Siyabonga Njica talks about his work investigating the history of exiled South African writers and artists
My work as a historian has been energised by the knowledge that I am not only part of a much larger tradition of African intellectual thought at Cambridge, but equally responsible for passing on the baton to a new generation of scholars...
Siyabonga Njica
Before his PhD Siyabonga Njica [2018] was a respected spoken-word poet and he is passionate about exploring Black intellectual history through exiled South African writers and artists.
He believes strongly that their stories should not remain in the archives, but should be widely understood and their impact on South African and global culture celebrated. He is also fascinated by the role institutions and scholarships play in that history.
The topic of his PhD, which followed on from an MPhil on the constructions of home in South African jazz and literature in exile, was an intellectual biography of South African exiled writer, dramatist, actor and broadcaster Bloke Modisane.
“My aim was to use Modisane’s itinerant life as a lens to think about the circulation of African cultural production and the politics of its discursive procedures against the backdrop of the intersecting histories of apartheid in South Africa, the American civil rights struggle, decolonisation on the African continent and the global Cold War,” he says.
He was not only able to use the wealth of resources in the Cambridge archives, but also drew on archives in London, including the British Library, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and the BBC Written Archives Centre in Reading. In the middle of his research came the Covid lockdown, followed by the Black Lives Matter protests.
It was at this point that his project crystallised, not least because he immersed himself in piano playing as a reaction to the deeply emotional and politically charged coinciding crises of 2020. “The research taught me a lot about the cultural dimension of South African history and helped me foreground African intellectuals as important historical actors in 20th century world history,” says Siyabonga.
He was particularly interested in the different creative genres the 1960s artists used, from journalism to literature and theatre. Modisane was a stage actor at the Royal Court Theatre and worked with the BBC. Through him Siyabonga came to know more about a generation of little-known black South African broadcasters based in London.
Post-doctoral studies
Since finishing his PhD, Siyabonga has stayed on at Cambridge to do a post-doctoral fellowship at the Centre for African Studies, which celebrates its 60th anniversary next year, and will join the Faculty of History and Lucy Cavendish College in the upcoming academic year as the Isaac Newton Trust Fellow in Global African History.
These appointments have enabled him to focus both on publishing and teaching about African intellectual histories at Cambridge University. He is currently working on his first monograph with Indiana University Press, while a second co-edited volume based on a symposium on Modisane that he co-convened at the University of Johannesburg last year is currently with Wits University Press.
Siyabonga also has a chapter on the black female broadcaster and writer Noni Jabavu in another ongoing book project titled “South Africa’s Black Britons”. “I came across Jabavu in the BBC archives and have been interested in examining the cultural politics of her little-known years as a freelance BBC radio broadcaster, roving journalist and public intellectual figure in London during the post-war period,” he says.
Jabavu comes from a prominent family of thinkers. Her grandfather was one of the first founders of a Black newspaper in South Africa and her father was an academic. Jabavu’s later life, which she wrote about in two critically acclaimed books, is explored by other authors. Siyabonga’s focus is on her early years in Britain. Jabavu left South Africa at 13 and went to live with a wealthy Quaker family in Oxford. She studied music at the Royal Academy before the Second World War. Siyabonga is interested in the gap between her early journalism and her time as a celebrated author.
Public engagement
In addition to writing about these artists and writers, Siyabonga is organising an exhibition at the Centre for African Studies in Cambridge for next year’s anniversary, which aims to bridge the gap between institutional histories and the general public. His background in the arts means he is perfectly placed to encourage dialogue across different ways of communicating culture and history and he says this is something other colleagues are also interested in. Siyabonga is fascinated by the role institutions such as the Centre play in British academia and in forging better conversations about both history and current issues related to equality, diversity and inclusion.
While he was a Gates Cambridge Scholar, Siyabonga also became involved in the Black Cantabs Research Society, founded by fellow Gates Cambridge Scholar Njoki Wamai to celebrate the history of Black students at Cambridge.
He continues to drill into this history, for instance, he cites a scholarship for Black Southern African students founded by Churchill College in the 1970s. There was a big diplomatic furore when the then apartheid government of South Africa said it wouldn’t let one of its scholars come to the UK because he was serving a banning order due to his political activities with the ANC. The fallout was that the college became more determined to welcome Black students from South Africa. Sidney Sussex College, where Siyabonga read his MPhil in African Studies in 2017, joined the scheme in the 1980s. By the time Archbishop Desmond Tutu was made an honorary fellow of Sidney Sussex in 1999, there was a cohort of Southern African students at the college.
Keeping the doors of learning ajar for all
“I am fascinated by the institutional and scholarship architecture that made these African student mobilities possible,” says Siyabonga, who currently teaches at the Centre for African Studies and Faculty of History alongside doing his research. He says he is committed to helping demystify Cambridge for students coming from a similar background to his.
“There is generational and symbolic value in illustrating to historically marginalised and under-represented groups at Cambridge that this strange place and its collections hold fragments of our diverse histories and a wealth of hidden heritage that we can draw from,” he states.
“Others have walked through these halls and asked different questions. Having lived in Cambridge for seven years, I have been sustained by the deepening of my archival research in this place. My work as a historian has been energised by the knowledge that I am not only part of a much larger tradition of African intellectual thought at Cambridge, but equally responsible for passing on the baton to a new generation of scholars and, as South Africa’s A.C. Jordan once put it, keeping the doors of learning ajar for all.”
