Tribute to Bernard Makhosezwe MagubaneJimi O. Adesina _ University of the Western Cape _ Cape Town, South Africa



12 April 2013

Professor Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane: An Obituary

Professor Bernard Makhosezwe

Magubane joined the league of

ancestors on the evening of Friday 12

April 2013. He was four months shy of his 83rd

birthday. It is often said that when an elder

dies in a village, a whole library is burnt down.1

With Prof. Magubane we have a rich library of

his scholarly works, political writings, a memoir, and several

interviews.

For a generation of African students and scholars in North

America, Magubane’s ‘A critical look at indices used in the

study of social change in colonial Africa’ (1971, Critical

Anthropology) would have the same insurrectional impact that

Archie Mafeje’s ‘Ideology of Tribalism’ (1970, Journal of

Modern African Studies) had on the other side of the Atlantic.

The paper was sent to fifty scholars for review, with over twenty

written reviews (Editorial Note, Critical Anthropology,12[4-5]:

419). Often understood as a relentless (even polemical) critique

of the Manchester School of Anthropology associated with the

Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI) in the former Northern

Rhodesia (Zambia), ‘A critical look…’ is better understood as

an uncompromising re-centring of the African experience in

narratives on Africa, especially African in the context of settlercolonialism. As Magubane noted in his memoir, My Life and Times (2010: 252), his encounters early in his academic career with the presentation of Africa and Africans as what others acted upon instigated in him a passion ‘to rectify the situation in my scholarship in line with the post-colonial scholarship that was evolving in Africa.’

Whether in his earlier works—such as his master’s thesis

dissertation at the University of Natal, on sports and politics in

the townships of Durban, his doctoral thesis on AfricanAmerican consciousness of Africa at the University of California,

Los Angeles and his early scholarly journal articles such as

‘Crisis of African Sociology’ (East African 5[2], 1968—or his

subsequent works such as The Political Economy of Race and

Class in South Africa (1979), The Making of a Racist State

(1996), Race and the Construction of the Dispensable Other

(2007), Magubane’s driving motive was the centring of the African

experience and the re-affirmation of the agency of Africans. The

history of the savannah plains will not be that of the hunters

alone but of the lions as well.

To understand Magubane and the corpus of his intellectual

contribution to South African liberation scholarship on the one

hand, and African Sociology on the other, one needs to locate

him within the contending forces that defined 20th century South

Africa, the African-American context of the 1960s, and the

continental African anti-colonial movements. For a person who

regularly described himself as ‘lucky’ and who ‘happened to be

at the right place at the right time,’ Magubane was as much a product of his time as he was an active

force in setting his own stars. As with

the 20th century story of his homecountry, South Africa, the story of

Bernard Magubane is one of triumph

over immense adversity.

Born on 26 August 1930, within two generations of the colonial

dispossession of the historical Zulu nation, the context of his

birth and early childhood epitomised the eviscerating impacts

of settler colonialism. His grandparents lived in the Zulu nation

ruled by Cetshwayo kaMpande. By the time of Magubane’s

birth, colonial dispossession meant that his parents, Xegwana

and Nozibukutho kaKhumalo, were squatters on a ‘Whiteowned’ farm near Colenso, in the KwaZulu Natal Midlands. His

father was a farm worker, who was also a seasonal migrant worker

on the Durban docks during the dry season. An altercation

between his father and the farmer forced Xegwana to flee

Colenso with his family to Durban.2

The family finally settled

down in Chesterville, a new township in Durban. The working

class environment of his home3

and the township, and the settlercolonial context of dispossession and pervasive racism would

provide the vital resources that framed Magubane’s intellectual

approach. It was also a context in which radical trade union

activism and the African National Congress-led resistance to

the racist settler-colonial order meshed in the leading

personalities and issues. African working class struggle was

one side of a coin. The other side was the resistance against

racial oppression and settler-colonialism. This thread runs

through all of Magubane’s intellectual works.

