University Education, Controversy and Democratic Citizenship [1st ed.] 9783030569846, 9783030569853

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University Education, Controversy and Democratic Citizenship Edited by Nuraan Davids · Yusef Waghid

University Education, Controversy and Democratic Citizenship

Nuraan Davids  •  Yusef Waghid Editors

University Education, Controversy and Democratic Citizenship

Editors Nuraan Davids Department of Education Policy Studies Stellenbosch University Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa

Yusef Waghid Department of Education Policy Studies Stellenbosch University Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa

ISBN 978-3-030-56984-6    ISBN 978-3-030-56985-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56985-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

As an emerging scholar who has delved into the trajectories of democratic peacebuilding and citizenship education and its pedagogies for the past eight years, I am privileged to offer a few comments on this excellent book. As an Egyptian-Canadian, I am also familiar with the politics and dynamics of the African continent, as well as that of relatively democratic western settler societies, in which democratic citizenship is still evolving in spite of its portrayal as a foundational backbone in their charters of human rights. While the notion of citizenship often implies conformity to the rule of law and a sense of patriotism and belonging, democratic citizenship questions the essence of the very laws that govern people in a particular setting. Hence, for citizenship to be democratic it has to be unsettling to enable people to examine their differences and learn to live together peacefully. University Education, Controversy and Democratic Citizenship explores democratic citizenship at the university as a higher education institution in the South African context. I find that every chapter in this book confirms a theory that democratic citizenship education encompasses four essential components: addressing conflictual issues, practising dialogue, recognizing diversity and building a pedagogical learning community. Starting with the Preface, Nuraan Davids and Yusef Waghid emphasize the indispensability of allowing students in higher education institutions to dig deeper into the structural and systemic causes of controversies that v

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plague society in general and post-apartheid South Africa in particular. Indeed, the context of South Africa is very unique since the black majority of the population faces discrimination, gender-based violence, and unequal access to social capital to name a few. Yusef Waghid’s chapter on ‘Controversy and the public sphere: In defence of pluralist deliberation’, uses Habermas’s account of the public sphere to encourage academics and students at universities to handle controversies through eliciting various or ‘pluralist’ points of views on unsettling or controversial issues, for example university fees. The chapter also discusses instances of controversies that took place in the workplace and what could have been done differently by the various stakeholders to foster deliberation, constructive communication and critical thinking. Conflict is a normal dynamic in human interaction, which can be handled in positive, non-violent ways to facilitate individual and collective learning and transformation. Denying students in higher education the opportunity to tackle controversies through dialogue, discussions and deliberation reinforces socio-­ political hegemony in society. There is empirical evidence, some of which is presented in the chapters of this book that teachers who engage in discussion, debate and deliberation on controversial issues explore with their students the root causes of hegemony. Stakeholders in the university public sphere scrutinize hegemony through eliciting alternative perspectives on embedded ideologies, to unveil some of the structural (economic, political and cultural) forces in society that contribute to the status-quo. The contributors in this book challenge the status-quo by bringing to the surface major conflicts and social controversies in South Africa and briefly, yet descriptively explain the context of South Africa, pre-and post-apartheid. Gender-based violence is a form of systemic violence entrenched in the patriarchal ideologies and societal practices of South Africa. Davids’s chapter ‘Reconceiving a world around our bodies: Universities, gender-based violence, and social justice’ is a wakeup call for university administrators and educators to recognize gender-based violence as a concern of social justice and a violation of human rights. Van der Walt and Terblanche provide another lens of gender-based violence through depicting the art of using protests as a critical self-reflective pedagogical tool to provide a safe space for students to closely examine the implications of gender-based violence from a victim’s and a perpetrator’s

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perspective, thus fostering empathy and perspective-taking, two essential qualities of a democratic citizen. Hungwe and Divala condemn violent students’ protests that defy the notion of a responsible citizen and problematize the glorified conception of violence in the African context in the public sphere of the university. Thus, violence of any type, shape or form contradicts democratic citizenship. The authors in this book did not just identify the various types of conflicts students and educators encounter in the university public sphere, they also discussed pedagogies that could foster democratic citizenship and enhance students’ democratic skills set. For instance, F. Waghid and Z. Waghid explore the use of educational technology to create a student-­ centred pedagogical approach to disrupt the ubiquitous practices of teacher-centred pedagogies and to alleviate cognitive damage that some students experience due to the absence of agency. Empowering pedagogies are essential to enhancing democratic citizenship in universities and counter what Freire critiques as the ‘banking’ model of education, in which knowledge is conceptualized as an object to be deposited in the learner’s passive brain. Simba emphasizes that universities could realize their democratic role by acting humanistically guided by the African philosophy of Ubuntu to fulfil their legal and moral obligation to society at large. Every chapter is an essential piece that contributes to the wholesome of the University Education, Controversy and Democratic Citizenship gestalt. A culturally-relevant gestalt to the context of universities in South Africa is transferable to other post-conflict contexts that are striving to instate democratic citizenship. Democratic citizenship in a university as a public sphere starts by acknowledging the prevalent conflicts and controversies, delving into the root causes of these conflicts, promoting dialogue and deliberation to foster communicative skills, recognizing differences including various perspectives and finally building a pedagogical learning community, in which students and academics feel safe and valued in spite of their differences. New York, NY, USA 

Yomna Awad

Preface

While it might be possible to consider the latest spate of anti-gender-­ based violence campaigns as yet another instance of student protests – legitimately brought about by what can only be described as horrific growing trends of violence against women – it is as important to reflect on these campaigns as an extension of an existing narrative of unease and controversy surrounding public universities in South Africa. Taking its cue from movements, such as #FeesMustFall, #RhodesMustFall, #MeToo, and the more recent, #AmINext campaign has served as harsh reminders to universities that social and societal controversies cannot be divorced from the university. That the anti-GBV protests – reignited by the calculated and tragic murder of Uyinene Mrwetyana – has forced universities to reconsider its conceptions of and policies on GBV, is a clear signal that the business of the university cannot proceed without contextual cognisance and responsiveness. Universities are thus being questioned not only on their responsiveness to violence but also their awareness of violence and its impact on all students. We cannot deny that societal living is under threat – violence resides in many forms – whether GBV, xenophobia or the realities of so-called initiation practices that often ritualise and trivialise violence, thereby institutionalising violence in university spaces. The result is an environment where students find it difficult to speak out against such violence. The first set of questions this new volume envisages to address, is: How aware ix

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are universities of their own institutional and spatial cultures concerning the (tacit) perpetuation of violence? What are their understandings of violence in the disciplines of teaching, research and social outreach? Secondly, do universities necessarily conceive of themselves as being under obligation to have an institutional response and responsibility to the types of controversies mentioned previously? If so, what kinds of responsiveness are necessary not only for decisive action but for sustained pro-action and responsibility? In sum, how do universities conceive of their roles and responsibilities in contributing to, and cultivating safe institutions as an enactment of peaceful and respectful co-existence? We contend that the university should do more to advance its public mission of upholding democratic values for societal change. In the anthology of essays, invited authors advocate the moral virtue of democratic patriotism, whereby universities are seen as institutions of higher learning that can produce both critical and patriotic citizens who can contribute meaningfully to the enhancement of democratic education for social justice in our highly complex and pluralistic society. This is a book about encouraging people in democratic societies to live together within pluralism and diversity; to recognise the significance of disagreement, disputation, and freedom; and to understand the pragmatic value of democratic education. Our main argument is that non-violence, tolerance, and peaceful co-existence ought to manifest through pedagogical university actions based on the university educator’s desire to cultivate reflectiveness, criticality, and deliberative inquiry in and through their academic programmes. In a way, our universities can respond more positively to the violence on our campuses and in society if public and controversial issues were to be addressed through education for democratic citizenship and human rights – the focus of this book. At the time of writing, one of the world’s most challenging issues on the theme of democratic citizenship education is the ongoing sociopolitical conflict in Hong Kong. The controversial developments in Hong Kong hinge on the advancement of conflicting and competing understandings of what it means to be a good, democratic citizen between pro-­ democracy citizens on the one side and the Chinese government on the other. The pro-democratic group advocates for upholding democratic values to initiate sociopolitical change, while their pro-establishment

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counterparts accentuate the importance of patriotic values to sustain the status quo. However, both pro-democratic and pro-establishment groups, in their defence of democratic patriotism, seem to be remiss of being attentive to non-violence in the pursuit of cultivating a democratic citizenry. This, of course, is not the first time that such conflict has beset the Chinese landscape. Tiananmen Square in Beijing is well-known for its pro-democracy protests in 1989. The protests ignited following the death of Hu Yaobang – a Communist Party leader who had worked to introduce democratic reform in China. Pro-democracy protesters, mostly students, initially marched through Beijing to Tiananmen Square and were eventually joined by thousands of people. At issue was a frustration with the limits on political freedom in the country, its one-party form of government (the Communist Party), increasing levels of unemployment and poverty for already marginalised communities, as well as calls for free speech and a free press in China. The various names by which the protests are known, provide some indication of both how it was experienced, and the intensity with which it escalated – from the Tiananmen Square protests; the ‘89 Democracy Movement; the June Fourth Incident in Mainland China; to the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The protests started on 15 April 1989. By mid-May, several student protesters initiated a hunger strike, which inspired other similar strikes and protests across China. This was followed by a disruption of a visit by the then Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union,, Mikhail Gorbachev. By the end of May, more than one million protesters had gathered in Tiananmen Square. Feeling the political pressure, the Chinese government declared martial law on May 20, and 250,000 troops entered Beijing. When the initial military presence failed to quell the protests, the Chinese authorities decided to increase their aggression. On June 4, Chinese soldiers and police stormed Tiananmen Square, firing live rounds into the crowd. Hundreds to thousands of protesters were killed in the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and as many as 10,000 were arrested. Traces of this unrest have resurfaced in the latest spate of protests. It seems as if the public sphere in Hong Kong – riddled by a series of protests – is confronted by complex and pluralistic aspirations of its critical

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patriotic citizenry. What the Hong Kong controversy reveals is that conflict in the public sphere cannot surrender to violent actions as violence has never been a plausible catalyst for liberty, equality and cooperation – all virtues of a democratic citizenry. We have seen similar pro-democracy protests and uprisings  – commonly referred to as the Arab Spring  – in several African and Middle Eastern countries, including Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Libya, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain, which started in December 2010. Echoing the absolute frustrations of the Tiananmen Square protests, the Arab Spring, was put into motion by the self-immolation of Tunisian university graduate and street vendor, Mohamed Bouazzizi, whose vegetables had been seized after he could not produce a permit. The public square, whether it is Tiananmen, a street in Tunis on which Bouazizi set himself alight, Benghazi Street in Libya, or Cairo’s Tahrir Square, has long been a space of contestation, antagonism, and agonism. Calls for democracy – fundamentally understood as the right of people to exercise their rights and voice – are inevitably wrapped in disagreement and contestations of what those rights encapsulate. While an individual has the right to articulate a particular viewpoint on a matter, so does another to counter or question that viewpoint. Democracy in the proverbial public square, therefore, is never without conflict. This is a point Chantal Mouffe (2000) is emphatic about  – if democracy is what is desired, and if democracy is allowed to play out in a way in which it actually ought to be understood, then we must allow for the possibility of conflict and antagonism so that that differences can be confronted. Not only, therefore, does democracy sometimes emerge from conflict, but this emergence in no way signals the end of conflict. To Mouffe (2000: 14), the central question for democratic politics is not how to negotiate a compromise among competing interests, but how to orientate ourselves to conflict that makes disagreement and antagonism central for democratic possibility. She views conflict, contestation, antagonism, as well as violence as an accepted part of human nature, describing it as the “dimension of the political” (Mouffe 2000: 130–131). Following this understanding, Mouffe advances the concept of “agonistic pluralism”. Agonistic pluralism sees conflict not as an undesirable phenomenon to be overcome by democratic consensus, but rather as

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constitutive of politics; it recognises the affective nature of political conflict, that is, the role of collective passions in politics (Mouffe 2014: 153). She argues that “It is only when the ineradicable character of division and antagonism is recognised that it is possible to think in a properly political manner and to face the challenge confronting democratic politics” (Mouffe 2014: 150). Moreover, in bringing into contestation existing patterns of power – as was the case during the Arab Spring, Tiananmen Square, and South Africa’s apartheid – what happens after that, as Mouffe (2014: 153) explains, is the emergence of new “institutions and configurations of power”, until these, too, are brought into question. Why does agonistic pluralism matter in a democracy, and hence in public spaces, such as universities? Firstly, following Mouffe (2000), agonistic pluralism recognises the existence of multiple, and hence, competing truths. The public square, like university spaces, provide a paradoxical convergence of divergent truths, perspectives, perceptions, and experiences, which, in turn, hint at underlying hegemonies. Which, and whose truth holds the power? Who controls the discourse of decision-making in university governance? What are the truths embedded and propagated in institutional norms and cultures? Secondly, agonistic pluralism matters, because it has the potential to transform otherwise unresolved conflicts (and violence) into deliberative encounters. In providing space and time for students to engage in discussions and debates – whether it is about the normalisation of violence, free education, or decolonising the curriculum – invites the potential for conflicts or antagonisms to shift into agonisms. This, to our minds and argued by scholars like Todd and Säfström (2008), ought to be a function of education. That is, it should create opportunities for students to engage in that which might be described as antagonistic and controversial and reconsider it so that it might warrant a different perspective, and hence, experienced as less negative or antagonistic. In other words, unless students are encouraged to articulate their differences or competing truths, they will not know what it is like to consider other competing points of view. The educational imperative, therefore, is not limited to the university experience but is tied to “larger political articulations” (Todd and Säfström 2008: 8) – articulations that students as citizens would, no doubt, need to navigate.

