Despite more than two decades of democracy in South Africa, black students and staff members still feel unwelcome and excluded at Stellenbosch University, says the writer. Picture: Stellenbosch University/Facebook
Nkosikhulule Nyembezi
Cape Town - Suppose you have not yet ploughed through the commission’s report on racism at Stellenbosch University.
In that case, here is a straightforward summary. Despite more than two decades of democracy in South Africa, black students and staff members still feel unwelcome and excluded at Stellenbosch University.
All because some students, staff, alumni and various political and interest groups, both within and outside the university, continue to preserve the same experience of university life on offer many years ago.
They laughed at the rest of the progressive university community. They congratulated themselves for ensuring that while the university’s impressive theoretical strides towards transformation represent a beacon of hope for an inclusive future, they do not translate adequately into the lived experiences of students and staff.
Their networks ensured that the university’s transformation journey took place in a piecemeal and uncoordinated fashion by frustrating the transformation apparatus comprising complicated, bureaucratic, multifaceted systems and structures.
They also kept these structures apart by ensuring they performed their separate functions with little cohesion or overarching co-ordination. This untenable pattern led to omissions, duplication of effort, confusion and a lack of accountability.
The squalor of the set-up is inseparable from the outrageous arrogance of those unwilling to accept responsibility for their actions and who are now resisting the implementation of the commission’s recommendations.
Instead, they are screaming over the recommendation for the university to review and revise its language policy to remove the possibility of language exclusion through the preference for Afrikaans.
They are swearing at the report’s mention that the university could only hope to realise its potential of becoming a national asset if students and staff felt that they belonged and it was a place for them.
What comes next? Judging by past form, not much. The unlucky rector and vice-chancellor, Wim de Villiers, who said the commission’s findings are “a tipping point” for the institution, will be served up for a sacrificial roasting in the media.
Others will fulminate to friendly journalists, knowing they will print their juiciest quotes with excuses for delaying decisive action without the incriminating detail of their names.
Some liberal academics will bang their tiny fists and demand that the university immediately review and revise its language policy, as they have done each week of this affair, always with the same lack of success.
The DA has indicated that it will immediately take the report on legal review, saying it “outrageously scapegoats the Afrikaans language for any and all problems at the university”.
AfriForum expressed outrage over the language issue, saying that the language rights of Afrikaans speakers could not be denied in reaction to the misconduct of individuals.
This opportunistic behaviour diverts attention away from the ongoing human rights abuses.
Further, it dampens any hopes for a collaborative approach to ensuring that the university speedily realises its potential to become a national asset in which students and staff feel that they belong, and is a place for them instead of a place in which others merely tolerate them.
The downside of this opportunistic behaviour is that it perpetuates the current profound lack of shared responsibility for transformation at the university.
Only a select group of progressive people bear the burden of driving transformation.
All this squeaking noise will be turned into The Stellenbosch Resistance Show, just as everything in the university has been under the shield of the institution’s organisational structure and historical culture.
It is the same organisational structure and historical culture favouring a hierarchy in which leaders, both members of staff and students, over emphasise the hierarchical nature of leadership positions at the expense of the duties of service expected of leaders entrusted with transformation projects.
Between the conservative individuals and various political and interest groups clapping like eager seals, we see a combined force turning the university’s affairs into one of the longest-running and most grimly predictable box sets of all time in our democracy.
Each episode starts with a scandal of abuse and the humiliation of a black person like Babalo Ndwayana by a white person like Theuns du Toit.
It ends on the same dreary cliffhanger: how does our exposed racist antihero get out of this one?
Even if the university governance structures, the donor community, and the government cannot tear themselves away, the rest of us should – and observe how the system that has enthroned and enabled Afrikaner supremacy over Africans has, in the process, leapt, destroying itself.
I am not only referring to the weaponisation of the Afrikaans language.
I also mean the political interests and the ideology that swept the DA, AfriForum and others into jumping to conclusions on those commission recommendations dealing with the Afrikaans language, to the exclusion of other crucial transformation issues.
And at what price! Through their full-bellied carelessness, they have clumsily yanked down the entire stage set of the puppet show that passes for a blatant undermining of South Africa’s democracy, which is meant to be cherished by different races that are united in diversity.
Our political culture and economic rationales lie before us, drained of credibility and emptied of purpose – except to hold in place the hollow untruths of individuals and political groupings opposed to transformation who have not the faintest clue how to unite a nation, save to mouth trite divisive slogans about preserving the dominant role of Afrikaans in Stellenbosch.
This is a world far away from cultural diversity and multilingualism –one whose population of Afrikaans mother-tongue speakers should organically swell over the next generations.
And, while those individuals who are anti-transformation in Stellenbosch are ultimately responsible for this suffering catalogued in the commission’s report, they are not solely to blame.
In this pile-up of vast polarising forces and purposeless leaders in public institutions across sectors of society, there is also an exhausted, corrupt government supervising run-down institutions meant to promote social cohesion and moral regeneration.
Indeed, in the pages of the commission’s report, you can see something far more significant than the fate of one Afrikaans-dominated university.
You can glimpse the end of an unchallenged political era where racial supremacy and cultural domination are wantonly weaponised for narrow ideological reasons at the expense of respecting human dignity as a mutually beneficial value that equally binds us all.
Nyembezi is a human rights activist and policy analyst
Cape Times