OnCampus Issue 3 • December 2016 • For daily updates visit www.uwc.ac.za
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Diana Ferrus - Cultural treasure at UWC
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UWC manual provides voter education
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Preserving Cape flora for the future
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Another trophy for Udubs Ladies
From anti-colonial to decolonial
O
ne of the most intriguing developments to emerge from the #feesmustfall movement has been the agitation around ‘decolonising’ education. As a historically black university, the dominant student political discourse at UWC has always been anti-colonial, despite the fact that the University was created to produce a loyal ‘coloured’ intelligentsia that would help the National Party government subjugate people. The University was modelled on the conservative Calvinist culture of the Afrikaans universities from which all the founding lecturers and administrators came. It wasn’t long before reality began to slip away from the design. By the mid-1970s, the crude racism of white staff had met its match in the black consciousness ideology of radical students, a liberal-minded black rector was in office and the ranks of the lecturing staff were being filled by black lecturers. Yet demographically at least, the apartheidcolonial project of a ‘coloured’ university remained on track. And then came Jakes Gerwel. In 1982, the new Rector persuaded the University Senate to not only reject ‘race’ as a condition of admission, but to make a ‘firm commitment to the development of the Third World communities in South Africa.’ This decision emphatically destroyed the overt colonial project. By the mid-1980s, the University had been transformed demographically and intellectually into the ‘university of the
Left’ – a liberated intellectual space. By 1990, the University was openly helping the liberation movement prepare to govern. Ironically, it was at this moment – when activists and intellectuals were formulating sophisticated insights into the politics of race, class, gender, sexuality and culture – that the opportunity went begging to interrogate the deeply colonial concept of ‘university’ itself. As a result, the economic and cultural assumptions of the colonial masters remain embedded in the supposedly postcolonial university. All South African universities have retained the colonial
markers and measures of academic performance (including the un-African pedagogical notion of passing /failing), the media of ‘instruction’, the pageantry of graduation and the mediaeval hierarchies of staff and qualifications (master originally meant ‘to subjugate’, a bachelor was a young knight, tenure related to control of land). Twenty-six years have passed since that pre-liberation moment. In that time a new generation was born, and fittingly, it is this ‘born-free’ generation that is asking society to reflect on the colonial past embedded in our democratic present, and to decolonise our academic practice. NL