Higher education in Africa: Race is an invention
I spent seven years here at Cape Town university as a student during the 1970s. Those years included some of the most tumultuous times this country has seen. The heavy hand of the apartheid government was everywhere – in our streets and in our heads. It sought, through force and seduction, to make us believe in the correctness of its racial ideology. In the height of this, the completely unexpected happened; on the 16th June, 1976, the students of Soweto took to the streets.
The entire experience, the might of the state, and the will to act of the students, left many of us disorientated. We had questions and anxieties. They ranged from deep insecurities about whether we had futures to look forward to in the country, to concerns about how we could become involved with the protests that were unfolding. Binding these concerns was the inescapable image of young people with stones in hand standing defiantly across the roads of our country from heavily armed police. Pervading the whole environment – on all sides – was a rage and an impatience which none of us had experienced before.
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I myself had been admitted into the university on the sufferance of a ministerial permit, and I was not allowed access to university facilities such as residences. However, I found here in and around the university a group of important interlocutors.
They were the cream of Cape Town’s intellectual activists, some of them academics in the university, many of them teachers in important schools of Cape Town such as Harold Cressy, Livingstone and South Peninsula. Virtually all of them were graduates of UCT. Some came from organisations such as the Non-European Unity movement, and others such as Dullah Omar became associated with the ANC. And yet others, such as Neville Alexander, worked in communities in and around Cape Town.
Over 100 people were killed and more than 1000 injured in South Africa following anti-apartheid protests in Soweto, near Johannesburgh. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images
Together, with all their social, cultural and political differences, both within and outside of the university, these people created an amazing environment for young students. When a debate involving these people took place on what we called Freedom Square, the space outside the Arts Block, young people came to sit and listen in absolute awe. That was a golden moment in our history.
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It opened for all of us new ways of thinking about ourselves, our identities and our relationships and responsibilities to one another. One lesson that they taught was that every single one of us were people of unconditional dignity and worth. They came to explain, right here in Cape Town, almost for the first time in the entire world, what the colonial and apartheid idea of ‘race’ was all about.
They explained, drawing on the best thinking in biology and science, on one hand, and in sociology on the other, that the idea of ‘race’ was an invention, an invention to be used to keep people who did not look white in a state of permanent subjection. The colour of your skin said nothing about the content of your character, your intelligence or any of your capacities. Dark – or pale – as your skin was and curly or straight as your hair might be, you were genetically no different, and not inferior or superior to anybody else in the world.
They called this idea non-racialism. The power of this non-racial idea was its usefulness at both a personal and a group level. At the personal level, it helped many of us come to the awareness that our dignity was unconditional. It did not depend on the identities that history sought to impose on us. We were human without qualification. At a group level, and this was a deeply important lesson, it made clear for many of us how problematic and morally objectionable the idea was that we owed greater loyalty to those who looked like us simply because of that – that they looked like us.
I cannot emphasise enough to all of you how deeply significant this new way of thinking was. It came to liberate many of us. It freed us from the conceits of superiority and the anxieties of inferiority. No longer did we need to think with our skins.
We are now going through another moment of disorientation, as a country, and at a much more local level, right here in the university with the student protests.
The question for todayis this: Does UCT continue to provide the interlocutors to assist in this current disorientation which we are experiencing as a country?
Students cheer as the Cecil Rhodes statue is being removed from the University of Cape Town on April 9, 2015 in Cape Town, South Africa. Photograph: Charlie Shoemaker/Getty Images
I would be foolish to trumpet the value of the university without acknowledging that universities in this country, and in most places around the world, are going through difficulties. Those difficulties have to do with funding and particularly with the ways in which market realities are forcing universities to be much more conscious of efficiency. But they also have to do with the ways in which the dominant ideas of a society come to find expression inside the university. It is unacceptable, therefore, when class, racial, or gender privilege in society is accepted as being normal in a university.
These are issues with which we struggle here at UCT. This university is working out what it means to be a post-apartheid university, what it means to live in a society which will progress beyond not just ‘race’ but all the debilitating inequalities which surround us. It is asking the hard question of how it plays the role of facilitating sense-making for itself and especially for its students.
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It has many of the features of South African society , and so its sense-making capacity finds itself constrained. But it bristles with ideas, with contestation and debate. In the midst of the incredible social, political and cultural confusion which surrounds us, and the corruption, greed, and disrespect for one another that this confusion generates,it continues to have extraordinary people. They come in all shapes, sizes and guises: men and women of different religions; those with histories of privilege and those without, who are committed to putting the very best of their capacities to thinking about how they and the whole country makes itself anew.
There is work being carried out in every faculty of this university which is seeking to help us understand, as those interlocutors did for me in the 1970s, what it means to be a human being in the year 2015. It is about the puzzles of identity, of femininities and masculinities, it is about violence and want, about fracking, sustainable energy, spatial inequality; it is about drug discovery and about the rights of ordinary people living under the aegis of traditional law.This university is as relevant as it ever was. It provides all of us and particularly our students the privilege of thinking through what it means to be a new South African, and indeed a new African; and a new citizen of this world. In this, it offers itself as a resource to the country. Its legitimacy is in this commitment to relevance. It is this that we all must continue to struggle to uphold.
Profess Crain Soudien is the outgoing University of Cape Town deputy vice-chancellor. These remarks were part of a key note speech he made in June.
For the next three months we’ll be running a special focus on the development of higher education in Africa. Do you have experience of the sector, or an informed point of view on this subject? We’re looking for comment and stories of best practice to run as part of our series on GDPN; contact us on globaldevpros@theguardian.com with “higher education in Africa” in the subject line.
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