Decolonisation vs “Progress SA”: An ongoing battle at University of Cape Town |
| Progress SA posters on campus |
The photo above shows posters recently put up all over campus at University of Cape Town (UCT). These posters were quite mystifying to me, because they seemed be taking aim at a target that I couldn’t quite see from my perspective as a newcomer to the University. I knew that they seemed to be promoting a perspective at odds with my own. And today, I found out part of what’s going on here, so I’m sharing.
Starting in 2016, so after the #RhodesMustFall movement (which evidently had a huge impact at UCT not to mention higher education as a whole), the Curriculum Change Working Group (CCWG) was formed. It conducted an 18-month research project to identify ways to transform and decolonise the curriculum, teaching practices, and the institutional culture of UCT. In June 2018, CCWG published the results of its work as the “Curriculum Change Framework” which you can read in full online.
The recommendations the Curriculum Change Framework makes are, to my mind, extremely practical. It argues that decolonisation should “blend formal structures with new emergent structures” (i.e. it does not argue that UCT should throw away everything that already exists in the name of decolonisation). It suggests that students and staff who have been marginalised, particularly but not only because of racism in South Africa and within UCT, should be enabled to decide research agendas and be recognised as knowledgeable. It says teaching should be “socially just”. It encourages work that blurs the distinctions between academic disciplines as currently defined. I think these are sensitive and practical suggestions.
But there are, no surprise, some people who don’t like the Curriculum Change Framework. They don’t seem to like decolonisation either. They have made themselves known largely through the abovementioned poster campaign which emerged on campus in the last couple of weeks. See the attached images for an idea of how well-resourced this campaign appears to be compared to some of the other posters that are put up on campus.
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| Poster quoting VC Phakeng, next to a poster for the Pan-African Student Movement of Azania (PASMA). The two organisations are basically in opposition so is the placement of these posters strategic? I don't know which was in place first... |
As the messages on the posters suggest, the group says it is in favour of “tolerance”, debate, and free speech, and claims “nobody has the right not to be offended”. If you look closely at the poster featuring “Dylan”, 2nd from bottom left in the photo at the top of this page, you can see the claim “Marxism and identity politics are prescribed religions in the Humanities Faculty”.
The campaign states that UCT is not free because there is "declining tolerance of controversial and potentially offensive opinions". The campaign does not explain why students should tolerate controversial and potentially offensive opinions, and it does not suggest what opinions specifically have been problematic, nor the venues in which this lack of tolerance is expressed: is it in class, or in student-led spaces, or both?
The Humanities Faculty (where I am located) seems to have been singled out for particular critique but I have seen no evidence that these ideologies are not tolerated. Now, I do not teach, so I can’t say for certain what students are asked to engage with in the classroom, but based on my interactions with colleagues I am pretty confident that this claim is exaggerated beyond any relationship to the truth.
I wonder if it is the case that the highly-valued 'free speech' that the campaign defends is not being used by left-leaning students to challenge their right-wing peers. This interpretation seems to be backed up by the campaign's own short explanation, which lists three positions that students apparently have found impossible to claim as positive identifications at UCT: liberal, capitalist, and conservative.
At first glance I thought there was some diversity of opinion represented in the posters. This poster (below) quotes Lwazi Lushaba expressing a seemingly positive statement about the decentering of white South Africans in the context of historical and contemporary white dominance at UCT. On further reflection, it is not clear that this poster is citing Dr Lushaba to agree with him. It is more likely that this poster is included in the campaign to illustrate the tone of political discourse on campus (and maybe in Humanities in particular).
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| Excerpt of Progress SA poster for #IsUCTFree? |
Beyond the fact that the letter misrepresents the Curriculum Change Framework, it suggests that it is incomprehensible (which has obvious implications about what they think of the people who wrote it):
“the Framework document is fraught with linguistic indeterminacies and technical jargon that impair, rather than aid, comprehension. Many of its claims and arguments are so ambiguous or obscure that bona fide attempts at understanding, let alone critique and rebuttal, are near impossible.”
This
is such a dismissive and patronising attitude and it is painful to realise that
the letter was drafted primarily by a member of the philosophy department.
So is this letter representative of opinion on campus? One way to find out would be to look at who has signed it. The answer is, 33 Emeritus Professors, Professors, Associate Professors, and Doctors, and about 80 students. Then there is a list of about 120 alumni. It’s the 33 members of staff are my concern. (I don’t think alumni are representative of the sentiments and conversations that happen day-to-day at UCT, and current students shouldn’t necessarily be the target of my critique especially as I can't necessarily find out about who they are.) Read the list of signatories here.
Of the 33 staff who have signed the open letter as of 6th March, they seem to be mainly senior white male academics in law and sciences. According to a recent “AboutUCT” factsheet, UCT has 28,600 students and “1,208 academic and 3,336 professional, administrative support, and service staff” (4,544 total staff). Yet despite the fact that such a small minority of staff has signed this letter, it has elicited an open letter in response from VC Phakeng, and a press release sent to the entire university, to state that the Curriculum Change Framework is not UCT policy, and that there will be not be a “colour bar” at UCT. Read VC Phakeng’s letter here.
