Thank you all for coming, and thanks especially for him for the invitation to speak on this platform.
I'm going to speak for about an hour and then we'll have questions and answers after that, Richardson.
Yeah, good bye. So my talk has four sections.
I want to give you an overview, a brief overview or review of the national student protests that took place from 2015 to 2017.
Then to say something about what does decolonisation mean in the U.S. context?
And it's going to be different, of course, in different contexts. But what were the issues in the in the U.S. environment?
And then the main part of the talk is to recount for encounters or examples which exemplify some of the dilemmas
raised by decolonisation debates and incidents during that during those protests and will be ongoing issues.
And finally, some summary or takeaway messages. So let me start with the some context for this lectures.
As just said, I was the vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town for 10 years, from 2008 to 2018, during the first seven years of that period.
The university was a relatively untroubled space. In fact, it was on something of a high experiencing growth,
improved performance in all the metrics that generally we use for universities greater research output,
greater more research grants, more international partnerships, more postdoctoral and doctoral and master's students.
The perceived global status measured in rankings that, if you pay attention to them,
was showed a significant improvement over the period and also doing really well in measures that are more truculent,
more important to the local environment, such as recruiting more black students,
more students from disadvantaged backgrounds and addressing many of the transformation
issues that were that were already that have been present since since for decades.
In fact, all these trends continued throughout the 10 years, but my experience was very much coloured by the last three years of my term 2015 to 2017,
which were marked by sustained and disruptive protests across the tertiary sector in South Africa.
And I would say these were the there was nothing on the scale since in the 20 years since the end of the apartheid era,
the protests were national, affecting every campus on the country in the country.
I think they were not dissimilar in a way to the riots and protests of the that rocked Europe and American
campuses in 1968 in terms of the trauma that they dealt both to the universities and to society more generally.
But the issues at stake varied across the universities and across time, depending on the local context on all the campuses.
The campaign for Free Higher Education has been a driving factor as a national policy issue.
This was the so-called hashtag FeesMustFall campaign. And historically liberal watching this universities.
The major focus was decolonisation under the banner hashtag RhodesMustFall.
That Afrikaans language universities was largely about changing the medium of instruction from Afrikaans to English,
which was regarded as the first step in a decolonisation process and also critical to the demographic transformation of those campuses,
which were not attracting African students. Because of the language policy and historically black campuses.
The longstanding crises in student accommodation and in financial aid were a primary focus on many campuses.
Workers employed by outsourced contractor companies such as cleaning,
security and catering allied themselves to the student protests to call for insourcing.
That is that they should be directly employed by the universities at most universities.
There were also smaller,
more focussed student campaigns which allied themselves to the main R-Miss. and FMF RhodesMustFall and FeesMustFall campaigns.
Broadening the agenda and the demands of the protests.
These related to sexual assault and rape, mental health and suicide, disability and patriarchy, gender identity and susciter known activity.
I suspect none of this would have reached boiling point where it not located in the context of national politics of unfulfilled expectations.
Twenty years after liberation,
inequality in society has increased and most black people have not experienced the economic fruits of political liberation.
The school system, available to most black children, is in crisis, and the majority of school leavers are not adequately prepared for university.
In addition, political parties all have youth branches on the campuses,
which dominate the student representative councils, the student unions, the national.
The National Political Party contestation, which has been so heightened in the last five to eight years,
including the sexualisation of the ruling party, is mirrored on the campuses and often informs protest politics.
The student political party branches escalate issues like the high cost of education as
a mobilising tactic to win support away from the ANC aligned student organisations,
which then respond by trying to demonstrate that they are more radical or more militant than their critics.
And finally, compounding the many intersecting agendas that I've described.
There has also been a rediscovery by the born free generation of its current students, born around 1994 of writers like Frantz Fanon.
The particular reading of one strand of Annan's argument on decolonisation has caught the imagination,
namely that there can be no true transfer of power and no real decolonisation without a violent revolution.
A violent revolution. The old regime and power relations persist into the post-colonial period.
Excuse me, but in the post-colonial period,
by co-opting a small number of previously oppressed to the class interests of the colonialists and little changes for the majority.
But some for some, this is a convenient and effective explanation of the current political dynamics in South Africa.
South Africa's peaceful transition to democracy, they believe, came at the expense of decolonisation and any significant redistribution of power.
These revolutionary readers of Fanon believe that violence is necessary for its own sake,
that the institutions of colonialism must be destroyed before one can rebuild a new decolonised society.
Burning the institutions is seen as the necessary price to pay.
I hasten to add that this is not a large or dominant group amongst the protesters, but it does not take many to burn a library or a bus.
And it changes the strategy for managing protests because from the perspective of university management,
because no amount of negotiation to address the underlying grievances can change the desire for violence in this particular subgroup.
Since the end of 2017,
the situation a discussion on most campuses in the country has stabilised and there have been there have been few further protests, not managed.
But I do expect there will be more because many of the issues persist and they are only partially addressed.