Had his father not fled the Colenso farm with the family in 1937,

Magubane would probably have grown up a non-literate second

generation farm worker. The restricted educational circumstances

in Durban at the end of the 1930s and early 1940s regardless, the

Magubane children proved to be quite precocious. Bernard

progressed from Mount Carmel to Mazenod, and then the

teacher’s college at Mariannhill. Again, in all probability,

Magubane would have settled into the life of a junior school

teacher but the rise of the National Party to power in 1948 raised

new challenges. Its heightened pursuit of racist policies,

especially the Bantu Education policies, would set the limit on

the options available in a teaching career for Magubane and

many in his generation. It was Johnny Makhathini who raised

the challenge to Bernard Magubane and others in their circle of

friends in Durban in 1953, but it was the guidance of Mazisi

Kunene that led Magubane to sit for the matriculation

examinations and eventually gain admission to the NonEuropean section of the University of Natal in 1954. University

education was a channel of escape and an act of resistance

against the rising tide of National Party totalising racist policies.

Already married to the love of his life, Thembie (nee Kaula) and

a growing family of his own, Magubane went to complete his junior bachelor’s, Honours, and Master’s degrees in Sociology Tributes

at Natal. It was during this period that Magubane met and

developed a life-long friendship with Leo Kuper, a Professor of

Sociology at Natal at the time. Kuper supervised his Honours

and Master’s theses. Magubane and Tony Ngubo worked as

field researchers for Kuper in materials that would be published

as An African Bourgeoisie (Kuper, 1965). While diplomas have

to be won, much of Magubane’s education at this time was

facilitated by anti-Apartheid resistance taking place outside the

classroom and the analyses in publications like the Guardian,

Advance, New Age, and Fighting Talk. However, the classroom

provided him groundings in the works of leading ‘bourgeois’

sociologists, having to read Max Weber and Emile Durkheim in

the original. The dissonance between the debate going on in

his classrooms and the lived experiences and struggles of people

in his neighbourhoods is one thing that Magubane would reflect

on then and later in life as disconcerting.4

From Zambia to Storr

(Connecticut, USA), Magubane’s pedagogic practices would

be shaped by the need to avert such dissonance.

In another instance of being at the right place at the right time,

the opportunity to continue his studies in the United States

came through an encounter with an American who was passing

through the University of Natal at the time Magubane was

completing his master’s thesis work. He and Tony Ngubo were

invited to apply for postgraduate scholarship to study in the

US; a scholarship both received. Leo Kuper had left Natal in

1961 for UCLA and facilitated Magubane’s graduate school

placement at the UCLA Sociology department

The delay in Magubane’s departure (on 21 December 1961) was

in large measure a micro-level impact of Dr H.F. Verwoerd’s

infamous question: ‘What is the use of teaching ‘the Bantu

child mathematics?’ If teaching the African child mathematics

was pointless, what would be the point of giving an African in

his early thirties a passport to go for doctoral studies in the US?

It took the intervention of several individuals and organisation

for Magubane to secure the travel passport. The passport, valid

until November 1964, was not re-issued until the 1990s. When

Magubane left in December 1961, he was forced to leave behind

his parents, wife, and three daughters. Thembie had also left

teaching to train as a nurse in the search to escape being tools

for delivering the National Party’s Bantu Education programme.

The family was not to be re-united until Thembie and their three

daughters joined him in Los Angeles in the Spring of 1965.

A student on a shoe-string scholarship, Magubane combined

studying with holding down multiple low-paying jobs. He

completed his Master’s degree in Sociology in 1963 and his

PhD in Sociology in 1966. In early 1967, Magubane took up a

teaching position at the new University of Zambia. His initial

stay in the United States would form the third plank of the

intellectual influence on his scholarship. While Magubane’s

exposure to Marxist literature in the 1950s was through the

contributions to the radical newspapers and magazines, it was

at UCLA that he would read Marx and Engels in their own words

for the first time. But while these would be influential, it was the

writings of W.E.B Du Bios and the political struggles of the

African American communities that shaped his thinking on race

and class. He did his doctoral thesis on African-American

consciousness of Africa (published as Ties that Bind in 1987).

