readership. However, it seems that his style of writing is too discursive, literary, and urbane for it easily to have found a place in the rather restrictive discourses of much academic psychology.
During the early years of his work as a practising psychologist Manganyi knew what it meant to put psychology to work in the service of ordinary black South Africans who were oppressed and exploited by a racist and unyielding government. His quest in these early writings to liberate black subjectivity could well be taken up by the proponents of the de-colonisation project in contemporary South African affairs and institutions of higher learning.
Manganyi’s thinking and research has always kept up with the times, and in the 1990s and early 2000s he published important work on political violence and the vicissitudes of the transition to democracy. Besides his contribution to the life of ideas he has also unselfishly given his expertise and wisdom to public institutions in South Africa. Since 1994 he has held highly prestigious appointments in educational and academic spheres: as director general of the national Department of Education (under Minister Sibusiso Bhengu), as vice chancellor of the University of the North, as vice chancellor (1999–2003) and then as vice principal (2003–2006) of the University of Pretoria, and as chairperson of the Council on Higher Education (CHE).
Manganyi’s intellectual pursuits have not been limited to the narrow confines of psychology. He has written three biographies, the first published in 1983 was on Es’kia Mphahlele, the novelist and literary theorist, which was followed in 1994 with a biography of the painter Gerard Sekoto who spent most of his adult years in exile in Paris, and most recently (2012) on artist Dumile Feni (1939–1991). Those on Sekoto and Feni are significant works that have contributed to the recovery of two major South African artists, whose exiled status could easily have resulted in a lack of recognition of their work.
Manganyi has now turned his craft of biography writing on himself, with the publication of this memoir, Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist. This text is more than an autobiography of a black psychologist, because Manganyi’s work and writing has not only been of a psychological nature. His memoir is also a story of apartheid in its ‘glory years’, in the period of its decline and demise, and of the last 20 years of democracy. His memoir offers us a view of a man who has throughout his life pursued an independence of thought, and who has had a profound respect and love for the life of the mind.
Since the early 1990s the South African literary scene has witnessed an outpouring of auto/biographical writing, mostly from, or on, political activists. Fewer have come from the pens of intellectuals, so this memoir is particularly welcome as both a history of ideas and an account of a scholar’s struggle against injustice and oppression.
Grahame Hayes
March 2016
Preface
What follows hereafter is the story of how I became a man, a citizen and a scholar.
A significant precursor in the history of this autobiography is a lecture I presented at Rhodes University in 2008 at the invitation of Professor Catriona Macleod, then head of the psychology department. The lecture followed my selection as the first recipient of a Department of Psychology award termed the ‘Psychology and Social Change Project’, an initiative
in which prominent members of the psychology community in South Africa are honoured for their contribution to social change in the country. The aim of the project is to acknowledge people who have gone beyond the traditional bounds and contributed, through intellectual, professional and personal labour, to social change and the field of psychology in South Africa.
The department’s Certificate of Acknowledgement stated that the award was made in recognition of a ‘sustained and excellent contribution to social change and the field of psychology in South Africa’. As sometimes happens at ceremonies of this kind, I was asked to give a public lecture when I accepted the award. I chose an autobiographical theme and used the opportunity of my engagement with the psychology community at Rhodes University to examine the opportunities and challenges I had encountered as a clinical psychologist in apartheid South Africa.1
By that time much had happened in my life beyond the demands of my position as the first African clinical psychologist in our country. For understandable reasons, the account given in the Rhodes lecture and the more substantive one given in this autobiography leave out matters which might be of interest to a wider audience. Among them are the rewarding one-and-a-half years I spent in the 1990s as the founding executive director of the Joint Education Trust, a Johannesburg-based, private-sector-funded organisation working in the education sector.
Excluded too is an account of the challenging and fulfilling period from 1994 to 1999, when I worked as the first director general of education during the years of Nelson Mandela’s presidency. In August 1999 I resigned from that post in order to take up a full-time position as advisor to Professor Johan van Zyl, then vice chancellor of the University of Pretoria. After a hectic nine-year absence, the return to a university setting provided me with a platform from which to conduct research and publish my work locally and internationally once again. That return to academic life also enabled me to undertake what I describe as a life-writing project.
The overall significance of the 2008 event at Rhodes is that Professor Macleod and her colleagues formally acknowledged my contribution to psychology as a discipline, and it was this acknowledgement that encouraged me to look more closely at my life and academic career and to write about it. Coincidentally, the award from Rhodes came in close proximity to honorary doctorates conferred on me by the universities of the Witwatersrand and South Africa.
Faced with the unexpected public recognition of my work more than 30 years after the publication of my fictionalised and semi-autobiographical memoir Mashangu’s Reverie and its companion essay ‘The Violent Reverie’, I was encouraged to examine and speak about my life.2
Although I was familiar with the international literature on biography, my knowledge of the literature on intellectual autobiography was relatively limited. Coming across discipline-based academic autobiographies written predominantly by psychologists and economists was an eye-opener. In the months and years that followed the public lecture at Rhodes, I was determined to turn the autobiographical essay I had presented in my speech into a full-scale intellectual autobiography.
I included the writing of this book in the life-writing project that was part of my work at the University of Pretoria. Consequently, work on this autobiography became part of a trilogy, which included a new, expanded edition of the letters of author Es’kia Mphahlele and the biography of the artist Dumile Feni that I was writing at the time.3
When I strayed into fictionalised autobiographical writing while doing my postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University in the 1970s, I could never have imagined that I would write an autobiography later in my career, since a significant portion of my working life was focused on mainstream academic publishing. Now I recognise that, woven into intellectual autobiographies such as this one, are threads of the formative educational and sociocultural influences of significant figures such as parents and public role models. At the heart of the narrative power and relevance of intellectual autobiographies are moments that stand out – the highs and lows of an individual’s intellectual life history.
I, too, had such moments. In the pages that follow I tell of my rural childhood, my adolescence and my years at university. I give full recognition to the fact that the educational and work experiences of those early years contributed to the development of the kind of intellectual I became. The themes of my childhood and early adulthood are given prominence in the early sections. I fully acknowledge that my primary and secondary school education, as well as my life and workplace experiences, contributed to my personal development and to my development as a professional psychologist.
The