Looking back over this period, this three year period of tumultuous protest.
Some will say these protests scarred the institution. Some will say they energised it.
Some will say there were a tipping point that finally broke the back of a passive resistance or apathy towards decolonisation and transformation.
Others will say they created a racial polarisation on campuses and set back by a decade or two.
The progress that had been made towards non-racial integration.
Some will say they have created cracks in the previously monolithic hegemony Eurocentric
culture of the university that made black people feel that they did not belong at your city.
Others will say the protests have created a toxic environment in which many people feel
alienated by identity politics and political correctness in the name of inclusivity.
All of these are right in some measure.
My bottom line is that this rupture had to come some time that the boil had to be lanced before healing and change could occur,
and that the lasting process was going to be painful for almost everyone, but that it was necessary and worthwhile,
and that the institution will be in a much stronger place in the future as it
heals and grows based on a changed set of ground rules and in the process,
shaping a new identity.
People often ask me whether I don't wish that I had ended my term after seven years, seven good years before the protest started,
and my response is always that I feel privileged actually to have had the
opportunity to steward the university through this period of challenge and change,
but challenging and often unnerving. It was, for sure.
It certainly pushed the edges of my ability as a leader and manager with many difficult and complex choices,
sometimes on a daily basis, accompanied by lots of self-doubt and hesitation.
And it is this that I want to highlight in this talk.
The difficulties typically arose from having to manage a range of interests, pressures and values,
often conflicting and sometimes in outright contradiction, and often without the luxury of time for wide consultation and slow deliberation.
The challenge for leaders during such times is first and foremost to ensure that the
institution survives something that cannot and should not be taken for granted.
Second, one has to hear and understand the causes of the protests,
not just the immediate grievances that triggered the eruption, but the underlying long term factors,
and to discern the different agendas such as the phenomenon the political party politicking,
the adolescent rebellion against authority and the real material hardships and psychological traumas.
So it is to find ways of responding constructively while balancing the interests of a large number of stakeholders that exist in a public university.
Stakeholders such as the students and their parents, staff, alumni, the government, donors,
research teams and other institutional partners at every point by just trying
to decide not just what is the right thing to do for each of the stakeholders,
but what will strengthen the institution in the long term.
Given the scale and scope of the three years of protests, I do need to say what this talk is not about.
Largely because of time. What I want to share with you are some personal experiences of dilemmas that was thrown
up specifically under the theme of decolonisation during these turbulent times.
But what talk will not cover is even a fraction of the issues that drove the protests.
No mention of the funding of higher education and fees of the gender, politics, disability or mental health.
I'm not going to be able to talk about worker student allowances and the pros and cons of insourcing.
I'm also not going to cover the debates about what are the legitimate boundaries of protest
and disruption and when management should tolerate protesters overstepping those boundaries,
which has been a key issue over the three years.
I will not be able to discover to discuss how university management should manage unlawful protests that affects
the rights of other members of the university community or the use of police and private security and the courts.
And I'm also not going to offer an analysis of the academic debates about declining reality, curriculum reform and identity politics.
As I said, this talk will focus on issues raised under the theme of decolonisation and will do so
by way of four examples related to decolonisation that the protests at GCT through.
The challenges for me were perhaps more personally taxing.
Certainly ethically and politically and my own activist inclinations, given those inclinations,
I found myself often in the position of agreeing with most of what the student protesters were campaigning for,
but the methods of protest and direct action taken by students to advance their
causes often overstepped what I considered the bounds of legitimate protest.
They also rejected the governance processes for making policy changes that would take account of other stakeholders in the university community.
So I found myself in the position of having to push back often against the against the protests, even when agreeing with their goals.
So what is meant by decolonisation?
If you are moving to the second having reviewed the protest you look at the second issue is what what what is what.
In this context, it means the debates manifest on a South African history that the debates manifest on the South African,
historically whites, culturally English campus. And I typify if you sit in your city.
The University of Cape Town was founded in 1829 under British colonial rule
universities 109 two years old and so has entrenched the traditions of that history.
And it continues until the present day broadly to embody and aspire to the culture, values and traditions of European higher education institutions.
This extends from the neoclassical architecture of the university to the Oxbridge type cloistered residences to the sense of elite status,
which the university takes pride in and boasts about taking pride in being part of the global club of elite universities.
And I do want to say it doesn't mean elitist, but a group of universities that sees itself in the top on the top rung.
In fact, it was not unusual for representatives of the university, including students, to refer to you as the Harvard or Oxford of Africa.
That was the unashamed aspiration it sees itself as similar to other cosmopolitan universities with an international identity.
For example, 30 per cent of the doctoral students are from other countries and about 20 per cent of the academic staff,
and it sees itself as pursuing and addressing global problems rather than a provincial university setting,
primarily the needs of the nation and the local community.
I hasten to emphasise that local impact is critically important, but it is balanced as in all top universities with global impact,
fundamental science questions which will affect all of humanity and our natural environment equally.
