Jane Bennett’s “‘Another world’? Let’s talk…”
JANE BENNETT: COMMENT – Apr 18 2011 10:15
The Mail & Guardian’s pages have been hosting commentary on the way in which the University of Cape Town’s humanities faculty is discussing the future of African studies within its borders. Given the tone, inaccuracies and blatant disrespect shown by some of the correspondence (in one letter, by an anonymous student, professors Lungisile Ntsebeza, Francis Njamjoh and Yaliwe Clarke — among others — were called “token blacks”, for instance), I’ve been tempted to keep my own analyses out of the media.
Historian friends have, however, reminded me that written records, no matter how odd, are often used to make meaning of the past and that silences lead to assumptions of victimhood, collusion or irrelevance.
From my point of view as the head of the department of the African Gender Institute (one of the “small departments” whose future is in negotiation alongside that of others), the public conversation has been unhelpful yet deeply and shockingly revealing of the degree to which South African voices are unable to think, speak or engage with one another under stress, beyond the Manichean.
That is, positions are naive (UCT is “all demonic”; some version of “African studies” is all victimised, trampled upon, good), racial hierarchisation is played and replayed and centuries-long traumas are rehearsed without a public hint of imagination, humour or goodwill.
To my mind, there are indeed some traumatising realities: UCT is rarely experienced as an institution that respects the aspirations, intellectual heritages and authorities of people racialised as “black” — or of people who are poor, people who are disabled, people who struggle with the politics of sexuality and gender. Like most universities whose criteria for strength prioritise alliance with the North, its cultures are alienating to many of its members, in many different ways.
Despite this, and often directly in the face of this, in the past decade (under the vice-chancellorships of Mamphela Ramphele and Njabulo Ndebele), spaces have been created in which the processes of knowledge-making have been able to radically challenge dichotomisation as a platform from which to create powerful teaching/learning spaces.
The African Gender Institute is one of these places. While we have had our fair share of institutional struggles, the institute has, in a decade, grown a full undergraduate and graduate suite of programmes, initiated an African feminist academic journal (www.feministafrica.org) and implemented 17 two-year and three-year research and networking programmes that have brought a steady flow of African writers and activists to UCT and, in turn, supported our institute’s staff in work in 10 different African countries and three Latin-American ones.
We have had failures and successes, but as African feminists (of diverse strategies) we understand dichotomised positions as a product, only, of serious trauma and obsession with the victimiser/victim trope. While the trauma deserves attention, it is not the strongest place from which to understand complexity (“intersectionalities”), to communicate (with poetry as well as science) or to begin to grasp the possibilities of the human or of “another world”.
As (we believe) a department interested in the work of all who share our vision of “another world” and willing (today) to have a conversation about how best to shape this interest into a rich campus-based space, we are sad about the spectres of “white liberal monster” versus “black victimised voices” that have arisen in the M&G’s pages and elsewhere. There are white liberal monsters. There are black victimised voices. There are, however, both horrors and courageous possibilities that reach far beyond this kind of characterisation of what is happening at UCT.
Professor Jane Bennett is head of the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town
Source: Mail & Guardian Online
Concerned CAS Students 
H-Net List on South & Southern Africa
From: E. Msndo
Sent: 21 April 2011
e.msindo@ru.ac.za
Jane Bennett’s defence of the UCT is ‘too successful’. I think it has to be admitted that there is something that the CAS perceive as sinister in the whole restructuring saga and the point is whether they are naive or what, as some want to portray them, they deserve the right to be heard. It is also falsely assumed that the UCT admin is right and correct in their move to ‘transform’ by merging. I have followed this issue for a time now, including a personal letter that I emailed the Vice Chancellor some last month or two ago. I must say, I am equally not satisfied with the responses of both Jane Bennett, who just responded to the letter from the ‘Honours Student’ who wrote to the Mail and Guardian and the Vice Chancellor [who replied to me on enquiry]. It seems clear that there is something amiss about the way things are going on at UCT and that university propagandists and spokespersons have not handled it well. The University has become strongly marketised, and it seems to be that learning has become the commodity and the students the customers. In this manner, one understands the Concerned Student who wrote in the MG paper. I don’t think the university of Cape Town is pro-poor at all. This is my personal view.
