Jonathan Jansen, recently appointed to the post of vice-chancellor at the University of the Free State, is one of the most energetic and productive academic scholars in the country, not only publishing numerous academic papers, articles and books, but also as frequently entering the public space with opinion pieces and commentary on educational and other social and political issues.
His views are invariably refreshing, innovative and challenging; at times controversial, because he certainly does not acquiesce to, or live comfortably or uncritically with, orthodoxy of any kind. In his latest book, Knowledge in the Blood: Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past, exploring what he calls a post-conflict pedagogy, two themes (among a host of others) introduced are those of the ‘disruption of received knowledge” and ‘pedagogic dissonance”. A persistent commitment to such disruption and dissonance is the hallmark of Jansen’s work as scholar and public intellectual.
Pedagogy is his field and in his writings he is the critical pedagogue, always inviting his readers on a journey aimed at the disruption of received knowledge of one kind or the other. Knowledge in the Blood is no exception in this regard.
In the narration and description of his time and experience as dean of education at the then predominantly white and Afrikaans University of Pretoria (UP), he sets out once more to challenge a number of popular and established preconceptions about people, groups of people, social practices and above all about the pedagogy in situations such as those he encountered and worked in.
The construction of the book is in itself interesting, being in part a mini-autobiography, but one that gains meaning beyond the narrative of a single person’s experiences through the theorising of those experiences and events into a body of insightful knowledge.
In each chapter illustrative personal encounters mostly with white Afrikaans-speaking students, academic colleagues, administrators, parents, high school learners and teachers are recounted as the basis for the extrapolation and construction of theory. ‘The black dean” features prominently, as is to be expected, as a character in the biographical segments of the book.
Any irritation the reader might start to feel with these self-conscious narrative interventions is soon dispelled by the sensemaking theory constructions that follow the narrative. And in fact one of the attractive features of the book is that Jansen, the observer, narrator and commentator, is himself a subject of examination and critical scrutiny.
This is not only the potentially patronising story of Afrikaner students (and colleagues) having to confront and overcome the constricting knowledge(s) transmitted from the apartheid past as they reconnoitre the frighteningly strange post-conflict situation; Jansen admits to learning about his own ‘racial demons”, discovers and discloses his own vulnerabilities. This, in particular, gives the book as story a poignant human edge.
Even an unsentimental reader cannot help but be moved by accounts of some of those excruciating and previously unlikely encounters between Afrikaner students and parents with the new black dean, and by the growth of mutual understanding and acknowledgement. At the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in the middle and late Eighties of the previous century we embarked on a comparable process of transformation, though in markedly different political circumstances and demographics.
We set out to transform the university into one that provided space for ‘an intellectual home for the left” and that audaciously explored the possibilities of a post-apartheid social space still within the repressive apartheid times. Jansen’s enumeration of challenges — such as changing the complexion of leadership, promoting diversity within the staff component and student body, fundamental transformation of the curriculum, changing the institutional culture and conducting change in a manner that would not make those from a former dispensation or view feel excluded — sounds very familiar.
It is the forthright self-conscious fore-grounding of ‘race” by Jansen that, among other things, would strike and interest the UWC participants from those earlier days. In a remarkably short period of time we managed through our admissions policy and practices to change the student body from being predominantly coloured to one with equal numbers from other groups, particularly Africans.
The other previously absent group, white students, did grow in numbers but not significantly at undergraduate level; the major challenge in those days was the ‘nonracial” diversity and unity of the black student population. There was an assumption that black students, a leading and progressive sector of the broad democratic movement, by and large shared a non-racial understanding and vision and would without major difficulties find one another socially and politically in the new and unique arrangement for those times with thousands of coloured and African students intimately sharing institutional space. ‘Race” and ‘group differences” were never seriously part of the discourse in the boisterously discourse-rich institution that UWC was. The ‘left” project, of which non-racialism was an important component, was almost disdainful of overtly ‘racial” conversations.
Diversification of the academic staff was primarily driven by the search for excellent scholars from the left to offset the history of conservative scholarship and assist with the curricular transformation. Changing of the demographics of staffing was seriously pursued but under euphemisms such as ‘affirmation of the majority” and attracting scholars from the rest of the continent.
Observing the persistence of seemingly antagonistic group differences in the Western Cape, for example, one may ask whether it was not a failing to have theoretically avoided the subject as we did. One of the lessons from Jansen is that group difference can be addressed in a manner that does not affirm any assumed ‘naturalness” of the social phenomena but through sound theorising opens the way for those differences to be illuminated, understood and overcome.
