The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
The Zulu and the Ndebele people must be the true poets of the world. Their poetry flows in different ways in the greetings, insults and daily humour.
The elders give themselves the poetic licence in greeting their younger fellows and pressing down their treasured, power, authority and privilege. I guess I was in the mood of a typical elder after a Keynote Address I gave at the University of Fort Hare in early 2019. A group of curious students came around to offer greetings and ask further questions about the Epistemologies of the South and the Decolonial Vocation that I had presented on.
There was some jostling and shoving for handshakes and photoshoots that have become part of the ritual of academic gatherings in South Africa. After a good Keynote Address one is sure to be posted in the social media Timelines and statuses of students. One fellow in the crowd was evidently taking things very easy. Even in the audience he was very visible and towering with an imposing stature, an unmistakable leader. He stood there to watch the scramble for handshakes and photos as if to say to his fellow students, stampede all you want but I will have the last word with that man, I am not in a hurry.
With the corner of my eye I was watching him. With a stern face and elderly voice, I broke from the polite niceties and shot at him with elderly rudeness, “wena mfana, uyadelela, uza kancane kancane la kimi ufuze uyihlo!” young man you are coming to me slowly, you are stubborn like your father) The jibe at his father was a sure good-natured cultural reminder to him and all about where I ranked in the social hierarchy, up there with his father. The group was stunned at my sudden turn of rudeness that all of them except Manford Hlabano himself and Professor Philani Moyo that stood at a good distance understood.
“Ah, Topi, ukudelela, okungaqalwayo!” It unfolded equally suddenly to the crowd of students and staff that I enjoyed fatherly authority over the student activist and candidate for a Masters in Social Work at the iconic institution in East London. His father, Boniface Hlabano, is an elder brother and friend to me, and I was going to press it upon all and sundry by dramatising my power and privilege, and the young fellow understood that clearly. Taking his proper position as my brother’s son he loudly and clearly demanded that when I get back to Gauteng I should send him a reading list that elaborated on the ideas that I had illuminated in my presentation to which my response was a firm promise that I went on to fulfil.
As I write this piece Manford Mbekezeli Hlabano has died in a tragic incident of violent crime in South Africa that has robbed the Hlabano family, Fort Hare, Bulawayo, and the students movement in South Africa of a brave public intellectual and a community leader. An influential social justice voice has been silenced and we are the poorer for it.
Intellectual Combat Personified
Those that worked with Manford in the South African and Zimbabwe attest that he was a “one-man majority” when it came to intellectual and political arguments. He accompanied his tough physical stature with some compelling mental stamina that arose from his loved habit of reading. In the present era of the social media and quick reading of posts, statuses and tweets, it is an old fashioned but real thing to do; to demolish hard copies of literature.
Manford did that with passion.
Comrades in the Bulawayo Progressive Residents Association (Bupra) and others in the National Youth Development Trust (NYDT) and Bulawayo Vendors and Traders Association (BVTA) narrate tales of a monstrous strategist and organiser that had deep respect for knowledge and leadership. After sending him a reading list of journal papers and books in Decoloniality he did not keep it to himself but circulated it far and wide among student activists at Fort Hare leading to a huge number of students affiliating to the Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN) of which I am a founding member.
Much like the father, Boniface, that is a leading Public Health professional and technocrat in the entire African continent Manford possessed a missionary intellectual spirit that drove him to believe that the world can be changed for the better through social and political education and organisation. His appetite for knowledge went beyond the selfish need to gather marks and qualifications to the desire to understand and seek to change the world.
He was part of the present cadre of university students in South Africa that went back to Paulo Freire, Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon to dig up revolutionary insights. This radical cadre of students is not satisfied with being taught and instructed by authority figures in shape of teachers and some keynote speakers but want to read and interpret ideas for themselves. The link with community organisations like residents associations made Manford a true public intellectual and what Antonio Gramsci called “organic intellectuals” that think with and for the downtrodden.
After one meeting with Faith Silandulo Dube and Boniface at Eastwoods, in the peripheries of the Hatfield and Arcadia parts of Pretoria, I remarked to Silandulo that when Boniface looks at you without a word you might think you are in real trouble. Only when he opens his mouth in conversation you experience a gentle and perceptive voice of a professional and technocrat with passionate commitment to social justice. What he gave to the son is exactly that menacing physical stature that hides a true social justice warrior inside. In debate Manford was radical and combative in the true manner of activists that take no prisoners in their walk. Fort Hare in particular is still, as of its old order in the 1950s, a hot pot of young African intellectuals with big dreams for their communities and countries. It is still the cradle of African revolutionaries that seek to look beyond personal success to the liberation of Africa. Our own Manford was part of that vocation, clearly.
An old African proverb holds that “when an old man dies it is a library that burns down to the ground.” That proverb recognises wise elders as the repositories of knowledge. Manford, for himself, was a brilliant and radical young man whose death is a real burning to the ground of a library. In the colloquia and conferences organised by centres led by some intellectuals like Professor Philani Moyo and Professor Willie Chinyamurindi and others, Manford was always part of the cohort of active participants and interlocutors of note, taking notes and asking stubborn questions that put even some of the most prepared presenters on their toes. These are the proverbial leaders of tomorrow that are actually leading today, in thought and activism. Condolences and memorials are pouring in from Zimbabwe and South Africa from young and old people that feel the loss of a combative and passionate young leader that stamped a bold signature in the hearts and minds of many.
Rest in power Comrade Karakara
Many called him Caracara which in my dictionary is a hawkish bird of prey. Others just called him Comrade Karakara. The sheer sound of the name bespeaks what was Manford’s radical and argumentative demeanour with which he publicly advanced his decolonial ideas. He was a son of his parents, member of his family and community and also a brother and friend to multitudes. He embodied hope and courage.
Some of us have lost a son, friend and fellow public intellectual that embodied thought and activism. It is a devastated Rodrick Fayayo, a fellow traveller with Manford and friend who says: “we disagreed on almost everything. We only agreed on the fact that I was his brother.” A perplexed Richard Runyararo Mahomva, like Manford a political science graduate from the Midlands State University notes that “will never forget your abundant love for me as a brother and your little dislike of me as a political animal.”
That in short is the pain and loss that the death of Manford has caused among fellow travellers and opponents alike. To Manford intellectual and political progress was not necessarily in consensus but also in disensus, to work together in disagreement and creative tension, which is the stuff of revolutionaries whose first and foremost agreement is disagreement itself. At Fort Hare I remember well a young lady that kept on calling him “Mamphitsha,” a name after the famous Kwaito star.
She did look to me like a Babes woDumo kancane. We are bereaved and aggrieved. Lala ngoxolo mfanakithi, Cde Karakara, we will always love and remember you. Boniface and the Hlabano extended family should take heart in that their loss and pain is shared by a wide world, alwehlanga lungehlanga bakwethu!
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria: [email protected]
