Biography

I was born on Sunday July 4, 1948 in Johannesburg at Coronation Hospital. My mother, Regina Makhosazana Ndebele, uMaTshabangu, was a nurse there. 923 John Mohohlo Street, Western Native Township was my home where I became the third child and first son inmy family. We lived not that far from Coronation Hospital. It could have been as long as it took us to walk to Christ the King Anglican Church in Sophiatown. A busy main road and a tramline that ran parallel separated us from our more famous township neighbour.

My father, Nimrod Njabulo Ndebele, taught Arithmetic and isiZulu at the prestigious Madibane High School at Western Native Township. By many accounts, he was an outstanding teacher. On the many occasions that I met Archbishop Desmond Tutu, he would say to people: “his father was my teacher: an outstanding teacher!” On another occasion he wrote: “Your dad was a superb teacher. He taught me arithmetic in forms 1 to 3 and then Zulu in Matric. He held our attention wonderfully and that was something in our large classes. He was my arithmetic teacher from Form 1 to Form 3 (Junior Certificate) and then taught me Zulu for my two years for Matric. He had us eating out of his hand and hardly ever having to punish us.” [1]

When in 1951 my father was promoted Principal of Charterston High School in Nigel on the East Rand, we moved there, just ahead of the mass removals of people from Western Native Township and Sophiatown to Soweto between 1955 and 1960. [2]

At Mzimkhulu Lower Primary School in Charterston where I began to go to school, the majority of teachers related to pupils the way my father did to Archbishop Tutu and his classmates. So it was with most teachers at Zakheni Higher Primary school. In particular, I remember Mistress Yende in Standard Three (1957), and teacher Maseko in Standard Five (1959) at Zakheni Higher Primary School. I loved them. But a few other teachers were resourceful in inventing new ways of inflicting pain on us children. I remember “the aeroplane” method of punishment. The teacher got the big boys to lift an offending boy into the air facing downwards such that his trousered buttocks were exposed for a thrashing in front of the entire class. Some of the teachers made sure that we feared them beyond the classroom when they strutted around the school carrying a reed cane.

In 1960 I went to boarding school in Eswatini (then Swaziland) at St Christopher’s Anglican High School for boys. Every morning after breakfast we walked for about ten minutes to Luyengo Primary school, a day school whose highest class was Standard 6. There, a few of fellow boarders completed the primary school phase of our education. I matriculated in 1966 and received the Cambridge Overseas School Certificate.

There were many of us boys from South Africa at St. Christopher’s. Our parents sent us there to save us from Bantu Education, the segregationist education designed to train black South Africans for menial labour for the benefit of White South Africans in their homes, businesses, factories, and mines. In the early 1950s, soon after the apartheid government came into power in the year I was born in 1948, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, known as the “architect of apartheid”, was Minister of Native Affairs when he notoriously stated: “There is no place for [the Bantu] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour … What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice?” He later became Prime Minister of apartheid South Africa and was assassinated while in office in the year of my matriculation in 1966.

At St. Christopher’s School, Teacher Radebe was among a group of South African teachers in exile in Eswatini, who proved Verwoerd wrong. An outstanding teacher of mathematics, he instilled a lifelong love of mathematics in me. So did Teacher Humphrey Langa, who taught us Physics-with-Chemistry. Teachers Pan Taylor, Rebecca Langa and Vera Habedi taught us English Language and Literature. As models they all prepared us to rise above the state of life planned for us by Verwoerd. Although they were in exile, many like them remained and continued to do their best back home. One of the best phases of my life began when I enrolled as a student at the University of Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland (UBLS) at the Roma campus in Lesotho in August of 1969. By the time I graduated first class in English and Philosophy in 1973, I had already published poetry in some of the literary magazines of those days, such as Classic Magazine, Contrast and the Purple Renoster. I had also been editor of the student magazine Expression. This was an exhilarating start for a young writer. Life at Roma was a constant social and academic thrill. We were students from Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland (now Eswatini), South Africa, Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda, and The Gambia. Our lecturers and professors came from South Africa, Lesotho, the UK, USA, The Netherlands, Germany, Canada, France, and Rhodesia, later,Zimbabwe. No other academic institution of higher education in Southern Africa boasted such an internationalist and cosmopolitan academic and intellectual environment where academic freedom was a lived norm.

