Mongameli Mabona

Front matter

LEUVEN UNIVERSITY PRESS icones core ili fam

HIS LIFE AND WORK

Ernst Wolff

Part 1 - Life

1. A snapshot of Xhosa life in the mid eighteenth century

2. Accelerated change: A typology of mounting conflict

3. A changing region in a changing world 3.1 Spread of Boers and British expansion 3.2 British domination and its effects on Xhosaland and beyond 3.3 Changes from the Xhosaland perspective 3.4 Changes from the broader South African perspective

1. International and Union politics

2. The economy

3. Separation - reserves - labour

4. Transkei: Culture, religion, education

5. Resistance nationally and in the Transkei

3. Enter Mongameli 1. Birth and first years 2. Early childhood in Qombolo

3. Life in Zigudu — Catholic background (1) 61 4. Ixopo - Catholic background (2) 67 5. Pevensey — Catholic background (3) 72 6. Early priesthood 75 4. Italy 77 1. Italian society after World War II 78 2. Everyday life in Rome 80 3. Mabona, the student and researcher 82 4, Further intellectual work 85

5. Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists: Alioune Diop and

Présence Africaine 88 Excursion: The journal Présence Africaine 89

6. Preparing for Vatican II 98

5. Back home? Apartheid, St.Peter's, SPOBA 103 1. Apartheid 103

2. Apartheid education 106

3. The South African economy in the 1960s 107

4, Resistance 109 4.1 The ANC and the PAC 110

5. Life back in South Africa 113 5.1 Lumko 113

5.2 Independent ethnographic studies 116

5.3 Poetry 118

5.4 Lecturer at St. Peter’s in Hammanskraal 119

6. London and Switzerland: Politics or anthropology? 129 1.SOAS 130

2. The Azanian People’s Liberation Front and other politics 131

3. Family life 133

4, Continued research 135

Part 2 - Work

3. “The depths of African philosophy” and The outlines of African philosophy 3.1 General appraisal: South Africa's first African philosopher?

4. Dissertatio ad lauream in Facultate Juris Canonici apud Pontificiam

Universitatem Urbanianam 5. “The nuclear blast of spring”: Poetry 6. Writings of a South African priest 7. Anthropology and religion 8. Interlude: The publication spurt of 1996 9. Diviners and prophets: The last, incomplete, work

9.1 Final appraisal

Timeline Mabona primary bibliography Notes on the sources for interviews and biography

References

PREFACE

After the Second World War, as most African countries were struggling through the turbulence which led to their independence from the erstwhile colonial powers, South Africa increased and strengthened the mechanisms of oppression and exploitation ofits African population. Apartheid was never designed to give any recognition to — let alone support the flourishing of — black talent. In the dust of social and political turmoil thrown up by the strife of the following decades, it was often difficult to notice some ofthe remarkable achievements that were realised despite all adversity. Thus, it was possible that exceptional individuals could simply disappear from public view.

At the end of the 1920s in a remote rural area in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, Mongameli Mabona was born. To a great extent, the most probable path that his life would take was set by the major forces of his time. Like many of his family and peers, he would have herded cattle as a child and received a few years of primary school education (ifany), before entering the labour market at a young age, either as a manual worker on a farm or as a miner far away from home. He would have married, lived mostly separate from his wife and children as a migrant labourer, and then he would have died an early death, poor and exhausted. But this is not what happened.

Through a stroke ofluck, and obsessive attention to footnotes, I stumbled across the life and work of Mabona. Over the span of four years I had the opportunity to gradually discover his writings, conduct interviews with him and elaborate a historical contextualisation of his life and publications. This book documents the fruit of this exploration and is the first study of any kind on this remarkable figure.

The book consists of two parts. Part 1 brings together two elements. On the one hand, there is the first-person account of his life that Mongameli Mabona so generously entrusted to me during two series of long interviews on 15 and 16 January 2016, and on 18 and 19 September 2018 (a list of these interviews is presented as an Addendum). These interviews were augmented by information given by his wife, Marta, and stimulating interventions in some of the interviews both by her, and their son, Themba. On the other hand, I embarked on a broad historical study to situate this extraordinary narrative. This work of contextualisation covers a very unlikely set of historical situations, as a sneak preview of the table of contents would reveal. By combining these two elements, I hope to offer a coherent and historically situated presentation of Mabona’s account of his life. While the first part of the book includes accounts of Mabona’s work in the wide sense of his divergent occupations, professions, and pursuits, Part 2 is devoted to his work in the narrower sense, namely to his complete writings. It was a daunting task to compile a complete list of his writings, and I remain haunted by the fear that I may have missed something. Nevertheless, the result is the very first examination of his entire body of writings. The objectives of this examination will be explained in the introduction to Part 2. The two parts of the book may be read separately, but they are intended to complement each other.

