Читать книгу Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist - N. Chabani Manganyi - Страница 10
Оглавление1Early days in Mavambe
When I remember the years gone by, especially the years of my childhood in a place called Mavambe (situated in what is now the Limpopo province), it is often visual images of people and places which come to mind. I remember the sombre darkness of some winter nights, when it was too bitingly cold for anyone to linger outside. I have memories of my mother carrying out everyday household chores in our yard or planting seed for a maize and vegetable harvest in the summer. Such memories are vivid enough. However, they are remarkably difficult to put into words.
I have always known and accepted the family history which says that I was born in Mavambe on 13 March 1940. If you were to insist on concrete evidence of my date of birth, neither my late parents nor I would be able to provide it, but I believe that date to be accurate because, at the beginning of the 1947 school year, when I started attending the one-teacher, one-classroom school across the river from our home, I was believed to be seven years old. With the exception of the year 1948, the most memorable and happiest part of my childhood was spent in Mavambe with my mother.
In 1948 I was sent away to live for a year at the home of my mother’s brother, Jim Manyangi, in Nwamatatani (many kilometres away) to attend the Assemblies of God school at the Caledon Mission, where I completed Standard One. The most visible figure at the school was a short, plumpish white woman called Miss Nash, who appeared to be in charge of everything that happened at both the small mission and the school. At the end of that year I returned home to attend another Assemblies of God school, which had classes up to Standard Six, the national qualification level for entry into high school. At both schools there was much praying and talk about Christianity, Jesus and God – talk which was unheard of at my home and within the chief’s village where we lived.
It was just as well that I was whisked away after only a year at the Caledon Mission. My uncle’s children showed little enthusiasm for learning to read and write and I was fortunate to have been rescued from the prospect of a lifetime of illiteracy and ignorance. Back home I found myself burdened with a daily walk of a few kilometres to and from Shingwedzi Primary School. It was a lonesome journey because, at some point, my cousins from the chief’s family had been allowed to drop out of school.
Over the long years of my adult life I have been unreservedly grateful to my parents: my father had made it clear both to my mother and to me that attending school was an obligation that had to be met. The message was conveyed to me firmly by my mother whenever I showed signs of wanting to play sick in order to stay home. It was under the resolute guidance of my parents and under the watchful eye of dedicated and exemplary teachers – very different from the highly unionised teachers of contemporary South Africa – that I completed primary school at the end of 1954.
That almost did not happen, however. Just before the final Standard Six examination I crossed paths with the head of the primary school, a Mr Mahlale. A short man with a serious turn of mind, he acted decisively when my classmates and I showed signs of boyish delinquency. My father had left his brand-new bicycle at home after his last visit and I thought I could put it to good use by cycling to visit relatives, such as my aunt at Xikundu, some distance away from our home. But this youthful waywardness became costly when I stayed away from school for a whole week. When I returned Mahlale summoned me to his office and proceeded to cane me so hard that the memory is still vivid in my mind.
Looking back at that experience and at the fact that children were dropping out of school at will, without the active intervention of their parents, I realise that what happened in Mahlale’s office was a life-changing event. I say this in all seriousness because even today I still ask myself what would have happened if the principal had spared the cane. After all, I had watched my cousins and others drop out of school without the sky falling from its heavenly heights. It is not difficult to play down the lifetime significance of isolated events of the ‘what if’ variety. But I have accepted the fact that a hiding in a school principal’s office in a small unknown village called Shingwedzi contributed in no small measure to the long and challenging journey that made me the man and the intellectual that I am today.
Mphaphuli High School in Sibasa (now Thohoyandou) looked recently built when I arrived there in January 1955 to begin my high school education. In those days parents did not discuss their choice of schools with their children. Nor had the teachers told those of us in the final year of primary school about the need to apply for admission to the high schools in Elim near Louis Trichardt and Sibasa.
The fact that I had done well in the final examinations was nearly undermined by the fact that I had not applied for admission to any secondary school. I was fortunate to have a distant relative, Constable Maluleke, who was stationed at police headquarters in Sibasa. In all likelihood he had approached the authorities at Mphaphuli High School to secure my admission as a student for the first of the three years of study towards my Junior Certificate. I, together with another boy, Xihala, was to live with Maluleke and his wife in the police compound adjacent to the office of the native affairs commissioner.
Thanks to my good school record in Shingwedzi I experienced no difficulties settling in at school. However, settling in with Constable Maluleke and his wife proved emotionally demanding and the first months of 1955 were nerve-racking. The husband was a friendly, warm, older man who kept out of one’s way. The hassles Xihala and I experienced arose from the demeanour of Maluleke’s wife. She was a heartless, childless woman who treated the two of us as though we were slaves. Thinking back to those days, I wonder about the fate of Xihala, who always looked so sad and subdued.