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Of significance to the cultivation of democratic citizenship education in conflicting societies like Hong Kong, are two studies offering complementary accounts of how touchstones of democratic citizenship education can resolve controversial matters in their societies. The first is by Koon Lin Wong and Chi Kin John Lee (2019), Learning to live together in polarized and pluralistic societies: Hong Kong teachers’ views of democratic values versus patriotic values, which offers a way in which critical patriotic citizens can cultivate sociopolitical actions concerning critical rationality and democratic development in Hong Kong. The second article by Mei-­ Yee Wong (2019), Understanding the educational value of the film Please Vote for Me: A case of a pedagogy course for citizenship education, argues that reflection and critical thinking ought to be revisited and cultivated in university programmes to respond to violent disruptions in societies. Both of these seminal works offer distinctive pathways for how university education can respond plausibly to issues of conflict and controversy. In this book, we take our cue from such scholars to proffer our own educational responses in dealing with controversial issues. The question arises, what should the role of universities be in ensuring that violent disruptions in politically charged communities do not escalate into unacceptable and uncompromising levels of intolerance? This anthology of chapters offers a response to intolerant, irresponsible, and controversial contestations on the basis of reconsidered touchstones of democratic citizenship education. Our main argument in this edited collection is that universities cannot turn a blind eye to sociopolitical upheavals. However, the response of such institutions of higher education ought to be constituted in touchstones of democratic citizenship education to deal with conflict and controversy in societies where virtues of democratic citizenship are seriously being eroded. The types of upheaval and conflict that often defined universities in South Africa during apartheid have spilt over into its democracy. Despite large-scale educational reform, which has seen dramatic shifts in terms of student demographics, accompanied with equally significant policy reform, intent on transforming and democratising higher education, universities have remained sites of intense controversies. These controversies, whether in response to the student fees, student access gender-based violence, or calls for decolonisation and transformation, have often descended into chaos, vandalism,

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violence, and worrying displays of hate speech. Inasmuch as these controversies and conflicts have centred on university issues, and was somewhat contained on campus spaces, the types of contestations highlighted cannot be delinked from South African society. The issue of high university fees has a bearing on student access and degree completion, which, in turn, impacts economic prospects, and hence, concerns issues of redress of social justice. Similarly, the high levels of gender-based violence encountered in university spaces are reflective of the unacceptable levels of violence, especially against women and children in South Africa. At the time of writing this foreword, yet another student had been brutally murdered, after being stabbed 52 times. Universities cannot decontextualise themselves from the inhumanity and injustice in which it resides. Students, therefore, should not be discouraged or deterred from controversial topics or. As Malik (2015) reminds us, “The university is a space for would-be adults to explore new ideas, to expand their knowledge, to interrogate power, to learn how to make an argument; a space within which students can be challenged, even upset or shocked or made angry … To be at a university is to accept the challenge of exploring one’s own beliefs and responding to disagreement”. Ultimately, the task of universities, and the goal of education, is about cultivating critical thinkers whose skill is precisely the ability to challenge pre-packaged or ready-­ made ideas (Malik 2018). We commence this anthology with Yusef Waghid’s chapter, entitled: “Controversy and the public sphere: In defence of pluralist deliberation”. The chapter draws on the German scholar, Jürgen Habermas’s (1989) account of the public sphere, which he conceives as a space whereby people come together as a public to engage in debate over rules governing human relations – that is, a space where people use their reason or where they (people) invoke “the art of critical-rational public debate” (Habermas 1989: 29). Following, Habermas’s elucidation of the public sphere, it can be claimed that a university is a social structure of the public sphere. It is at the university where people, in a Habermasian way, express their opinions, freedoms, judgments and recommendations on affairs of the state and civil society based on insight and argument (Habermas 1989: 117). Alternatively, critical debate is the touchstone of truth and by implication, of university life (Habermas 1989: 118). Considering the above

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understanding of a university within the space of the public sphere, it seems inconceivable, argues Waghid, that university academics and students should become disengaged from a critical debate about controversial matters. To Waghid, controversial matters infer matters that require deep and reflective thinking concerning what people (dis)agree on. In his chapter, he espouses the ramifications of a lack of critical debate on controversial issues in the (South African) public university. Waghid specifically focuses his attention on how a disengagement with controversial issues at public universities could lead to the disintegration of the public sphere. However, he argues that public deliberation should not be conceived as strictly a mode of argumentation and debate among participants, but rather, a pragmatic way of pluralist joint activity through which shared agreements can ensue and manifest in the public sphere. Waghid’s focus on Habermas (1974) is aptly followed by Nuraan Davids’ leaning on Nancy Fraser’s (1990) account of the public sphere. Unlike Habermas, Fraser is more forthcoming in recognising that the public sphere provides neither equal access nor equal participation. In her chapter, “Reconceiving a world around our bodies: Universities, gender-­ based violence, and social justice”, Davids highlights that for as long as students have protested for access to and participation in universities, female students continue to be at the centre of what appears to be a collision between gender and violence. She asserts that despite its implied specificity, gender-based violence (GBV) emanates from a complex intersection of not only normative constructions of gender, but of race, class, culture, and religion, as well as power and education. As such, GBV is as much about the entrenchment of hegemonic norms as it is about the need to disrupt the structures and discourses sustaining these norms. To address GBV, argues Davids, is to bring into question the societal and social dictates that designate power to some through denigrating others. In this regard, Fraser (1990) is particularly useful in drawing attention to the prescriptions that dictate women’s participation in the public sphere, and the ensuing violence which might unfold should these prescriptions not be followed. To Davids, therefore, because GBV impacts upon issues of access, participation, mobility, and safety, GBV has to be considered, and tackled as an issue of social justice.

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Also on the topic of GBV, Charlene van der Walt and Judith Terblanche’s chapter, “Violent pedagogy?: Critical pedagogical self-­ reflection in the midst of engaging the silencing effects of gender-based violence within the context of higher education”, focuses on the alarming reality GBV has on all communities in South Africa. The level of distress, often undermined by the under-reporting of GBV, have seen numerous religious scholars appeal for urgent critical reflection and prophetic action by religious institutions and faith leaders. Their chapter provides a critical reflection on the role of protest within the pedagogical practice of theological education in the South African context and draws on insights gained from relevant pedagogy and gender theorists. Beyond the descriptive task of the chapter, Van der Walt and Terblanche deliberates on the process of critical pedagogical self-reflection as a counter-measure to the possibility of violence. In his chapter, “Re-posturing the African university for social justice in light of increasing violence”, Chikumbutso Manthalu argues that the nature of the current frameworks that anchors the African university, renders the university largely desensitised from meaningfully committing to identifying, appreciating and addressing the challenges of its social environment – especially the increasing gender and xenophobic violence. To him, this is due to the fact that the African university is primarily driven by an agenda that almost necessitates detachment of the university from its social context to ensure global relevance and competitiveness. By drawing on Freire’s (2014) notion of domination, Todd’s (2007) thinking cosmopolitanism and Waghid’s (2008) conception of the civic role of the university, Manthalu contends that as long as the standards for a thriving university generally exclude and tacitly undermine the centring of local interests in higher education research and pedagogy, the resultant education materially perpetuates the different forms of abuses such as gender, racial, xenophobic, and even epistemic violence. Manthalu maintains that unless there is a democratic transformation that ultimately centres local interests as legitimate objects of focus in academic research and pedagogy, the African university will not only fail to realise democratic change in society but will continue tacitly retaining and reproducing different structures of violence.

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Zayd Waghid and Faiq Waghid, in their chapter, “Re-examining an education for cognitive justice in relation to virtues of democracy”, take cognisance of the reality that despite the South African government‘s continued attempts to redress the social injustices of the past, progress is seemingly marred by the complex and complicated racial categorisation and identification of its citizens. They posit that Sen’s (2007: 89) dialectics of the colonised mind can be used to make sense of an individual’s self-perception and attitudes towards particular races, and what may prevent such individuals from moving beyond historical and political differences. Zayd Waghid and Faiq Waghid cite their own witnessing of violence during the #fallist campaigns, which they ascribe to a breakdown in dialogue between the South African government, universities and students. In response, they argue that the level of cognitive damage – an instance of cognitive injustice – among students, is perhaps one of the significant underlying factors denying democratic relations in both the university and societal contexts. They firstly explore how Sen’s (2007) explication of three tenets of democracy, namely the instrumental, intrinsic and constructive values of democracy unpack how universities can be more responsive to instances of cognitive injustice. They then explore a Rancière (2006) enactment of educational technology for the alleviation of cognitive damage in defence of democratic action. Lastly, they offer a pragmatic approach, drawing on Diana Laurillard’s (2012) ways of learning, to how university educators could disrupt instances of cognitive damage in the university classroom. Precious Simba’s chapter, “Responding to the needs of the republic: Investigating the democratic/social role of the university in contemporary South Africa”, casts a spotlight on how the university should enact/ dispense its responsibility. Without a formal guide, the university is left to define its own obligation, which has culminated in the university either being oblivious to the issues plaguing the broader South Africa or being part of those issues, as made manifest in the array of protests, unrest and violence encountered on university campuses. To Simba, the need for a clearer democratic/social role of the university has become exacerbated by the growing trends of violence within the country as well as within the university campus. Questions, therefore, have to be asked about the role and obligation of the university. In response, she argues

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that the university should act in loco humanus, that is, in the place of a human; and in the “African” context to be human is circumscribed by the notion of ubuntu. If the university is to actualise its role as a democratic citizen or social agent, then its endeavours must be humanistic, guided by ubuntu. In her chapter, “Identity (re)construction in higher education spaces”, Sinobia Kenny explores the intersection of individual identities and the institutional cultures and norms practised within higher education spaces. There is a tacit institutional assumption, states Kenny, that it is up to the individual to navigate his/her way, to (re)construct his/her identity (if necessary), if the individual is to fit into the existing culture and discourse of the university. The university, she contends, appears to be unconscious of the impact of its institutional norms and practices on students’ identities. Drawing on Honneth’s (1995, 2007) theory of recognition, Kenny contends, firstly, that institutions of higher education should aim to facilitate the inclusion of all identities so that no student feels subordinated or marginalised within higher education spaces. Secondly, by adopting a proactiveness, higher education institutions lend themselves to cultivating the self-respect and self-esteem of individuals, and hence, a dignified society. Janine Carlse, in her chapter, “Institutional culture and the lived experience of violence on university campuses in South Africa”, contends that the upheavals and crises confronting universities presents an opportunity for the university to reflect on its practices and cultures that might perpetuate climates of racism, exclusion and non-belonging. Considering the long history of discrimination and dehumanisation that the South African higher education system embodies, the first section of the chapter looks at the university as product, producer, and purveyor of systemic and ideological racism. This is followed by Louise Vincent’s conceptualisation of institutional culture as operating at a nexus of intra-action of the material–discursive, discussed through the lens of “new materialism”  – that is, the interplay of the material environment with the discourses promoted on our university campuses. Carlse continues by exploring the lived experiences of black students concerning institutional culture and covert racism on historically white university campuses. She

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concludes by proposing considerations and strategies for humanising institutional cultures. In the chapter, “Burn to be heard”: The (in)dispensability of “revolutionary” violence in student protests and responsible citizenship in African universities’, Joseph Hungwe and Joseph Jinja Divala critically examine the concept of “revolutionary” violence as an apparent indispensable practice and responsible citizenship within the purview of student protests in African universities. University student protests invoke images of torched buildings, burnt cars and buses, police tear gases, bleeding bruised faces and in some extreme cases, there is a loss of human life. The apparent legitimation of “revolutionary” violence in student protests remains a highly contestable and contentious matter and contradicts the notions of responsible citizenship that espouses non-violence, critical thinking, accountability and civic engagement as some of its central tenets. By reflecting on universities on the African continent, they argue that the seeming indispensability of violence among university student protests is opposed to some of the fundamental tenets of responsible citizenship. The primary objective of the chapter, therefore, is to critique the logic and contextualisation of revolutionary violence in pursuing genuine student concerns in African universities. Nuraan Davids and Yusef Waghid, in the concluding chapter, “On the controversy of democratic citizenship and its implications for university education”, acknowledges that inasmuch as this edited collection has focused on controversy concerning university education, this focus cannot be remiss of the inherent controversies that exist in the conceptions and practices of democratic citizenship. As such, debates in and about the university, its cultures, practices, discourses, and people, cannot be divorced from its communities, society, and hence, the politics in which it finds itself. In the case of South Africa, therefore, the university and its education cannot be dislodged from its context of democratic citizenship. In the South African context, what happens at a university (its education and controversies) are embedded in notions and practices of citizenship. Issues of violence, discrimination, xenophobia, and racism lived and reviled on campuses, are as symptomatic of a controversial democracy as they are an indictment on the university to rise to the moral responsibility to confront these controversies. The expectation, therefore, that a

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university, or a society, can be without controversy is flawed at its basis. Indeed, Davids and Waghid argue that the absence of controversy suggests deeper concerns of apathy, passivity, and uncontested agreement – attitudes which suggest the absence of oppositional voices and actions that can neither be in the interest of democratic citizenship nor a public good. In recognising this, they conclude this edited collection by addressing the notion of democratic citizenship as a controversial practice and then sets out to examine some of the implications of controversy and a lack thereof for university education itself. In the Coda, Rumbidzai Mashava and Joseph Jinja Divala pose the question of whether decolonisation (we would prefer to talk about decoloniality) of the university in Africa has become one of the elements in re-imagining transformation in higher education. They argue that decolonising the university is more likely to remain a pipe dream given that post-independent states within whose conditions African universities exist and operate have other interests to protect. In proposing this argument, they examine the different conceptions of decolonisation and claim that a new form of internal colonialism might be at play in Africa that invariably disrupts the university sector. Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa

Nuraan Davids Yusef Waghid

References Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text, 25(26), 56–80. Freire, P. (2014). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary edition). New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Habermas, J. (1974). The public sphere: An encyclopaedia article (1964). New German Critique, 3, 49–55. Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Trans. from German T. Burger and F. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Honneth, A. (1995). The struggle for recognition – The moral grammar of social conflicts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Honneth, A. (2007). Disrespect – The normative foundations of critical theory. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a design science: Building pedagogical patterns for learning and technology. New York/London: Routledge. Ling Wong, K., & Chi Kin, J. L. (2019). Learning to live together in polarized and pluralistic societies: Hong Kong teachers’ views of democratic values versus patriotic values. Citizenship Teaching Learning, 14(3), 303–330. Malik, K. (2015). Free speech in an age of identity politics. Pandaemonium. https://kenanmalik.com/2015/08/13/free-speech-in-an-age-of-identity-politics/. Accessed 7 Apr 2020. Malik, K. (2018). What is education for? Pandaemonium. https://kenanmalik. com/2018/03/19/what-is-education-for/. Accessed 7 Apr 2020. Mouffe, C. (2000). The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso. Mouffe, C. (2014). By way of a postscript. Parallax, 20(2): 149–157. Rancière, J. (2006). Hatred of democracy. Trans. S. Corcoran. London: Verso. Sen, A. (2007). Identity and violence: The illusion of destiny. London: Penguin Publishers. Todd, S. (2007). Teachers judging without scripts, or thinking cosmopolitan. Ethics and Education, 2(1), 25–38. Todd, S., & Säfström, C.  A. (2008). Democracy, education and conflict: Rethinking respect and the place of the ethical. Journal of Educational Controversy, 3(1): 1–11. Waghid, Y. (2008). The public role of the university reconsidered. Perspectives in Education, 26(1), 19–25. Wong, M.-Y. (2019). Understanding the educational value of the film Please Vote for Me: A case of a pedagogy course for citizenship education. Citizenship Teaching Learning, 14(3): 263–276.

