Africanist academics have come together to mobilise for change on campuses — and they have the government’s latest report on tertiary institutions in their sights. Justin Pearce reports
A GROUP of black academics is set to do battle with the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE), a body appointed by Parliament to find a new framework for higher education. At a conference last weekend, an ad hoc committee was formed to lobby Parliament not to put into law the NCHE’s recommendations, dealing largely with the ”massification” of higher education, or ways to bring more people into the tertiary education system. The academics declared the report — released last month by the NCHE — would do nothing to transform South African tertiary education as it did not address the need for fundamental change.It was a serious accusation, and a sign of how high passions are running in the debate around the Africanisation of South African universities and technikons.
”Black perspectives on tertiary institutional transformation” was the title of the conference at the University of Venda that presented the challenge to the NCHE. It was attended by about 100 black academics, most of them from historically black universities.
The conference marked the first time that academics, who have fought lonely battles to transform their universities, could pool their experiences and work towards a coherent philosophical grounding for the often ambiguous concept known as Africanisation. Opposition to the NCHE’s report was first voiced in the paper delivered by Venda University vice-chancellor Gessler Nkondo — a paper which transcended academic discourse to become a cry to battle: ”If we — and now I mean conscious South Africans who must, like soldiers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of power — do not falter in our mission now, we may be able to end the nightmare of domination, and achieve our country, and contribute to the changing of the world.”
Nkondo charged that the NCHE had failed to identify the need for ”a coherent philosophy of education … emerging organically from the national aspiration for liberation” and ”an in-depth analysis of a curriculum based on the principle of liberation”.
Implicit in Nkondo’s accusation was the underlying theme of the conference: political power may be largely in the hands of the black majority, but cultural and educational resources will continue to be dominated by what whites brought with them from Europe.
Nkondo hinted that intervention by a ”strong affirmative state” would be a necessary weapon against a conservative academic establishment. This idea was echoed by the enthusiasm for the idea that Parliament be asked to take a tougher line than the NCHE suggests. But if the approach to Parliament is to be the first shot in the battle, no one was saying what future direction the battle would take.
Rather, the conference set out a philosophical basis for the need for Africanisation. Papers were based on an understanding that Africanisation is a necessity, not a luxury which can be indulged at a pace dictated by university authorities still dominated by white faces and perceptions. Africa must replace Europe in what is taught and studied, how it is taught and studied, and in what language it is taught and studied.”The research that we do should reflect where we come from,” said Professor Sipho Seepe of the University of Venda.
In the humanities, Professor Herbert Vilakazi of the University of Zululand spoke of the need to rediscover, record and teach the forgotten traditions of African scholarship and knowledge.”Nobody knows about developmental psychology better than our grandmothers. We should send our researchers to ask why they say this or that. Our Freuds are there.”
His address was a reminder of the vastness of the Africanisation project — far more than simply rewriting course syllabuses, it entails building up a new body of knowledge.
Vilakazi also suggested the possibility of changing methodologies. The Western academic tradition had bred a culture of experts, but ”the African tradition is to set out a problem and everyone discusses it”.Other speakers contrasted the African tradition of oral learning with the Western obsession with referencing and footnoting. Others emphasised the need to develop all South African languages to the point where they would be suitable for academic scholarship.If after the conference the future course of the Africanisation process did not seem clear, the uncertainty was matched by a realisation of the size of the gulf between the vision of the conference participants, and the reality of academia in South Africa today.
There was a poignant irony in the references to Aristotle, Shakespeare or Gramsci, which far outnumbered the allusions to Achebe or Biko.
Seepe set out the challenge as ”how do we educate ourselves and redefine ourselves”, the goal being that ”everything that follows will have been guided by a philosophy based on African experience”.
While there was no question at the conference that Africanisation was a necessity, some were worried about the lack of diversity in the opinions that were expressed.
”The conference was not representative in terms of who was invited,” said Professor Joe Teffo, deputy dean of arts at the University of the North. ”It was a group of individuals sharing a common perspective.”
Teffo was also concerned that the conference had gone beyond its mandate in pressing ahead with the challenge to the NCHE: ”They don’t have the legal standing to challenge or even replace a body elected by Parliament.”
Another speaker pointed out: ”Culture is a dynamic and changing thing — it is still not clear what we are referring to by an African culture in 1996.” The intricacies of identifying what is African without being deluded by an impossible quest for a pre- colonial essence were left unexplored.
Another delegate complained about the lack of change at universities where blacks are in charge: ”Make a black person a vice- chancellor, and all he does is complain there are problems in his own institution when he has the power to change them.”
Vera said the issue is not that simple: ”We have inherited a staff structure from the previous regime. When one attempts to transform, they can play games by delaying — they won’t take orders from black leadership.”
Delegates were under no illusions that change is about to happen spontaneously . While universities are an obvious area of interest to academics, the conference was about more than just universities — it was also the most eloquent challenge yet to today’s prevailing ideology of reconciliation and rainbow nation- building.
If intellectuals are a vanguard, the message of the conference is that the practice of the new South Africa has yet to catch up with the theory of its liberation.No end to taxi strife in sightRehana RossouwTHE Western Cape government has been blamed for the failure to defuse the taxi violence in Cape Town which has claimed seven lives in the past month.Taxi organisations and mediators say that in the past two years, the provincial government has failed to promulgate regulations or legislation for the industry, creating opportunities for thugs to operate above the law.The reasons for the outbreak are murky: nameless factions of the two major taxi organisations in the Cape, the Congress of Democratic Taxi Associations (Codeta) and the Cape Taxi Association (Cata) have been blamed for fuelling the violence in an attempt to wrest control of lucrative routes.
Codeta chairman James Mafuya said the delay in promulgating regulations to govern the industry was stymieing attempts to mediate between warring groups.Mafuya said he believed the taxi sector required special protection from government to minimise the barriers they faced to making a profit.He called for an end to the violence and assured commuters that Codeta’s office bearers were trying their utmost to end it. He said he was concerned about reports that commuters were planning a taxi boycott as this might fuel the violence.Western Cape police representative Superintendent John Sterrenberg said the SAPS had a ”contingency plan” to deal with the violence. ”The minute it breaks out, we call UMAC (the Unrest Monitoring Action Committee) and the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) to facilitate negotiations.”To get everybody involved around a table is extremely difficult and these two organisations can do it better than we can.”CCR mediator Nomagcisa Sipoyo said her organisation and UMAC decided they would no longer rush to the scenes of violence to mediate as it served no purpose.”We’ve done our best to keep the parties in discussion, believing that if they were negotiating they were less problematic. But without guidance from government, without legislation controlling the industry, there is nothing we can achieve,” she said.Sipoyo said UMAC and the CCR held a meeting with all the law enforcement agencies this week and warned them that mediation is slowly collapsing.