Visiting academic Professor David Scott’s analytical lecture ignites the audience’s passion for thinking at Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study
By Jojokhala Mei
On a cold July 2025 evening the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) at the University of Johannesburg reverberated to the USA’s University of Columbia Anthropology Professor David Scott’s lecture.
The mood of the lecture is not complacent, and Prof Scott proposes reparations as a form of revolution in a world where what I would call capitalism’s big ‘dog’ is sleeping on its death bed.
Afterall, local economist Natalie Labia has noted in the Daily Maverick newspaper capitalism’s multiple heart failures as ‘the once symbiotic relationship capitalism used to have with democracy has come unstuck … too much of capitalism has come to consist of creating quasi-monopoly profits’ and ‘is being destroyed by … technofeudalism; that “value extraction has increasingly shifted away from markets and to digital platforms like Facebook and Amazon,”’(20-26 May 2024).
Prof Scott’s lecture concludes that “Reparations development funding is morally owed to the Caribbean, … as the salience of the idea of Repair.”
Prof Scott proposes a re-reading of old masterpieces like Walter Rodney’s 1972 book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is a ‘point of departure’. To the list of books, he adds How Brittain Underdeveloped the Caribbean: A Reparation Response to Europe’s Legacy of Plunder And Poverty, by Hilary Mc. Beeckles.
The eminent Anthropologist’s path-finding works include Rethinking Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality (1999); Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (2004); Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an ethics of Receptive generosity (2017); and he is working on a biography of Stuart Hall.
What springs to mind is the pastoral, yet strikingly biting and observant novel, Master Of The Dew by Haitian Communist Party member Jacques Roumain. The novel is as daring as workerist political farce stage play, Accidental Death Of An Anarchist, that ironically clinched its Italian playwright Dario Fo the Nobel Prize for Literature, prompting me to later ask two or three questions aside:
Jojokhala Mei. Since you have come out all the way from America, will you also visit other marginal, former Black, universities in the country that need to hear you? Like the University of Venda or Walter Sisulu University in Mthatha? [As a 1984 high school student it was mortifying to wave in the faces of a few Walter Sisulu university students the Francophone signature manifesto-of elitist-betrayal called False Satr in Africa]
Prof. Scott. Yes, I would visit any marginal university campus, if I am invited.
Jojokhala Mei: My impression of the Caribbean countries is Rum, Marijuana, and Rasta music. Happy-go-lucky people?
Prof Scott: That is a stereotype.
Jojokhala Mei: Isn’t gluttonous BBBEE (Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment) Reparations betrayed?
Prof: Scott. Redress of an irreparable past [is inevitable] . … Every African has the responsibility to understand the Legacy of persistent poverty … revived reparatory social movements, … and egalitarian redistribution.
Professor David Scott also edits the robust online academic publication called Small Axe. The name is inspired by a Caribbean saying: “If you’re a big tree; then we’re a small axe.”