The university was thus created in the image of the colonies as universities, and it still measures itself against their standards.
Degrees must be internationally accredited theses marked also by international examiners, articles international,
peer reviewed and where appropriate, partnering with researchers, international researchers as co-authors and that is generally valued by all.
That is why the top students, white and black from all over the continent, come to want to get introduced and compete to get into this team.
That is also why the top students wanting to pursue graduate study abroad often regard Oxbridge and Harvard as the prise,
including, by the way, many of the students who were hashtag must fall protesters and leaders of the protest at the time.
But it is also the source for the ambiguous feelings about their alma moxa and anxiety because it implies evangelisation
of the history and culture of the colonisers and of those who still dominate the academic ranks of the institution today.
And it goes along with an invisible ization of other cultures and traditions and ways of seeing the world.
The symbolism of the university reflects its history. The statues on the founders and donors, all white, mostly men,
the names of buildings likewise honour a past with the academy and the academic and political leaders and donors to the university,
where white men must be said that there has been there had been a conscious project over
the last two decades to name buildings in honour of black role models and cultural values.
But the numbers, so names are so few, and what had not been considered was the removal of things that were already in existence.
The arts and sculptures tend to reflect accumulation over centuries of the work of artists who were, of course, predominantly white.
There were also considerable numbers of paintings and photographs that actually
depicted the inequalities and indignities of apartheid as a statement of injustice,
usually on all produced by anti-apartheid artists and photographers.
But as seen by contemporary black students who often did not know the context of these artworks, these served only to undermine their self-esteem.
A black student leader wrote in 2014, quoting,
I've noted two broad themes being recurrent in yuki's paintings poverty of black people and the naked black body.
More so the genitalia of black men. These artworks reinforce the inferiority complex of the black student, he said,
while concurrently reaffirming the superiority of the superior superiority complex of the white students.
End quote. The portraits in the corridors and public halls are of chancellors, vice chancellors, deans, professors who again are mostly white men.
The photos on the walls of the residences are of House committees and student society committees,
which again are largely of white students as the same student direct quote grants at.
Some of the portraits are not demeaning and humiliating in and of themselves, but concern is not generally with the individual portraits,
but with the message the collective paintings are saying about someone of my pigmentation
and the colonial traditions continued through the ceremonial activities of the university.
The academic dress, the pageantry of graduation, the singing of cardiologists in Latin, amongst others.
And then there are all the critiques of the curriculum.
These ranged from content that ignores locally important issues to reading lists that imply that all authority on a subject is written.
The university is most certainly vulnerable to criticism that it offered a menu of romance languages and Mandarin classical,
Latin and Greek, but not Kiswahili, and even many indigenous life conveying widgets were missing,
and that many courses and reading lists included mainly intellectual thoughts from the global north, but not from Africa or the global south.
More generally, but more profoundly,
the decolonisation protagonists challenge the presentation of a Western worldview and framing of questions as if that were a global norm,
rather than just one amongst several frames available.
Indeed, the decolonisation movement in universities in the global north tends to have its primary focus on curriculum reform.
These are much more blurry and contested critiques. I think everywhere, but certainly in the city environment.
So these colonial legacies obviously overlay racially aligned cultures, languages, histories,
worldviews and therefore the experience of being a black student in a university like city.
The experience for many has been that their own cultures and languages were not recognised or veterans, that excellence was associated with whiteness,
that they were not good enough and that they needed to assimilate into the dominant traditional culture of the university.
Decolonisation A. is the attempt to change this experience.
So now I want to turn to the four examples that that I'm going to cover.
And they are the Rhodes statue, the removal of the red statue, debates around the artworks,
cultural practises and some comments from decolonising the curriculum.
Many of you will be familiar with what has become an iconic image of the removal of the right of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes.
This was the start of the three years of protests.
It began with one student supported by two others on the 9th of March 2015, throwing human faeces over the statue.
They called for the statue to be removed, arguing that it represented white power, colonial oppression,
the lack of transformation on the campus and an insult to black students whose ancestors had suffered from Rhodes as policies,
legislation as prime minister of the Cape Imperial annexation of territory and military conquests.
The hashtag RhodesMustFall movement was born. Sorry.
The statue was the perfect lightning rod for this protest because it indeed indeed it symbolises the particular heritage which has been hegemonic a.,
which captures white privilege and white supremacy as the underlying ethos of colonialism, the dominance of the English language,
the superiority of European culture, all the things that feed the experience of being black in this city.
I was immediately sympathetic to the demand for the effort to remove the statue.
In fact, in a speech the previous year in 2014, I said that the university ought to consider and reconsider the appropriateness of the statue.
Our plan, the executive's plan for 2015,
was to review the controversial yet apparently untouchable icons and names of buildings and subject them to critical debate.
This explicitly included the statue and Jemison Hall Jemison.
She must have, you know, was was one of Rhodes of lieutenants and supporters.
