What is occurring on an administrative level within the university is a questioning of the place of a distinct Centre for African Studies in a university which itself is considered by many to be ostensibly African. Indeed, UCT is situated in South Africa and as an institution is emplaced within the contextual landscape of politics, society and culture that is already African. In this regard, it is expected therefore that the study of Africa is already mainstreamed within the disciplines. What need then, one might ask, for a separate centre of study, when the immediate locus and profile of the university places it automatically within the discursive frame that occupies the Centre for African Studies in their research and teaching? For the editors at postamble, with the latest edition, the debate emerged in another guise: could we really say to some of the Masters and Doctoral students that we could not accept their work because they did not focus on Africa or African studies in their research? Surely, one could argue that the fact that these students are situated within Africa means that their research is automatically imbued with a particular African character and viewpoint, inscribed by a positionality that makes the work African by nature?

The battle that the Centre for African Studies faces partly an administrative one, concerned with the shape and size of academic departments and partly an epistemological one, concerned with the question of knowledge production on and around Africa. In postamble’s opinion, to claim that the Centre and its concerns (including this journal) are somehow redundant at UCT is an error of a most short-sighted nature. For, the inheritance and legacy of an institution such as ours are always entangled with its past and here, these are undeniably colonial ones. And, what is Humanities scholarship for if not a means of drawing necessary attention to knowledges that have been marginalised by the very script of the western model of academic theory and practice? Certainly, it can be regarded that, in a far away land where ‘Africa’ is a separate entity entirely, a discrete school (or journal) of African Studies might seem more ‘logical’. However, this assumes that the study of Africa is only a study of a place and its people, and not the very ideologies that emerge from within that place itself which, in their origins, are often contested. This would also be assuming that western languages, world views, ideas and aesthetics have not dominated most ways of studying the world (including Africa from within Africa) for a very long time. As history has shown this is very much not the case. And, as most of us know, it will still be some time before the world order shifts to share power and position with the subaltern. Therefore, the Centre for African studies at UCT exists as a means to counter the tendency within our own society to look west. It also exists as a space in which important African thinkers are seen to be part of the vital nexus of people mapping out an ever expanding and diversifying planet. Should the Centre be dissolved or assimilated unthinking into a different department, what will be lost is a place of study that actively demands of its students that they challenge the status quo of their understanding of ideas, of their own country, and even of their own university.

postamble, like the Centre for African Studies, is dedicated to contributing to the production of knowledge from within Africa, based on the understanding that studying the ways knowledges are studied matters–just as much as the knowledges studied. In other words, until the world order ceases to cast Africa as ‘other,’ there will be a need for an African Studies Centre, even in Africa.

I recently attended a book launch at the hip book venue, the Book Lounge in Roeland Street, Cape Town. The launch was for a new novel, by a new young author: male, Cape Town educated, Southern Suburbs school, University of Cape Town, and so on. With him, in the panel discussion at the launch was another young author, a little more well known for her own literary ventures. She made some comments which I found deeply disturbing, and also, completely misplaced. Some of these I would like to reflect briefly on here.

The author in question asserted that nowadays, "boring" political novels are becoming redundant. Any story about apartheid is outmoded. Apparently what people want to read about in this city of Cape Town and in this country of South Africa is popular culture, media, consumerist desires….you know, the interesting, real life stuff. Now, please don’t imagine that she was towing the famous Njabula Ndebele line about 'rediscovering the ordinary.' She was not extrapolating ways in which one can avoid the spectacular melodrama of political sloganeering or such like in works of fiction. Rather, her point was that politics and the past are not interesting to the youth anymore. Apparently, they have better things to be concerned about–fashion, parties, being 'global', social media, movies and so on. Not vacuous in any way, this supposed new generation of South Africans (of all backgrounds, we assume), is just not interested in the political particularities of this nation. This aspect of local is not of import it seems. Rather, the youth (spoken for by the author in question) are looking to be part of mass culture that spans the known world. Accordingly, writers in this emerging social moment need to be responsible to their immediate world and respond to what is more interesting and apparently more entertaining. Basically, politics and story don’t mix.