My first aim is to present a book that would be compelling to academics. It should be of value to those who study South African intellectual history (specifically philosophy, theology, and anthropology) and poetry, but also aspects of struggle history (the role of Christianity or of Black Consciousness). The book should also be relevant to scholars of African diaspora studies and indeed to anybody who takes an interest in Présence Africaine and the work of Alioune Diop. Finally, part of the discussion is so intertwined with events in Europe that it may also be of interest to some scholars of specialised areas of European history and intellectual life.

However, my second aim was to write this book in such a way that it would be as accessible as possible to the broader public. For this reason, I tried to keep the text relatively short. Where I engage with the development of Mabonaas an author, the text is inevitably more specialised, but I hope that my decision to present the material by means of a broad review will give reasonable access to those readers who want it. I wrote the book in the conviction that many people, from very different situations in the world, may take an interest in it. Therefore the historical setting also serves to ensure that the divergent contexts discussed in the book become comprehensible to readers who are not acquainted with them. This is my rationale for including information or insights that may already be familiar to some readers.

Undertaking such a project in the absence of scholarly precedents is a perilous venture. I freely acknowledge that some avenues of exploration remain unexhausted. For this reason, the material had to be presented within a welldelimited framework. I avoided inflating the significance of the findings and qualified the conclusions. At the same time, the whole book implicitly reflects my conviction that Mabona’s name should henceforth be familiar to scholars and students in the fields of academic study mentioned above. On the whole, I offer a wealth of fascinating and remarkable material, but refrain from prescribing to the reader how to assess it. That is for each reader to decide. The ambition of this study is rather to clear the terrain, to introduce its main protagonist and to give tools to others for further study. This is not the definitive work on Mabona. I hope, instead, that the book will be a useful first step to whatever else scholars may deem appropriate to do with this heritage. Indeed, in a spirit congenial to some of Mabona’s writings, I call on my readers to consider this an invitation to take this exploration further, in directions that their concerns and competences will show them.

Perhaps the most pressing objective of this project was to have the book completed during Mabona’s lifetime. At the time this manuscript goes to press, this is still possible.

I would like to thank to so many people who have helped me in this project. Among them are Rachel Mahlangu (University of Pretoria) and Stefan Derouck (KU Leuven) and their colleagues who helped me to obtain Mabona’s writings. Aretha Roux produced a very accurate and useful transcription of the January 2016 interviews. Jos Lievens assisted me to work through Mabonas first doctoral dissertation by preparing a Dutch translation of its preface. I had the fortunate opportunity to work through Mabona’s poems in the perceptive and erudite company of Pol Peeters. Idette Noomé shouldered the burden of editing the manuscript, as she has for many of my texts over many years. Mirjam Truwant and her colleagues at Leuven University Press worked through all the difficulties to accompany the manuscript to its publication.

Enormous gratitude is due to the Mabona family: Marta Mabona and Themba Mabona for their practical help and generous hospitality, Mongameli Mabona for patiently sharing his life narrative.

Finally, while working through the material that became this book, I was impressed all over again by the chance I have had in life to have parents who strove to instill the desire for fairness and justice in their children, even at a time when it was far from the evident thing to do. While I know that there must be shortcomings in this book, it is evident to me that without #hese parents, most of what I have written about here might simply have remained invisible to me.

Ernst Wolff Leuven, October 2019

PART 1 - LIFE

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Qombolo, about 90 km to the east of Queenstown, in the southeastern corner of South Africa, is where Mongameli Mabona was born. That was on 5 June 1929.

Like all other infants, he had no idea about the world which he entered, and only became slowly acquainted with it. But for us who want to look back at his life, a longer and broader view on events is required to understand the events. We need to know something of the historical construction of the world into which he was born and from which his life was to take its course. We also need to take note of this background, since it informed his later intellectual work too — as we will see in the second part of this book.

I pick up the narrative with a snapshot of traditional life in Xhosaland towards the middle of the eighteenth century.

CHAPTER: 1

1. A snapshot of Xhosa life in the mid eighteenth century

By the middle of the eighteenth century, there were various groups of Xhosa people who went about their daily concerns in the south-eastern part of southern Africa.! They lived in extended homesteads containing a number of families, and these patrilocal units were in turn part of larger lineage-based clans. Settlements were usually built close to a stream or tributary, and the people lived in round, beehive-shaped huts with thatched roofs, with low mud-dung plastered walls and floors.” The Xhosa, like their neighbours, relied heavily on the bounty of nature for their provisions, including food. For meat, they hunted. They also practised subsistence farming: sorghum was the staple, but they also cultivated maize,