I had not acted before that speech in 2014,
often because I did not think there was enough support for this on the campus and that it would be hugely divisive.
And when the topic was raised, indeed it was huge and divisive.
While many supported removing the statue and many more believe statues should not be removed in principle,
and that this amounted to airbrushing history,
and that this was just the beginning of a process that would end with the wholesale destruction of the heritage of the past.
In fact, even the democratically elected ANC government did and still does espouse a national
policy on monuments and memorials that is opposed to the removal of statues.
And I had, uh, I had a number of calls at the time from people senior in government saying that we should not agree to having the statue taken down.
Furthermore, the land on which you city is built was bequeathed by roads and as well.
So there were many who argue that you could not now just its most significant benefactor.
Not only should the institution recognise its indebtedness to roads,
but it should recognise the message it would send to current and future diamonds that a
commitment to honour them in recognition of their beneficence could be overturned in the future.
We experienced vehement anger on the part of many donors, alumni, parents and students who opposed even opening a debate on the removal,
arguing that it had nothing to do with what they thought of Rhodes,
the man that was the principle of removing statues and dishonour and and dishonouring
people who were benefactors of the university or removing recognition of their benefit.
There can be no denying that the student protests took us by surprise with the timing of their eruption.
The passion and the breadth of support take on it.
This overtook the pace of our original plans.
But given the views of the exhibit, given that the views of the executive on the road statute were actually aligned with the cause of the protest,
there seem to be no point in creating a conflict where there ought not to be one.
There was sort of a conflict about process, with the students arguing that the statue should come down simply because they felt offended by it and
that it should come down immediately with no further ado in the student sphere or in the protesters view,
it wasn't only students, also staff members, some staff members in the protesters view management.
Most whites, most alumni and donors could not be expected to understand their pain in this regard.
So we simply had to accept it.
There was nothing to be discussed for the university management and council, which I should emphasise had many black members.
The crucial issue was to defend the idea of a university as a space for ideas and debate matter where decisions are made rationally,
not as the result of populist pressure, nor on the grounds that personal experience places an issue beyond debate.
But those who don't share that experience and with proper governance processes where it hits you.
This meant that the decision had to be taken by the University Council, informed by the arguments presented by different key constituencies.
This is essentially what was done. We scheduled a special council meeting to be held one month later and recommitted to conducting debates
and soliciting views from all constituencies within that period to inform council the council's decision.
Meanwhile, the protesters, including some staff members,
occupied the main administration building of the university, which is in the photograph for a month.
While these consultations were going on and we decided to allow them to do so in spite of the severe disruptions caused,
rather than creates further confrontation and recognising that this was not actually a contest over the goal, not with the executive.
At any rate, we also had to provide security for the statue from being pulled down.
And this shows you a picture of the statue, which so the statue was sort of continuously under attack of one form or another.
You can see it wrapped up in rubbish bags and covered in tape.
But we had to because because there were regular rumours of a tow truck and the
chain coming in the middle of the night that would to pull the statue down,
which would easily have been able to do so. And if this had happened, in my view, it could of sabotage the whole process,
both by probably forcing us to react and perhaps restore the statue to its plinth,
but also making it harder to shift the attitudes of those who are opposed to the removal and who were,
at least to some extent, consoled by the fact that there was a process of consultation and due process taking place in many fora,
just by the way that boards that you see then report that would put up to invite people to express their views and share their opinions.
Although most of that happened online through an online forum in many fora, including Senate, convocation and council.
It was clear at the start of each debate that not only reviews much divided,
but in most cases I expected the majority to be opposed to the removal of the statue.
And yet, by the end of those debates, the arguments in favour of removal, often most persuasively presented by the student representatives,
prevailed and there was almost unanimous support for the removing a statue.
That was the one exception to that was, of course, the alumni group.
But when they haven't got time for the details, what were the main?
What were the main compelling arguments in favour of removing the statue?
I don't think it's necessary to elaborate roads as problematic values,
and these these have been widely covered, and few still think that is Virtues operator's licence.
But more importantly, we should be clear that in spite of this,
the argument that won the day and that achieved consensus was not that the statue should be destroyed and nor that it should be,
or that it should not be accessible to the public in a public place.
In my view, there were very few people. There are very few people there were that think that another statue of Cecil Rhodes,
which is in the company gardens next to Parliament, should be removed.
The argument has been entirely about the location of the statue on the U.S. campus and the symbolism of that location.
That's the picture. That's the picture of the campus from from afar.
And if this works didn't work well just to be the case, that is that.
So. The statue is over there in the centre, and it's in this sort of amphitheatre, the focal point of the of the campus.
The statue is, to all intents and purposes, the only statue of its kind on the campus,
an imposing grand statue of an individual signifying veneration and the instalment of his values and achievements.
The location in pride of place on jemmy steps at the focal points of the magnificently
built landscape of the upper campus communicated that Rhodes was emblematic of the city,
thus signalling much more about the city than it did about drugs.