H-Net List on South & Southern Africa
From: Clapperton Mavhunga
Sent: 21 April 2011
clappertonm@yahoo.com
ABOLISHING CAS A SERIOUS ATTACK ON SELF-RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PREVIOUSLY DE-CONSTRUCTED SOUTH AFRICAN MAJORITY
Like E. Msndo, I was one among many who received the Vice-Chancellor’s reply, which sought desperately to de-racialize the issue by extensively citing the departure of Professor Mahmood Mamdani’s departure from UCT much earlier on. I was rather stunned by two things respecting the VC’s ref to Mamdani:
First, was he saying that simply by citing Mamdani it would be okay to dissolve CAS?
Second, did Mahmood know that his name was being used to abolish CAS?
There is something cavalier about the way the administration is handling this. Some basic questions deserve to be asked, not least: Who will head the New School? What sort of agenda are they pushing? Where are they coming from?
Let me preface my response by saying that the “white hegemony” being referred to here, and which I see also, is “white South African.” I suspect there are a lot of “white South Africans” who like the letter writer are appalled by the status quo as well. They unfortunately get caught up in the demographic of faculty to which their numbers contribute. I know “white South African” friends who also think that transformation shouldn’t come at the expense of their own jobs. My response is located within my experience as a student and an academic colleague of some of these good “white South Africans” whom I cannot name by name because the list is endless, for whom this debate is uncomfortable because they can’t change the biological fact of being white, they want to keep their job as much as any black person would, but they also see a genuine need for the transformation in the demographics of faculty-to-student ratios. With that being said, many of them often are caught in their particular frames of defining South African Studies and African Studies to the degree that it reinforces a certain racial(ized) hegemony. Are they the right candidates, ethically speaking, to do this, especially given they needed to have understood the sensitivity of self-definition after the end of a period in which the definition that determined who lived or died under apartheid was a white racist one? The pragmatics of it would suggest that it is undiplomatic and downright provocative for someone emanating from a quarter of the population who, no matter how progressive personally under apartheid, were responsible for maintaining a regime that marginalized people on a racial basis, to preside over the abolition of the Center for African Studies.
I know the South African academy too well to be so naïve that there is something going on behind the scenes regarding the particular timing of the abolition of CAS and the change in leadership a year or so ago. Whispers go on, you see. You hear names being named, which this move is being done at this particular time, why certain persons are involved in pushing the idea. Walls have ears-rumor now, but who knows? Is it really worth sacrificing the study of the identity, culture, and history of an entire continent, camouflaged as a New School? The “Honors Student” knows exactly what s/he is talking about; unless good white folks, good friends of mine who hear whispers about the timing of this thing, do not speak up, and the category “white hegemony” is applied to them, then they will have brought it upon themselves. The only ones I sympathize with are those who have not heard anything being whispered why this thing is going on at this moment, its paper trail, and so on. Why now, why at UCT, why CAS?
Here is how I would have handled this matter to absolve myself of being accused of being a “white South African” hegemon if I were the Vice-Chancellor: Appoint an independent commission–independent of the University of Cape Town, free of the Vice-Chancellor’s office–to investigate the premise for this abolition of CAS, with a remit to talk to a different cross-section of stakeholders beyond the university, people who have nothing to personally gain or lose by abolishing African Studies. I am not convinced that one can deliberately choose to under-fund African Studies in order to use that as a straw man to say that CAS is unviable. That is exactly what is happening: people who don’t know why African Studies are important or who know are important but do not like the usable value an African Studies program that is well-structured to address key issues, or those who simply use trivia and trinkets from Africa to formulate western-centric theories, are being allowed to direct the fate of CAS, which, potentially, could become a space where people discover who they are, the varieties that they are, and the inspirational value of anchorage in a specific civilization and place. As the letter from “honors student” shows, you cannot design the curriculum in such a way as to make the “African” in “African Studies” invisible and irrelevant to the people who for long have accepted and cherished being African (compared to fair weather identifiers with Africanness who find it proper now but saw it as a marker of being a lower species in days bygone) and expect to attract a sizable crowd of students. Nor can you teach histories without “usability” and expect to draw African students. Still, a commission of inquiry should find out: why now, why UCT? If rumors are true, this is not so much a case of race but powerful networks that govern who gets what at which SA university; under apartheid these networks thrived, to the degree that at some universities, some lecturers (unless things changed recently) only had honors degrees, but because they belonged to the right network, kept their job or even became senior lecturers.
