The Mail & Guardian’s pages have been hosting commentary on the way in which the University of Cape Town’s humanities faculty is discussing the future of African studies within its borders. Given the tone, inaccuracies and blatant disrespect shown by some of the correspondence (in one letter, by an anonymous student, professors Lungisile Ntsebeza, Francis Njamjoh and Yaliwe Clarke — among others — were called “token blacks”, for instance), I’ve been tempted to keep my own analyses out of the media.
Historian friends have, however, reminded me that written records, no matter how odd, are often used to make meaning of the past and that silences lead to assumptions of victimhood, collusion or irrelevance.
From my point of view as the head of the department of the African Gender Institute (one of the “small departments” whose future is in negotiation alongside that of others), the public conversation has been unhelpful yet deeply and shockingly revealing of the degree to which South African voices are unable to think, speak or engage with one another under stress, beyond the Manichean.
That is, positions are naive (UCT is “all demonic”; some version of “African studies” is all victimised, trampled upon, good), racial hierarchisation is played and replayed and centuries-long traumas are rehearsed without a public hint of imagination, humour or goodwill.
To my mind, there are indeed some traumatising realities: UCT is rarely experienced as an institution that respects the aspirations, intellectual heritages and authorities of people racialised as “black” — or of people who are poor, people who are disabled, people who struggle with the politics of sexuality and gender. Like most universities whose criteria for strength prioritise alliance with the North, its cultures are alienating to many of its members, in many different ways.
Despite this, and often directly in the face of this, in the past decade (under the vice-chancellorships of Mamphela Ramphele and Njabulo Ndebele), spaces have been created in which the processes of knowledge-making have been able to radically challenge dichotomisation as a platform from which to create powerful teaching/learning spaces.
The African Gender Institute is one of these places. While we have had our fair share of institutional struggles, the institute has, in a decade, grown a full undergraduate and graduate suite of programmes, initiated an African feminist academic journal (www.feministafrica.org) and implemented 17 two-year and three-year research and networking programmes that have brought a steady flow of African writers and activists to UCT and, in turn, supported our institute’s staff in work in 10 different African countries and three Latin-American ones.
We have had failures and successes, but as African feminists (of diverse strategies) we understand dichotomised positions as a product, only, of serious trauma and obsession with the victimiser/victim trope. While the trauma deserves attention, it is not the strongest place from which to understand complexity (“intersectionalities”), to communicate (with poetry as well as science) or to begin to grasp the possibilities of the human or of “another world”.
As (we believe) a department interested in the work of all who share our vision of “another world” and willing (today) to have a conversation about how best to shape this interest into a rich campus-based space, we are sad about the spectres of “white liberal monster” versus “black victimised voices” that have arisen in the M&G’s pages and elsewhere. There are white liberal monsters. There are black victimised voices. There are, however, both horrors and courageous possibilities that reach far beyond this kind of characterisation of what is happening at UCT.
Professor Jane Bennett is head of the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town