Prof Tinyiko Maluleke
Vice-Chancellor and Principal.
Remarks on Occasion of the 2024 TUT Academic Excellence Awards
‘Do not go gentle’! With this injunction, which will be the theme of my intervention tonight, I wish to agitate against mediocrity in favour of a culture of constant innovation and an endless quest for excellence.
But first, I take the opportunity to welcome Flautist extraordinaire, Dr Wouter Kellerman. Kellerman is a two times Grammy Awards winner and a five times Grammy Awards nominee! The latest Grammy nomination - for the Best New Age Ambient or Chant Album (Triveni) - came through last week, on the 9th of November 2024. Truly, Dr Wouter Kellerman is the Pied Piper of South Africa. May the sound of his flute help to rid our country of the infestation of the rats which are slowly eating away at the soul of the nation. Above all, he is an example of the kind of excellence we will recognise among our academics tonight.
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
These are the immortalised words in the refrain of the poem: “Do not go gentle into that good night”. It was written in 1947 by one of the most ferocious poets of the 20th century – the Welsh man, Dylan Thomas. Such was the power of Thomas’ poetry that apparently, when a young artist and musician Robert Allen Zimmerman read Thomas’ poetry for the first time, he adopted Dylan as his name. And that’s how Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, became Bob Dylan.
The back story of the poem is that when Dylan Thomas wrote the poem, his father, David John Thomas, was lying on his deathbed. Through this poem, Dylan Thomas was “pleading” with his father not to give up, and not to give in to the death that was lurking – a death which he mockingly renames, “that good night”.
In fact, the last stanza of the poem makes direct reference to Thomas’s father:
Dr Wouter Kellerman, the Grammy-awards winning pied piper of South African music performing at the TUT Academic Excellence Awards.
And you, my father, [sitting] there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
But there is an alternative, somewhat “juicier” backstory, namely that, apparently Dylan Thomas may not have been exactly sober when he wrote this poem or parts of it. After all, Dylan Thomas, is said to have once described himself as a “roistering, drunken and doomed poet”. All we know is that, in the poem, “do not go gentle into that good night”, Dylan Thomas offers what, author, literary and science blogger, Maria Popova calls “a rapturous ode to the unassailable tenacity of the human spirit”.
And this, is precisely the point of our celebration tonight. The TUT Academic Excellence Awards are the institution’s humble attempt to give a fitting and “rapturous ode to the unassailable tenacity” of the TUT academic stars that shine bright above the night skies.
In my remarks on this self-same occasion in 2023, I cautioned the awardees not to make the mistake of thinking that academic excellence awards are some form of retirement awards. I said then that awardees should not, because of the awards, slip into complacency or worse still, develop an inflated sense of accomplishment and self-importance. These awards are not meant to send recipients into “that good night”.
For God’s sake TUT academics, do not go gentle into that good night! Do not go gentle when it comes to the pursuit of excellence in research. Do not go gentle when it comes to supervision, teaching and learning. Do not go gentle on research productivity. Rage, rage against the culture mediocrity. Rage against the dying of the light of excellence in research and in the scholarship of teaching.
I urge you to seek out fellow pursuers of excellence in this country and elsewhere in the world, from within your field and beyond, among those who are your contemporary and those from previous epochs. Use them as your North Stars, as exemplars to follow, and as mentors at whose feet you may sit and learn.
If you struggle finding and identifying them, let me lend a hand, let me introduce, ever so briefly, a few pursuers of excellence who inspire me.
Let me present to you a boy from the village of Botshabelo Mission Station near Wonderhoek, in Groblersdal. His father was the village priest. “One day I was looking curiously through my father’s books when all of sudden I came to the biggest surprise of my life: a drawing book in which there was a still-life in colour done by my father when he was a student at college,” writes the boy. From then on, the boy knew what he wanted to be when he grew up - an artist. Later when he moved to live with his cousins in Sophiatown,8 he cherished the room with “a big street-facing window” in which he worked. His biographer, Chabani Manganyi, notes that “it was from that view and in that room that his creative future would take off in earnest”.
The boy we are talking about is none other than Jan Gerald Sekoto – who became a world famous South African painter and musician. Chabani Manganyi interviewed Sekoto over a period of 10 years from 1984 to 1992, on the basis of which he published A Black Man Called Sekoto (1996) which was later expanded into Gerald Sekoto: I am an African. Both Sekoto and his biographer, Manganyi, each in his own way, one a fine and musical artist, the other a psychologist and a biographer; are exemplars of what excellence is all about. Curiosity. Fascination. Meticulousness. Tenacity. Endurance and attention to the minutest details.
