JONATHAN JANSEN | Path-breaking psychologist Prof Chabani Manganyi leaves an enduring legacy

I was visibly agitated on the way to the weekly meeting with my line head and vice-principal of the University of Pretoria, Prof Chabani Manganyi.

As the first black dean of education at UP I could not fathom the dismissive authoritarianism of the senior management, the normalised racism, and the stifling of anything resembling original thought. I could lead my faculty with some facility, but the moment I had to engage the big men in Die Skip, the administrative headquarters of the university, the answer to most things was no.

Seething, I sat down in the chair opposite Prof, as we respectfully called Manganyi, and there was that faint smile again. “You know, JJ,” he said softly, “you get angry before you think. Ask yourself why things are the way they are. Where do you think the racists and racialised thinking all went after apartheid? They did not disappear into thin air.”

The esteemed clinical psychologist had my attention. He would in the years that followed teach me to think my way through problems, to understand root causes, and to appreciate the heavy hand of history in the present. Shortly afterwards I wrote the book Knowledge in the Blood, an attempt to grapple with an institution, its history and its people.

There will be those who write in these days following his passing about Manganyi’s immense contribution to Black Consciousness thought through seminal texts like Being Black in the World, or how he turned his formidable intellect to the crafting of riveting psycho-biographies of giants such as the writer Es'kia Mphahlele and the painter Gerard Sokoto. What I would like to do, however, is talk briefly about Manganyi, the man and his mind. What was going on in his head? How did he estimate the world around him? And what can we learn about his interiority?

Manganyi had a healthy disdain for noise, that emptiness of political rhetoric and posturing that comes with activist performance on our campuses. It took a single meeting of a Senate at the University of the North (now Limpopo), where he was vice-chancellor at the time, for Manganyi to be appalled by the shallowness of intellectual discourse that marked the place. He packed his bags and left.

No doubt, Manganyi must have contrasted the quality of academic life at Yale University where he was a fellow with the ruins of thought at this apartheid university. Thinking mattered to him, reason he held in high regard. He spoke in awe of the minds of great thinkers of an earlier era at the north like Abram Tiro and even some dyed-in-the-wool Afrikaner academics who brought to their disciplines attempts at original thinking even in the stifling atmosphere of the times.

Nor did he take kindly to moral vacuity and political pettiness on the part of the ANC. After Manganyi’s stint as the first director-general of education in our new democracy, that preening minister of education Kader Asmal, let it be known that the DG would be redeployed. You could pay this independent thinker no greater insult, so he gave them the middle finger, metaphorically speaking, and went on to lead a lowly nonprofit education trust where he could serve among more serious people.

Shortly after that, the enterprising new vice-chancellor of UP, Johan van Zyl, appointed Manganyi as his adviser in one of the more transformative moments at this old university. Together, they conspired to bring me from my university in Durban to Pretoria as dean of education.

Towards the end of his career, Manganyi spoke to me about giving an account of his life in book form, but he did not have much time to write. I suspect it was not that, but an ambivalence towards talking about himself. So I offered to interview him every Friday afternoon, record and transcribe the sessions, and give it to him to compose into book form. That is how his award-winning biography Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist came to life.

Thinking mattered to him, reason he held in high regard

Listening to Manganyi every Friday at his home in Centurion, I struggled to process the systematic discrimination that a man of his dignity had to experience in hospitals where he worked as a psychiatrist and even in the discriminating halls of Wits University which, for all its liberal pretences, took some time to give full regard to black intellectuals of that time.

From rural Limpopo, where his values where formed by outstanding teachers in low-resource schools, these institutions, he recalled, were rich in other ways and gave the great man a sense of himself and the world.

Manganyi was already in decline when I last called him in Johannesburg. Ma Peggy, his beloved wife, was the connection between us in those final years. He laughed with joy and told me several times how he appreciated the reconnection. He apologised for his decline and asked that I not regard his frailty. On the other side of the phone I choked up and promised to send one of my books in which there is an honourable mention of the man who became the most important intellectual mentor and role model in my life as a young academic in South Africa.

My heart is broken but my spirit optimistic, for he has left an enduring legacy for those of us who still believe in the life of the mind, the courage of our convictions and the indomitableness of the human spirit.

Thank you, my Prof.