The College of Humanities at the University of KwaZulu-Natal organised the Dr JL Dube Memorial Lecture series as he celebrates his 150th birthday. This is the lecture delivered by Lukhona Mnguni. Earlier, we posted the summary of this lecture on the CIHA Blog (found here) and this manuscript serves as an additional resource for anyone who wishes to read Mr. Mnguni’s lecture in full.
By Lukhona Mnguni, PhD Candidate at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
This 150th anniversary of John Langalibalele Dube comes at a time when the country and the world is in a state of flux, short of direction and extinguishing fires of visited upon us by the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a demand for great intellectuals who possess a compelling vision coupled with compassion for our society. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to stop and revisit our humanity as a society to much trepidation about what the future holds. There are no definitive responses nor predictions about our future.
Living has been reduced to being grateful for life in the face of devastating human loss to the pandemic. Some families have shut their door as COVID-19 kills entire generations or parents, with the latest figures suggesting that South Africa has the highest number of orphans due to COVID-19 in the African continent. The reports suggest that around 95 000 children have lost their parents or guardians in the wake of this global pandemic. Life expectancy has been significantly reduced in the short-term due to human losses visited upon us by the pandemic. To avert this unfortunate trajectory, the scientific community has worked tirelessly on developing vaccines as a shot in longevity and avoiding severe illness.
What have higher education institutions done in South Africa? Many have attempted to preserve the status quo albeit through virtual platforms. There has been a push for the completion of the academic years as we know them, teleporting of the contact university methodologies into a different reality of long-distance virtual learning. There has been little demonstration of agility towards adaptation of pedagogies to meet the demands of the current times. Where concerns have been raised on the challenges of online assessments and their integrity or lack thereof, there has been deference to abstract hope that systems will over time improve. Because our education has for some time not been accompanied with a strong teaching on values – it is easy for some students, lecturers and managers to stray. The push for multiple chances for students to catch up with work, redo their assessments or revisit some has in some instances become an unethical push to pass students at all costs, grating away the quality and integrity of the results. Thus, unintentionally (at least) visiting a false sense of achievement on some students.
Given the unstated push for passes, some academics – at the annoyance of perpetual repetition of the same task – have seen it fit to pass as many students as possible first time around. A cursory look across Colleges and Schools tells a story of increasing pass rates during this time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Are these increased pass rates a reflection of improved quality and preparation of the student for the uncertain future we are confronted with or are they merely a reflection on mastery over the past and possibly outdated ways of understanding the world and our place in it? Such reflection should be led by the best intellectuals among ourselves who are imbued with compassion for society. The latter is important when considering education as a transformative tool at our disposal with the ability to shift any society’s consciousness while equipping individuals with knowledge and skills for their own personal and collective development.
This era of consternation subjects us to involuntary questions such as, what would John Langalibalele Dube and his generational peers do or say about education in general and higher education in particular? We ask this because of compelling historic archives that Dube and his peers were compelling intellectuals with an industrious ethos in how they plied their trade. They are the founding fathers of organised resistance against oppression, they are the pioneers of journalism and black press media and ultimately they were inventors of transnational solidarity and the importance of locating one’s reality within a global perspective. These are important lessons because societies in a growingly interconnected world tend to undergo similar experiences. This opens up room for shared lessons in brokering solutions to some of our immediate challenges. It is for this reason that we must respond to the question, what would Dube do or say by revisiting his source of inspiration into the education space.
When Dube left the land of his birth with the Wilcox family – missionaries – for the United States, he was transported into a new world that would be most influential in the formation of his political thought and understanding of the oppression of black people across different societies. This is the awakening of international solidarity in Dube’s life but it would not be until the late 1890s that he would live in that space of shared international struggles by black people. In his early life in the United States, Dube would traverse the path between Oberlin and New York as he visited Rev Wilcox once he had moved to New York. In that period, Wilcox was still reflective on his missionary work in South Africa. They both worked – it is narrated – on a pamphlet entitled “Self support among the kaffirs”. Wilcox used the pamphlet to communicate his views that “industrial education was the best way to uplift the native people of Africa”. These views planted seeds on Dube but his encounter with Booker T Washington crystalised them and influenced John and Nokutela Dube to found the Zulu Christian Industrial Institute, which later became the Ohlange Institute.