I do not think that because they are in a minority that they must be wrong, nor that because they are in a minority they do not matter. But I do think that the relatively small number of signatories might indicate that the majority of staff are at least neutral about the decolonising project. The poster campaign is evidently well-funded and highly visible on campus, and now the whole discussion has gained increased visibility through being featured in a recent university-wide email bulletin. This has given the campaign greater publicity (to which I am contributing here, I suppose).
Looking at Progress SA’s website reveals their ‘core principles’: Liberty, opportunity, ‘non-racialism and non-sexism’, market economy, and rule of law … it is clear who they are speaking for and whose interests they represent. The naming of ‘non-racialism’ and ‘non-sexism’ as opposed to ‘anti-racism’ and ‘feminism’ is very revealing of their political persuasion: and reveals a lack of understanding (or a deliberate refusal to learn) about gender, power, and racism.
Additionally, the use of images on Progress SA’s website very interesting—it’s not at all clear if they mean to support student politics in general, or just to defend the ‘liberal’ students they say are labelled and excluded at UCT, or to positively demonise students’ radical left politics (i.e. current Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leadership of the student body, the #FeesMustFall movement, and the historical—and, it must be said, successful—#RhodesMustFall campaign). I think this ambiguity is absolutely deliberate, meant to create plausible deniability in response to any interpretation of those images.
Black students are very visible on the website and in the poster campaign which is prominent in my building (which houses the social sciences, religious studies, and politics departments) Their presence I think amounts to tokenisation, presumably in a pre-emptive self-defence against accusations of racism. The message I receive from the use of these photos is along the lines of: “Some black students agree with our analysis of the situation at UCT, so therefore we can’t be wrong in (i) our criticism of the ideological atmosphere on campus, nor (ii) in our assessment of ourselves as ‘non-racial’.”
Science
All of this comes across as defensive and reactive. It is not surprising that the people who stand to lose the most from decoloniality are upset by it, but nothing excuses the way in which they have wilfully misinterpreted the demands that are being made of them. I draw your attention to the following passage in the open letter from Progress SA:
So is this letter representative of opinion on campus? One way to find out would be to look at who has signed it. The answer is, 33 Emeritus Professors, Professors, Associate Professors, and Doctors, and about 80 students. Then there is a list of about 120 alumni. It’s the 33 members of staff are my concern. (I don’t think alumni are representative of the sentiments and conversations that happen day-to-day at UCT, and current students shouldn’t necessarily be the target of my critique especially as I can't necessarily find out about who they are.) Read the list of signatories here.
Of the 33 staff who have signed the open letter as of 6th March, they seem to be mainly senior white male academics in law and sciences. According to a recent “AboutUCT” factsheet, UCT has 28,600 students and “1,208 academic and 3,336 professional, administrative support, and service staff” (4,544 total staff). Yet despite the fact that such a small minority of staff has signed this letter, it has elicited an open letter in response from VC Phakeng, and a press release sent to the entire university, to state that the Curriculum Change Framework is not UCT policy, and that there will be not be a “colour bar” at UCT. Read VC Phakeng’s letter here.
I do not think that because they are in a minority that they must be wrong, nor that because they are in a minority they do not matter. But I do think that the relatively small number of signatories might indicate that the majority of staff are at least neutral about the decolonising project. The poster campaign is evidently well-funded and highly visible on campus, and now the whole discussion has gained increased visibility through being featured in a recent university-wide email bulletin. This has given the campaign greater publicity (to which I am contributing here, I suppose).
Looking at Progress SA’s website reveals their ‘core principles’: Liberty, opportunity, ‘non-racialism and non-sexism’, market economy, and rule of law … it is clear who they are speaking for and whose interests they represent. The naming of ‘non-racialism’ and ‘non-sexism’ as opposed to ‘anti-racism’ and ‘feminism’ is very revealing of their political persuasion: and reveals a lack of understanding (or a deliberate refusal to learn) about gender, power, and racism.
Additionally, the use of images on Progress SA’s website very interesting—it’s not at all clear if they mean to support student politics in general, or just to defend the ‘liberal’ students they say are labelled and excluded at UCT, or to positively demonise students’ radical left politics (i.e. current Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leadership of the student body, the #FeesMustFall movement, and the historical—and, it must be said, successful—#RhodesMustFall campaign). I think this ambiguity is absolutely deliberate, meant to create plausible deniability in response to any interpretation of those images.
Black students are very visible on the website and in the poster campaign which is prominent in my building (which houses the social sciences, religious studies, and politics departments) Their presence I think amounts to tokenisation, presumably in a pre-emptive self-defence against accusations of racism. The message I receive from the use of these photos is along the lines of: “Some black students agree with our analysis of the situation at UCT, so therefore we can’t be wrong in (i) our criticism of the ideological atmosphere on campus, nor (ii) in our assessment of ourselves as ‘non-racial’.”
