Introduction to Special Issue: Celebrating Ari Sitas

Ari Sitas, in his response in this special issue, divides his working life into two parts: ‘If the first direction of my work was all about a new labour studies, the second has been historical, starting from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in the last few years moving deeper into the eighth, tracing narratives from ‘that’ then to the fifteenth century in AfroAsia … What opened all this up,’ he continues, ‘was creative work in poetry and music between Indian and South African creative pioneers’.

It is this creative tension between Ari as social scientist and Ari as artist, and Ari as a deeply committed (South) African and Ari as a passionate cosmopolitan, that has made his career such an exceptional and innovative one. But these are not two chronologically distinct parts or phases of his life. For Ari, and it is reflected in the articles in this volume, it has been an uninterrupted journey designed to bring together the world of science and the world of poetry.

We begin this Introduction to this Special Issue celebrating the working life of Professor Ari Sitas in two parts. In Part one we give a brief biography of Ari. In Part two we introduce the articles in this volume.

Part one: Ari’s intellectual journey

Ari arrived in South Africa in 1972 from Cyprus at the age of twenty to join his parents who had immigrated to South Africa. It was the height of apartheid. Indeed, the coercive capacity of the apartheid state appeared so powerful to the sociologist Heribert Adam that, in his celebrated book Modernising Racial Domination, published a year before the mass strikes in Durban in 1973, he wrongly predicted strikes were not possible in apartheid South Africa . The strikes were to be the trigger in developing a powerful worker movement in South Africa in a struggle for national liberation. There were similarities with Cyprus. Cyprus had gone through a turbulent anti-colonial guerrilla struggle against Britain that culminated in its independence in 1960. It also shared with South Africa a complex legacy of division between two ethnic groups, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. Importantly, on a personal level, anti-fascism was deep in his upbringing: his mother’s father had been murdered by the Nazi Regime in 1942.

Ari began his studies in sociology at the University of Witwatersrand in 1975. He was active in the radical theatre movement and was part of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company that produced a range of challenging plays. Ari went on to graduate in industrial sociology, then did the honours degree and a doctorate on African workers’ responses to changes in the metal industry on the East Rand, 1960–1980.

The rapid growth of the new unions, legitimised in 1979 by the recommendations of the Wiehahn Commission, led sociologists to examine the origins and nature of the labour movement. How does one explain, sociologists began to ask, the emergence of militant mass-based industrial unions among black workers at the height of the repressive apartheid regime? What accounted for the emergence of strong shop steward structures, some of which shared links with radical social movements in the townships?

Ari believed it was necessary to go beyond the workplace to answer this question. He was influenced by David Webster’s anthropological training, Alain Touraine’s ‘group self-analysis’, and by workshop processes that had been developed by the Junction Avenue Theatre Company in the seventies. As a result, he believed that it was necessary to follow workers into their rooms in the single-sex hostels where these migrant workers were housed and their shacks in the sprawling townships of the province of Gauteng. The purpose of the field work was to create what Ari was to call in his doctorate, ‘an experiential mosaic’ (Sitas 1984, 55).

Ari developed a theoretical approach during the eighties that identified the distinct cultural formations created by workers. This enabled him to avoid the economism of the dominant labour process approach pioneered by the American Marxist Harry Braverman. Ari called this new approach the analysis of culture and working life. The culture of black workers ceased to be seen in negative terms; instead, it became a way of empowering and mobilising workers. The traditional Nguni praise poet, the imbongi is now seen as a grass-roots intellectual, educating workers about past struggles and, at the same time, offering interpretations of how the past can affect the present (Bonnin 1987).

At the centre of Ari’s innovative approach to culture was an argument that the responses of metal workers were not mere ‘reflexes’ – a mechanical adaptation to the changing world of work; they were rational responses ‘in and through distinct working class cultural formations, formations that were part of a profound social movement emerging on the East Rand’ (Sitas 1984, 9). These cultural formations, he argued, enjoyed a degree of autonomy that was not reducible to the ‘economic structure of society’ (39). ‘Culture’, he suggested, ‘is not so much about what people do, but more importantly the form the activities take. It is not that a worker sings or drinks; it is the way he or she sings or drinks’ (40).

