Biko’s true ‘joint culture’ can only come from a place of good faith all round

IT IS indeed instructive that former UCT dean of arts John Cartwright was roused to action only by what he describes as my “bad faith” in pointing to the implications of Benatar’s writings, which include providing grist to the mill for self-declared racists such as David Bullard.

I would have thought this implication would be obvious for an astute university administrator. But as the high school student, and no doubt future UCT professor, Khaya Mathambo, pointed out, it has become commonplace in SA to turn victims into offenders, and offenders into victims.

I am told that Benatar is an old hand at offending and then asking to be treated charitably. But this time he struck a raw nerve to all those who grew up being told that their cultures were inferior. He writes that I assume the worst about him.

But my assumptions are based entirely on what he wrote, which I have repeatedly reproduced verbatim on these pages. The ploy may work with former UCT administrators but not with those of us on the receiving end of his barbs. The real bad faith lies in the notion that Africa has to demonstrate that it has something to prove in the world of knowledge, something that reasonably decent universities recognised decades ago.

Just the other day I was looking for one of my lecture theatres in preparation for the beginning of classes next week. A white professor asked me what I was doing in the building, a strange question given the staff card hanging around my neck. At that moment I felt like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. With as much calm as I could muster I asked why he wanted to know. What came out sent shivers through my body. “We’re expecting a delivery,” he answered. “Do I look like a delivery boy?” I asked.

But I have also been too long in the tooth to know not to walk into the situation Chumani Maxwele found himself in last semester. As an older man I have come to know, as WEB Du Bois put it in The Souls of Black Folks, “how it feels to be a problem”. Had I raised my voice at his indignity, I would have been the one acting in bad faith. Intemperate. Angry. Aggrieved. Emotional. In the minds of some people, black people are the only human beings who are not expected to possess these human emotions. They are expected to wince politely even in the face of blatant insult, not to speak back.

My experience with this particu- lar individual took me to Wahbie Long’s thesis that the problem we face is class, not race. How rich. Steve Biko would have told Long to say that to Van Tonder in the Free State. But it looks like he would not even have to go off campus to realise the absurdity of that argument. Long should point me to one white professor who has been mistaken for a delivery boy on campus and I’ll join him for a toast to our post-racial Nirvana.

The question of who has the right to police the movement of black people at UCT is a question the administration must seriously address as a matter of urgency. Our access to campus buildings cannot depend on the capricious whims of our white colleagues. It’s demeaning when it happens.

And what to make of Jeff Rudin’s description of Black Consciousness as an Africanist movement that counterpoises African therapies with science? He argues that the ideology cannot stand because the continent on whose identity the movement is based is sitting on shifting tectonic plates. If anyone is on shaky grounds on this point it is Rudin himself. If he had the barest knowledge of Black Consciousness he would know it was never an Africanist movement. Maybe he is confusing Black Consciousness with Pan Africanism. They are both Black but they are not the same.

As Robert Fatton points out in his book, Black Consciousness in South Africa: The Ideological Resistance to White Supremacy, Black Consciousness had more of a Third World than a Pan Africanist outlook. If the foundations of Rudin’s arguments are faulty, then surely his house of cards must surely fall.

This brings me to the heart of the matter – the parochial nature of the knowledge we have inherited from the apartheid past in our universities. In one of his latest salvos, Benatar adds insult to injury by telling us that the African philosophy that exists is of a very poor standard. But how would he know, given that he rejects the very idea of African philosophy? And what gives him the authority to make such a sweeping judgment given that his specialty, as he says, is bioethics?

Can I expect howls of protestation about the bad faith in his statement – a statement that does nothing other than to further give offence to African, Afro-Caribbean and African-American academics all over the world?

I have spent the past 20 years writing about the dangers of black people protecting individual politi- cians in the name of racial solidarity. I see no reason why I should look the other way when white people also use racial solidarity to protect individuals who are causing damage to the reputation of our institutions.

As the saying goes, what’s good for the goose is also good for the gander. That puts me in that awkward middle space I believe we must all move towards if we are going to break from inherited patterns of blind solidarity. The true meaning of democracy is not only to hold everyone equally accountable for their actions, but to collectively create what Steve Biko called the joint culture, which can come only out of mutual respect for all our cultures in our classrooms and in the broader society. That can only come from a place of good faith all around.