I use the term “Xhosaland” to designate the area occupied by Xhosa people during the whole period, in agreement with Mabona’s own use: “In pre-colonial times the Xhosa speaking area stretched from Umzimkhulu to Rhamka (Gamtoas). This is the Xhosaland I am speaking of” Mongameli Mabona, Diviners and prophets among the Xhosa (1593 - 1856): A Study in Xhosa Cultural History. Münster: LIT, 2004, p. 431. Henceforth: DP. The exact demarcation of the area at each historical phase is not important. For the whole paragraph, see Reader’s Digest, Illustrated history of South Africa. The real story (third edition), Cape Town: Reader's Digest Association South Africa, 1994, pp. 63-64; Les Switzer, Power and resistance in an African society. The Ciskei Xhosa and the making of South Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, pp. 24ff; and Jeffrey Peires, The house of Phalo: A history of the Xhosa people in the days of their independence, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981, Chapter 1. For a description of housing and related terminology, cf. DP, pp. 38-39.

millet, melons, beans, bananas, sugar cane, peas, and pumpkins? Cattle was very significant in the provision of food (both for meat and milk); other livestock included poultry, goats, and sheep. When nature provided in abundance, life was abundant; conversely, changes of the season, times of scarcity, and drought made life hard. A number of safeguards helped them to absorb part of the shock of these vicissitudes: they stored grains, diversified their crops, provided each other with mutual support, and engaged in trade.

Much of daily life focused on providing for basic needs: farming and herding, constructing huts, working leather, etc. But beyond attending to their immediate needs, people were involved in a variety of activities, including mining iron and ochre and manufacturing spears and other tools which they could use to work, hunt, or fight. They worked ivory and made pottery. They also cultivated and enjoyed tobacco and dagga.

They traded cattle, copper, iron, and beads to create wealth, rather than as a means of subsistence. These goods offered a general means of exchange for goods and labour, functioning as a form of currency.’ The goods were also exchanged as a form of speculation. Trade relations connected the Xhosa through various intermediaries with other peoples living farther to the north-east (the Hlubi) and the north-west (the Kwena), but also with neighbours closer by, such as the Mpondo. Trade included dagga, elephant tusks, and other valuables.

Accumulation of goods was fairly limited, with the notable exception of cattle, the kingpin of the Xhosa economy. Cattle was an essential medium of exchange in social relations (for instance, in payment of labour, in establishing marriage agreements between families, etc.). It also served as a symbol of authority. Different levels of wealth existed, but in Xhosa society these differences were limited. Regarding the social importance of cattle, Mabona would later write:

Those of us who have seen the tailend of this cattle culture can only say that those who have not experienced or seen it can scarcely have an idea of what it was like and meant. Anybody who wants to understand the southeastern Bantu, though, must understand this background in all its implications.’

Switzer, Power and resistance, p. 38, Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners. Biography of a people. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004, p. 60. Cf. Peires, The house of Phalo, p. 95 and Chapter 7. True to my approach, I focus here on a

ES particular moment in Xhosa history. In DP, Mabona has a section on the much older “Early Pre-Historic Trade and Migration Routes in Southern Africa” (DP, pp. 58-62). 5 DP, p.265.

Numerous aspects of routine life were subject to tradition and/or ritual, including, for instance, the formulae of respect, and more especially, the key events of life, such as coming of age, marriages, and deaths. Religious‘ practices were performed at the level of the homestead or clan, and were associated with the main features of life, such as agriculture and war. The distinction between religious and secular life was blurred, as unseen forces continually acted in ways impenetrable to human understanding and largely impervious to human influence.’ There is no evidence of worship of a transcendent God; matters of good and evil were approached through the exemplars of the ancestors and through the mediation of traditional practitioners such as diviners.

Society was arranged primarily according to kinship relations, but ties could also be created through marriage. The chief, his counsellors, and the commoners formed the levels of social stratification.’ Work and daily duties were divided according to social role expectations: men took charge of hunting and stock farming; women and children were responsible for agriculture and housekeeping. The homestead was the basic unit of production, and functioned and planned in relative autonomy — in agriculture, trade, and hunting - but collaborated with other homesteads and groups.”

The chiefs were responsible for the distribution of goods and trade, since they controlled land usage for agriculture, hunting, and dwelling; there was no private ownership of land. The chief was also the principal responsible for economic, religious, military, and judicial matters." Together with his counsellors, the chief also arbitrated disputes and decided on appropriate strategies regarding defence, food security, and other general concerns. However, a chief — although this differed to some extent from ruler to ruler and in various historical phases - did not hold absolute power. There were kings, but their powers over their subordinates were limited. In effect, consolidated, centralised power depended on nodes of supportive power which relativised the centralised power. Similarly, the power of chiefs tended to be held in balance, mutually, or through the power relations in their clans.!! The commoners granted the chief their respect

Peires, The house of Phalo, Chapter 5. Mabona’s own views will be summarised in Part 2, sections 7 and 9.

7 Peires, The house of Phalo, p. 67.

: Peires, The house of Phalo, p. 33.

10 Cf. Peires, The house of Phalo, p. 31. Like land, cattle also belonged essentially to the chief, DP. p. 186.

For details on the structures of authority in Xhosa society, cf. Peires, The house of Phalo,