Archie Mafeje - The Challenge of Agrarian Transformation (Paperback)

Against the background of the immense influence and awareness of the scholarly works and political commitments of Archie Mafeje, you would understand my irritation at the fact that the intellectual legacy of globally distinguished intellectuals such as, Bernard Magubane, Fatima Meer or Ruth First are marginal, at best, and subjects of erasure, at worst in many of our universities and curricula. I taught a 3rd year Sociology class at Rhodes University until March 2011. Less than one year to their graduation, 99% of my students had never read Mafeje, Magubane or Meer. This silencing and erasure, I would argue, are not innocent or matters of oversight; they speak to a new struggle in the post-1994 South Africa – the battle for intellectual high ground and ideational project of structuring how we imagine and shape the future. We would be well-served to remember that the cultural pillar of settler-colonialism, like the economic pillar, never came up for reckoning after 1994 – not even at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The educational structure of any system is a central cultural pillar of that system. If people like Mafeje, Magubane or Fatima Meer – to mention just a few – continue to be cast mainly as activists, then it is easy to manage them. You don’t have to take them seriously. When you have to deal with them as men and women of ideas – as outstanding intellectuals in their own rights – then you have to confront the hegemonic project of the prevailing cultural capital; you have to enter the grounds of the contestation of competing and conflicting intellectual projects: one settler-colonial, the other its nemesis.