Contents

1 Controversy and the Public Sphere: In Defence of Pluralist Deliberation  1 Yusef Waghid 2 Reconceiving a World Around Our Bodies: Universities, Gender-Based Violence, and Social Justice 13 Nuraan Davids 3 Violent Pedagogy? Critical Pedagogical Self-Reflection in the Midst of Engaging the Silencing Effects of Gender-­ Based Violence Within the Context of Higher Education 31 Charlene van der Walt and Judith Terblanche 4 Re-posturing the African University for Social Justice in Light of Increasing Violence 57 Chikumbutso Herbert Manthalu 5 Re-examining Instances of Cognitive Damage in South African Universities: Invoking Democratic Action Through Educational Technology 81 Zayd Waghid and Faiq Waghid xxiii

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6 Responding to the Needs of the Republic: Investigating the Democratic/Social Role of the University in Contemporary South Africa101 Precious Simba 7 Identity (Re)construction in Higher Education Spaces119 Sinobia Kenny 8 Institutional Culture and the Lived Experience of Violence on University Campuses in South Africa131 Janine Carlse 9 “Burn to Be Heard”: The (In)dispensability of “Revolutionary” Violence in Student Protests and Responsible Citizenship in African Public Universities147 Joseph Pardon Hungwe and Joseph Jinja Divala 10 On the Controversy of Democratic Citizenship and Its Implications for University Education167 Nuraan Davids and Yusef Waghid  Coda: Old Wine in New Skins: Why Decolonisation May Be a Failed Project in Rising Africa179 Rumbidzai Mashava and Joseph Jinja Divala Index201

Notes on Contributors

Janine Carlse  holds a Masters in Religious Studies from the University of Cape Town. She is working on her PhD in Education Policy Studies at Stellenbosch University. With a deep interest in transformative approaches to higher education pedagogy and policy making, Janine’s current research has been spurred by the ideological challenges facing the still stratified post-apartheid South African higher education sector. Janine has worked within philanthropic, private and public higher education environments. Her experience within the higher education sector over the past few years includes a combination of project management and administration, stakeholder engagement and partnerships, working with civil society organisations, student academic support, tutoring, facilitation and lecturing. Nuraan  Davids is Professor of Philosophy of Education in the Department of Education Policy Studies in the Faculty of Education at Stellenbosch University. Her research interests include democratic citizenship education; Islamic philosophy of education; and philosophy of higher education. Recent books include: The Thinking University Expanded: On Profanation, Play and Education (2020, with Y. Waghid); Democratic Education and Muslim Philosophy: Interfacing Muslim and communitarian thought (2020, with Y. Waghid); Universities, pedagogical xxv

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encounters, openness, and free speech: Reconfiguring democratic education (2019, with Y. Waghid). Joseph  Jinja  Divala is associate professor in the Department of Curriculum Studies at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. His research focuses on a decolonial notion of philosophy of education. Joseph  Pardon  Hungwe is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of South Africa in the College of Education (Educational Foundations). His PhD in Education awarded from the University of Johannesburg, researched on Afrophobic tendencies and practices as social, political and economic impediments on internationalization of public higher education within the Southern African region. With research interests in internationalization, global citizenship education, student activism and decolonization of higher education, he has published book chapters and presented at several academic conferences. Sinobia Kenny  is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Education at Stellenbosch University (SA). Her current doctoral study explores lived experiences of professional mathematics educators in higher education spaces. Her research interests include identity construction in higher education, professional learning of mathematics educators and reflective learning of teachers. She holds an MA from Edgehill University’s Faculty of Education in the Department of Professional Learning (UK), a PGCE from Southbank University (UK) and a Higher Diploma in Education from the University of the Western Cape (SA). Chikumbutso Herbert Manthalu  is a Senior Lecturer in philosophy of education in the School of Education, at Chancellor College, of the University of Malawi. His research interests include education for democratic citizenship, global justice and education, and African and political philosophy. Rumbidzai Mashava  is a doctoral candidate in philosophy of education at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Precious Simba  is a doctoral candidate in the faculty of education at Stellenbosch University and a researcher at the Stellenbosch Centre for Pedagogy (SUNCEP). Her current doctoral research is a feminist critique

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of Ubuntu as a philosophy of education centred on education policy in Zimbabwe. Her research interests are in Ubuntu, education policy, feminist theory, intersectionality, and democratic citizenship education. She has an MA from Sussex University’s Institute of Development Studies (IDS) where her studies focused on gender and development with a special interest in education. Judith  Terblanche  is a chartered accountant and working as a senior lecturer in the Department of Accounting at the University of the Western Cape. She obtained her PhD in Philosophy of Education from Stellenbosch University. Her research interest is focused on the intersection of commerce, theology and education. She is co-author of the book, Cosmopolitan Education and Inclusion: The Self and Others in Deliberation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020 with Yusef Waghid, Chikumbutso Herbert Manthalu, Faiq Waghid & Zayd Waghid). Charlene  van der Walt is the head of the Gender and Religion Department at the School of Religion, Philosophy, and Classics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She is also the deputy director of the Ujamaa Center for Contextual Bible Study at UKZN. Yusef Waghid  is distinguished professor of philosophy of education at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He is the co-author of the following books: Teaching, Friendship & Humanity (with Nuraan Davids, Springer, 2020); Teachers Matter: Educational Philosophy and Authentic Learning (with Nuraan Davids, Lexington Publishers, 2020); and Cosmopolitan Education and Inclusion: The Self and Others in Deliberation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020 with Chikumbutso Herbert Manthalu, Judith Terblanche, Faiq Waghid & Zayd Waghid). Zayd Waghid  is senior lecturer of business and economics education in the Faculty of Education as the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in South Africa. He is the co-author of three books, Educational Technology and Pedagogic Encounters: Democratic Education in Potentiality in 2016 (Sense Publishers); Rupturing African Philosophy of Teaching and Learning: Ubuntu Justice and Education in 2018 (Palgrave Macmillan); and Cosmopolitan Education and Inclusion: The Self and Others in Deliberation in 2020 (Palgrave Macmillan). His current

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research interests are in the field of social justice education and educational technology within the context of teacher education. Faiq  Waghid is an academic at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology’s (CPUT), Centre for Innovative Educational Technology (CIET). His research interest includes the use of participatory action research towards improving teaching and learning practices, augmented through the use of educational technologies. Of Faiq’s noteworthy research endeavours include the publication of three international coauthored books, ‘Educational Technology and Pedagogic Encounters: Democratic Education in Potentiality’ (Sense, 2016), ‘Rupturing African Philosophy on Teaching and Learning: Ubuntu Justice and Education’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and more recently ‘Cosmopolitan Education and Inclusion: Human Engagement and the Self ’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). He is rated by the National Research Foundation (NRF) as a promising young researcher.

1 Controversy and the Public Sphere: In Defence of Pluralist Deliberation Yusef Waghid

Introduction The German scholar, Jürgen Habermas’s (1989) account of the public sphere, is one whereby people come together as a public to engage in debate over rules governing human relations – that is, a space where people use their reason, or where they (people) invoke “the art of critical– rational public debate” (Habermas 1989: 29). Following, Habermas’s elucidation of the public sphere, it can be claimed that a university is a social structure of the public sphere. It is at the university where people, in a Habermasian way, express their opinions, freedoms, judgments and recommendations on affairs of the state and civil society based on insight and argument (Habermas 1989: 117). Alternatively, critical debate is the touchstone of truth and by implication of university life (Habermas 1989: 118). Considering the above understanding of a university within

Y. Waghid (*) Department of Education Policy Studies, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 N. Davids, Y. Waghid (eds.), University Education, Controversy and Democratic Citizenship, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56985-3_1

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the space of the public sphere, it seems inconceivable, to say the least, that university academics and students should become disengaged from critical debate about controversial matters. By controversial matters, I mean matters that require deep and reflective thinking about what people (dis)agree on. Usually, controversy surrounds decisions that people reach that some might find agreeable and others reprehensible. For instance, although some university students in South Africa consider the payment of tuition fees as necessary to university education, other students might find the payment of such fees as burdensome. The controversy arises when decisions are made that adversely affect both groups of students. In this chapter, I elaborate on the ramifications of a lack of critical debate on controversial issues in the (South African) public university. I specifically focus my attention on how a disengagement with controversial issues at public universities could lead to the disintegration of the public sphere. However, as I argue, public deliberation should not be conceived as strictly a mode of argumentation and debate among participants, but rather, a pragmatic way of pluralist joint activity through which shared agreements can ensue and manifest in the public sphere.

On the Downfall of the Public University I shall now look at three controversial issues that emerged at the university where I work. Firstly, when a university academic antagonistically affronted some students in her class because they (students) questioned her for teaching in a language that categorically excluded them, she momentarily suspended what a university actually stands for – academics engaging critically with students about controversial matters. Lecturing black students in Afrikaans – the language of instruction formerly considered as compulsory in public universities in the apartheid past – without acknowledging their incapacity to comprehend important pedagogical concepts and to engage critically with them, is not a matter of only flouting the institutional language policy, but also one of misrecognising one’s students and treating them with contempt. How does a university academic who bluntly refuses to engage with irate students on the grounds that they have been excluded from pedagogical understanding, advance

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the claims of a university to openness and deliberative engagement? Simply put, if a university academic dismisses her students on the basis that she considers it her legitimate right to lecture in the language of her choice, even though doing so would disengage them, then such an academic has put the university’s responsibility to engage one another critically, at risk. When critical debate is not constitutive of what a university ought to be encouraging, then the downfall of the public university is imminent. Habermas aptly states that a university that fails to ensure the coherence of the public as a critically debating entity can be said to have been considerably weakened (Habermas 1989: 162). Secondly, and quite controversially, a group of academics at the institution where I work decided to publish an article on coloured (a racist term referred to people of colour) women’s apparently low cognitive functioning. The ensuing fallout played out on many levels – institutionally in terms of ethical compliance and regulation; academically, in terms of racial essentialism; politically, in terms of the continuing humiliation and degradation of a historically maligned category of people, superficially referred to as “coloured”. Condemned as racist research, the outcry from certain groups of academics was to the extent that the journal eventually withdrew its publication due to public pressure. In seeming uncertainty, the initial response from the university was one of detachment and disengagement – under the auspices of academic freedom. This was followed by a response of disappointment in this type of research – an investigation to be launched immediately that would hold the academics accountable. When senate convened, about two months later, the university’s vice-­ rector was asked to provide an update on the promised investigation into the research, and how the researchers were able to attain ethical clearance, considering that pressure was mounting from inside and outside the institution to hold the responsible academics accountable. Instead, the vice-rector called upon the dean of the faculty where these academics are based. He, in turn, appealed to the senate to “forgive” these colleagues even though the case was still under investigation by the institution as it was claimed that it is more feasible to follow such an approach than to marginalise and even penalise the responsible academics. It would seem that the dean’s articulation of the coloured women affair was biased

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towards the academics, who had written the article, as opposed to a willingness to bring into question the apparent disregard of ethical conduct. Stated differently, there appeared to be a need to dismiss the incident for fear of reputational damage to the university, rather than going to the trouble of dealing with the pain and harm that had indeed been caused by this article. This reminds me of Habermas’s (1989) assertion that conversation and discussion in the public sphere and universities are no exception, have been prearranged and become superfluous on the basis that critical debate has been pre-planned and engagement avoided (Habermas 1989: 164). If a controversial university matter such as that which deals with the humiliation of a marginalised group of women can be side-stepped in a very organised way in the highest academic body of the university, then it simply means that the university has not adequately fulfilled, what Habermas refers to as “its publicist function” (Habermas 1989: 164). On what basis does university management encourage reconciliation and forgiveness when the issue about demeaning other women has not been subjected to critical-rational engagement? This only leads to the inference that reconciliation and forgiveness are unconditional human acts that do not require any form of argumentative substantiation and or deliberation. I cannot imagine that a university should abandon such an important virtue that has been endemic to its illustrious historical legacy. Thirdly, another controversial matter that seems to raise its head every now and then at major research-intensive universities in the country, including the university where I work, is that of dis-invitation. In early 2019, it was heard that several Israeli academics withdrew from a conference, entitled Recognition, reparation, reconciliation: The light and shadow of historical trauma, held at the end of 2018. The conference focused on historical wounding and its transgenerational repercussions. As it turned out, a contingent of Israeli scholars did not attend citing the university’s inept manner in which it dealt with anti-Israeli activism. The university’s management subsequently offered a public apology, but by then, Israeli scholars were already excluded from the conference. If the Israeli scholars were to have attended the conference at the university, it would have sparked controversy, on the one hand, because it was felt that their presence could have enflamed emotions by a religious minority that could

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have provoked a security risk at the institution. Yet, the organisers of the conference’s apparent dis-invitation of the Israeli scholars curtailed deliberative engagement with the views of the scholars. As it is argued for elsewhere, “dis-invitation aborts speech instantaneously. A lack of opportunity to engage with difference, even in the face of vehement onslaughts against one’s faith, does not help in recognising one another’s humanity because potential violent responses to difference are never desirable” (Davids and Waghid 2019: 83). The point I am making is that a university cannot disallow controversy in the sense that not only does controversy offer an opportunity for “any humane form of engagement to transpire” (Davids and Waghid 2019: 83), but it also provides the bedrock according to which the university could enhance its credibility within the public sphere. As cogently reminded by Habermas, when the public sphere is no longer devoted to rational-critical debate, in this instance, about controversial issues, then its collapse is imminent (Habermas 1989: 247). The latter is so, on the basis that when critical public scrutiny becomes vulnerable to manipulation and unquestioning decision-making, the communicative interconnectedness of a public university succumbs to the exercise of negative domination and power that excludes others and otherness. Habermas (1989: 249) makes the point that a public university should remain one in which many people express opinions as receive them; and that there is always a chance for people to respond to any controversial matter in public. Unfortunately, dis-invitation, so it seems, undermines the institutional autonomy to engage openly and reflectively with all others – that is, public deliberation would have been short-circuited, and the university would have succumbed to what Habermas (1989: 247) refers to as “the vortex of publicity that is staged for show or manipulation”. The question remains: Why does a lack of rational and critical debate in and about controversial issues enhance the collapse of the university? I address this in the ensuing discussion.

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 n the Significance of Critical-Rational Debate O to Address Controversy Public deliberation is not just a dialogical process whereby participants exchange reasons to resolve controversial matters or situations. In this sense, deliberation does not just imply a form of discourse or argumentation. Following James Bohman (2000), public deliberation involves at least three aspects of human activity. Firstly, public deliberation requires the consensual involvement of participants whereby decisions are subjected to a process of public discussion and debate without decisions being imposed on the participants (Bohman 2000: 4). That is, when people deliberate in public, they are moved by a willingness to deal with controversial matters and the decisions that emanate from their deliberations are the outcomes of pluralist public scrutiny. Secondly, public deliberation invites people to “justify their decisions and opinions by appealing to common interests or by arguing in terms of reasons that ‘all can accept’ in public debate” (Bohman 2000: 5). Put differently, through public deliberation, pluralist decisions ensue that are justified by convincing public reasons. “Reasons given must primarily meet the conditions of publicity; that is, they must be convincing to everyone” (Bohman 2000: 6). Of course, in deliberations about controversial matters, not all public reasons are equally accepted as persuasive by everyone. So, in a way, others might consider public reasons in a sceptical way. If not, their equal freedoms are undermined. By implication, and thirdly, public deliberation is primarily conceived “as a cooperative activity” in which reasons are exchanged for purposes of resolving controversial issues (Bohman 2000: 27). More poignantly, public deliberation succeeds on the grounds that participants in the cooperative, joint activity not only proffer reasons in the public sphere. Instead, their diverse reasons result in recognised decision-­making – that is, participants in the joint activity recognise their pluralist contribution to, and influence on the outcomes of deliberative decision-making, even when they agree or disagree with it (decision) (Bohman 2000: 33). For resolving controversial matters of public concern, the afore-­ mentioned practice of public deliberation as a cooperative activity seems

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to be the most feasible. This is so because public deliberation is not aimed at putting down opposing views or humiliating others’ contending views on the basis of argumentation basis of an actual decision is acceptable when the reasons behind it are sufficient to motivate the cooperation of all those deliberating. In other words, decisions reached are grounded in non-tyranny, equality, and publicity conditions (Bohman 2000: 35). What follows from the above, is that a university that does not attempt to resolve controversial matters on the basis of public deliberation – that is, the willingness on the part of participants to engage, to proffer justifiable reasons, and jointly to cooperate in a non-tyrannical way – makes itself vulnerable to recurring controversies. Controversies are often propelled in the public sphere because of the diverse views of the public. Reaching consensus strictly based on deliberative argumentation might not always be possible in complex and diverse societies. However, when public deliberation is conceived as cooperative action, the possibility of shared agreements in accountable and reflexive ways might just ensue. As Bohman (2000: 55) avers, “as a joint activity, [public] deliberation produces outcomes in a non-aggregative way … [which makes] deliberation … one of the many cooperative activities that demands a plural rather than a collective or an individual agent or subject”. The point is, controversial issues stand a better chance of being resolved if public deliberation unfolds in pluralist (as opposed to collectivist) decision-making based on which shared agreements manifest in the public sphere. In the main, what has been argued for above, is that public deliberation seems to be the most plausible way to address and possibly resolve controversial matters. This is so on the basis that a diverse and pluralistic public sphere creates opportunities for people to deliberate together without “collapsing into sheer conflict or a babble of incommensurable voices” (Bohman 2000: 69). Likewise, public deliberation as a pluralist, joint activity engenders new possibilities for cooperation to emerge and to resolve deep and irreconcilable conflicts in the public sphere. A public university that advances deliberation would be most appropriately positioned to resolve conflicts without surrendering the equality of its staff and students; the non-tyranny of outcomes, and most of all, the publicity of dialogical experiences.

