Letter to the Editor: “CAS a victim of white hegemony”

Letters to the Editor: March 25 

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA Mar 25 2011 17:37

CAS a victim of white hegemony

I am an honours student at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for African Studies (CAS).  It is good that we have African content in courses at UCT and that there is inquiry into issues  African in all the disciplines (“No threat to African centre”, March 18).

In my undergraduate degree, my majors, linguistics and archaeology, contained 50% to 100% “African” content in that the digging or the recording (the fieldwork) for the articles in our readings took place on this continent. But this is not enough. Because of the history of power  and discourse in the world, the findings from all this work on Africa, as well as the shaping and designing of projects on Africa must pass through a framework of critique that is antiracist, anticolonial and antihegemonic.

The hegemony I am referring to here is white scholarship. It should not be that all the papers we read and the vast majority of our lecturers are white academics. We are an African university. Most of the papers we read should be written by Africans and most of our lecturers should be Africans.

I find it distasteful that I should have to make such a racist statement, but this is South Africa, and again and again I have encountered prejudice in white South African, particularly male, lecturers that is out of place in “the best African university”.

I believe that white people as a group cannot talk about Africa without their own assumptions coming through. These are damaging to students and to unbiased academic inquiry. There may be exceptions, but they are rare enough that a group of 20 white South African lecturers will contain a preponderance of those who patronise and minimise African achievement, even if from a kindly liberal standpoint. That is why we need more black staff. They need to be there to critique the assumptions of their colleagues, to produce points of view that don’t evolve from the perspective of the white power hegemony (no matter how liberal).

This is one of my wishes for this university — that it will become truly African. The wannabe-Ivy League and old-school-tie pretensions of liberality and the absence of an energetic pro-African ethos at UCT have irked me to the point of open criticism — and I am a white female student. How  much more may black students feel this lack? The closing of CAS comes across to me as a conspiracy of white hegemony, even though there are a few token black academics in the discussion groups on the new school. They need to go back to the drawing board and the recruiting line. — Name withheld

Source: Mail & Guardian Online