SINCE the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the
University of Cape Town, UCT has been in the midst of a far-reaching
change that will see a fundamentally different university emerge. This
change is part of a national dialogue taking place about higher
education.
While what happens nationally will have profound implications
for UCT; how it deals with its own challenges will in turn influence
the national debate.
Indeed, the ramifications are international:
when "Rhodes fell" at UCT, it triggered a re-examination of our colonial
legacy, not only in SA, but also in the colonial heartland itself,
Great Britain.
On campuses around the world, heritage symbols,
names and statues are being challenged and the invisibility of those who
suffered, resisted and overcame those race-and slavery-based colonial
systems of power is being highlighted.
What "new UCT" will emerge
is still contested. But what is indisputable is that the old UCT of
white historical privilege is being transformed, if for no other reasons
than history and demography.
THE very language that is used to describe the transformation process
is contested. The language and content of "transformation" is argued by
some to surreptitiously maintain the status quo against which the
alternative of decolonisation has to be championed.
The former, it
is argued, is about reconciliation, redress, affirmative action to
achieve equity, academic support programmes to counter the effects of
schooling deficits, and ultimately, the incorporation of those
previously disadvantaged into the economic and power structures of
society.
The latter, decolonisation, as a language of resistance
has a long history in the struggle for human rights, equality, and
social justice. Because of the peculiarly South African phenomenon in
terms of which the vast majority of the former colonial population
became citizens, the term "colonialism-of-a-special type" was developed
to describe the particular form that the struggle for democracy would
take in SA.
In recent times, this language has been revived in the
context of the institutional culture, symbolic representation, academic
orientation, axes of privilege and black experience at UCT.
DECOLONISATION is not self-explanatory, nor unproblematic
conceptually, and in the intensity of the challenges faced, it is easy
to fall prey to either simplification or caricature. It should certainly
not be reduced to some naive atavistic desire to return to a pristine,
unblemished Africa before the arrival of the settlers.
In its most
radical form, it is presented in the polar opposites of white privilege
and black pain; the exclusion and marginalisation of black bodies by
white domination.
The manifestation of this takes the form of a
number of allegations: for instance, about the biased content of the
curriculum celebrating white intellectual accomplishment; the calculated
holding back of black academic promotion; the recurring toll of black
financial and academic exclusions; and the outsourced exploitation of
black workers.
This version of decolonisation is thus profoundly
about race, and pitches black liberation against "whiteness" conceived
as some homogenised form of identity defined mainly by the happenstance
of pigmentation. As such, it risks polarisation, as it implicitly
rejects nonracialism as a form of co-option, limiting the engagement
that is necessary if we are all to embrace transformation as a shared
commitment.
Yet the call for decolonisation holds an essential and
valid critique of the failure of transformation as conventionally
understood to challenge old value systems, notions of what counts as
excellence, or the validity of the old hegemonic cultural norms. We
should not lose this by uncritically rejecting the paradigm and language
of decolonisation. If decolonisation can instead be viewed as an
integral part of transformation that must involve not only an
epistemological and intellectual paradigm shift, but also an internal
personal willingness to interrogate our own value systems, prejudices
and inherent assumptions about ourselves, our histories, cultures, and
convictions that are tied up with our identities, and also about the
"other", then just maybe the fall of Rhodes can begin to signify the
re-emergence of UCT as a place for all of us.
AND if the critique of "whiteness" can be understood as a rejection
of the perpetuation of historical entitlement in all of its forms, then
maybe (to paraphrase Joel Netshitenzhe) "blackness" can transcend being
"defined by howls of pain in the face of a stubborn and all-encompassing
racism" and instead "position itself as an integral and equal part of
humanity in dogged pursuit of excellence on a global scale".
A
task team at UCT has already begun the process of interrogating all the
artwork and photographs in public spaces across the campus to consider
and consult on what the university community as a whole would want to
see celebrated, venerated, and commemorated. This could begin a process
of deep engagement and reflection on cultural diversity, affirming
identity, and how to achieve an inclusive environment.
Furthermore, a Curriculum Planning Group has begun the process of conceptualising what decolonising a curriculum really means.
It
will develop some concrete examples in different disciplines for
academics and students to debate. A really meaningful and powerful
gesture in this context would be for the university community as a whole
to agree to rename Jameson Hall, the university’s iconic assembly and
graduation venue, at the same time that it reconsiders the names of
other buildings.
Renaming buildings and spaces should not be
interpreted in any way as an attempt to erase our past; rather, as a
conscious effort to confront this past by neither being captive to it
nor by being ignorant of it.
The outcome of such a process may yet
surprise all of us. Because not only will we have to decide how we
confront our past, but more fundamentally, what future we want to
inhabit.
• Dr Price is vice-chancellor of UCT and Dr Ally is executive director: development and alumni department at UCT
by Max Price and Russell Ally
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