But these activities created, he says, an ‘us and them’ divide, with those who belong to the workers’ side on the one hand, and the cowards or the impimpis on the other. The new cultural formation had shifted the ground, bringing with it a new understanding of power (417). Above all it brought with it a new discourse of struggle; a militancy – what Ari would come to call populist workerism, captured here in the words of one of the workers:

It is the workers that shall lead the struggle for freedom. No other person knows the feelings of influx control that makes cheap labour; the fact that we make people rich for nothing; our time has come. (418)

Ari concludes the thesis with these words:

In refusing to deal with ‘culture’ as an institution outside production and linked to leisure or reproductive practice only, the thesis contributes to the rethinking of the interconnection between the two areas of working-class life (or, put differently, of production and reproduction).

The Durban days: the eighties

In October 1982 Ari arrived in Durban as a newly appointed lecturer in sociology at the then University of Natal. His entry into the world of Durban working-class politics was not straightforward. ‘The idea of cultural struggle’, Ari was to write, ‘seemed peculiar at that time and placed me outside the boundaries of “workerism”. Many trade union leaders in FOSATU found any such notion at best amusing, at worst, bizarre’ (2016, 12). But, he continues, ‘in 1983, I was fortunate enough to be asked alongside Astrid von Kotze to participate in the great social experiment that led to the explosion of worker plays, performance, and events in Natal’ (2016, 12). The Dunlop Play was the trigger for the start of a series of plays and the launching of the Culture and Working Life Project (CWLP) in 1984. The project was given R1 640 by the church group, Diakonia, and R1 000 by traders that Prof Fatima Meer solicited for the project (Interview, Sitas 2017). The launch of the CWLP began a flowering of labour and cultural activities: the Natal Workers’ History Project, the Industrial Health Centre, the Trade Union Research Project (TURP), the Youth Unemployment Project, and the launch in 1986 of Injula, a journal published in Zulu. Unions began to establish what they called ‘cultural locals’; initially in the southern industrial area of Durban, Clairwood, but soon across the Durban-Pinetown area and beyond.

Ari had found his voice on the complex question of working-class culture and could now speak with confidence. This is captured in his collection of essays, The Flight of the Gwala-Gwala Bird, where he stresses the centrality of the Dunlop experience and the Dunlop Play in developing a broad group of cultural activists inside FOSATU and their offices in Gale Street. (Sitas 2016, 138). He suggests three reasons why the Dunlop Play was so crucial: firstly, ‘it created a space within the labour movement for cultural activity over and above union struggles, and occupying this space was a core of activists committed to cultural work, alongside worker organisation, no matter what obstacles were put in their way’ (138). Secondly, many of the participants in the play became central shop-stewards and worker leaders in Dunlop, in MAWU and in Natal’s trade union life. Thirdly, cultural work spread horizontally to other factories in Durban and beyond through ‘imitation-effects’. Other workers, having seen the Dunlop Play, started organising their own plays and cultural events independently, and sometimes they also solicited the cooperation of the core activists’ (138).

Songs and oral poetry

Ari began by identifying work-songs – songs often sung by road gangs as well as the Zulu guitarist playing his instrument or a squash box on the street corners of Durban – but then discovered a forklift driver at Dunlop, Alfred Temba Qabula, who survived the working day by composing songs. These songs, writes Ari, concerned with both redemption and resistance, were based on Qabula’s everyday experiences in the factory. ‘I would see something that hurts, that causes me pain and then I would spend the day making a song about it’, Qabula says (in Sitas 2016, 75). Then, in 1984, Qabula started to perform his praise poem “Izibongo Zika Fosatu” at union meetings. His performances initiated a revival of imbongi poetry throughout South Africa, as workers transformed this tradition into a powerful expression of their struggles. (Qabula 2017 [first published in 1989]).