The debate about CAS suggests that if something needs changing, it is the attraction of talented faculty that reflects the post-apartheid dynamics, but that is not all. The key for me lies in revolutionizing the way in which African Studies are taught and structured, to render them competitive-for example, introducing topics never before imagined because the racist system found them heretic. For example, courses on “Indigenous Technology”; “African Inventions”; “African Science”; what Ranger called “Usable Pasts,” “Where was African Technology Going before Colonialism Happened?” Putting “African Innovations” at the center of African studies, and displacing the negative as a framing reference would get kids excited, and engineering departments would make courses like that compulsory. I was educated in the South African academy, and continue to exercise constant pursuit of what is going on, and I can say without hesitation that the terms of framing the history of South Africa vis-a-vis the region, the continent and the world, for example, must dramatically change and I don’t think that it will happen without two things.
The first is the continued attraction of African intellectuals from all over the place whose mandate would be to reshape the questions being asked and for whom they matter, not just this notion of history as study of the past. This should not be done at the expense of white folks already there or young ones who might come; rather, that is a good reason to expand African Studies and seek conversations with Government to justify why the state, through its research arms like HSRC and NRF, should step into the breech and fund African Studies. As currently formulated, if I was deciding what to fund, I do not know I would okay half the courses on offer because they are intellectually trapped. We need new questions, less cliché, and all the originality we can master. This isn’t just something affecting history; new questions need asking all over anything to do with African Studies. Honestly, I find this “navel-gazing streak” in South African scholarship quite boring and downright lazy. I can see this is why the CAS is being abolished–to remove Africa from this intellectual “ghetto”–but I do think there is no need to abolish CAS to do it; it can be done as an intellectual debate and reform within CAS.
Secondly, and this is an indictment on not just the South African postgraduate education system alone but the British system and its infrastructural legacy in African universities. The PhD system needs a total overhaul and to embrace the sort of rigorous coursework of the American PhD system. For a continent that just became independent the other day, let alone a 16-year old republic, it is a luxury for the African academic to engage in ivory tower intellectualism. Always, what we produce should reflect a pracademic dimension, the pursuit of applied and academic value, always veering the “So What?” question towards taking responsibility to advance the lot of our communities, countries, and continent. Not to be led on the garden path of fascinating ephemera that has nothing to do with our futures. Producing “thinkers” should be what training a PhD student means. But it doesn’t help the student very much when PhD is like “corresponding” or “distance education,” a one-on-one with a supervisor who is seldom available for consultation. Whatever theoretical aptitude the student musters is a painstaking result of his/her own resourcefulness. It’s “You’re On Your Own,” you and your supervisor. Meanwhile, the students have to scrounge for scraps to earn a living. When one finishes PhD, unless they were resourceful, the system itself has not prepared them to propagate intellectual thought and rigor. If one checks the dissertations, they are heavy on empiricism but dire on theoretical framing. ‘IF!’ they finish at all because of the insurmountable financial challenges!
As far as I am concerned, therefore, the problem has little to do with changes in rubrics, but fixes to these problems FIRST. That does not mean CAS should be sacrificed to make African Studies savvier. UCT, Wits, UKZN, UJ, Stellenbosch, Pretoria, and other universities in South Africa could become very important centers for the study of Africa in the world. But the sooner the chancellorship recognizes that it is a dumb idea to abolish CAS, no matter what language it uses, the better. America has many centers for American Studies, Britain Commonwealth Studies and British History; Asia, Australia, China too have national and continental foci centers.
This craze to de-construct, orchestrated by a small liberal elite with financial connections and race-based networks of power within and beyond South Africa, runs the risk of turning elite discourse into THE national priorities of the South African academy. One reason why overseas universities like to collaborate with African institutions is the belief that those based in South Africa have a different, “on the scene” view that those abroad do not. What is the point of someone from Massachusetts to visit the “New School” in Cape Town when there is one right over here in New York which is better and more diverse, where South African scholars are actually to be found? The colonial education structure was a cope-out of the European systems; why should the post-apartheid university be a cope-out of the US academy? Who should say it must be that way? If the government and previously disenfranchised majorities do not wake up, they will realize that their efforts at self-reconstruction are the very ones that are under attack, and they will naively join in to reinforce their own self-deconstructions. It is dangerous to lurch on to certain de-essentializing crusades without knowing; and while deploying certain de-essentializations as weapons of self-reflexivity is a critical component to the new Africa those of my generation seek to build, one should always remember that certain essentialisms are necessary and indispensable to the project of innovative futures saturated with new possibilities. Instead of destroying places where “Africanness” can be critically essentialized, Africa needs as many such centers as it can.
