Archie Mafeje

Archibald Boyce Monwabisi Mafeje (30 March 1936–28 March 2007), commonly known as Archie Mafeje, was a South African anthropologist and activist.

Born in the Cape Province, Union of South Africa (now Eastern Cape), he received degrees from the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Cambridge University. He became a professor at universities in Europe, the Americas, and Africa, but spent most of his career away from apartheid South Africa after he was blocked from teaching at UCT.

Mafeje was one of many anti-apartheid activists in exile. As an important Pan-African intellectual, he studied African history and anthropology. He demanded that imperialist, Western ideals be eliminated from Black African anthropology, pushing for the decolonisation of African anthropology and challenging anthropology's entrenched notions of colonialism and racial hierarchy.

Life and career

Early life and education

Archibald Boyce Monwabisi Mafeje was born on 30 March 1936 in a remote village in the Ngcobo (Thembuland), Cape Province, Union of South Africa. His father, Bennett, was the headmaster of Gubenxa Junior School and his mother was a teacher. Archie was the oldest of 7 siblings, the others being Vuyiswa (born in 1940), Mbulezi (born in 1942), Khumbuzo (born in 1944), Mzandile (born in 1947), Thozama (born in 1949), and Nandipha (born in 1954).

In 1951 and 1952, Mafeje completed his Junior Certificate at Nqabara Secondary School, a Methodist missionary school in Willowvale District. There, Nathaniel Honono, the school's headmaster, introduced Mafeje and the other pupils to the politics of the Non-European Unity Movement.

Mafeje was then matriculated in 1954 to Healdtown Comprehensive School, Fort Beaufort, a Methodist missionary with a list of alums that includes Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe. There, Mafeje was deeply influenced by Livingstone Mqotsi, a history teacher, and started participating actively in groups connected to the Non-European Unity Movement.

Mafeje joined the Fort Hare Native College, a black university in Eastern Cape, in mid-1955 to study zoology, but he left after one year. He then enrolled at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1957, joining the minority for non-white student numbering less than twenty out of five thousand students. At UCT, he initially enrolled for a Bachelor of Science (BSc) in biology, but failed to pass the required courses. Mafeje described how "as a biology student in the late 1950s at UCT, I had been taught the same acist attitudesby my white professors who nonetheless regarded me as the ''other''." He then switched to studying social anthropology in 1959. In 1960, he completed a Bachelor of Arts in Urban Sociology with honours, followed by a Master of Arts (MA) with a distinction in Political Anthropology, before leaving the university in 1963. At UCT, he was part of the Society of Young Africa (SOYA) and the Cape Peninsula Student Union (CPSU).

Mafeje's master's project was supervised by Professor Monica Wilson, in which Mafeje's utilised his knowledge of the Xhosa language and his father's connections to complete the fieldwork in Langa between November 1960 and September 1962. Monica Wilson then wrote the study into a scientific paper titled '' Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township,'' published as a book by Oxford University Press in 1963. However, in the early 1970s and as Mafeje's critique of hiteanthropology increased, Mafeje distanced himself from the book, and pointed to Wilson’s underlying Christian liberal ideology, which he perceived as a limitation because it favours Eurocentric theoretical approaches.

In August 1963, Mafeje spoke to a group that was were gathered illegally, and as a result, he was detained. Then, he was sent to Flagstaff to stand trial. He was fined and sent back to Cape Town instead of being prosecuted. Mafeje then moved to the UK initially as a research assistant at the University of Cambridge after being recommended by Wilson, but then completed a Doctor of Philosophy under Audrey Richards at the King's College, University of Cambridge, in the late 1960s.

Richards had doubts about Mafeje's work ethic and ability to be an academic, particularly when it came to handling theories, text analysis, and fieldwork. Mafeje's letter to Richards after his PhD summed up their relationship

Although personally you are not to blame and, in fact, you did everything to help, you are associated with this experience in Cambridge. Your frequent charge that I was ungrateful to you for the various things you had done for me ... did not make me feel any better. As a matter of fact, I began to wonder why you continued to help at all if that is what you felt about things. Whatever your complaints, one thing certain is that you knew from me that I was fully aware and appreciative of everything you have done for me. But for my own reasons, I was not going to allow myself to be 'adopted' by anybody (dated 10 June 1970)

The Mafeje Affair

Mafeje sought to return to University of Cape Town (UCT) and applied for a senior lecturer post that UCT widely advertised in August 1967. He was unanimously offered a post as Senior lecturer of social anthropology by the UCT Council.
By law, the UCT could only admit white students unless suitable courses were not available at black universities. Still, the law did not explicitly bar UCT from hiring non-white faculty. Mafeje was scheduled to start in May 1968, but the UCT Council decided to withdraw Mafeje’s employment offer because the Government threatened to cut funding and impose sanctions on UCT should it appoint him.

The Council decision angered UCT’s students and led to protests followed by a sit-in, on 15 August 1968, to pressure the Council to reverse their decision. The sit-in gained international coverage and was considered part of the global protests of 1968 that received support from students mounting barricades in Paris and London. However, the protest crumbled when counter-protestors stormed the building with weapons and dogs while the photos of some of the protestors were passed around to create targets for the counter-protestors.'' Varsity, Student Newspaper of the University of Cape Town, Volume 27, numbers 20 and 21, August 14 and 21, 1968; UCT archives''

Shortly thereafter, Mafeje left South Africa to pursue a career abroad. During the negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa in the early 1990s, UCT offered Mafeje his 1968 senior lecturer position back on a one-year contract, but he declined the position as he was already a well-established professor. Mafeje said he found the offer "most demeaning." In 1994, Mafeje applied for the A.C. Jordan Chair in African Studies at UCT, but his application was rejected as he was deemed "unsuitable for the position." Mahmood Mamdani, an Indian-born Ugandan professor, was appointed instead. He left after having disagreements with the administration on his draft syllabus of a foundation course on Africa called ''Problematizing Africa''. This was dubbed the ''Mamdani Affair''.

