Mamphela Ramphele and the Crossing of Boundaries – Part 1

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Like most heroes and sheroes who capture and sustain themselves in the limelight for quite a long period, the personal political trajectory of distinguished South African activist and major player of the Biko-led Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), Dr. Mamphela Ramphele has suffered a nose-dive in fame and reputation in the last couple of years. The former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town’s credibility has even been called into question. By any measurable standard, however, Mamphela Ramphele is a great woman. I partially caught a glimpse of her epic anti-Apartheid journey from the movie “Cry Freedom,” which had the legendary African-American actor, Mr. Denzel Washington, in its lead role. That movie was largely about the larger-than-life existence of Mr. Steven Biko, the witty and fiery spearhead of the Black Consciousness Movement who, for a short while, was one of the most formidable challengers of the globally infamous Apartheid regime.

While a student at the City College of New York, of the City University of New York, I had occasion to review Mr. Biko’s classic anthology of musings, articles and essays titled I Write What I Like. That was some twenty-seven years ago. But what still sticks in my memory like a giant scar tissue is his exhortation to global Africans to boldly and frankly accept the fact that we were a defeated people, and then radically work from that premise to attain our freedom in a white-dominated and unforgivably violent world in which the deck of destiny’s cards were heavily stacked against us. In fact, on the night that I came out of the theater at Manhattan’s Chelsea Cinemas, having just watched the Attenborough-produced “Cry Freedom,” I nearly punched the face of the first white person that I met on the street. I could barely contain my fury, particularly regarding the scene in which a bestially chained and stark naked Mr. Biko had his head banging against a huge stone, while the prison van on whose floor he lay, barely conscious, sped a thousand miles from one end of South Africa to another.

What inspired me to pick up Mamphela Ramphele’s autobiographical classic Across Boundaries: The Journey of a South African Woman Leader (New York: The Feminist Press, 1995-6), was the fact of Dr. Ramphele’s having struck up a romantic relationship with a then already married Mr. Biko and mothered two sons by her brutally slain lover. The author has wistfully justified her otherwise untenably home-wrecking affair with Mr. Biko on the grounds of having initially rejected an unmarried Mr. Biko, who was also her medical school classmate. The increasing fame brought about by his political activism as leader of BCM would cause Mr. Biko’s academic progress to seriously falter; he would eventually be expelled from the University of Natal’s Medical School. As a formidable academician and a highly skilled professional, Mamphela Ramphele holds an MD – or the Doctor of Medicine – degree, as well as the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Anthropology. She has also served as a Managing-Director at the World Bank, Washington, DC., a businesswoman and a corporate executive with a South African mining company.

And so in the true sense of the term, Mamphela Ramphele has lived life to the fullest. One gets the impression that her initial rejection of the advances of Mr. Biko was partly ethnically based, though she offers no hint of this in her autobiographical memoir. One observation in the Preface to Across Boundaries is the traumatic impact that apartheid political culture had on the generation immediately preceding Dr. Ramphele, as well as those immediately following until the end of the apartheid era in the early 1990s. Regarding the preceding, this is what the Sotho author has to say: “All the same, the temerity of writing one’s biography in one’s forties still needs to be explained. It is a foolish act by any description. Why should one make oneself so vulnerable? There are mitigating factors for this foolish act. I believe that growing up under apartheid promoted premature ageing. One’s childhood, adolescence and young adulthood were knocked out of one very rudely. One either grew up and survived, or was destroyed along the way.”

Needless to say, Mamphela Ramphele was among the lucky ones who survived. There was, of course, an equal number of members of her generation who did not survive the immitigably depraved and inhumane anti-African conditions of apartheid. We also learn quite a bit about the psychological and moral costs of the subjugation of global Africans by Western Europeans, particularly the deleterious impact of white racial supremacy. On this score, this is what the author has to say: “The European names which occur in my family deserve comment. They embody the legacy of the missionaries, who saw it as their duty to give Africans ‘Christian’ names as part of the sacrament of baptism. African names were regarded as heathen and unacceptable to God. Considerations of convenience were thus turned into theodicy – for most whites did not, and still are unwilling to, learn African names, some of which are tongue-twisters for foreigners. The ease with which most whites shrug off attempts to pronounce African names is a logical consequence of the low status accorded Africans historically; there were no incentives to learn to pronounce their names properly nor sanctions in the event of failure. Thus even those Africans who were not baptized were given ‘slave names’ by white employers for their convenience.”

The first couple of this eight-chapter book make for a quite laborious reading, if also because the author launches into a detailed description and discussion of the culture of the Northern-Sotho people. It is fascinating from the theoretical perspective of a genealogist. Nonetheless, it is a necessary part of the entire narrative, as it sets up the backdrop for the main focus of the narrative, which is the twentieth century’s anti-African racist cauldron that was Apartheid South Africa. On the decision of the Black Consciousness Movement’s leaders to keep progressive white liberals at bay at a critical point in the intellectual and cultural struggle against white supremacy, the author poignantly recalls as follows: “Steve’s conclusion was that the only way to effect fundamental change in South Africa would be for the oppressed themselves to take the initiative and to work for their own liberation. He drew on the experiences and approaches of the Black Power Movement in the United States for inspiration, as well as on the Negritude writers such Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire whom he quoted extensively in his speeches and later in his writings.”