Berkley Center

Background: South African scholar Professor Njabulo Ndebele is an outspoken South African educator with wide experience with the issues confronting both education and leadership in the region and the challenges his country faces in light of its history and especially the legacy of apartheid. His interests range widely, from history to literature to society to politics. Ndebele was part of the Black Consciousness Movement and has distinctive views about affirmative action in the United States and South Africa and about the impact of apartheid on contemporary politics and society. In this discussion with Angela Reitmaier in Capetown, South Africa, he highlights steps along the way of his ethical journey and its unfolding in the unique context of South Africa. The discussion took place in October 2013, shortly before the December 3, 2013 death of Nelson Mandela. He brings a challenging view to the much discussed concept of ubuntu. It had, he argues, profound effects on young scholars from Southern Africa and a mixed legacy. The joint realities of absent fathers and mothers working so hard that they left home before daybreak helped to shape their intense desire to see change in their societies. One result was that family life itself has become a political issue. He highlights the energy that flows from the juxtaposition of the two names—Mandela and Rhodes—that are part of the foundation he leads. His final thoughts are positive and optimistic: literature, music, and art are thriving, he argues, and make it impossible for repressive government to take hold in South Africa.

What excites you about being the chairman of the Mandela-Rhodes Foundation, a foundation in the names of a freedom fighter and a colonialist?

Being the chairman brings new responsibilities but adjusting to the role has not been that difficult given than I am one of the founding trustees. Thus I am working in a space of some familiarity. From the governance perspective, the chairman becomes a kind of public face of the foundation. This comes with its challenges. One of the most exciting ones is that I and my fellow trustees are conscious of holding in our hands the almost permanent resonance arising out of the contiguousness of the names Mandela and Rhodes in one linguistic space. It is a resonance the founder, Nelson Mandela, was fully aware of when he said: “The bringing together of these two names represents a symbolic moment in the closing of the historic circle; drawing together the legacies of reconciliation and leadership and those of entrepreneurship and education.” It represents a gesture of reconciliation between two historic moments: the moral ambiguities in the historical triumphs of colonialism and the transformative mandate of a modern democratic South Africa.

The two names side by side engender unflagging energy, because the tension in their interaction is ultimately irresolvable as a constant spur to reflection on the possibilities, and the difficulties, of people living together in history. In colonial settings, in the specific instance of Kenya for example, you had the Mau-Mau revolt. In its legitimate reactions to conquest the Mau-Mau engaged in actions that in retrospect the people in Kenya might feel they could have done differently. We have those examples also in the South African context, where the victim legitimately takes action against the oppressor, but in retrospect, if the victim is honest, he can say, perhaps we could have done things differently. 

So the juxtaposition of these two names is itself the story of human interaction. The actions of a Cecil Rhodes, no matter how reprehensible in certain respects, created an infrastructure of schools, universities, roads and railways. This may have been the result of a world that Joseph Conrad attempted to understand in his book Heart of Darkness, but, nevertheless, a railroad is a railroad. I once reflected on this in an essay on Nelson Mandela (Mandela: The Authorized Portrait. Johannesburg: Wild Dog Press: 2006. pp. 336-354). I went to interview him, and landed at the Transkei Airport. I remembered that this airport was built during the times of Apartheid in a Bantustan, but I was landing at the airport at a time when the Bantustan was re-incorporated into South Africa. I did not like the airport and what it represented of a disagreeable aspect of our past, but I realized that the airport really does not care what I feel about it. Its purpose is to be a place where planes land and take off. So whatever meaning we attach to things is neither here nor there, as far as their utility is concerned. So it makes little sense to say, I will not take this railway to go to Dar es Salam, because it was built by Cecil Rhodes. The point is that today, it is serving a different purpose, which is to facilitate travel among people, who are free of the colonial context within which the railway was built. 

So the Mandela-Rhodes Foundation will always be renewed by the debates that the two names will engender for generations to come. I think that the foundation will always be exciting from that point of view.

