Andy Duffy
The head of African studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT) has downed tools amid a racially charged dispute over the content of the university’s new foundation programme.
Professor Mahmood Mamdani, director of the university’s Centre for African Studies, has withdrawn from the programme. A public seminar has been called on the campus next month to debate what he terms a “poisonous” and “morally flawed” African studies course.
He says he will only resume teaching work at UCT from July, and that he has “no incentive” to stay on. “The terms and conditions are not what I was promised,” he says.
However, Professor Mamphela Ramphele, vice-chancellor of UCT, rejected this, and said that Mamdani was being dishonest, and that it was news to her that he had downed tools.
Mamdani’s opponents say he has not grasped what the foundation programme is targeting. The multi- disciplinary scheme, running this year for the first time, is designed quickly to bring all first-year students up to speed with the demands of tertiary education.
Ramphele said the tensions between disciplinary heads and convenors of inter-disciplinary foundation programmes were apparent in other faculties and represented a simple academic challenge not to be blamed on racism or sexism.
Mamdani, who joined UCT in September 1996, began designing the Africa component of the foundation programme last October, at the invitation of the deputy dean of the faculty of social sciences and humanities, Charles Wanamaker.
Mamdani claims that Wanamaker suspended him from the course two months later, following arguments between Mamdani and other course designers over the depth and scope of the course.
Mamdani secured an apology from Wanamaker and faculty dean Ian Bunting at a meeting of the faculty board four weeks ago. Bunting called on Mamdani to rejoin the programme: “His role as professor of African studies is highly valued. His leadership at African Studies must include a major role in the foundation programme.”
Mamdani, however, says neither apology is sufficient and that he must be given full control over the programme, with the power to “radically revise” its content. “It is a poisonous introduction for students entering a post-apartheid university,” he told the faculty board.
“The syllabus reproduces the notion that Africa lies between the Sahara and the Limpopo … an idea produced and spread in the context of colonialism and apartheid.”
In the African foundation course, drawn up by other academics after Mamdani left, none of the recommended authors are African, which Mamdani says, “encourages the idea that Africa has no intelligentsia. This too is poison for students wrestling with a legacy of racism.”
Ramphele dismissed the criticism of the course, saying it had been rebutted point by point by Professor Martin Hall, who designed the first component of the course.
“Professor Mamdani came to UCT with a very hierarchical, archaic and patriarchal image of what a professor should be. Professors are not the gods they were.”
She said that his assumption that white male South Africans were inherently racist was not true. “We are dealing with people who are struggling with transformation as a general rule and are not as ignorant of Africa as he thinks.
“We genuinely hope that Professor Mamdani realises that we value him as a scholar, but that he is not the only authority on the African continent.”