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.

The Black Soul of Jean-Paul Sartre

by Pravasan Pillay, Black Radical Congress, 2001

Just over twenty years ago fifty thousand men and women crowded the Champs-Elysees to mourn the death of Jean-Paul Sartre. Many of the ordinary people present in the crowd that day loudly proclaimed the dead philosopher as France's greatest intellectual of the 20th century. Others, perhaps acquaintances from the many Left Bank cafes he frequented, unashamedly extended the scope of his influence to encompass the entire Western world. Still others, perhaps ardent followers of the then popular post-structuralist movement, begrudgingly paid their respect only to follow it up with some derisive salvo or the other. Whatever else was said of Jean-Paul Sartre on that cold Paris day no-one present dared to deny his incredible gift to arouse the passions, of admiration or of anger, of all who encountered him or his monumental body of work. This would have been the way Sartre, ever the egoist, would have wanted it. A reaction of any sort was infinitely more desirable than apathy.