Being-Black-in-the-World, one of N. Chabani Manganyi’s first publications, was written in 1973 at a time of global socio-political change. The Black Consciousness movement had emerged in the mid-1960s and the African continent was throwing off its colonial yoke. In South Africa, renewed resistance to the brutality of apartheid rule would detonate in the Soweto uprising led by black school children three years later. Publication of Being-Black-in-the-World was delayed until the young Manganyi had left the country to study at Yale University. His publishers feared that the apartheid censorship board and security forces would prohibit him from leaving the country, and perhaps even incarcerate him, for being a ‘radical revolutionary’. The book thus found a limited public circulation in South Africa and original copies were hard to come by. This new edition, in contrast to its previous suppression, is an invitation to the #FeesMustFall generation to engage freely with early decolonising thought by an eminent South African intellectual. An astute social and political observer, Manganyi has written widely on subjects relating to ethno-psychiatry, autobiography, black artists and race. In 2018 Manganyi’s memoir, Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist was awarded the prestigious ASSAf (The Academy of Science of South Africa) Humanities Book Award. Each of these short essays can be read as self-contained reflections on what it meant to be black during the apartheid years. Manganyi is a master of understatement, and yet this does not stop him from making incisive political criticisms of black subjugation under apartheid. While the essays are clearly situated in the material and social conditions of that time, they also have a timelessness that speaks to our contemporary concerns regarding black subjectivity, affectivity and corporeality, the persistence of a racial (and racist) order and the need for a renewed decolonising project. The essays will reward close study for anyone trying to make sense of black subjectivity and the persistence of white insensitivity to black suffering. Ahead of their time, the ideas in this book are an exemplary demonstration of what a thoroughgoing and rigorous decolonising critique should entail. The re-publication of this classic text is enriched by the inclusion of a foreword and annotation by respected scholars Garth Stevens and Grahame Hayes respectively, and an afterword by public intellectual Njabulo S. Ndebele.
