Open Stellenbosch manifesto lists demands regarding oppressive culture

We are tired of empty promises and goals that are perpetually postponed. We’ve been having these conversations for over a decade now

MANY people in South Africa are aware of the Rhodes Must Fall movement at UCT and the problems of institutional racism it has highlighted. These problems are nowhere more present than at Stellenbosch University where Afrikaans systematically excludes black students and staff, and where white Afrikaans culture is celebrated over all others.

Open Stellenbosch was created to challenge this. We are a movement of predominantly black students and staff at the university who refuse to accept the current pace of transformation.

In 2013, only 3.5 percent of all professors at the university were black, while 86 percent were white. In fact, there are more professors named “Johan” than there are black professors at our institution. Is this really what transformation looks like 20 years after apartheid?

The fact that we as black students on campus have to take matters into our own hands to change the oppressive institutional culture at Stellenbosch is an indictment on university management. We do not believe that those in the SRC, the senate or the council understand the weight of normalised oppression that we experience at this overtly white university.

Although our institution claims that “continuous transformation is part of the core being of the univer- sity”, this could not be further from our everyday reality at Stellenbosch. We are tired of empty promises and goals that are perpetually postponed. We have been having these conversations for over a decade now and it is clear that the management at Stellenbosch has been operating in bad faith. Many promises, little action. There was the “Strategic Framework” of 1999; the “Vision 2012” document of 2000; the “Transformation Strategy” of 2008; the “Overarching Strategic Plan” of 2009; the “Quality Development Plan”; the “Employment Equity Plan”; the “Diversity Framework” and so it goes on. These have all failed because of a wholesale lack of political will to implement them – both then and now.

Although there are many things that need to change at Stellenbosch University, as a matter of urgency we are calling for the following:

1) No student should be forced to learn or communicate in Afrikaans and all classes must be available in English.

2) The institutional culture at Stellenbosch University needs to change radically and rapidly to reflect diverse cultures and not only white Afrikaans culture.

3) The university needs to publically acknowledge and actively remember the central role that Stellenbosch and its faculty played in the conceptualisation, implementation and maintenance of apartheid.

Every day students and staff who do not understand Afrikaans are excluded from learning and participating at Stellenbosch University. As black students we are frequently asked “Why do you come here if you can’t speak Afrikaans?”. This question highlights the pervasive and problematic sense of ownership that some have over this university. Stellenbosch – like all universities – is a public institution. This is not an Afrikaans university. It is a South African university which offers instruction in Afrikaans and (to a lesser extent) English.

We have personally experienced countless instances of this institutional racism. Including being forced to ask our Afrikaans-speaking peers to interpret what “Huiskommitee” members are saying in residence meetings. When we are allocated rooms, we are intentionally paired with other black students. Initiation at our residences involves explicit racism, homophobia and intimidation. It’s telling that we actively discourage our black school-leaving friends from considering Stellenbosch as a place to study. This is in an attempt to spare them the pain and humiliation of being silently subjugated by a passively hostile culture of white Afrikanerdom.

These exclusionary practices are not limited to students only. Some academics are forced to sit through meetings in Afrikaans where they do not understand anything and yet are required to be there. These norms help explain why black students find Stellenbosch to be a hostile environment that privileges white Afrikaans culture. These privileges are most obviously reflected in the racial composition of teaching staff at the university

We want to see an end to Afrikaans-only classes. We want our university to represent our cultures as well. We want to be taught by more blacks. After years of empty promises and hollow commitments we no longer trust what you say. Speak to us with your actions because your words will fall on deaf ears, as ours have for over a decade.

We insist that at this campus language is currently used to divide, exclude and marginalise.

Our demands are that the following measures should be in place by January 2016:

1) All classes must be available in English:

The use of translators and translation devices must be discontinued as they are ineffective, inaudible and highlight the place of non-Afrikaans speaking students at Stellenbosch as those who do not belong.

All official and unofficial communication from management, faculty and university departments must be available in English. This includes communication between faculty and staff, and not simply the communique from management.

All residence, faculty, departmental and administrative meetings and correspondence must be conducted in English.

Afrikaans must not be a requirement for employment or appointment to leadership positions.

The university must stop using isiXhosa as a front for multilingualism when it has clearly invested minimal resources in its development on campus. Alternatively, significant investment must be directed at developing isiXhosa on campus.

All signage on campus must be available in English.

2) The re-establishment of The Centre for Diversity and Inclusivity:

The Centre for Diversity and Inclusivity must be re-established. This must be done by the end of September 2015.

If the university is serious about transformation, then council should insist on the employment of a director who is black, since the office that is responsible for transformation must itself be transformed. In addition, the importance of this office must be reflected in its name. The philosophy of mere “inclusivity” is itself an upholding of whiteness, since it relegates black subjects to mere appendages of a white Afrikaner culture. Therefore, the term transformation or Institutional Culture or Equity and Redress and so on, must be encompassed in the title of the office. 3) Curriculum changes: Our approach to curriculum change at Stellenbosch University draws on the philosophy of African intellectuals such as Professor Achille Mbembe, Professor Premesh Lalu and Professor Amina Mama, who have addressed the issue of transformation in post-apartheid universities ( Decolonising Knowledge and the Question of the Archive).

We second Mbembe’s call for a curriculum audit in order to establish what is currently taught, and the ways in which it is taught, in order to ground a discussion about what needs to be changed.

4) We call for the decolonisation of our curricula in order to produce a new kind of university, one that works for the public good:

Mbembe argues, for instance, that curricula devised to serve the needs of the colonial and apartheid regimes remain largely intact.

He argues that we have not yet done the necessary work that will make our universities truly democratic spaces.

The widespread racism on our campus and ignorance about the history of our own country as well as that of our neighbouring countries and, indeed, our continent is a clear sign that what is being taught is not sufficient to bring about social justice in the aftermath of apartheid.

We call on the management of the university and on the deans of each faculty to hold, encourage and fund faculty level debates on curriculum change with each faculty and students.

Since many of the faculty members studied and began working at the university during apartheid, we call for open discussions about how apartheid-era ideologies continue to affect what we are taught in the present, and how such forms of knowledge and ways of being affect the work and thought of those who teach students in a post-apartheid context.

We call for the university to fund the development of new curricula that account for social and political changes in our country after apartheid.

These measures must be taken by January 2016.