“Rid yourself of your PHD mentality, Cde. Floyd”
Soon after Cde Sbu Ndebele was released from Robben Island I remember him venturing forth on one aspect of the tragedy of apartheid: that African South Africans often adopted the PHD mentality when trying to demonstrate their intellectual prowess. Of course those PHDs were cdes who Put Him/Her Down (PHD) rather than engage substantively in advance of the National Democratic Revolution and the struggle for socialism.
Whilst I am not a member of the SACP and hold no brief to speak on behalf of Cde Blade Nzimande, I have known him and worked with him since 1984, probably around the time Cde Floyd was born. I remember distinctly the night Blade and I first met – at the Umlazi campus of the University of Zululand. I was a temporary lecturer in Geography and he was on the Psychology faculty. Blade was well known on that campus as one of the few outspoken progressives and that is why I sought him out.
Both of us taught adult part-time students, most of whom travelled each day up to 200 kilometres each way to study and ultimately get degrees. I still remember getting to campus that night, a night much the same as ones before and after where simply getting to the campus was a mission – roadblocks galore, the stench of teargas, and security forces everywhere. I always used the sight of the helicopters to work my way around the backroads, avoiding detection in getting to campus.
As we worked then in the UDF and in the many formations of the liberation movement, we did not walk around announcing who we were and what we were doing, but we all accepted that each was working in their own way to undo the apartheid state, brick by brick, mortar shell by mortar shell.
But I remember my first meeting with Cde Blade because I confronted him and asked him if I could give a lecture in his course on what I saw as African schizophrenia, where Africans under apartheid had to adopt two personalities – one for when they engaged with whites and the other was the personality of who they really were. That trait still continues today – don’t we still hear rich people often saying that – “my maid thinks…..”.