To write the most beautiful book I have ever read, The Beauty of The Line: The Life and Times of Dumile Feni, Manganyi interviewed up to 39 contemporaries, colleagues, friends and family of the man called Zwelidumile Mhlaba Mgxaji – Dumile Feni. The book is a compendium of the most beautiful narratives and assessments of the artistic genius of Feni. So much to learn about the art of excellence and the pursuit thereof, from Manganyi, Sekoto and Feni!
Come walk with me on the yellow brick road that cuts across the length and breadth of the KwaMakhutha township, south of Durban. From north to south, the yellow brick road descends into the valleys, ascends up to the hilltops all the way to the seaside town of Amanzimtoti, where bundles of turquoise water leap into the sky and spiral into curling waves.
Phamela Zibuyile Dube vividly remembers how as a young girl, her father, Sipho Matthew Dube, took her and her younger sister Penelope Ntombizethu to a theatre in Durban. There they watched The Wizard of Oz - the story of a young girl named Dorothy who follows the yellow brick road to the famed emerald city, where the celebrated Wizard of Oz lived. Later, when Pamela read Lyman Frank Baum’s original, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, she began to dream of the yellow brick road that would take her beyond the confines of the KwaMakhutha and its culture of violence, to a world where, as Martin Luther King Jnr once put it, Dube “would not be judged by the colour of her skin, but by the content of her character”.
Dube has never forgotten that story. She has followed that yellow brick road in pursuit of academic excellence from section 8 KwaMakhutha’s Hibiyana Lower Primary to Amanzimtoti where she used to sneak into a whites-only library to read voraciously, to Inanda Seminary where she matriculated, to the University of Natal, to Germany, back to Mzantsi and all the way to becoming Vice- Chancellor and Principal of the Central University of Technology. Pamela Zibuyile Dube is an exemplary pursuer of excellence.
If you could indulge me one more moment, I would introduce you to a boy from Dinamuneng, Zebediela, nageng ya Kgosi Sebetiela. Come, let us join the 12-year-old young man on his mercy mission. It is midnight and the young man is running through Mapatjakeng village, towards the home of his uncle in the neighbouring village of Magatle. He runs across the bridge over the Kumpi river. Arriving at his uncle’s home, he bangs the door while shouting at the top of his voice: “Malome John (Uncle John)! Malome John! Koko-Mma (which is how he and his siblings referred to their grandmother) is very sick! Wake up! We must take her to hospital now!” His quadriplegic grandmother was having yet another cardiovascular failure.
For eight years, his quadriplegic grandmother taught him how to herd her goats and cattle, milk the cows, cook, think, love, laugh, persevere and do life in general. Then one day she said to him. When you grow up, you must go and study to be a medical doctor so that you can come back and heal me. And after matric, he did just that. He was admitted to medical school at the University of Natal, in Durban.
Sadly while he was writing the final-year exams in his first year, his grandma, Koko-Mma Elizabeth Ramadimetja Madisha, ngwan’aMphahlele, passed away.
But I guess her mission was accomplished. Not only was her grandson training to become a medical doctor, but of her seven children, one was a postmaster, another a teacher, and the youngest, was a qualified professional nurse. These achievements were no small feat for an illiterate black woman whose offspring were supposed to become hewers of wood and drawers of water. Today that grandson of hers, Professor Mosa Moshabela, is the Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Cape Town.
From the Chabani Manganyis, Gerald Sekotos, Dumile Feni, Mosa Moshabelas and Pamela Dubes of this world – there is so much inspiration from which we can draw. In the pursuit of excellence, we cannot afford to go gentle into the night of mediocrity.
TUT is honouring deserving pursuers of academic excellence. But it is only when institutions and role-players outside TUT – such as the Sunday Times Book Prize, Booker Prize, Pulitzer Prize, the National Research Foundation (and other RFs), the Grammys, the national and international academies of science – recognise and give you accolades, that the world will begin to notice.
Dear awardees, you are not there yet. But where you are, you are. And where you are, matters, because TUT does not hand out these awards as if they were potato-chips from a spaza shop.
My dear winners and awardees of the 2024 excellence awards; do not go gentle. Rage, rage against academic mediocrity. Rage and rage against research slovenliness. Rage against the bane of plagiarism. Rage against academic entitlement. And I do not care whether Dylan Thomas was sober or not when he said this words, I join him in pleading with you: you dare not go gentle into that so-called good night.
Dr Emily Mabote, Acting Executive Director: Institutional Effectiveness
and
Technology, winner of the ‘Service beyond call of duty’ award with
Prof Tinyiko Maluleke, Vice-Chancellor and Principal.
Some of the winners at the 2023-2024 TUT Academic Excellence Awards.