Growing up during the Sixties and Seventies on the Cape Flats, Jonathan Jansen spent time dodging recruitment by two powerfully competing forces — the evangelical church and a gang called the Americans. “The church won, though: I became a preacher at 15 or 16,” he says.
But preaching was not to be his vocation. The lecture I had heard snippets of while waiting to interview him was an induction session for 40 students in their first year of doctoral study. That is 40 PhD students in one faculty (education) at the University of Pretoria — a number that comfortably outstrips the total doctoral enrolment at many other South African universities.
It is a fair bet to say that many of those students are there because Jansen is there: since 2000 he has been dean of education at this traditional stronghold of conservative white Afrikanerdom.
To recall that he moved there from its political and cultural opposite, the former University of Durban-Westville (UDW), is to register another of the surprising contradictions that have formed one of South Africa’s most prominent critical intellectuals. Bearing in mind his international academic standing, it is just as startling to hear his unabashed confession that he failed his first year as a BSc student at the University of the Western Cape (UWC).
This was partly because he had almost no Afrikaans at the time — he is now fluent. It was also because of his extremely poor high school preparation in maths and science: “The first time I saw a microscope was at university — and then I looked through the wrong end of it.”
A temporary setback, as it turned out. After completing his BSc, he obtained a teaching diploma and a BEd from Unisa. Seven years of teaching science in rural Western Cape schools followed, and it was the combination of his UWC student years and initial teaching experience in deprived schools that alerted him “to a whole world I was missing”.
While the church offered stability, peace and security from the violence of the Cape Flats, “suddenly that protected world was gone” when he became a student, heard people like Allan Boesak and Beyers NaudÃ