No local or global issue escaped our attention. We studied and debated among others matters, the decolonisation of Africa and the “Third World”, a handful of countries still to achieve their independence, particularly in Southern Africa. History, philosophy, economics, literature were some of the vehicles through which we engaged with the Cold War between the USA and the USSR; the ousting of invaders, USA and China, by the Vietnamese; the resilience of Cuba against the USA; and the great anxiety over The Nkomati Accord, an “Agreement on Non-Aggression and Good Neighbourliness between Mozambique and South Africa”. [3]

I remember how the Accord polarised the campus. One strand of opinion was that apartheid’s Prime Minister, conservative hawk P W Botha, had managed to contain liberated Mozambique’s first President, Samora Machel and compromise his radical intentions to follow through the opportunities of independence and work towards fullest potential of Mozambique’s socialist vision. There is some merit to this view having regard to Mozambique’s adherence to the terms the accord in expelling ANC cadres from the South of Mozambique, while South Africa violated the accord in continuing to support the dissident, anti-Communist RENAMO in destabilising Mozambique.

The strand of opinion which had some resonance with me was that the Nkomati Accord was a result of a joint recognition of the importance of realism at a particular moment in the flows of Southern African history. I believe that the spirit of this aspect of the accord was to be mirrored in the South Africa’s negotiated settlement that led to the historic elections of 1994. Such topical issues shaped our political land moral perspectives at UBLS. Being on such a campus, completely surrounded by South Africa, was in itself a profound act of resistance against global imperialism generally and racist oppression in South Africa, specifically.

In the winter of 1973 word got to me from my father that South African security agents visited my home in Charterston Location, inquiring after me, my father informed me. I resolved not to return home. Having arrived in Lesotho alone in 1969, I returned home in 1990, the year of Madiba’s release, with a wife and three children. It was as at UBLS that I met the woman who would become my wife, Mpho Malebo.

Twenty-one years old in 1969, and 42 years old in 1990, I was half-and-half formed by two countries. With Lesotho as my second country, I had travelled to many other countries. They too became a part of me. Cambridge (UK) for my MA; Denver (USA) for my PhD. There were several other countries in Europe and Africa, where I attended writers’ and other conferences.

By the time I left Lesotho for South Africa in 1991 just under a year after the release of Nelson Mandela after twenty-seven years of imprisonment, I had become Head of the Department of English, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, and Pro Vice-Chancellor at UBLS, which in 1975 became the National University of Lesotho. I was trained and experienced enough to participate at the highest levels in the recovery of South Africa by its oppressed black citizens. Beginning at the University of the Witwatersrand, I wore the shoes of esteemed Es’kia Mphahlele as the Chair and Head of Department of African Literature. Then Vice-Chancellor Jakes Gerwel recruited me to join his executive teach as a Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of the Western Cape. A year and a half later I was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of the North.

It was a time of great mobility for a wide spectrum of professional people previously excluded politically and legally from participating in the organised social order of South Africa under apartheid and who had now returned home. After a full term of office at the University of the North I spent just under two years as Scholar-in-Residence at the Ford Foundation in New York. It was the second glorious time in my life. My wife and I fell in love with New York City, and the affection remains to this day. New York’s infectious cosmopolitan energy was its greatest appeal.

In 2000 I began what would be a two-year term of service as Vice-Chancellor and Principal of University of Cape Town. It was to be a most fulfilling time in my executive career. At the end of it, I had experienced the entire range of higher education institutional types in South Africa, adding to my experience of higher education in independent Lesotho.

