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Posted to the web on: 14 July 2024
Thinker who shook Harvard to explore meaning of Mandela
Xolela Mangcu
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CORNEL West is my intellectual hero. Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates jnr has called him “our black Jeremiah, the pre-eminent intellectual of our generation”.

Widely considered the intellectual heir to WEB du Bois, West shot to prominence with the publication of Race Matters in 1993, a bestseller that has become a 20th century classic and is an amazing blend of profound philosophical thought and public engagement.

He cautions against the pitfalls of racial reasoning among black leaders and yet provides a trenchant critique of white supremacy. In that way, West produces something very similar to Steve Biko’s internal self-critique within the context of structural analysis.

The internal critique comes in the form of a prophetic framework for blackness that does not rely on a closed-ranks mentality, but on “one that encourages moral assessment of the variety of perspectives held by black people and selects those views based on black dignity and decency that eschew putting any group of people or culture on a pedestal or in the gutter”. This is what he calls black cultural democracy.

This is the black cultural democracy we must build out of the raw materials of our own history. But for that we need to get to an understanding of traditions in self- renewal. West writes about “the inexpungible character of tradition, the burden and buoyancy of that which is transmitted from the past to the present. This process of transmittance is one of socialisation and appropriation, of acculturation and construction. Tradition, in that sense, can be both a smothering and liberating affair, depending on which traditions are being invoked, internalised and invented.”

I suppose that paragraph captures the essence of my own curiosity about African political traditions and thought, and why they need to be part of the mainstream of modern epistemology and political practice.

We cannot reinvent ourselves every time we are confronted with political problems, and it is through that process of revisiting our traditions that we can bequeath a sense of history to our children. Without that history we are nothing.

Next week, on Thursday and Friday, Gates jnr and Wole Soyinka will be delivering, at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), the second and third lectures in a series on the Meaning of Mandela, in partnership with the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

I cannot think of any single individual who has done more to preserve and institutionalise the black intellectual tradition in the US than Gates. He built the African-American studies department at Harvard to be the most formidable in the US by bringing in such talented intellectuals as West, Kwame Anthony Appiah, William Julius Wilson, Leon and Evelyn Higginbotham — the famous Dream Team. No group of intellectuals has so dominated US intellectual life since perhaps the Jewish socialist intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s.

Gates also unearthed the first novel written by a black American, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, and the first written by a female slave, Hannah Crafts’ the Bondwoman’s Narrative.

In his book, Harvard Rules, Richard Bradley describes Skip Gates’s power in the American academy: “His list of publications was longer than some people’s dissertations. Skip Gates was a celebrity, a brand. And he was powerful. Gates could get people jobs — and keep people out of them. A phone call from him to a publisher could land a book contract for a young scholar; a blurb by Gates signified establishment approval; a Gates recommendation could mean the difference between winning a grant or changing careers.”

Bradley notes that: “At Harvard, Gates had taken something that was historically white — profoundly white in its composition, its outlook and culture — and had made it, in a small but significant way, black. And because this was Harvard it had a ripple effect on the nation’s finest universities — at Princeton, Yale, Columbia.”

Gates’s lecture will be on the Meaning of Mandela, but it will draw specific links between Mandela, the struggle in SA, and the earlier traditions of people such as Du Bois. Hence the title of his talk: WEB du Bois, Encyclopaedia African and Nelson Mandela.

Gates will be coming with his former teacher and friend at Cambridge University, our continent’s foremost playwright, cultural critic and first Nobel laureate in literature, Wole Soyinka. Soyinka has been as much a writer as an activist, spending long terms in prison because of his uncompromising opposition to Nigeria’s dictators.

He is a living example of the important role that independent public intellectuals can and must play in the life of any democratic society.

It is an honour and privilege to be in the presence of such passionate global ambassadors for the life of the mind, paying tribute to the only truly universal hero — Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela — on his birthday.

‖Mangcu is HSRC executive director for social cohesion and nonresident WEB du Bois fellow at Harvard. He writes in his personal capacity.


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Thanks for that. Where did it come from?
 

anti-depressants are psychotropic?
 

Think so, yes. Am I wrong about that?
 

strictly literally, they are. but i would be surprised if preston knew that. IMHO, she was comparing anti-depressants to things like LSD and X, in order to make a statement that had impact. apples and oranges.

and not to start rumors or anything, but, each one of the celebs wrapped up in scientology has also, for years, had rumors circulating about their own sexual preferences. why do you think that is?
 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychotropic