Being-Black-in-the-World, one of N. Chabani Manganyi’s firstpublications, was written in 1973 at a time of global socio-political change. The Black Consciousness movement had emerged in the mid-1960s and the Africancontinent was throwing off its colonial yoke. In South Africa, renewedresistance to the brutality of apartheid rule would detonate in the Sowetouprising led by black school children three years later. Publication of Being-Black-in-the-World was delayed untilthe young Manganyi had left the country to study at Yale University. Hispublishers feared that the apartheid censorship board and security forces wouldprohibit him from leaving the country, and perhaps even incarcerate him, forbeing a ‘radical revolutionary’. The book thus found a limited public circulationin South Africa and original copies were hard to come by. This new edition, incontrast to its previous suppression, is an invitation to the #Fees Must Fallgeneration to engage freely with early decolonising thought by an eminent South African intellectual.An astute social and political observer, Manganyi haswritten widely on subjects relating to ethno-psychiatry, autobiography, blackartists and race. In 2018 Manganyi’s memoir, Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist was awarded the prestigious ASSAf (The Academy of Science of South Africa) Humanities Book Award.Each of these short essays can be read as self-containedreflections on what it meant to be black during the apartheid years. Manganyiis a master of understatement, and yet this does not stop him from makingincisive political criticisms of black subjugation under apartheid. While theessays are clearly situated in the material and social conditions of that time, they also have a timelessness that speaks to our contemporary concerns regardingblack subjectivity, affectivity and corporeality, the persistence of a racial(and racist) order and the need for a renewed decolonising project.The essays will reward close study for anyone trying to makesense of black subjectivity and the persistence of white insensitivity to blacksuffering. Ahead of their time, the ideas in this book are an exemplarydemonstration of what a thoroughgoing and rigorous decolonising critique shouldentail. The re-publication of this classic text isenriched by the inclusion of a foreword and annotation by respected scholars Garth Stevens and Grahame Hayes respectively, and an afterword by publicintellectual Njabulo S. Ndebele.
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