PERSPECTIVES
 INTRODUCTION TO THE SYMPOSIUM
                                                                       Mike Morris
  On behalf of the editors of Transformation I would like to welcome all participants
gathered here. Local academics, researchers, political activists, trade unionists,
principals and vice principals and anyone else who does not fit into the previous
designations. I would also like to especially welcome the guests from the rest of
Africa that we have been able to bring to this symposium. We are very grateful to
the Canadian IDRC for making the symposium financially possible, and in particular
Marc van Ameringen and Pierre Sane (who is unfortunately unable to be here with
us).
  We have, as foreign guests, amongst us Abdoule Bathily, from Dakar, the President
of the African Political Science Association; Togba nah Tipoteh the Director of the
research institute USUUKU in Monrovia; Akilagpa Sawyerr, the vice-chancellor of
the University of Ghana; Mahmood Mamdani from the Institute for Basic Research
in Kampala; Ernest Wamba dia Wamba from Dar es Salaam University; Rene
Loewenson from the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions; and, from the IDRC,
Marc van Ameringen from Ottawa and Firoz Manji from Nairobi. We are sorry that
the other guests who were invited and prepared to come had to pull out at the last
minute, but I am sure we will have many more opportunities for meeting with them.
  It is of great significance, and I think the first time, that we have such a spread of
eminent academics from the rest of the African continent concentrated in one
symposium in South Africa We are greatly honoured by the fact that you all took
so much trouble to come. On behalf of the editors of the journal Transformation, the
Universities of Natal and Durban-Westville and I am sure everyone else present here
tonight, we are really extremely pleased to see you all and hope that this is merely
the start of many more fruitful interchanges between South African intellectuals and
those from the rest of our continent We hope that you will find our discussions
fruitful and mat we are all able to mutually learn much from this interchange of ideas
and experience.
   I think it is appropriate in opening this symposium that I lay before you some of
its genesis - both organisationally and conceptually. I was sitting in Ottawa about a
year ago, shivering in the snow and longing for the sticky, stultifying heat of Durban,
speaking with Marc van Ameringen from the IDRC when he raised a very important
issue. This was that those of us who are committed to socially relevant research need
to stop and reflect on what we are doing when we engage in research to effect social
transformation. One thing led to another, and we soon began reflecting on the
potential lessons to be drawn from the long period of struggle against apartheid. This
made sense to both of us. After all the business of the IDRC is to fund research which
has practical consequences, yet it has never really funded the process of reflecting
on what it is doing. It struck a chord in me since, like many other researchers in the
country, I have been continuously plagued by an inability to find a balance between
TRANSFORMATION 18 (1992)                                                               1


   PERSPECTIVES                                                                  MORRIS
  studying this country in abstraction and actively striving to change it. And so the
  idea of the symposium was born. And what better vehicle to host it than the journal
  Transformation which was founded as an attempt to intervene in the process of
  transforming South Africa through creating an intellectually rigorous, but politically
  informed and non-sectarian, debating forum for ideas, concepts and organisational
  lessons?
    In setting up this symposium we very carefully chose the name. We did not want
  to have a large open academic conference, nor a large congress of social and political
 activists. We sought rather to try and bring together researchers from a variety of
 different institutions and organisations into a smaller forum where the issues that
 bind and divide them could be more easily debated and reflected on. That is why we
 have tried to keep the inputs to a manageable number and limited each speaker to
  15 minutes. Asregardsthe number of participants our original intention was a forum
 of around 60 people maximum. That soon proved to be a theoretically desirable but
 practically unattainable boundary. It grieves us to have had to say no to many who
 wished to attend, but if we had created an open conference we would not be able to
 achieve the goal we set out to achieve. Luckily the size of the room, the amount of
 money available and the optimal number that the caterers could deal with, created
 the necessary discipline to keep the number to a maximum of 100 and so still
 maintain its integrity as a symposium.
     The word symposium has two classical meanings - 'philosophical, friendly
discussion on one subject from various points of view', OR , alternatively, 'an
ancient Greek drinking party'! Presumably the more one drinks the more friendly
one becomes; whether this leads to philosophy or not remains to be seen.
    Without pre-empting the discussion that lies before us, we thought it would be
useful in opening this gathering to try and lay before you all a few ideas that sum up
our intellectual reasons for hosting this symposium. We originally intended to
circulate a few pages beforehand as a basis for the symposium. However due to a
number of critical problems, which unfortunately can be summed up in my inability
to both organise the symposium and write the introductory piece, we decided instead
       r eC
        f !"L 8 °t " * role o f research i n ^ ^ transformation in South Africa we
w«estruck by three disjunctures that are likely to inform our deliberations and
reconceptuahsation of the issues at stake:
                                                         which fostered     research
      the disjuncture between resistance and establishment researchers
                                                          ^
                                                         TRANSFORMATION 18 (1992)


MORRIS                                                                  PERSPECTIVES
   In our opinion the central problem that we are faced with can be reflected in a
single question? How, in a society which is riven with the requirement to resist
authoritarianism and gross inequality and transform it to one characterised by greater
equality and democracy, does one do research that is rigorous and maintains
scientific integrity but which also allows one to be ethically and socially relevant?
How does one use these two imperatives in a creative manner rather than being
paralysed by their potential polarisation? If one bends the stick too far in either
direction this leads not only to the danger of being either epistemologically or
morally illegitimate, but also very practically renders one useless to society and to
the scientific community. In short bad research is useless to everyone, except perhaps
the most cynical political maneuverer.
  The problem is that the constituencies one is dealing with, university researchers
on the one hand and organisational activists on the other, in the past at least, have
tended not to understand the need to maintain both sides of the polarity in ones hand
at the same time. Both constituencies have very legitimate perspectives - the problem
tends to lie in the subordination of the needs of the other constituency.
   Activists tend to want to subordinate research to their immediate and short term
organisational needs, tend to resist conclusions and debates which run contrary to
their immediate political agendas, and tend to adopt essentially a moral vision
alienated by the objective necessities of rational enquiry.
   Researchers, particularly university based ones, on the other hand tend to subor-
dinate moral and social needs to analytical symmetry (the elegant simplicity of
econometric model building), refuse to acknowledge the validity of a logic of social
action equivalent to the logic of analytic enquiry, tend to feel individually threatened
by social demands to concentrate their research agendas in this direction rather than
that, and finally tend to be driven by a highly individualised moral vision of the self
importance of their own intellectual work.
   No matter how much each side of the polarity is irritated by the demands of the
other, it helps not one iota to adopt a dismissive approach to the other's driving
concerns. One cannot do good socially useful research if one is a political hack, and
one cannot transform society usefully if one is not informed by sound analyses and
policies.
  How one achieves this balance? Well that is what we hope will emerge either from
 our discussions or from our drinking over the next few days!
 TRANSFORMATION 18 (1992)