A Tribute to Harry Garuba (1958–2020)

A member of our editorial board, Professor Harry Garuba passed away in 2020. The Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies Journal would like to pay tribute to Harry’s many roles: the caring mentor; the inspiring teacher; the brilliant thinker; the thoughtful poet and the person of integrity.

“A strong coffee is the muse of inspiration” (l. 6)¹

Could there be a more apt chant to bring us a smile as we mourn and celebrate Harry? Who here has not seen him with his coffee at the table outside the Centre for African Studies (CAS) building at the University of Cape Town (UCT)? Talking, reading, writing, thinking, whatever. Always with the coffee. He once said, towards the end of a dinner, that he needed a good strong cup before bed to help him sleep — we laughed as we all sipped our mint and chamomile.

I was asked to remember Harry in the old days of CAS. So, I have permission for nostalgia for a very bygone age in our corner of UCT. We had a vision of a centre of learning in which we could be academics, friends, parents and hosts. We believed that embracing all these different life dimensions at work could make us better scholars, more whole people. It was a time of hospitality, towards ideas, towards visiting scholars and towards our children, who were always welcome, especially at the Friday teas.

Harry brought baby Ruona to take tea with us one Friday. It didn’t work out well. The little boy wept throughout in terror of Jackson Hlungwane’s snake sculpture, which is just outside. My memory is of Harry gently hugging and rocking his beloved baby boy, while simultaneously discussing the issue of the demonisation of Africa in the media. We liked each other and our students; we were on a mission to find and make the tools, and the language, with which to research and teach our complicated, diverse, continent, with all its differences and its shared struggles.

I met Harry in 2001 when he applied for the post of a lectureship in African Studies. He flew in from Zululand for his interview for the post. I met with him in my office the day before the interview. He could not take his eyes off my bookcase. Hells bells, he was supposed to be impressing me, as Chair of his selection committee, but all he wanted to do was to get at the books. I knew I had my person for the job!

What a gift to have top notch scholars from other countries in Africa to deepen and broaden our South African minds! Thank you for Harry, Nigeria!

He was a man with a driving urge to know more and to know better. I find Harry nuggets entering my mind. One of the best was his intervention in a heated seminar about the use of the first person in academic writing. Dare we write “I” when we are supposed to be objective scholars? Harry cut through it all with his Two I solutions.

There is the personal I, the private I, which is different from the I who is the academic. What can, and must, be visible in our writing is the academic I, who engages in rigorous research, which is filtered through the intersection of our place and time, our privileges, politics and our power.

Memories. Harry was passionate about transforming the curriculum from the get-go, a transformation that he knew was as necessary as it was complicated. He demonstrates this complexity in his famous 2003 essay “Explorations in Animist Materialism”:

In front of the National Electric Power Authority of Nigeria headquarters is a larger-than-life statue of Sango, the Yoruba god of lightning, clad in his traditional outfit, presiding, as it were, over the offices of the major power generation and distribution corporation of the country. (261)

So, not the Greek Pantheon but Yoruba Deities, with their African worlds and knowledges, but, says Harry wryly,

Sango’s life is not exactly a tale of nobility and selflessness. On the contrary, he is the usual tyrant of history and mythology whose pettiness leads him to overplay his hand in the end. (“Explorations” 262)

For Harry transformation was never simply Sango instead of Zeus.

Seriously funny. Harry the scholar-poet, was inspired by Sango, realistic about gods and power, words and their slippery, lightning meanings and always the cup of coffee — one of those everyday things that re-enchant the world of Animist Realism —

have a coffee, you said

so you can still read the poem as it was meant to be,

meant to be read, meant to be sung, meant to be chanted

with all the pauses in the right places, the verbs in the night spaces. (l. 7–10)

Harry loved the pauses, the moments of nuance and silence within the loud clashes, wars and orthodoxies. He searched for those verbs, those actions hidden in the darkness. He was loyal and true, fierce and steadfast in the gentlest and the kindest of ways.

have a coffee, you said,

you must have a coffee

to make the lost names, the lost voices, the lost metaphors

live again in your voice, in your words, in your present … (l. 32–35)

Harry’s search took him through the gaps and silences. Fuelled by a powerful rush of caffeine, Harry pushed passed the gatekeepers to engage with the knowledges that had been bounced, had been erased from the archive.

Harry’s passing put me in mind of a third I to add to his two. The third eye, and Harry would have loved the pun, is who we are as human beings. Not Humanism perhaps which has been tainted by the benchmark of those Greek Gods, but Personhood. Harry was a lovely, special person. He relished engagement in robust debate, but never, ever, in all the years I worked with Harry, not once, did he put down or undermine a colleague or a student, whose opinions differed from his own. Not once did he raise his voice, never did he dominate conversations or situations.

He understood that all our lives are tiny, bright, moments when we are called upon to make a poem, to make a difference. This moment is like the fleeting space between sunset and the rise of the moon. For us who live on after Harry has died, I must end with his beautiful words:

the night is yet to come, a full hour before sunset

And another before the full moon when you are meant

to read the poem

so have a coffee, you said,

a really strong coffee for the sake of the poem … 

for the sake of the dead … (l.36–41)

We will, Harry, thank you, we will.

Notes

1 From Harry’s poem “For the sake of the dead” from the collection entitled Animist Chants and Memorials.

Every attempt was made to contact Kraft Books Limited to obtain the permission to cite from Harry Garuba’s poem “For the sake of the dead”.