The Maluleke family left Sibasa long before the end of the 1955 school year as a result of Constable Maluleke’s transfer to a different police jurisdiction, and I was compelled to move on to live with Ramaite, an unmarried clerk employed at the commissioner’s office. At his home I did not have to wake up at dawn to make a fire and boil the hot water for his bath as Xihala and I had done for the Malulekes. Yet it soon turned out that I was destined for a short stay. Ramaite made intolerable demands when he arrived home late at night after his regular drinking sorties in the village. In his state of intoxication he would call for food, though he knew there was often none in the house.
Luckily I did not try to find my way back home when my living conditions became intolerable. Perhaps a greater being was watching over me – I was much happier with the two families I lived with during the second half of the year. Overall, I still relish the fact that, demanding as the first year of high school was, the experiences of that year turned me into a more self-sufficient young man, one who could cook simple meals, iron a policeman’s uniform, and polish his big boots and brass buttons without missing a single day of schooling in the process.
Once again, my success at high school, and later at university, was assured by good teachers. The best among them made the classroom a very interesting place to be in, and learning became a challenge and an adventure. The brother-and-sister team, the Dzivhanes, who had university degrees, was the most memorable pair of teachers in my life, and I know now that all such individuals at both high school and university were able to engage my curiosity and interest in learning, encouraging me to learn even more by reading outside the classroom.
What I found most admirable about the memorable men and women who taught me at different stages of my life was their ability to engage my curiosity and interest in such a way as to leave an enduring disposition – a love of knowledge – that served me well for the rest of my life. Consequently, on looking back now, I am intrigued by the way in which certain people’s lives, their knowledge and achievements, as well as their example and their confidence in me at certain critical moments, has meant so much in the story of my life. To admit our indebtedness to others is a strength and a virtue. No one literally took me by the hand, but my favourite teachers enticed me with their intellectual brilliance and through gestures of confidence in me and what I was doing. I always admired their self-confidence, skill and the dedication with which they carried out their teaching.
Some aspects of my childhood and youth have puzzled me a great deal. One thing that still intrigues me today is how I and other infants born at that time survived both birth and early childhood without the benefit of regular visits to Western medical practitioners. There were neither clinics nor hospitals for miles in any direction from our home, yet here I am, still up and about a little more than seven decades later.
Our home in Mavambe was adjacent to the homestead of our chief, whose first name was Morris and his surname, like that of all of us in our extended family, was Manganyi. In common parlance he was Chief Mavambe, as were several of my ancestors who had been chiefs before him. According to information I found recently, our family was part of the migration from Mozambique to the then north-eastern Transvaal. In the course of my research I came across a brief, tattered document dated 25 November 1957 and written by N J van Warmelo, a South African government official of note. The document, signed at Sibasa, was given to my cousin Chief George Mavambe, who was investigating the land claims of his people after the democratic elections of 1994. It contains information about various chiefs and their descendants in Mavambe after their forebears’ arrival from Mozambique. In it Van Warmelo pronounced:
This chief has no jurisdiction as yet and some of his followers live on land adjoining the location. As with other smaller Shangaan sections south of the Levhuvhu river, the people of different units live interspersed, the farm boundaries on the map are unknown and not to be found with survey, and therefore meaningless for administrative purposes, so that a good deal of census-taking and other ground work will have to be done before defined areas can be set aside for different chiefs and headmen – if at all possible in some instances without causing hardship to the people who have either to move or transfer their allegiance. Alternatively, they may be left where they are, and amalgamation and abolition of headmanships can be resorted to. The need for attempting to do all this at once is not apparent and I would recommend getting Bantu Authorities started and working in the other bigger first [sic].
The everyday consequences of policies briefly referred to in Van Warmelo’s document are still evident today in Mavambe.
When I was growing up I never heard anyone refer to Mavambe as a location. What people talked about was a chiefdom, headed by a chief (‘hosi’ in my vernacular), not the character Van Warmelo calls ‘kaptein’. Van Warmelo confirms our Mozambican ancestry when he reports that the first three chiefs – Bungu, Mukhanwe and Khutla – were sub-chiefs at a place called Bileni in Mozambique. We learn also that the surname of all the chiefs had always been Manganyi. After migration from Mozambique to South Africa the succession involved Mavambe, Chabani, Muhlava, John Muhlava Mavambe, Morris Manganyi, Patrick Manganyi and John Magezi Manganyi, and I, too, was given the name Chabani – Noel Chabani George Manganyi.
