Prelims for Apartheid and the Making of a black psychologist

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Apartheid and the Makingof a Black Psychologist



Award from the Psychological Society of South Africa in recognition of the author’s

contribution to the field of psychology.



Apartheid and the Makingof a Black Psychologist

A Memoir by N Chabani Manganyi



Published in South Africa by:

Wits University Press

Jan Smuts Avenue

Johannesburg,

www.witspress.co.za

Copyright © Chabani Manganyi Published edition © Wits University Press

Photographs of the installation of the chancellor and vice chancellor © University of the

North

All other photographs © Chabani Manganyi

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Edited by Pat Tucker

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Contents

Award from the Psychological Society of South Africa ii

Acknowledgements vii

Foreword ix

Preface xi

Early Days in Mavambe 1

Baragwanath Hospital and Beyond 25

A Place Called Umtata 49

Curiosity Did Not Kill This Cat 63

In the Soup: Courtrooms and Witnessing 101

The Psychology of Crowds 115

Justice and the Comrades 127

Working for a Higher Purpose 159

Notes 177

Appendix 189

Index 201



Acknowledgements

Several relatives, including my late mother and father, teachers at

several schools and academics at various universities made

notable contributions to my well-being, to my academic and

professional development, and to my success throughout my working

life. Some of them are acknowledged at appropriate points in the text

which follows.

My concern here is to acknowledge the support and encour-

agement of a number of colleagues at my home university andelsewhere. At the University of Pretoria, where I have spent the

longest span of my working life – from September until now

– Professor Robin Crewe and other senior colleagues supported my

life-writing research programme, coupled, in recent years, with my

appointment as a Senior Fellow of the Centre for the Advancement of

Scholarship.

At Rhodes University Professor Catriona Macleod, withoutknowing it, set in motion a series of events which led me to think back

to the nerve-racking mid-s, when I wrote a fictionalised memoir

in the US. The public lecture at Rhodes University, which she invited

me to present in , inspired me to undertake the arduous task of

researching and writing this full-scale intellectual autobiography.

Opportunities for discussions as well as for the writing of sections

of this book were made possible by invitations from Professor F

Geyer and his colleagues at Stellenbosch University during my

numerous working visits as a Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute

vii



for Advanced Study (STIAS), especially in . During the course

of my visit to STIAS, Professor David Attwell, a South African

friend and colleague, currently at York University in the UK, and I

held numerous discussions on life writing, complemented by a STIAS

discussion of the central themes of this book. He is one among a list

of colleagues who read through earlier manuscript versions.

Helpful comments and encouragement were graciously offered

by professors André du Toit of the University of Cape Town and

Grahame Hayes, formerly of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Special

attention was paid to the ‘Justice and the Comrades’ chapter by three

high court judges – Judge Bernard Ngoepe, Judge Phineas Mojapelo

and Judge George Maluleke – and by one of our country’s pre-

eminent academic lawyers, Professor Christof Heyns of the

University of Pretoria. A version of the appendix was first published

in Die Suid Afrikaan, published in December , issue , page –.

I dedicate this book to my wife and members of our extended

family as well as to my late parents, Hlekani and Dumazi Manganyi.

viii



Foreword

Chabani Manganyi is a writer of great prominence and, within

particular academic circles, highly considered and revered as an

elder statesman of academic psychology in South Africa. In his quiet

and unassuming way, he has produced an impressive body of work

since his first publications in the early s. His early work tended to

focus on the experience of being black in apartheid South Africa, and

his highly influential publication Being-Black-in-the-World caught

the attention of a nascent anti-apartheid and critical psychologyreadership. However, it seems that his style of writing is too dis-

cursive, literary, and urbane for it easily to have found a place in the

rather restrictive discourses of much academic psychology.

During the early years of his work as a practising psychologist

Manganyi knew what it meant to put psychology to work in the

service of ordinary black South Africans who were oppressed and

exploited by a racist and unyielding government. His quest in theseearly writings to liberate black subjectivity could well be taken up by

the proponents of the de-colonisation project in contemporary South

African affairs and institutions of higher learning.