I had also been exposed to a wide geographical experience of my country, having lived at the centre of South Africa in Johannesburg where I was born; in the Western Cape; in Limpopo, and then back at the Western Cape where I still am: grandchildren a new marker in the passage of time.

Periodically, I ply between Cape Town and Johannesburg (UJ) to officiate in Graduations at the University of Johannesburg where I am Chancellor. Each time I am there, I feel the campus’s close proximity to where I was born. More than a connection of office and function, there is a bond of emotion between Johannesburg, UJ and I.

* * * * *

The Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) which flourished in the 1970s gave my political instincts strong psychological moorings. I experienced it as an authentic existential base from which to imagine a future democracy in South Africa in which the “black experience” was taken for granted as the normative base in the construction of a new national identity. Such a normative base would not need to justify itself in endless protest.

I first entered the BCM when, as president of the Students Representative Council at the UBLS, I was invited by the South African Students Movement (SASO) to deliver a keynote address at their historic Second Annual General Students Council, at Hammanskraal in 1972. The letter of invitation was signed by the General Secretary of SASO, Barney Nyameko Pityana. My address was an analytical reflection on social groups among black South Africa and the relative location of each in the struggle for emancipation. It was published in the first edition of Black Viewpoint in 1972 edited by Steve Biko. [4] The culmination of the period for me was when BCM activists Jeff Baqwa and Onkgopotse Tiro came to Lesotho in the winter of 1973 to begin to implement a BCM plan to spread the students’ movement across Africa, beginning in Southern Africa.

The Southern African Students Movement (SASM) was launched at the Roma campus of UBLS with inaugural members from Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. I was elected onto the Executive Committee chaired by Tiro as President. To take advantage of my impending travel to Cambridge on a Churchill College scholarship for my post-graduate studies, I was made SASM’s international organiser. Little did we know that the organisation that partly supported SASM, the International University Exchange Fund (IUEF) would be infiltrated by South African spy Craig Williamson, to devastating effect. Tiro received a parcel with postal markings he trusted were from the IUEF. His trust led to his tragic death.

At the time he died we were preparing for SASM’s first Annual General Meeting to take place in the winter of 1974 in Botswana where Tiro was exile. I nevertheless travelled to Botswana to see what could be rescued. I saw the house in which Tiro had lived. No human being could have survived the power of the destruction that wrecked the house in which Tiro opened the parcel of death. SASM’s intention to export the spirit of the South African students’ movement beyond the borders of South Africa must have been deemed a significant strategic threat by the apartheid government. The brutal end of SASM was an outcome of that assessment.

The reflections in my SASO keynote address titled “Black Development” were consistent with the impact on me of the literature curriculum of the Department of English at UBLS at that time, and also of Philosophy, my other major. My extensive reflections on this experience were to be articulated many years later in my keynote address at the 40th Annual Conference of the African Literature Association in 2015 held at the University of the Witwatersrand. [5]

My collection of short stories, “Fools” and Other Stories (1983), which won the Noma Award in 1984, and the essays that followed it as “Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture (1991, 2006)” [6], may reveal a continuing strand of the influence of both the BCM and the UBLS academic, intellectual, and milieus. In his editorial introduction to Black Viewpoint, Steve Biko made a seminal statement:

“It is significant that in a country peopled to the extent of 75% by blacks and whose entire economic structure is supported and maintained, willingly or unwillingly, mainly by blacks, we find very few publications that are directed at, manned by and produced by black people.

“Black Viewpoint is a happy addition by the Black Community Programmes to all those publications that are of great relevance to the black people in South Africa in their struggle for liberation from apartheid oppression. Through this publication, we communicate to black people what was being thought and sad by black people in the various situations in which they found themselves in this country of ours. We have felt and observed in the past, the existence of a great vacuum in our literary and newspaper world. So many things are said so often us, about us and for us but very seldom by us.” [7]

