Maluleke Faces and Phases of Resilience

A Memoir of a Special Kind
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-0672288-8-0
Verlag: Tracey McDonald Publishers
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 372 Seiten

In this captivating collection of essays, Tinyiko Maluleke invites his readers on a journey that begins with his eventful boyhood in Soweto and his life-changing upbringing in Limpopo. His heartfelt reflections on the roles of his mother, maternal grandmother and aunts in his childhood will resonate deeply with readers. In the truest sense, this is a 'feminist' book - one that powerfully highlights and celebrates the vital contributions of women to national development. This memoir traces Maluleke's journey through academia, his rise through the ranks, and the invaluable lessons he learned along the way. Woven into his personal narrative is a broader reflection on the South African experience, inviting readers to reconsider the history of the country - its villages, townships and even their own identities. Maluleke delivers unflinching analysis of critical issues facing South Africa, blending rigorous scholarship with a masterful command of diverse literary genres and writing styles. More than just a memoir, this book is both a tribute and a testament to the moments, places, and people - both celebrated and unsung - that have shaped his perspective. His incisive profiles of fellow university leaders are particularly compelling. Faces and Phases of Resilience will make you think, laugh, yell, and cry. More than just a personal memoir, it is the memoir of a country, a historical epoch, and a people - an invitation into the tragedy, beauty and hope that define South Africa. Forty-nine chapters later, the book closes with a haunting essay on the scourge of xenophobia, culminating in a chillingly titled reflection, 'The Day I Die' - an ironic foretelling of Maluleke's own death - that lingers long after the final page. A literary treasure trove for seekers of exemplars and of fountains of inspiration. It is an ode to resilience. - DR REUEL J KHOZA What a feast! - DR JUDY DLAMINI, Chancellor of Wits University Maluleke has the power and ability to engage a reader's senses ... Highly readable ... - FRED KHUMALO, Journalist and Author

Autoren/Hrsg.

Maluleke, Tinyiko

Leseproben

FOREWORD

By DR REUEL J KHOZA

MALULEKE’S MASTERFUL PROFILING OF OUTSTANDING achievers, captivating storytelling and remarkable ability to unite complex themes into a compelling narrative sets him apart as a writer. His depiction of life at the zenith of apartheid, and its subsequent demise, intriguingly enlivens that epoch. Above all else, this collection of essays is an ode to resilience – personal, communal and institutional resilience.

Through incisive observations of life during his generation, Maluleke vividly chronicles the harrowing conditions his parents and, later, himself and his contemporaries endured and overcame. Having done justice in narrating the life and times of the generation that precedes his as well as his own, rural and urban, Maluleke’s Faces and Phases of Resilience glides into profiling the accomplishments of black South Africans from various walks of life.

It covers a broad spectrum of remarkable lives of purpose, resilience, pioneering stewardship and outstanding exemplary accomplishments. Scholarly, lucid vignettes merge a profound intellect with eminent readability – at times poetic, at times lyrical, evocative and moving. The book is a fascinating invitation to embark on a journey of empirical and practical observations depicting pithy lessons for South African citizenry and for humanity at large.

Maluleke is an accomplished thinker, observer, scholar, academic leader, writer, political analyst and profound theologian – with the accent on thinker. His accomplishments in various walks of life, as this book attests, are predicated on his proclivity to think and, having thought, his tenacity to express the thoughts and observations creatively with a linguistic command that is nothing less than enviable.

He and the personalities whose exemplary accomplishments he profiles may in part, knowingly or unknowingly, have heeded George Matthew Adams’s advice on the importance of thinking:

We can accomplish almost anything within our ability if we but think that we can! Every great achievement in this world was first carefully thought out … think but to a purpose. Think constructively. Think as you read. Think as you listen. Think as you travel and your eyes reveal new situations. Think as you work daily at your desk, or in the field, or while strolling. Think to rise and improve your place in life. There can be no advancements or success without serious thought.

So sagaciously advises George Matthew Adams (August 23, 1878–October 29, 1962), a well-known American newspaper columnist and syndicator. This wisdom could very well have been articulated by Tinyiko Maluleke in South Africa’s twenty-first century. Going through Tinyiko’s Faces and Phases of Resilience, one cannot but conclude that he is the quintessence of thinking, keen observation, serious reflection, pragmatic empiricism and creative linguistic expression.

Given the stunting effect of Bantu Education and the fact that Tinyiko went to one or other ‘Bantu’ school for his primary and secondary education, how did thinking become his quintessence? He explains it as a function of a defining moment when he started his tertiary education at an institution in KwaZulu-Natal.

When he arrived in Pietermaritzburg as a first-year theology student, he was confronted with what he considered to be the most disruptive question in his educational journey up to that moment. Until then his education comprised what Paulo Freire called the banking method of education, according to which, education becomes an act of depositing, with the students being the depositories, and the teacher the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorise, and regurgitate.

