Over the past decade, South Africa has given up an astonishing number of stories about its dark past.
Some hidden places have still to give their accounts of what happened during and before apartheid. The ongoing fracas over the military archives is such an instance; some places, we can be sure, will never reveal their pasts except, perhaps, in the novels that remain to be written.
One place where stories have still to be told and which will not wait for the novels are South Africa’s universities. Recalling the past is often difficult, but not unusual, within the academy. After the Berlin Wall collapsed, for instance, a slow but steady flow of stories on the complicity of academe in the development of the Cold War and the perfection of both its ideology and weapons that sustained it began to flow from the United States’s universities. This confirmed the increasingly important conceptual recognition that there is a link between organised forms of knowledge and political power.
How are we to know what happened in (and to) South Africa’s universities under apartheid? How are South Africa’s universities currently positioned in the telling of their tales? What is likely to happen to South Africa’s universities as they tell these stories? How do these stories find their way into currents and practices in South Africa’s universities today? And will they help to shape the future? Finding the answers to these questions will understandably not be easy.
A modest beginning will be made at Rhodes University this month. A two-day colloquium on August 20 and 21, structured around the themes of students and staff experiences at Rhodes, and in Grahamstown, over six decades — from the 1950s to the present — promises to open a window on this particular institution’s past. But it will also allow the university to reflect on what happened, and when, and why, and what is next.
Rhodes University has produced its fair share of critical thinkers; the contribution of this tradition to university life is inestimable and this should be acknowledged as integral to the many reasons the university has to celebrate this, its Centenary year. Certainly these celebrations have opened space for the Rhodes community — including, of course, its more than 30 000 alumni — to explore the past, both critical and other, and its future.
Well, if not directly explore the past, then certainly to look again at some seminal events and episodes in the university’s past and to suggest how the actions of both students and staff changed the university and the society. But it also opens a window on how they, in turn, were influenced, in varying contexts, by the university and the apartheid system within which Rhodes and other South African universities operated.
The purpose is not to open up old wounds — certainly many who attended Rhodes (and other South African universities) over the apartheid years were wounded — but to look honestly at university and society over five and more decades. The intention is not to point fingers at the institution or at individuals who may, or may not, have driven an agenda that was pro-apartheid, or for colonialism, or supportive of both minority rule and white privilege.
What we do need to understand is the manner in which South Africa’s dark moments predisposed students and staff to various forms of action, political and other.
An old truism, never really understood in South Africa, is that higher education plays an inordinate role in the experience and so in the lives of both individuals and communities. Many of our graduates, broadly defined as critical, were crucially shaped by what happened at Rhodes. The Rhodes gathering will offer an opportunity to explore this idea.
But the interest is in the future, too. What do these critical thinkers make of their own, the university’s and the country’s future? Indeed, what does it means to be critical — in the past and today? Can officialdom — university or other — genuinely embrace critique and survive? Does critique always have to be external to the inner workings of an institution in dark times? Does this help it survive? And what does critical mean for individuals in the new South Africa?
An astonishing feature of the new South Africa is how critical activists and individuals have become compliant, even complicit, citizens. Can we understand why this is so? And does a university such as Rhodes have a professional responsibility to train critical minds? Can critique help us resolve South Africa’s many contradictions, now and in the future? And what does this mean for a university in a democracy?
Many questions, to be sure. But asking questions is in the best tradition of serious scholarship, especially the critical kind.
In an age when all too easily the quick answer is preferred to the long haul offered by reading, thinking and writing, two days and two nights in a wintry Grahamstown clearly will not be enough, but it may well be a beginning for Rhodes and for other South African universities.
Fred Hendricks is professor of sociology and dean-elect of humanities, Rhodes University; and Peter Vale is Nelson Mandela Professor of Politics at Rhodes