Van Warmelo concludes his account by stating that the majority of the inhabitants of Mavambe were Tsongas. He is probably right; yet, during my boyhood in the 1950s and 1960s many Tshivenda-speaking families lived in our midst. Sadly, as Hendrik Verwoerd’s apartheid policies started to take hold during the 1960s, large numbers of Tshivenda-speaking members of our community were forced to move to predominantly Tshivenda-speaking areas across the Levubu River. The national loss of ethnic and cultural diversity involved in the separate development policy of the 1960s planted the insidious seeds of cultural and political fragmentation, which the independent homelands policy brought to fruition over the next several decades.
I do not know when my parents were born. My grandfather, a man I never set eyes on, was one of the many chiefs who were descendants of the family from Mozambique. His name was Chabani and I was dutifully named after him, though I had no prospect whatsoever of becoming a chief. I learnt when I grew up that there had been succession disputes in the past and my father was determined to stay out of the fray. He lived, worked and later died in Johannesburg, as though he was at pains to demonstrate his rejection of the chieftainship throughout his life.
Mavambe Store, named after the local chief and still in existence today, is a stone’s throw away from my childhood home. I remember the sedentary shopkeeper, Jerry Khangale, who became my first adult friend of a kind in Mavambe in the early 1950s. A short distance away from the shop and along the road to Phunda Maria stood a ramshackle brownish building that was called a hotel. I remember some locals meeting there to buy and drink home-brewed beer. Nwambhangini, a short, dark-skinned, enterprising woman, was the power behind this thriving but illegal undertaking.
My memories include regular meetings of the chief and his councillors under the big tree at the chief’s homestead and the comings and goings of men from the mines in Johannesburg being transported home to Mozambique and Malawi on buses owned by the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association. The miners would stop over on Saturday afternoons and drink more alcohol than was good for them in Mavambe Store.
At Christmas time, when most migrant workers, including my father, were home for the holidays, there were plenty of sweets and chocolates, new school clothes and shoes for me, plus the melodic sound of the His Master’s Voice gramophone. Our single-room house contained a sizeable double bed, a wooden table and chairs. Cutlery was brought into daily use only when my father was home.
This rural tranquillity was shattered briefly and our village and the neighbouring communities put on edge by a murder in one of the local forests. Fortunately for all concerned, a citizen’s arrest brought welcome relief. A story spread throughout the village to the effect that the murderer, whose identity remained a mystery, had been tied to a tree until police from Sibasa arrived to fetch him. For some time after this incident I remained fearful at night because there were only the two of us, my mother and me, at our home.
Well before I went to high school, my father had decided, like so many African men in those days, to marry a second wife. She was my mother’s niece. It was not long before there were consequences for the four of us. Instead of maintaining only the one home that he had so successfully supported in Mavambe, he joined the increasing millions of African migrant workers who were making the cities and towns of the Witwatersrand their second home. My father moved out of the single-sex hostel in which he had lived for many years to find a bed in a shared, single, all-purpose room in Sixth Avenue in the bustling Johannesburg township of Alexandra. At one stage in the mid-1950s two couples and a boy my age lived in the room.
My father must have known that he would struggle to support two families – he was biting off more than he could chew. No matter how well intentioned he was, the wife in Mavambe was going to play second fiddle to the one who spent most nights with him in Johannesburg. Remarkably, he made sure he had a job to wake up to throughout his working life, but it took several years of living in single rooms in Alexandra township and in Sun Valley in Pimville, Soweto, before he qualified for a cramped, three-room, semi-detached house in Zone 5, Diepkloof. On the few occasions that I visited him in Johannesburg, I was struck by the unfamiliar signs of naked poverty that surrounded the place in Soweto that we called home. The solid wooden furniture, double bed, crockery and cutlery of my youth in Mavambe were a thing of the past. It took me some years to gain an understanding of our family’s plight as well as of the levels of poverty which had overtaken our people in the cities and the countryside.
Regrettably, I took a very long time to accept and understand the troubles that had befallen our family. The easy way out was to blame my father for his decisions. By the time he died, in 1981 in Soweto, he was effectively left with one wife – the one with whom he had continued to live in Johannesburg. My mother had moved to a cottage I had built for her next to her sister’s home in Olifantshoek, near Giyani in Limpopo.
It was only during my participation in the Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in Southern Africa in the 1980s that I gained a better understanding of our fate as black South Africans as the apartheid racial utopia took shape in town and countryside during the late 1950s and 1960s. I had innocently decided that my contribution to the inquiry would take the form of an essay titled ‘The Worst of Times: A Migrant Worker’s Autobiography’, which focused on the working life of a labour migrant from Limpopo.7
I researched the life history of my mother’s elder sister’s husband, Chipa Hlengani Mkhabela. Like my father, he spent the major part of his life working in Johannesburg. For him, too, life had been good in the early years of his career as a migrant. I had seen him back home at times, at a place called Barota in Limpopo, when my mother and I visited her sister. There were no alarm bells then about hunger and poverty. Yet, by the time of the inquiry I was compelled to describe his life as one of misery and struggle. Excerpts from the Carnegie paper provide some interesting insights into a migrant’s dilemma with regard to some of the most pressing problems of those days.