Qabula, and the many other izimbongi active in Durban in the eighties, can best be described as organic intellectuals, ‘a grassroots response that uses well-rooted forms, organically linked to working class cultures and infuses them with new contents of the factory experience, and that of a worker militant’s beliefs’ (Sitas 2016, 77). But what is important here is that Ari is deepening the concept of black workers’ cultural formations identified earlier in his work on the East Rand and finding new concepts to define their responses. For example, Sitas uses Qabula’s depiction of shop-floor struggles as umlabalaba (a traditional board game) to depict their complex struggles, characterised by victories and defeats.

Blade Nzimande, who translated the original Zulu into English in the late eighties and was reflecting on the work and life of Qabula, makes two observations: firstly, through these cultural expressions, oral poetry brought back the idea that workers were not just commoditized objects of political and economic exploitation, and secondly, they highlighted the richness of indigenous cultures, languages and forms of expression. Indeed, writes Nzimande, ‘Qabula’s oratory allegories and idioms used traditional imbongi styles of expression that resonated with the imaginations of migrant workers and communities across the country’ (2017, xvii).

Ari’s ear was already well-versed in folk and popular poetry from his childhood years in Cyprus: the sound and tone of the chiatista songs by the poihtarides (folk poets) had never left his ear to meet imbongi poetry. Life after all is but a Homeric journey, an odyssey, where the West meets the East, the Global North meets the Global South. Ari’s poetry of the 1980s expressed insurrectionary South Africa in “Tropical Scars” and his masterpiece, “Slave Trades”. The journey is full of adventures and encounters form the colonial and postcolonial memories and rejuvenated ties to his hometown, Limassol, to great cities of the south from Addis to Durban in South Africa and later India. It is all there in “Rhythmskewed”:

So many thousand molecules, shaped by history’s rhythms-the molecules press, solid, visceral, at my brains and ignite ancient premonitions. (Sitas 2013)

The journey never stops. In his latest work, the poet-sociologist embarks on an even grander journey to paint a magnificent, albeit devastating and fearsome global map of suffering (Sitas et al. 2020, 5). His hero and student, Nomxakazo, embarks on a global voyage, like the ‘strange birds’ that ‘come from afar’ and ‘are condemned to wander’.¹ This is a wonder/wander around the world of savage labour, murderous borders, ‘daisy cutter bombs and gadgets, refugee camps and refuse’, charting a global map of suffering, connecting the commodity with products of wonder, art, craft, and the labour process right through to destruction and death. This It is a majestic work combining a poetic, creative-art, and sociological voyage along ‘our contemporary Silk Roads and Hazmat Highways’.²

Workers’ theatre

Ari traces his involvement in worker plays to the Junction Avenue Theatre Company in Johannesburg in the mid-seventies when he travelled ‘from union halls to community venues, from church halls to schools, from backyards, to hostels; constructing and performing ‘a new form of popular culture’ (Sitas 2016, 79). There are a number of contradictions in worker theatre, Ari argues, but at the centre is the difficulty of portraying production on the stage ‘as the real site of exploitation – the heat of the steel furnace, the dust of the textile mill and the noise of the rubber assembly line’. He identifies other contradictions – the difficulties in portraying the tensions created by the new moral order and codes of conduct – sometimes best captured through worker songs. Ari’s deep connection with music and songs continue as we move to his wandering around the world.