What was immediately alarming about this speech at the Book Lounge was that the person in question was unconsciously mirroring an infamous argument made by the literary critic, Ulyatt, in the mid 1980’s, who vilified protest literature in a thinly disguised racial attack on black political writing. According to Ulyatt, poetry and politics are antagonistic, especially in literature. Political ideas, he wrote, should not contaminate art (especially when the former represents the ugly plight of the oppressed.) Ulyatt is now widely used as a textbook example of the arrogant and dangerous opinions of those not suffering under a system like apartheid, who could still argue for the purity of art for art’s sake, despite existing in a society where every single moment, the majority was denied their basic human rights to freedom and freedom of speech.

For those who are interested in the past, we know that in fact, it was through literary acts that these freedoms became partially accessible. In South Africa, we have a long tradition of art as the vehicle for the expression of socio-political suffering and concerns. And, as we know it still, literature, as an art form, is one of the primary ways through which the disenfranchised speak. Furthermore, it is generally accepted nowadays that literature can in fact be both political and poetic. It is shortsighted and narrow minded to believe that politics and ‘art’ be incommensurate with each another, especially in a country and world that is, whether we like it or not, politically highly charged. Perhaps a conversation with Nobel Laureates Toni Morrison, J.M. Coetzee and Orhan Pamuk would convince any naysayer that the most powerful writing, and the most beautifully poetic writing, is very often grounded in the political.

This does not mean that we should cry for stories that look only to the past or are not works of the creative imagination. But it is shallow to think (especially considering that those in this country who may have these opinions do not usually hail from historically disadvantaged backgrounds) that it is only what the readership in this country needs, as we plot our way forward from a traumatic past and through a still traumatic present, are easy-reading, fun, imagined fictions. Many believe that we are in dire need of young writers who, immersed in their milieu, can also respond to the very real social conditions of our landscape. This is what it means to be an interesting writer, and certainly, only gifted young artists can achieve a fluid and exciting textual pollination of the harshest reality with the everyday concerns facing our youth today. This is why it is the Kgebetli Moeles, Ceridwen Doveys and Niq Mhlongos of the world who are being hailed as the new bright young things coming from this country and not, needless to say, the authors of books about life in the clubbing or cafe circuit of Long Street, Cape Town.

There is a very interesting paper, written by Lindsay Bremner, entitled "Bounded Spaces: Demographic Anxieties in Post-apartheid Johannesburg" – about how all humans are compelled to find not just the "other' but the "threatening other' in their environments, outside of themselves and in other people, as a way of diverting the primal feeling that we ourselves have the potential to be our own 'threatening other.' She stresses how in South Africa, now that Apartheid has been dismantled, those violent binaries and distinctions, mostly around race, which were part of the system are now not usable/relevant/acceptable and so on (not that they ever were, but many people were complicit with them, as we all know). What she writes is that in our social and political landscape, there now exists a lack, a vortex where the threatening others of apartheid, whether they were racist 'boers' or 'terrorists', are no more. The impulse is then to look elsewhere for the deference of our innate sense of trauma and auto-threat, to place it upon someone else, something else, another 'threatening other'- to make ourselves feel safe in ourselves. In comes the Nigerian immigrant, mercantile, smart, visible, and we label him criminal, drug dealer, hustler, thief. The creation of the criminal other, especially, the foreign criminal other, is the ultimate useful displacement of ourselves.

if you in CT this weekend, make sure you make your way down to the convention centre for the best books and publishing houses around.. also, look for Chimurenga's launch of their virtual library: "an online archiving project that profiles independent pan African paper periodicals from around the world. It focuses on cultural and literary magazines, both living and extinct, which have been influential platforms for dissent and which have broadened the scope for print publishing on art, new writing and ideas in and about Africa." (from Chimurenga online).  This sounds like a useful resource for all of us involved in knowledge production within and about Africa.  From the 11th of June, check out www.chimurengalibrary.co.za where this archive will be available.  Otherwise, hope to catch you at their Stand F11 this weekend