It presented him as a founder and the hero. While he did donate, the land promised investors votes.
He was born a quarter of a century after Yeasty was founded, so he said he wasn't the founder,
and he died a quarter of a century before he moved on to the land that he bequeathed, which had bequeathed specifically for his team.
Anyway, so and those two arguments were not strong arguments, but the main thing was that it was saying something about the university's values.
Thirdly, the proposal to remove the statue from its current location was certainly not an attempt to airbrush Rhodes out of his history,
as some were reclaiming.
For one, historical memory does not simply depend on or require retaining statues of the old without relocation or contextualisation.
Moreover, the plants that was that remains A. Nairobi contextualised with the story of the statue that was once upon it and why it was removed.
Arguably as interesting an account of history as that offered by the statue in the past.
Firstly, removing the road statue from its central location in the city was an important symbolic
gesture of a decisive rupture with the past because it signalled that as a community,
we recognised how divisive its presence had become.
The process of mobilising the overwhelming majority of the campus to support taking the statue down and the event itself.
And you see here a picture of it and what it is not as clear, but I'm sure you can still see that was a hugely multiracial group.
This was not a protest in the end, supported primarily by black students and staff.
It won support across the campus. This was a very celebratory activity and event.
The process of mobilising this majority in and and many different groups on the campus
to support us was itself symbolic and signalled a change in attitudes on the campus.
The removal was followed by the establishment of task teams to look at symbols
and statues across the university and another to look at the names of buildings.
Whereas in the past, as I mentioned,
new names reflecting transformations were only allocated to buildings that had not been formally named before the task.
Torstein was not empowered to solicit views on names that should be removed from buildings.
The renaming of Jenison Hall, which had been part funded by the friends of Jemison after his death,
again raised the issue of under what circumstances can one change names that are
created by people no longer around to grant permission or just speak to change?
And what does this say for other donors? Many opposed the renaming, but I believe it will contribute to a greater sense of inclusiveness.
Don't have time to talk in more detail about that. But I think it has a whole lot of interesting stories associated with that itself.
Incidentally, the hashtag RMF movement triggered a re-examination not only of our colonial legacy in South Africa,
but also around the world and particularly in the USA,
on campuses where historically oppressed minorities are now achieving a critical mass, empowering them to find their voices.
Some of the campaigns have been waged to make the alienating institutional cultures more inclusive.
Heritage symbols, names and statues of each challenged and the invisibility of those who suffered,
resisted and overcame race based or slavery based systems of power is being highlighted.
So, for example, Harvard Law School decided in 2016 that its crest should be replaced because it included the coat of arms of Isaac Royal Junior,
a cruel slave owner who had endowed a nest egg for the Harvard Law School in the 1780s.
Incidentally, that campaign also had the same moniker hashtag on an almost full.
Yale University named Calhoun College renamed Calhoun College,
one of the residential colleges replacing the name of an alumnus remembered as an advocate of slavery at the University of North Carolina.
The officials renamed the hall that had honoured leader of the Ku Klux Klan at Princeton University
that chose not to remove the name of Woodrow Wilson as protesters had demanded that they.
But they pledged to be transparent about his failings, such as Trump, such as his support for segregation.
Similar campaigns and outcomes are taking place on numerous campuses across the United States, and as you all know,
there was a similar campaign, although unsuccessful, to remove the Rhodes statue from Oriel College.
So that was the first example in the bananas it throws up first about what to do,
the substance of the issue and the process issues and the role of of of an executive in that, as really indicated in looking at the artworks now,
as already indicated, many black students and staff experience the aggregate of artworks and portraits that look
back at them from the university's walls as communicating a message about racial hierarchies.
And it makes them and and and it makes them feel that they, as individuals and their cultures and histories, are not valued or respected.
The debates about how to deal with this began in 2015 as part of the hashtag R-Minn. and continued within the task teams.
Yet in February 2016, amidst a protest about insufficient accommodation for students who were attending at the start of the academic year,
the protest suddenly escalated and protesters invaded neighbouring buildings,
took down portraits and paintings and set them alight in the Central University Plaza.
Ironically, amongst the paintings burned were a collection.
The one on top of that part is one of them. We're a collection of paintings by Justis first black fine arts graduate,
which speaks to the ignorance of the protesters about what they were targeting or whose portraits for being torched.
But it also speaks to the point that it was less about the individual artworks and more about the Agric. aggregate effect,
in a sense, the curation of the artworks. The university says you can return, as you would expect, was in a state of shock following this protest,
both from the image of the bonfire of the paintings and its connotations of fundamentalism,
anti-intellectualism, ethnic purification, but also because of the anger that it apparently revealed.
There was no official policy, you DCT on the public, on the public curation of artworks.
The university has an impressive art collection, but no dedicated gallery, so the artworks are displayed throughout the campus.
We were caught off guard and had to react quickly.
The issue immediately proved controversial and intensely divisive for entirely understandable reasons.