You have held and are holding many other important positions and are acclaimed as a leading South African thinker. How did you come to do what you have done? What inspired you?

Normally we say that what inspires us comes from outside of oneself. I am more conscious of what is inside of myself, urging me on to do something.

Then what are the values you draw your strengths from?

Reflecting about my ethical journey, I recall an incident from when I was a young boy, maybe around the age of 8 or 10. In my township, my father was the principal of the Charterston High School in the 1950s. One afternoon, I came back from school and I found that there was a group of children from my school, a primary school, who were working in the garden of my home. I went inside the house and did not come out, because I was conscious of and uncomfortable with the fact that here were my peers, working in my home. I felt that I should more appropriately be working with them, somewhere else, as a matter of public duty. I have always tried to understand why I felt so uneasy about this. With the hindsight of an adult, my uneasiness had probably something to do with the fact that my peers were put into a position of serving me. I have always thought that there was something that I could not explain, but which, as an adult, I was able to give words to: the deployment of privilege and power to get things that you normally have to pay for. I do not know to this date whether my father paid something, but the likelihood is that he did not. It was a favor from one principal to another; a kind of feudal entitlement.

I use that as an example of the awareness of an uncomfortable ethical moment. Is ethics in that situation a natural thing? Where does one learn to make those distinctions? Is the sense of fairness, or unfairness, an inborn thing? Are we naturally inclined to discover one or the other, and then are fated to take a position one way or the other? Is it that a corrupt politician has been corrupt a long time ago, before he took office, because he made one choice as opposed to the other? Or did he become corrupt along the way? So I am seldom far away from the questioning of my own position. 

If somewhere along the way Nelson Mandela comes along, I do not think he inspires me; rather, he confirms something that is already there. And if a Cecil Rhodes comes along, and I do not like something about Cecil Rhodes, I think Cecil Rhodes confirms something already inside of me that I do not like. So this is probably responsible for my lack of adulation for a leader, even of the stature of a Nelson Mandela. I do not feel that in his presence, I have been in the presence of a God that cannot be questioned. This is not to say that I have not deeply admired him, and wished that in some cases I could emulate him. Put simply, I do not recall any leader that I have met that I would be so awed by, that I would be ready to do anything he tells me to do, that would be beyond my questioning. 

I believe therefore that the education of an individual is the one antidote to powerful people, who are inclined to ride roughshod over people. So if the sum total of the educational system of South Africa since the introduction of Bantu education has resulted in people who are in adulation of leaders, then Henrik Verwoerd (South African prime minister in the late '50s and early '60s and who was often called the “architect of apartheid") succeeded. 

In an interview with Bishop Mvume Dandala, he highlighted his formation by the Black Consciousness Movement. He spoke of the days when Stephen Biko was the prime student leader and people like yourself, Barney Pityana, and Mamphela Ramphele questioned the role of society in forming their attitudes, and their own role in forming the attitudes of society. What impact has the Black Consciousness Movement had on your life?

It was a very formative influence. What Black Consciousness did was philosophically to contradict the assertions of apartheid, that black people were inferior and of little value compared to white people. This had a very liberating effect. Steve Biko’s power came not from confronting white power with its own logic, but from asserting a black self-centeredness that did not seek justification from outside of itself. There was a sense of integrity that was ultimately beyond the control of political and cultural whiteness. Apartheid sought to implant its negativity about black people inside of them so that they could accept that very negativity as a vital condition of their identity. If black people accepted that condition then there would have been no need for laws to control their behavior. Black Consciousness, which represented a rejection by black people of becoming agents for their own indignity, led to the apartheid state passing more repressive legislation. The more resistance there was, the more the repression to crush it. Thus the repression was not only evidence of institutionalized racism, it was more significantly an index of the intensity of black resistance to it.

