Looking Through Philosophy in Black

Memoirs

Mabogo Percy More

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786609403
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

This autobiography is a series of interrelated true-life events and decisions taken by a black philosopher that highlight the human drama unfolding in the inferno of the South African apartheid system. Mabogo More details what it means to be a black philosopher in an anti-black apartheid academic world. More’s life story traces his emergence in philosophy and his pursuit of a philosophical dream, a dream that takes him from his South African black ghetto township to American and British universities and finally to the prestigious Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement award. His extraordinary philosophical autobiography, with an emphasis on Africana existentialism that takes into account issues of racism, identity, liberation, freedom, alienation, responsibility and bad faith, is supplemented by three key essays from his intellectual career representing the extraordinary contribution he has made to Africana philosophy and black existentialism.

Part I

A Philosophical Autobiography

Chapter One

By Way of Freedom

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

Born in October 1946 in Benoni, located on the eastern side of the Witwatersrand (East Rand and now Ekurhuleni), two years before the institutionalization of apartheid, I have always wondered what my existence in the world meant for me. The second child of a family consisting of three boys and three girls, I grew up in the squalid environment of apartheid urban labor concentration camps called Native (Naturelle) townships or locations. Victims of apartheid forced removal policy because our township was close to a white urban area and thus constituted itself a “Black Spot,” a physical, social, and political threat to the welfare of white people, we were forcibly moved to Daveyton Township, twenty-five kilometers away from the white town, when I was twenty years old. Despite all this, I have always, consciously or unconsciously, moved from the premise that I am freedom; a being—to use the famous French philosopher of the twentieth century Jean-Paul Sartre’s formulation—such that in his own being his being is always in question, a being who is what he is not and not what he is. Not an is describable in determinate terms but always a becoming; always attempting to become something other than what I am. This sense of being is not something that we as human reality have but something that we are. In other words, as human beings we do not possess freedom in the manner of a property or characteristic, but we are freedom. Being a human being and freedom are synonymous terms. Sartre puts precise terms to this when he says: “What we call freedom is impossible to distinguish from the being of human reality. Man [sic] does not exist first in order to be free subsequently; there is no difference between the being of man and his being free” (1956: 30). It is because human beings are free that they are able to choose. As freedom, we cannot escape the necessity to choose. To choose not to choose is unfortunately still a choice.

But my freedom (existence, so to speak) is always already a freedom in situation; that is, I exist within an ensemble of limitations (e.g., race, gender, class, culture, physical attributes, my past, my particular parents, place of birth, time of birth, etc.—in short, my facticity) that I did not choose and by which I am conditioned. Indeed, my situation defines me and conditions me in such a way that I become my situation that shapes and limits me, but that (as a freedom) I also transcend by the choices and attitudes that I make and assume and that then decide the meaning of my situation. That I am black is a given, it is my facticity, but it is entirely the meaning I give to my blackness that gives it its significance. However, within a world where it is easy and comfortable to live one’s life in terms of social demands and prescriptions, to be one’s own freedom, a rebel, a nonconformist, a being who refuses to play the game according to certain well-established and revered rules, carries with it a heavy price.

Personal Identity

Of course, by freedom I do not mean absolute freedom to be whatever I want; this would be absurd. As a human being, a free consciousness, there are things I can choose and those I cannot choose. I did not, for example, choose to be born at a particular time in a particular place by particular parents of a particular racial stock. I was thrown into the world as me, the person later to be identified as Percy or Mabogo or Samuel More or even in my streetwise or sporting identities “Manuel” (certain circle of very close friends in the township called Wattville), “Nduna” (Turfloop University close friends), “Sheriff” (Turfloop University, my brother’s friends and other young, fun-loving students who used to hang out in my flat), “Mainline” (Etwatwa Old Location and Wattville as a soccer player), and others—depending on who you were and in what capacity I relate to you. There are qualities that come to us solely by means of the judgment of others. Others are of our own making. So naming, more often than not, is an attempt on the part of those who name to capture those presumably salient qualities of a person. The reason my being named “Percy” or “Samuel” is unknown to me except that colonialism forced white names on us for the convenience of the colonizer who refused to acknowledge and respect our African names with all the meanings attached to them or in pursuance of the Christian civilizing mission. Each one of us colonial subjects (objects?) have names such as “Nelson,” “Oliver,” “Robert,” “Stephen,” “Jacob,” and so forth, as a sign of being civilized. Unfortunately, gripped by a colonial consciousness, we became proud to be called and use our “Christian” names while discarding or hiding our difficult-to-pronounce-by-white-persons African names. Thanks to the Black Consciousness philosophy, we became tired of pursuing a whiteness that was impossible to achieve; we reverted back to our African names, and we said: “Anybody don’t like calling me by my African name, go to hell!”

