other specialized experts in a lingua franca largely unintelligible to unspecialized people.’ 12 Said insists that the intellectual has a specific public role not determin