The ethical and moral implications of Black Consciousness as not only an antidote to White Consciousness, but also as a new standard for more humane society were deepened further for many of us when we came across the seminal writings of the Brazilian philosopher of education, Paulo Freire. Freire famously wrote “It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors. The latter, as an oppressive class, can free neither others nor themselves” (Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York, The Seabury Press: 1968. p.42).

It is the existential confidence of the oppressed as representing a more humane future that supports their confidence in defining that future and then working to make it happen. People who have been oppressing others, do not know how to bring about a different future. They are committed in the main to maintain the status quo. But those from whom something has been taken away, have a sense of and mission to bring about the unity and wholeness that they have been deprived of. They can restore that unity and mission for the sake of everyone, including those that have made life intolerable for them.

Paradoxically today, in post-apartheid South Africa we still have organizations that call themselves “black” such as the Black Lawyers Association, and others. We have government policies such as Black Economic Empowerment. Beyond Black Consciousness there ought no longer to be any need for black people in South Africa to define themselves as “black,” because they are supposed to have reached a state of existential self-definition that provides the human standard for a new society. Instead, they cede their existential power to a force they still perceive to carry human currency and agency they have to respond to, instead of leading it towards a new human reality.

From this perspective there is no place in South Africa for the policy of affirmative action. It may have a place in the United States, where black people have had no chance ever of being the majority population, and only through policy of affirmative action could they be enabled to create space for them in the larger society. To take affirmative action and bring it into South Africa is to put black people politically and psychologically into a position of being a minority. It does not make any sense for any black people today to be calling themselves black. They are, who they are. In the South African context, they are the definers of the future; they do not need a description that is based on some politics of the past that is no longer applicable to the situation of today. They need no definition that supersedes their status as empowered citizens in a democracy with a constitution and a bill of rights that put them, as citizens, at the center of the entire national endeavor.

So I think we have gone in the wrong direction. All Black Empowerment does is get a few black people into the very structures of oppression that were responsible for our past. We have got that wrong, and we are continuing with it, and it is a tragedy. So I do not have to define myself as black in order to be a full participant in the affairs of the world. I may have started with Black Consciousness, but it was a means to recapture the wholeness of myself. That has been done. We need to get on with life and not keep putting that tag on who we are.

When you were invited to speak about Sister Quinlan in 2012 on the sixtieth anniversary of her death at the hands of ANC youth during the Defiance Campaign, you asked your audience, “What would you have done had you been in that group of young people that stopped Sister Quinlan’s car and killed her?” How do you break out of the loyalties that keep you in the group? Who today are the examples of people who break out of loyalties?

I struggle to look for those examples, because those that ought to be them, I feel, have been silenced within the ANC. They are not as powerful a voice as they have used to be in the past. There are many people who fear the consequences of being perceived as disloyal, even though in all conscience, they no longer agree with where the ANC is now.

In the speech about Sister Quinlan I dramatized the situation of an ethical key moment, where you know that something is wrong, but you participate in the doing of it, because you are no longer in control of your ethical faculties. But I hasten to add that this is a condition that is very human. If I can give one example, one of the greatest books in my library that I always think of in such situations, is Lord of the Flies, where lawlessness takes over this group of well-disciplined English boys, who find themselves in a situation away from constituted authority. It is a human condition. When the boy Piggy is finally killed, it is a killing of conscience. When conscience is put aside in human society, the society swerves to extremes. In Germany, this happened under Hitler. I think that all these stories tell us that societies have to work hard to have thoughtful and sensitive critical citizens, who honor their individual and collective consciences.

Do you think that Edward Snowden, the whistleblower of wiretapping in the United States, is someone who broke out of such loyalties?

He is a very good example of someone who had to weigh between personal loyalty to his country and the greater good for the world, and he chose the latter. This choice is not easy. I wanted my audience to confront this difficulty. And I once put a similar question forward in one of my articles, when I wrote about a police officer who was beating the wife of a colleague in public. If you see people beating up a person in public, what do you do? Do you go and defend that person? Or do you stand aside, watch and not do anything? Or do you walk away, embarrassed by your own inability to do anything? This is a classic ethical moment, which we have seen various examples of around the world.