The period of graduate studies abroad was not a time of distancing from the political struggles in South Africa. In 1962,

with Martin Legassick and Tony Ngubo, Magubane organised

the earliest anti-apartheid picketing of the South African

consulate in the West Coast. It was also a time for widening the

pan-African network of friends and colleagues. Both would stand

him in good stead later in life.

When Magubane relocated to Zambia in 1967, to take up a

lecturing post in the new Department of Sociology at the

University of Zambia, it was a decision he made against more

financially rewarding job offers in the United States. The three

years he spent in Zambia were not only exceedingly rewarding

intellectually, they would insert him and his family in the growing

network of ANC leadership in exile and South African exile

community in Lusaka. Magubane had joined the ANC in 1951 in

Durban.5

As Magubane would say, it was another case of being

in the right place at the right time. The experience of living and

teaching in Zambia would bring Magubane face to face with the

existential implication of colonial Anthropology as well as the

imperative of creative pedagogy when available materials are

largely irrelevant to the context in which he was training

students. The first set of his scholarly works in the period include

‘Crisis of African Sociology’ (1968), ‘Pluralism and Conflict

Situations in Africa: A New Look’ (1969) and ‘A Critical Look at

the Indices Used in the Study of Social Change in Colonial

Africa’ (1971). They would bring Magubane early scholarly

attention and a measure of academic superstardom.

Politically—and unanticipated at the time of his departure for

Lusaka—the period 1967 to 1969 firmly placed him within the

leadership circles of the African National Congress. O.R. Tambo

would spend time at the Magubanes’—initially for space and

time to work while the family was at work or school, and later to

stay-over. Years later, Magubane would speak glowingly about

the humanity of O.R. Tambo—not simply as one who led the

Movement through the dark days of exile but about the humanity

of a person who would help the Magubane girls with their

Mathematics homework and do dishes with the family after

dinner. Jack Simon and Ray Alexander would become close

friends and intellectual sounding boards. Magubane would also

speak with deep affection and respect for the young activists

like Chris Hani and Basil February whom he met in Lusaka. Hani

would lead the Luthuli Detachment in the Wankie Campaign

and February would be the first martyr of that campaign.

From serving on the production team of Mayibuye journal of

the ANC to being a delegate to the 1969 Morogoro Conference

of the ANC, the period in Lusaka would serve to firmly ground

Magubane’s life work within the works of the ANC. In many

ways, Magubane saw his intellectual works as the pursuit of

the political struggles by means available to a scholar. The

Lusaka period was also a time for deepening his intellectual

engagement with Marxist writings. This was the period of

encounter with Frederick Engel’s The Conditions of theWorking

Class in England in 1844—a work that would reinforce

Magubane’s position that to understand the conditions in South

Africa, one needed a global understanding of capitalism and its

historical developments. Magubane would go on to publish an

article in Dialectical Anthropology (1985, No. 10) on the continuing relevance of the work and Engel’s 1872 The Housing

Question to Urban Anthropology.

In 1970, Magubane returned with the family to the United States,

initially on a visiting appointment at UCLA but later in the year

to a tenure track appointment at the University of Connecticut,

Storr. The UConn appointment, Magubane would argue, was

another instance of a fortuitous convergence of events. The

invitation to apply for the position at UConn was at the instance

of James Faris, who first became aware of Magubane through

his works while in Zambia. It was the start of a life-long

friendship. Faris and Norman Chance would provide a near ideal

environment—politically and intellectually— for the next 27 years

that Magubane would spend at Storrs.