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 ublic Deliberation and Cultural Pluralism P in the University In any public university in South Africa, emerging forms of cultural diversity have often produced deep and troubling conflicts that have, in many instances, escalated the institution’s stability. In all three examples mentioned earlier – the academic who persists that it is her inalienable right to teach in the language of her choice, the coloured women affair, and the dis-invitation of scholars to the institution, it seems that the parties were not all prepared to give in to disputes surrounding the incidents. By this is meant that each party perceived the incidents through the lens of their values and principles – the academic who insisted on teaching in her language of choice considered it her right to do so; the researchers of the coloured women affair insisted that their research was impartial and that they did not violate the human dignity of others; and organisers of the conference felt that they acted with conviction in the interest of other scholars. These examples accentuate the prevalence of a plurality of points of view that often highlight the prevalence of rival interpretations of events. In a public university where alternative and rival points of view are often rife, it does not augur well for institutional peace and stability when all participants and or groups hold on to their own rational and moral convictions. For this reason, we require a deliberative process of reflection whereby all parties can engage with their conflicting sets of values and beliefs and the possible construction of an alternative set of values and beliefs. Pursuant to the above, Bohman’s (2000: 93) notion of pluralist public reason offers a framework whereby deeply controversial issues can be resolved. Firstly, pluralist public reason lends itself to reaching a process of moral compromise rather than coercion. In a moral compromise, each party recognises the other’s moral values and standards as constitutive of the framework of moral compromise. Reaching a compromise implies a form of give-and-take dialogue whereby people cooperate and deliberate with the other (Bohman 2000: 91). In a moral compromise, each party can modify the text according to his or her values and principles, and the result does not necessarily reduce the plurality of points of view. Although

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not all participants will abandon their convictions, enough will find the compromise acceptable if it fuses and modifies pluralist views that become acceptable for contending parties (Bohman 2000: 93). Simply put, reaching a moral compromise is tantamount to subjecting two conflicting sets of values and beliefs to a deliberative process of reflection from which an alternative set of beliefs and values are constructed. Secondly, pluralist public reason promotes common deliberation about conflicts and not about the collective goals of particular cultures. That is, pluralist public reason endeavours to transform the cultural framework of each culture through mutual criticism and interpretation and any attempt at preserving dogmatism will be resisted by all participants (Bohman 2000: 95). In other words, pluralist public reason “promotes critical reflection on one’s own culture, and open and pluralistic public forums inevitably change the beliefs and identities of their participants as they incorporate the new reasons and novel justifications of others”. (Bohman 2000: 95). If diverse people are not prepared to engage in pluralist deliberation, the possibility of a moral compromise will be unlikely. Furthermore, following Bohman (2000: 105) again, at “a time when deep conflicts can ignite virulent nationalism and religious fanaticism, political liberalism cannot ignore the new challenges of cultural pluralism to social peace and stability”. Achieving a moral compromise in disputes is not a matter of giving in to existing injustice, irrationality, and untruth. Rather, reaching a moral compromise is a recognition that controversies can be resolved in collective deliberation and pluricultural frameworks of human engagement, “which inevitably spills over into deliberation within each community” (Bohman 2000: 95).

 owards a Conclusion: Cultivating a Practice T of Teaching Students to Think Controversially Much of the afore-mentioned discussion involves making a case for a plausible understanding of pluralist public deliberation on the grounds of which participants can reach some moral compromise in attending to

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controversial issues. In this concluding remark, I give an account of how students can be initiated into a practice of pluralist public deliberation in resolving controversial issues. One way of teaching them about the art of pluralist public deliberation is for them to be initiated into how to think controversially. Douglas Yacek’s (2018) view that students be taught the psychological condition provides a backdrop to my own claims of teaching them (students) to think controversially. For Yacek, (2018: 84) teaching students to think controversially has two parts: teaching them dramatic directivity such as directing or steering them to realise a moment of suspense in the classroom by which they can experience the excitement of discovery in the pursuit of truth; and, teaching students exemplary directivity according to which they engage with a teacher’s defence of a particular controversial view based on the teacher’s position as a role model (Yacek 2018: 84). I agree with Yacek’s claim that students need to be taught through raising a moment of suspense and in actually engaging with controversial issues. However, I am less inclined to agree with Yacek’s practice of student directivity. When students are directed or steered in a way whereby they are encouraged to think controversially, there is also the possibility that a teacher would guide a student towards fixation and certainty. If students are not provoked to think for themselves about controversial issues such as global warming and capital punishment, then the possibility exists that students might not learn how to think controversially on their own as they are expected to rely on the guidance or directivity from teachers. My understanding of teaching is that students should be summoned to speak their minds and engage with controversial issues themselves  – that is, their potentiality to think controversially should be evoked. Only then, as Yacek (2018: 85) correctly posits, the “presence of doubt” will be become part of students’ “intellectual tension” that allows them to think controversially. And, when the “irritation of doubt” (Yacek 2018: 85) becomes part of students’ learning, the possibility is always there that they can reach moral compromises in and about controversial issues. Of course, as aptly argued by Stanley Cavell (1979: 431), learning with doubt – a matter of living with scepticism – implies that humans leave open the possibility that things can be seen as otherwise. That is, in the

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face of doubt, learning is inconclusive which means that one’s learning is ongoing as any position one takes is tentative and always subjected to suspicion (Cavell 1979: 440). What follows is that learning is never complete, and one always engages afresh with new thoughts that lay the ground for any kind of controversial pursuit. Put differently, engaging with controversial matters invariably depends on being provoked by doubt on the basis that doubt triggers the suspicion necessary to deal with controversy. Now to be suspicious about another person’s view on a particular matter does not mean that one misrecognises another’s claims or even treats another disrespectfully. Raising suspicion is a matter of bringing into play the notion of mistrust that suggests that someone’s views are not just dogmatically accepted as an axiomatic truth. Instead, treating someone’s views with mistrust is aimed at raising doubts about such a person’s views that would invariably provoke one to think much deeper about the view with which one is confronted. In distrusting the claims of one’s students, one recognises that what they hold dear and argue for can be put to question, brought into doubt and perhaps disrepute. But, equally so, when one mistrusts, it also alerts one to the possibility that students’ claims can have some value, and by implication, their claims can persuade one. In this sense, mistrust and, therefore, raising suspicion or doubt, does not imply an outright rejection of someone else’s claims. Instead, raising doubt opens one up to become more reflective and open to the unexpected and that which might still be possible. In sum, I have argued that public deliberation is a pluralist activity on the basis of which shared agreements can ensue and manifest as moral compromises in the public sphere. Although public deliberation among many people with diverse cultures can most poignantly engage controversy, the latter can best be realised on the grounds of invoking doubt within human encounters. Moreover, raising doubt is tantamount to invoking suspicion that can either persuade or dissuade. In conclusion, raising controversy, firstly, is a human practice that ought to feature in university pedagogical encounters. It provokes teachers to question and interrogate the truth claims of their students and, equally, it raises doubts – that is suspicions – about matters that confront them. Yet, controversy also allows one to make better sense of the moral

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claims of others. Secondly, embarking on controversial actions prompts one to search for moral compromises and the basis of shared agreements on the grounds that diverse and different claims might not always result in acceptable agreements to all pluralities. Thirdly, through controversy, public deliberation becomes an act of pluralistic communities according to which they raise the possibility for shared compromises. It is through shared moral compromises that deliberations have shown to manifest tangibly in the public sphere.

References Bohman, J. (2000). Public deliberation: Pluralism, complexity, and democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cavell, S. (1979). The claim of reason: Wittgenstein, scepticism, morality and tragedy. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davids, N., & Waghid, Y. (2019). Universities, pedagogical encounters, openness, and free speech: Reconfiguring democratic education. Lanham/Boulder/New York/London: Lexington Books. Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Trans. from German T.  Burger and F. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Yacek, D. (2018). Thinking controversially: The psychological condition for teaching controversial issues. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 52(1), 71–86.

2 Reconceiving a World Around Our Bodies: Universities, Gender-Based Violence, and Social Justice Nuraan Davids

Introduction Like the student protests – captured in the hashtags of #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall  – the more recent anti-gender-based violence (#AmINext) is not a new concern at South African universities. For as long as students, during and after apartheid, have protested for access to, and participation in universities, female students, in particular, continue to be at the centre of what appears to be a collision between gender and violence. Despite its implied specificity, gender-based violence (GBV) resides and emanates from a complex intersection of not only normative constructions of gender, but of race, class, culture, and religion, as well as power and education. GBV is as much a matter of violence, as it is about access, participation, mobility, inclusion and recognition. It is as much about the entrenchment of hegemonic norms, as it is about a need for the

N. Davids (*) Department of Education Policy Studies, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 N. Davids, Y. Waghid (eds.), University Education, Controversy and Democratic Citizenship, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56985-3_2

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disruption of the structures and discourses sustaining these norms. While the focus of this chapter is on GBV in universities, its discussions and arguments are not limited to universities. Universities are ecologies of societies, and GBV is but one scourge within society. To address GBV is to bring into question the societal and social dictates that designate power to some through denigrating others. It is apt, therefore, to follow the previous chapter that drew on Habermas’ elucidation of the public sphere, with one that draws from the work of Nancy Fraser. Not only does Fraser (1990) call out the relegation of women to the margins of the public sphere, but unlike Habermas (1974), she knows that the public sphere does not guarantee access to all. She also knows that women’s participation in the public sphere is heavily prescribed. As such, and as will be discussed in this chapter, the concern of GBV has to be conceived and tackled as an issue of social justice.

Making Sense of Gender-Based Violence Descriptions of gender-based violence are generally understood as violence against women. Butler (in Yancy 2019), for example, describes GBV as a masculine prerogative to define the very existence of women’s lives, and to be dispensed of, as desired. Yet, as Bloom (2008: 14) makes us aware, GBV involves more than a result of the normative roles and expectations associated with each gender. GBV brings to the fore the unequal power relationships between the genders within the context of a specific society. It is, therefore, as important to recognise the myriad and disturbing forms of GBV, as it is to note how normative constructions of gender are, indeed, used as a justification for violence. Commonly, GBV is associated with sexual harassment, physical violence, domestic violence, emotional violence, economic violence, sexual violence, and intimate partner violence often conflated with femicide (Vetten 2007; Sigsworth 2009). The increasing digitisation of our world, and especially the world of university students, has seen a steady increase in other forms of GBV through social media. These include location tracking, online harassment, unauthorised dissemination of sexual images and texts, bullying or harassment of sexual assault survivors, cyberstalking, the use of

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deception and anonymity, and shaming – particularly “slut-shaming” of young women (Fairbairn et al. 2013). Like violence, gender adopts various forms and enactments – many of which are neglected concerning GBV. Gender, as Butler (1999: 5) explains, is not always composed coherently or consistently in different historical contexts; it intersects with social, class, ethnic, sexual and regional modalities of discursively comprised identities. Alongside the incorrect binary man/woman, are the associated narratives of women as being deductively weak and powerless. Women, as the lived experiences of LGBTQI individuals will confirm, are neither alone nor unique in coming up against normative hegemonies that seek to impede, and at times, expunge their identities (Valentine et al. 2009). In recognition of the prevalence of GBV, and its determination to eradicate it, South Africa subscribes to several policies and protocols that include the: • Beijing Platform for Action (BPFA) (1995); • UN Resolution 1325 on Women; • Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (2003); • SADC Declaration on Gender and Development; and • UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and other international instruments (UN 1993) Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR 2016). At the university level, the “Policy Framework to address Gender-­ Based Violence in the Post-School Education and Training System” (DHET 2019: 8) recognises that while GBV “is most often directed at women and girls as the obvious bearers of the female and feminine, LGBTQI individuals may also experience GBV, including on the basis of being gender non-conforming and/or not practising heterosexuality”. The policy framework continues that “[V]iolence may also be used to feminise men, or undermine their masculinity, ensuring that they are not exempt from some forms of GBV either” (DHET 2019: 8). In terms of the policy framework (DHET 2019: 8), “GBV has thus been coined in

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recognition of the ways in which gender shapes particular manifestations of violence.” The recent student anti-GBV protests have once again shone the spotlight on university policies, procedures, and understandings of GBV. Despite a recognition of the growing pervasiveness of GBV on university campuses by South African universities, and despite a seeming prioritisation of policies and grievance procedures concerning dealing with GBV, a number of questions and concerns remain. Firstly, universities in South Africa do not all have policies that address GBV. Secondly, there is no overarching policy to address GBV at universities. Thirdly, where policies on GBV do exist, these are often not up to date with current legislation and best practice. Fourthly, many universities lack the necessary support structures to address and respond to cases of GBV (Adams et al. 2013; DHET 2017). An overview of a sample of policies reveals an emphasis on sexual harassment without a clear awareness of the inherent complexities within constructions of violence or gender. For example, Stellenbosch University specifies three policies that, according to the university, has a direct bearing on the fight against GBV: “Policy on Unfair Discrimination and Harassment” (applicable to staff and students) (Stellenbosch University, 2019a); “Disciplinary Code for Students of SU” (applicable to students) (Stellenbosch University, 2019b); “Disciplinary Code for Staff Members of SU” (applicable to staff) (Stellenbosch University, 2019c). None of these policies provides a comprehensive definition of what is understood by GBV. The “Sexual Offences Policy for Students” of Rhodes University, and the University of the Free State’s “Sexual harassment, sexual misconduct and sexual violence policy” neither unpacks what is understood by GBV, nor mentions LGBTQI students or staff. Evident from these policies are generic understandings and emphasis of sexual harassment – with limited, to scant indications of the myriad permutations shaping both violence and gender. Furthermore, the policies are couched in a legal framework of response and remedial action that need to be drawn upon as required, as opposed to a discourse or ethos that ought to be cultivated not only in institutional spaces and practices but also in academic programmes through teaching and learning encounters. It would not be an exaggerated generalisation to state that while GBV might differ in form, intensity, and frequency, it occurs in all university

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settings across geopolitical and economic contexts (Karjane et al. 2002). In a study involving 27 institutions of higher education in America, with responses from 150,000 students, researchers found that since enrolling, 23% of female students had experienced sexual contact involving physical harm or incapacitation, and 62% had experienced sexual harassment (Cantor et al. 2015). More specifically, 23% of women; 6% of men; 12% of students who identified as transgender, genderqueer or non-­ conforming, questioning, or not listed (TGQN); and 13% of students who declined to state their gender indicated they experienced some type of sexual violence while enrolled in college (Cantor et al. 2015). Significantly, according to Cantor et al. (2015), while female students were the most likely to be sexually harassed, nearly 43% of male undergraduate students reported experiences of sexual harassment; and TGQN students had the most reports of sexual harassment. Likewise, according to a survey by The National Union of Students (NUS) of 2000 students, studying in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, one in seven female students had been a victim of serious sexual assault or serious physical violence, while 12% had been stalked (NUS 2010, cited in Anitha and Lewis 2018: 3). And, in Northern Nigeria, more than half of the 300 female students, who participated in a study, reported experiencing one or more forms of GBV (Iliyasu et al. 2011). Following the above, it would appear that the pervasiveness of GBV is only surpassed by reports that it is the most under-reported crime across universities in different contexts. The issue of under-reporting demands serious consideration since it raises questions and concerns not only about the nature and impact of GBV, but about university climates and protocols that might not facilitate or support clear and unhindered reporting policies and procedures. I will address each of these concerns in the ensuing discussions.