What I discovered during my conversations with him was that in the course of his protracted working life between the 1930s and 1983, when ill health compelled him to stop working, the conditions of his life had changed dramatically. Now, at 70, Mkhabela, like my father and thousands of his contemporaries, lived what I described in the essay as the ‘marginal life of the seasoned but permanent migrant who is neither a townsman (proletarian) nor a village peasant’. Like millions of his African compatriots, he had been compelled by our country’s racist laws to move back and forth between his home in the Northern Transvaal countryside and the urban residential ghettoes known as hostels in Johannesburg.
As though that were not enough suffering for one lifetime, his family and tribe back home were faced with government-enforced migrations from one part of the Northern Transvaal to another, mandated in the interests of Afrikaner farmers as well as to achieve the ethnic segregation of black people in the rural areas. Sadly, I concluded after my conversations with him that his life and work history illustrate the kind of social alienation, displacement and rampant impoverishment that accompanied the roll-out of the everyday practical applications of Verwoerd’s policy of separate development. Indeed, the conditions of his life and work were so onerous that it became increasingly difficult for him to support himself and his family in the countryside.
Revisiting Chipa Hlengani Mkhabela’s life story still makes me indignant. In it I recognise a replay of the life story of my father and the cruel fate that our family endured as separate development policies took hold throughout South Africa. I now appreciate more clearly than I ever did during the early 1980s the impact of the lifetime employment of men such as my father and his brother-in-law in South Africa’s cities on their lives and those of their families. For me, participation in the second Carnegie investigation opened up wounds that had been festering in my heart and mind for many years.
What made the situation more distressing for me was the fact that my father had died early in 1981. I was left imagining how I might have asked him for understanding and forgiveness for my youthful ignorance and the ruthlessness with which I had judged him. It had been difficult for me to understand how the caring, family-oriented, self-respecting man of my childhood years could have changed into what we called in Shangaan a ‘kholwa’, or one who never returns to the rural areas from the cities. Now I understand that the burden of black migrant male workers during the second half of the twentieth century was simply too onerous for anyone to carry with any dignity. Men such as my father and his brother-in-law had known self-respect and a sense of self-worth before the unrelenting claims of urban and rural poverty left them with an unmistakeable sense of shame, silent anger and regret.
In my juvenile lack of understanding in the late 1960s and 1970s, I failed to appreciate the fact that my father had managed, through what on occasion must have been intolerable sacrifices, to pay my school fees at Douglas Laing Smit, the high school section of a mission boarding school called Lemana, a short driving distance from the small provincial town of Louis Trichardt. I attended Lemana for four years between 1956 and 1959, when I completed matric.8 Unlike Mphaphuli High, Lemana, a combined teacher-training and secondary school co-educational institution, was a boarding school. On the male campus on which I lived during my student days, each of us was allocated to a house. Each house was named after an outstanding figure (one was Seretse Khama of Botswana). I lived in Livingstone House.
Like many other celebrated African schools in the late 1950s, Lemana was invaded by crusaders of what was to become known as Bantu Education and was educationally vandalised through the introduction of that iniquitous system by the Afrikaner emissaries who formed the advance teams dispatched by the apartheid government to take over the management and administration of African schools. Like St Peter’s in Johannesburg and many other notable schools throughout our country, Lemana was ultimately closed down and literally abandoned to the elements, a fate which must stand out as one of the most shameful wastes of educational infrastructure in South Africa’s history.
On a Saturday morning in 2010 I paid a lone and nostalgic visit to my alma mater. I was greeted by an eerie silence as I walked along the unpaved pathways and roads from the male housing complex and around the ornate dull-brown chapel that had looked so much bigger during my school days. Then followed a slow walk down the cascading slope from what used to be the teacher-training part of the campus to the old Douglas Laing Smit Secondary School at the brow of the hill. I could not help thinking that, following their arrival, the Swiss missionaries, educators and medical doctors who had come to this part of the country must have banked on a long stay at Lemana and at the Elim Mission, Elim Hospital and Valdezia, some kilometres to the north-east of Lemana. The old buildings at Lemana Hill, including the superintendent’s residence, as well as the forest plantations along the edges of the hill continued to create an atmosphere of serenity. Even after years of neglect the campus remains remarkably steadfast and visually engaging. I felt that my old school was like a sanctuary waiting for a second coming.