Manganyi’s thinking and research has always kept up with the

times, and in the s and early s he published important work

on political violence and the vicissitudes of the transition to

democracy. Besides his contribution to the life of ideas he has also

unselfishly given his expertise and wisdom to public institutions in

South Africa. Since he has held highly prestigious appointments

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in educational and academic spheres: as director general of the

national Department of Education (under Minister Sibusiso Bhengu),

as vice chancellor of the University of the North, as vice chancellor

(–) and then as vice principal (–) of the University

of Pretoria, and as chairperson of the Council on Higher Education

(CHE).

Manganyi’s intellectual pursuits have not been limited to the

narrow confines of psychology. He has written three biographies,

the first published in was on Es’kia Mphahlele, the novelist and

literary theorist, which was followed in with a biography of the

painter Gerard Sekoto who spent most of his adult years in exile

in Paris, and most recently () on artist Dumile Feni (–).

Those on Sekoto and Feni are significant works that have contributed

to the recovery of two major South African artists, whose exiled status

could easily have resulted in a lack of recognition of their work.

Manganyi has now turned his craft of biography writing on

himself, with the publication of this memoir, Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist. This text is more than an autobiography of a

black psychologist, because Manganyi’s work and writing has not only

been of a psychological nature. His memoir is also a story of apartheid

in its ‘glory years’, in the period of its decline and demise, and of the

last years of democracy. His memoir offers us a view of a man who

has throughout his life pursued an independence of thought, and who

has had a profound respect and love for the life of the mind.Since the early s the South African literary scene has

witnessed an outpouring of auto/biographical writing, mostly from,

or on, political activists. Fewer have come from the pens of

intellectuals, so this memoir is particularly welcome as both a history

of ideas and an account of a scholar’s struggle against injustice and

oppression.

Grahame Hayes

March

x



Preface

W hat follows hereafter is the story of how I became a man, a

citizen and a scholar.

A significant precursor in the history of this autobiography is a

lecture I presented at Rhodes University in at the invitation of

Professor Catriona Macleod, then head of the psychology department.

The lecture followed my selection as the first recipient of a

Department of Psychology award termed the ‘Psychology and Social

Change Project’, an initiative

in which prominent members of the psychology community in

South Africa are honoured for their contribution to social change

in the country. The aim of the project is to acknowledge people

who have gone beyond the traditional bounds and contributed,

through intellectual, professional and personal labour, to social

change and the field of psychology in South Africa.

The department’s Certificate of Acknowledgement stated that the award

was made in recognition of a ‘sustained and excellent contribution to

social change and the field of psychology in South Africa’. As sometimes

happens at ceremonies of this kind, I was asked to give a public lecture

when I accepted the award. I chose an autobiographical theme and used

the opportunity of my engagement with the psychology community at

Rhodes University to examine the opportunities and challenges I had

encountered as a clinical psychologist in apartheid South Africa.

xi



By that time much had happened in my life beyond the demands

of my position as the first African clinical psychologist in our country.

For understandable reasons, the account given in the Rhodes lecture

and the more substantive one given in this autobiography leave out

matters which might be of interest to a wider audience. Among them

are the rewarding one-and-a-half years I spent in the s as the

founding executive director of the Joint Education Trust, a

Johannesburg-based, private-sector-funded organisation working in

the education sector.

Excluded too is an account of the challenging and fulfilling period

from to , when I worked as the first director general of

education during the years of Nelson Mandela’s presidency. In August

I resigned from that post in order to take up a full-time position

as advisor to Professor Johan van Zyl, then vice chancellor of the

University of Pretoria. After a hectic nine-year absence, the return

to a university setting provided me with a platform from which to

conduct research and publish my work locally and internationallyonce again. That return to academic life also enabled me to undertake

what I describe as a life-writing project.

The overall significance of the event at Rhodes is that Professor

Macleod and her colleagues formally acknowledged my contribution to

psychology as a discipline, and it was this acknowledgement that

encouraged me to look more closely at my life and academic career and

to write about it. Coincidentally, the award from Rhodes came in closeproximity to honorary doctorates conferred on me by the universities of

the Witwatersrand and South Africa.

Faced with the unexpected public recognition of my work more

than years after the publication of my fictionalised and semi-

autobiographical memoir Mashangu’s Reverie and its companion essay

‘The Violent Reverie’, I was encouraged to examine and speak about

my life.