Knowledge is the socialising concept around which Jansen organises his description and exploration of differences which otherwise could have been conveyed as natural. The title of the book, Knowledge in the Blood, does initially raise curious eyebrows, knowing that it deals with attitudes, practices and behaviour among white Afrikaans-speaking people — communities that are often the subject of ready generalisations and prejudices in return for the institutionalised racial prejudices and generalisations on which the (Afrikaner-ruled) apartheid order functioned.
Jansen explains that ‘knowledge in the blood means for me knowledge embedded in the emotional, psychic, spiritual, social, political and psychological lives of a community”. The question raised by this concept of embeddedness is about the immutability or otherwise of such embedded knowledge.
Jansen’s formulation on this subject is cautious: ‘This does not mean that knowledge in the blood cannot change its outer coating and mimic in style and language that which is ordered by the new state. Nor does it mean that through the transfusion of new knowledge the authority of received knowledge cannot be overcome — Even so, knowledge in the blood is not easily changed.” This message read in isolation sounds strangely discouraging; Jansen is one with an optimistic educational philosophy, strongly believing in the possibilities of change.
A basic problem that inspired this (inspiring) book was exactly understanding the indirect knowledge that continues to guide the attitudes and behaviour of second generations (like his young white Afrikaans-speaking students) who had no direct experience of those events from the past contained in this indirect knowledge; then to understand how a post-conflict pedagogy contributes to change.
In the course of his arguments he confronts Courtney Young about her thesis on changes in political identities in South Africa; cautioning against her over-positive reading of change among Afrikaners, he reminds that ‘political and cultural identities are not like an overcoat that can be slipped off as easily as weather changes”.
The research on reversal of attitudes towards the Holocaust among adult Germans is much more instructive. It was found that adult Germans did not change in the first decades following the post-war period; reversal of attitudes is unlikely to come from the generation that participated in the previous unjust order; reversal of attitudes only came after the political elites of the group recognised the link between the pain and suffering of both victims and perpetrators. This would indicate for South Africa that large-scale attitudinal change in the white population is still some way off. This perspective on generational shift, Jansen adds, must not imply a waiting voluntarism, but ‘also suggests agency in that inspired changes led by elites” can begin to have an impact on the minds and hearts of successive generations.
The crucial role of educational knowledge in this process of reorientation is stressed. It will be interesting to see the reaction of white Afrikaans reviewers and commentators to this important discussion on change in South Africa. The book’s primary focus is educational and pedagogical transformation but it is in effect a much broader and fundamental discussion about reparation and reconciliation in postapartheid South Africa in which white Afrikaans- speaking people are historically located as perpetrators.
The opening chapter deals with their response to loss and change after the transition to democracy, making assertions that are sure to be challenged, resented and denied by some, both from the right and the left. This is a sympathetic work, but not one that pulls punches or softens analytical blows. We have mentioned Jansen’s propensity for the disruption of received knowledge.
A demonstration thereof in this book is his engagement with critical theory, an approach on which he was raised intellectually. He now finds critical theory ‘severely limited in post-conflict situations for making sense of troubled knowledge and for transforming those who carry the burden of such knowledge on both sides of a divided community”, which is what this book is about.
Critical theory constructs the world as divided between oppressed and oppressor, sees it as torn among rival groups and in its more radical version portrays the ‘enemy” as not human. ‘Such a conception of the other side, without real human beings to encounter, engage, confront, and change, has little value for post-conflict pedagogy”. This could have been written by Nelson Mandela, to whose ‘incomparable example” Jansen refers in his book.
In the concluding chapter he identifies key elements of a post-conflict pedagogy, most of which could as easily count as guidelines for creative and transformatory living together in South Africa today: understanding the power of indirect knowledge, the importance of listening, the respectful disruption of received knowledge, reframing of victors and victims, the acknowledgement of brokenness, the value of demonstrative leadership, the importance of hope. A book for its times, rich in insights and wisdom, it will stand the Free State vice-chancellor in good stead.
Professor Jakes Gerwel is chairman of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation and the Nelson Mandela Foundation and former rector of the University of the Western Cape. On August 17 at the University of the Free State, Professor Jonathan Jansen kicks off the Education Conversations series — a partnership between the Mail & Guardian and the Development Bank of Southern Africa