While the vulgarity of Bantu Education was creeping into our classrooms in 1958 and 1959 at Lemana and elsewhere, Afrikanerdom was bringing a splendid educational chapter to a close and, along with it, the intellectual bounty of excellent teachers. My Lemana teachers found me ready for demanding studies in English higher grade, history, geography, Xitsonga and Afrikaans. I left each lesson with the distinct feeling that the teachers knew what they were doing. What I needed to do was to take full advantage of what was on offer.
By the time of my solitary visit to Lemana I had learnt a lot more than I had known as a schoolboy about the history of the school’s founders and about Elim Hospital, where I was circumcised, where I received my first pair of spectacles and where I worked in close proximity to medical doctors, doing odd jobs during school holidays for the first time in my life. Experiences at Elim Hospital opened the doors for my appreciation of what could be achieved with a good education, beyond teaching and missionary work. Little did I know at the time that hospitals and healing would play such an important role in my professional life.
Before my visit to Lemana I had read Patrick Harries’s book Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa. This helped me to understand the role of Swiss and other missionaries in the development of education in the north-eastern part of our country. One of their aims was to harness the combined potential benefits of belief in God and the discoveries of science. We learn from Harries’s account that a farm named Klipfontein at the headwaters of the Levubu and the Letaba rivers became home to several thousand early Christian converts. The missionaries named the station Valdezia. A few kilometres from Valdezia another mission outpost, called Elim, was established. The point at which this history touches my own life arises with the establishment of Lemana and Elim Hospital, both of them about 80 kilometres from Mavambe. During the four years I spent at Lemana as a student not even a hint of this interesting colonial history was given to us.
Harries also tells us that
missionaries normally erected their houses on hills from where they can cast an organizing gaze on the land below. From this vantage they conceived cleanliness as their major defense in the battle against the dark forces attached to the land; they obsessively washed themselves, particularly their children.9
I confirmed this choice for myself as I walked at different times over the hills at Lemana, Elim Mission and Elim Hospital.
My years at Lemana did more than expand my world educationally. I also gained an understanding of the connection between education and life choices. To me, education meant more than reading, writing and being able to calculate. I was exposed to some of its practical outcomes when I was given an anaesthetic by a doctor at Elim Hospital before my circumcision. About two years later, during my holiday work as a gardener for doctors at the hospital, I watched them at work in the wards in their white coats, stethoscopes hanging around their necks.
At Lemana itself one was given a peep into the world of knowledge through the school subjects, which, apart from Afrikaans, were taught at high levels of mastery. I worked hard, not only because I was expected to, but also because I enjoyed reading the prescribed texts that our English teacher, Mrs Hill, so confidently took us through during our senior years. Socially, culturally and intellectually my experiential horizons expanded at Lemana.
A substantial number of students at the school came from urban areas such as Pretoria and Johannesburg and many different African languages were spoken. In addition, there was an array of excellent and seasoned teachers, mostly black, with a sprinkling of white ones. Interestingly, what I remember most vividly about my days at Lemana has very little to do with play and entertainment. Most memorable to me are the teachers who made us laugh in class; those instructors, such as our geography teacher, Miyeni, who gave masterful performances in the delivery of their subject matter; and the self-restrained lifestyles and expectations of the missionaries.
In 1958 and 1959, my last two years at Lemana, the National Party occupation of African schools began in earnest. The sudden appearance of government-appointed senior white officials to take charge of our school was a sinister precursor of what was to follow: the nationwide closure of excellent schools such as Lemana. First, the Reverend Bill, the missionary and overall head of the school, was suddenly replaced by a Mr Endeman, a government appointee. Soon Mr Witkop, the well-liked and revered principal of the secondary school, was summarily removed. A former senior police officer, a Mr De Beer, was appointed second in charge. He also became our Afrikaans teacher in matric.
While the chief concern of the missionaries had been about relationships between male and female students on campus, naked attempts were made – by De Beer in particular, during our Afrikaans lessons – to indoctrinate us to become supporters of the tribal homelands that were soon to be established throughout South Africa. My classmates and I were dragged into apartheid and separate development politics during our final year at the school. Most of us in that matric class of 1959 received a foretaste of the kind of future that Afrikanerdom was busy concocting for us, both in our institution and in South African society as a whole.
Pupils at Lemana wrote the Joint Matriculation Board examinations instead of the National Senior Certificate examinations written by those at government schools. A friend of mine, Mike Sono, and I passed well enough to qualify for university admission, but our misfortune was the year in which we did so. For on the first day of August 1959 the University College of the North (popularly known as Turfloop, after the farm on which it was situated) was proclaimed by the minister of Bantu Education. This ‘ethnic’ university was to function under the watchful eye of the University of South Africa (Unisa) in Pretoria.
