The Social and Political Thought of Archie Mafeje. Bongani Nyoka

      In spite of the said deconstruction, or the so-called crisis anthropology went through, attempts at reconstructing or otherwise burying it altogether proved impossible. The lingering problem of alterity is a case in point. Elsewhere, Mafeje suggested that anthropology was on its deathbed, but not yet dead. Although Mafeje recommended in his earlier works that critical evaluations must be directed at all the imperialist social sciences, Helen Macdonald, in her article subtitled ‘Subaltern Studies in South Asia and Post-Colonial Anthropology in Africa’, has pointed out that Mafeje revised his position somewhat in the light of responses from his critics.⁵⁴ The most important thing, however, is that Mafeje made a plea for non-disciplinarity, a case he had been building as far back as the 1970s with the essay ‘The Problem of Anthropology in Historical Perspective’.

      The issue turns on transcendence of disciplinarity as against the unification of disciplines. Adesina takes issue with Mafeje’s rejection of disciplinarity and epistemology. He argues that not only did Mafeje mistake issues of pedagogy for those of research, but he also mistook epistemology for dogmatism. Adesina advances a well-considered, albeit brief argument against Mafeje, but it needs to be said that Adesina wrongly imputes to Mafeje the concepts of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity.⁵⁵ Adesina’s claim is that scholarship is interdisciplinary ab initio. No societal problems are purely social or purely economic. In terms of research, societal problems require one to tap into other disciplines. In Adesina’s view, Mafeje’s argument appeared misdirected. As regards pedagogy, Adesina argues, the danger with interdisciplinarity is that it leads to training students who have no methodological grounding in any discipline. This is a valid argument. But there is something to be said about Mafeje’s advocacy of non-disciplinarity rather than inter- or transdisciplinarity. Mafeje’s proposal has far-reaching consequences for both teaching and research.

      The non-disciplinary approach makes proposals or has implications not only for transcendence of Euro-American epistemology and methodology, but necessarily holds true for teaching purposes as well. It has to be so, for the simple reason that if disciplinarity, such as is conventionally known, is to be transcended or otherwise dismantled for the purposes of knowledge production/research, the same must be true for teaching purposes. Thus Mafeje’s new social science ought to entail new teaching or training methods as well. Mafeje did not use the concepts of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity affirmatively. In recent articles Dani Nabudere and Helmi Sharawy both feel that Mafeje did not transcend the Western knowledge archive;⁵⁶ indeed, Mafeje ‘does not uphold the idea of the End of Anthropology in order to liquidate an epistemological order, but rather to put in its place a more appropriate alternative to the concept, which, in his opinion, leads to anthropological theorising of another kind’.⁵⁷ Again, here the question seems to turn on whether Mafeje succeeded or failed, and not on his attempt to liquidate an epistemological order, which is clear – the search for an epistemological rupture is a case in point. Mafeje’s interlocutors are correct in claiming that he did not transcend the Western knowledge archive, but their reasoning is faulty. For example, they say he advocated interdisciplinarity. That is incorrect. A much more suitable example of Mafeje’s failure to transcend the Western knowledge archive is his appeal to Marxism as the best anthropology there is. In this regard, Sharawy and Nabudere are onto something. But this is a position Mafeje modified in his later commentary on the social sciences, since he no longer appealed to Marxism per se. For example, in Anthropology and Independent Africans, Mafeje maintains that ‘of interest to us in the present context is that all what is said above was not anthropological … Nor was it interdisciplinary … It was non-disciplinary.’⁵⁸ In his response to his critics, ‘Conversations and Confrontations with My Reviewers’, he argues that ‘interdisciplinarity leads to theoretical hiatus. It will require a major epistemological breakthrough as good as positivism which instigated the rise of the disciplines and led to the fragmentation of social theory to achieve any coalescence.’⁵⁹ Earlier he had argued that ‘the attack on Anthropology was heartfelt and justified in the immediate anti-colonial revulsion. But it was ultimately subjective because the so-called modernising social sciences were not any less imperialist and actually became rationalisations for neocolonialism in Africa, as we know now. However, the important lesson to be drawn from the experience of the African anthropologists is that Anthropology is premised on an immediate subject/object relation.’⁶⁰

      This is consistent with Mafeje’s stance on the social sciences generally and on anthropology in particular. In the light of criticisms, however, Mafeje slightly revised his position. On the racist nature of anthropology he was consistent, but on the question of Eurocentrism in other disciplines he backtracked – an inconvenient afterthought that could have easily cost him the debate. Mafeje’s belated concession that the other social sciences are less Eurocentric is a blunder that nevertheless does not diminish the overall substance of his assessment of the social sciences. Perhaps Mafeje might have been justified in making such a concession when one considers some of the pioneering works of African social scientists – Oyewumi’s work in social science, for example, is hardly Eurocentric and Akinsola Akiwowo’s sociology is just as far from Eurocentric.⁶¹ Similarly, Ifi Amadiume’s works fall within the social sciences but she rejects anthropology in favour of social history.⁶² Nor are Cheikh Anta Diop’s works in historical sociology Eurocentric. The point is that Mafeje was making a distinction between bourgeois Eurocentric social science and social science as such. His argument is that it is difficult to conceive of anthropology without racism (epistemology of alterity) whereas one can think of sociology or economics without being, ipso facto, racist. The anthropological inquiry is premised on the researcher as ontologically distinct from the subject of their inquiry, whereas Western sociologists study the subjects of their inquiry as ontologically similar to themselves.

      Still, this does not explain why social scientists from the global South still speak today of epistemological decolonisation or curriculum transformation. That there exists less Eurocentric social science from African scholars is no reason to suppose that the social sciences are not overwhelmingly Eurocentric. To assume that the social sciences cannot be transcended, in the manner of Mafeje’s non-disciplinarity, is to assume that the social sciences, as they are currently known, are transhistorical – they have been there since the beginning of time. That is not the case. Anthropology, for example, is the child of colonialism and imperialism. Mafeje’s later position on anthropology centred on the lingering problem of alterity, years after the discipline underwent its epistemological crisis. In critically evaluating anthropology, and the social sciences generally, Mafeje was in search of an epistemological rupture and therefore new paradigms. Regardless of whether Mafeje backtracked in reviewing all of the social sciences, the substance of his analysis remains. He was not assessing anthropology (and other social sciences) for its own sake; he sought to replace it with something else. Hence ‘deconstruction’ and ‘reconstruction’.⁶³ He saw such an undertaking as being accomplished through sound research and deep familiarity with one’s ethnography and he says, for example: ‘As our study on the interlacustrine shows, without a serious return to the study of African ethnography, it is not likely that any important breakthroughs will be made in African social science.’⁶⁴ What exists currently is anthropology in Africa as opposed to African anthropology. Mafeje uses the term ‘ethnography’ in two senses. First, ethnography as he conceives of it has sociocultural connotations – it is in fact his preferred substitute term for the nebulous concept of culture. Second, by using ‘ethnography’ he is referring to ‘non-disciplinarity’ and it became a substitute for the social sciences as they are conventionally known.

      Figure 3.1. Map of interlacustrine kingdoms. Drawn by Patrick Mlangeni