Mandisi Majavu, SACSIS
Almost two decades into post-apartheid South Africa many black
academics still feel that the “white networks that have de facto run
academic decision making” are derailing the transformation agenda. This
is according to the Charter for Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS), a report commissioned by the Minister of Higher Education and Training, that was published in June this year.
In many respects, the CHSS echoes the 2008 Report of the Ministerial
Committee on Transformation and Social Cohesion and the Elimination of
Discrimination in Public Higher Education Institutions, which noted that
the high education sector has inherited the country’s apartheid and
colonial legacy. Consequently, racism continues to manifest itself in
the core activities of teaching, learning and research.
According to the CHSS, one of the key challenges facing South African
universities is how to transform the curriculum in a way that it
reflects “the knowledge production that has been going on in Africa”. As
has been pointed out by African thinkers such as Mahmood Mamdani, the
enduring apartheid intellectual legacy at South Africa universities is
the ‘paradigm of the colonial academy’.
Thus many universities across post-apartheid South Africa continue to
study white experience as a universal, human experience; while the
experience of people of colour is seen as an ethnic experience,
according to Mamdani. Additionally, in many cases students are taught a
curriculum that is premised on the notion that Africa has no
intelligentsia worth reading. This pedagogical approach is more
pronounced at former white universities. And, needless to say, the
foregrounding of white experience and Western thought at these
universities serve to reinforce the hegemony of whiteness.
After all, as many educators argue, the role of educational training
institutions is not only to teach students history or whatever other
subject, but also to inculcate students with values, beliefs, and codes
of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures
of the larger society. Thus the type of students recruited in large
numbers into former white universities are the kind of students who are
more than willing to adjust to the institution’s power structure.
In other words, the kinds of students that the former white
universities are likely to attract in large numbers are students who
graduated from the former white Model C schools and private schools.
Interestingly, this is one of the observations made by the CHSS.
According to the CHSS there exists a “common-sense culture based on a
pop sociology which is rather racialised: Model C plus black = potential
and success, Non-Model C plus black = failure.”
Hence institutions like the University of Cape Town, for example,
tend to attract in large numbers students from schools such as
Westerford High School, Rustenburg Girls High School, Rondebosch Boys
High School, Herschel Girls High School, and Reddam House. This is
partly because the mental outlook of the students from these schools
needs less adjustment to meet the system’s demands [1]. Additionally,
students who graduate from these schools have the ‘right’ attitude
towards authority, and they fit perfectly in social hierarchies at these
institutions.
An argument that is often made for recruiting students from these
high schools is that universities have to maintain their ‘educational
standards’. This is one ideological instrument among many that is
utilised to filter out the ‘undesirables’ from the South African white
academy. Writing about the U.S., American academics---Herman and Chomsky
explain that the operation of an ideological filter in choosing the
‘right-thinking’ people to be accepted in institutions that serve the
elite occurs so naturally that selection panels, frequently operating
with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves
that they choose the right candidates all the time on the basis of
merit.
The ‘undesirables’ that manage to pass through by means of
affirmative action programmes and other means are dealt with by means of
clever devices such as being punished or failed for carrying out
research projects that challenge a particular discipline for instance.
Dissenting black voices that refuse to bow down to the oppressive
paradigm of the colonial academy are caricatured as ‘polemicists’, or
lacking ‘theory’ in their scholarship.
Obviously, this is a universal problem. For instance, in 2002, Cornel
West, one of the most important black scholars today, was pushed out of
Harvard because his work was seen as being not sophisticated enough to
be classified as philosophy. According to West, he was instructed by
Lawrence Summers, the Harvard President at the time, to ‘write a major
book on a philosophical tradition to establish’ himself, and to further
desist from writing works that were being reviewed in popular
publications.
The logic that shapes the oppressive paradigm of the colonial academy
is that a ‘good student’ carries out research projects that improve the
identity, aims and interests of this tradition. There are exceptions,
so one might find one or two departments at former white universities
that are open to an alternative way of approaching certain subjects.
The point I am making here is that the hegemony of whiteness has to
be exposed if we are serious about transformation and about encouraging
emancipatory scholarship in post-apartheid South Africa. Affirmative
action is a necessary strategy to counter the hegemony of whiteness,
however on its own, affirmative action “will be superficial and
cosmetic”, according to Mamdani. In other words, the creation of a black
intelligentsia is necessary, but that on its own will not automatically
give us an intellectual product that is based on Africa’s own
experience.
It is worth noting that there are academic projects that strive to
develop an Africa-focused intelligentsia. Rhodes University’s ‘Thinking
Africa’ programme is one such project, and the Makerere Institute of
Social Research interdisciplinary Ph.D programme is another project that
aims to develop Africa-focused intelligentsia. These programmes have
the potential for producing graduates who research and write about
issues in South Africa and Africa as a whole in a way that resonates
with the experiences of people on this continent.