During his time at Oberlin College Dube’s path crossed with the towering intellectual and activist of his era on civil rights. Washington was not only a man of words, he had founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, now Tuskegee University. The university outlines that “Tuskegee’s mission has always been service to people. Stressing the need to educate the whole person, that is, the hand and the heart as well as the mind, This institution founded by Dr. Booker T. Washington was acclaimed–first by Alabama and then by the nation for the soundness and vigor of its educational programs and principles.”
Alabama, of course, has a pride of place as the home of many struggles against racial oppression and imperialism in general. It is a place that has produced, inspired and ushered into the world a many activists. This is the place that becomes a great influence in Dube’s own developmental thinking and fixing his priorities for his future commitments and projects. Of course Dube had already established a small school at the Umkhomazi Valley around 1894/1895, but it was not with the great clarity with which he returned following his spell in the US from 1897 when he went back to train as a priest at the Union Missionary Seminary in Brooklyn, in New York. It is during this stay that Dube encounters and to a degree befriends Booker T Washington who had founded Tuskegee over 15 years ago with great experience on what emancipatory education should look like.
The governing ethos at Ohlange Institute can be traced to such remarkable foundations. Therefore, when we ask the question, what would Langalibalele Dube do or say about higher education in South Africa today? We are given clues by his founding and inspiring ethos at the turn of the 19th century. 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 remind us to tear down the veils of discrimination that distort our consciousness and encounter with humanity. Dube would be disappointed at the regressive tendencies of selfishness, greed, plagiarism, ideas theft and poor compensation for excellence that emerges 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 with the need to broker new emancipatory pedagogies that correspond with the challenges of our times. We would not rush to conclude academic years without being concerned about the future pathways that may not be available to our students. There would be greater analysis of the devastation visited upon society by the pandemic, opportunities hampered and lives lost with an appreciation on future implications and the need to remake the world. This was the task of people such as Dube and Washington, a need to remake the world. What work is being done persistently and perennially to remake the world at our institutions of higher education? Have we not accidentally or through co-option become reinforcers of oppressive and/or totalitarian system that perpetuate inequality and discrimination? Have universities not become too elite 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?
If Dube were present, he would perhaps within some bounds remind us of the duty to hold power to account. Even though he may not be the best example at this given his fairly conservative emancipatory politics at the time. Dube also had the need to preserve his proximity to the state to sustain Ohlange and the Ilanga lase Natal. There were funding and subsidy implications, which some have argued led to his slow departure from the African National Congress (ANC). This is a subject that still needs greater scholarship to traverse Dube’s politics and his protection of institutions that were fundamental to the intellectual liberation of black people. This interrogation should happen in tandem with one that puts a spotlight at higher education in South Africa today. There have been many symposiums held on the future of higher education but there is difficulty in finding a collective response to, what is the duty of higher education in South Africa?
During the years of Dube and Washington there was an intersectionality of scholarship, politics, development and futuristic pursuits. In today’s world these are often segmented – creating the unintended consequence of timid academics who live in bubbles of self-created social realities. As the academics go out to society to research, they embark on fieldwork because they do not live in the field. They are on an excursion to reality, only to return to their bubbles to pontificate about trends that tend not to adhere to the lived experiences in society. For this reason, the usefulness of academia has come under the spotlight a great deal. Where to from here for higher education? Why have we not built enough early warning systems for the emergent social strife with perilous outcomes for society? How do we position higher education to lead rather than to lag and study the after effects of social evolutions? Can higher education be visionary and ahead of the tide as it was in the times of Dube? Or must we be resigned to the inertia higher education has worked itself to? Have the walls of majestic existence distorted the need for existence?
Some of these questions are as ideological as they are practical about the place of higher education. I believe John Langalibalele 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.