Anger over Rhodes vindicates Mamdani

Nomalanga Mkhize, Business Day

IN 1998 eminent Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani put forward the following challenge to his colleagues at the University of Cape Town (UCT): "The key question before us is: how to teach Africa in a postapartheid academy?" This was in response to the hostile resistance he received when, as professor of the Centre for African Studies, he devised a curriculum that put at its centre African scholarship that many UCT academics had either never heard of, or whose significance they did not understand, largely due to the isolation of South African universities under apartheid.

Land-grabber Rhodes still honoured all over SA

Adekeye Adebajo, Business Day

THIS year marks the 110th anniversary of the founding of Rhodes University, which was created with Cecil Rhodes’s wealth and named after him.

It is also the 86th anniversary of the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) relocation to Rhodes’ estate, which he bequeathed to it. Both universities continue to grapple with transformation, even as they largely ignore these lingering historical connections. While many symbols of Afrikaner supremacy have been removed, the legacy of the greatest symbol of British imperialism — Rhodes — remains surprisingly uncontested.

Race Bound

T.O. Molefe, The Con

Racial ideology, oppression and the battle over entrance to the new South African university

The University of Cape Town’s “new” admissions policy appears to be not only imperfect, it also looks incomplete. It generates a racial profile of admission offers similar to the old model, but it does so using a conceptually muddy pretext and might still exclude “disadvantaged” black applicants in favour of similarly capable white applicants who’ve performed only marginally better at school. I reviewed the parts of the policy that are public and tried to make sense of how a policy that seems to be a move in the right direction came to be an overwrought capitulation to the pressure from politicians and the dangerous lobbyists for race blindness. I also looked at the broader social implications.

Partha Chatterjee: The Vice-Chancellor's Open Letter, University of Cape Town