Science
All of this comes across as defensive and reactive. It is not surprising that the people who stand to lose the most from decoloniality are upset by it, but nothing excuses the way in which they have wilfully misinterpreted the demands that are being made of them. I draw your attention to the following passage in the open letter from Progress SA:
“There would, for example, be a risk that a lecturer in the Department of Biological Sciences would not be free to teach Darwinian evolutionary theory as the most plausible scientific explanation for objectively observed physical phenomena, but only as a case study of a theory manifesting colonial, cis-gendered[*] or heterosexist power relations. Furthermore, the Framework document does not admit that ‘decolonial’ theory may simply be irrelevant to the inquiry of certain disciplines such as mathematics and physics, in which a question such as ‘Will this photodiode emit light?’ simply cannot be answered with reference to theories in the social sciences.”
1.
Darwin
I do not think that CCWG is asking for “Darwinian evolutionary theory” to be rejected because it is colonial. Rather, the point of decoloniality is to present that theory in its socio-political and historical context, as a product of a particular time and place. If it works “as the most plausible scientific explanation for objectively observed physical phenomena” then that is something that should definitely be examined in depth in a module on evolution. Why not include critical anthropology and postcolonial history as part of that discussion?
Why shouldn’t science students be taught how to evaluate the complex interaction between scientific thought and political ends to which it is put, whether in rhetoric or in technology? Why should a class about Darwin neglect to mention that, by virtue of being a human in history, Darwin was influenced at conscious and unconscious levels by “colonial, cis-gendered or heterosexist” ideas, and that this might be evident in his theoretical output? Including these ideas in teaching about science would not need to take massive amounts of time and effort, especially if working across disciplines with colleagues who have relevant specialisms, and it would enrich the discussion. What exactly is being objected to?
2. Photodiodes
This one is perhaps stronger as a comment about decoloniality as it applies to sciences, but it still fails as an objection to the Curriculum Change Framework.
I do not think that CCWG is asking for “Darwinian evolutionary theory” to be rejected because it is colonial. Rather, the point of decoloniality is to present that theory in its socio-political and historical context, as a product of a particular time and place. If it works “as the most plausible scientific explanation for objectively observed physical phenomena” then that is something that should definitely be examined in depth in a module on evolution. Why not include critical anthropology and postcolonial history as part of that discussion?
Why shouldn’t science students be taught how to evaluate the complex interaction between scientific thought and political ends to which it is put, whether in rhetoric or in technology? Why should a class about Darwin neglect to mention that, by virtue of being a human in history, Darwin was influenced at conscious and unconscious levels by “colonial, cis-gendered or heterosexist” ideas, and that this might be evident in his theoretical output? Including these ideas in teaching about science would not need to take massive amounts of time and effort, especially if working across disciplines with colleagues who have relevant specialisms, and it would enrich the discussion. What exactly is being objected to?
2. Photodiodes
This one is perhaps stronger as a comment about decoloniality as it applies to sciences, but it still fails as an objection to the Curriculum Change Framework.
“the Framework document does not admit that ‘decolonial’ theory may simply be irrelevant to the inquiry of certain disciplines such as mathematics and physics, in which a question such as ‘Will this photodiode emit light?’ simply cannot be answered with reference to theories in the social sciences.”
What the Framework is asking of scientists at UCT is that they consider how the unequal distribution of institutional power manifests itself in science departments and faculties, and between different students within those faculties, and what can be done materially to mitigate those disparities (see p.45). For example, to consider the effects of the language they use to teach and disseminate their research, both in terms of vernacular language, i.e. English, Afrikaans, or isiXhosa, as well as accessible language (see p.36).
In the question about photodiodes, I think decolonial questions would likely be: Who is funding the project to find out whether this photodiode will emit light? Why do they want to know the answer? Who benefits from answering this question, and is anyone harmed by the answer or its applications? What domains of knowledge are being engaged in the research into this question, and which are ignored, and why? Asking these questions does not imply that research into photodiodes should be abandoned.
There are many other examples I could cite here, but I don’t have time. The point is, by reframing the question of decolonising the curriculum as something irrelevant to science (and even as nonsense), the letter allows scientists to ignore the very specific and obviously relevant recommendations that the Framework actually makes. And by ignoring them, it allows scientists to avoid engaging in critical self-reflection about how they perpetuate coloniality in their work. This is one of the ways the status quo prevails.
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* When they say “cis-gendered or heterosexist” here, I think they mean “cis-hetero-sexist”... there’s nothing wrong with being cisgender, afaik, so there is no reason why decolonial change would problematise it alongside coloniality. (Also, the fact that ‘coloniality’ and ‘cisgender’ are listed alongside one another suggests that the authors of the open letter are unaware of how these are different kinds of things.) The problem would be if a scientist were to insist that there are 2 “biological” sexes, and that these unproblematically, universally, and consistently match up with 2 genders (an aspect of cissexism), and that these sex-genders directly determine sexual preference and behaviour (an aspect of heterosexism).
Update 15/05/2019
More photos of posters in the Leslie Social Sciences Building:
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