Big Read: In the age of the cadre, transformation needs rethinking

Thuli Madonsela is a hero in our family, an inspiration to my feminist daughters and nieces. Alongside our Archbishop Tutu blooming redder than an EFF beret ever would, we have a place reserved for the rose we know is somewhere out there named after her.

So we were all greatly disappointed when she responded to the latest scandal from the town that is the gift that never stops giving to the news cycle, Stellenbosch, with some of the nuttiest arguments presented in a while. When assessing Stellenbosch University (SU) rector Wim de Villiers’s alleged nepotism in helping a relative to jump the queue for medical school, one should distinguish between family and relatives, she averred. Helping one is OK, the other not.

In a similar vein was the successful putsch by 1,559 members of the 230,000-strong convocation against its executive, who very aggressively campaigned for De Villiers’ resignation, also for other transgressions, such as meeting secretively with chancellor Edwin Cameron, when he was still a judge sitting on a matter in which the university was a respondent. Instead, the convocation’s executive was voted out for bringing the university into disrepute.

Occasion for the LOL triple emoji? As ever in the town with its multiple murders and stuttering soccer team, things are complicated. This was but one skirmish in a bigger battle, some would say a war, over what one side calls language, and the other transformation. And as so often happens in the ivory towers academia, the two are semaphoring right past each other: the taalstryders believe De Villiers is out to kill off Afrikaans, while the transformers say the taalstryders are really fighting for white privilege.

In battle, truth is the first casualty, again demonstrated by Madonsela’s pronouncements. She says the taalstryders want to make the university Afrikaans and white again, which is simply not the case. There is a vast difference between the parallel-medium ideal represented in the name of their movement, Gelyke Kanse, and an Afrikaans-only university. Likewise, their cause cannot be called apartheid revanchist when it has several black members, nor even right-wing with supporters such as Breyten Breytenbach, JM Coetzee, Marlene van Niekerk or Mahmood Mamdani and various other academics in the rest of Africa who admire the rise of Afrikaans.

The taalstryders believe De Villiers is out to kill off Afrikaans, while the transformers say the taalstryders are really fighting for white privilege.

What is true is that the convocation was led by Jan Heunis, an establishment Afrikaner whose father was PW Botha right-hand man Chris Heunis, and who as a successful advocate favours an irascible, adversarial style of up-your-nose challenges and walkouts from meetings. Many of the rebels who voted him out are taalstryders themselves and privately call for De Villiers’s resignation, or at least disciplinary action, but detest what they see as National Party-style kragdadigheid and manipulative bad faith by Heunis and Co.

At this stage I have to confess that I have skin in the game. Wearing my hat as a Stellenbosch-born writer, I support Gelyke Kanse, but with a severe case of cognitive dissonance, since many of its detractors are friends or academics whose general inclinations are similar to mine. Also, the koeël is deur die kerk, Gelyke Kanse has lost long ago. Operationally SU is an English-language university with Afrikaans embellishments, and a good one at that, by all accounts well run by De Villiers & Co. And Madonsela can join the flat-earth society; that rose will one day still adorn our garden.

Latterly my discomfort has come to centre on “transformation”, the fallback concept in almost all utterances by Madonsela and the corrective collective. What can it still mean in the age of state collapse due to cadre deployment, the most formidable opponent of which, bar the Zondo commission, was the selfsame Madonsela? When supposedly more transformed universities are wracked by corruption, feuding staff and campus violence?

I once needled my friend Rehana Rossouw saying, “ag man, Stellenbosch will always be white”. She got very cross, and laid into me about Kayamandi spilling over into the town hall one day, until I said: “I am referring to the whitewashed buildings, no matter who is in them, they will never get painted any other colour because it is tradition stretching back 300 years.”

I cite my lame attempt at humour in the later context of the Polokwane Literary Festival in which I took part, where I was asked about my support for Gelyke Kanse. Answering that I would like to see universities with focuses on all local languages, not only Afrikaans, a young woman in the audience said Afrikaans should be eradicated and then English, to be replaced by Swahili. I politely asked which of the three forms of Swahili, and how did she propose Afrikaans and English be eradicated, because the only way would be to kill all its speakers.

I also explained that an Afrikaans SU should not be a sop to Afrikanerdom, of which I have been a vociferous critic, quite the opposite, its general brief should be to reconnect the language with its roots as a black language created by slaves, refugees and the flotsam and jetsam of a cosmopolitan Cape. Whereupon the organiser of the festival jumped up and shouted: “Afrikaans can never be a black language.” 