GBV: Disguised and (Il)legitimised as Culture The reasons why GBV is perpetrated are complex and intricate – no more so, because they are often locked in deep social and patriarchal constructions and posturing. Patriarchy, explains hooks (2004: 1), is expressed in

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a way that holds up maleness as central, as opposed to femaleness that is deemed as subordinate. Patriarchy, she continues, endows men with “the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence” (hooks 2004: 1). This centrality is evident in male domination, whereby males occupy the most important and visible roles while women who hold these positions are expected to subscribe to male norms (hooks 2004). This power dynamic is as widespread in society, as it is in university spaces. The very notion of violence being predicated by a social construction such as gender should raise questions that extend beyond reductive understandings of violence, aggression and violence. At play here are norms and narratives of power, and more specifically, what Foucault (1997: 291) refers to as “relations of power”. To Foucault (1997: 292), human relationships, whether they involve verbal communication, amorous, institutional, or economic relationships, are always influenced by power – that is, one individual is always controlling another. Where an individual is perceived, or constructed to be less than, or at another’s disposal – that is, an object or thing – the potential to “wreak boundless and limitless violence” exists (Foucault 1997: 292), as is evident in GBV. Power, states Foucault (1990: 93), is everywhere, “not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everything”. Power exists in “regimes of truth” – that is, in the knowledge that is true and right, between that which matters and not (Foucault 1991). There is, in sum, a superficially constructed patriarchal prototype that not only dictates how men and women ought to behave, but determines access, participation, and recognition. Power exists in all relationships: between friends, supervisors, lecturers, students, and within university structures. Jackson (2019) cites the example of academic conferences – regarded by academics as a significant space for the advancement of scholarship, professional development, and the establishment of communities of practice. To Jackson (2019), conferences are discursive spaces that do not allow for equal entry or participation; instead, academics enter into and experience professional environments differently according to culture, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and more. Historically, continues Jackson (2019), academia has been white and male. As a result, “many academic societies

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have been observed engaging in soul searching in recent years regarding the accessibility and openness of conferences to minorities, women, schoolteachers, etc., pondering the value and legitimacy of traditions and norms associated with what some may still see as old boy networks” (Jackson 2019: 694). According to Jackson, it is not uncommon for female academics to experience certain aspects and spaces of conferences as unsafe – with women reporting being touched, caressed and grabbed by men in unnecessary and unexpected ways, or being complimented by men for their attractiveness, rather than their ideas or presentation. The cause of GBV cannot be ascribed to a single factor, any more than it can be addressed through stand-alone policies. The perpetration of GBV emanates from a cross-section of “regimes of truth”, which includes culture, religion, economics, age, gender, sexuality, space, community, as well as education, or a lack thereof. Collins (2014: 286), for example, reports that for many young people (18–23 years), university presents the first opportunity to live away from home. The unfamiliar social environment presents “fewer constraints and greater opportunities for experimentation – means that students are potentially more vulnerable to abuse and, because of their age and lack of experience, less skilled at protecting themselves” (Collins 2014: 286). Other studies, such as those by Heise, Ellsberg and Gottmoeller (2002), confirm the link between growing up in a home characterised by violence, and the normalisation thereof later in life. This kind of home is often symptomatic of particularly impoverished communities, “where violence against women is seen as the norm culturally and religiously, use of alcohol and ownership of guns, all of which are celebrated as markers of hegemonic masculinity” (CSVR 2016: 8). As hooks (2004: 2) makes us aware, patriarchy requires male dominance by any means necessary, and therefore, supports, promotes, and condones sexist violence. To her, the most common forms of patriarchal violence are those that take place in the home between patriarchal parents and children. The point of such violence, contends hooks (2004: 2), “is usually to reinforce a dominator model, in which the authority figure is deemed ruler over those without power and given the right to maintain that rule through practices of subjugation, subordination, and submission”.

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GBV is often minimised, dismissed, or legitimised through the (often misinterpreted) understandings and framings of religion, culture and tradition. African cultural practices, such as ukuthwala (forcing young girls into marriage), virginity testing, and lobola are often cited as traditions which promote the ownership, control and subjugation of women (Ludsin and Vetten 2005). Socialisation into practices of male authority and female submissiveness is as pervasive in the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), as they are in other faiths and traditions. Moreover, religious traditions are inextricably intertwined in cultural contexts and norms – often, making it hard to differentiate between what is religious, and what is cultural. Conceptions of culture are not always attached to a particular religion or tradition. Cultures, as Yuval-­ Davis (2011: 115) clarifies, are dynamic social processes operating in contested terrains in which different voices become more or less hegemonic in their offered interpretations of the world. In this sense, cultural discourses often resemble more of a battleground for meaning than a shared point of departure (Yuval-Davis 2011: 115). One such battleground is the idea of men’s entitlement to sexual intercourse – leading to blurred lines between what is often dismissed as seemingly harmless “lad culture” and “rape culture” (Phipps et al. 2018). Phipps et al. (2018: 1) explain that these cultural norms produce prevalent “rape myths” such as that women enjoy being raped, and give credence to the idea that there are “blurred” lines around consent, which have generated widespread disbelief of rape victims and low conviction rates of perpetrators. The issue of consent is further blurred in settings of alcohol and/or drugs – both of which are commonly associated with university culture. Now that I have provided some insights into the nature and prevalence of GBV in university spaces, I will turn my attention to the major concern of under-reporting and its inadvertent consequence of perpetuating GBV.

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Shame, Silence and Under-Reporting That none of the female students (58.8%) at a Nigerian university, who shared that they had experienced GBV, reported the incident to the university authorities (Iliyasu et al. 2011), provides some indication of the problematic depth of under-reporting. While it is possible to discern between individual and institutional reasons for under-reporting, these reasons are often trapped in intersections of relationships and normative constructions of what constitutes perpetration, victimhood, and shame. One of the most commonly cited reasons is that of “not knowing what to do”. At times, students report literally not knowing whom to approach, where to go, and what processes to follow – in sum, a lack of clarity about institutional procedures. Other times “not knowing what to do” speaks to the sense of shame, confusion, and trauma, as well as fear of reactions from parents, family, friends, and the community; fear of stigma; and of course, fear of reprisal attacks from the perpetrator (Iliyasu et al. 2011). Contrary to widespread “stranger-rape” myths, in the majority (80–90%) of GBV crimes, the victim and the assailant are known to each other as an acquaintance, friend, or date (Karjane et al. 2002; Rennison and Addington 2014). This, together with the possibility of drinking that often defines socialising on university campuses, adds to the burden experienced by victims and the subsequent unlikelihood of reporting. The shame and stigma attached to being a victim of GBV are often reinforced by the social and institutional discourse and norms. Programmes and initiatives aimed to prevent GBV are regularly directed at women or victims of these crimes and places the responsibility of stopping this violence on them, rather than the perpetrators, or the contexts that might facilitate these crimes (Rentschler 2015). Other times, victims know what to do, but as Ahmed (2015) explains, they come up against wall after wall. Students, she continues, are actively discouraged from making complaints: “if you complain you will damage your career (this can work as a threat, you will lose the very connections that enable you to progress); or if you complain you will damage the professor; or if you complain you will ruin a centre or collective” (Ahmed 2015). Once complaints are made, more walls come up: an injury to the

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student or professor’s reputation. Furthermore, according to Jackson (2019: 698), women may not frequently or openly discuss experiences of GBV, even if these are commonplace for them, because of early/initial experiences where such sharing – particularly about experiences that border on sexual harassment – is met primarily with objections and/or scepticism. Moreover, complaints about sexual harassment are not made public as a way of protecting the organisation from damage (Ahmed 2015). Of particular concern is that high rates of under-reporting – as influenced by individual and institutional barriers  – contribute to the perpetuation of a dyadic relationship between patriarchy and GBV. Patriarchal, heteronormative, and hegemonic masculine norms are so entrenched (and celebrated) across race, class, religions, and cultures, that GBV is often not understood as a form of violence. A vast majority of individuals, states hooks (2004: 2), enforce an unspoken rule in the culture as a whole that demands we keep the secrets of patriarchy, such as violence in the home, or violence in university spaces. To hooks (2004: 2), this rule of silence is upheld when the culture refuses everyone easy access even to the word “patriarchy”; this silence promotes denial. If the system of patriarchy cannot be named, then the system can neither be challenged nor changed (hooks 2004). Patriarchal ideology, maintains hooks (2004: 3), conditions men to believe that their domination of women is beneficial when it is not, and passive male absorption of sexist ideology enables men to a false interpretation that this disturbing behaviour is positive. For as long as men are conditioned “to equate violent domination and abuse of women with privilege, they will have no understanding of the damage done to themselves or to others, and no motivation to change” (hooks 2004: 3).

Universities as Unsafe Public Spheres Although most universities in South Africa have sexual harassment legislation and policies, there are questions about how GBV is understood, and in light of low reporting rates, indeed, whether these policies are effective. As Gouws and Kritzinger (2007) observe, while universities want to be perceived as taking GBV seriously, they fear that in actively

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addressing it, there will be an increase in reporting that could tarnish their institutional image. If we speak of sexual harassment as organisational culture, states Ahmed (2015), we threaten the organisation’s reputation. “Those who are damaged become the ones who cause damage... [a]nd the institutional response can take the form of damage limitation”. There are two concerns worth considering here. On the one hand, is the contention – as made during the recent anti-GBV protests on South African campuses – that students resort to sharing GBV allegations on social media because universities failed to address these allegations adequately. Inasmuch as social media can be abused as a platform for GBV, so, too, has social media provided women (as the primary victims of GBV) “with unparalleled opportunities to form and participate in counter-­publics in which allegations of sexual violence are being received, discussed and acted upon in ways contrary to established social and legal norms” (Salter 2013: 226). To Mendes, Keller and Ringrose (2019), social or digital media presents a generative activist space which allows for affective commonalities and solidarities, including fear, anger and disgust at GBV, but also to expose societal and institutional practices that feed into sexual discrimination and GBV.  Yet, in the same way that social media can be abused as a tool for GBV, so too, can it be used for other forms of revenge, violence and violations whereby activism degenerates into defamation and harm. Consider, for example, a bulletin issued by the Equality Unit of Stellenbosch University, which reads as follows: The Equality Unit (EqU) notes with great concern reports of gender-based violence and sexual harassment allegations against Stellenbosch University (SU) staff and students on social media in recent weeks. … Most often, no formal statement/s were made by the complainants even after several attempts to gather information… While the EqU attempts to assess each case on its individual merit/s, it is additionally the responsibility of individuals and groups to take due diligence when posting allegations of sexual misconduct or sexual harassment on social media. (Stellenbosch University 2019d)

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Both sides of this debate have its own merits and its own complexities. What both serve to highlight, however, is that the malaise of GBV cannot be managed solely through policies and initiatives of response. The prevalence of GBV speaks to broader and deeper disorders of misconduct. Firstly, GBV is symptomatic of the sedimentation and entrenchment of gender-specific roles that are often protected by the hierarchical and patriarchal structures found within academia and university spaces. Secondly, GBV is a means through which to define and reduce not only women, but anyone who does not conform to gendered forms of conduct, to stereotypes of less-than, to that which deserves to be controlled, manipulated, and violated. In this regard, it is important to heed the opinion of Swartz, Mahali, Arogundade, Khalema, Rule, Cooper, Molefi and Naidoo (2017), that university environments have proven to be incubators for patriarchy, homophobia, and sexism to flourish. What Swartz et al. (2017) bring to the fore is that GBV exists because of particular contextual structures and systems. GBV as a system cannot be separated from the ongoing problem of how a privileged few reproduce a world around their bodies (Ahmed 2015). As such, any framework that seeks to address GBV, would need to depart from recognition of contextual norms, structures, and cultures that seemingly solidify gender biases and discrimination. What needs to be disrupted, therefore, are not only acts and perpetuations of GBV, but systemic structures and cultures that allow GBV to occur, in the first instance. Fraser (1990: 63–64) cites what she describes as a syndrome in university faculties among male and female academics, whereby men tend to interrupt women more than women interrupt men; men tend to speak more than women, taking more and longer turns; and women’s interventions are more often ignored or not responded to than men’s. As argued by Swartz et al. (2017: 78), “we cannot expect to see patriarchy, sexism, gender-based violence, homophobia and other related exclusions addressed if the proportion of university authorities (i.e. professors and decision-makers) is not sentient of gender and sexuality-­ related (dis)advantage”. To Fraser (1990: 65), we should ask whether it is possible for interlocutors (academics, students, men, women, LGBTQI’s), even in principle, to deliberate as if they were social peers in specially designed discursive areas, when these discursive areas are situated in a

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broader societal context that is pervaded by structural relations of dominance and subordination.