Around the World with Ari

Harpooning the angel was easy

tugging him down to the dhow, mending him, to nail him to the mast,

was hard

Unfolding his wings to steer

against the crosswinds through the Arabian Sea through Ratnataka was

sheer joy

So we sailed (Sitas et al. 2014, “Moorings”)

Ari’s scholarship always had wings, from South Africa to Cyprus, to Ethiopia, to India and back to South Africa. Ari’s intellectual connections with his birthplace, Cyprus, and his subsequent involvement in the reunification of the island, starts much later than one would imagine. Cypriot sociologists, social and political scientists and activists ‘discovered’ Ari in 2004. Before that Cyprus was mostly about nostalgia and memory. In 2004, when Kofi Annan floated the plan of reunification of island, Ari, an intellectual with no party politics in Cyprus, became the ideal person to lead a community-to-community discussion. Even though the initial plan did not come to fruition, Ari became involved in conducting the first bicommunal study in Cyprus about the prospects of forgiveness, reconciliation and coexistence, across two generational cohorts. This study became a pioneering one and was Ari’s inspiration for the book Beyond the Mandela Decade: The Ethic of Reconciliation. Since then, Ari has been identified and celebrated as the voice of reconciliation between the two communities, Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots and active in initiatives for the peaceful reunification on the island. Collaborating with local researchers, Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots, he carried out pioneering empirical studies on the prospects of reconciliation, coexistence and forgiveness (Sitas, Latif, and Loizou 2007) and has been actively involved in research and debates in the country. Ari’s work had a wide impact and exercised a major influence on the subject, never hesitating to humbly join and connect with Cypriot scholars, artists, intellectuals and activists struggling to overcome the division and barbed wire that cuts across the country. His engagement and support brought him close to scholars working on migration, racism and post colonialism, deviance and globalisation, placing Cyprus on the global research map. His latest round, after his academic retirement is an ongoing initiative, to bring to Cyprus a team of writers, theatre directors and performers from South Africa, India and Cyprus (Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots) to bring Othello back to Cyprus. It is an ambitious postcolonial rescue of Othello. The project was abruptly halted during the COVID-19 pandemic, but Ari persists.

Cape Town and the global stage

In 2009 Ari arrives in Cape Town and at the University of Cape Town (UCT). At UCT, Ari did not have an easy task. Not unexpectedly, Ari arrived at UCT to shake things up and often ended up stepping on important toes. In 2011, major action was already stirring, which later manifested itself as the Fallist movement and debates around de-coloniality. Through many strategic moves, and over many a bottle of wine, plans were hatched to transform Sociology at UCT. A simple comparison of the UCT sociology in 2010, with 2022 will give you more than a hint of the outcome of these plans.

Ari brought the Global Studies Programme (GSP) with him to UCT. The GSP started in 2002 at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) through discussion between Ari, Prof. T. K. Oommen (Indian sociologist and Professor Emeritus at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University) and Prof. Schwengel (Institut für Soziologie, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg). The two-year programme is currently conducted jointly by Freiburg, UCT, the Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLASCO) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand, and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, India. The struggle in any global studies programme is to have southern collaborations, but India was key in the programme, right from its inception. Given Ari’s Durban connection, India was a logical intellectual port, but while Durban spoke of India at a distance, as both a paradise and nightmare, the intellectual collaborations with JNU made India one of Ari’s homes.

Ari’s inroads into India start in 1995, when Immanuel Wallerstein invited Ari, as the first post-apartheid president of the South African Sociological Association (SASA), to a meeting on Southern voices in the association. That’s where Ari started forging firm friendships with Indian scholars, made official later as institutional attachments with JNU, Delhi University and Ambedkar University. This relationship deepened in 2016 when Ari was invited as the inaugural Bhagat Singh Chair at JNU, New Delhi, India. JNU was an active, creative and intellectual community with a long-standing history and impulse for dissent, amongst the students and scholarly community. As Ari confesses, ‘Unlike anthropology, I did not want to study either India or Indians, there were enough scholars in Indian who could do that much better. I wanted to compare notes with colleagues, and this led to an exciting journey’. In 2009 Ari was invited to visit the newly formed B. R. Ambedkar University (AUD), Delhi, especially the Centre of Development Studies. For a few decades, AUD remained a project to be believed in – now, with the systematic killing of dissenting voice, at the level of appointments, funding and promotion, the story of these institutions has changed dramatically.

