Johnny Masilela BLACK PERSPECTIVE(S) ON TERTIARY INSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATION edited by Sipho Seepe (Vivlia/ University of Venda, R39,90)
Once upon a time a young university student lamented that as the only African (except for menial workers) he was regarded at best as a curiosity, and at worst as an interloper.
The institution was Wits University, the year 1942, and the student – one Nelson Mandela.
“This statement reflecting the experiences of President Mandela in 1942 as a student, is as true today, 53 years later, as it was then,” charges Malegapuru William Makgoba, one of the contributing authors in this collection of essays.
Black Perspective(s) on Tertiary Institutional Transformation is an attempt by six of South Africa’s most eminent black academics to grapple with the possible Africanisation of the country’s universities.
For Makgoba, Africanisation is the vehicle for defining, interpreting, promoting and transmitting African thought, philosophy, identity and culture.
In a chapter co-written with former Apla operative and now academic Teboho Lebakeng, Sipho Seepe argues that debates on Africanisation are stuck at the level where black intellectuals have to justify why they would like to replace a tradition that has “worked” (quotes as per text) for so long.
“A distinction is deliberately not made that this Eurocentric intellectual tradition has worked for whites but certainly not for the indigenous people of this country. Moreover, black intellectuals are being forced to prejudice the future contours and directions of the alternative intellectual tradition, and the kind of university they envisaged for South Africa,” say Seepe and Lebakeng.
“As African American Carter G Woodson and our own Steve Biko put it, the most valuable weapon for the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed,” write Mashupye Kgaphola and Thandwa Mthembu.
It was suicidal, argue Mashupye Kgaphola and Thandwa Mthembu, for aspirant black intellectuals to choose to work within constraints that had been set with a total disregard for one’s own idiosyncracies. The latter robs one of some basic tools for intellectual creativity and ushers in a process of self- censorship.
The overall result, the two argue, is that the black intellectual becomes an agent through which his own academic freedom is curtailed, albeit at a subconscious level.
Years of racial, class and gender domination, writes Muxe Nkondo, have constructed a particular human nature with its South African biology of intuitions, impulses and emotions.
“It would appear to me at least, that we have a historic task of reconfiguring South African humanity, of truly humanising South African men and women in our continuous, perhaps endless, endeavour to complete history’s unfinished business. And the curriculum may perhaps be the most effective way of influencing the inauguration and movement of consciousness or of conscience as a force or faculty of discrimination,” Nkondo points out.