No hiding from SA’s race bomb at ‘white’ varsities
Monumental Issue | In more ways than one, the statue of Cecil John Rhodes — removed this week from the University of Cape Town campus after student protests — is a symbol of a far deeper malaise at SA’s universities
THE University of Cape Town’s decision to remove the statue of Cecil John Rhodes hopefully opens up the prospect for more debate on race, racism and higher education.
I would have hoped for a deep, deliberative engagement before a decision was concluded, but given the emotional climate, this was not really possible. Feeling beleaguered, the university community hoped to quickly pacify the student revolt in the hope that things could get back to normal.
But this is not going to happen at UCT or elsewhere. The Rhodes statute was simply a trigger point for a broader unhappiness.
The universities, particularly the historically white ones, have been in a bubble. They assumed their intellectual atmosphere and their middle-class constituencies protected them from a social explosion around race. But this was not to be, because there is legitimacy to the students’ criticisms.
How can there not be when there are universities, 20 years after our democracy, where more than twothirds of the students are still white? How can there not be unhappiness when there are universities that are organised around racialised federal principles — and when an incoming vice-chancellor tries to change them, he becomes subject to attack by external rightwing organisations including AfriForum and Solidarity? How can these students not feel offended when even in the more liberal and historically English-speaking universities, such as UCT and the University of the Witwatersrand, the curriculum is not sufficiently reflective of our history?
The failure of transformation at our universities is a collective failure of all of us, and not simply that of a single constituency. This is important to note, especially given how quickly the ANC rushed in to voice support for the student protests without reflecting sufficiently on its own complicity in the failure of transformation.
After all, it was the failure of public policy in the 1990s and 2000s that accounted for the lack of postgraduate scholarships for black students, which ultimately contributed to the poor numbers of black academic representation at the universities. In addition, there is scepticism about universities at the heart of the government and this continues to be reflected in the underfunding of higher education, estimated by the Ramaphosa task team to be in the region of 65%.
But university executives are as much to blame for the lack of transformation. The racial representation of students in some of our universities would not have been possible without the complicity of some of us.
The low numbers of African staff and professors has in part got to do with unimaginative recruitment and our failure to transcend the racialised networks we inherited. And the fact that so many black students feel marginalised speaks to our failure in transforming the institutional cultures of our institutions.
Black academic staff must also engage in some self-reflection. Too many advocates of African representation in the professoriate tie their own personal promotional prospects to the cause, with the result that the individual conflicts of interest compromise the legitimacy of their advocacy.
Questions must also continually be asked about the importance of quality, even though it incenses so many of us. After all, the university system is replete with examples in both the apartheid and post-apartheid eras of the appointment and promotion of academically deficient white and black staff.
But even if there is legitimacy to the students’ critique, this does not mean that they should not think through the nature of their struggle and the solutions.
Consider, for example, the Rhodes statue. Should the decision have been to remove it? Would it not have made sense to re-imagine the memorial? What if another statute was built next to it commemorating the victims, with a collective plaque telling the full story of Rhodes and his brutality?
This would have led to a reconceptualised memorial indicting Rhodes down through the ages. The myth of Rhodes would have been truly punctured, and a much more historically accurate memorial established.
The real purpose of memorials is to visually represent a historical message, so that future generations are made aware of what happened in the past. This should be the philosophy underlying our naming processes and the establishment of our statues and memorials, not, as was suggested by some, to replace the colony’s and apartheid’s heroes with those of the revolution. After all, other than in one or two cases, it may be too soon to judge our heroes.
Has no one truly understood the real message of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which is about the revolution’s leaders behaving no differently from their predecessors?
In any case, it would be well for these individuals and many in the political elite to remember that the indigenous tradition of naming is not to do so after individuals. This is a Western custom. The truly indigenous and African tradition is to name after symbolic events and/or to convey evocative descriptions of a particular place.
This is not to suggest that there should not be naming after individuals. After all, Western traditions are as much part of our historical legacy as are more indigenous traditions. But the sad thing is that under the pretext of bringing to the fore indigenous traditions, our public naming processes have followed Western traditions without even realising it.
But memorials and naming are not the only issues.
The call here is for a deep, deliberative conversation on solutions to our problems because they require hard trade-offs, which need to be understood.
For instance, in my own university, there has been a continuous call for insourcing of all workers who have been outsourced in the past decade. It is a legitimate call given their salaries and living conditions. But can this be done without massive increases in the subsidy or in student fees? If it were to be done, it would definitely come at the cost of quality.
On much of this continent, universities are no more than glorified teaching colleges, with little research and innovation. We cannot go down this path, for it would forever confine us into underdevelopment. This is why deep, deliberative conversation is required.
Habib, vice-chancellor of Wits and chairman of Higher Education South Africa, writes in his personal capacity
The failure of transformation at our universities is a collective failure of all of us and not that of one constituency