An Issue of Social Justice in the Public Sphere To address GBV is to recognise, firstly, that it resides and thrives in patriarchal and dichotomous constructions of male domination as opposed to female subjugation. Secondly, because GBV impacts upon an individual’s access, mobility, participation, recognition, inclusion, and safety, it has to be considered as a concern of social justice within the public sphere. In sum, that female and LGBTQI communities are constrained in how they navigate the public (university) sphere and are potentially harmed when they do so, demands a renewed consideration of the public sphere (the university) itself. Following Habermas (1974), open access to the public sphere is one of the central meanings of the norms of publicity. Yet, as Fraser (1990) emphasises, and as is evident from the preceding discussions, women of all classes and ethnicities were (and are) excluded from official political participation precisely based on ascribed gender status. Moreover, in many contexts, women and men of racialised ethnicities of all classes are excluded on racial grounds (Fraser 1990: 63). The concerns of access, unendangered mobility, and unconstrained deliberation, therefore, have to be considered in relation to unequal access, participation, and exclusion. In stratified societies, Fraser (1990: 64) contends, “unequally empowered social groups tend to develop unequally valued cultural styles”. The result, she continues, “is the development of powerful informal pressures that marginalize the contributions of members of subordinated groups both in everyday life contexts and in official public spheres”. Depending on a university’s institutional culture, these pressures are either acknowledged and mitigated or denied and enhanced. As has been highlighted in this chapter, universities neither share a common understanding, nor adopt a common approach to addressing, and ultimately, preventing GBV. Moreover, while some might question the need for a common approach in the first instance, the point being that in the absence of recognising GBV as an act, which at a fundamental

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level, is a violation of human rights, might provide some insights into why GBV continues in the way that it does. Men, women and LGBTQI individuals do enter the public sphere or the university sphere as equals. It cannot be that in order for a woman to access and participate in the public sphere, she cannot do so in her singularity. Dominant responses from universities dealing with GBV, continue to caution women to be accompanied; to have a whistle, or pepper spray, or whatever other device might be necessary to ensure her safe passage. Such an approach suggests the idea of a multiple publics – one for those who constitute the dominant discourse, and the other for those who need to navigate their way along nondescript margins. But, as Fraser (1990: 66) reminds us, the idea of a multiplicity of publics represents a departure from, rather than an advance towards democracy. For universities to function as an embodiment of democratic values, it has to ensure what Fraser (1990: 66) refers to as “participatory parity”. Notions of segregated spaces, and designated conversations, and prescribed conditions, point to a perpetuation of unequal spaces, and an increased likelihood of marginalisation and voicelessness. In other words, all individuals, regardless of their race, class, religion, gender, or sexuality, have to enter the same public sphere on their respective terms if the dominance of patriarchal hegemonies is to be deliberated upon, and more importantly, disrupted. If women or LBTQI individuals are perpetually required to assume responsibility for what may or may not happen to them in the public sphere, then it means, on the one hand, that the perpetrator is neither held accountable nor constrained. On the other hand, it signifies a compromised understanding of just actions among human beings. Following the above, addressing GBV requires a critical reflection not only of the summative effects of violence on women and LGBTQI individuals but also on what gives rise to it in the first place. As shown in this chapter, universities are spaces that have the potential to enable GBV. As such, GBV can only be undone by addressing the public sphere of a university – that is, its institutional cultures and systemic structures. How is the university’s public sphere used to perpetuate sexist or exclusionary dogmas? Which spaces and discourses force women and LGBTQI individuals to retreat into corners of silence and invisibility? The

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establishment of a parallel public sphere, which is often embedded in institutional responses to managing GBV, is not an alternative. Such initiatives not only serves to protect dominant hegemonies but prevents a counter-narrative from being voiced. In conclusion, the public sphere of a university is, by its nature, constituted through diverse and pluralist communities. This diversity and pluralism have to be reflected in the institutional identity of a university. Moreover, the contestatory nature of this diversity needs to be foregrounded in institutional governance and norms. It is through access, participation, and recognition that the public sphere can be held in check so that existing privileges do not monopolise the centre, but rather that the centre remains fluid concerning shifting identities and discourses. Such an understanding and approach are better placed to recognise that despite GBV being directed at particular communities because of their socially constructed and imposed vulnerability and less-than status, the effects of GBV ripples into serious repercussions for universities as socially just spheres. Universities have to be seen to be serious about addressing GBV, and this means being serious about taking the necessary steps to facilitate a socially just public sphere by undoing those systems and cultures that have thus far played a role in both the overt and covert discrimination and harassment of certain individuals and communities. Concerns about the image and reputation of a university have to be outweighed by socially just action. In the end, it is up to universities to depart from pre-existing and uncontested norms and to reconceive themselves in relation to a type of world where bodies and sexualities of human beings are not the basis of violence. The lived experiences of women and LGBTQI individuals cannot be detached from the public sphere. For the violence to cease, the public sphere of universities has to be reconceived and reproduced.

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Ahmed, S. (2015). Sexual harassment. https://feministkilljoys.com/2015/12/03/ sexual-harassment/. Accessed 23 Mar 2020. Anitha, S., & Lewis, R. (2018). Gender based violence in university communities: Policy, prevention and educational initiatives. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Bloom, S. (2008). Violence against women and girls: A compendium of monitoring and evaluation indicators. Chapel Hill: MEASURE Evaluation. Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Cantor, D., Fisher, W. B., Chibnall, S., Townsend, R., Lee, H., Bruce, C., & Thomas, G. (2015). Report on the AAU campus climate survey on sexual assault and sexual misconduct. https://www.aau.edu/sites/default/files/%40%20 Files/Climate%20Survey/AAU_Campus_Climate_Survey_12_14_15.pdf. Accessed 23 Mar 2020. Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR). (2016). Gender-­ based violence (GBV) in South Africa: A brief review. Pretoria: Embassy of Finland. Collins, A. (2014). Faceless bureaucracy? The challenges of gender-based violence and practices of care in higher education. In V.  Reddy, S.  Meyer, T. Shefer, & T. Meyiwa (Eds.), Care in context: Transnational gender perspectives (pp. 286–304). Pretoria: HSRC Press. Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). (2017). Addressing gender-based violence in the post-school education and training sector: Draft policy and strategy framework. Pretoria: Government Printers. Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). (2019). Policy framework to address gender-based violence in the post-school education and training system. Pretoria: Government Printers. Fairbairn, J., Bivens, R., & Dawson, M. (2013). Sexual violence and social media: Building a framework for prevention. Ottawa: Crime Prevention. Foucault, M. (1990). The use of pleasure: Volume two of the history of sexuality. New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and punish: The birth of a prison. London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1997). Ethics: Subjectivity and truth. In P.  Rabinow (Ed.), and Trans. R. Hurley and others. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press. Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text, 25(26), 56–80. Gouws, A., & Kritzinger, A. (2007). Dealing with sexual harassment at institutions of higher learning: Policy implementation of a South African university. South African Journal of Higher Education, 21(1), 68–84.

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Habermas, J. (1974). The public sphere: An encyclopaedia article (1964). New German Critique, 3, 49–55. Heise, L., Ellsberg, M., & Gottmoeller, M. (2002). A global overview of gender-­ based violence. International Journal of Gynaecology and Obstetrics, 78(1), 5–14. hooks, b. (2004). Understanding patriarchy. https://imaginenoborders.org/pdf/ zines/UnderstandingPatriarchy.pdf. Accessed 23 Mar 2020. Iliyasu, Z., Abubakar, I. S., Aliyu, M. H., Galadanci, H. S., & Salihu, H. M. (2011). Prevalence and correlates of gender-based violence among female university students in Northern Nigeria. African Journal of Reproductive Health, 15(3), 111–120. Jackson, L. (2019). The smiling philosopher: Emotional labor, gender, and harassment in conference spaces. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51(7), 693–701. Karjane, H., Fisher, B.  S., & Cullen, T. (2002). Campus sexual assault: How America’s institutions of higher education respond (Final report, NIJ Grant # 1999-WA-VX-0008). Newton: Education Development Center. Ludsin, H., & Vetten, L. (2005). Spiral of entrapment: Abused women in conflict with the law. Johannesburg: Jacana. Mendes, K., Ringrose, J., & Keller, J. (2019). Digital feminist activism: Girls and women fight back against rape culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Phipps, A., Ringrose, J., Renold, E., & Jackson, C. (2018). Rape culture, lad culture and everyday sexism: Researching, conceptualizing and politicizing new mediations of gender and sexual violence. Journal of Gender Studies, 27(1), 1–8. Rennison, C. M., & Addington, L. A. (2014). Violence against college women: A review to identify limitations in defining the problem and inform future research. Trauma, Violence & Abuse, 15, 159–169. Rentschler, C. (2015). #Safetytipsforladies: Feminist twitter takedowns of victim blaming. Feminist Media Studies, 15(2), 353–356. Salter, M. (2013). Justice and revenge in online counter-publics: Emerging responses to sexual violence in the age of social media. Crime Media Culture, 9(3), 225–242. Sigsworth, R. (2009). Anyone can be a rapist…: An overview of sexual violence in South Africa. Braamfontein: Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. Stellenbosch University. (2019a). Policy on unfair discrimination and harassment (applicable to staff and students). http://sunrecords.sun.ac.za/controlled/

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C4%20Policies%20and%20.Regulations/FINAL%20Policy%20on%20 Unfair%20Discrimination%20and%20Harassment%20ENG%202016. pdf. Accessed 3 Oct 2019. Stellenbosch University. (2019b). Disciplinary code for students of SU (applicable to students). http://sunrecords.sun.ac.za/controlled/C4%20Policies%20 and%20Regulations/C4_SU_Disciplinary_Code_2016_09_26.pdf. Accessed 3 Oct 2019. Stellenbosch University. (2019c). Disciplinary code for staff members of SU (applicable to staff). http://www.sun.ac.za/english/human-resources/Documents/ HR%20WEB%20-%20MHB%20WEB/Documents-Dokumente/PoliciesBeleide/Employee%20Relations-Arbeidsbetrekkinge/Eng/IR0152-%20 Disciplinary%20Code-%20March%202015.pdf. Accessed 3 Oct 2019. Stellenbosch University. (2019d). Equality unit convenes extraordinary sexual harassment advisory panel. https://www.facebook.com/stellenboschuniversity/posts/takenote-equality-unit-convenes-extraordinary-sexual-harassment-advisory-panelth/10157694757047421/ Accessed 3 Apr 2020. Swartz, S., Mahali, A., Arogundade, E., Khalema, E. S., Rule, C., Cooper, A., Molefe, S., & Naidoo, P. (2017). Ready or not! Race, education and emancipation: A five-year longitudinal, qualitative study of agency and impasses to success amongst higher education students in a sample of South African universities. Client report submitted to the Centre for Critical Research on Race and Identity, University of KwaZulu-Natal/Department of Higher Education and Training. http://www.hsrc.ac.za/en/research-outputs/view/8966. Accessed 23 Mar 2020. Valentine, G., Wood, N., & Plummer, P. (2009). The experience of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans staff and students in higher education. London: Equality Challenge Unit. Vetten, L. (2007). Violence against women in South Africa 2007. In S. Buhlungu, J. Daniel, R. Southall, & J. Lutchman (Eds.), State of the nation: South Africa (pp. 425–447). Cape Town: HSRC Press. Yancy, G. (2019). Judith Butler: When killing women isn’t a crime. https://www. nytimes.com/2019/07/10/opinion/judith-butler-gender.html. Accessed 22 Oct 2019. Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. London: Sage Publications.

3 Violent Pedagogy? Critical Pedagogical Self-Reflection in the Midst of Engaging the Silencing Effects of Gender-Based Violence Within the Context of Higher Education Charlene van der Walt and Judith Terblanche

Introduction Gender-based violence (GBV) is an alarming reality plaguing all communities in South Africa. According to research, the endemic amount of cases reported to the South African police annually is but the tip of the iceberg as the silencing effects of GBV remains pervasive. 2018 marked a distressing increase in visibility of alarming and high profile GBV cases within faith communities in the South African landscape. Consequently, numerous religious scholars have called for urgent critical reflection and

C. van der Walt Department of Theology, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] J. Terblanche (*) University of the Western Cape, Bellville, Western Cape, South Africa © The Author(s) 2020 N. Davids, Y. Waghid (eds.), University Education, Controversy and Democratic Citizenship, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56985-3_3

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prophetic action by religious institutions and faith leaders as it seems that the intersection of gender, religion and culture within the South African context offers fertile soil for the enhancement of life-denying constructions of masculinity, the promotion of patriarchy and the endorsement of sexism. In an attempt to foreground the issue of GBV within faith communities and to oppose the silencing effect of GBV within these settings, the Gender and Religion Department at the School of Religion, Philosophy and Classics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in collaboration with the Aids Healthcare Foundation, ACT Ubumbano, We Will Speak Out South Africa and the Ujamaa Centre for Contextual Theology again hosted the #SilentProtest against GBV in 2019 after the successful initial pilot of the project in 2018. The protest was strategically embedded as part of the teaching and learning practice within a postgraduate module entitled: Issues of Masculinities and Gender. This contribution sets out to reflect critically on the role of protest within the pedagogical practice of theological education in the South African context and draws on insights gained from relevant pedagogy and gender theorists and the reflections of both the teaching team and students registered for the module. Beyond the descriptive task, the essay further aims to engage in the process of critical pedagogical self-reflection to engage the issue hinted at in the provocative title namely the possibility of violence when one is pedagogically committed to the destabilising praxis of facilitating deliberative encounters.

 onsidering the Broader South African C Contextual GBV Landscape Between 1942 and 1945, several million people were put to death in the concentration camps of the Third Reich: at Treblinka alone more than a million and a half, perhaps as many as three million. These are numbers that numb the mind. We have only one death of our own; we can comprehend the deaths of others only one at a time. In the abstract we may be able to count to a million, but we cannot count to a million deaths.

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It is with these words expressed by Elizabeth Costello, the main character in J.M Coetzee’s 2003 novel, that the writer expresses the incomprehensible and mind-numbing effect of pain expressed in numbers, especially statistics concerning human suffering and death. Figures suggest there are an estimated 500 000 rapes in South Africa every year and that for every 25 men accused of rape in the country, 24 walk free. Some 140 rapes are reported every day, but considering the low estimated report rate of rape and sexual violence, the number could be much higher. It is further estimated that that half of South African women will be raped in their lifetimes (Di Silvio 2011: 1477).1

When considering 500,000 women being raped in South Africa in a year, the words of J.M Coetzee concerning the incomprehensibility of large numbers illustrating human pain and suffering rings profoundly true. We might be able to count to 500,000, but can we, for a moment, consider the bodies of 500,000 women being violated, disrespected and sometimes even destroyed, if we have only one body of our own? Can we truly comprehend the impact of sexual violence on the South African landscape – especially considering the situatedness of victims and survivors of sexual violence within communities? Survivors of rape, intimate partner violence and other forms of sexual violence continue to live within communities. The impact of sexual violence can, therefore, not only be calculated at the individual level, but one also has to consider the consequential fallout within communities. South Africa has the highest rape statistics for a country not at war, and yet, if one considers the pervasiveness of GBV and intimate partner violence (IPV) in the South African context, it could be argued that we are a country at civil war staged on the bodies of women and those embodying non-normative sexual and gender identities (Lukani 2019).  South Africa’s crime statistics for 2018/19 were released by the police during a meeting in parliament on 12 September 2019. It is reported that in 2018/19, a total of 2771 women were murdered in South Africa – down from 2930 in 2017/18. This means a woman is murdered every three hours. A total of 1014 children were murdered. Further to the amount of femicides, the police recorded 41,583 rapes in 2018/19, up from 40,035 rapes in 2017/18. This means an average of 114 rapes were recorded by the police each day. The rape rate increased from 70.5 in 2017/18 to 72.1 in 2018/19. (AfricaCheck 2019.) 1

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In an important essay, Deborah Posel (2005: 240) “traces the genealogy of sexual violence as a contested public and political issue, from its initial marginalization and minimization during the apartheid era, through to the explosion of anguish and anger which marked the post-­apartheid moment, and most dramatically the years 2001 and 2002.” Posel (2005: 240) explains this increase in political public discourse concerning the issue of sexual violence post-1994 in line with the “wider political and ideological anxieties about the manner of the national subject and the moral community of the country’s newly established democracy.” Posel (2005: 242) sheds light on the concealment strategies employed under the apartheid regime regarding sexual violence when …banishing the problem to the margins of public discourse and attention… The perpetrator was rendered as a deviant stranger, the antithesis of the figure of father/provider… The likelihood of rape was seen to be highest amongst men who were unknown and anti-social: stray beasts, roaming on the margins of society. Rape was a quintessentially anti-social act, the symptom of brute force and untamed lust, ant the rapist was typically a faceless, predatory stranger – without a personality or motives other than an inchoate sexual menace.

The issue came into public view more sharply and significantly after 1994, in the so-called post-apartheid milieu. Tellingly, it was a focus on the violent sexual abuse of children that subverted the comforting image of the protective and fatherly male most powerfully, which excited the highest orders of concern. Posel (2005: 247) explains: [In the post-apartheid context,] sexual violence … bec[a]me a trope of degradation, violation and moral frailty in all its manifestations. Rape now exemplified the most fundamental political and moral challenges confronting the newborn democratic nation: the terms and conditions of the new nation’s moral community, the manner of the national subject, … and the meaning of hard-fought liberation and democracy.

