The statue, the poo and the university

On statues.  I am pleased we don’t really live in an age of statues; these generally are from a past age where big men were made bigger and people presumably were impressed.  So the statues amongst us are generally relics from the past, with some exceptions.  So we are talking here about relics from the past, and indeed about the past.  We have a painful past.  If anything I am pleased that this debate reminds us that the pain was not only from the apartheid era, but stretches long before that in the way that colonialism divided up who could own land and who could not.  In this regard the figure of Cecil John Rhodes is pertinent.  Rhodes was a businessman, an unscrupulous one, who made effective use of political patronage to further his business interests.  In modern day terms he was corrupt.  But he also thought enough about his legacy to throw some ill-gotten gains in a philanthropic direction, most notably in the establishment of the Rhodes scholarships and in the donation of land for the new UCT campus on the slopes of Table Mountain.  In 2015, what does the presence of this statue mean for the university?  For me to date it has simply been a relic of the past and part of the neo-classical look of this campus built in the 1920s.  Now it has become a flashpoint for something else and we need to talk about that something else.  Then we can come back to the statue and what to do with it.

The real issue is about the university in 2015.  A university is not actually a collection of buildings (with or without statues), it is a collection of people come together for a common purpose, around learning (around the dissemination of knowledge we already have, and around the exploring of that still needed).  This is a real privilege and in our society it is a small group of people who get that privilege.  But it is a hard task, to learn is to get your ignorance exposed, and your very person stretched.  You can only put yourself to this task in place which is safe to do so.  Thus, at the same time the university offers challenge it needs to offer solidarity[1].  What does this mean in South Africa in 2015?  We come from a society where the actions of Rhodes and his ilk still live with us in terms of who has access to what, most importantly in terms of who gets access to knowledge and to the privilege of a higher education.  When we come together to learn this society comes with us too.  It is the starting point for our most important learnings, but it is also a potential constraint on that learning.  If staff and students in the university do not feel that they are legitimately part of that community, that their voices can be heard, and that their struggles can be held, then we cannot really learn.  This, I think, is what the statue debate is really about.  Now there are maybe some of us who feel that this was all neatly stated in about 1985 amidst the teargas, and that nowadays UCT unproblematically continues to carry this flag.  That is unfortunately a naïve take on the university.  It will never be a comfortable place, the notion of ‘transformation’ is a university business that can never be complete because these are not simple questions.  The only issue is whether the community is a safe space, where difficult questions can be entertained, and where staff and students can feel they belong.  I think what we are hearing is that we are far from offering belonging and safety to all our members.

Let’s get the issue of poo out of the way.  Throwing poo on campus is a form of vandalism.  Obviously as a community we have to have sanctions for that and I don’t think anyone would expect the university not to discipline such actions.  In 2015 in Cape Town throwing poo is of course a political action too.  In that regard we should not think that the campus will be immune from politics.  But let’s also remember that politics, while an important space in a democracy, has slightly different modes of functioning to those we would like to foster in the university.  Let’s take the political calls as an alert to issues we might have been blind to, but let’s not think we are limited to tackling them in political ways only.

So to get back to the statue.  I am completely open to a university community having robust deliberations on the symbols that are on its campus, and potentially to rethinking how some of these function and indeed their very presence.  In this regard there would be a few options at hand and here I think of how the Iziko museum went through such a complex process of thinking through the contemporary relevance of its San dioramas (which nowadays have a critical recontextualisation at play alongside them; in my view a more productive option than simply moving them to the basement).  So a statue could certainly be moved (most probably not a cheap exercise) or it could have an artistic reworking; am thinking how someone like Brett Murray would relish such a challenge.  So let’s put our minds to it, as we do in a university.  I have to admit here that I find the baying crowd a little bit alarming.  I might have missed something but I found the SRC’s issuing of an ‘ultimatum’ to the university just days after what appeared to be the first public student meeting on the matter, to be a little bit premature.  The university community is made of staff, students, and alumni.  We of course all have the ability to issue ultimatums when we feel that some part of the university is not listening to us, but that doesn’t feel right as a first move.  Maybe what we are hearing here is a frustration from prior engagements, a sense of not being heard?  I would like to hear more.

So to those who say, don’t UCT students have anything better to worry about, I say, this is not just about a statue.  This is about our past and our present, it is about how the pain of the past reaches into the present.  It is about how a university can offer both challenge and solidarity to all its members.  It is an important conversation.

[1] Mann, S. J. (2007). Study, power and the university. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Coda

This afternoon I attended a meeting that the university had set up a while ago to discuss heritage, symbols, etc.  You have most probably by now read about this meeting in the press.  The SRC president and his entourage pulled what felt like a Julius stunt.  They insisted that the SRC president speak first, and then they left en masse. The general view of the meeting hereafter was a diagnosis that the university management has lost credibility with the SRC, and needs urgently to work to redress that.  The meeting itself was cancelled.

All I can say is that we are in a bad way.  Partly I feel that this has been a long time coming (see my blogpost from last year “Racism on the Hill?”).  For too long it we have exhibited a defensive approach on real transformation questions.  We need a much more active engagement.  But I fear that this brand of student politics is going to afford that.  I certainly grant them their right to protest and I think we need to hear these voices stridently in our ears .  But I am not convinced that this particular group is really interested in any sort of dialogue at all.  It feels like sheer political stuntmaking.  Great for the building of future political careers but not likely to deepen the university community.   It is going to take extraordinary progressive leadership on both sides to get us out of this impasse and I will be watching closely.  I still think this is the most important conversation we need to have.