ROAPE celebrates the life and work of Alpheus Manghezi, researcher, scholar and activist. Manghezi was a citizen of the world and a fighter for the freedom and liberation of all peoples. He worked in Johannesburg, Glasgow, London, Zambia, Mozambique and Tanzania. We post two celebrations of his life, one by the Centre of African Studies in Maputo, and the other by Gottfried Wellmer. As Gottfried writes, “If the soul of a human is the capacity to communicate with other humans, then Alpheus was a great soul.”
The Centre of African Studies at Eduardo Mondlane University (CEA-UEM) reports with great sadness the passing of Professor Alpheus Manghezi on 16 May 2024.
Alpheus Manghezi was born on 8 June 1934 in Northern Transvaal, today the province of Limpopo in South Africa. From an early age, he dedicated himself to the social cause of the masses, studying social work in Johannesburg (1960), psychiatric social work at the London School of Economics (1963) and community development in The Hague (1969).
He subsequently earned a degree in sociology at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria (1968) and a PhD in sociology at Uppsala University, Sweden (1976). Naturally, this trajectory turned him into a citizen of the world and a fighter for the freedom and well-being of the people, which materialised in his work in Johannesburg, Glasgow, London, Zambia, Mozambique and Tanzania – among other places.
In Mozambique he stood out as a researcher at CEA-UEM between 1976 and 1987. During this period, Alpheus Manghezi participated in and led several research projects, producing most notably works on cooperatives and the cooperative movement, peasant political economy, and the impact of labour migration to the mines of South Africa.
Manghezi’s professional talent in working with oral sources made him one of the great specialists in oral history, both in Africa and globally. His love for his Shangaan mother tongue and his culture helped him to immerse himself in communities in southern Mozambique, where he collected multiple interviews and songs that constituted the main sources for his book Trabalho forçado e cultura obrigatória do algodão: o colonato de Limpopo e o reassentamento pós-independência c.1895-1981 [Forced labour and compulsory cotton cultivation: the Limpopo settlement and the post-independence resettlement, ca.1895-1981], as well as his article “Ku Thekela: estratégia de sobrevivência contra a fome no Sul de Moçambique” [Ku Thekela: survival strategy against hunger in Southern Mozambique]. Among other publications authored by him or with his participation, the following stand out: O mineiro Moçambicano: um estudo sobre a exportação de mão de obra em Inhambane [The Mozambican miner: a study on the export of labour in Inhambane], a work coordinated by Ruth First and which includes interviews and songs recorded by Alpheus Manghezi, as well as Macassane: uma cooperativa de mulheres velhas no sul de Moçambique [Macassane: a cooperative of old women in southern Mozambique], published in 2003 and also containing interviews and songs that he had collected.
The funeral of Alpheus Manghezi took place on 22 May in Mariebjerg Kirkegärd, Copenhagen. CEA-UEM extends its deepest condolences to his widow, Nadja Manghezi, to his family, and to his friends.
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Gottfried Wellmer, who was a colleague of Alpheus’s at the Centro de Estudos Africanos in the 1980s, recalls some adventures while carrying out fieldwork in rural Mozambique with him. Manghezi worked extensively with Ruth First in Mozambique, and his refections on her and his time can be read here.
Alpheus always impressed me… I was allowed to travel with him to a cooperative in the south of Mozambique, to listen to a song about Ngungunhane: how the Portuguese not only captured him, but also forced him to violate the eating tabus of a king.
I had recorded the song on my tape recorder, and I played it for Alpheus. He was interested because there were some verses that he hadn’t heard before. However, unfortunately, I ran out of tape for interviews, and I over-recorded the song with another interview. Alpheus then got Ruth First’s permission to go with me to the cooperative and record the song again. In general, it seems that Alpheus preferred direct conversations with local people in Shangaan to academic theories passed around among the other researchers!
First of all, we went to talk to the women working in the fields. While I was recording their songs about colonial ill-treatment and the forced cultivation of cotton, Alpheus killed a big python that had threatened a woman who was working alone in another area. That python was at least two metres long. However, the women were not impressed. They asked Alpheus: why didn’t you kill its mate as well? Don’t you know that they hunt in pairs? Now the widow of the python will follow you until it can kill you.
We took a coffee break. The women retired to a shady and grassy spot to eat their lunch, while Alpheus kept up some humorous banter with them. Suddenly all the chatter stopped, and there was complete silence. I saw Alpheus move towards a woman who was standing frozen to the spot – she had lifted a cooking pot, only to discover that a small green mamba was resting underneath it. Alpheus got hold of a catana – a machete – and in a couple of paces reached her and killed the snake, an extremely venomous species. He turned to me and remarked ironically, “It’s a good day to die!”
Suddenly he was the hero of the day. The women marched us back to the village, singing and ululating. There we met the old man who had given me the original version of the song about Ngungunhane.
The understanding and sympathy between Alpheus and the members of the cooperative was extremely impressive. If the soul of a human is the capacity to communicate with other humans, then Alpheus was a great soul, and I will always admire him for that ability.
An interview with Alpheus Manghezi was conducted by Vanessa Rockel in 2012 as part of the Ruth First Papers project at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. Listen to the interview here.
That is, a revolution born out of a dispute over wages and careers.
Alpheus Manghezi greeted me at the CEA [Centro de Estudos Africanos] on the first day of my arrival at the Centre, asking me how things were in the UK. I replied, “Very cold, both meteorologically and politically.” It was in early January 1982, and in the UK we had all felt the impact of both the exceptionally cold weather there and of Margaret Thatcher.’s growing political dominance.
Later Alpheus told me that he had been a social worker in the Great Western Road area of Glasgow, an area that I knew fairly well from my time as a student at Glasgow University in the 1960s. So we exchanged reminiscences on the difficult social conditions there.
My first task at the CEA was given to me by Ruth First. It was to read all of the fieldwork notes in English and Portuguese produced respectively by Alpheus and his colleague Salamão Zandamela who also spoke Shangane. He was technically employed as a driver, but he too did some great fieldwork under Alpheus’ guidance.
I was then to present a report on this to Ruth. I did so verbally, with a colleague whom I knew as ‘Sipho Dhlamini’ also present. After weeks of my careful work, Ruth of course noticed a flaw in my argument/analysis immediately and so I metaphorically verbally awarded her a prize for spotting the ‘deliberate mistake’. My analysis of that fieldwork was written, and I had read it out to Ruth and Sipho. After correcting my mistake, I gave the report to Alpheus and he seemed to appreciate the analysis.
I know that some years later, another colleague Yussuf Adam was given permission by Alpheus to use some of his fieldwork as a basis for his PhD in Denmark. The public verbal PhD examination of this PhD thesis may be one of the few times that Alpheus’ research was publicly discussed in English, and sadly he was not present for it, but I was there as the external examiner.
On another occasion, Alpheus invited me to the funeral in Maputo of an ANC member of Umkhonto we Siswe [The Spear of the Nation, known in Mozambique as MK] who had left South Africa during the Soweto uprising and had undergone military training in Angola. On his return to South Africa, he had been arrested and severely beaten in the John Vorster police station in Johannesburg, but had managed to walk out with a fractured skull. He had then been rushed to the Central Hospital in Maputo by car but the staff there were unable to save him. As is the custom in South Africa the coffin was open and as his relatives drew back the shroud, I could see how bruised his whole body was. This was the reality that ANC members faced in South Africa and neighbouring countries, especially if they were members of MK. I regarded it as a privilege to have been invited to this funeral.
Gary Littlejohn