Maluleke further describes this life changing turning point:

In Freirean terms – my sporadic spasms of talent notwithstanding – I was, up to that point, an excellent ‘depository’ throughout my Primary and High School Education. Imagine my shock when I received my first assignment – from the late Dr Simon Gqubule at FEDSEM in Pietermaritzburg, which started with the question-phrase: ‘What do you think …?’ What do I think? Who? Me? Does it matter what I think? Until then, no teacher had ever asked me what I thought. They always asked me what I remembered from the ‘facts’ that had been ‘deposited’ into me. Until then what I thought was not part of my education. I was immediately thrown into a deep epistemological crisis.

This was clearly one of the defining moments in Maluleke’s educational journey and intellectual development. From then on he dedicated himself to optimal usage of his mind, heeding the scholarly dictum that the mind is a terrible asset to waste. As a self-nourishing bookworm he perennially provides his mind with the requisite sustenance.

Through what comes across as a mighty collaboration of hermeneutics, sociological imagination and astute observation, Maluleke captures and profiles testaments of resistance, in masterful linguistic command, impressive humour, and elegant turn of phrase. He chronicles sung and unsung heroes and heroines. Historical phenomena such as the Nongqawuse, Sharpeville, the June 16, 1976 student uprising, Boipatong and the Marikana massacres are masterfully chronicled.

With commendable magnanimity he also extols the virtues of competitors, giving credence to the dictum that great leadership (which he is abundantly imbued with) is competitively magnanimous in defeat as it is in success. He deeply appreciates that the success of others does not diminish one’s own success but adds to the good of the common wealth.

Faces and Phases of Resilience: A Memoir of a Special Kind has something for everyone, from the insatiable scholar to the casual reader fascinated by sumptuous stories – paying reverence to souls gone by; profiling leadership stalwarts from politics, authorship, the arts, struggle icons; exploders of myths and stereotypes; Nobel Prize winners; sports icons; scholars of superb standing; trailblazers from various walks of life – covering a broad gamut of human accomplishment. He described these as ‘faces that made me think, phases that made me cry, places that made me go wow and those that drove me crazy’, in the author’s own words.

In the essay ‘Valdezia Writes Back’ Maluleke graphically traces African history before the advent of western civilisation by impersonating the village of Valdezia. Herein he successfully laments the painful reality that as the African proverb goes: Until lions have their own historians, all stories about hunting will glorify the hunter.

Valdezia, like South Africa, has changed ownership among numerous colonisers, none of whom acknowledges the existence of the indigenous inhabitants, not even those of legendary neighbouring Mapungubwe, except occasionally, in derision. Remarkable African hospitality could very well have been its own undoing. The proselytising mission of western missionaries took advantage of this. Till this day the Swiss missionaries and their descendants still beat their chests in self-adulatory fashion for having brought civilisation and salvation to Valdezia. This is replicated throughout the country by the Dutch, the Anglicans, the Germans, etc. Echoed by no less a contemporary ‘leader’ as Helen Zille: Africans be grateful you were colonised!

In his own impactful way Maluleke wages war against GBV and the contempt and derision visited upon women, through profiling luminary women as national exemplars. Women of colour and valour including inter alia Prof Puleng LenkaBula, Unisa Vice-Chancellor; Tsakani Maluleke, Auditor-General; Nadine Gordimer and Wangari˜ Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize Winners; Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, first African woman president; trail-blazing Nonkululeko Gobodo, first black woman CA in South Africa. Global female leaders Michelle Obama, former First Lady of the United States and Kamala Harris, Vice President of the United States of America receive glorious accolades as world class sources of inspiration. Of particular interest among the instructive profiles penned by Tinyiko are the young women murdered by boyfriends as well as by strangers. These are presented so evocatively, they should hit the solar plexus of the nation.

Male iconic leaders and national benefactors such as Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Steve Bantu Biko, Thabo Mbeki, Samora Machel, Sam Nzima, Es’kia Mphahlele and Imtiaz Sooliman are given fresh and refreshing treatment. Of Nelson Mandela, Maluleke admonishes his readers to heed that the time has come for him to find his place among great national, continental and world leaders; that this is the only way we can remember him appropriately; that over-essentialising Nelson Mandela in relation to his peers reduces rather than enhances his stature.

Maluleke’s profiling of Steve Biko throws down the gauntlet to contemporary black intelligentsia. He perceives Biko’s outstanding trait as the ability to articulate rage with crystal clarity; advocacy for unity across political and ethnic divisions; courage and a penchant for building institutions; profound appreciation of religion, politics, education, economics and psychology. Significantly, Biko’s defiant hope was surreal: ‘We have set out on a quest for true humanity, and somewhere in the distant horizon, we can see the glittering prize.’ A powerful vision for ubuntu and what later...