Judge Sisi Khampepe has just delivered a report, after an inquiry was commissioned by Stellenbosch University, to investigate allegations of racism against the institution, when an Afrikaner student was filmed urinating on the study desk of a black, African student earlier this year and this went viral and subsequent to that, during the month of October, another Afrikaner student urinated inside the room of two black students.
All of this rightfully caused an uproar, with black students openly calling for an end to racial discrimination at Stellenbosch University.
In accepting the outcomes and recommendations of the Judge Khampepe report, Stellenbosch vice-chancellor Wim de Villiers openly acknowledged that there are indeed racial problems within Stellenbosch University, with most black students and academics expressing sentiments and lived experiences of being unwelcome and unaccepted at the institution and he has committed the university to taking action to rectify and remedy this, in line with recommendations from the Khampepe report.
I was reflecting on all this and just thinking to myself, “why the heck do darkies not just build their own institutions and stop subjecting themselves to all this?” Twenty eight years into democracy, we should surely have been able to build African language schools and tertiary institutions that are centres of excellence in preserving, developing, and promoting African cultures in this country as well as primary custodians and enablers of the decolonisation and transformation of South African society quest.
To quote the words of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “Language as communication and culture are then products of each other. Communication creates culture, culture is a means of communication. Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other beings. Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world.”
In my view, instead of trying to “de-Afrikanerise” tertiary institutions such as Maties and Tukkies or schools such as Affies and Grey Bloem, blacks should be building their own, African language tertiary institutions and schools, which are just as excellent, if not even more, and which can advance the transformation agenda much more effectively and efficaciously than what we are currently witnessing.