Arguably, rape statistics have been employed as a powerful tool to shift the discourse on sexual violence from a “private” event where sexuality as such is often still regarded as both shameful and private, to a political

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issue where rape is seen as a “matter of political and public concern” (Du Toit 2005: 253). Du Toit (2005: 253) argues that this shift from rape as a private event to a public concern brings into focus the intrinsic power and political realities that comes into play when considering rape as she explains that politics is about who has power over whom, and rape (and its threat) is one of the multiple ways in which people wield power over each other. Du Toit’s important work on rape as a form of torture nuances the pervasiveness of GBV to extend beyond the physical threat to the systemic and punitive forms of control that limits women’s freedom of movement and self-expression because of the immanent and ever-present threat of the possibility of rape.

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Before focusing our attention on the #SilentProtest2 against GBV hosted at the UKZN, we consider some underlying issues. Firstly, we reflect on the question as to why GBV is so prevalent in South African society? The endemic and pervasive nature of GBV against women and children in South African society is something that cannot be denied. Boonzaier and De la Rey (2003: 1004) describes the unique complexities of South African society concerning GBV as follows: In South Africa, there are particular manifestations of violence against women that result in a unique interaction between race, gender and other forms of power to form complex dynamics of inequity and domination. The sociocultural context provides the boundaries through which women filter their experience of violence and through which men access preferred or devalued forms of gender identity. An analysis of woman abuse amongst South African women, therefore, cannot be accomplished without acknowledgement of multiple levels of analysis, such as the social, cultural, economic and historical contexts.

Keeping these complexities in mind, Rachel Jewkes from the Gender and Health Group at the Medical Research Council in Pretoria has developed a theory concerning the causality of GBV and IPV. Her model for explaining these causes “presents it as a constellation or web of associated and mediating factors and processes that are centrally influenced by ideas

 One of the strongest dimensions of the #SilentProtest is the striking visual nature of the protest. The protest conceptually developed in an attempt to make visible the popular rape statistic during the 2005–2006 Jacob Zuma rape trial where it was estimated that 1 out of 9 woman reported incidences of GBV or IPV. All images used in this essay is from the 2019 protest hosted on the Pietermaritzburg campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal on the 7th of August 2019 and is courtesy of @AlexaSedge. For more please see: www.alexasedge.co.za. Survivors who are depicted in the images used in this essay gave written consent for the appropriation of their images for this publication. The images in the publication are deliberately not captioned as we aim to invite the viewer to enter into a creative dialogue between text and image. 2

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about masculinity and the position of women in society and ideas about the use of violence” (Jewkes and Abrahms 2002: 1615). Fundamental to the understanding of violence against women are two separate yet connected ideological concepts. Firstly, Jewkes and Abrahms (2002: 1615) points to the ideology of male superiority which, …legitimates the disciplining of women, often for [the] transgression of conservative female gender roles, and often also the use of force in this. They construct women as legitimate vehicles for the reconfirmation of male powerfulness through beating since this is a demonstration of male power juxtaposed against the lesser power of women. They act to disempower women through denying equal access to education, employment and political roles. In so doing, they impact on women’s perceptions of self-worth and self-efficiency, as well as reducing their social and economic ability to leave a relationship, return to family and/or live alone and thus severely curtail their ability to act against an abuser.

The second ideological factor that serves as an explanation for the high incidence of violence against women is the so-called “culture of violence” where violence is deployed frequently as a tool for conflict resolution (Jewkes 2002). It has been argued that violence against women is much more common where interpersonal violence is generally common, and it has been shown that childhood experiences of violence in the home serve to reinforce the normative nature of violence and thus increase the likelihood of women’s acceptance of abuse (Jewkes and Abrahms 2002: 1615).

When considering the psychological consequences and societal fallout of the systemic dehumanisation of people as it found expression under the apartheid regime and how this system informed conceptions of what constituted personhood and humanity, it is not impossible to argue for the structural affinities between a society plagued by racism and the

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current systemic expressions of sexism and misogyny. Justifying the use of violence to dehumanise people of colour during apartheid clearly informs the current South African landscape where it is possible to erase, dispose or destroy women’s bodies at will. Secondly, and linking to the previous point of reflection, we consider the question as to why faith communities seem like ideal sites for the occurrence and flourishing of GBV? 2018 marked an alarming increase in the visibility of alarming and high-profile GBV cases within faith communities in the South African landscape.3 Rather than receiving solace, care and support from faith communities when survivors of GBV seek assistance from these communities, it has become apparent that women are particularly vulnerable to abuse and further victimisation within such communities. Consequently, numerous religious scholars have called for urgent critical reflection and prophetic action by religious institutions and faith leaders as it seems that the intersection of gender, religion and culture within the South African context offers fertile soil for the enhancement of life-denying constructions of masculinity, the promotion of patriarchy and the endorsement of sexism and homophobia. Heteropatriarchy, as a systemic reality that aims to affirm the superiority of men over women and the consequential social control of women’s bodies is deeply informed by both African expressions of religion and culture. At the heart of attempts to ensure the stability of culturally endorsed heteropatriarchy through religion are fundamentalist and non-contextual

 The accusations of rape by Cheryl Zondi and the high profile court case against the Nigerian pastor and tele-evangelist Timothy Omotoso is a prominent example of this disturbing trend. For more in this regard please see among others: Harding, A., 2018, South Africa shocked by live rape trial of Timothy Omotoso, viewed 6 December 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-­ africa-­45940338. Another high profile case involving a faith institution and GBV was the alleged sexual exploitation that took place at the so called 7 Angles Ministries. For more in this regard please see among others: Manona, N., 2018, How Ngcobo cult kept its sex slaves, viewed 6 December 2019, https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/how-ngcobo-cult-kept-its-sexslaves-20180311-3 3

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engagements with sacred scriptures. The fundamental patriarchal ideology informing the nature of sacred scriptures offers fertile ground for informing the stability of cultural and religious constructions of patriarchy. In a patriarchal system, women are essentially constructed in binary opposition to men and always in an inferior power position. These structural and systemic realities inform the precarious position of women in the South African landscape in general and the faith landscape in particular. Thirdly, and considering the theme of the protest, we would like to offer some preliminary reflections on the pervasive silence that continue to exist when it comes to GBV. Survivors of GBV often do not report incidences of violence or respond to probing questions about the occurrence of violence within a family or personal setting. This arguably happens because of the inability to name commonplace behaviour as violent or to express in words the pain and suffering that they often endured because of situations of violence and abuse (Jewkes and Abrahms 2002). Survivors of GBV also often remain silent as a form of self-preservation/ protection from further violation at the hands of the ones they choose to tell who most often will not believe them and will tell them to keep quiet or at the hands of the justice system. The vulnerability of women due to the intersection of race, gender, sexuality and socio-economic realities also increases the risk of women who dare to speak out and the subsequent positions of precarity. Beyond challenges posed to survivors of GBV in speaking out against abuse and violence, the pervasive institutional and societal silence that continue to dominate the issue has often been remarked on by scholars and remains a perplexing systemic reality.

2019 #SilentProtest at UKZN In an attempt to foreground the issue of GBV within faith communities and to oppose the silencing effect of GBV within these settings, the Gender and Religion Department at the School of Religion, Philosophy and Classics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in collaboration with the Aids Healthcare Foundation and the Ujamaa Centre for Contextual Theology, piloted the #SilentProtest against GBV in 2018. In 2019 the

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NGO partners supporting the protest increased to include ACT Ubumbano and We Will Speak Out South Africa and the protest was strategically embedded as part of the teaching and learning ­practice.

The #SilentProtest is an attempt to reflect and engage collectively with the silencing and dehumanising effects of GBV. The protest is a form of embodied resistance against the effects of rape and sexual violence as it concerns issues that affect us all and cuts across race, gender, class, sexual orientation, culture and religious affiliations. The protest took place on August 7, 2019, on the PMB Campus of UKZN and the level of participation can be noted from the image above. Joining the protest meant that participants committed themselves to a day of silent embodied resistance against the silencing and dehumanising effects of GBV.

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Protesters have a choice as to how they want to participate in the protest. Firstly, participants can join as silent protesters who wear a purple T-Shirt with the protest slogan: Believe Survivors, and they have their mouths taped shut from 8:00 to 18:00 embodying, offering and challenging the silence surrounding rape and sexual violence.

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Secondly, and even more demandingly, survivors of GBV can join the protest wearing a T-Shirt stating: Survivor. Survivors of GBV function as the dynamo for the protest activity as their mouths are not taped shut. They are the voice of the protest and the visual reminder that those affected by GBV continue to navigate the landscape of everyday existence in South Africa. The protest encompassed individual and collective dimensions. Protesters joined strategic collective sessions during the day but were also encouraged to go about their normal day-to-day activities and to visually represent those who have been silenced by the reality of rape and sexual violence. Some of the central collective activities include the silencing ritual at the beginning of the day, the river of death or die-in during the lunch break where protesters occupy a central space by visually embodying the victims of GBV, and the unsilencing ritual that takes place at the end of the day when protesters get to speak out against GBV collectively.

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 mbedding Protest in Pedagogy: Theoretical E Underpinnings Informing the Inclusion of Protest as Part of the Pedagogical Process As was already hinted at, the protest was strategically embedded within the teaching and learning practice and found expression in a postgraduate module within the School of Religion, Philosophy and Classics at UKZN entitled: Issues of Masculinities and Gender. The module represents a collaborative engagement by the Gender and Religion programme and Biblical Studies Department in the School and explores issues of masculinity and gender from ancient to contemporary contexts. This module is located within the intersections of issues such as gender, masculinity, and sexuality within African faith contexts. The module aims to interrogate stereotypical androcentric and patriarchal representations of masculinity and aims to open up space for a more complex and nuanced understanding of what constitutes positive or redemptive masculinity. Further, considering the landscape described above regarding GBV in the South African context, the module is an example of an attempt to teach for social justice. When reflecting on this mode of pedagogical practice, Chubbuck and Zembylas (2008: 311) argue that “[t]eaching for social justice, then, is not only a cognitive endeavour; it involves engaging in emotional reflection, finding one’s own contextualised relationship to justice, and creating an empowered sense of agency to take action and transform one’s teaching practices.” Students enrolled in the module are expected to participate in the protest and to reflect on their experience critically as an assessment project of the module. Several insights inform the inclusion of the protest in the pedagogical framework of the module. Firstly, the students involved in the module consists mainly of current or prospective clergy, faith- or community leaders and by capacitating these current and prospective change agents with greater sensitivity, skill and vocabulary to engage issues of GBV within the South African society in general and within faith communities in particular, it is reasoned that beyond individuals, entire communities could be capacitated through these change agents. Secondly, although the protest includes numerous uncomfortable elements, from the embodied challenges of not

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being able to eat, drink or speak for an entire day to the ideologically complex and confronting subject matter, the reasoning behind the inclusion in the curriculum is deeply informed by insights developed in a so-called “pedagogy of discomfort”, as developed by Zembylas, McGlynn, Boler amongst others (see Boler 2014; Boler and Zembylas 2003; Zembylas 2006; Zembylas 2015; Zembylas and McGlynn 2012). Zembylas and McGlynn (2012: 41) explain the imperative of deliberative discomforting experiences in pedagogy when stating: “[p]edagogically, this approach assumes that discomforting emotions play a constitutive role in challenging dominant beliefs, social habits and normative practices that sustain social inequities and in creating possibilities for individual and social transformation.” Thirdly, and considering the challenge posed by Martha Nussbaum (Nussbaum 1999) to strive for the development of moral imagination, the protest creates a space for participants to move beyond the immediacy of their own lived experience and to risk the vulnerability of compassion and care by seeing the world from another’s perspective, however briefly. Waghid, Waghid and Waghid (2018: 21) reflected on this process of care or empathy development when stating “we have to listen to what the other has to say, even if the other’s views are abominable (detestable and atrocious)”. This is also echoed in Marais’s (2014: 712) reflection when she argues for the importance of reflection on the narratives of the marginalised and oppressed. She states that this is because “the life stories of those who have been oppressed are heard and reflected upon because these stories hold the potential for transformation of both the oppressed and their oppressors”. The protest has thus illustrated great possibility for the interrogation of hegemonic values and the structures that it informs. Boler (2014: 129) aptly argues in this regard: “pedagogy of discomfort invites not only members of the dominant culture but also members of the marginalized cultures to re-examine the hegemonic values inevitably internalized”. Something of this dimension becomes apparent in the following two examples of personal reflections offered by students who participated in the protest: The first shock I had was in seeing some of my classmates wearing the t-shirts written survivor. That knocked the wind out of me. I did not know what would be an appropriate way to speak to them. Should I just pretend that I don’t notice what is written on their t-shirts? Can I ask what happened or is that too inva-

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sive? I did not ask them anything I just sat down. We then had our mouths taped by the survivors, and I struggled to look at them in the eye. As a black male person, I rarely try and look at issues from a female perspective. The silent protest was a chance to embody something that happens mostly to women. The image of the doe being pounded is stuck in my mind. Am I one of those who pound the doe or do I just watch silently? Am I a perpetrator or silent observer of gender-based violence? I keep on thinking that genderbased violence happens because we allow it.

Despite all of the above, the protest remains confronting and triggering for some, if not most of the participants. Some solace can be found in the reflection of Zembylas (2015: 166) concerning the creation of safe pedagogical spaces to engage complex social issues when he states, “safe space, then, is not about the absence of discomfort, but rather it is a way of thinking, feeling and acting that fosters students’ critical rigor”. Still, the question pertaining to the ethical responsibility of setting up discomforting pedagogical spaces remains. Griffiths (2003: 59) poignantly illuminates the confronting complexity of teaching for social justice when arguing “[t]here is always a danger with human relationships that difficulties are avoided rather than confronted. Listening, talking, consultation, cooperation, respect and value accorded to people: all this sounds pleasant, even cozy. But it is far from it. Working for social justice is never cozy!” When critically reflecting on the pedagogical practice the module implies and the discomforting experiences it evokes, the following from Griffiths (2003: 59) rings true: “[t]here is a particular danger that some aspects of social justice work might seem too difficult to confront, too likely to provoke discomfort.” This current essay is by no means an attempt to tie up the complexity or discomfort brought about by including a protest in the pedagogical praxis, but rather an attempt to articulate something of the ongoing imperative of critical pedagogical self-reflection and collective peer-­ centred, ethical, and pedagogical interrogation. Because of the ongoing and unfolding nature of the current pedagogical intervention under discussion, the essay represents something of an ongoing and unfinished pedagogical self-reflection as it aims to critically reflect on the role of protest within the pedagogical practice of theological education in the South African context. Although this reflection draws on current and

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reputable pedagogical and gender theory that informs the inclusion of the protest in pedagogical practice, in the final part of the essay we would like to offer some preliminary insights gained from the process of ongoing critical pedagogical self-reflection.

 reliminary Pedagogical Insights Gained P from Critical Pedagogical Self-Reflection Although by no means an exhaustive list of possible themes for critical pedagogical self-reflection and collective ethical interrogation of the implications of setting up confronting teaching and learning spaces engaging GBV in the South African context, we would like to highlight some issues for continued communal reflection. In the process, we hope to extend an invitation for others to join the conversation and the creative enterprise of teaching for change.