These exposures to the GSP, India and Cyprus allowed the possibility of having students and their networks across the world, students that had the enthusiasm and energy which inspired the trilogy Deviance/Defiance/Dystopia Project that Ari collaborated on with colleagues and/or students from across the world, including Sumangala Damodaran, Faisal Garba, Wiebke Keim, Amrita Pande, and Nicos Trimikliniotis.

In the late 2000s, Immanuel Wallerstein invited Ari to head the cluster on deviance, one out of nine groups of researchers in a project aiming to examine world polarisations and convergencies – his last project. Ari with his cluster team then set out on another global journey: After the publication of a chapter in Wallerstein’s edited volume (Sitas et al. 2015), Ari and his cluster continued with the deviance and defiance project (Sitas et al. 2014; Sitas et al. 2022). The project continues with a scheduled third volume.

The next intellectual milestone for Ari is, possibly, what he calls ‘becoming an accidental historian’. This started with the writing of Gauging and Engaging Deviance but became far more extravagant with the Afro Asia project. With an interdisciplinary team comprising an archaeologist to musicians, this project journeyed on a less-traversed historical path. Thanks to a generous fund from the Afro Asia project has created more than a few murmurs in revolutionising music, archaeology, sociology and of course, history.

The Afro Asia project demonstrates, definitively, that knowledge circulates. Ari’s next project with former student and now colleague, Dr Faisal Garba, will extend this argument. Ari explains the idea behind this project as ‘radical non centerism’, one where horizontal dialogues between Asia, Africa, Latin America can be initiated but in conversation with the north. A pre-requisite to this radicalism is a body of knowledge that takes Afro Asia seriously enough by historicising the connections that produce their entanglements and the contemporary societies, knowledges and imaginations that they give rise to. Through this work, Africa is understood as central to the making of the modern world, and not a footnote in global encounters. In quintessential Ari style, he confesses that the attempts that he embarked upon, to rewrite history and re-imagine that other sociology, remains an unfinished task. A daunting task that Ari continues to spearhead.

Part two: outline of the papers

The contributions to this special issue reflect the many innovative and creative forms of scholarship that have inspired and been inspired by Ari. We begin with an article by Debby Bonnin on the transformation of work in South Africa. She takes us back to Ari’s early pioneering work on the culture and working lives of metal workers in the industrial towns east of Johannesburg. She provides a comprehensive intellectual history of the changing world of work and the impact changes in the political sphere, economic policy, labour markets, technology and the construction of time, have had on working life. Of particular interest is her research on the way in which Computer-Aided-Design (CAD) has transformed the production conditions of textile designers.

The originality of this research on labour led Wiebke Keim to argue that counter-hegemonic currents emerged in the eighties in apartheid South Africa amongst a vibrant, engaged scholarly community (Keim 2017). This community of critically engaged labour scholars focusing, she says, around specific, most often locally relevant topics, despite the strictures and structures of North Atlantic domination of sociology. She argues that by engaging with actors outside the university – social movements, trade unions, religious communities, NGOs, etc. – these sociologists avoided ‘extraversion’ and a fixation on the North – on the centre. These scholars in the periphery developed alternative concepts based on the social reality around them. On this foundation, sociologists, she argues, began to professionalise their work, eventually creating an equal partnership with the North. Citing the scholarship of Ari and others at the University of the Witwatersrand, she argues that these sociologists began to make an original contribution to the advancement of the discipline as a whole.

In Keim’s contribution to this special issue, she returns to her argument that Ari was a central part of a counter-hegemonic sociology and traces how Ari was crucial to her conceptualisation of her earlier argument. In this article, Keim discusses in some detail Ari’s later work, The Flight of the Gwala Gwala Bird (2016) as well as Voices that Reason: Theoretical Parables (2004).

