Claudia Braude
PRIOR to one of the lectures of the three candidates for the position of vice- chancellor at Wits last week, I bumped into Professor Alan Kemp, deputy vice-chancellor. The last time I’d seen him he was in the process of reviewing the continued viability of Wits University Press. “Have you succeeded in shutting the press yet?” I asked. He wasn’t impressed. “That’s very unfair. We’ve done everything in our power to maintain it.”
I resigned from the press a year ago when it became increasingly clear that “everything in our power” was unlikely to include funding a publishing programme concerned with the production of critical African scholarships I was then developing. A programme that, pitched right, could have made Wits a significant player in redirecting some of the flow of information so that Africans determine what is known about Africa, rather than importing definitions and representations about themselves from the United States and Europe. Wits could have acted as a bridge between African and international academic markets.
But I got to feeling sorry for Kemp. He, like others at the university, is doing as well as he can, in a thankless context.
Enter Professor Sam Nolutshungu. His vision of an Africanised university, contained in his presentation last week, draws on experience in and research on the history of universities in post-colonial Africa (he taught at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and has researched extensively in Africa). His understanding of the concept of Africanisation integrates developments and debates throughout the continent and in the US.
“Africans had to staff and run institutions as their own in a proprietary sense,” he said in his presentation, “but also in the sense of being at home in them, and as a logical progress of the anti-colonial struggle and anti-imperialism … Africanisation in this sense is somewhat different from what has been debated in South Africa under Africanisation, which seems to be focused more on the content of education.
“Yet, there is a meeting point, and US experience becomes relevant here. It is now generally agreed in the US that universities cannot advance responsiveness to black people both as subjects of study and as producers of knowledge unless they are there at all levels of university life, not as a feeble presence in numbers or in intellectual autonomy and significance,” he said.
His concern with shedding the “uniform standards of value” intrinsic to the establishment of English-model universities in South Africa and Africa has its source, not in a knee-jerk anti-colonial resentment, but in an understanding of the way such “standards” have the potential to “[divert] attention from more pressing intellectual work that [will] need to be done” in reconstructing our society. This includes confronting our racial history.
While pursuing knowledge, members of the Wits community under his leadership will be encouraged to engage in dialogue with our troubled past in order to avoid further ethnic and racial conflict. “Whatever consensus is achieved on a South African identity for universities … will incorporate both greater recognition [and] coming to terms with … racial identity and the extensions of the concept of `African’ beyond, indeed, against race.” They will be encouraged to remember the visions and goals of the unfinished struggle for liberation, in order to complete the transformation of our society.
Nolutshungu is aware that such transformation requires a three-pronged strategy involving the promotion of South African scholarship nationally by balancing Wits’s relatively well-off position with that of cash-strapped black universities; plugging Wits into the intellectual development of Southern Africa and the continent; and activating potential co-operation between Wits and international universities, particularly US, in the study of Africa.
His appointment as vice-chancellor provides hope for the future of Wits as a centre of South African intellectual activity. If he succeeds in translating his vision into a policy guideline for members of his staff, like Kemp; and if he succeeds in linking Wits to regional and international developments and academic markets the university could yet find itself a keypin in the centre of an African intellectual revival.
Claudia Braude was commissioning editor of humanities at Wits University Press