Ahead of her inaugural lecture on August 26, newly-appointed Dean of the Arts Faculty, Professor Fiona Moolla, describes herself as “Capetonian through and through”.

Prof Moolla became Dean on August 1. Though her family moved from Johannesburg, she grew up in Cape Town, completing all her schooling in the Mother City, including postgraduate studies at UCT. Coming from a political family (the Pahad brothers are her relatives), she developed a strong sense of social justice.

“I came from a family where society and the political were always on the horizon. So I think that influenced my consciousness and for that reason as a young person, I felt I wanted to be a lawyer. I thought I could fight the good fighter as a lawyer,” said Prof Moolla.

She attended Harold Cressy High School, one of only two schools in Cape Town for people of colour offering Latin, a requirement for studying law. There, she was exposed to a new political context and anti-apartheid activist teachers like Helen Kies, Professor Crain Soudien, and Derrick Naidoo.

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“I regard myself as being incredibly privileged to have attended a school at the forefront of political struggle, informed by intellectual debate,” said Prof Moolla.

The political upheavals of 1985 prevented her matriculation, but Prof Moolla said the year was her biggest expansion of consciousness, teaching her more than the school curriculum did.

Her inaugural lecture will delve into emotions and why emotions have not been “foregrounded” in African literature and the scholarship of African literature. Asked why emotions have been marginalised in African literature, Prof Moolla said writers and scholars have not focused on emotions for gendered and racialised reasons.

Emotions often are thought of as being trivial, and are conceived as sentimentalism. For that reason emotions are often linked with weakness and thus with women. This is an attitude that comes through, mistakenly, in some early African literature.

African intellectuals are also wary of highlighting emotions since it may play into a racial stereotype of Africa. The European Enlightenment linked Europe with the light of reason and Africa with emotion. Reason and emotion formed a binary where reason was at the top of the hierarchical binary. The philosophy of Negritude rehabilitated emotion as a positive stereotype of Africa, but maintained the binary. For this reason, emotions have been viewed with suspicion in African debates.

“The emotion that I’ve been researching over the past few years, in particular, is the emotion of love, romantic love. Romantic love is especially interesting in a colonial context since it is an emotion that has been a part of Europe’s reflection of itself as a superior civilisation. It has also been used to “other” colonised cultures. Many scholars of romantic love in Europe suggest that love is part of a complex self-realisation through the beloved and that it elevates women. This, they claim, is something that is unique to Europe. These ideas need to be examined in the context of the ways other cultures consider love, including African ideas about romantic love. 

One writer who seems to have thought about love right from the start of her career is the well-known Ghanaian writer, Ama Ata Aidoo. Aidoo suggests that African writers have felt they could not write about personal relationships and love since there are so many more important challenges in African societies. These include the challenges that have come out of slavery and colonisation. For this reason, “the socio-economic things have been focused on in the literature and scholarship,” said Prof Moolla.

But she says if one studies African literature carefully, it presents a range of finely developed representations of relationships and emotions: “There are the relationships between parents and children. The relationship of friends, romantic relationships. So there's a whole range of relationships and emotions that could be studied... but for the most part, it has missed the attention of scholars because it always seems as though when it comes to Africa and African literature, there are more important things that one needs to focus on,” said Prof Moolla.

But emotions are important for the ways they can contribute to an understanding of the social and the political, since emotions themselves are social concepts that may be used for political ends.

@uwconline Appointed during Women’s Month, Prof Fiona Moolla steps into her role as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities with a clear vision for building an inclusive, dynamic, and socially responsive faculty. Her inaugural address marks the beginning of this new chapter. #IAmUWC #UWCInauguralLecture ? original sound - University of the Western Cape