Retired Constitutional Court judge Sisi Khampepe’s report on racism at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University (SU) received extensive media coverage.
Much of the reaction was predictable: on the one hand, it was presented as further proof that SU is the last remaining apartheid institution of higher education; on the other, critics of the report argued, it is a thinly veiled way to finally kill off Afrikaans as an academic and colloquial language on campus.
The Khampepe report makes it clear that SU is not simply a relic of apartheid and that its existing transformation efforts are sincere; that it has put together a sophisticated policy and is working to implement that policy, not just at senior management, but at the faculty and department level, where work is being done to address historical injustices and inequities.
To say that SU is still not past the 1980s is unfair. The problem with a narrative of a mythical Stellenbosch with mythical Afrikaners simply stuck in the past is that it makes it difficult to properly understand the interests and contradictions that drive racism in the present.
There is certainly a lot to be said for the role of language in the decolonization of universities in South Africa, including SU. To date, none of South Africa’s tertiary institutions have put forward a language policy that is practical or significantly overturns the colonial language order.
African languages like isiXhosa or isZulu don’t stand out at all, and it’s naive to pretend that English doesn’t come with subtly mobilized sociolinguistic markers to exclude people or make them feel like they don’t quite “measure up.” to the standard”.
Recently, one of my honors students, who is brown and speaks English, wrote in an assignment about how her way of pronouncing the “r” (the rolled “r” or alveolar punch) marks her and other students as sociolinguistically different. The result is that these students internalize the idea that they must alter their language when they speak English in order to sound sophisticated and be taken seriously academically.
In my own experience, it is very rare for black staff and students to be hostile towards Afrikaans and its uses. What they oppose are the many explicit and subtle ways in which language, specifically Afrikaans at UB, is mobilized as an institutional, academic and social barrier.
However, SU, precisely because it has not fully transitioned to English yet, is, ironically, of all the universities in South Africa, the one currently in the best position to do something new and transformative in terms of creating an academic culture and multilingual tertiary institution.
A lot of money is invested at SU in an infrastructure that supports large-scale translation and interpretation, and even if in practice classes are increasingly taught in English and then interpreted into Afrikaans and isiXhosa, it would absolutely be possible with the technology. and help for a teacher to teach not only in Afrikaans, but in isiXhosa, with interpretation in English and Afrikaans. Just think how radical, how decolonizing it would be if a module in SU was offered on isXhosa.
Students would experience the African language as an academic language. Most white students would be placed in the position of having to fit in and adapt to a situation and environment that is not simply a mirror image of the world from which they come.
It can be easier to make others feel welcome when sometimes you need to be welcomed yourself; when the possibility of alienation is a little more evenly distributed.
But I don’t want to write here about language and “the language debate”. It is unacceptable that the discussion of racism is subordinated again and again to the discussion of language, and specifically to the discussion of Afrikaans, with “multilingualism” becoming a convenient rhetorical maneuver to stabilize the position of Afrikaans.
Reactions like that of the Democratic Alliance deputy, Leon Schreiber, only reinforce the idea that, in the end, a choice must be made between anti-racism and Afrikaans. This is morally unjustifiable, given UB’s history, and undermines any position that really wants to take multilingualism and decolonization of our university seriously.
If you want to negotiate a place for Afrikaans by denying or relativizing racism, you will do nothing except strengthen the perception that Afrikaans is part of the problem. What makes this relativization possible is the mistaken assumption that racism today only exists in the form of isolated individual cases of prejudice, discrimination, or hurtful language.
What the Khampepe report makes clear, and what Black staff and students have been reporting for years, both informally and in investigative reports, in private conversations with white colleagues, and on public platforms, is that SU it remains an alienating space: one in which Black staff and students often feel they are tolerated rather than truly a part of the institution and where they can say without reservation, “This is my university, my campus.”
Here YOUR, and all your white staff, deserve a harsh criticism. Why was it necessary for another racism scandal and a commission of inquiry to take note of the unrelenting nature of racism at UB and in the city of Stellenbosch?
Not just the “newsworthy” cases of flagrant racism, not just the incidents in which white students urinated on black students or their property, but also the hundreds of daily examples of belittling and humiliation students report. and black staff, and that SU, and especially the city of Stellenbosch, treat very lightly.
Or our white colleagues and the university knew about it, but we are only being persuaded by the national exposure and the damage to our reputation and “brand” to actually do something?
Of course we knew.
Racism at UB and at Stellenbosch is not a secret. On a personal level, I know many people (black colleagues, alumni and friends) who have experiences with open racism at UB and in Stellenbosch. They can tell how the words K and H are randomly thrown at them from passing cars.
For them, SU is a place that can get you a title or a salary, but the city of Stellenbosch should be avoided as much as possible. The Khampepe report confirms what we already know. UB, its white staff, and the public must do much more to understand how this soft spot of bigotry and, even more often, overprivileged indifference, remains.
It is necessary to say that with the word racism I do not only refer to conflicts between, or mutual prejudices or suspicions. I am referring, especially, to white normativity, white superiority, and white resistance to the substantial changes that are taking place in the US.
The former can be addressed relatively easily by working on personal relationships across group boundaries and building cohesion and shared goals. This is important work, but not enough.
The second is much more difficult to tackle and will require more honesty, courage and political imagination. One of the great obstacles is that we tend to depoliticize and reduce social problems to interpersonal and even psychological issues; which unfortunately means they can be easily hijacked by political opportunists from all walks of life.
Racism is a political problem, and it is also a political problem for white people, and not just for those who receive it. Our racist reality was the main ideological framework within which we, as white people, constituted ourselves politically and established a social and cultural world.
The future of SU and Stellenbosch does not depend on the extent to which white people here can transcend our individual stereotypes and prejudices about others. That future will depend on the extent to which white people can articulate anti-racism as a genuine political position and, accordingly, fundamentally rethink ourselves, our environment, and our relationship to the continent and those with whom we share it.
It will take more than taking a stand against individual acts of racism. What it requires is a fundamental reinvention of who we are.
This is an edited version of an article first published by Africa is a countryadapted from Universiteitseminaar: Die US, rasisme en die toekoms (Litnet), and translated by Sean Jacobs.
Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect official policy or the position of the mail and guardian.