The works of Art Committee quickly identified about 70 artworks on display in public spaces that
were likely to be considered offensive by some black students and remove them for safekeeping.
That being the first responsibility of the committee to protect and safeguard the university's art collection.
This not surprisingly generated an enormous global backlash against the university's authorities.
That unit that you see was censoring art simply because it was considered offensive by one to one particular group.
Various artists whose works were removed or cabinet expressed their dismay at the university's handling of the issue.
They far too many issues and debates on the whole handling of the artworks controversy to cover here.
So I want to focus on one particular artwork around which there has been much controversy to illustrate just some of the dilemmas.
This is the sculpture of Sara Bachmann. Sara Bachmann was born in the 1770s.
She was a South African Khoi woman who, due to her large buttocks, was exhibited as a freak show attraction in 19th century Europe.
As you see from the sketch, she was exhibited under the name Hottentot Venus in 1810.
She went to England with her in class as she'd been selected, of course,
in 1810 at the age of about 35, and she went to England with her employer and an English doctor.
And just incidentally, her employer himself was a freed black slave.
The sort they sought the employer and the doctor to show her for many on the London stage in 1814.
She was both brought to Paris and sold to an animal trainer who made her amuse onlookers.
Bachmann lived in poverty and died in Paris about 18 months later.
After her death, the professor of comparative anatomy dissected her body and displayed her remains for more than a century and a half.
Visitors to the Museum of Man in Paris could view her brain, skeleton and genitalia, as well as a plaster cast of her body.
Her remains were finally returned after some to ing and fro ing returned to South Africa in 2002.
As you enter the University Library, you pass the sculpture of Sarah Bachmann made of,
well, the well, the tools and bicycle parts brutish, crude and powerful.
She stands life-size naked, but her exaggerated buttocks.
You might well think that the artist was caricaturing her sexuality.
If you did not know what she really looked like,
and especially if you did not know that the sculptor Willie Bester is black and claimed some quick white ancestry,
he is, of course, bemoaning the cruelty shown to Bachmann.
But if, like most passes by, you don't pay attention to the explanatory plaque next to the sculpture,
you might think at worst that this is institutional racism and sexism.
Bradford you seeing the very humiliation that Sara Bachman experienced over two centuries before in Europe?
At best, it may be viewed as reflecting an unquestioning indifference of the institution to whether our students,
particularly women, students and especially those of quickly origin with similar physiognomy experience,
embarrassment or shame through her naked presence in the entrance to the library with thousands of students posture every day over the next two years,
the sculpted body of Sara Bachmann became a site of struggle.
Some women put robes on the sculpture to cover its nakedness.
Others occasionally removed the robes,
surreptitiously provoking protests at the disrobing how you see the sculpture disrobed again and a protest taking place in front of it.
But within a short time again, the sculpture was usually robed.
Various published articles accuse the authorities, quote unquote, which means me and my colleagues, the authorities, of covering the statue.
But actually, we did nothing of the sort because we just didn't know what to do.
I suppose you could say that we, the authorities, turned a blind eye to the covering in the sense that we did not remove the sculpture
and we also did not investigate or prosecute those covering it up for vandalism.
There were strategic and principle reasons for not doing us. We were concerned it would have led to US vandalism, such as painting the sculpture.
But more importantly, we decided instead to let the debate play out on the campus and for the sculpture to be the focus of thinking about race,
gender representation, the dignity of the subject and the way it made some views feel.
So while for some, such as the distinguished photographer David Goldman, who was abhorred by the covering and our failure to act against it so,
so offended was see that he removed his collection of photographs, which he had given to use YouTube to keep interest and took them away.
But people like to recall that accused us of creating a climate in which quote,
it is impossible to deal with the past in the light of the erosion of evidence.
For me, at least, the covering up led to far more debates about the past.
For more insight into the history of Bachmann for Greeks are coming to terms with the legacy that had ever happened before.
In all the years the sculpture had stood there without magazine covers.
The ongoing covering was an exercise in multicultural education.
How some people feel today when confronted with those reminders and how an understanding on the parts of
diverse cultural groups about the perception of sculpture as a repetition of the original humiliation.
Indeed, prior to the covering, most people passing the sculpture did not even know who it represented and what statement it was making.
But there were many whose views on deep respect who didn't agree with me, often passionately so.
A number of conversations were held with the artist himself, the investor who is deeply upset by the covering up.
He eventually initiated a legal suit against the university,
demanding that the sculpture be displayed uncovered on the grounds of restricting his artistic freedom,
but causing the artwork to be presented and viewed in ways that were contrary to his intention.
A view that an artist has the right to control the originality and authenticity of their work, even when they no longer own it.
Rather than. Rather than contesting this,
we agreed to move the sculpture to a gallery venue as opposed to public space
where it could be displayed alongside and contextualised and better protected.
But in particular, it could be displayed alongside photographs, full size photographs of the sculpture,
as it had been rutted with comments on why people had rode it and destroyed the public.