Ubuntu is something uniquely African that binds groups together: "a person is a person only through other persons." It creates the glue holding communities together. Do you have positive examples of ubuntu? Could this glue also work negatively, making it more difficult to break out of group loyalties in the cases we just mentioned, or does it work only positively when you enhance the social spirit of the community?

I must admit I have an ambivalent stance as to the notion of ubuntu. It came about in a context in which black people were made to feel that they had not made any major contribution to the world, and so somebody said that we contributed ubuntu to the world. If you study the proverbs of Africa, it is possible to say that Africans are more conscious of the social sphere within which an individual African exists than many societies outside of Africa, and particularly of the West. Perhaps beyond that I can say that third world societies in general, be they in South America or Asia, are more likely to have a sense of ubuntu. Ubuntu describes more a social awareness and an ethics that is derived from that awareness, rather than something to be experienced as a philosophy characteristic and definitive of black people in a prescriptive and regulatory kind of way. In other words, logically, an African may have ubuntu, but an African is not always in an ubuntu situation. Many other people in the world may have ubuntu without it being described that way. A new South Africa does not need an ubuntu outside of a constitution, which is already informed by it.

In your “Meditations on Corruption,” you speak about "corruptive collusion as forming the new foundation of group solidarity within the group in power in South Africa, as being hostile towards any regulatory measures emanating from outside the group, even the national constitution, and as using concealment as a necessary method of operation." What can be done to stop this?

Your first question was about the Mandela-Rhodes Foundation. We have just completed four days of interviews to select the next cohort of the Mandela-Rhodes scholars. And what struck me about practically all of them is their sense of, and their awareness of, a world that needs to be changed. They come from Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, Botswana, or Lesotho. The majority are from South Africa, and within South Africa, they come from the Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Gauteng, KwaZulu Natal, all over. So where does this sense of awareness of a world that needs to be changed come from?

The vast majority of them were born around the end of apartheid in 1994. Yet they are aware of where we have come from, and of disparities within the society, of enormous wealth, and enormous poverty. I extrapolate from this that the vast majority of South Africans outside of the political realm are far more advanced in their social thinking than the government itself. They have moved far ahead of the government, which in my view thinks that because many in it, as members of the ANC fought in the liberation struggle, it is must continue to fight the good fight it, even though the necessity for that kind of fight ended 20 years ago. The government seems incapable of thinking anew, even within the constraints of the constitution that it fought for.

It makes no sense not to care about the quality of people to be appointed appointed judges, ministers, or police officers, or even members of political parties. Ethical and moral commitment need to go with education and trained skill. If you have a potential Chief Justice, who has proven to be effective, and you choose someone else who has no comparable track record, you should give reasons why universally recognized qualities should no longer be considered relevant in South Africa. Instead manipulation of the system and becomes a substitute for transparent discussion.

But a system that has to be manipulated suggests that it cannot be justified. We need a political imagination that is aware of but is no longer founded, on the logic of a necessarily secretive liberation struggle, but more on transparently activating the talents of all South Africans in order to make the future which the constitution wants us to make. I can see that kind of politics beginning to take shape from amongst the young people that I recently saw.

In your novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela you comment on the rebuilding of homes and communities, which you see as the "most compelling factor in enabling us to sustain our nationhood. That way we may yet prevent our democracy from being a system in which extremes of behavior... wreak havoc on our capacity to sustain our freedom." Have you seen progress in the rebuilding of homes, not just physical structures, but homes, as you say, "into which the values of honor, integrity, compassion and creativity are infused?" What role are women playing in this?

