Our past is rich with stories asking to be told

Little has been done by academic institutions in 20 years to face our racist history and create new futures writes, Xolela Mangcu

Over the years I have had the great fortune of being at Harvard University for some of its most historic moments.

I was in the front row when the university called a Special Assembly to award an honorary doctorate to Nelson Mandela in 1998. It was only the third time the university had convened such an assembly. The first time was to honour George Washington in the late 18th century, and the second to honour Winston Churchill. Needless to say, Mandela was the first African to receive this recognition in Harvard's 400-year history.

Now the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies has convened the Harvard community for the WEB Du Bois Medals to honour eight individuals who have made special contributions to African and African American art.

My descriptions of these individuals do not even come close to their achievements in life: legendary musician and activist Harry Belafonte; civil rights leader Congressman John Lewis, who as a youth in 1965 was beaten at Martin Luther King jnr's march in Selma, Alabama; Hollywood filmmaker Harvey Weinstein, who has produced movies such as Django Unchained, Pulp Fiction and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom; Shonda Rhimes, creator of Grey's Anatomy, the first and only black woman to own three shows on prime-time US television; Steve McQueen, maker of 12 Years a Slave, for which he won an Oscar; David Adjaye, the genius architect behind the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture; Oprah Winfrey is, well, Oprah Winfrey; and Maya Angelou, who was awarded the medal posthumously.

Those being honoured were introduced by individual professors in the department of African and African-American studies: such as Winfrey by Harvard president, Drew Faust, who described the gathering as the most historic event at Harvard since it honoured Mandela.

What is most instructive for me here is the convergence of academic and public life, at the heart of which is Henry Louis Gates jnr, the doyen of African-American studies. Gates's CV would be as long as this article, so I won't go there. Suffice to say I have watched this guy build the greatest monument to African and African-American scholarship at Harvard.

And because nothing succeeds like success, Gates's friend from their undergraduate days at Yale, Ethelbert Cooper, has endowed the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery, which opens on October 21.

At the end of the ceremony we walk over for dinner. Fortune places me at the table behind Gates and Belafonte.

Now, I am not one of those who crowd around asking for selfies or autographs. So I am content, more than content, to be a few feet away from Belafonte. The last time I felt like this in the presence of a human being was with Mandela.

At the dinner, the chair of Harvard's Committee on Afri-can Studies, Caroline Elkins, announces the establishment of the Centre for African Studies teaching about Africa.

She says the new centre will put the study of race "front and centre" of the academic enterprise at Harvard. This is because teaching about race is a moral imperative, so our young people should never be taught to hate again. It is in the classroom that a structured discussion of the past, and how it insinuates itself into the present, takes place.

The other instructive piece here is the role played by Faust, the president of Harvard and herself a historian of slavery. Frankly, the reason the African and African-American studies department exists is a combination of Gates's academic entrepreneurship and Harvard's name. And with their name, they go where angels fear to tread - to take the study of race seriously.

At the end of the ceremony I whisper to a fellow Fellow that I wish I could put this in my pocket and take it back to South Africa. Sympathetically, she says, "at least you will remember it". Well, I am tired of remembering. I want us instead to do things our children can remember. Few things pain me more than the little to nothing we have done to build African scholarship in South Africa over the past 20 years.

Instead, our universities are withdrawing into denial about race, shirking the responsibility to take our past by its horns and create new futures out of it.

The reason people such as Weinstein and McQueen can make movies such as Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave is because of the research on slavery and race here at Harvard, with Gates as their lodestar.

And then something happened. I saw Gates fidgeting with his phone. I said to the person sitting next to me that it looked like "Skip" had just won the lotto. Gates started jumping up and down: "I've just won an Emmy!" This is of course the highest honour for a television production in the US. Gates received it for his public television series, Many Rivers to Cross.

As we walk out, fortune again puts me a few steps behind McQueen. I tell myself I will not mob the guy, he is having enough difficulty fending off all manner of prospective filmmakers. But then an idea crosses my mind, and I holler at him: "Hey, Mr McQueen, I have an idea for you."

He is initially dismissive, taking me for one of the wannabe filmmakers. But then he could not resist his own curiosity. "Yeah, go ahead," he says. "I think you should do a movie about Steve Biko," I say. "Aha, that's an idea," he says.

"You think Richard Attenborough did not do a good job with Cry Freedom?" he asks. I share an anecdote about how Attenborough told Nkosinathi Biko and I at his house in London he needed a white hero for the film to succeed in the US and it ended up being more about Donald Woods and less about Biko.

Now whether my idea about a Biko movie keeps McQueen awake at night is another matter. If he doesn't do it, someone finally will. The more important point is that until there is sufficient research and scholarship in our universities, there will be no movies, songs, art, literature about Biko or Oliver Tambo, Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge, Chris Hani or any other person whose story is worth telling.

I am a great fan of biography in social science research. Biographies tell us about the triumphs and travails of individual narratives but take us deep into the history of ideas that remain the unfinished business of our generation - those of us who were placed by history to be the last witnesses to apartheid. Painful as that history was, it is also simply too rich to waste.

Mangcu is associate professor of sociology at UCT, Oppenheimer Fellow at the Hutchins Center at Harvard and author of Arrogance of Power: South Africa's Leadership Meltdown