It was this kind of struggle for a sense of self within a living environment with an autonomy which supported black identity. It is against such a background that in “Fools” and Other Stories I deliberately explored a world in South African townships without white people in it. The kind of communication Biko envisaged ought to be normal in South Africa today. But it isn’t yet where it should be. Black South African’s still feel impelled to make a case for their lives against the resilience of their inherited structural exclusion from an economy and life style from which millions of workers and their children have been excluded and which they continue to experience as predatory, despite twenty-three years of freedom under the government of the African National Congress . By the time these stories were written and published, my understanding of Steve Biko’s perspective had been considerably deepened by the sharpening of my intellectual and creative sensibilities in Cambridge and later in Denver. There I was exposed to some of the great stylists, and innovators in fiction across many traditions of fiction beyond my African influences. They included James Joyce, Gustav Flaubert, Virginia Wolf, Henry James, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, Arthur Koestler, James Baldwin, Toni Morison, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Ernest Gaines, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Gloria Naylor, John Edgar Wideman, James Alan McPherson, Yukio Mishima, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Dandicat, George Lamming, Kobo Abe, J.M and many others.

These writers built on a firm base of African influences primarily of my UBLS days: Thomas Mofolo, Sibusiso Nyembezi, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Camara Laye, Ferdinand Oyono, Cyprian Ekwensi, Ayi Kwei Armah, Mariam Ba, Eskia Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, Mongo Beti, Alan Paton, Bloke Modisane, A.C. Jordan, Mongane Serote, Nadine Gordimer, Sipho Sepamla, Mbulelo Mzamane, Noni Jabavu, Sol Plaatje, Miriam Tladi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Can Themba, Nuruddin Farah, Kole Omotoso, Kwame Nkrumah, David Mailu, Sembene Ousmane, Ama Ata Aidoo, J.M Coetzee and Andre Brink, are but a sample.

Staffrider Magazine was a landmark popular publication in South African literature. It had been going since the historic year of 1976 when the school children of Soweto confronted the might of the South African Defence Force deployed against them by the South African government. For these school children the apartheid final straw was the government’s imposition of the Afrikaans language as the language of instruction in all black schools. By its police and military action against protesting black students the white government definitively cast black people in South African as an external enemy to be destroyed by its security systems. Thousands of young lives were lost in an uneven battle. But while the battle may have been uneven, the resolve and commitment to bigger war against apartheid would continue unabated and growing stronger against a government faced with decreasing options. Perhaps one of the great a tragedies of the phase of the black struggle for freedom was in how the apartheid government deployed its own young in the army to kill their black age mates who lived in the townships. The play Black Dog/Inj’emnyama [8] created and workshopped by Barney Simon and his cast in 1984, explores the stirring interaction of young characters involved in and affected by the student resistance of 1976 from their various racial, social, and cultural backgrounds.

When the #RhodesMustFall Movement began in March 2015 the play was staged again in June 2015. I was able to see it at the Baxter Theatre. It did ring with a timely relevance linking the events of June 1976 with the latest student uprising against the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, highlighting the continuity of the struggle for freedom and social justice from the apartheid days to a liberated South Africa. The statue of Rhodes was seen a symbol of the continuities of structural and cultural oppression. [9]

In the same way that apartheid guns did not stop young people, they had not stopped the emergent flowering of creative activity in literature, theatre and music from South Africa’s townships. Within a year of my return to Lesotho with a PhD from the University of Denver, Mike Kirkwood, Staffrider’s intrepid editor, sent me a copy of Anatolian Tales, a book of short stories by Turkish writer Yasar Kemal. [10] At the time, there was a running discussion in South Africa about storytelling and fiction writing as narrative modes. Kirkwood wondered what I thought of Kemal’s tales against the running public discussion. The result was my article, Turkish Tales and Some Thoughts on South African Fiction in Staffrider in 1984. It became an influential article in the discussion of the relationship between literature and society in South Africa.

The antecedents of Turkish Tales can be traced back to Lewis Nkosi’s essay “Fiction by Black South Africans”. I have never forgotten the mind-opening impact of this essay when I first read it at the Thomas Mofolo University Library at UBLS. At first, resisting the power of its message out of an instinctive solidarity with the literature under review, I had eventually to give in to the power of Nkosi’s reasoning. Nkosi’s essay pushed me to recognise and embrace the powerful value of open mindedness. He put a marker on the reading of South African literature.

