Listening to the silent majority

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[85]

Nimrod Mkele advised me to go and meet professor NC Manganyi, formerly professor of psychology and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Transkei, and presently Head of the Institute of African Studies at the Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. There were some hurdles to overcome before I finally entered his Wits office. He knew I wanted an interview for this report, but once we were talking, he made it clear that á la Buthelezi, he didn't want his name linked in a book to people not his kind. I tried various angles to convince him that he could still decide upon reading the text of our talk to not have it published after all. We even discovered that we both had spent some time at Yale University, in Hew Haven, Connecticut, and had both lived in Pierson College out there. But not even that remembrance moved him. Every person is entirely free in his choice as to whom he grants an interview. But in the case of Professor Manganyi, I recalled Don Mattera's reminder about ‘people with a hidden agenda’.

John Mavuso and Nelson Botile had mentioned Gibson Thula, the former member of the Inkatha Central Committee sacked by Chief Buthelezi because he wanted to open a liquor business. I approached him too. He replied that he was no longer a public figure and therefore, ‘it would not be fair on you to interview me’. Probably it was also an excuse, because he didn't feel like granting a time-consuming get-together, but in Thula's case, it didn't leave me with an aftertaste.

Professor Manganyi was nevertheless kind enough to leave me some of his papers, which convinced me even more that I had lost an interesting personality for this book. Like Mkele, professor Manganyi speaks of the destruction colonization has brought, since the 17th century, upon black South Africans and he litters his reflections with catch-phrases like ‘Caucasian arrogance’, ‘aggressive racial capitalism’, ‘systematic racist ideology’ and so forth. These are the standard epithets of the left. But I also found a fascinating paper he presented some years ago at a Pugwash Conference at my former college for the diplomatic service at ‘Nijenrode Castle’ in the Netherlands, a meeting I attended as well.^64.

In this study he wrote, inter alia, ‘I am convinced that Africa's leaders have failed to grapple meaningfully with the process of definition - what

64. Neither of us was aware of the presence of the other at ‘Nijenrode’ at the time

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it means to be free - and to project this meaning as a quality of life, humanism’. ‘The beautiful ones have not yet been born,’ an African writer once proclaimed. ‘Indeed, after colonialism, Africa must still free itself from tyranny and from those of its leaders who have inherited the physical and psychological instruments of terror. The face of terror that the Amin's and the Bokassas's represent is the supreme contradiction of the quality of Africa's independence, of the freedom of its peoples.’ He quotes Franz Fanon describing Algerians, under French occupation, not breathing freely, but being engaged in ‘combat breathing’. He next drew a parallel with the racial doctrine of apartheid and, who knows, perhaps his not wanting to speak to me related to earlier unfortunate experiences with journalists. I said before and I say again, that memory is not a weapon. Memory is a cul-de-sac, even for a psychologist or expert.