The CIHA Blog brings you the second lecture of the planned four-series of posts on the Dr JL Dube Memorial Lecture as he celebrates his 150th birthday. These series of lectures are organised by the College of Humanities at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. This specific lecture was delivered by Mr. Ngila Michael Muendane and Mr. Lukhona Mnguni (you can find the full lecture by Mr. Mnguni here).
By Dr. Taruona Kudzai, University of KwaZulu-Natal
Indigenous Africans have been urged to develop a correct mind-set as a precondition for the use of land because their current orientation is not conducive to the handling of land in a productive way, thus frustrating the vision that John Langalibalele Dube had for the self-reliance of his people.
The call was made by former political prisoner and author, Ngila Michael Muendane, while presenting the second of the four John Langalibalele Dube Memorial Lecture series, together with emerging UKZN political scientist, Lukhona Mnguni on Land and Climate Change, and Higher Education, on 14 September.
Muendane said indigenous people need a mind shift from wages and salaries to self-reliance, as shown by Dube.
He said, “The immediate preoccupation of our people is with wages and salaries. This materialistic orientation of the mind is also evident when land redistribution takes place. Most people who get their land back through restitution prefer money to taking land. Around this, there is massive corruption where government officials, out of greed and corruption take away land from the previous owners only to lease it back to them and give communities a mere pittance of the monthly earnings from leasing out the land. The communities remain destitute, unskilled, unproductive and dependent, a spirit contrary to self-reliance that Dube espoused.
“The mind-set of indigenous people has come to be characterised by the weakness of dependency. Nobody that suffers from the dependency syndrome can ever become self-reliant. The dream of Langalibalele Dube for his people becoming self-reliant can never be achieved without changing the mind.”
Muendane blamed the current mind-set and the consequent dependency syndrome partly on colonialism that, he said, relegated indigenous Africans to virtual automatons: “Colonialism discouraged indigenous people from taking the initiative to till the land by taking away their land. They were forced to leave their lands to go and work in mines and factories and those that remained behind were constrained to become labourers on the farms or remaining peasants with little to live by and were left without having to make decisions on the use of the land. Consequently, their perception of the land was reduced from that of the purposefulness to a way of earning a wage and live from day to day instead of providing food for the community and store for the future.”
Colonialism, Muendane said, engineered African minds such that Africans cannot work together to achieve a common objective without conflict.
“Working on the land for productive reasons requires all hands on deck, self-reliant people working together and integrating skills. Colonialism deliberately engineered the African mind in such a way that it removed from us the spirit of interdependence, making way for conflict. There is an endemic culture of conflict in practically all organisational formations in our country. Constructive or productive management of work is not possible when people are in conflict with one another. It is under conditions of team spirit or a system of shared values that any productive outcome can materialise when people work together to produce anything of value to meet their needs,” he said.
The cause of the conflict, Muendane said, is because the African mind-set is characterised by a blaming mode of thinking and speaking.
“When we face challenges, we blame someone else for the unpleasantness of our situation. It has become normal to blame someone else for our ill-feelings instead of taking responsibility for our thoughts, actions and feelings. This tendency to blame others instead of taking responsibility is evident in all sectors of society including the family, school, religious formations, business organisations and political formations.
“Clearly when one depends on other people to meet one’s expectations, and those people fail to meet those expectations, one is bound to blame them and get upset. But when one depends on oneself, one will take responsibility for meeting those expectations and consequently cope better with one’s challenges and problems. No conflict will arise among people who have to work and live together,” he said.
Co-presenting the lecture and speaking on Dube and Higher Education, Mnguni posed and responded to the question: What would Dube do or say about higher education in South Africa today?
“Dube would implore us to position our institutions to be emancipatory to the most downtrodden, to uplift our communities and to inform the soul of our future humanity as a country. This would mean gravitating beyond simply being vessels of hard skills and rigorous knowledge production that is devoid of a compelling offer for the humanisation of society. Dube would be disappointed with the regressive tendencies of selfishness, greed, plagiarism, ideas theft and poor compensation for excellence that emerge from time to time in the academy.
“If Dube were to be the guiding light, we would espouse an industrious spirit in our conduct and ensure equity in the access to opportunities and upward mobility. The students would continue to be at the centre of our innovative efforts that correspond with the challenges of our time. We would not rush to conclude academic years without being concerned about the future pathways that may not be available to our students. Universities would not become too elitist and far removed from the existential realities of ordinary people who ought – in an ideal world – to be beneficiaries of the intellectual work of universities,” Mnguni said.
Noting that during Dube’s years, there was an intersectionality of scholarship, politics, development and futuristic pursuits, to the contrary, Mnguni said, in today’s world these are often segmented, creating the unintended consequence of timid academics who live in bubbles of self-created social realities.
He said, “I believe Dube would encourage us to keep reinventing ourselves for the benefit of humanity, to embody a lasting industrious spirit that is about the making of the future than a reproduction of the present. Higher education must be at the centre of making the future world we want to see, unlocking answers to all the intersectional points of scholarship, politics, development and futuristic pursuits.”