Vashna Jagarnath, The Daily Maverick
The extraordinary
rejuvenation of student politics in South African universities has enabled a
moment of real possibility. It is imperative that we seize this moment to have
an honest conversation about racism in wider society, and in universities like
UCT and Rhodes, and to act to effect real change.
I studied history at the
former University of Natal in Durban where Keith Breckenridge and Catherine
Burns built an extraordinary department, of the highest academic quality. The
African experience was taken seriously, black thinkers were taken seriously and
black students flourished. I am one of many black people that found my way into
an academic life as a direct result of the space that was created in the
Department of Historical Studies in Durban.
Moving to Grahamstown to
work at Rhodes University was a profound shock to my sense of myself and my
place in the world. Grahamstown started out as a fort on the colonial frontier.
It remains an evidently colonial town, one that wears its settler history with
pride. The colonial mentality that pervades the town has a clear presence
within the University itself. In various ways the university, and a few streets
around the campus, still remain very much a bastion of white power, looking up
at the hills where the dispossessed black population live. Today the white
section of town is guarded by private security companies rather than a colonial
militia. But in the heart of the white part of town, in the university,
whiteness is still taken as normal context for academic life and as a mark of
excellence.
Here, in both the
university and the town, racism is a routine feature of everyday life. Like
other black students and staff members I have accumulated a long list of
anecdotes, most of which recount experiences that would be unimaginable in the
spaces in which I lived, worked and socialised in Durban. When I started
working at Rhodes University I went to the library to arrange access. A white
librarian told me that I was lying when I told her that I was a newly appointed
member of the academic staff. I returned in tears., On one occasion, at a
meeting of the transformation committee, it was assumed that I am not an
academic member of staff.
Like many black staff
members, and many black post-graduate students too, I have never felt at home
at Rhodes or in Grahamstown. In order to survive the constant diminishment of
our personhood, and the consequent mutilation of self, many black staff members
and post-graduate students have to spend large amounts of time, sometimes hours
a day, offering support to each other. Strong people are frequently reduced to
tears. I myself suffer panic attacks when I have to return to the racism that
asphyxiates me in Grahamstown after time spent in Durban or Johannesburg,
cities in which I can breathe freely.
When I first arrived at
Rhodes the university had attracted some national attention as a place where
there was a discussion about white privilege. I personally found this
discussion to be hugely problematic. It seemed to me that this discussion
simply functioned to cast the white person publicly bewailing their privilege as
the most ethical person in the room while avoiding any kind of discussion about
building the kind of alliances and taking the kind of action that could achieve
real change.
It was also immediately
evident to me that at Rhodes white women had been the biggest beneficiaries of
affirmative action. It is not uncommon for white women to present themselves as
equally oppressed as black people. I have been subject to the most
extraordinarily patronising engagement by white women in the name of feminism.
Like many other black women I am deeply aggrieved at the way in which the white
feminism that has flourished here so often casts the black man as the epitome
of all evil. Along with many other black women in this space I am here, in
large part, because of the unflinching support of my black father. It is a
striking feature of Rhodes that African South African men are rarely appointed
to academic jobs. As Gayatri Spivak has shown the demonization of black men is
a longstanding feature of how colonial power operates.
There is constant
discussion about ‘transformation’ at Rhodes but it never seems to go anywhere.
Like many black academics I have concluded that these endless discussions,
often themselves under white control, have simply not been effective in
confronting racism.
The discussion about
‘transformation’ is inevitably presented in technocratic terms when the
question of deracialisation and decolonisation is, clearly, a political
question. Moreover the discussion is framed in a way that casts the black
student and the black academic, whether absent or present, as the problem. Even
on the occasions when the endemic racism of the institution is identified as a
central problem it is not confronted.
The challenges that have
to be taken on by anyone working while black at Rhodes exceed the constant
exhaustion from everyday encounters with racism. One also finds that one’s
intellectual energies have to be directed at the problems of the colony in a
society in which the problems of the postcolony are becoming more acute with
every passing day. For both blacks and white progressives working here the need
to fight yesterday’s battles makes it very difficult to effectively engage the
deepening crisis of the rest of the country, let alone to situate oneself fully
within the debates across the global South. It feels like we are stuck in the
1960s, in the moment before Steve Biko and Richard Turner, and the movements
that coalesced around them, started to challenge the racism of the liberal
universities.
Although Rhodes has been
lucky enough to have two progressive black Vice-Chancellors the academic staff
at the university is so overwhelmingly white that a lot of power has remained
in white hands. The conversation about ‘transformation’ – which seldom deals
with the fact that what we actually need to confront is deracialisation and
decolonisation – has been often itself been monopolised by white staff. In some
instances, even within the conversation about ‘transformation’, there is an
astonishing lack of basic awareness about what racism is. On more than one
occasion white staff have expressed sentiments that are immediately recognised
by black staff and students as being rooted in a set of unexamined colonial
assumptions.
The gifts of brilliant
black students are often just not recognised by their teachers. Black students
are often expected to conform to narrow colonial stereotypes in their work.
There are whole departments in which our most talented black students report
that they just do not feel comfortable.
White mediocrity is
seldom challenged here. Yet blacks have to attain unquestionable excellence in
order to demonstrate that they deserve their place in the academy.
Progressive whites report
that crude racism is not infrequently expressed in conversations between whites.
The sort of liberal paternalism, and maternalism, that assumes that inducting
black people into the university requires that they be inducted into the
grammar of whiteness flourishes.
Working at Rhodes while
black often leaves me anxious and frequently makes me very angry. In many
respects it has been a mutilating experience. One has to harden oneself to
survive here and I worry that this experience is going to break something in me
and turn me into the sort of person that I don’t want to be. Already my
intellectual energies are withdrawing from my original academic interests and
are increasingly focussed on the need to confront racism. This is one of the
costs of the imperatives of survival.