Dialogue was held, focussing on the surrebuttal and sculpture, seeking more input from the university community.
The recommendations from the task team the recommendation from the task team is to
differentiate between public spaces and private gallery spaces in the public spaces.
People have no choice about what they view, and it is much harder to contextualise the art.
With explanations and related artworks in gallery spaces, people can choose whether they wish to view the specific artworks or not,
and when they do, the worst can be explained and placed in context.
The most controversial works of art, then would be displayed in galleries or should be,
and no art should be removed altogether or censored should be hidden away or censored.
The third encounter is around different cultural practises.
The story of the sheep I received a call one afternoon in 2015 from local races from
a local resident who lived opposite a university building known as Avenue Home.
Everyone had been occupied by the forest protesters for many months.
It is about a kilometre away from the main university in a quasi residential area.
The neighbours reported that there was a sheep in the avenue whole yard tethered to a sheep,
and I presume that the sheep was about to be slaughtered in the yard. They were outraged and demanded that the university do something to prevent it.
The students confirmed that they intended to hold a celebration or rally in the garden,
and he intended to slaughter the sheep as a ritual cleansing and part of a celebration.
They argued that this was the culture that decolonising the university meant
respecting the traditions and not imposing our Western sensitivities on them,
but that becoming a more inclusive space space meant creating space for them to slaughter animals.
Richard. Our initial reaction was to try to stop the slaughter.
We first looked to the municipal bylaws and called them instead to show the
killing of animals to eat or for other purposes must be restricted to abattoirs.
Not so. It appears the laws make provision for people to kill animals on their own private property.
But it sounds to me as follows the landlord of the private property has to give permission.
In this case, the private landlord was the university so he could not pass the buck to another authority, after all, but further research.
We also learnt that ritual slaughter has been recognised by the Commission on the Rights of Culture and
Religion as a fundamental part of the culture of some groups in South Africa and essential to their identity.
There are also laws for the protection of animals against cruelty,
but on cruelty is defined as any killing of animals, and most of us sanction that by virtue of eating meat.
It cannot be applied selectively in a case such as this.
The affirmation by the students that they had an experienced person to do the act would have made
singling out these slaughters from the many others that do indeed happen all over the country,
especially in rural areas. Every day would have made this a targeted political action were the other grounds for disciplinary action.
Not surprisingly, the university itself had no rules against slaughtering animals on campus,
so any disciplinary rules available to us would have been to charge students for bringing the university into disrepute.
But that would indeed be playing into their hands, acknowledging that the value system that should prevail on campus but not elsewhere in society
should be that of the white community because its traditional sensitivity to ritual slaughter.
Of course, this was a deliberate provocation on the class of the students and the statement that they were
claiming that their identity not hiding it or submitting to colonial norms and sensitivities.
This, as I've said they had argued, was what was required of an inclusive campus culture.
The slaughter and celebration went ahead, hit the animal skin, was hung up to dry, attracting flies and generating false smells,
generating further across from various constituencies and demands that the university should prevent future slaughters and discipline those involved.
We did neither, but those decisions were controversial and unpopular with the mainstream of the university staff.
Many students, alumni and some critics, especially those middle class white communities of Cape Town from memory, draw many students.
In their view, this was a sign that the university was becoming quote-unquote.
A Third World university used in the pejorative sense of standards are declining.
This is the this is the beginning of the end. We also did not react to your letter.
In another, she brought the time onto the campus and slaughtered one evening on the balcony of the student union building on Steve Biko,
voting largely as an act of provocation.
These X's responses to play down ignore it, other than ensuring the skin was quickly removed and the area cleaned up.
These are the challenges to the cultural norms and values of the university,
which have a lot which had been largely the norms of white culture and the legacy of colonial culture.
But by now, there are also other sets of values and priorities,
such as those who support animal rights that had ethical obligations, ethical objections to the slaughter.
And in time, I think the university will have to develop its own set of rules for for various customary and cultural practises,
ritual slaughter amongst them. Curricula and decolonising charisma.
Curriculum reform is probably the most contested and complex area of decolonisation debates.
I'm not going to address the substance of this highly contested field. Frankly, I'm not well enough informed to do so.
Other than perhaps in my own field of medicine and health, rather,
I want to highlight the dilemmas it poses for university executives and leadership when a group of black academics approached me.
They're known as the Black Academic Caucus to discuss the call for decolonising the curriculum.
The highlights is that this was something that had been on the university's agenda for years, with little evident shift.
They argued that this was in part a lack of commitment from the university executive to see change and be more directive, for example,
by incentivising academics through reward or promotion systems to change their curricula or teaching practises in a particular direction.
They asserted that the Teaching and learning committee, which is elected by Senate,
was would never support these sorts decolonising curriculum because the Senate
was still majority white and not persuaded of the decolonisation arguments,
let alone committed to them, and would never drive the decolonisation agenda and that such direction was needed from the executive.
They argued that a directive was required from the vice chancellor.
That would require each department to engage with what decolonisation would mean in their respective fields.
