The Gariep is an indigenous image, he adds. It transverses the whole of South Africa and its tributaries have catchment areas across the country. The Gariep is also a dynamic metaphor, writes Alexander, which “gets us away f
rom the sense of unchanging, eternal and god – given identities”. “For this reason,” he continues, “it is appropriate for the transitional period in which we are living, any one tributary might flow more strongly that the others, that new streamlets and springs come into being and add their drops to this or that tributary, even as others dry up and disappear; above all, it represents the decisive notion that the mainstream is constituted by the confluence of all the tributaries … that no single current dominates, that all the tributaries in their ever – changing forms continue to exist as such, even as they continue to constitute and reconstitute the mainstream.”
Alexander called metaphors “powerful instruments of mobilisation and conscientisation”. Indeed,
his life’s work can itself be read as a metaphor for these things. When UCT’s Faculty of Humanities unveils the Neville Alexander building on 28 August, one day after the anniversary of his 2012 passing, it’s in memory of a man who “meant many specific things to many different people”, according to a tribute penned by Crain Soudien and eight others in 2012.
Born to a carpenter and a school teacher in Cradock in 1936, Alexander was formally schooled at the Holy Rosary Convent. He completed a BA and MA at UCT in only five years before earning a PhD at the acclaimed University of Tübingen in Germany in 1961. The Sharpeville massacre in 1960 heralded an immediate return to South Africa after his doctorate. He formed the Yu Chi Chan Club, which evolved partly out of a relationship to Marxism that he retained and refined throughout his life.
The early ’60s were wracked by mass imprisonments of apartheid’s opponents, violent security police, forced removals of black people from their homes, and tens of millions of black South Africans were barred from cities unless they were coming to work and carried a ‘dompas’. It was in this stifling environment that Alexander came to support armed struggle – indeed, Yu Chi Chan means ‘guerilla warfare’ in Mandarin. “What separated Alexander from many other academics and intellectuals is that his pursuit of knowledge was anchored in the existential imperative to act in the ‘here and now’,” Soudien et al write. As Salim Vally, Jane Duncan and Brian Ramadiro wrote in 2012: “His whole life he argued for and practised a principled approach to building an independent anti – capitalist left while emphasising the need for the unity of all organisations committed to a socialist future.” Alexander was arrested in 1963 and 12 months later was banished to Robben Island for a decade. His time on the island produced the Robben Island Prison Dossier, a blow – by – blow account of the political prisoners’ brutal treatment by the apartheid regime. By the time he established the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA) at UCT in 1992, Alexander had published the seminal One Azania, One Nation under the pseudonym No Sizwe. He insisted that post – apartheid education, and indeed the economy as a whole, suffered for the marginalisation of indigenous languages. Arguing that the legacy of apartheid education maintained the skewed status quo, he lamented mother – tongue education was still equated with the “ravages of Bantu education”.