Abstract
William Faulkner’s appalled recognition – ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ – sets the scene for many of the animating concerns of this Special Issue. This is focused on work in and debates around the humanities in South Africa, where many artists and academics appear to be wrestling with a particularly strong version of Faulkner’s dilemma. 1 For just over 20 years after the formal dismantling of apartheid embodied in the adoption of South Africa’s new Constitution, what we are witnessing is a living on of the past, a startled recognition that the past is not even past. For the structural persistence of forms of racialized inequality at every level of society and of the economy is now becoming increasingly expressed and articulated in and through the deeply polarising debates around higher education which are largely taking place within the humanities.
This persistence of the past, combined with the dictates of a national higher education policy cloned from a global template indifferent or even hostile to the humanities and the qualitative social sciences, exerts both globally familiar and locally specific pressures on the possibilities and potentials for humanist study and critical reflection. In these pages we cannot pretend to cover or fully represent the totality of work in the arts and humanities in South Africa. However, we hope that this assemblage of snapshots, glimpses and fragments of work will nonetheless work to yield some insight into the South African academy, and offer some sense of its uneasy relation to the larger forces and conflicts of the nation and the state.
All of these conflicts are now rapidly coming to a head in the university system, where as we write, campuses across the country are closed due to student protests. #FeesMustFall follows on the #RhodesMustFall protests at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in March 2015. Here, a student in a well-publicized demonstration stirred up students across the country (and beyond) by throwing a bottle of human waste over the statue – centrally placed at UCT – of the great symbol of colonialism, Cecil John Rhodes, resulting in the at least temporary and perhaps permanent removal of the statue from the campus. On 23 October, a gathering of thousands of students outside the Union Buildings in Pretoria, where President Jacob Zuma had convened an urgent meeting with student representatives and university vice-chancellors. By the end of the day, in a televised statement, a stuttering and uneasy President announced there would be no fee increases for students in the new 2016 academic year. 2
Issues of everyday racism; poverty and hunger in the student body; significant increases in black student enrolment, but poor completion rates and significant amounts of student debt; anger and concern about the still small proportions of black academics in the professoriate; questions of curricula reform for a post-colonial or post-post-colonial world; and the larger confusions around political identity as the still dominant ANC party becomes ever more suspect after the Marikana Massacre 3 – all of these factors and more feed into the current ‘state of urgency’ that characterizes this tumultuous moment in South Africa’s haunted present.
Central to this moment are the related questions of tradition, transition and transformation. Twenty years ago, the question of South Africa’s transition would readily have been understood as one from apartheid state to constitutional and non-racial democracy. But now, the gathering uncertainties around and challenges to the ‘Western’ idea of constitutional democracy – with, at its centre, a decontextualized idea of the citizen removed from all material considerations, including the blunt materiality of race – are evident in many of the essays and articles here, brought together under three rubrics: Frames, State of the Arts, and New Voices. 4
Opening with Frames, we offer four different takes, from significantly different vantage points, on the current moment of humanist study and critical inquiry in South Africa. Three engaged artists help to set the scene in different ways and from different vantage points. Writing from Australia, South African born novelist J. M. Coetzee situates the local debate within a global framing by asking how ‘to keep humanistic studies alive in a world in which universities have redefined themselves out of existence’, noting that ‘the record of universities … in defending themselves against pressure from the state has not been a proud one’, 5 while in a graduation address at the University of Cape Town, Johannesburg-based artist William Kentridge tries to capture the mood of the present generation of students. These, he suggests, in terms designed to appeal to students, are finishing their degrees ‘as our country is in the middle of a massive hangover’. ‘The democracy party’, he puns, ‘is long finished, but everybody is left with a headache and a foul temper’, but, despite the inevitable hangover blues, there remains ‘still much to undo, and even more to do’.
Novelist, academic and one-time university leader Njabulo Ndebele puts his finger on the sore point of much current concern, writing how ‘I and my generation were without choice educated in a schooling environment that in its content orientated us away intellectually from our formative environments of home and community’. This resulted in dangerously high levels of alienation as ‘our affective imaginations progressively got anchored elsewhere’, with the inevitable consequence that ‘our own immediate world’ became ‘less real’. On the political level, he suggests, in a provocative analysis of the growing and visible corruption of the new ruling classes, ‘where there may have once been the inner pain of self-degradation, there is now an inner sense of entitlement’.
Meanwhile, social theorist Achille Mbembe, replying specifically to the #RhodesMustFall movement, poses the central dilemma for South Africa where, as he observes, ‘[m]any still consider whites as “settlers” who, once in a while, will attempt to masquerade as “natives”’. Yet, he urges, ‘with the advent of democracy and the new constitutional State, there are no longer settlers or natives. There are only citizens. If we repudiate democracy, what will we replace it with?’
In State of the Arts, we present engagements with these issues across several disciplines. From History, Premesh Lalu asks us to reflect more deeply on the current desire to ‘occupy [the university] more purposefully … [and] to discover anew the conditions for what in these post-apartheid times is to be called schooling’, and asks us to look back on how it was ‘in apartheid’s wastelands that a struggle for ideas once burst through the barriers of race to produce an all too brief glimpse of what was possible after apartheid’, while from English literary studies, Victoria Collis-Buthelezi seeks to begin the task of ‘muddling through this thing around our necks that is English and (English) literary and cultural studies with no guarantee that it will remain once the dust settles’.
Similarly, in an interview conducted by Peter Vale, Pam Maseko retraces her own struggle with western forming of knowing the language of her birth and suggests new ways to recover Xhosa and South Africa’s many other tongues, while Jane Bennett looks at African Gender studies to warn that the idea that ‘feminist thinking is “Western,” and “borrowed”, remains clad in steel’. From Film and Media Studies, Ian Rijysdjk notes how standard international textbooks ‘are notorious for making only the most cursory comments about African cinema, a reflection of how little African cinema is taught outside of Africa’. The final contribution in this section examines the discipline most uneasily placed – at least in its current form, dominated by an anti-historical and anti-theoretical trend – in these pages: in it, economist David Fryer reflects on the false promise of what Thomas Carlyle famously called ‘the dismal science’ in the world’s most uneven society.
Under New Voices, we present five shorter pieces, expressing the views of a new generation: each reveals a dissatisfaction both with the dominant analytical categories and the politics of the Humanities. Vineet Thakur interrogates the ‘theory thin’ discipline of International Relations in his native India and in his adopted South Africa. Rhodes University’s activist-academic, Nomalanga Mkhize, calls for a blurring of the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture in order to liberate African Languages from conservative versions of culture. Ayesha Omar investigates the potential for the decolonisation and (to coin a word) deparochialisation of political theory from the western canon. Practising school teacher Athambile Masola ponders on the ‘value proposition’ of a degree in the Humanities –while Thapelo Tselapedi calls for the decolonisation of political studies, and pleads for academics who take Africa as their central point of epistemic reference. And finally, Estelle Prinsloo, in a consideration of #RhodesMustFall, urges scholars to question both the desire for change and the resistance to it.