USA Africa Dialogue Series - Remembering AC Jordan with CAS at UCT

Remembering AC Jordan with CAS at UCT

I first came to know about AC Jordan when I was a student at the Center for African Studies (CAS) at the University of Cape Town (UCT). The CAS professorial chair in African Studies is, at least up to now, named after him. By the time I joined the centre as a postgraduate student the first AC Jordan Chair, Professor Mahmood Mamdani, had contentiously left - if not pushed to leave - after what has come to be known as the 'Mamdani Affair', an experience I attempted to review elsewhere. Interestingly it was while attending classes held by Professor Brenda Cooper, the second AC Jordan chair, that I made sense of why the name behind it matter to Africanists.

She introduced us to Phyllis Ntantala's book 'A Life's Mosaic', publicly available online. In it a whole chapter is dedicated to one Archibald Campbell Mzolisa. As you can deduce from the initials of his names, this was non other than AC Jordan. His was indeed a remarkable life of an intellectual in the then Apartheid South Africa. His love for and commitment to African Studies, or the Study of Africa if you may call it, was unquestionable. This is how his wife, Phyllis, captures it:

Early in May, A.C. wrote from Los Angeles to tell us he was going to give a talk at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, at the end of the month. In June he wrote again to say he had been offered a post at the same university, to help them structure their African Studies Program, due to be launched the following year. He had accepted the offer.

It is not by accident then that UCT chose his name when it was looking for a professor to help it teach Africa in a post-Apartheid South African university in the 1990s. Ironically, as the raging debate on the disetablishment of CAS UCT indicates, 'UCT' "will move to release the AC Jordan Chair." If one may borrow that famous adage, AC Jordan must be turning in his grave!

http://udadisi.blogspot.com/2011/02/remembering-ac-jordan-with-cas-at-uct.html
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My mission is to acquire, produce and disseminate knowledge on and about humanity as well as divinity, especially as it relates to Africa, in a constructive and liberating manner to people wherever they may be.
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