Mabogo More: More than a Black Philosopher

 

Mabogo More

The Con

The Rhodes Must Fall campaign has shaken both the University of Cape Town and Rhodes University to the core. It has quickly become about a lot more than just a statute and name. Students are demanding the deracialisation and decolonisation of both institutions. As more and more stories are being told about the racism faced by workers, students and academics in these institutions, and its hold over curricula, the idea of the liberal university as a space of universal enlightenment and reason is being subjected to sustained and cogent critique. Much of this critique is, rightly, orientated towards the present and the prospect of a better future. But there is a long history of the systematic marginalisation of black South African academics, whether working at home or in exile, in both the liberal and radical wings of the South African academy. In 2015 students at a university like Rhodes are quite likely to graduate with a degree in the social sciences without ever having been asked to read people like Archie Mafeje or Sam Nolutshungu.

No country for brilliant thinkers

Mabogo More

by Kwanele Sosibo, Mail & Guardian

The philosopher’s den cum-study-cum-living area simultaneously conjures order and chaos. The bookshelf behind his desk is lined with mostly existential philosophy tracts in logical order, so that he easily pulls out tomes by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and African-American philosopher Leonard Harris to chart his intellectual trajectory. His desk is covered in open, upended books alongside strewn academic papers, evoking his widely referenced, re-interpretive papers and essays.

Black Existence in the Philosophy of culture

Lewis Gordon: Black Existence in the Philosophy of culture by TigersEye99

Is Philosophy Blue?

Lewis Gordon, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory & Criticism

I here offer a portrait of the blues as a philosophical medium. A critical way of looking at the world from the perspective of the African diaspora, what, we may ask, can we learn from looking at philosophy in blue?

There are many ways to talk about the blues. Here are two. First, the blues is a form of black music. That is pretty well known. Second, the blues is a condition that transcends music. The music is, in other words, an expression of the blues. A philosophy of the blues, or perhaps blues philosophy, is more concerned with the latter.

Nahum Dimitri Chandler: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought

I just enriched my bookshelf with a text that will no doubt be required reading.

- Lewis Gordon

Freedom, Philosophy and Reason: A lecture by Lewis Gordon in Bogota in 2009