Although I was familiar with the international literature on biog-

raphy, my knowledge of the literature on intellectual autobiography

xii



was relatively limited. Coming across discipline-based academic

autobiographies written predominantly by psychologists and

economists was an eye-opener. In the months and years that followed

the public lecture at Rhodes, I was determined to turn the

autobiographical essay I had presented in my speech into a full-scale

intellectual autobiography.

I included the writing of this book in the life-writing project that

was part of my work at the University of Pretoria. Consequently,

work on this autobiography became part of a trilogy, which included

a new, expanded edition of the letters of author Es’kia Mphahlele and

the biography of the artist Dumile Feni that I was writing at the time.

When I strayed into fictionalised autobiographical writing while

doing my postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University in the s,

I could never have imagined that I would write an autobiography

later in my career, since a significant portion of my working life

was focused on mainstream academic publishing. Now I recognise

that, woven into intellectual autobiographies such as this one, arethreads of the formative educational and sociocultural influences of

significant figures such as parents and public role models. At the heart

of the narrative power and relevance of intellectual autobiographies

are moments that stand out – the highs and lows of an individual’s

intellectual life history.

I, too, had such moments. In the pages that follow I tell of my

rural childhood, my adolescence and my years at university. I givefull recognition to the fact that the educational and work experiences

of those early years contributed to the development of the kind of

intellectual I became. The themes of my childhood and early

adulthood are given prominence in the early sections. I fully

acknowledge that my primary and secondary school education, as well

as my life and workplace experiences, contributed to my personal

development and to my development as a professional psychologist.

The fact that race and racism form an important part of this life

story should occasion little surprise. Before the end of apartheid and

xiii



the dawn of the new democratic South Africa, black people were not

allowed to forget that they lived in a racially segregated society, and

it was in this society that I spent the greater part of my working life.

The professional part of my life started in earnest in a neurosurgery

ward at Baragwanath Hospital between and – not out of

choice but because, as a black South African, I could not be admitted

as an intern clinical psychologist at Tara Hospital in suburban

Johannesburg. Tara Hospital was a whites-only psychiatry facility and

there was no similar training facility for Africans in Johannesburg or

anywhere else in the country.

Apartheid laws and practices followed me relentlessly during my

last years at high school and stayed with me for most of my adulthood

and professional life. Overcoming the apartheid-era legal constraints

on my education, professional training and pursuit of my career as a

clinical psychologist was a lifelong challenge.

However, Baragwanath was an exceptional place in which to begin

clinical training in the health professions. The overall academic andprofessional atmosphere in Ward (neurosurgery), where I was placed

for training, was such that, not only did I complete my internship, but

I also conducted and completed my doctoral research on body image

in paraplegia in record time, between and . It was then that

my publication record began to take shape.

Writing this book has enabled me to come to terms with the

personal ways in which encounters with success and adversity becamepart and parcel of the happy and, at times, painful life story told

here. It is a story told on behalf of countless other black and white

South Africans with deserving life stories of their own. Autobio-

graphical memories enable their bearers to fashion what are

sometimes described as ‘identity narratives’.

Even those who do not write their autobiographies find

themselves resorting to such narratives by checking, remembering

and celebrating the man or woman they are at certain stages in their

lives. What is missing from my story are juicy anecdotes of the type

xiv



psychoanalyst and literary scholar Josh Cohen calls ‘the private life’.

The reason is that, as he wrote recently, ‘[a]s soon as you put the

private on display, the clear distinction between honesty and

dishonesty, revelation and dissimulation, dissolves’.

In this book I tell the story of how I became a psychologist from

a number of perspectives. At different times and stages of my writing

I wrote as someone steeped in the traditions of academic and applied

psychology. For such sections of my work I depended largely on

available records, as well as the published work of others.

However, there are sections in which I thrived on the tools and

strategies of a creative non-fiction writer. For those sections, which

are steeped in ‘imaginative reconstruction’, I relied heavily on

autobiographical memory. Throughout the course of writing the

autobiography, as I strove to tell the evolving story of my working life

as a psychologist over a number of decades, I worked hard to come

to terms with what Charles Fernyhough so fittingly describes as the

‘first-person nature of memory’.

xv

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Prelims for Apartheid and the Making of a black psychologist