The university was brought into being through the promulgation of the Extension of University Education Act (Act No. 45 of 1959). The first rector was a short, strong-boned man, Professor E F Potgieter, who took his seat at the new institution on the day it was proclaimed. The college itself opened its doors to students on the day of my arrival, 2 March 1960. I was student number 11 in the college register, which recorded that there were fewer than 100 students at the university. From the start the college authorities made sure that unauthorised student meetings were forbidden on campus, so we held them behind the bushes on some of the prominent hills.
The first Student Representative Council (SRC), of which I was a member, was elected in 1961. I had been a member of the first dissident class at Lemana and had the requisite political consciousness to become involved in student government and its unavoidable politics. Our class was, in all likelihood, the last group to have escaped the introduction of Bantu Education.
Apart from Professor Potgieter, who came from Unisa, there was, among the white members of staff, a notable mix of overseas-educated academics and those who had come from some of the country’s Afrikaans-language universities. Short in stature as Potgieter was, in presence and intellect he towered over most of his colleagues and was a very effective speaker. Although we left some room for guarded suspicion in our relationships with him, the brightest among us could not help according him the respect he was due. Together with the less academically outstanding Afrikaner academics was a small group of carefully selected African intellectual upstarts who had a great deal to learn about what it meant to be an academic. They had been carefully hand-picked from the Bantu Education inspectorate corps to serve in disciplines such as education and the region’s African languages – namely, Sesotho, Tshivenda, Setswana and Xitsonga. In time, some African staff members became the most visible beneficiaries of the emerging Bantu Education and homelands projects of the ruling National Party.
Shortly after I had settled in at the university, and before autumn came, I learnt that my father would be unable to meet the cost of my studies. What distresses me most is that to this day the good Samaritan who came to my rescue is unknown to me. The crisis concerning my university fees was handled in two stages, the first implemented with a sense of urgency. It was agreed that to cover my fees I would work in the kitchen of the students’ dining hall. In practice this meant that I reported for duty before supper was served to help set the tables and do other odds and ends. After dinner I helped the kitchen staff wash up and prepare for the next morning’s breakfast. The good Samaritan was someone at the Zion Catholic Church, whose headquarters are a few kilometres away from the campus. He or she must have taken pity on me, for I was pleasantly surprised by the second stage of aid, when I was offered a scholarship that was contingent on my doing well in my studies. Once again, my encounter with financial difficulties so early in my studies and the unexpected help that I received make me think about reaching crossroads and asking the ‘what if’ question.
In those days Unisa required 11 full-year courses for the completion of a Bachelor of Arts degree. I selected English and psychology as my majors. Unlike my other courses – sociology, political science, history and Xitsonga – my major subjects had to be studied up to year three. The majors were the recognised bridge towards postgraduate study because, armed with a major (a third-year qualification), one could be admitted to Bachelor of Arts Honours studies. Two factors worked in my favour as far as my majors were concerned. In English I was sustained both by the good tuition I had received in matric and by my own deep-seated interest in the study of literature, for in those days I had a lingering hope of becoming a fiction writer. With regard to psychology, I received my inspiration from the head of the department, Professor T van Dyk, a knowledgeable and energetic man. As fate would have it, during my senior years I also came under the influence of Professor Johan Garbers, a charismatic educational psychologist who had recently returned after undertaking advanced studies in Holland. When he asked me to be his assistant in the child guidance clinic, which he had established following his arrival at the university, I accepted. That experience, limited as it was, gave me a foretaste of what the professional application of psychology to real life was like in practice.
I am grateful to this day that there was so much learning to be had outside the classroom in the early 1960s at the university. Above all, what one needed in order to be able to learn outside the classroom was a public-spirited disposition. Despite the university’s small student population in the early years there was no scarcity of colourful public-spirited students. I remember Chris Shongwe from Kimberley, who, some would say, was outrageously colourful in terms of both dress and disposition. Another Chris who comes to mind, this time from Phokeng outside Rustenburg, had an exuberant disposition and a razor-sharp intellect. I learnt a great deal from my participation in debates in closed SRC meetings as well as at open student mass meetings.
To make headway with someone as shrewd as our rector, we made SRC pre-meeting preparations among ourselves mandatory, using the strategy of persuasion as well as strategic retreat in certain situations. Active participation in student affairs exposed me to the prevailing concerns of students in South Africa and by then independent Lesotho. Student leaders at our university followed a deliberate policy of active engagement with SRCs at other universities as well as national student organisations such as the National Union of South African Students (Nusas).