The period from 1970 to 1997 marked an immensely productive

and politically engaging time for Magubane. In addition to his

numerous scholarly works produced, Magubane’s two most

important books, The Political Economy of Race and Class

(1979, Monthly Review Press) and The Making of a Racist State

(1996, African World Press) were released. Several of the articles

have been republished in two collections. South Africa—from

Soweto to Uitenhage (1989, African World Press) is a collection

of Magubane’s more ‘political’ writings. The African Sociology—

towards a critical perspective (2000, African World Press) is a

collection of his more ‘academic’ writings. The more ‘political’

materials, Magubane would argue, were writings he did to keep

himself sane over the long years of exile. The more ‘academic’

writings were to keep his day-job. Yet, a close reading of both

collections would suggest that the scholarly writings were driven

by political commitment, as much as the political was driven by

intellectual demands.

Magubane’s scholarly works contended with the pluralist

narratives of the ‘Liberal White’ scholars and Anthropologists

and the ‘neo-Marxists’’ as well. The former defined the South

African conditions in terms of a ‘plural society’ and dismissed

the relevance of class analysis. For Magubane, it was impossible

to speak of the impact of colonialism on the indigenous

population or their contemporary situation without confronting

the exploitation of the labour-power of the local population.

Memory is a weapon of the oppressed in negating efforts to

routinize their lived realities. In the new settler-colonial society

created, ‘white domination was not only economic but political

and cultural as well. Any theory of change in the patterns of

behaviour of the indigenous population must take into account

this total situation’ (Magubane 1971: 419). To account for the

‘total situation’ requires a venture in historical sociology. For

Magubane, it is in exploring the history of dispossession and

disruption of the human conditions of the indigenous

populations that one can account for their social existence in

the present.

The neo-Marxists who focused exclusively on class relations

fail to address the ‘over-determination’ of racism (Magubane

[1985] 2000: 482). Here, Du Bois (1933: 55) was an important

source for Magubane: ‘First of all colored labor has no common

ground with white labor. No society of technocrats would do

more than exploit colored labor in order to raise the status of

whites. No revolt of a white proletariat could be started if its object was to make black workers their economic, political

and social equals.’6

In failing to grapple with the ‘overdetermination’ of racism and the specificity of the ‘National

Question’ in South Africa, the neo-Marxists missed the knob of

the situation. The issue, Magubane, would argue is not race or

class but race and class; in the racist settler-colonial context,

racism over-determines class. Much of what passed for the

‘workerist’ discourse in South African labour historiography, in

the 1980s, dismissed this critical element to the South African

situation. In Race and the Construction of the Dispensable

Other (2007) Magubane assembled the primary sources and

arguments that underpinned his analyses since the 1970s.

The undeclared undertone of Magubane’s scholarship is the

distinction that must be made between ‘White’ people and others

who may be of Caucasian or European descent but firmly rooted in anti-racist traditions and emancipatory politics. ‘White’ is

a category of power rather than phenotype or pigmentation. As

a description of skin colour, ‘white’ is deeply false. Only in the

context of racial domination does whiteness acquire its salience

as a signifier of power over the ‘dispensable Other.’

If Magubane’s writings did not reflect the pessimism that

sometimes afflicts exile scholars, it is largely because of his

proximity to the liberation movements in Southern Africa and

the ANC in the particular case of South Africa. His time in Zambia

had placed him in close proximity to the leadership of the most

prominent liberation movements in Southern Africa. The return

to the United States and being at Storrs—with its close proximity

to the ANC officials in New York—meant that he maintained a

fire-side view and engagement with political works of the

liberation movement. Over the years, and increasingly in the

1980s, Magubane would undertake representational duties for

the ANC. In addition to the local anti-Apartheid movement in

the West Coast, the increasing mobilisation work would bring

him into close contact with a wide range of people in the antiApartheid community in the United States. Magubane would

later serve as a member of the ANC delegation at the July 1987

meeting in Dakar with a delegation of Afrikaner intellectuals.8

Magubane was always the first to acknowledge that it was the

strength derived from the warm family environment that he built

with Thembie, their daughters and the growing number of grandchildren that sustained him and her in exile—as much as the

community that the ANC afforded him. A scholar committed to

the liberation project, Magubane was himself sustained by the

network of people committed to the same project. The friendship

of James Faris and Norman Chance and of their families with the

Magubanes in rural Connecticut provided both an enabling

intellectual environment and support for his political works.

