UCT silent on discussions
Rhodes Must Fall has issued this collective statement following UCT's handing of admission of guilt letters to 240 students and staff who stood in solidarity with the four suspended members.
Would not be commenting on process through the media
UCT has opted to remain mum about transformation discussions at the university as the debacle involving Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) continues.
UCT spokesperson Kylie Hatton yesterday said university management was engaging in transformation discussions with stakeholders at UCT, but would not be commenting “through the media”.
Ongoing conflict between UCT management and the RMF movement – which has been campaigning to fast-track transformation at the university – started in March after student activist Chumani Maxwele flung human excrement on a statue of Cecil John Rhodes. After the removal of the statue, RMF members faced disciplinary action for occupying UCT’s Bremner Building in March and Avenue House on April 29.
UCT management then granted amnesty for all protest-related incidents between March 9 and May 18.
Four students were suspended for remaining in Avenue House after May 18.
After RMF handed UCT a document listing 240 students and staff members who stood in solidarity with those suspended, university management responded by issuing those on the list with admission of guilt pleas.
This week, RMF refused to sign the pleas and has since requested that UCT abandon all disciplinary processes against the movement. After a meeting on Monday, the movement agreed to boycott a mediation process, which was set to begin in July and would provide a platform to tackle transformation at UCT, unless their demands were met.
The UCT Transformation Committee (UCTTC), which consists of 12 constituencies at the university including the SRC and RMF, is also involved in planning a “transformation dialogue”. RMF spokesperson Kealeboga Ramaru yesterday said the mediation process and the dialogue were separate processes.
“We will not partake unless the university abandons all disciplinary processes against the movement,” she said.
National Education Health and Allied Workers Union (Nehawu) UCT branch chairperson Patricia Berry said “almost all” the UCTTC constituencies supported RMF.
Asked for a response to RMF and UCTTC, Hatton said: “UCT will not be commenting on this through the media, as we are already engaging with and will continue to engage with all the stakeholders… involved in the transformation discussions.”
Berry said: “We need to take this dialogue forward and eliminate the need for transformation activists, yet we continue to be faced with racism, patriarchy and autocratic management.” He said Newahu and “10 of the other constituencies” were willing to work with UCT management to tackle transformation.
“UCT management saw nothing wrong at the university until the students pointed it out. Now the very same people are being pushed aside with charges,” she said.
IN THE wake of the University of Cape Town’s decision to pursue disciplinary action against more than 200 students who stood in solidarity with the arbitrarily selected “Azania 4” – who faced the university tribunal in late May of 2015 – and in making sense of this hostile behaviour, we reflect on the hypocrisy of the institution in relation to our country’s past.
When we think about what it means to be part of a subversive movement, our first association is of disobedience. The 1976 Soweto uprisings happened as a result of a movement of black students who refused to obey educational laws that perpetuated their oppression under apartheid. The understanding of struggle takes for granted that the system which we struggle against is unjust.
Now, when interrogating Rhodes MustFall as a social movement with this history in mind, it makes it easy to recognise that here, too, we are black students of diverse intersections of oppression forming a group that continues to challenge an educational system that refuses to see us. As the narrative of this particular movement has grown thicker, we have come to recognise that oppression at UCT is inescapable.
From the first-year orientation process, the curriculum and division tactics (such as the extended degree programme), to the kind of culture it breeds through its overwhelming representation of whiteness, and systematic exclusion of blackness and black people.
We have managed to energise a targeted discussion around the struggles of black pain: the “uncomfortable” feeling of being “othered” in the classroom, the unfair profiling of black students in the marking of their exam papers, the Mamdani affair, individual stories of racist violations, the continuation of outsourced labour and the perpetuation of class division and poverty, the overwhelming white constituency of decision-making bodies at the university, the Eurocentric curricula, and so much more.
Our protest action ignores the governing principles of the institution because we understand that these governing principles are the very thing that excludes us from our own educations.
Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that since the first rumbles erupted from the Rhodes Must Fall movement, UCT management has criminalised its black students time and time again for speaking unapologetically against the system which hurts us.
Most recently, in this ongoing and unequal narrative, Rhodes Must Fall has been pushed into a position that means that unless we attend and participate in a “mediation” process with management, we will be charged in court in proceedings that we cannot afford, against a case which criminalises individuals from the movement.
As a result of the individual internal charges that came with the criminalisation of the “Azania 4”, we collected a number of students’ names (and student numbers) who wished to claim their stake in Rhodes Must Fall activity, and stand in solidarity by taking on whatever charges the university threw at them.
By collecting over 200 names, we made the statement that there is an existing voice that speaks against the patriarchal racist culture of UCT, and that this voice will be heard.
On June 17, the day after Youth Day; the day on which we remember what the students of Soweto in 1976 did for black people in South Africa, as well as in the time leading up to the Rhodes Must Fall mediation process with management, UCT issued an e-mail to all the students on this list stating that as a result of their position in solidarity with Rhodes Must Fall occupations and activities, they were to be charged with 10 hours of community service and a reprimand from the university.
There are a number of issues that can be taken with such an act, most ironic and rather humorous being the idea that students who have invested time in creating community are being charged with “community service”.
Up until this point, Rhodes Must Fall community service has come in the form of conscientising each other through conversation and organised talks, building safe friendships, reading, writing, reaching out to national and international black-student movements for exchange and solidarity, attending meetings to conceptualise and strategise around how blackness can be centred on an inherently colonialist institution, and most significantly, sacrificing time in order to contribute to a humanising cause whose end goal is black liberation in every sense.
It is strange to try to conceptualise, therefore, what the inference is when management talks about community service, because it speaks to an invalidation of the work that we continue to do; framing it, not as service, but as punishable crime. There will be many more hours spent serving the movement and it’s associated communities.
We can only wonder if when these hours are tallied up, whether they might be signed off by the so-called “transformation” committee of UCT. We do get the feeling, however, that there exists an inherently opposing tension between their mandate and ours. This simply acts as another aggression that confirms this hostility to true decolonisation within the tertiary African institution.
Finally, and more disturbingly, UCT’s idea of mediation seems to include a strategy to inspire student panic, and intentionally making the playing field unequal before this process even begins. The upper echelons of UCT have continued to illustrate the contradictions of the “modern” neo-liberal university.
However, their persistent performance, aggression and wilful ignorance will do no more than apply the necessary pressure required to forge the diamonds of resistance that will cut right through the colonial enclave that is the University of Cape Town.
We remain brave, with the end in sight.