Question 1

Can you discuss your family&#8217;s background?

Accepted Answer

I was born in Cape Town. My mother’s family were Jews from Lithuania; my father’s father was from Ukraine and emigrated to England; during the recession of the 1890s, he went first to Rhodesia and then later to Cape Town. My parents grew up during the Great Depression and World War II. They were aware of the Holocaust and afraid. When the first National government came to power in 1948 under Prime Minister D.F. Malan, he was quoted as saying that had the Axis powers won the war, the Final Solution would have been applied in South Africa.

Question 2

What was it like to live under the Apartheid regime?

Accepted Answer

I grew up in Cape Town during the dark years of Apartheid in a very, very violent society. I was radicalized, as were many of our generation, by the Zionist socialist movements, which were more socialist than Zionist at that time, and in which many South African scholars got their training in leftist social theory…

What was interesting about the School of African Studies [at the University of Cape Town] in those days, where anthropology was situated along with archaeology and African languages, was that it was the only place on the campus which was licensed to have black and white faculty together – 1964-1966 – the period of the sabotage trials, the rise of ‘Umkhonto we Sizwe’, Pogo, etc. – it was a strange moment. Very repressive. It is hard to explain to our students what it was like growing up in a fascist education system. Under South African law anybody who had had any connection with the Communist Party could lose their jobs. This happened to a lot of our teachers: Jack Simons – who wrote a brilliant book, Caste and Colour in South Africa – and who trained many important South Africans, like Albie Sachs – was summarily banned during our second year. We were out of the classrooms as much as possible, protesting. Of course, many of the books that we teach now and take for granted were banned…

Question 3

Why Anthropology?

Accepted Answer

Anthropology in that world seemed to have a resonance with contemporary South Africa like nothing else did. It wasn’t a radical discipline, but it created a base from which one could think radical thoughts, and from which one could ask questions about the nature of South African society, which was almost impossible anywhere else.

Question 4

How did you meet your partner, Jean?

Accepted Answer

Jean and I met in anthropology where Monica Wilson took us under her wing. She and her husband had been an anthropological couple. She had done a kind of historical anthropology and was co-editor of The Oxford History of South Africa. We went on to write historical anthropology and Jean worked on ritual, so there was a very strong genealogical link with her.

Question 5

What was it like to work as a couple at the London School of Economics?

Accepted Answer

Jean had a wonderful line, which is absolutely true. Social anthropology was deeply gendered when we were at the LSE, so she ‘got religion’ and I ‘got’ politics. The LSE didn’t entertain any possibility of us doing a Ph.D. together. The model of the individual author really did apply. It was no different here (in the US). Basically, we started to write together as a way of arguing with that tradition. My doctoral work looked at the nature of African political life in the colonial and then Apartheid period. I wanted to re-theorize the nature of vernacular politics. Schapera, my teacher, had written of African government and politics in such a way as to render them sterile. They were about administration and order and had nothing to do with power – which struck me as fundamentally wrong. I worked on the historical records of Tswana chiefdoms before going into the field. It struck me that they operated on very different terms from those that had become the orthodoxy in anthropology. I went to the field wanting to take a radically different look at power in pre-colonial systems. Like Jean, I found that I was working in the world of Apartheid. The leader of the opposition faction in the chiefdom in which I was working happened to be the Treasurer of the African National Congress. The question became; how did these things (vernacular and national politics) interpenetrate? I wanted to show that these African worlds, which anthropologists since the 1940’s – since African Political Systems – had treated entirely as discrete islands, were built upon contradictions, not on principles of order, that they were riven with struggles over power and legitimacy in which the oratorical construction of competitive realities played a significant part, that they were dialectically entailed in the world beyond them. These things became (the core of) my work. Also, by coincidence, I became involved in law. One of the things we see nowadays throughout global politics is their judicialization. This was always the case amongst Tswana, and indeed in many African polities, where what we take to be political forms of contestation occur through and in the language of legalities. I got interested in this and landed, again through the intervention of Schapera, writing up papers with Simon Roberts, which led to a book, and a secondary life in the study of law. Schapera read every word we wrote. He was an amazing interlocutor. He had an encyclopedic grasp of Africa and seemed to know everything. The last thing that he read of our writing, other than a book of photographs, was “Of Revelation and Revolution.” He read through those two volumes with a fine-tooth comb and made amazingly precise comments on our footnotes.

Question 6

Can you talk a little bit about The African Photographs of Isaac Schapera?

Accepted Answer

It was one of our lifelong struggles getting it out. It took us about fifteen years in the end, a labor of love. Had we known what it would take to do it, we would never have started. In the end, the RAI was very helpful, but there were many obstacles along the way. I hope that at ninety-five, if I am alive, I will be able to tell a student that they had taught me something I didn’t know about myself.

Achile Mbembe

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