careful reading of his analysis of the social sciences more broadly suggests that he was in fact a revolutionary scholar. Mafeje understood what other radical social scientists did not: that all the social sciences are Eurocentric and imperialist and the focus on anthropology to the exclusion of other disciplines is founded on reformism. He called for the adoption of a thoroughgoing commentary of the social sciences, which would lead to the emergence of what he called ‘non-disciplinarity’.3
Thus the excessive focus on Mafeje’s assessment of anthropology is a one-sided and partial reading of his oeuvre. Mafeje traced the development of anthropology and its impact on Africa in relation to the other social sciences. Having traced anthropology’s role in colonialism and imperialism, he acknowledged that it was bound to be plunged into deep crisis precisely because of anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist struggles. Mafeje thus advocated the importance of the study of ethnography in the social sciences in Africa.
Sociology of knowledge and the ‘totalising critique’
Mafeje’s 1975 essay ‘Religion, Class and Ideology in South Africa’ is not only a brilliant analysis of social change, but also a pioneering work in the sociology of knowledge. Together with ‘The Ideology of “Tribalism”’, it marks a significant departure from standard anthropological and sociological writings on Africa. The 1975 essay, moreover, constitutes an auto-critique of his earlier work with Monica Wilson on Langa. Evaluating some of the themes pursued in Langa, Mafeje focuses in particular on those aspects that dealt with religion; outlining his theoretical matrix, he singles out a controversial question in the epistemology of the sociology of religion. The question turns on whether it is possible to reconcile a belief in an ‘extra-societal source’ – the transcendental viewpoint – and a belief in a positivist conception of science.4 In other words, the conflict seems to be about whether belief systems are a reflection of concrete realities – experience – or an outcome of higher or divine intervention. This challenge compelled secular theorists to make a distinction between sociologists of religion and religious sociologists. For Mafeje, this reinforced the positivistic notion of value-free or non-partisan science. Just as materialists are confronted with the problem of consciousness and empirical history, positivistic idealists are similarly confronted with the problem of theodicy. As a result of the functionalist approach, South African sociology of religion was confined to narrow studies of churches and tribal rites and their function in society. Yet, ‘the preoccupation with institutions has meant a narrowing of context to a point where some of the more general ramifications of belief systems and some nascent forms of commitment are made to appear as something apart’.5 This is Mafeje insisting on taking into account history and the wider sociopolitical context – his argument is that functionalist analyses of social phenomena or ‘functionalist organicism’ interpret social change as if it only meant ‘a substitution of one set of institutions with another’ because of the tendency to study social institutions as if they were disconnected, rather than to focus on societies as a whole.6 At the descriptive level, this may well be valid, but at the substantive level it serves as what Mafeje terms an ‘ideological mystification’ of underlying societal issues. Accordingly, social change, such as is understood by functionalist and positivist sociologists, does not necessarily connote the radical historical transformation advocated by Marxists. In analysing social change, Mafeje appeals primarily to the sociology of knowledge and attempts to relate sociological phenomena to its material substratum, class and ideology.
Writing in response to Magubane’s well-known essay on the review of social change, ‘A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Change in Colonial Africa’, Philip Mayer says: ‘The considerable interest of Magubane’s paper seems to me to lie in its contribution to the sociology of knowledge rather than to the theory of change. The author’s own “existential” situation is therefore of some relevance, especially as such single-minded onslaught of “colonial anthropology” seems almost anachronistic in 1970. He is speaking out of personal experiences which have clearly affected his perspective.’7 There is a lot riding on this quote. First, Mayer is not praising Magubane, or if that was his intention, the compliment is surely backhanded. Second, Mayer sets up a false dichotomy between the sociology of knowledge and contribution to the study of social change. In the process, he disdainfully discards the relevance of one’s existential experiences in the process of knowledge making and, in so doing, confirms both Mafeje’s and Magubane’s commentary on, respectively, the positivistic nature of social anthropology and sociology in Africa. Mayer wrote as though social scientists write neutrally and objectively, without being influenced by the sociological baggage of their socio-historical backgrounds. His argument accords with the issues raised by Lewis R. Gordon when he says that such treatment as black intellectuals get from their white counterparts, where it is not patronising, is so contemptuous that they are seen as providers of experience, rather than as knowledge makers in their own right.8 Yet taking seriously one’s lived experiences is precisely what enabled both Mafeje and Magubane to see through the colonialist and imperialist nature of the social sciences in Africa. Third, Mayer is unable to see through the colonial nature of anthropology, even as late as the 1970s – which is precisely because of his failure to acknowledge the importance of one’s own socio-historical and biographical experiences. By contrast, however, and in taking seriously the sociology of knowledge, Mafeje was able to understand the totality of South African history without getting entangled in the idealistic arguments that characterise the works of liberal functionalist and positivist sociologists and anthropologists in South Africa. This is what he calls a totalising critique.
The holistic historical approach is important for Mafeje because, as he says, ‘a sociology of knowledge that operates outside of particular historical contexts seems futile’.9 In acknowledging the importance of history and context, Mafeje parts ways with liberal idealists who only focused on what he terms minor contradictions and perversions of South African society. For Magubane, colonial anthropologists – in refusing to acknowledge that colonialism is an essential dimension of the present social structure – assumed that its general characteristics are already known and therefore one could conduct research without situating these characteristics in their historical context. What is essential in understanding social change, Magubane argues, is ‘a total historical analysis’.10 In accounting for changes in African urban and rural settings, colonial anthropologists spoke of ‘Europeanisation’, ‘Westernisation’ or ‘acculturation’. In so doing, Magubane says, they thought Africans were aspiring to a Western way of life and did not take into account that Africans were deprived of their being and knowledge systems. Colonial anthropologists, according to Magubane, played down the fact that the purported acculturation of Africans hinged on three stages. First, there was a period of contact between the coloniser and the colonised, in which the latter were defeated through physical force. Second, there was a period of acquiescence during which some Africans were not only alienated from their societies, but also acquired the ‘techniques and social forms of the dominant group’, such as religion and education. Third, there was a period of resistance in which Africans ‘developed a “national” consciousness that transcends “tribal” divisions and confront the colonial power with the demands of national liberation’.11
There is an overlap in these stages. But they must all be taken into account if one is to survey social change in Africa in a meaningful way. Thus, for Magubane, colonialism had at all times to be the natural starting point. Social anthropologists and sociologists tended to ignore the fact that the different stages of change in Africa were accompanied by force and coercion, and to focus on appearances and superficial issues that do not scratch beneath the surface, so that many of the conclusions reached were no more than impositions of dominant values on Africans. These studies also tended to take on micro units of analysis, such as individual behaviour, rather than society at large, whereas the study of social change requires that one examine not only the victims of oppression, but also the structure of domination itself and the methods used by the oppressor to maintain the oppressive structure.
Anthropologists have a tendency to create a dichotomy between rural and urban communities. For Mafeje, there is a dialectical link between the two settings. Based on the fieldwork he conducted in Langa township and the rural Transkei for his Master’s thesis, he argues that, sociologically,