When he was away from the university, he could rely on Faris

and Chance to step in for him—personal angles and contributions

that are easy to miss in a macro-history of emancipatory politics.

The final home-coming in 1997 was meant to be a period of rest,

after retiring from UConn, but this was not to be. Yet, of the

numerous works and challenges that he took on after 1997, the

most significant and rewarding for Magubane was his invitation

to direct the Road to Democracy Project under the auspices of

the South African Democracy Education Trust (SADET) project.9

The project, at the instance of President Thabo Mbeki, was

concerned with the recovery of memory and the documentation

of the years of struggle in a period when documentation was a threat to underground work. The multi-volume works that have

been produced under the SADET project, the nurturing of a

new generation of South African scholars who have successfully

continued the project,10 will serve as the enduring legacy of

Bernard Magubane. The inclusive nature of the project is evident

in the expansive coverage of the contributions of a diversity of

movements, organisations, and forces to the South African

liberation project.

In 1999, Professor Magubane received national honours of the

South African government for his contributions to the social

sciences. He was a recipient of honorary doctoral awards from

the University of Fort Hare and the Walter Sisulu University. In

2004 he delivered the keynote address at the annual conference

of the South African Sociological Association. July 2007 saw

his investiture as a founding Fellow of the African Sociological

Association. In 2010, an international conference was organised

in Tshwane to mark his 80th birthday and to celebrate his

intellectual contributions.

With the passing of Magubane, we would need to double our

efforts in reversing the intellectual erasure and elective amnesia

with which the works of scholars like Bernard Magubane are

met in the mainstream of South African social science. The corpus

of his works and the example of his life are important resources

for educating a new generation of South Africans. They should

be acknowledged as important aspects of our intellectual heritage.

Notes

1. This is often intended as a signifier of the non-literate character of

such societies in which elders are considered repositories of knowledge.

The problem with the aphorism is that the ontological underpinning of such societies hardly admits to the irrevocable destruction of

knowledge that ‘burning of the library’ imagery connotes.

Communication between the ‘living’ and the ancestors continues

beyond the different ‘planes of existence’.

2. Interview with Bernard M Magubane, 29 December 2009 (Deinfern,

Johannesburg). Magubane, My life and times. Scottsville: UKZN Press,

2010, pp.14-15. There were three children in the family at the time.

Magubane’s older sister, Mary, and a younger sister, Florence.

3. His father, a dock worker, and his mother combined domestic labour

services with informal traditional beer brewing (Interview… 29

December 2009).

4 .Interview with Bernard M. Magubane, 03 January 2010 (Deinfern,

Johannesburg).

5. Interview with Bernard M Magubane, 31December 2009 (Deinfern,

Johannesburg).

6. WEB Du Bois. 1933. ‘Karl Marx and the Negro’, The Crisis 40(3),

March, cited in BM Magubane, 1996, The making of a racist state.

Trenton, NJ: African World Press, p.337.

7. These are materials that Magubane used in his teaching over the 27

year period at UConn.

8. BM Magubane. 2010. My life and times. Scottsville: UKZN Press,

pp.318-319.

9. Interview with Bernard M Magubane, 3 January 2010 (Deinfern,

Johannesburg).

10. Dr Sifiso Ndlovu, a trained historian, worked with Prof. Magubane

from 1997 and went on to succeed Magubane as the Director of the

SADET project.