I participated in field trips to what was then known as Roma University in Lesotho, visited fellow black students at the University of the Witwatersrand and attended the historic Nusas meeting at Rhodes University during which the breakaway of black students was mooted. All in all, the situation throughout the early years of the history of our college was that for those of us who cared to be actively engaged in student affairs, there was much valuable learning to be gained outside the lecture rooms.
I wrote the final examinations for my BA degree towards the end of 1962 and the degree was awarded by Unisa early in 1963. Before the start of the 1963 academic year I became aware of a vacancy at the National Institute for Personnel Research (NIPR) in Johannesburg, the national centre of the country’s research into the industrial psychology of Africans at work. In the 1960s and 1970s it was the home of research into and psychological testing of Africans through the use of in-house psychological test batteries.
According to the advertisement, the primary requirement for the position was a bachelor’s degree with a major in psychology. I applied for the position, and to my surprise I was shortlisted and invited for an interview – a long and dreary process that included psychometric tests. It could well be that my psychometric profile did not make the grade, for my application was unsuccessful. Another unexpected crossroad was before me. Two options came to mind. One was the high-risk route of continued job-seeking. With a bachelor’s degree and no professional certificate I had no way of knowing how far such a strategy would take me. Whatever practical wisdom I had at the time prevailed, for I decided to go back to university to register for an honours degree in psychology.
Did I consider studying for an honours degree in my other major, English? Yes, I did. But, apart from a teaching career, which had been made unattractive by the introduction of Bantu Education, there was little that a black man could do with such a qualification. In February 1963 I returned to Turfloop, where I registered for a two-year honours degree in psychology. Although the course was taught by staff at the university college, the course work and examinations were those of Unisa. One was expected to choose five study areas, equivalent to five papers that would form the basis for one’s final examination. Study fields such as psychopathology, developmental psychology, personality theory, research methodology and therapeutic psychology were largely familiar to me. What was expected was a broadening of knowledge and a deepening of understanding of the chosen study areas.
What I found most stimulating was the study of the philosophy of science, especially the wide-ranging contribution of Karl Popper. Even today, after several study visits to some of the most prominent psychology departments in both the US and the UK, I am still convinced that Unisa’s honours programme was a sound preparation for advanced academic and professional studies in psychology. Indeed, by the time I fulfilled the requirements of the degree early in 1965, I knew I had been through an excellent theoretical preparation for entry into a research-based master’s degree.
I worked diligently on the five papers or directions of study that I had chosen and, all in all, my failure to qualify for the position at the NIPR paid excellent dividends. After two years of hard work, Unisa awarded me a Bachelor of Arts Honours degree in 1965. Armed with two degrees at the age of 26, I was prepared to venture into the world of work.
During my five years at the University College of the North two tendencies appeared to be at play in the affairs of the university. On the one hand, Unisa, the institution which administered the academic programmes of the new university, appeared to conduct its academic oversight diligently. As the first victims of the Bantu Education experiment in South Africa’s segregated university education, some of us appreciated the supervision Unisa provided. On the other hand, the staff were deeply committed to the implementation of the separate development agenda of the Nationalist government. Looking back from the perspective of the more than 50 years that have passed, I am able to imagine how stacked against us the odds were in view of the kind of political objectives the government planned to achieve through the special kind of education we received.
The all-white university council consisted of four whites who represented government entities such as the departments of Bantu Education and Bantu Administration. The all-black advisory council was made up of chiefs, church leaders and inspectors of Bantu Education. When it came to the appointment of black members of staff, white senior academics chose their black protégés scrupulously. Once they were identified during their senior undergraduate years, they were carefully nurtured and made to feel very special, so much so that the majority of my contemporaries who were offered the local carrot rarely left the university to study or work elsewhere. Some, indeed, would not have been qualified to work elsewhere in academia.
Such a political programme on the part of the university authorities, both academic and administrative, meant that in due course they defined for themselves and for their own selfish interests who among the students they would prefer to dispose of as soon as possible. In my case, even after I had completed my doctorate at the age of 30, the authorities at my alma mater failed to acknowledge my applications for academic positions until 1990, when everyone’s political fortunes were about to change. When my application for a relatively junior position was greeted with silence, I remembered a conversation I had had with one of the influential black members of staff who was a superintendent of one of the university residences.
The conversation had taken place after the elections for one of the SRC executive committees. The staff member invited me to meet him at his house one evening. It turned out to be a short meeting. Our SRC had recently elected a Johannesburg student as president. For reasons that were not divulged to me, the university authorities disapproved of our choice. My host was direct and visibly free from shame when he asked if I would agree to take over the presidency so that, in return, I could be assured of an academic position at the university. What a despicable and outrageous proposal! I declined the offer firmly and reminded the staff member that the president of the SRC was elected democratically by students and his SRC colleagues and that had to be the end of the story.
