Thirty Years On: The Wits Makgoba Affair and the Gang of 13

Makgoba’s 1997 book Mokoko: The Makgoba Affair – A Reflection on Transformation, it is indispensable for your article — but it must be handled critically because it is simultaneously evidence, autobiography, political argument and self-defence.

Makgoba wrote it after the Wits conflict, and the book is unmistakably his version of events.

It presents the affair not primarily as a CV dispute but as a struggle over who would determine the meaning and pace of transformation at a historically white liberal university. A contemporary academic review described it as a painstaking account of the struggle between Makgoba and the thirteen, but explicitly warned that the book is told from Makgoba’s perspective.

Its great strength is that it preserves the texture of the conflict that institutional minutes cannot. Makgoba reproduces correspondence, reconstructs meetings, discusses the investigation into his CV and explains how he interpreted the behaviour of Van Onselen and his colleagues. He rejects the allegations against his CV as a mixture of “misrepresentation, misinterpretation” and pettiness. A later Wits study notes that Mokoko is particularly valuable for understanding his counter-investigation: Makgoba says that when he examined the personnel records of his accusers he found considerable compromising material, although he did not ultimately publish those files.

That point is extremely important for the article we have just written.

Makgoba claims he could have escalated much further than he did.

In Mokoko, he presents his decision not to expose everything he says he discovered as partly recognition that complete victory over the Gang of 13 might have caused the wider Wits structure to implode. A later scholarly discussion interprets the book in precisely this way: by that stage Makgoba understood that the struggle had become larger than thirteen individuals and involved the whole liberal institutional establishment surrounding them.

But Mokoko also reveals Makgoba's weaknesses.

One contemporary reviewer, Guy Martin, thought Makgoba's pride in his genuine scientific achievements repeatedly tipped into intellectual arrogance and self-centredness. Martin also questioned Makgoba's use of unconventional methods and found it difficult at times to distinguish objective fact from Makgoba's interpretation of events.

Another academic reviewer, Willem van Vuuren, was much harsher about the book itself. He criticised its repetition, editing and self-aggrandisement. A later Wits study even observes that Mokoko itself presents referencing and attribution problems serious enough to complicate Makgoba's position as the defender of exact academic standards.

That is fascinating because the personality we have been reconstructing from the Wits affair is visible in the writing itself.

Makgoba does not write like someone quietly presenting evidence to history. He writes like a combatant who believes history has vindicated the fundamental meaning of his struggle. His scientific achievements, ancestry, African identity, Wits transformation and personal conflict tend to merge into one narrative.

The title itself tells us something.

Mokoko invokes Makgoba's ancestral world and, particularly, the memory of Chief Makgoba. Contemporary reviewers noticed that Makgoba consciously drew a parallel between his battle at Wits and the historical resistance associated with Chief Makgoba. One reviewer described the book as effectively presenting the modern Wits confrontation as a symbolic re-enactment of that older struggle.

That is rhetorically extraordinarily powerful.

But analytically it is dangerous.

Once Van Onselen becomes analogous to the invading historical power and Makgoba becomes the descendant resisting conquest, an argument over executive behaviour, CV wording and institutional governance is already being inserted into a much grander moral narrative. That can illuminate why Makgoba experienced the conflict as he did, but it can also make self-criticism much harder.

The book shows an exceptionally intelligent man with a highly developed sense of historical mission. That may have been precisely part of his tactical weakness at Wits.

A person thinking principally as a prospective Vice-Chancellor asks:

How do I acquire and retain sufficient institutional power to implement change?

Makgoba often appears to have been asking another question:

What does this moment require me, as an African intellectual in history, to say and do?

Those are not the same question.

The second produces Mokoko.

The first might have produced the Wits vice-chancellorship.

There is also a major counterweight. Mahmood Mamdani read Mokoko very differently. Reviewing it in 1997, Mamdani argued that the affair demonstrated the operation of racialised institutional power at Wits and questioned the self-understanding of liberal universities as neutral custodians of “excellence.” His point was that institutions can turn historically produced standards into seemingly apolitical measures of legitimacy.

This tells us something important thirty years later: even serious academics reading essentially the same book saw radically different things.

One reader sees excessive ego.

Another sees racialised institutional power.

Another sees ethical difficulties in Makgoba's tactics.

Makgoba sees an African intellectual resisting an entrenched establishment.

That multiplicity is not a problem for your article. It is the article.

Mokoko therefore should become one of the central sources in the “Thirty Years On” piece, but I would not use it as the authoritative account of what happened. I would use it as something richer:

the documentary record of how Makgoba understood what had happened to him.

And I would probably add a section to the article titled “Mokoko: When the Defendant Writes the History.”

Because that is precisely what happened. The tribunal never delivered the definitive judgment that Van Onselen's faction wanted. The conflict ended through mediation. Then, barely a year later, Makgoba published his own 243-page judgment on the case.

In that sense, although he lost the DVC office, he won something else:

he got the first major opportunity to frame the historical memory of the Makgoba Affair.

And thirty years later, we are still arguing with that framing.