In 2002, Njabulo Ndebele, UCT Vice-Chancellor, re-opened the matter of the ''Mafeje affair''. In 2003, UCT officially apologised to Mafeje and offered him an honorary doctorate, but he did not respond to UCT's offer. In 2008 - after Mafeje died - and on the incident's 40th anniversary, UCT formally apologised to Mafeje's family. Mafeje's family accepted the apology.

Academic career

Mafeje assumed the position of a senior lecturer in 1969, before becoming a Professor and the head of the Sociology Department at the University of Dar Es Salaam. However, he was seriously injured in a vehicle accident in 1971. He then stayed in Uganda and carried out surveys on African farmers.

Between 1972 and 1975, Mafeje chaired the Institute of Social Studies' Urban Development and Labour Studies Program, where he first met Shahida El-Baz (), an academic and activist from Egypt who would later become his wife. Mafeje was appointed ''Queen Juliana Professor'' of Development Sociology and Anthropology by a Parliamentary act in 1973, aged 36. He was also appointed one of the Queen's lords, with his name engraved on the prestigious blue pages of the Dutch National Directorate, as one of the first Africans to receive this honour.

With the assistance of Mafeje in 1973, the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) was founded to promote an Afrocentric approach and eliminate the Western perspective from pan-African research. Archie was appointed Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at American University in Cairo from 1992 to 1994, and was also chosen to lead the University of Namibia's Multidisciplinary Research Center. Mafeje served as a senior fellow and guest lecturer at several colleges and research centres in North America, Europe, and Africa.

Mafeje returned to South Africa in 2000 after spending more than 30 years in exile and took the position of a Research Fellow at the ''African Renaissance Centre'' at the National Research Foundation. He joined CODESRIA's Scientific Committee in 2001. He received the Honorary Life Membership of CODESRIA in 2003 and was named CODESRIA Distinguished Fellow in 2005.

Personal life and death

Mafeje was married to Shahida; they had five children, Nandipha Mafeje, Lumko Nkanyuza-Mafeje, Lungisa Nkanyuza-Mafeje, Xolani Mafeje, and Dana Mafeje. Mafeje died in Pretoria on 28 March 2007.

Research and ideology

Mafeje was one of many anti-apartheid activists in exile. As an important Pan-African intellectual, he studied African history and anthropology and wrote about the anti-apartheid movement. Mafeje published highly influential sociological essays and books in the fields of development and agrarian studies, economic models, politics, and the politics of social scientific knowledge production in Africa. He is considered one of the leading contemporary African anthropologists; however, he is more of a critical theorist than a field researcher.

Mafeje scholarly work significantly contributed to the decolonization of African identity and its historical past, criticising anthropology's typically Eurocentric techniques and beliefs. He demanded that imperialist and Western ideals be eliminated from Black African anthropology, which led to an examination of the discipline's founding principles and the methods by which academics approached the study of the attributed ''other''. CODESRIA, which promoted an Afrocentric approach and eliminated the Western perspective from pan-African research, was founded with the assistance of Mafeje. He was one of the very first to dedicate himself to deconstructing the ideology of tribalism.

His work includes a whole series of debates and polemics with scholars like Harold Wolpe, Ali Mazrui, Achille Mbembe, and Sally Falk Moore, his favourite target who was an hiteanthropologist and Chair at Harvard University. Mafeje is part of the first generation of ''indigenous'' researchers, who reject the colonialist and neo-colonialist interpretations of Africa. According to Mafeje, hiteanthropology is inherently problematic since it is founded on the pursuit of ''otherness'', which breeds racism and apartheid, as South Africa's experience plainly demonstrates. hiteColonial anthropology is therefore doomed to the extent that it embodies the separation of the subject (the white anthropologist) and the object (the Africans). However, Sally Falk Moore discredited Mafeje’s claims, accused him for lunching unfounded personal attacks, while “trying to kill a dead horse”, i.e., colonial anthropology.

Mafeje is perceived as one of Africa’s most prominent intellectuals who mixed his superb scholarship with his experience as an oppressed black person. After he passed away, his work gained wide attention and a growing interest from other African scholars, e.g., Francis B. Nyamnjoh.

Awards and honours

Mafeje was elected a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences in 1986. He received the Honorary Life Membership of CODESRIA in 2003 and was named CODESRIA Distinguished Fellow in 2005.

University of Cape Town (UCT) posthumously awarded Mafeje an honorary doctorate in Social Science, established a scholarship in his honour and renamed the sit-in meeting room the ''Mafeje Room'' with a plaque honouring Mafeje, that now presides in front of the Senate meeting room that the protestors held throughout their action. UCT also established the ''Archie Mafeje Chair in Critical and Decolonial Humanities.''

The University of South Africa established the ''Archie Mafeje Institute for Applied Social Policy Research'' (AMRI) in 2017. In addition, Archibald Mafeje PhD Scholarship was established in 2014 by Tiso Foundation.

Publications

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Notes

References

Further reading

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External links

The Social and Political Thought of Archie Mafeje
Centre for Leadership Ethics, University of Fort Hare (2021-03-02), YouTube

Was Mafeje a Marxist?
Bongani Nyoka, YouTube
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Fellows of the African Academy of Sciences
1936 births
2007 deaths
South African political writers
South African activists
Academic staff of the University of Namibia
Academic staff of the University of Dar es Salaam
American university and college faculty deans
Alumni of the University of Cambridge
Academics of the University of Cambridge
University of Cape Town alumni
South African anthropologists