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Chabani Manganyi — a reflective journey through apartheid, scholarship, and the human spirit

Chabani Manganyi — a reflective journey through apartheid, scholarship, and the human spirit
Tinyiko Maluleke
By Tinyiko Maluleke
6 Nov 2024
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Chabani Manganyi, who has died at the age of 84, was a brilliant author and scholar. But despite five decades of consistently breathtaking scholarly output, there was, in Manganyi, neither a hint of hyperbole nor self-importance.

“What follows hereafter is the story of how I became a man, a citizen and a scholar.” 

With these words, Chabani Manganyi begins his brilliant 2016 memoir, Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist — the last of his dozen or so monographs.

The unspoken reticence and the simplicity reflected in the diction of the opening line is typical of Manganyi’s measured approach to (self) reflection and writing. After five decades of consistently breathtaking scholarly outputs, there is, in Manganyi, neither a hint of hyperbole nor self-importance. Note how Manganyi does not define himself as a “good man”, an “exemplary citizen” or a “consummate scholar” — even though he was all of these and more. 

The only child of Hlekani Sophie Manganyi (née Manyangi) and Dumazi Frans Manganyi of the rural village of Mavambe near Malamulele in Limpopo, Chabani Manganyi was named after his grandfather. The Manganyis are the royals of the greater Mavambe area, inclusive of all its satellite hamlets of Xikhulu, Jim Jones, Makumeke, Jerome, Mapapila, Dinga, Mafanele. This is the area in which Chabani Manganyi was born and bred. He matriculated at Lemana High School at the mission village of Elim.

After completing both his undergraduate and honours degrees at the University of the North, Manganyi obtained his Master’s degree at Unisa in 1968 and his clinical psychology PhD, also at Unisa, in 1970. This, at the age of 30. What a monumental “transgression” of the limits and the boundaries that were set for black people in those days!

Later he enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand for clinical training/internship, which he did at Baragwanath Hospital.

A towering intellectual


He grew up to become the towering intellectual at whose feet I had the privilege to sit. Every time the University of Pretoria Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship held its board meetings, Manganyi would drop into my office unannounced.

He would then proceed to examine the quality of my library collection, always recommending a book or two for my further reading. Upon hearing Manganyi’s signature laughter, our mutual colleague and renowned entomologist Robin Crew, whose office was next door to mine, would often join us. Before I knew it I would be drawn into a discussion about Eugène Marais’ classic, The Soul of the White Ant.

One of the fondest memories I have of Manganyi was the evening I spent with him and his great friend, the late Justice George Shane Sammy Maluleke, on the occasion of Manganyi’s National Research Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in Polokwane in 2016. We also took the opportunity to celebrate his memoir.

From the time Manganyi completed his master’s degree and especially after his doctorate, the discipline of psychology slammed all (employment) doors shut for the young Manganyi. And so did the rest of South African academia, including “the authorities at my alma mater (who) failed to acknowledge my applications for academic positions until 1990”.

Apartheid — especially the pernicious apartheid of academia — did throw everything at him, including exile, so that his “exile” started way before he went to the US, even in his childhood, thanks to apartheid’s ethnic and social engineering projects.

Chabani Manganyi’s life could therefore be roughly be subdivided into four phases: the exile before exile, the exile during exile, the exile after exile and the period he himself dubbed “serving a higher purpose”, which included serving as vice-chancellor at the erstwhile Unitra, University of the Transkei, and as the first director-general of education in democratic South Africa. 

Neither bitterness nor triumphalism


Having overcome apartheid and still lived to tell the tale, you’d think Manganyi had earned the right to a little triumphalism. Either that or the right to a good dose of rancour. But there was none of the above in him.

Instead Manganyi chose what academic Jonathan Jansen in his review of Manganyi’s 2016 memoir, described as “restraint”. It is in the profundity of his scholarship that Chabani Manganyi floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee. No one could read Manganyi’s 1973 classic — Being Black in the World — and not feel the power of his beautiful mind. 