The point to these anecdotes is firstly the enormous ignorance that exists about Afrikaans beyond the Fish and Orange rivers, who only see it in terms of the 1976 Soweto uprising. And second, that absolute transformation can only be achieved by erasing all links to the past, including deeply entrenched culture. Reasoning backwards from this reductio ad absurdum argument, where should transformation stop before it causes counterproductive damage? Does it still make sense if it is not absolute?

Surely we are now at the point where, with the phrase “failed state” being bandied about from pulpit to pit toilet, we should be reviewing the broad concept itself? And yet, as the nepotism scandal revealed, at Stellenbosch the call is for more transformation, instead of what one would expect from academics: proper research and theorising.

Instead we are presented with more regressive moves similar to Madonsela’s distortions. Before the nepotism scandal there were the findings of the Human Rights Council on complaints over private mother tongue conversations being forbidden in favour of English at two residences. When a panel found this to be true, but declined to fully present the evidence, in order to protect the teenage complainants as required by law, a gallery of public intellectuals fell over their feet to denigrate the council and dismiss its work.

Hidden by the furore was a creative suggestion by the panel, that another concept central to transformation be rethought, since it is leading to counterproductive outcomes: that of inclusivity. Pursue inclusivity too zealously and exclusion can be the result. It is a brilliant idea. Just imagine what could come out of a conference on the many philosophers, from Aristotle to Jacques Derrida, who theorised against and for it, or a moot court in the law faculty where students have to argue both cases, or a comparative literature exercise looking at Ovid and Kafka.

Inclusivity and exclusivity are two sides of the same coin. Universities are by nature exclusive organisations, so trying to make them inclusive necessarily entails tampering with their exclusivities. This in turn can open the door to that all-pervasive SA way of life: corruption, which is what was actually demonstrated by the De Villiers nepotism affair. Rapport columnist Pieter Malan, in speculating about the motivation behind inserting a relative ahead of someone else in the queue, implied that a whole different ethics can be at work.

The affair is being investigated by a special panel, and the talk is that it is taking so long to produce a report because it has stumbled upon a whole culture of nepotism at the university. In terms of Malan’s argument, staffers may see it as part of a correction of a deeply unfair state of affairs. While they are paying lip service to transformation and inclusivity their household consciences are pricking them to make things right at least in those cases where their intimate knowledge of a candidate through familial ties proves the injustice of the exclusion being perpetrated.

SU academics tell me the student body exists of one demographic only, rich kids. Since the turn of the century, as parents began baulking at the rise of corrective race theories accompanied by persistent campus turmoil, SU was inundated by pupils from private schools in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. They were little bothered by the mostly Afrikaans instruction then, believing it would rather broaden their kids’ minds.

My kids too went to a quasi-private school and such an education is the best there is in SA. But it also comes with those attitudes of class superiority inherited from English’s aristocratic provenance that so characterise moneyed Anglo-Saxon education across the world. These are expressed in a general disdain for local cultures that can be traced back to the notorious Macauley Minute on Indian education of 1835, which taught that English cannot be beaten as summum bonum of human civilisation because its roots go several empires back to Roman and Greek times. Private school education does not come with much appreciation for black Afrikaans culture.

I believe it would be unlikely that the university would have instructed student leaders to ban non-English during private conversations. Rather, based on the several instances when I had been upbraided by youngsters for writing in Afrikaans, they were simply expressing the Anglocentric attitudes of these schools. If I am right, then university programmes extolling the richness of Afrikaans culture, especially its black and Indonesian roots, might do the rich kids a world of good.

Whatever the case, black African privilege complementing the white is what you see in the conspicuous consumption in dad’s hand-me-down Eskom beemer on the way to $100 dinners in “Stellies”, the moniker that has replaced “Maties” (which pronounced the English way is too reminiscent of animal sex, one student quipped).

Let’s not be hypocritical, you reading this piece and I are part of this elite, and it is a cosy and rewarding life. This is where we cross the racial divides daily, chatting with Chinese/German/Malawian neighbours, or watching The Wire alongside Japanese manga, or listening to the African American scholar John McWhorter’s podcasts on the origins of language.

