OPINION | Bringing Xhosa history into the light

Tisani, a scholar, liberation struggle veteran and dedicated Pan-Africanist, titled her lecture “Lost opportunities and pervading hope in South African higher education”.

It reflected on the history of South African universities through the experiences of the African scholars whose work was never studied or who themselves were marginalised on account of being black.

In the lecture, she explored the intellectual legacies of Tiyo Soga, Charlotte Maxeke and Archie Mafeje and asked: What could our universities have become had the stellar contributions and work of these individuals been recognised?

Part of the tragic logic of settler-colonialism and the birth of universities in South Africa, is that so many brilliant black scholars were denied for so long the opportunity to form part of knowledge-making and training systems of this country. There are great knowledge gaps and silences in the South African scholarship, especially in the humanities.

Rhodes MA student Sanele kaNtshingana described the lecture as “a moving and thought provoking lecture that touched on critical issues that the academy is grappling with at the moment: issues around ontology and epistemology, the ‘multiversality’ of knowledges, and the necessary project of rooting ourselves to knowledges emanating from African ways of thinking in higher education … Every black person who is committed to the project of critical re-Africanisation of the academy, of ways of knowing, of our continent, needs to know this historian.”

It is a poignant comment on Dr Tisani, whose own academic career as a black historian was affected by systemic racism at Rhodes University.

How would generations of black students have benefited had she been a member of the faculty?

While we cannot know what could have been, what is happening now is that a new generation of students and young academics are accessing and engaging her writings.

Tisani’s doctoral thesis, “Continuity and change in Xhosa historiography” is particularly important for understanding how and why the history of amaXhosa came to be written in the way it has been for two hundred years.

The work traces how Xhosa history came to be written down by European travellers, then colonists, and the missionaries, educated Africans and eventually, the first white colonial historians George McCall Theal (whose work formed the basis of academic history at universities).

Tisani argues, for example, that much published Xhosa history privileges royal accounts because travellers saw chiefs as the sole repositories of power in the Xhosa political system.

But this does not give a full picture of the political history of amaXhosa and such observations distort Xhosa history.

To focus on just one sector, royal men, presents an incomplete and distorted view of the Xhosa political system.

Moreover, Tisani shows how different genres of African historical literature such as folk tales, legends, myths and clan names were engaged in the writing down of Xhosa history.

With this kind of systematic analysis, Tisani shows how the idea of “Xhosa history” came to be formed.

Most important within Tisani’s doctorate is the analysis of educated Xhosa writers such as William Wellington Gqoba.

Tisani shows how they themselves came to formulate their own versions of Xhosa history based on their interaction with the many written colonial sources and oral histories.

Tisani’s thesis has devastating implications for what we call South African history, for it becomes painfully clear that the prolific writings of the kinds of black historians she analyses have been forgotten over time.

Within English universities George Theal became the foundational and organising standard for South African historiography.

Tisani’s work disrupts the Theal foundational standard and forces today’s historians to ask: when we teach South African historiography, where are the works of African historians in our history curricula?