Njabulo Ndebele’s 2016 essay, “Being-Black-in-the-World” and the Future of “Blackness” – which is based on a rereading of Manganyi’s book – strikes a note of tragic lament when he asks rhetorically: “What if #RhodesMustFall student activists had in large numbers encountered this book in their undergraduate syllabus at any South African university they had chosen to attend?”

What if indeed! 

Some of his peers, reviewers and interlocutors have either marvelled at his level-headed scholarship or gently criticised him for the almost-total absence of bitterness and/or anger in his writing – including in his 2016 memoir.

A fellow psychologist from UKZN, Graham Hayes, has called this the “generosity of spirit in his critiques of the alienation and indignities black people were constantly being subjected to”, so much so that Hayes has often wondered: “Why isn’t this guy more angry?” 

My own view is that this may be a slight misreading of Manganyi. You cannot read the last chapter of Manganyi’s Being Black in the World, which is satirically titled “African Time”, or his 1984 essay on race pseudo-science, titled: “Making Strange: Race science and ethnopsychiatric discourse”, and not feel the seething anger in front, behind, above and below the text.

In the latter essay, Manganyi challenges the established views of the local and global gods of Western psychology and philosophy, exposing their racial biases: Hegel, Freud, Lacan, Jensen, Carothers and De Ridder, among others.

And yet, if Manganyi’s writing is of such sublimity and such ferocity that it leads his readers to ask why he is not angrier, then perhaps he has succeeded in his distribution and literary management of anger. 

Unlike Es’kia Mphahlele, who in his autobiography Down Second Avenue tells the metaphorical story of his lifelong quest to track, find and tame the “fatally beautiful lady called bitterness”, Manganyi announces no such intentions and therefore declares no eureka moment where and when he tracks bitterness down.

And yet, the very nature of Manganyi’s day-to-day experiences when he was a practising clinical psychologist were enough to make him fume. He often witnessed patients saying “Baas” and “Master” to white doctors who seemed to accept or trivialise the significance of such faux pas.

How could Manganyi not feel scandalised and infuriated?

A legacy of scholarly brilliance


In 2023, Mabogo Percy More published an important monograph, Being-While-Black-And-Alienated in Apartheid South Africa, in which he engages with the life work of Chabani Manganyi. This in itself is a profound acknowledgement of the worth of Manganyi’s oeuvre.

As per the rigorous conventions of scholarly engagements, Percy More includes a critique of the work of Manganyi, starting with what he calls Manganyi’s seeming “elision of black social critics, political theorists, activists, psychologists and even sociologists in his early works”. 

Similarly, Garth Stevens suggests that Manganyi’s “great deal of emphasis on his relationships with white colleagues and mentors” may indicate “an internalised deference towards whiteness”.

Both critiques are plausible but a little overstated. The critique is much stronger where it points out the theories or arguments of specific thinkers — black, white, women, men thinkers — which could strengthen, prove, improve (or even disprove) specific aspects of Manganyi’s literary works.

There is consensus among the vast majority of Manganyi’s peers, including those critical of aspects of his work, that as a scholar, writer and intellectual, Manganyi’s body of work constitutes a national treasure.

All writing is ultimately autobiographical and none more so than Chabani Manganyi’s type of writing. In fact, Manganyi is a master biographer. He has bequeathed us five biographies in all — two autobiographies and the biographies of Mphahlele, Dumile Feni, and Gerald Sekoto — not to mention his other paradigm-shifting monographs. 

Chabani Manganyi was a formidable scholar, a brilliant author and a gentleman. His death is a momentous loss to family, friends and the country as a whole.

Rest in peace Chabani Manganyi wa Mavambe wa Khutla wa Mukhane wa Bungu wa Mulekale wa Nsindavani wa Ripindzi ro phasa homu na rhole. Magoda! Manganyi! DM

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