A collective movement of students and staff members mobilising for direct action against the reality of institutional racism at the University of Cape Town. Formed as a direct result of the Open Air dialogue that took place on Thursday 12th of March at the University of Cape town.
The chief focus of this movement is to create avenues for REAL transformation that students and staff alike have been calling for.
Calls that the institution have thus far ignored or silenced.
While this movement may have been sparked around the issue of the Rhodes Statue: the existence of the statue is only one aspect of the social injustice of UCT. The fall of 'Rhodes' is symbolic for the inevitable fall of white supremacy and privilege at our campus.
UCT students, workers, academics and interested staff members refuse to be alienated in their own university. If the institution will not bring true transformation to us - we will bring it to them.
Many in South Africa are aware of the RhodesMustFall movement at UCT, and the problems of institutional racism it has highlighted. These problems are deeply entrenched at Stellenbosch University, where Open Stellenbosch was created to challenge the hegemony of white Afrikaans culture and the exclusion of black students and staff. Open Stellenbosch is a movement of predominantly black students and staff at the University who refuse to accept the current pace of transformation.
Every day students and staff who do not understand Afrikaans are excluded from learning and participating at Stellenbosch University. As black students we are frequently asked, “Why do you come here if you can’t speak Afrikaans?” This question highlights the pervasive and problematic sense of ownership that some have over this University. Stellenbosch - like all universities - is a public institution. This is not an Afrikaans university. It is a South African university which offers instruction in Afrikaans and (to a lesser extent) English.
Although there are many things that need to change at Stellenbosch University, as a matter of urgency we are calling for the following:
1. No student should be forced to learn or communicate in Afrikaans and all classes must be available in English.
2. The institutional culture at Stellenbosch University needs to change radically and rapidly to reflect diverse cultures and not only White Afrikaans culture.
3. The University publically needs to acknowledge and actively remember the central role that Stellenbosch and its faculty played in the conceptualisation, implementation and maintenance of Apartheid.
#RaceAtUFS
After having previously been open only to whites, UFS admitted its first black students in the early 1990s, as apartheid in South Africa began to end.[4] Large majorities of students of all races supported racial integration of the housing facilities,[4] and for several years UFS was seen as a model integration project. However, in the mid- to late-1990s, blacks began to form a larger percentage of the student body (they are 85% of the population of the Free State province) and began to be less enthusiastic about continuing traditions from the white-only history of UFS.[4] After a 1996 riot, the UFS student residences became de facto re-segregated. Furthermore, as classes became offered in English as well as Afrikaans, classes also became segregated as whites favoured Afrikaans-language classes and blacks favoured English-language classes.[4]
The university faced controversy in late February 2008 following a video made by four white students of the Reitz residence which was referred to as being a protest against racial integration on the campus. The real motive behind the making of the video is still debatable. The video depicted five black workers being subjected to various mock activities, including being forced to consume food which appeared to have been urinated on.[6] The video received coverage from both South African and international media and condemnation from most major political parties in South Africa, and led to riots and racial strife among students at the university. In riots that followed the video, threats were made against white students by protesting black students.[7]
The council of the university closed the Reitz hostel over the incident and the incident triggered a broader investigation into racism in education by the Department of Education (South Africa).[8]
The then-new Vice-Chancellor, Jonathan Jansen - a strong proponent of intellectual freedom[9] and the first black president of UFS[4] - was appointed and he has subsequently initiated a process for campus-wide racial integration among students which included inviting the four students to continue with their studies at the university. In 2010 The university was awarded the World Universities Forum Award for Best Practice in Higher Education which praised amongst other the racial integration and harmonisation of the student community.[10][11][12] On receiving her honorary doctorate from the university, Oprah Winfrey called the transformation of the university as “nothing short of a miracle” when referring to the incident and subsequent racial integration.[13]
#WhiteSupremacy:WITS/Mcebo Dlamini
Dlamini described the university as an “anti-black” institution after Vice-Chancellor and Principal Professor Adam Habib announced on Monday that Dlamini had been removed from his position as SRC president.
Dlamini came under fire for his social media posts expressing his admiration for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and calling white people racist.Dlamini said the decision to remove him was not taken by the students who elected him, but rather by “a kangaroo court protecting white supremacy”.
Dlamini added: “But I will continue fighting these intellectual thugs.
“I will not stop fighting their white supremacy.
“Wits does not want black students to flourish in education and I’m not going to be intimidated by Habib and his white bunch in management.”
The Progressive Youth Alliance (Wits PYA) said Habib’s decision to remove Dlamini was unguided and weak.
“The Wits PYA, without fear or favour, rejects any decision that thinks it can come from the 11th floor [and is] not supported by
students.
“The past weeks have highlighted the hypocrisy of Wits management.”
So as crude as Dlamini’s comments might have been, they bring into focus a larger discussion that needs to be had in South Africa. We need to define whiteness in relation to the creation of blackness through slavery and land dispossession.
How do we define racism? Can black people be racist? How do we balance the scales when whites were the beneficiaries of slavery and colonialism – systems built on black blood and sweat? What does it feel like to be a black person in a world defined by a global white power structure?
One of the greatest minds to come out of South Africa in the last half-century, Stephen Bantu Biko, defined racism as, “we [black people] do not have the power to subjugate anyone … Racism does not only imply exclusion of one race by another it always presupposes that the exclusion is for the purpose of subjugation”.
Philosopher and professor, Mabogo More, agrees with Biko when he says, “racism, therefore, is not discrimination alone, but also the power to control the lives of those excluded”.
Ambalavaner Sivanandan, novelist and director of the Institute of Race Relations in London, puts the nail in the coffin on the ‘blacks are racists too’ statement. He says, “it is the acting out of racial prejudice and not racial prejudice itself that matters… Racism is about power not about prejudice.”
In his important essay, Blacks Can’t Be Racist, Andile Mngxitama aptly puts it, “to make the concept of racism elastic, as to include whites as victims, is to render it useless, and more importantly, to make it susceptible to appropriation by the very beneficiaries of racism”.
What all these thinkers have in common is the idea that racism requires power. The power to subjugate. To oppress. What power do blacks have in a system that is designed to supress and alienate them? What does a black person saying “fuck you” to a white person do to a greater system that oppresses blacks collectively?
Black words are impotent. When we scream “fuck you” to the world, our words dissolve into a vacuum, causing no harm. What power does a colonised people have over its coloniser? Can a slave master wake up tomorrow and claim that they are being oppressed by their slave?
White people can never dissociate themselves from the violence their wealth is built on. White people, consciously and unconsciously preserve whiteness by the very act of denying their white privilege. To deny the violence that their wealth and power is built on, is to continuously deny black people the space to speak about their pain.
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