Читать книгу Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist - N. Chabani Manganyi - Страница 9

Preface

What 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 2008 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.¹

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 1990s 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 1994 to 1999, when I worked as the first director general of education during the years of Nelson Mandela’s presidency. In August 1999 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 internationally once again. That return to academic life also enabled me to undertake what I describe as a life-writing project.

The overall significance of the 2008 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 close proximity 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 30 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.²

Although I was familiar with the international literature on biography, my knowledge of the literature on intellectual autobiography 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.³

When I strayed into fictionalised autobiographical writing while doing my postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University in the 1970s, 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, are threads 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 give full 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 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 1969 and 1973 – 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 and professional atmosphere in Ward 7 (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 1969 and 1970. It was then that my publication record began to take shape.⁴

Writing this book has enabled me to come to terms with the personal ways in which encounters with success and adversity became part 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. Autobiographical 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 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’.⁵

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’.⁶