H-Net List on South & Southern Africa
From: Sean Jacobs
Sent: 22 April 2011
jacobss@newschool.edu
Here is a blog post we wrote on Africa is a Country on the downgrading of CAS. The post also contains a number of comments which can be accessed at the link which I copied below.
‘A World Class African University’
http://africasacountry.com/2011/02/17/a-world-class-african-university/
Late last year (in November) The New York Times ran a news piece on how the University of Cape Town is “now resplendently multiracial” despite the paper noting that white students still outnumber blacks “almost two to one” on the campus. This in a country where “only 9 percent [of the people] is white.” The piece did not say much about what the faculty looked like except that white men make up 70% of all professors.
We were reminded of that piece when our inboxes were flooded with forwarded emails (and petitions) about a decision by the University to downgrade its Center for African Studies (CAS) – founded in 1976 – by incorporating it into a hodgepodge department incorporating Anthropology, African Languages and Literature and Gender Studies. The building space that CAS occupied – including a gallery, and a public lecture and performance space (at one time, CAS was also home to a resident dance company, and hosted book launches and groundbreaking conferences) – is already being partially occupied by a new Institute of the Humanities in Africa (HUMA), with some costly renovations. In many ways, a centre for “African Studies,” and an institute to foster the “Humanities in Africa” replicate each other in their continental ambitions for subjecting the whole of “Africa” to comprehensive study. So why would one institution, established in the mid ’70s, and fought hard-for, be quietly divested of its faculty over the past couple of years, only to be replaced by a twin by another name?
There’s a lot of rumors and whispers speculate on what is making these moves possible. However, there’s little reporting on this situation in Cape Town or elsewhere. And in its public statements, the university is coy about the politics in which this move is submerged. But to some observers, there’s a couple of things that stick out: though the university boasts that 40% of its students are black, not many of its faculty are; new hires often leave for positions in other universities, citing the problematic racism pervasive within their departments. In fact, at the higher levels of management, this disparity is even more noticeable: the director of CAS, Harry Garuba, is one of only three black heads of departments-out of about 40-at the university. The other two are Francis Nyamnjoh in Anthropology and Abner Nyamende, who is the head of African Languages in Literature (two of the departments about to be merged with CAS).
The university insists CAS is past its sell by date (it’s a relic of Apartheid, which made it necessary for a centre dedicated to the study of all things “African”) and anyway, “the study of Africa is deeply rooted across the institution” (and now that those bad days are over, all things African are freely incorporated across the curriculum). Not so fast, say defenders of CAS and critics of the university’s curriculum. Some faculty-in informal conversations-scoff at such a suggestion. They note that it is no coincidence that the last significant public confrontation around how connected UCT’s curriculum was to its surroundings ended in the director of CAS at the time, Mahmood Mamdani, being pilloried. Mamdani eventually left, but CAS survived with a small faculty and little resources, yet remained one of the few departments that welcomed visiting scholars and provided a space for free-flowing ideas and interdisciplinary research. Some of us who’ve walked into the Department of English at UCT, for example, only to encounter a wilful lack of interest-accompanied by those mild expressions of resentment found in peculiarly colonial spaces-found, to our delight, that CAS not only provided us with office space and access to libraries, but introductions to fellow scholars and opportunities to share our work with UCT faculty and students.
This is all, of course, going down at a “world class African university.”
Here’s the thing – us on the ‘outside’ of UCT, who despite not paying fees, still feel like the University belongs to us because it is in our city, hear about what is going on second hand, and never have enough information to reach an informed opinion. UCT doesn’t seem to think it has a responsibility to the general public, so it never really issues full statements of what’s going on or why, or what it’s considerations have been in coming to a decision. So we fall back on the ‘dichotomised positions’ because it’s all we have. UCT needs to start to genuinely engage and stop treating the general public like we’re idiots.