Tribute

Ntongela Masilela Years at Pitzer: 1989-2012

Professor Emeritus of Creative Studies Ntongela Masilela died July 5 after a yearlong battle with cancer, at age 71. A prolific writer about the African continent, and South Africa specifically, Masilela was widely considered one of the leading scholars of South African descent.

Masilela came to Pitzer College in 1989. His expertise was in Third World literature, Commonwealth literature, Central European literature, African literature, Latin American literature, literary theory, postmodernism and Ancient Asian literature.

He was born in Orlando West, Soweto, the eldest of four brothers. Following his secondary education at Delamere Boys School in Nairobi, Kenya, he followed his father to the United States and to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received his BA, MA and PhD degrees in sociology. The title of his doctoral thesis was “Theory and History in Marxist Poetics.”

After UCLA, Masilela held a research position at the Fanon Research and Development Centre at the Martin Luther King Jr. General Hospital in Compton, CA. He returned to Kenya in 1979 to teach at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. He studied further and taught in Poland and Germany. In 1989, he and his family relocated to the United States, where he joined the Pitzer College faculty.

Kara Henner Eastman ’93, one of his former students, recalls: “Professor Ntongela Masilela made an indelible impression on my life. I once asked how I could earn an A in the class. He told me to do things ‘three times better.’ He introduced me to James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and to myself as a writer. It is because of his pedagogy, mentorship and insistence that I spend most of my day and night reading, that I do indeed attempt to do things three times better.”

Masilela was a profound and prolific writer. His most recent book, A South African Looks at the African Diaspora: Essays and Interviews (2017), reflects on the meaning of, and relationship between, the concepts of home and exile. As an international scholar and a South African exile, he drew from both his own experiences and the research he conducted in archives on both sides of the Atlantic.

Among Masilela’s other enduring works are An Outline of the New African Movement (2013) and Historical Figures of the New African Movement (2014), in which he curates and makes legible the intellectual history of the 19th century South African intellectuals in colonial South Africa. He also wrote many articles, book chapters and book-length works, including The Cultural Modernity of H.I.E. Dhlomo (2007).

Masilela worked with Professor Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane to assemble Magubane’s collection of essays, published in 2000, titled African Sociology: Towards a Critical Perspective. The book is considered a treasure trove of sociological writings.

In addition to teaching and writing, Masilela was the former director of the H.I.E. Dhlomo Center for African Intellectual History at Pitzer, established in 1999 to create an extensive archive of the writings of New African intellectuals and to reconstruct South African intellectual history on the basis of this material.

Masilela is survived by daughters Vuyiswa and Nomaduma, and brothers Monde and Temba, plus members of his extended family.