Ruction over Rhodes elicits much heat, little critical thought

Eye

WHEN a statue of President Jacob Zuma is erected at the Union Buildings, carefully sited to avoid falling into the large shadow cast by that of Nelson Mandela, there will be joy and ululation throughout the land.

For despite his manifest failings and a large bill outstanding for home renovations, he is our third (elected) president of the democratic era.

One trusts there will be sufficient political maturity by then that those outraged at the absence of a statue of the second president of the democratic era, the now reviled Thabo Mbeki, will not smear JZ with faeces and demand that he be parked out of sight in a plywood hokkie.

Many of those scrambling to align their opinions with the somewhat inchoate aims of the students who demanded the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, have insisted, on behalf of the students, that it isn’t about a statue.

It is about a lack of transformation at universities and larger South African society. Their explanation goes something like this: after 20 years, black people are out of patience with recalcitrant whiteys who refuse to assuage black anger and share the goodies. This understandable impatience stretches the gamut of being delivered “white” education by white academics, to the fact that most wealth is still in white hands.

There is also a subtext that if this continues much longer, impatience will turn to rage. So for God’s sake, don’t thwart them in their demands, no matter how apparently irrational.

Transformation is undeniably difficult. Privilege is not readily relinquished and incremental change is just that – painfully incre- mental. But there are some strategies the government could implement. It could embark on a programme of affirmative action, deploying its most fervent cadres to the commanding heights of the literally thousands of institutions that the government controls or influences.

To deal with white heel-dragging in the private sector, mechanisms could be set up which would penalise businesses that do not sequentially transform their shareholdings, management, and staff. Simultaneously, it could build black business entities through preferential access to state contracts, mining licences, and low-cost capital for large industrial and manufacturing projects.

Oh, I forget. That is what the government is already doing.

And the reason it has been a slow process has nothing to do with stub- born whites. The biggest reason for South Africa being only partially transformed is that there is a lack of skilled black people, directly attributable to the dismal failure of the basic education system. There are many who would like to replicate President Robert Mugabe’s disastrous land seizures in Zimbabwe. They would do better to implement his real success, albeit now eroded, of providing good quality primary and high school education.

In southern Africa it is only in this country that we indulge the serial incompetence of our basic education ministers, who dare not tackle the SA Democratic Teachers Union’s lack of commitment to teaching.

Two sound bites from the statue hysteria were particularly revealing. One was a black student conceding that the Zulu king Shaka was a more murderous and destructive imperialist than Rhodes, but explaining that this was okay “because he was an African”.

The other was a student who spoke of being “traumatised” by Rhodes’ presence at UCT. This justified the scat attack, the implication perhaps being that were he not to smear his faeces on some imperial granite, he might feel compelled to express his alienation and trauma in some less symbolic and perhaps more violent manner.

The threat of outrage turning to violence is raised, too, by Dr Xolela Mangcu in City Press. Mangcu, an associate professor at UCT, quotes US political scientist Robert Weissberg that “unadulterated tolerance is a dangerous illusion”, which “mocks the very idea of the antiracist society we fought so long and hard to attain”.

“My biggest fear is that black peo- ple will not take the racist abuse any longer and we will find ourselves in the racial civil war we averted in 1994… The students of UCT are our best antidote to racist psychosis (of whites). They are the miner’s canary foretelling us of the perils of racial war.”

Part of being at university is being outraged and outrageous. But another more important aspect is being able to cope with the “trauma” of realities that we had no choice in and do not like, as well as being tolerant of ideas and values different from our own.

The race war hyperbole being bandied about on campus is a sign that, much like the hopeless administrators of basic education, our academics are not succeeding at their most fundamental task: producing critical but tolerant graduates. Follow WSM on Twitter

@TheJaundicedEye