Njabulo Ndebele: luminary and distinguished academic

Abstract

Njabulo Ndebele, intellectual, academic and university leader, is first and foremost a writer. As he declared in the inaugural Steve Biko Memorial Lecture (not the only lecture series he has headlined), writing for him is an 'act of faith' - not supplanting the conventional act of faith one would expect of someone steeped in the Anglican tradition, but embodying it in what became for him a true vocation. The self-deprecatory 'with a few ideas' (in the epigraph above) is a monumental understatement: a cursory look not only at the man's oeuvre but at the contribution of his ideas to intellectual thought and cultural appreciation in southern Africa will show that these are almost unparalleled. Njabulo Simakahle Ndebele was born on 4 July 1948 in Coronation Hospital, where his mother, Makhosazana Regina Tshabangu, was a nurse. His father, Nimrod Njabulo Ndebele, taught arithmetic and isiZulu at the Madibane High School in Western Native Township. He was deemed 'an outstanding teacher' by no less a person than his former pupil, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Ndebele junior attended Emzimkhulu Lower Primary School in Charterston (the 'location' adjacent to the town Nigel in present-day Gauteng Province) and, in 1960, went to boarding school in Swaziland at St Christopher's Anglican School for boys, where he matriculated in 1966. The education he received there enabled him to rise above 'the level of certain forms of labour' for which Hendrik Verwoerd, then Minister of Native Affairs, claimed the 'Bantu child' was destined.