In some circles, “Percy,” the name my parents gave me at birth and that ironically—through the meanness of apartheid machinery—does not appear in my “dom-pas” (apartheid ID document) and hence in all my official documents such as passport or ID, is subsumed under one of any of those streetwise or sporting name tags. This identity is made even more problematic by the fact that “Percy,” the name I have used throughout my life, does not appear in my identity document, yet it consistently appears in all my school and academic certificates (Standard Six, Secondary and High Schools, BA, BA (Hons), MAs, DET Certificates, except my doctoral certificate). This effectively means that my identity document and my education certificates do not refer to the same person. Given the recent popular fraudulent acquisition of academic qualifications, I might be accused of having acquired mine fraudulently and dishonestly.

Multiple Identities

Since freedom is at the origin of my being, dare I also say at the origin of the being of everyone I chose to be a bachelor, or a professor or a bachelor-professor or whatever. These identities, however, do not constitute my “nature” or “essence.” Human beings are metastable; that is, there is a fundamental incompleteness or plasticity at the heart of what a human being is. For example, I can change from being either a bachelor or a professor or both of them any time I decide or choose to. I am thus a bachelor, first of all, by my free intention not to get married. But at once it follows that I become a man whom others consider as a bachelor; that is, who has to respond to certain demands and who has been invested, whether he likes it or not, with a certain social perception, function, and expectations or lack thereof. Whatever life game I may play, I must play it on the basis of the representations and perceptions that others have of me. I may want to modify the character that people attribute to a bachelor or a professor in my society, but in order to change it, I must first slip into it; that is, become one with that character. Hence the public intervenes with its customs, its visions of the world, and its conception of bachelors or professors within that society. It surrounds my being a bachelor or professor, hems me in, and its imperious demands, its refusals and its flights, are the given facts on whose basis my bachelorhood or professorship is constructed.

So the meaning of an ascription of identity, even though it may or may not be indicative of one’s character, nevertheless constitutes one into a character within a society that gives meaning to it. For example, in a society fundamentally premised on the significance of civility, respectability, decency, and family values, on the values of family as a constitutive unit element of society, bachelorhood puts into serious questions those values that are predicated on the sanctity of family life whose origin and leitmotif is marriage. The latter notion of marriage is important precisely because within certain contexts of human existence, marriage is not a sine qua non for familyhood. It is possible and imaginable that within certain cultural contexts, a family can exist without the institution of marriage or marriage vows as we know and practice them today within Western Christian practices.

But also, outside certain societies, being a bachelor does not involve the Kantian categorical imperative principle of universalizability. By choosing to be a bachelor one is not by that very fact legislating that bachelorhood be made into a universal law of human conduct; that is, that I will or wish that everyone should be a bachelor like me. While such a scenario is imaginable in a possible world, a world in which no one marries anyone but still observing the basic elements of human dignity as enshrined in the principle of respect for persons (e.g., sticking to one partner and having a family without necessarily going through the rituals of the marriage process, like taking the vow of marriage), choosing to be a bachelor does not necessarily entail the universalization of my action. Indeed, marriage has worked and is working very well for a considerable number of people in the universe. And if it works for some people, then it means there is some good in it, its oppressive patriarchial foundations notwithstanding.

