adminJOHANNESBURG— Almost every day I feel like I am going back in time. In 1983 I went to Wits University as a first year student. I was admitted by the university on the basis of my matric results, but the government denied me entry because of its racist policies against black students studying at white universities.
I persevered until I was registered in 1984 after the same government had changed its laws to allow for the registration of a quota of black students. What I remember about my student experiences are the incidents of gratuitous victimisation by my white professors.
The most notorious of these guys was an international relations professor, Dick Kunert. One day he called me to his office to talk about my exam script. As I walked in I noticed a big Jonas Savimbi poster behind his desk.
He went into a rant about how communists were planning to take over South Africa. All the time he was waving my script in his hand.
He said he had given me 49 percent but wanted a good reason why he should change his mind and pass it. What he really wanted me to do was to say Savimbi was not such a bad guy after all.
It was an excruciatingly humiliating moment but I also figured I had nothing to lose by lying to the guy to get my pass mark. He scratched across the 49 percent and gave me 50 percent.
There was also the constitutional law professor who later became a prominent opposition politician in post-apartheid South Africa.
He took great pleasure in embarrassing the handful of black students in his class, all of whom were prominent activists. If you got a question wrong he would say: “See, and you people think you can run this country?”
This kind of malevolence continued right through my master’s degree. I faced the real prospect of being held back for a year because an openly racist professor gave me 49 percent for a course. I appealed his mark and the head of the department found that he had been grossly unfair.
I never thought those experiences would be visited on young black students again in this country. Now I routinely have students coming into my office weeping about one maltreatment or the other by our senior white professors. I should hasten to add that this abusive conduct is not limited to black students.
A person who has grown accustomed to bullying black people soon extends that conduct to everyone else, including junior white staff and administrators. In an ironic sense, racism affects white staff and students as well – albeit in a vicarious sense. I also never thought the eugenicist questioning of black people’s intellectual abilities would be articulated so openly.
At UCT we have a professor and head of department of philosophy, David Benatar, who openly says Africa must still prove it has something to contribute to philosophy. In the more than10 years he has been head of department he has not seen fit to hire one black member of staff in the whole department.
He defends this by saying the work that is being produced in African philosophy is of poor quality.
This is all despite the remarkable work done in African philosophy over the decades.
But I have not heard any denunciation of these pronouncements from my white colleagues, and the fact that he is head of department for more than 10 years.
Instead of condemnation there is endless cover-up. The weird thing is that it has become hard for black people to call racism by name on the liberal universities.
There are howls of protest against Penny Sparrow but not against the bigotry that is on display on campus on a daily basis. It is even harder for students who depend on these very same professors for their grades.
The professors can respond simply by failing them. However, the universities, being centres of learning, have a real opportunity to practice what I call a prophetic common sense on race i.e. the ability to anticipate the future implications of present-day racism.
We need to speak frankly and openly about the kinds of places universities have become for black professors and black students alike. We must get to a point where it is unacceptable for a white professor to feel they have the licence to just send you an email attacking your personal integrity or achievements.
We must reject it not only because of the hue and cry it would generate if black professors did it but also because it is an indecent practice.
James Baldwin once noted that “one of the reasons people cling to their hate so stubbornly is because they sense that, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain”.
The racism we see on our campuses is a result of this dance with hate and pain among some of our colleagues, not knowing which one to quite embrace.
But surely we cannot wait for some Damascene conversion on the part of these individuals before we transform our universities.
It is incumbent for the students themselves to take up questions of governance at the universities.
Governance is not a liberal bourgeois indulgence.
It is the only way to protect themselves from the untrammelled power of professors who treat departments as if they are their personal fiefdoms.
Universities should not be exempt from the requirements of accountability, transparency, fairness that we expect from all other modern organisations.
Students have a right to be critical of professors without feeling that they will be victimised in any way.
We owe it to their parents that they are protected from the abusive practices of senior professors who are protected from scrutiny by virtue of being part of a powerful, unaccountable racialised oligarchy.
Our universities advertise themselves as home to students of all races – even as they claim not to see race. Go figure. But when young black kids come to our shores, their experiences tell a different story.
They are abused in pretty much the same way as we were back in the 1980s.
That is what I mean by feeling like I am going back in time. In the euphoria of 1994 I never would have imagined that I would be marching alongside my own daughter for the end of racism at the university.
I am sure Frank Chikane would never have imagined that he would be coming out in solidarity with a son charged for protesting for a new university system.
That is what I mean by feeling like I am walking back in time, when the pain I thought was behind us, is now visited on our children, by the very institutions that are supposed to protect them.—The Sunday Independent
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