The university subsequently gained its autonomy and a fully fledged university known as the University of the North (now the University of Limpopo) came into being.
I had more pressing personal concerns. What prospects did I have, in early 1965, of finding a job in which the psychology I had studied for five years would be of some use? At that stage one needed fewer than the fingers on one hand to count the number of African psychologists with an honours degree, let alone a master’s degree. The prospects were not promising. During the course of my studies, specialisation in the psychology of work, or industrial psychology as it was once called, was relatively rare. Yet, at what now looks like a snail’s pace, an insignificant number of African graduates had found employment. The jobs were not only at the NIPR, the Chamber of Mines and one or two private sector companies; they were, as I was soon to find out when I joined Asea Electric in Pretoria West as a personnel officer, employed to help manage the increasing numbers of African employees in commerce and industry. However, my intention is not to relate the story of my first job in the mid-1960s. I will limit myself to a few essentials about work at Asea Electric because what is of greater interest are the steps I took to work towards a professional career in psychology under the conditions that prevailed in our country at that time.
Asea Electric was a sizeable Swedish company engaged in the manufacture of electrical cables and transformers. Located in the industrial area of Pretoria West, the company employed several hundred African workers, who, as was the practice in the country at the time, were occupied in the lower ends of the production chain. Together with an amicable white colleague, who was my immediate senior, I looked after the day-to-day interests of these workers. Although my title was not that of a welfare officer, I dealt with a wide range of problems black workers experienced, including housing, acquiring loans to support schoolgoing children and overcoming the myriad restrictions imposed by the pass laws. My work was a precursor to what later became known as personnel work or human resource management.
As well as finding my feet in an unfamiliar work situation I was learning to live as a bachelor in the black township of Atteridgeville, west of Pretoria. In addition, soon after my honours results were released I took immediate steps to register for a master’s degree in psychology at Unisa, which was located in the central business district of Pretoria. Professor F W Blignaut, one of the senior professors in the psychology department, was assigned as my supervisor. The degree was entirely research based. Once the research was completed, a dissertation in the form of a research report was submitted for formal examination.
Blignaut was like a distant Afrikaner patriarch. Our consultations were held either at his university office, then in Pretorius Street in Pretoria, or in the study at his home, a country-style homestead a short distance away from Rosslyn, north of Pretoria. What subject had I decided to investigate? The research design was simple and straightforward, for I was going to compare a group of factory workers and a group of furniture salesmen. Working primarily from Abraham Maslow’s theory of the differentiated and hierarchical structure of human psychological needs (from basic to what he termed self-actualisation needs), I proposed the hypothesis that my research results would show that the two groups would differ significantly in confirmation of his theory. I expected the salesmen (more highly educated than the factory workers) to have need profiles that displayed higher-order self-actualisation needs as opposed to lower-order basic needs. In those days we used what were called non-parametric statistical tests of significance (the chi-square test) to test hypotheses and differences of the kind I was investigating.
I planned to complete the degree in two years and worked hard to ensure that my plan was realised. Yet, the closer I came to the point where it seemed that most of the work had been completed, the more trivial difficulties seemed to arise. The solution I adopted at the time throws some light on where some of the difficulties had arisen. I requested an appointment with Professor A S Roux, the head of the psychology department. He was a sombre-looking man with spectacles that looked unwelcome over his eyes, nestled as they always were on the end of his nose. I knew that he had undertaken his doctoral studies in Holland and, to all intents and purposes, he appeared to deserve the air of self-confidence he displayed. In the course of our meeting I outlined the difficulties which had arisen in my work. I described how, over a number of months, we had failed to resolve questions about the statistical analysis of the research results. I went so far as to threaten that should I fail to receive relief from his office I would take the matter as far as the dean of the faculty.
Fortunately for me Professor Roux was untouched by my display of youthful bravado. A short while after my visit to his office another senior psychology professor, highly regarded for his expertise in research methods and non-parametric statistics, was assigned to help complete my research report. A few months were all we needed to resolve the statistical questions and finalise the dissertation for submission and examination. I celebrate the fact that in the face of a substantial obstacle that almost brought my academic aspirations to an end I did not twiddle my thumbs in confusion and self-pity. I took a stand and my resolve paid off in more ways than one. In the quest for a judicious resolution of my troubles with Professor Blignaut I earned myself the respect of Professor Roux. I completed my MA in 1968 and, at the beginning of 1969, when I needed a supervisor for my doctoral studies, Professor Roux was ready to take me under his wing.
