The widely used term term risks becoming a buzzword for people who want to seem open-minded, warns Paballo Chauke.
Akin Jimoh hears how the 2015 toppling of the Cecil Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town was both an anti-climax and a catalyst for change.Paballo Chauke and Shannon Morreira examine a drive by the University of Cape Town to cultivate a more inclusive academic environment after a campus statue of nineteenth-century imperialist Cecil Rhodes was toppled in April 2015.
In this series we explore the practice of science in this wonderful continent, the progress, the issues, the needs, and in the words of the African scientists who are based here. But I was in a campus where I wasn't seeing myself, either In my class . The people that were teaching me were not Black people. The only Black people were cleaners and, and, like, sort of supporting staff. But academics were mainly white. Mainly white men, even. Not just white but white straight men.
But also people were saying, “What's the point of trying to erase history?” And that was not what we were trying to do. The protesters were not trying to sort of erase history, actually, they were trying to underline it, and sort of highlight the pain and the suffering that history has caused in the present as well.So when it was taken down, you were there? Can you go back and, you know…What were the things that happened, you know, while watching, you know.
There was theory and practice behind why the statue must fall. The students were informed about why this must happen. There isn't just an emotional, “Oh my God“, the statue must go. We read books. I Write what I Like by Steve Biko. Books by Toni Morrison, and Malcolm X, and Audre Lorde. We were philosophical, sociological, we were thinkers. People must know that “Rhodes must fall” was a thinking movement. So we’re thinking, we’re moving, we’re speaking, and we prayed.
We're saying, we are fighting back, that this is obviously a small win, but it's something, and it's showing that unity, you can actually sort of address the issues that killed us. The issues that keep us suppressed and buried without anyone knowing. But what Rhodes did that's had such a lasting impact on Southern Africa, was that he combined his economic interests in the colony with political interests. So he was a very strong imperialist. He had a huge strong belief in expanding and consolidating the British Empire.
So as long ago as the 1950s, there were Afrkaans nationalists who protested against the statue, because it was a statue of a British imperialist, through into the present into the postcolonial moment where for a number of years, prior to 2015, there had been sort of recurrent moments of student protest against the presence of the statue on the campus.
One very strong arm of the protests that you've just touched upon was this recognition of, of the role of emotion in teaching and learning, and the role of emotion, particularly in a postcolonial setting, in dealing with a lot of, of the subjects that the disciplines cover. So yeah, so a lot changed quite slowly and in some ways, very slowly, from the perspective of the lifecycle of a student I think. Quite quickly from the perspective of the lifecycle of an institution.
So to the core of, from what I understand, the core of the movement, you know, events leading to bringing down the statue has to do with some form of discrimination, issues of carryover from apartheid, and so on and so forth. But I also sort of have to recognize that even in that I'm, I'm speaking from a position of privilege, and there's probably a lot that I don't necessarily see that happens within the university space.Yeah. If I may ask, from your, from your vantage point, I say, a white staff member teaching predominantly Black students? What are the challenges you face, or you've you've, or you've come across?So the challenges are all mostly good challenges, productive challenges.
So thinking about the university in terms of course content, pedagogy, what languages we teach in, etc, but also thinking about all of this hidden social capital that's carried by whiteness in South Africa, and by different forms of privilege. So when do you be an active citizen? And when do you just sit down and keep quiet? So I think that's that's the ongoing challenge, maintaining a reflexive awareness of, when you work with the structures and when you just step out of them.Shannon Moreira 19:33
We're seeing more and more excellent postgraduate students graduating, making their mark on the academy from a sort of African/South African perspective. But Africa also has very rich informal knowledge making spaces, so things that sometimes get called indigenous knowledge systems, for instance. And I think true decolonization, either of African science or of Africa in general, is not going to be the way people have presented it over the past few years, particularly after Rhodes Must Fall. The word and the theory has come back to life. But I'm worried that people think it's all going to be strawberries and cream, it's going to be peaceful, it's going to be nice, and people want to feel good, people want toi feel comfortable.
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