But make no mistake, at SU the Afrikaner elite machine of the past has become the elite machine for the new apartheid in SA, separating those who have sufficient proper English from those who don’t and who live in SA’s hundreds of shack cities. Inclusivity breeds further exclusion when you apply that litmus test used in unravelling graft: who benefits. Certainly among those are the academics fearing exclusion from the next round of “transformation” when they will need all the citations in English they can clock up on their CVs to find new jobs abroad.

Cementing the status quo even more, from a global perspective, is what De Villiers boasts about, not without justification: the amounts of funding he and his team have extracted from donors abroad. Nowadays especially English-language universities have become quasi-commercialised, and companies investing in them do so with a different set of values in mind, those of competitiveness and return on that investment.

In the old days gold was extracted from SA by the suction pump that was the colonial and postcolonial economy. Nowadays, with our gold mines near depleted, what little remains for the rest of the world to take includes — yes, that word — its financial and managerial products, which are highly regarded from Guangzhou to Wyoming.

Even more sought-after are black members of the elite, to fulfil the needs of inclusivity dictated abroad by the new ESG reporting; indeed, the latest surveys show almost as many black parents see a better future for their kids abroad as whites. Which means more South Africans are set to be excluded from the services of those their tax rands are used to train: doctors, managers, engineers, nurses, linguists …

In a similar fashion we have to ask: what do we mean with transformation? It seems to me the answer can only be twofold: to shake off the discriminatory practices of the past, that is adopt a liberal society, or complete upheaval. We would be foolish to follow the latter path with the examples of Zimbabwe and our own momentous failures with cadres in charge.

But when we wish to adopt a liberal society, who judges when it has been achieved? One can venture it has to be the already transformed, but logically speaking that would rule out those who never needed to be transformed, which in SA turn out to be those formerly disadvantaged occupiers of the new moral high ground. Can they judge something they have not undergone themselves?

Other logical gaps open when you try to argue that certain members of the untransformed should be the arbiters precisely because of their status as victims of the untransformed. The most serious is that they would nevertheless be incapacitated to manage the process precisely because of that oppression. Another is that once the untransformed have been relieved of their power there is nothing to transform anymore.

Such paradoxes can be papered over by sloganeering a la Madonsela, but they find grievous practical expression in the further issue of distribution of the spoils of transformation. In the Western Cape the Constitutional Court had to rule that the provincial demographics have to be followed and not the national ones.

Despite this we have a situation where the conservative forces of Solidarity and AfriForum are called upon to fight transformation on behalf of liberal society in the form of the latest equity legislation, the Amended Employment Equity Bill, which is interpreted by many to mean that black Africans should get preference for jobs.

University of Western Cape lecturer Anastasia de Vries wrote movingly in Vrye Weekblad about the avalanche of TikTok movies and general despair among coloured students in response to the news, how a teacher threw aside a newspaper disgustedly, saying, “Die osse stap aan deur die stowwe, geduldig, gedienstig, gedweë, reguit terug apartheid toe. (The oxen are striding through the dust, patiently, dutifully, slavishly, straight back to apartheid.)”

Meanwhile, suffer the children. When it comes to cognitive dissonance, the greater crisis is often signalled when it is absent. At the same time that SU academics went full guns blazing for the Human Rights Council over its language ban findings, the now notorious Pirls findings on literacy came out. All the breast-beating and lamentation had one underlying assumption: that the shock discovery that grade 4s could not read for meaning meant reading in English.

It took the sober response of department of basic education researcher Nompumelelo Mohohlwane to show that among “African languages” (excluding Afrikaans) there was actually a considerable improvement (off a low base, she admits). This was the result of a drive since the 2010s to improve mother tongue instruction in the early school years. Yet so entrenched by the dogmas of transformation and inclusivity is the assumption that education has to be in English that she felt it necessary to spell out in her Daily Maverick article, that “our African languages are a strategic resource and not a hindrance to learning to read. Local and international research on this is clear.”

She added that much more needs to be invested in mother tongue education to continue with this upward curve and also far greater teacher training. This is where Afrikaans, the African creole language the government has classified as non-African until recently, is the model par excellence. It has garnered the admiration of the likes of Mamdani by establishing mother tongue universities as key to elevating poor people (albeit it poor whites) to eventually provide most of the engineers and others who built the modern SA.

Only when the STEM subjects are taught in a general mother tongue environment will teachers be sufficiently trained to in turn inculcate these subjects’ formidable mysteries in pupils.