against African at UWC’
University of the Western Cape lecturers Desiree Lewis, Sean Lewis and Kole Omotoso take issue with a recent M&G article about tensions at the institution
Philippa Garson’s article entitled “The big battle for ‘Bush'” (Mail & Guardian, March 1 to 7) caused a furore at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) — ranging from anxious discussion at a faculty meeting to an emotional campus meeting six days later.
Tensions at UWC around identity politics are clearly increasing. Many “African” students, articulate their feelings of marginalisation at a historically “coloured” university, while numerous “coloured” students feel that the interests of “African” students are unfairly prioritised.
Other dynamics with racial overtones include the facts that the largest group of UWC employees are coloured and that many black non-South African academics feel discriminated against.
Place this cultural smorgasbord in a context where resources are scarce and there is a national call for transformation, then it is likely that the competition for these resources will be articulated as racial tensions. These are real and cannot be disputed or sidelined.
But the M&G’s reduction of the problem to a rise of conservative colouredism threatening the gains of a national democratic struggle is crude and potentially dangerous.
What we object to is not that the M&G has revealed political tensions at the university. These are present and need to be publicised through what rector Cecil Abrahams calls “a vigorous programme of information and action” (M&G, March 15 to 21). What is disturbing about the M&G’s report is that it distorts UWC politics and can dangerously influence what people do.
Beneath the sensationalist headline are — it is implied — the opponents of the opposing factions: stern-looking coloured rector Abrahams, and African SRC president Jay Jay Thabane, smiling, authentically black and speaking sensibly about turning the university into a national asset.
The biases are continued in the text: quotations have been used out of context, and long interviews have been reduced to create the impression of starkly polarised interests and patterns of disaffection and patronage.
It is important to mention, too, that on the same day that the article in question appeared, a prominent UWC academic sagely cautioned that UWC’s policy needed to be re- thought since — fact — prominent UWC figures were spearheading coloured nationalism.
It is not merely amusing that certain academics — familiar with Marxist theory and deconstruction — unquestioningly accepted the accuracy of a single article. It is also revealing how readily they accepted this statement.
Such eagerness can be explained by considering the legacy of factual representation in South Africa: South Africa’s facts are generally constructed by certain groups who focus on others whose behaviour is viewed as bizarre and extraordinary.
Black objects of interpretation — whether coloured, middle-class or “UWC’s disaffected black academics with axes to grind” become probed objects, their weird motives being opened to scrutiny by white journalists or academics at faculty meetings who ponder endlessly the strangeness of the other, and, by implication, consolidate their authority.
White interpretation consequently becomes a sacrosanct ritual, and even when it is as blatantly misrepresentational as the M&G article in question, it is not interrogated because it is situated within that body of reliable white knowledge production called “White facts about Blacks”.
Whether this knowledge production is liberal, Marxist or feminist, it carries the stamp of approval of a white knowledge-producer.
This body of knowledge, and those who uncritically act upon and live by it, demands to be opened up to the same sort of scrutiny that black objects of interpretation are relentlessly subjected to.
This has not been happening at UWC, or in South Africa at large. Identity politics is of course high on the agenda everywhere right now. But identity politics concerns not only blacks or Africans, or coloured people, but also the history of interpretative authority that many white academics have for many years lived by.
Until the debates acknowledge that there are wider interests at stake than coloureds and Africans fighting for the fruits of uhuru, we will not get very far at UWC or the country as a whole.
There is, indisputably a serious crisis at UWC over competing interests and resources, but there is far more at stake than African versus coloured interests.