Paddy
O’Halloran, Pambazuka
Photographs of
dozens of black intellectuals, artists and revolutionaries decorate the walls
of the Black Student Movement Commons, formerly the Council Chambers, at the
university currently known as Rhodes in Grahamstown, South Africa. Among the
many people honoured there are Angela Davis, Steve Biko, Albertina and Walter
Sisulu, Bob Marley, Frantz Fanon, Ellen Kuzwayo, Frederick Douglass, Maya
Angelou, Robert Sobukwe, Harriet Tubman and Malcom X. Unlike the dreary
portraits of Vice-Chancellors of bygone years that hang in the hallways outside
the doors of the Commons, the many faces stuck up by the Black Student Movement
(BSM) exude no pomp, none of the unearned arrogance of tradition, nor the
security of age-old hierarchy. The assemblage of poets, fighters and thinkers
provide inspiration for BSM members, who have occupied the Chambers for two
weeks demanding a long-term resolution to the problem of vacation accommodation
in university residences as a first practical step toward transforming their
university.
It is a
changed room. What was once the usually empty Council Chambers is now a
thriving space of politics, study, engagement and protest. What was a sanctuary
of solemnised, unimaginative bureaucracy has become a democratic, multilingual
and politicised commons where transformational practice has replaced the
procedural status quo as the mode of operation. To complement the symbolic
inspiration of the photographs, the BSM have established a library; many of the
authors to be found there are also among the faces on the walls. The BSM
Commons has the unmistakable character and activity of a university, carried on
alongside the work of peaceful political activism and protest.
The BSM
reminds us that transformation requires change: not only the changing of
policies and calendars, budgets and staff, but also the reinventing of
university spaces, rhythms and procedures. BSM have offered a glimpse into such
a transformation. Significantly, it comes during the longest and most fraught
protest action that the BSM has staged since their first public meeting in
March.
The topic of
transformation of South African institutions of higher education has long
involved the objective of ‘Africanisation’, of creating an‘African university’
as part of the decolonisation of education. Debates continue around developing
an African curriculum, around academic staff’s (racial) composition and
employment equity, and on the language (or languages) of study. These are
important issues, and they deserve thoughtful attention and effort. However,
the BSM occupation, which joins a growing list of student-led protests at South
African universities this year, demonstrates a different version of the
‘African university’ than the one which has been discussed and debated: the
African university as a site of protest.
An African
university must constitute itself as a revolt. This does not simply mean new
policies decided upon and implemented in the usual manner. As the BSM
recognises and is doing its best to impress upon the administration of the
university currently known as Rhodes, the ‘usual way of doing doings’ is simply
unsatisfactory; moreover, it is colonial. To pursue this insufficient course of
action can be modestly reformative, but never transformational. Genuine
transformation demands that fundamental shifts in the political imaginations of
university administrators and staff, in addition to students, must occur.
To affect this
shift, we must consider the African university not as something to be
implemented, but rather as something to be practiced. The African university is
not a decolonised institution but a university that is engaged in the process
of decolonising. As the experiences of the people pictured on the walls of BSM
Commons attest, decolonising can only be practiced through acts of protest.
To be engaged
in such protest, in the process of decolonising, does not mean that the African
university will cease to be a place or learning, nor that all of its times and
spaces will be taken up with sit-ins, marches, singing, graffiti and the other
methods of change that we are seeing now. These actions are and will remain
necessary, but they do not signal the entirety of what it means to be a
university in protest. Fulfilling its mandate as a place of learning can and
must become itself an act of protest in the African university.
On Robben
Island during apartheid, the political prisoners formed themselves into a
university. ‘We became’, Nelson Mandela writes in his autobiography, ‘our own
faculty, our own professors, our own curriculum, our own courses’ (1995: 556).
Crucially, this was an act of protest: it was done outside of the prison
regulations; banned subjects such as politics were taught; and it was informed
by the anticolonial struggle in which the prisoners were involved. It was a
university dedicated to learning, but also constituted through and in protest.
While political imprisonment is not a requirement either of political struggle
or of an African university, moments in history such as this are important in
considering a future for universities that are transformed and African.
The point is
that the African university must be a critique of the colonial university, of
the conception of the university as institution, of the increasing
corporatisation of the university. It must be anti-colonial—more importantly
and accurately, decolonising—in its outlook, its form, and its objectives. It
must be open revolt against modes of operating that conserve traditions that
are variously oppressive, reformist, anti-transformational and irrelevant.
As the BSM’s
struggle shows, this critique and protest must first happen within South
Africa’s universities, before they become African universities for the world.
Still, in the BSM Commons, such a university is proven possible. Through the
Commons’ constitution as protest, oppressive tradition no longer has a place
there, institutional authority is held accountable and opportunity for
transformation is intensely present.
Malcom X is
not pictured on the wall of the BSM Commons to enshrine him, to let him grow
stale and forgotten like the haughty old white men of the paintings. He is
there as an intentional and insistent reminder that change is necessary, and
that transformation moves outside of institutional strictures, even if it uses
the same space.