Unfortunately, I do not see many good signs. I think that the African family has been under attack for more than 300 years. When the colonialists such as the British, including Cecil Rhodes, came to South Africa, they levied taxes on conquered people, so they had to go and work in the mines, abandoning their families and destroying the family structure. We are reaping the havoc created over more than two centuries ago. Today many families do not have a father, because he walked away for various reasons. The impact of this situation on women is what The Cry of Winnie Mandela explores. The women who wait do not know if their husbands are coming back. This has consequences for the decisions that they make about the intimate sides of themselves. Sometimes they are driven into things, even without being aware. Decisions that they make at the spur of the moment are indicative of desires that they have had for a long time and that are activated in moments of extreme loneliness and weakness. And then they find out that they have taken a plunge into hell, and they struggle to come back.

I think that part of the politics of the future is to make family life a political issue. We need to activate one aspect of ubuntu that I have always been positively inclined towards. It is captured in an African proverb: it takes a village to bring up the child. So what do we do, when we have a school in some township and some 60 percent or more of the children in that school last saw their mother yesterday evening, because she arrives from work after dark, sees them for a few hours, and leaves before daylight when they are still asleep. Who is bringing up these children?

Clearly, the school and the teachers play a great role, but do they have the awareness, the training, and the inclination to nurture children in the school environment? How do you design the school environment to minimize the negative effects of parental absence? How do you design the human environment beyond the school? So today I see the houses built under the Reconstruction and Development Program. There is no soul in them, because they have not been built around a defined social purpose, but in the way they have always been built, as little four-roomed houses for black people, who still call themselves “black” and the stay with the implications of that self-description despite “black people” being in power. The very black people are still building the same kind of houses. The “black people” in power have spent an insufficient amount of time and targeted resources visualizing the community of the future.

Two thirds of the world’s populations live in the third world. I have been to South America, Ghana, Nigeria, India, and I have read about communal lifestyles in the Middle East. The vast majority of the world's population live as families in compounds. This is diametrically different from a modern city environment in predominantly westernized communities, where you do not know the person next door, or on the opposite side of the road; they are complete strangers. Many people find this alienating. But it is obviously designed for a certain kind of economic structure. That economic system reproduces itself by focusing on the labor of people and by reducing the social networks. We have many, many issues to work out, but our politics is currently not configured to do that. A big portion of the budget goes to social grants. I should not be misunderstood to be against such grants. But the social grants must be construed in a manner that incrementally takes people away from dependence on them. If a good portion of the population depend on them, you can say at the next election, that if you vote for that party, they are going to take the social grants away from you, but if you vote for me, you will continue to get them. This is the politics of impoverishment, fear, and dependence.

In Chinua Achebe’s book Anthills of the Savannah, he says "Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit—in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever." Would storytellers still be perceived as a threat in South Africa that has a constitution guaranteeing rights to freedom? 

Well right now, I am happy to say, the storytellers are thriving. The books are coming out, new novels, poetry, new plays, new music. The storytellers are thriving in the same way that the young people I was mentioning are thriving. The storytellers, the young people represent a re-adjustment in society. A base of consciousness is being created, from which we can start thinking about a new future. So if Chinua Achebe is saying storytellers are a threat, they are a threat to totalitarian control freaks. If South Africa develops such freaks, because some people want to hold on to power at all cost, then the storytellers will be a threat. But I am hoping for a situation where the storytellers are so many, that there is no way that they can be repressed. And I hope that oppressive, corruptive governments will simply wither away because there is no room for them anymore. And I suspect that foundation is probably being laid in South Africa today, and no single party, no matter how powerful now, is likely to withstand it. It may take another decade, but it is irreversible.

There was a time when I thought that the ANC was such a visionary party that they could also anticipate their own departure from power. If you look at the Western Cape, where the ANC is fighting against the Democratic Alliance in all sorts of ways, including the liberation struggle tactic of “rendering the province ungovernable.” There is a devastating irony in the question: how can a government in power render ungovernable a part of the country whose stability it is their constitutional responsibility to ensure? Surely there is only one way that the ANC can win back Western Cape. It is by being a good radical political party that pursues the dream of the constitution. If they do that, they may very well be voted in for a long time. But I do not think they are configured to pursue the hard work required, in skill and principle, pursue that route.