However, within the context of the society in which I was thrown, a society that is presumably founded and grounded on both African and Christian ideals that enshrine patriarchical values and the sanctity of the marriage vow and bonding between two human beings, my bachelor identity locates me into the realm of the different, the outcast, the vulgar, irresponsible, immature, and licentious human beings deserving of no respect or social acceptance. It is this very bachelor identity—besides posing as a dialectical opposite of marriage, a negative moment in the dialectical process of achieving “true humanity,” the antithetical stage to be transcended into the ultimate synthetic moment of “human fulfillment and wholeness”—that generates exclusions from the social, political, and economic spheres of existence. For example, as a bachelor (impohlo, isishimane), it is almost impossible to become a vice chancellor or CEO of a university or a major presumably reputable company or any top job in any organization in my society. The standard suspicion and fear of the cultural, religious, and bourgeois “respectables” is that a bachelor presumably lacks a sense of responsibility that is associated with the responsibility and respectability of a married family man. A married man, it is assumed, cannot risk anything for fear of betraying and embarrassing his family, especially his children who look upon him as an embodiment of respectability, but also has the moral, economic, social, and even religious obligation to care for, provide for, and live for his family. On the basis of these obligations and responsibilities, a married man is therefore presumably a much more trustworthy and responsible person (experience to the contrary notwithstanding). A bachelor, on the other hand, lacking in all these virtues associated with a married man, cannot be trusted with anything. Period! How else can we explain the box in which one has to tick [Single, Married, or Divorced] in every application form for a job?

Professorship, however, complicates this complex and knotty scenario. Professors—unlike bachelors—because of the value placed on them in societies such as mine, constitute the category of those who are desirable, the untouchables of society, the included and wanted. (Unfortunately, this perception has been eroded in the Zuma regime era.) Professors are those who are supposed to transmit, create, and produce knowledge necessary for sustaining and maintaining the values of society but, more importantly, for even keeping that very society alive, sustaining, prolonging, and safeguarding its very existence. From this perspective, professors are the husbands or midwives of society. So, a professor, unlike a bachelor, is a necessary requirement for the existence of society, the fountainhead of and the lifeline of any social arrangement. The big crunch, then, is: combine a bachelor and a professor in one and the same person, and an oxymoron emerges in the form of an “excluded inclusion,” “undesirable desire,” or, if you prefer, “unwanted wantedness.” This state of affairs takes on the form of a philosophical aporia. The problem becomes that of something which is and is not at the same time. But is that not exactly the description of myself I gave above: a being who is what he is not and is not what he is? To be sure, add to this mixture the very fact that I am not just a professor. Professor is not my name or my soccer nickname, although I have heard people with no clue as to what “professor” means calling me “Bra Prof.” Professorship is an acquired designation, a title indicating something about oneself that is bestowed upon you not by yourself but by other human beings in a particular environment with particular qualities and intentionalities. Etymologically, the word professor, just like the word profession or professional, refers to the process wherein, by taking vows, one sort of enters into a religious order. Thus a professor is someone who by definition claims or “professes” to know something. Such knowledge claims are endorsed by those in similar positions who profess knowledge claims about some field in our knowledge kingdom. Thus one can, in terms of socially constructed knowledge systems and fields—for example, chemistry, biology, medicine, economics, history, literature (Zulu, Sotho, Xhosa, English, German, French, or any spoken and written language in the world), psychology, and so on, and so on—claim or profess to have extensive knowledge in that field. How then do we verify and test this claim? This is customarily done, in the academy or institutions of higher learning, by mechanisms such as one’s record of publications in peer-reviewed journals, books, conferences, teaching experience, research, knowledge production, and more. In other words, evaluative procedures for promotion to professorship are determined by a professorial peer group. Broken down to its simplest meaning, a professor, as a matter of fact and at bottom, is an advanced student, a person who falls in love with learning and continues to learn together with his/her students. A professor is a co-learner with people who are learning.

Now, here’s another crunch: I’m not simply a bachelor or a professor of philosophy, I am also black! This becomes triple jeopardy. I have never doubted the compatibility of these identities, either in my lifestyle or in my profession. However, to simply describe oneself as a professor of philosophy is enough to cause pandemonium to the o...