The dilemma is that a fundamental value the fundamental values of academic freedom
grants lecturers the right to teach subjects and disciplines the way they deem fit
is not usually the role of the university executive vice chancellors to get involved
or be directive about reading this balance of content or epistemic frameworks.
Even the Senate would not prescribe individual individual disciplines how they should be taught,
and Senate would rightly be jealous about its authority to appoint the members of committees that
oversee the educational processes and critical of a vice chancellor who threatens to usurp that role.
The defence of such an approach to academic freedom is as important in protecting academics
from government interference and political interference as it is from commercial interference,
interference by donors and by many generalist university leaders.
So how, if at all, should a university to respond to the call for decolonising curricula or promoting any other curriculum or teaching reform?
It seems to me that some leadership was required because the group was quite right that there was no
initiative and very little initiative coming from senator and representative in the state in this regard.
And you see context, most Senate members who are, by definition,
professors and have have studied their PhDs in universities in the in the colonial global north,
have very close ties to those universities and colleagues and very limited links to southern universities and certainly to African universities.
The alternative perspectives are much more likely to be found amongst younger scholars and black scholars.
My solution my best way of balancing these pressures was to agree to formalise a curriculum change working group,
which reported to me, but which would be black led and black majority membership.
But it was an understanding that all its meetings would be open to all who wish to attend and that it would not replace the formal Senate structures,
but would feed any recommendations it had it came up with each of those structures.
The purpose was to provide some resources that the group could themselves develop a clearer vision of what
decolonisation would mean in different disciplines and footnotes and different modes of teaching and assessment,
and to back them to give them the authority of my office in encouraging departments to hold workshops with the script in
order to try and nudge the thinking of academics and students in those departments to challenge their received paradigms.
But it was.
I did have to make it clear that ultimately the change had to be earned by the experts in the disciplines themselves to create and change within.
Group has completed its work over 18 months with patchy and I think in the end, rather limited success.
Thus far, the success thus far generating a mixture of controversial controversial reactions and disinterest.
But it remains a dilemma for university leadership. How to fulfil what is probably the most important line in our job description,
which is that we are supposed to provide academic leadership while respecting the academic freedom of individual academics.
So to wrap up the examples and there are more many more where these came from, I hope make some of the following points.
The issues are complex for a variety of reasons. They reflect deeply divergent practises, values and sensitivities of different cultural groups,
different histories and different and different power relations to the establishment.
Some of these differences are about substantive issues such as and that's due to monuments.
The perspective on particular historical leaders.
The response to particular artworks individually or in aggregate cultural practises such as ritual slaughter.
The balance between curricular content and epistemology approaches that are that dominate the globalised
academic world versus those that are determined much more heavily by local histories and cultures.
Those are substantial differences over the substantive issues,
and there are also differences over process and governance issues and what counts as a compelling argument in a and in particular,
where their inclusiveness. This, I think, is the crux of it,
where their inclusiveness requires simply that nothing in the institutional environment should cause offence to anyone,
or if one of the alternatives that one accepts that in an increasingly diverse community.
There were many. There will be many elements that some or other group will take offence.
That and that is and that it is not appropriate to find the lowest common denominator.
There has to be that in this song.
This argument has to be some other criterion other than defensiveness or sensitivity around which we still need to build consensus.
But for now, as leaders of these institutions who have to make day-to-day decisions without consensus guidelines on what criteria should be used.
These remain taxing dilemmas. The examples I have shared share a common theme,
namely the challenge to the historic historical approach to transformation for the least in South Africa.
The approach to transformation in the decades before RhodesMustFall is argued by some surreptitiously
to maintain the status quo against which the alternative of decolonisation has to be championed.
The former transformation, it is argued, is a project of assimilation.
Tonight, the newcomers to the institution, more like us and us,
means people like me to change them so they would fit in with the dominant traditional culture of the university.
It is about reconciliation, redress, affirmative action to achieve equity,
academic support programmes to counter the effects of screening deficits and ultimately the
incorporation of those previously disadvantaged into the economic and power structures of society.
By contrast, decolonisation are and problematic.
Conception holds an essential critique of the failure to challenge the validity of the old hegemonic cultural norms.
Decolonisation, decolonisation of institutional culture.
Calls for change in identity for the creation of a new culture that is more balanced and more balanced.
Mixture of the diversity of the communities that make it up.
At least recognising that we appropriate value rising a variety of cultures, histories, languages, value systems and ways of seeing the world.
And finally, for the institutional culture to change, it has to be much more than the symbols on the walls, the symbols,
the artworks on the walls and the curricula has to be an internal individual willingness to interrogate our own value systems,
prejudices and blind spots and inherent assumptions about ourselves,
our histories and cultures and convictions that are tied up with our identity, but also about the other.
If we can do that, then maybe just in the form of Rhodes can begin to signify the re-emergence of the emergence
of a more inclusive institutional environments and institutions all over the world.
Thanks.