Retrospective 2: Traditions II: Everyday Lives of African Men

Jimmy Manyi

One of the relatively big stories of 2011 was triggered by the comments made by Mr Jimmy Manyi, President of the Black Management Forum and Head of Government Communication and Information Services. The story went big because of the protagonists, but also for the reason that it was yet another dreadful replay of the effects of the inherited misunderstandings of the racialised past that made us into who we are.

Like other ugly stories of race, Manyi’s words and the exchanges that followed entrapped our imaginations because they played on the masochism and misrecognition that, since apartheid at least, have become an unhappy part of black traditions. I also suspect that the story was a salutary lesson on the unrealised hopes and persisting uncertainties of what it means to be us in this suspended present moment.

Occupying the position of director-general of the Department of Labour at the time, Manyi had expressed the view on KykNet's Robinson Regstreeks show in 2010 that coloured people “must stop this over-concentration situation (in the Western Cape) because they are in over-supply where they are so you must look into the country and see where you can meet the supply”.



Trevor Manuel



One of the political figures who was angered by the comments and publicly responded to Manyi was the minister in the presidency Mr Trevor Manuel. To Manuel, Manyi was “the worst-order” racist, formed “in the mould of HF Verwoerd”.



In turn legal adviser to the minister of defence, Mr Paul Ngobeni, known to have been part of the “brains trust” that helped President Jacob Zuma during his corruption case, came blazing out in support of Manyi. Ngobeni said Manuel a gangster and racist.

The tone of the whole affair was rather unsavoury, from start to end. It is sometimes inevitable that such eruptions will happen, given the continuing trauma inhering in our identities. Still, because of what this regrettable exchange says about us as black people, I found it instructive about how not to think or talk about others.

Yet even though the subject of racial feelings and thoughts is something one does not carelessly broach in polite company, we could still have taken the opportunity to learn, and teach other especially younger people, about how we got here. We could still have fruitfully used the apparent possibilities even while recognising the hurt that Manyi caused in many black or coloured-identified people.

I am also aware, as all the central actors in this story might well be, there are many older people of all hues and creeds who could use some considered lessons about what apartheid racialising and tribalising traditions we employ to identify ourselves continue to do to our language and interior lives.  

The Manyi-Manuel-Ngobeni affair came back to mind at Traditions II, the second travelling pitso held in Ethiopia on 28-30 November 2011 by the University of South Africa’s Institute Social and Health Sciences. Hosted under the theme of Changing Traditions: Everyday Lives of African Men, the biennial tradition pitso is one of the pillars of the Changing Traditions Project which emerged, among other things, from amongst others the observation that there tends to be an incapacitating conflation of tradition and traditionalism.

Delegates at Traditions II: Everyday Lives of African Men 
held in Ethiopia on 28-30 November 2011



During the discussions, when highly emotional disagreements as well as serious distortions became apparent, I was reminded of one statement by Ngobeni that should have but never got much discussion. Ngobeni said Manuel acted as though he was “the king of coloured people”.

Clearly intended to offend, the sentiment plays on the untruth that those who claim a coloured identity do not have a cultural tradition, specifically not one of kingship.

This unfortunate miseducation about tradition which parses coloureds as cultureless is one which I have encountered also in my interactions with coloured-identified students when I used to teach at the University of the Western Cape. I am afraid it is far more common than that though, widely believed among many old and young people identified as African.

The idea that a people who have roots traceable to at least more than 450 years old in South Africa can be without tradition or culture is plainly incorrect, besides being offensive.

Yet this lie that only some people – specifically those who were once referred by apartheid laws as Bantu – can claim the right to be recognised as a traditional community is the very one freighted by the South African laws on traditional leadership and governance. These laws, to be clear, have the unwitting purpose of primitivising or retribalising ethnicity on the one hand, while also denying the equal fullness of the traditions of coloured-identified people on the other.

What baffles me is how a politically black democratic government fails to realise that the groupings brought under the term traditional communities in post-apartheid South Africa are the very same abhorrent tribes Archie Mafeje showed in the early 1970s to have been the creation of colonial rulers and racist anthropologists.

Let us be clear then that identifying as Zulu or Venda does not necessarily make you a tribesman or tribeswoman, just as being identified coloured or white does not by itself make you a tradition-less post-modern subject. Surely being an indigenous native speaker of isiZulu does not mean you have more traditions than being a native English-language speaker.

Perhaps the argument the dominant discourse on black traditions wants to convince us of is that those who were once Bantu are more strongly tied to their cultural traditions than others. That also is not quite true, for Europeans and North Americans may be said to have stronger traditions precisely because these tend to go unremarked, and often do come under the rubric tradition. It is when a tradition does not call itself a tradition, such as in eating with a fork and knife or calling ourselves by our race names, that it is almost unchallenged in its power over us.

Yet it also needs stating that to be black in the way black South Africans are black is very modern political tradition, but a tradition nonetheless. Furthermore, being black, because it is political identity, does not have ready correspondence with ethnicity. Indeed all racialised identities are first and foremost political identities. 

The fact is while all rituals are part of a tradition, not all practices within a tradition are ritualised. Tradition, that is to say, is not about primitives, pure tribes, traditional communities, kingships or whatever object a person or government wishes to employ to refer to the alienating Otherness we have become used to and use on ourselves.

Tradition is the basic question that all of us try to work from the moment we become cognitively capable of recognising both our individuality within and connectedness to our families, what remains unarticulated in our interactions with each other. Whereas we tend to think of tradition as that practice, rite or custom we do once a year or in a longer while, like being initiated into manhood, celebrating Christmas or Eid, paying mahadi, or burying the dead in a particular way, at its most productive moments tradition is what goes unspoken. Like gravity, tradition is the force that holds down the responses of the insiders to the tradition to the everyday problems of being human.

Though they may be out of sight, traditions are always an underlying dynamic in any practices where one person consciously or otherwise seeks to hand down – this being the principal meaning of the term tradition – the usable parts of a culture, whether that behaviour is what to eat, how to pray, who to love and how, the best way to raise children and how to raise them, and of above all how to be a person in the world of others.

Being at the centre of these traditions lipitso I have become even more aware that there is a great deal of ignorance, confusion and distortions that exists about what traditions mean. It is especially when one tries to square up the very modern, highly improvised, daily lives of black men and women in the Africa of today with how tradition is apprehended that one comprehends the misconceptions, myths, and caricatures that dogs our lives. Black men and women are perhaps the most post-modern subjects of all, and that does not negate that they can and may need to recognise where they have been.

However, it must be said, the paradoxical pull for many to define traditions in barely concealed tribalistic or racialised terms may be due to the uncertainties first provoked by imperialism and colonialism as well as the search for an elusive search for an old wholeness that may or may not have existed before those racist ideologies gutted our cultural life supports.

The Changing Traditions Project was conceived with the aim that, if we want to contribute in building Africa one figurative kgotla at a time, we have to set time aside whenever we can to help each other to more carefully think through what tradition means. We all need to carefully figure out and where necessary rethink what our traditions are, and that done, build on our best. Careless words, lazy thought and insulting each other are not the best way to build one other and our collective black lives.