My Madiba Moment - Part 18

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Attending the recording of The Madiba's special town-hall meeting with Ted Koppel's ABC-TV "Nightline" program was my first visit to the Aaron Davis Theater, a two-chambered performance arena, since I was literally kicked out of the dressing room by Mr. Duma Ndlovu, immediately following the Harlem, or Uptown, performance of "Sarafina!," the famous South African Broadway musical. I was trying to get a few quotes for my review from the show's creator, Mr. Mbogeni Ngema.

The Harlem version of "Sarafina!" was a contractually abridged version of that which was running on Broadway. Most of the costume featured in the far more lavish and expensive Broadway performance was missing from the Harlem version. But it was, nonetheless, a spellbinding performance. It well appears that the extant New York City Cultural Affairs Commissioner, Dr. Mary Schmidt-Campbell, had negotiated with the landmark show's creator and producers to make it available to interested Harlem residents who could not afford expensive patronage on Broadway. That was sometime in the mid-summer of 1988, if memory serves me accurately.

On stage as narrator-commentator, though, Mr. Ndlovu made it seem as if he had undertaken the lion's share of the proverbial heavylifting needed to have "Sarafina!" performed Uptown. When Mr. Ndlovu kicked the several of us reporters out of the dressing room, I was more annoyed than angry. I would shortly learn from a couple of my South African friends on the City College campus, that Mr. Ndlovu had created quite an unenviable controversial reputation for himself, largely as a snob. I was a little annoyed because Mr. Ndlovu, who also worked with the Roger Furman Theater, housed inside Aaron Davis, made it seem as if we were some media opportunists attempting to freeload on "Sarafina!" in order to make a cheap name for ourselves.

Maybe that was the case for the other reporters. For, by the time that I saw this brilliant South African musical in Harlem, I had already published a review of Woza Albert!, another of the great South African dramatic pieces, for the New York Amsterdam News. In Ghana, while I served as a Post-A-Level National Service English and History Teacher, at the Osu Presbyterian Secondary School (SENDO), in Accra, between 1984 and 1985, I had taken my form-five students to see a laudable performance of "Sizwe Banzi Is Dead!," that had been produced by final-year students at the University of Ghana's School for the Performing Arts. The latter drama, largely about the odious pass laws and occupational problems of working-class indigenous South Africans, had been directed by Prof. Mohamed Ben Abdallah, by his own account, my father's former student. Dr. Abdallah would be shortly named Secretary for Culture by the Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC).

I would also shortly discover, to my amusement and irrepressible contempt, that Mr. Ndlovu had evidently felt that he had proprietary rights over the reviewing of "Sarafina!," and may actually have kicked my fellow reporters and me out of the dressing room of Aaron Davis' main stage, primarily because of me. For his own review of "Sarafina!," aside from my own, would also be shortly published by the Amsterdam News. Duma Ndlovu's brand of arrogance made me sometimes wonder whether it was worthwhile spending countless days covering anti-apartheid issues and events and then sitting up a remarkable number of nights composing reports about the same for publication in both the Amsterdam News and CCNY's Campus newspaper.

Fortunately, such insufferable rudeness as wantonly exhibited by Mr. Ndlovu was more than remarkably offset by the courtly deportment of the several South African students that I had struck up friendship and acquaintance with at CCNY. At Temple University graduate school, I would also get to know two indigenous South African professors, namely, Professors Alfred Moleah and Clement Tseloane Keto. Both gentlemen, who had grown up together in South Africa, before immigrating to the United States, are presently deceased.

Moleah, an erudite political scientist and a longtime consultant with the United Nations' office in Geneva, Switzerland, had a doctorate from New York University (NYU). He would been the first to resign his professorship, two years before he qualified for early retirement, to assume the post of Principal and Vice-President at the former University College of the Transkei, later the Eastern Cape, located at Umtata (Umthatha), the very province in which The Madiba had been born and was recently buried. I had taken classes with both likable gentlemen but was much closer to Prof. Moleah.

At the time of his "premature" resignation, Moleah had confided to me that the shabby treatment being meted him by the faux-cultural warlords of the Afrocentic Movement would kill him with a heart-attack, if he did not immediately leave Temple and return home. He would eventually die of a heart-attack in Geneva, where he had just concluded service as South Africa's ambassador.

Moleah and Keto had had a falling out over "this Afrocentricity madness," as the former chose to call it. Moleah was thoroughly convinced that "Afrocentricity" was a lame excuse for an abject lack of rigorous scholarship. And to be certain, Professor David Bradley, the renowned African-American novelist and a then-faculty member in Temple's English Department, had once "whispered" to me at a Pan-African Cultural Festival at the Philadelphia Community College, that he had flatly refused to teach courses in the African-American Studies Department because he was also convinced that the "Afrocentric Warlords" were making it easy for rabid Black racists to obtain the doctorate as a license to peddle their patently unwholesome trade. Of course, Prof. Bradly would later bitterly complain to the media about the shamelessly entrenched racism in his own department.

Keto, on the other hand, seemed to be madly in love with this faux-theory and had even written a "pamphlet," as Moleah sarcastically characterized it, on Afrocentricity that he kept incessantly revising and updating and requiring students to purchase as one of the seminal textbooks for his classes. Even so, both gentlemen maintained a mature and cordial relationship. In the end, Keto would, like Moleah, be rudely given to understand that Afrocentrity was essentially an African-American gravy train whose front seats were reserved solely for the purpose, and that Blackness and Africanity were simply not enough.