In November of the same year in 1984 I delivered the address Rediscovery of the Ordinary as keynote address at the conference on New Writing in Africa: Continuity and Change, at the Commonwealth Institute in London. In my address I attempted to question the notion of ‘protest literature’ in the light of new avenues and possibilities of resistance as I understood them in South Africa at the time. In the audience were Lewis Nkosi and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

At the time of the conference, Ngugi was strongly advancing the cause of African languages, urging African writers to write in their own languages. I remember Nkosi rising after Ngugi had spoken to pose a question to him; but the question was in isiZulu! Of-course Ngugi did not understand what Nkosi was saying. Ngugi conceded the implicit point that Nkosi was making: the historical fact that the imposition of European languages on their African colonies made those languages a mode of communication that enabled Africans to communicate among themselves across their different languages, as well as communicate with the colonialists who held power. Ngugi was nevertheless steadfast on the point of his mission. The endpoint in the liberty of Africans was the promotion and use of their languages as the ultimate source of their dignity as people of a continent and its unique cultures. In 1986 Ngugi published his influential book Decolonising the Mind. [11]

My own position on this issue of writing in African languages is expressed in the book Africa Talks Back: Interviews with Anglophone African Authors, Edited by Bernth Lindfors, and published in 2002. Bernth Lindfors interviewed me in Lesotho on 19 August 1986. [12] In the interview I express the view that a decision an African writer makes on which language to use will be informed by intersecting personal as well historical circumstances. The writer interprets those intersections as a context against which he or she makes choices on the matter.

If “Fools’ and Other Stories” expressed my fictional explorations of some aspects of life in a African location or township where black people are the primary object of artistic reflection, the collection of essays “Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture” reflects my attempts at unravelling the theoretical underpinnings of my own creative writing, at the point at which I had become my own reader. How much of the social is in the art, and the art in the social? How much of the human is in the art, and the art in the human? The questions are for me a permanent feature of a creative writer who also reflects on his or her writings and those of other writers.

In July of 1987 I was elected the first President of the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW), a position I held for about ten years. The organisation, partly formed in response to the notion that culture and art be regarded as a weapon of struggle against apartheid, brought together experienced and new writers across all genres. There was a political, cultural urge to COSAW. As more experienced, older writes shared their experience, they were in turn energised by the perspectives of younger, beginning writers. In this way the organisation was a dynamic mix of diverse creative and political energies within a progressive orientation. To be a part of this energy from Lesotho, whose passport enabled me to slip in back home, kept me connected to the energy of resistance in South Africa.

I was Vice-Chancellor of the University of the North when freedom came to South Africa in 1994. I remember the sudden, almost euphoric lull that descended on an otherwise rumbustious campus. Adam Kahane, writer and facilitator of dialogues on “tough problems”, facilitated a historic campus dialogue over three days. The dialogue brought together a cross section of teachers, students, and workers to envision together the future of the campus. It was an extraordinary, tightrope walking experience that seemed to work for a while. It was an attempt at public transparency, trust and visioning as foundations for sustainable solidarity on an otherwise fractious campus. There were to be no protest songs on campus for a while, but plenty of tough interactions.

Three years later around 1997, a year before the end of my tenure, things seemed to fall apart. The reasons are many and still require inquiry and understanding. But it did look to me that although the old was dying, the new seemed uncertain about what it knew of itself, not sure how to sustain the new sense of possibility before it. There was the sense of a campus preying on itself. The means of combating the old, appeared to be turned on the new with similar intensity. In 2016 South Africa and the legacy of institutions are still struggling with the gap between the vision of the future and how best to achieve it.