Boikie Rehbein’s article analyses the establishment and successful development – six hundred students completed the course – of the Global Studies Programme (GSP) of which Ari Sitas was a co-founder. It is an imaginative idea that involves students from three continents coming together over a two-year period to complete a masters degree. The underlying motivation for the programme is that we are in a multi-centred world where understanding the other and mutual understanding are crucial. The result of the programme, Rebhein argues, is that graduates no longer refer to the single tradition of the Euro-American social sciences but to at least three different traditions. ‘It leads’, he says, ‘to a reflexive attitude and to a questioning of principles taken for granted’ (Rehbein 2021, 9).

The next article in the special issue, by Nicos Trimikliniotis, explores the relationship Ari Sitas, as a poet-sociologist, has developed between the country of his birth, Cyprus, and his country of adoption, South Africa. Drawing on Sitas’ South African experience, Trimikliniotis traces how Sitas engages in debates in Cyprus as a ‘diasporic intellectual’ developing the notion of a ‘third space’ where Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots can negotiate and generate the spaces for dialogue, common action, and institutions that would facilitate reconciliation. He shows how Sitas’s studies of race, migration, deviancy and globalisation, have allowed him to navigate, bridge and mediate between these two countries.

In her comparative study of ‘loose women’ in British India and British South Africa, Amrita Pande employs one such theoretical bridge, that of ‘deviants and deviancy’ to show how colonial authorities tried to control these autonomous women through codification. Drawing on colonial archives in India and South Africa, Pande argues that the codification of ‘prostitution’ was not merely a reflection of colonial sexual anxieties but the need to restrain the autonomy of working women, at large. Ostensibly concerned with morality and the need to control sexually unrestrained women, these colonial codes and laws effectively restricted women to the home or to labour markets deemed legitimate for their gender and race.

Sumangala Damodaran outlines Ari’s engagement with the ‘international of the imagination’ through music and musicality. These creative outputs demonstrate the fundamental relationship between art and politics in Ari’s work and his theorising of cultural practice as an embodied political process. Damodaran describes the idea behind the “Insurrections Ensemble” and the ensemble’s innovative process of producing and curating a novel form of ‘shared tonality’ between Africa and Asia. This ensemble experiment, Ari’s insistence on weaving together a collective of compositions, Damodaran argues, has allowed Ari to reach a distinct scale of theorising around aesthetics and social change.

In the last piece, Asad Essa reflects on different frames of viewing life, academia and a chocolate factory through his encounters with sociology, global studies, journalism and, of course, Ari.

We conclude this Special Edition with a response by Ari entitled “Culture in my working life – response to my compeers”.

The articles we chose for this Special Edition celebrate the creative tension between Ari as social scientist and Ari as artist. This creative tension was to find full expression when Ari returned to Durban in January 2023 to celebrate with colleagues, comrades and friends Fifty Years since the 1973 Durban strikes. Reviving the Culture and Working Life Project of the eighties and early nineties, Ari and fellow artists through the award-winning “Insurrections Ensemble” told the story of the strike. They did it brilliantly through drawing on the stories of the women who worked in the textile mills and ‘who decided in January and February 1973 to say ‘enough is enough’ and ignited the road to freedom.’

This celebration of Ari would not be complete without mentioning his life-long collaborator and partner, Dr Astrid von Kotze. An accomplished scholar and educationalist, it was their common interest in the theatre that laid the foundations for the intellectual and political project they have developed for nearly half a century.

Acknowledgements

This special issue is based on the symposium “Celebrating Ari Sitas: The World of Work and the Power of Poetics” organised at the University of Cape Town in 2017. This symposium was made possible by a generous grant by the University of Cape Town. A big thank you to colleagues, from near and far, who responded enthusiastically to my call for this symposium and this special issue. A special note of thanks to colleagues Faisal Garba, Tinashe Kushata, Sinazo Maqezu and Sepideh Azari, for their generous and efficient assistance, at various stages of planning and research. Amrita Pande.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amrita Pande

Amrita Pande is Professor of Sociology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Edward Webster

Edward Webster is Disinguished Professor at the Southern Centre of Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Notes

1 See the Table at the end of the various visits in this wandering.

2 Back cover note from the author, Ari Sitas, Notes for an Oratorio.