Xolela Mangcu
21 August 2008
column
Johannesburg — WHAT is going on at my alma mater, Wits University? I read with shock what Anton Harber had to say about transformation on these pages yesterday.
His column starts with a critique of L'Oreal "for lightening the skins of some of their models". He then extends this to how the Chinese misled the world by digitising the fireworks display at the Olympics. "I suspect the Chinese are bewildered at the fuss. These opening ceremonies are all artifice and spectacle."
He concludes by suggesting SA should try similar artifice at the 2010 Soccer World Cup: "For those foolish enough to go to the stadium, we could put up a giant screen. And maybe we could even create an animated version of our team winning and run that on a parallel channel during the finals. And everyone - the players, the coach, the managers, all the fans - could be black. It's called transformation."
There have now been a series of newspaper articles out of Wits mocking transformation at the university but the insensitivity of such a generalisation about black people and transformation is in bad taste.
In essence, Harber argues through his example that we can fool the world by using technology to paint an illusory picture of black excellence and give it political credibility by calling it transformation. Now it is quite possible that Harber did not intend it that way but his example feeds into pre-existing perceptions about the lowering of standards. The stereotypical black team in his example is an undifferentiated mass -- the players, the coach, the managers and the fans are all part of the illusory pretence at excellence. There are no good people here.
I am sure there are problems with the implementation of transformation in our universities and there would be no point putting our heads in the sand about such problems. But the idea that transformation is an illusion of black excellence that can be sustained only through theatricality violates the basics of scholarship -- to interrogate each case on its merits and provide empirical evidence for one's argument.
It is the generalisation that galls me. Maybe I am singing for my supper here but I am quite impressed with the University of Johannesburg's R30m initiative to encourage black PhDs to become researchers and academics. In the process, vice-chancellor Ihron Rensburg has thrown down the gauntlet to other universities to do the same.
Rensburg's initiative is similar to something I suggested upon my return from the US in 1999, after a decade of study at Cornell, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , the Rockefeller Foundation and Harvard. I argued that we needed to blow the real cover of mediocrity that is often presented as normality in the white "knowledge-ideas complex" at our universities: "what we need is a proactive effort to train the country's future thinkers, as Asian governments do when they send their students to places like the US's Massachusetts Institute of Technology.... This country needs to develop a corps of young leaders and thinkers who will ... start rebuilding this place -- with or without the naysayers."
But Rensburg would be wrong if he thinks the money would be sufficient to overcome racial stereotypes in the white academy. The academy also needs a change in consciousness that starts with the words of Steve Biko: "I am against the intellectual arrogance of white people that makes them believe that white leadership is a sine qua non in this country and that whites are the divinely appointed pace-setters in progress."
Mangcu is convener of the Platform for Public Deliberation at the University of Johannesburg and the author of To the Brink: The State of Democracy in South Africa.
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I asure you it is the sensitivities of most people with a lesser degree of mellanin in their skins,that have been trampled all over for some time now,and more and more viscous with each passing year,perhaps to much.