I published two books during my tenure as Vice-Chancellor of UCT: The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2004) and Fine Lines from the Box: Further Thoughts About our Country (2007). I like to think that they came out of the compulsions and resilience of the artist and thinker in me to stay alive in the midst of institutional leadership and the grind of administrative work. I retired from the daily routine of work in 2008. I had been involved in the executive leadership of South African and African higher education for two decades. In that time I was privileged to serve in the elected positions of Chairman of the South African Vice-Chancellor’s Association (SAUVCA), an association of South Africa’s public universities.

It became Higher Education South Africa (HESA), now known today as Universities South Africa (USAf). and finally as President of the Association of African Universities, with its headquarters in Accra, Ghana.

Two of Nelson Mandela’s legacy organisations on which I serve respectively as chairman, keep a finger on the pulse of a vibrant country still on an exciting but arduous path to its future: the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Mandela Rhodes Foundation.

Other organisations I have served are the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation, MTN Foundation, Deloitte Africa, Cape Town Partnership, and the UBLS Association, the latter set up by alumni of the UBLS. My fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study and at the Archive and Public Culture Research Project at UCT, help to keep my academic interests awake.

I have become profoundly aware of the importance of strong institutions for any successful society. Institutions, wherever they are, represent a solemn agreement among those that have created them to surrender a little of themselves to the common good they have identified, defined, and committed to. Such institutions mediate the space where our personal inclinations often seek to overcome our solemn rationality. They enable us to face mandatory limits embodied in the supremacy of our agreements. Because such agreements are never infallible, they can be changed in the face of the most rigorous of reasons why they should be revised.

A book I started many years ago on boxing in the Eastern Cape with the working title “Beyond Sweaty Windows” and whose first draft I completed, had to be redone from the beginning. It is near its second completion, hopefully the last one. In it I reflect on the extraordinary boxing achievements of the Eastern Cape in which over a thirty-year period Mdantsane has done what I believe could be unmatched in the world. It produced more than twenty world champions and fifty national champions all within the radius of town and township. It is a remarkable demonstration of self-organising effort within a small geographical setting. Why were they able to do so?

At this moment in 2022, South Africa faces a crisis of confidence in the prospects of its future. This has to do with how the governing African National Congress has significantly succumbed to corruption, in its personal and organisational dimensions, to the extent of losing its credibility as a governing party across the spectrum of South Africa’s citizens. In the view of many, the party is unlikely to secure a majority mandate to govern South Africa after the forthcoming 2024 national elections. Will South Africa muddle through coalition politics for some years from 2024, or will a new political environment emerge that will take South Africans and their country beyond 2024 with a visionary, wise, practical, and decisive idealism informed by lessons from the past, a sense of urgency towards the present, while being invigorated by what the future holds. The period up to 2024 will be witness to a great deal of invigorated public contestation over the birthing of a new post 2024 South Africa. But the future that faces my grandchildren is not that clear.

[1] Email: 18 July 2021
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31379211
[3] https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/south-africa-and-mozambique-sign-non-aggression-pact
[4] B.S. Biko (Editor). Black Viewpoint. Durban: Spro-Cas Black Community Programmes, 1972
[5] Ndebele NS. To be or not to be: No longer at ease1. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education. 2016;15(1):15-28. doi:10.1177/1474022215613610
[6] Njabulo S Ndebele. Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. Johannesburg: COSAW, 1991.
[7] https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/black-viewpoint-introduction-edited-bs-biko-1972
[8] https://esat.sun.ac.za/index.php/Black_Dog-Inj%27emnyama!
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodes_Must_Fall
[10] Yashar Kemal. Anatolian Tales. London: Writers and Readers, 1983.
[11] Ngugi Wa. Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya, 1986.
[12] Bernth Lindfors (Editor). Africa Talks Back: Interviews with Anglophone African Authors. Asmara: Africa World Press, 2002. pp.226-248.

Honours:

Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Research Foundation, 2009
Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, 2007
Fellow of the University of Cape Town
Cape 300 Foundation Molteno Gold Medal for services to literature and education, 2015

Honorary doctorates: