‘DECOLONISING’ OUR CAMPUSES AND BURNING THE MEMORIES OF THE PAST
In the 10th Annual Helen Joseph Lecture last month, Prof Njabulo Ndebele, the Chancellor of the University of Johannesburg, mused about the burning earlier this year by UCT Rhodes-Must-Fall activists of portraits and commemorative objects symbolising the university’s “colonial” past. One of the objects was a plaque honouring Jan Christian Smuts. At first, Ndebele was shocked by this “burning of memory”.
However, after he had ‘mediated’ his thoughts, he saw the incident in a different light. It represented instead a clash between two historic periods - on the one hand “the legacy of the history of conquest” represented by Smuts - and on the other “the nascent moments” of the history that had begun in 1994.
The students, circling the bonfire, complained that they were “suffocating in the legacy of whiteness” that had been imposed upon them by the ‘colonialists’ who had created UCT. This was the onset of a “declared process to decolonise UCT” and rid it of aspects of its legacy that “consigned them to silence… and where they found it impossible to breathe.”
According to Ndebele, “at the heart of the call for the decolonisation of UCT was a more elemental source of disaffection: being ‘black’ in a ‘white’ world. The ‘black body in pain’ needed to be affirmed as human against its dehumanising depreciation as exploited labour over more than a century of captured service to Rhodes’s imperial, capitalist vision…”
One of the RMF activists, Athabile Nonxuba, recently spelled out the decolonisation agenda: he complained that “the current (UCT) curriculum dehumanises black students.” “We study all these dead white men who presided over our oppression… Our own thinking as Africans has been undermined. We must have our own education from our own continent.”