Unfortunately, like a traumatized manumitted slave of the nineteenth century, Keto would pathetically and predictably attempt to return to Temple and tragically meet his evidently peaceful and natural death in an Atlanta, Georgia, hotel room, according to reliable reports. I have tended to believe that it had been, somehow, preordained by Divine Providence that Keto shall not return to the old effectively discredited and jaded ways. Moleah would also be mercifully granted his full retirement benefits by Temple's top administrators. Apparently, somebody much higher up had been watching the raw deal dealt him by the "Afrocentric" colleagues that he had mistakenly presumed to be on the same rigorous academic page as himself.

Before assuming his professorship at Temple University, Alfred Moleah had taught history and politics at the African-world's renowned seminal and predominantly Black academy, Lincoln University, also located in Pennsylvania. Lincoln, of course, is the alma mater of such legends as Langston Hughes, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kwame Nkrumah and Ako-Adjei, among a host of other African and African-American artists, scholars, scientists, educators, politicians, opinion leaders and policymakers.

Compared to Prof. Moleah, Prof. Keto was more exuberant and outgoing. A historian by training, with a doctorate from Washington, DC's Georgetown University, Keto seemed to be very class conscious where Moleah deftly exuded a reticent sense of dignified deportment. For instance, Keto was more likely to brag about an uncle or ancestor who was a great Tswana chief; and another uncle who was so filthy rich and decidedly insulated from the sinister ravages of the apartheid regime, that the critical-thinking listener began to wonder precisely why Keto had decided to leave South Africa for the United States. Obviously, it was his self-defensive way of needlessly compensating for the abject collective indignity and humiliation brought to bear on the indigenous South African by the racist apartheid regime.

Keto, a tall and remarkably handsome brown-skinned man who stood at about six-feet, was also quite popular with the ladies. But unlike his other more relatively indiscreet colleagues in the department, Keto was not known to romantically and unethically involve himself with students, graduate or undergrad. There was one professor in particular (name purposely withheld), however, who was widely rumored to be morbidly afflicted with some strange disease called "The Pope Complex" or "Pontiff Complex," who, legend had it, came extremely close to getting fired and being criminally prosecuted for routinely coercing graduate female students into having sex with him or refusing at the certain risk of their being terminated from the doctoral program.

Once, during the infamous U.S. Senate's Supreme Court confirmation hearings on the now-Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Prof. Pontiff invited himself into the apartment of a good friend of mine, a half-Swede and half-Yugoslav woman. She would shortly bitterly complain to me as follows: "Kwame, Professor Pontiff came in here last night, uninvited, and fucked me royally!" My friend routinely described herself as a "dirty blonde." And once or twice, she had asked me whether I thought that her "royal" rapist loved his fellow-faculty wife, Prof. Aishetu Kamara (not her real name). "I couldn't care less," I had simply shrugged off my response. She had confided her "Afrocentric" royal raping by Prof. Pontiff to me, because she was contemplating a lawsuit and wanted to know if I would consent to starring as a key witness in her case.

"I have to be frank you, Kristana [not her real name], but my main reason and purpose for coming to Temple is to obtain my doctorate, not to witness or referee the sexual indiscretions of any student and her lover-boy professor." "I understand," Kristana had said in a near whisper. My frank and blunt response may well have stopped the polyglot graduate with a master's degree in public policy in her tracks. She would later give birth to a daughter, Sasha, by her African-American tae-kwon-do instructor.

Today, Prof. Pontiff, a self-described genius inventor of the first Afrocentric academic department in the world, lives with an Afro-Latina from Central America who is easily half his age. He, literally, kicked his African-American wife, by whom he had a son, to the curb nearly a decade ago. And you guessed right, she too, had been his graduate student Up-State New York where he virtually ran one of the hitherto finest communication studies programs in the State University of New York system aground. He would later blame his gross administrative incompetence on "Eurocentric" neurosis.

At Temple, it was Prof. Moleah who practically administered the department. Prof. Pontiff would rather be traipsing zig-zag across the country, preaching the "Afrocentric" gospel of Black humanity and magnanimity and collecting whopping speaking fees, while religiously ensuring that not a dime of it spilled out of his bloated wallet and even into charitable work in his own "hallowed" African-American community. These are the words of Prof. Abu Jihad [not his real name], Prof. Pontiff's former graduate student and his most dedicated human pit-bull, not mine, by the way.

He would also "royally fuck" an East-African woman I briefly became acquainted with. Today, the woman, who shall remain anonymous because she is somebody that I once liked and very much respected, after screaming AFROCENTRICITY to deafening decibels and wildly claiming the same to have been the most rational ideology invented by the Black man, since the Pyramids of Gizeh, has quietly and comfortably settled down and made a few babies with a Western-European man she met while doing volunteer work somewhere in the southern African region for the United Nations. Once or twice, she had passed on information through a mutual acquaintance, with her phone number, for us to get in touch, but I have promptly declined. She even once e-mailed to find out about me but, once again, I promptly declined. I would rather not be drown into the primrose circle of the clinically deluded and delirious. In her case, though, there may well be hope for salvation.

Prof. Pontiff also smugly and imperiously claims to have authored and published over 240 books, and has recently acquired a Ghanaian human lapdog who has been penning and publishing reams of largely bombastic and incoherent and decidedly vacuous testimonies in support of the same. What they are cleverly not letting on to their unsuspecting and captive audiences is the fact that most of these so-called books are actually less than one-hundred pages of recycled tripe.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Dec. 30, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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