The Problem of Performing Pain

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Despite positive experiences of support and solidarity voiced by survivors who participate in the protest finding expression in the critical personal reflection offered by one of the student participants in the protest, the complexity of representation remains an issue that warrants ongoing critical reflection. Larissa also said something that was comforting and reassuring when she said to all survivors: ‘We believe you’. Those words, as little as they are, meant a lot. There is someone who believes that it was not my fault, I did not want what was done to me, I did not ask for it, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and a very sick man took advantage of that.4

The overarching feminist commitments and underpinnings of the pedagogical practice within the Gender and Religion programme insist on theoretical and practical engagement with issues located within the intersection of gender, sexuality and religion by investing in and foregrounding the epistemological privilege of those most affected by these embodied and contextual issues. For this reason, the voices, experiences and narratives of survivors of GBV are central and uncompromisable to the praxis of the intervention. The risk of re-traumatising survivors of GBV in the process cannot be denied, but beyond this risk, it also seems complex to insist on survivors always playing the role of the agents or educators raising community awareness. A very real risk regarding representation exists at the heart of the protest as it sometimes leads to situations where survivors of GBV have to perform their pain to shift public opinion or understanding of the embodied and contextual realities informing GVB. Furthermore, because one cannot manage the participation and intention of all those who join the protest, it sometimes leads to incidences where survivors of GBV feel used or unsafe due to the uncritical  Larissa Klazinga is the South Africa Regional Policy and Advocacy Manager for Aids Healthcare foundation. Larissa has been instrumental in the conceptualization and development of the #SilentProtest intervention strategy and has co-hosted the protest in numerous settings and on various South Africa University campuses. Larissa’s work as an activist and community organizer has recently aimed at making the intersectional connection between the high prevalence of GBV and the ongoing increase in the rate of HIV infections among young women in South Africa. She argues that when one cannot navigate for safe sex due to violence and coercion it creates an ideal space for the continued HIV prevalence. For more in this regard please see: https://www.iol.co.za/ news/south-africa/saaids2019-study-confirms-link-between-gender-based-violence-hiv-26140382 4

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aloofness of some who join the day of protest as a photo-opportunity. The ongoing task of awareness-raising and critical reflection on privilege and positionality remains a high priority in this regard.

Finding a Vocabulary to Name Experiences of Violence

In the pedagogical and protest space, individual culturally embedded narratives are met by “the other” who may see things from a different perspective. This community of reflection offers alternative viewpoints that might offer an individual the tools and language with which they could critically engage with their own life experiences and consequently, could be empowered to begin to unmask “normal” behaviour within their given context as violent or abusive. The protest offers participants an opportunity to develop the skills to speak about violence and abuse in the process of finding their voice. Critical to the development of the protest remains the challenge to find a balance between visually representing the

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silencing effect of GBV and of creating caring, supportive and enabling spaces for speaking against violence. The empowering shift between being a visible representation of the silencing effects of GBV to finding a voice to resist personal and systemic expressions of violence and dehumanisation is illustrated in the following student reflection: Although the day had its sad and challenging moments, it was truly rewarding and a learning experience. I am glad I took part in the protest and that I became a visible sign that gender-based violence is a reality, but it is also something that you survive. There are many who still die in silence without speaking out. I’m glad I spoke out, and I soldier on with the fight with the words of Maya Angelou: Out of the huts of history’s shame. I rise. Up from a past that’s rooted in pain. I rise… Leaving behind nights of terror and fear. I rise.

Beyond the enabling and empowering dimension of the protest that allows for the cultivation of voice to express experienced realities of GBV, the protest also allows for the possibility of compassionate witnessing. Hansen, however, remarks on a crucial emphasis when considering positionality in the process of listening or witnessing. In order for students and teachers to partake, to be receptive, they should move beyond “listening to others to listening with them” (Hansen 2011: 116) (original emphasis). The difference between to and with is the difference between merely stomaching the other versus being prepared to be moulded by the other; the difference in essence thus comprises a particular openness. Hansen (2011: 166) argues that listening with others is “an imaginative, aesthetic exercise of trying to see the world as they do, to try to grasp the underlying values, beliefs, and aspirations that inform their ways of looking and knowing”.

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 ountering a “Violent Culture” by Creating Safe C Spaces and Communities of Solidarity

The primary contribution that the #SilentProtest within pedagogy could potentially offer is the creation of a safe space where women and men can engage with the realities of a violent culture and the ramifications thereof, from within the confines of a caring and supportive environment. White (1997: 141) suggests that when people stand together in solidarity, however briefly and partially, it “provides us with the opportunity to look back on our taken-for-granted ways of thinking and being in the world”. White (1997: 141) believes that this makes it possible for people to “think outside the limits of what we would otherwise think, to challenge aspects of our participation in the reproduction of dominance, and to identify options for action in addressing disadvantage and inequality that would not otherwise be available to us”. By creating a safe space where the voices of the individuals are embraced within the safety of a caring community, the possibility for “compassionate witnessing” exists. Weingarten (2003: 21 –38) describes the ideal witnessing position concerning violence as one of “awareness and empowerment” where we are able to acknowledge

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losses, to support mourning and grief, to humanise the enemy, and to witness individual and collective pain with as much heartfelt compassion as we can muster. In “compassionate witnessing” and a stance of solidarity, a possibility for “reasonable hope” exists. Reasonable hope consistent with the meaning of the modifier, suggests something both sensible and moderate, directing our attention to what is within reach more than what may be desired but unattainable. Reasonable hope softens the polarity between hope and despair, hope and hopelessness and allows for (more) people to place themselves in the category of the hopeful… Reasonable hope is relational; consists of practice; maintains that the future is open, uncertain and influenceable; seeks goals and pathways to them; and accommodates doubt, contradiction and despair (Weingarten, 2010: 7–9).

Theoretical Scaffolding for Social Action

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When fundamentally grappling with the question if there is a place for protest in pedagogy and if including protest in pedagogy could be considered violent if one takes into account the high level of discomfort that it evokes and that becomes apparent in preliminary reflection, it seems like the theoretical scaffolding of acts of intervention enhances the impact and understanding of those who engage within the intervention. It seems that if we are working towards the development of socially engaged democratic citizens with a commitment to social justice and the cultivation of a just society, then we need to move beyond protest as an event to protest as embedded within a process of critical theoretical reflection, conversation and discussion informed by embodied experiences of discomfort. For the students enrolled within the module, the protest forms part of a scaffolded theoretical process. The GBV sub-section in the module starts from a broad theoretical grounding into foundational gender theory and scholarship, engaging the root causes of the prevalence of GBV in the South African context. The theoretical introduction is contextualised by a discussion engaging the concept of so-called “rape culture”. In the second week following the theoretical grounding, the emphasis shifts to the prevalence of GBV in media and popular culture when students are encouraged to find music videos that normalise violence against women and gender non-conforming people and to engage with these examples critically. These theoretical engagements and resulting robust class discussions seem to align students well for the activities of the protest. One student in the cohort highlights the difference he observed between his own experience and those who joined the protest from a partner institution where the protest was not embedded in an ongoing theoretical conversation. I had been grateful to participate in the silent protest once again in 2019. I volunteered in doing the marshalling task whereby I encountered different people who were more interested in participating in the silent protest in future. Even my school committed to giving us no choice to be part of the silent protesteven though there were people who shared that they came simply because they had no choice; they were taped because they felt peer pressure and it was against their will to participate in the protest. In the end, the same people came to me

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witnessing that the need for this kind of campaign is of importance since the challenge of gender-based violence is beyond the building. I have learnt new approaches to fighting against gender-based violence.

When considering the above mentioned, it seems that there is no better place for protest than embedded in pedagogy.

Some Concluding Thoughts Despite the structural vulnerability of faith institutions to patriarchy and the toxic theology that it informs, if one considers the broad-based community presence of faith institutions in the South African context, it remains valuable and imperative to engage and activate faith institutions in the fight against GBV. As with most things, it seems that despite institutions of faith being part of the problem, they also remain pivotal in the process of finding creative and life-affirming ways to deal with dehumanisation and oppression. For faith communities to become what they confess to being, namely communities that strive to express love, care and justice, there has to be an institutional commitment to a robust engagement with how patriarchy informs institutional culture, leadership and toxic theology. Toxic theology finds expression in the instance of faith leaders in telling women and gender non-conforming people that they are somehow blessed for enduring the suffering inflicted on them by men and male-dominated systems. If faith leaders further insist on engaging with sacred scriptures in such a way as to keep these systems in place, we will continue to be a country where it is unsafe to be born a woman and where the bodies of women will remain the landscape of our ongoing violent civil war. For faith leaders to be equipped to have these complex conversations in congregational settings, they must experience the confronting challenge of discomfort when one has to reconsider one’s positionality in situations of injustice and oppression. Although not without complexity and fraught with issues that warrant further reflection and critical engagement, the pedagogically embedded #SilentProtest seems to offer a space that enables the development of leaders who are capacitated to journey

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with others through the inherent complexity when one is challenged to lean into discomfort to aspire to a more just and life-affirming society for all. Considering much of the discussion above and notwithstanding the positive outcomes that the protest enables, it remains critical to reflect on the controversy in higher education when, in order to engage realities of violence in the South African context, potentially violent pedagogy is employed. In the case of the #SilentProtest and the embeddedness of the protest within the teaching and learning process, two central questions remain. Firstly, how could the psychosocial support to students for whom the module is compulsory be enhanced, especially considering the possibility of being triggered because of the sensitive subject matter addressed by the protest? And secondly, ongoing reflection remains imperative on how to honour and centre the lived experiences of survivors without burdening them with the obligation to perform their pain in order to conscientise those for whom GBV remains a thing that happens to other people.

References AfricaCheck. (2019). Factsheet: South Africa’s crime statistics for 2018/19. https:// africacheck.org/factsheets/factsheet-south-africas-crime-statistics-for2018-19/#rape. Accessed 24 Mar 2020. Boler, M. (2014). Teaching for hope: The ethics of shattering worldviews. In V. Bozalek, B. Leibowitz, R. Carolissen, & M. Boler (Eds.), Discerning critical hope in educational practices (pp. 26–39). London: Routledge. Boler, M., & Zembylas, M. (2003). Discomforting truths: The emotional terrain of understanding differences. In P.  Tryfonas (Ed.), Pedagogies of difference: Rethinking education for social justice (pp.  110–136). New  York: Routledge. Boonzaier, F., & De La Rey, C. (2003). “He’s a man, and I’m a woman”: Cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity in south African women’s narratives of violence. Violence Against Women, 9(8), 1003–1029. Chubbuck, S., & Zembylas, M. (2008). The emotional ambivalence of socially just teaching: A case study of a novice urban schoolteacher. American Educational Research Journal, 45(2), 274–318. Coetzee, J. M. (2003). Elizabeth Costello. London: Secker & Warburg.

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Di Silvio, L. (2011). Correcting corrective rape: Carmichele and developing South Africa’s affirmative obligations to prevent violence against women. The Georgetown Law Journal, 99(5), 1469–1515. Du Toit, L. (2005). A phenomenology of rape: Forging a new vocabulary for action. In A. Gouws (Ed.), (Un)thinking citizenship: Feminist debates in contemporary South Africa (pp.  253–274). Lansdowne: University of Cape Town Press. Griffiths, M. (2003). Action for social justice in education. Berkshire: Open University Press. Hansen, D. T. (2011). The teacher and the world. A study of cosmopolitanism as education. Oxon: Routledge. Harding, A. (2018). South Africa shocked by live rape trial of Timothy Omotoso. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-45940338. Accessed 24 Mar 2020. Jewkes, R. (2002). Intimate partner violence: Causes and prevention. The Lancet, 359, 1423–1429. Jewkes, R., & Abrahms, N. (2002). The epidemiology of rape and sexual coercion in South Africa: An overview. Social Sciences and Medicine, 55, 1231–1244. Lukani, M. (2019). Violence against women in SA comparable to counties that are at war  – Ramaphosa. https://www.parliament.gov.za/news/violence-againstwomen-sa-comparable-countries-are-war-ramaphosa. Accessed 24 Mar 2020. Manona, N. (2018). How Ngcobo cult kept its sex slaves. https://www.news24. com/SouthAfrica/News/how-ngcobo-cult-kept-its-sex-slaves-20180311-3. Accessed 24 Mar 2020. Marais, N. (2014). Blessed? A critical analysis of salvation in Denise Ackermann that portrays human flourishing as liberation, grace and the goodness of life. Dutch Reformed Theological Journal, 55(3 & 4), 701–727. Nussbaum, M.  C. (1999). Sex and social justice. New  York: Oxford University Press. Posel, D. (2005). The scandal of manhood: “Baby rape” and the politicization of sexual violence in post-apartheid South Africa. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 7(3), 239–252. Waghid, Y., Waghid, F., & Waghid, Z. (2018). Rupturing African philosophy on teaching and learning. Ubuntu justice and education. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Weingarten, K. (2003). Common shock: Witnessing violence every day – How we are harmed, how we can heal. Dutton: Penguin Books.

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Weingarten, K. (2010). Reasonable hope: Construct, Clinical applications, and Supports. Family Process, 49(1), 5–25. White, M. (1997). Narratives of therapists’ lives. Adelaide: Dulwich Centre Publications. Zembylas, M. (2006). Witnessing in the classroom: The ethics and politics of affect. Educational Theory, 56(3), 305–324. Zembylas, M. (2015). “Pedagogy of discomfort” and its ethical implications: The tensions of ethical violence in social justice education. Ethics and Education, 10(2), 163–174. Zembylas, M., & McGlynn, C. (2012). Discomforting pedagogies: Emotional tensions, ethical dilemmas and transformative possibilities. British Educational Research Journal, 38(1), 41–59.

4 Re-posturing the African University for Social Justice in Light of Increasing Violence Chikumbutso Herbert Manthalu

Introduction This chapter argues that the nature of the current conceptualization and operational frameworks that anchor the African university, in principle desensitises the university from meaningfully committing to identifying, appreciating and addressing the challenges of its social environment, especially the increasing gender and xenophobic violence. This is due to the fact that the African university is primarily driven by a global relevance and competitiveness agenda that principally necessitates detachment of the university from its social context. The central argument of the chapter employs Paulo Freire’s (2014) notion of “critical pedagogy”, Sharon Todd’s (2007) notion of “judging without scripts” and Yusef Waghid’s (2008) conception of the civic role of the university. Using these notions, the chapter contends that so long as the standards for a

C. H. Manthalu (*) Department of Education Foundations, School of Education, Chancellor College, University of Malawi, Zomba, Malawi e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 N. Davids, Y. Waghid (eds.), University Education, Controversy and Democratic Citizenship, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56985-3_4

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thriving university generally exclude and tacitly undermine the centring of local interests (which partly determines how democratic the education is) in higher education research and pedagogy, the resultant education in principle materially perpetuates different forms of abuse such as gender, racial, xenophobic, and even epistemic violence. Unless there is a form of democratic transformation in the university that ultimately centres local interests in the university as legitimate objects of focus in academic research and pedagogy, the African university will not only fail to realise democratic change in the society but will continue tacitly retaining and reproducing different structures of violence. The chapter particularly focuses on gender violence concerning the African university. Upon giving an overview of the prevalence of gender violence and the role of the university in Africa, borrowing from Waghid’s (2008) notion of the civic role of higher education, Freire’s (2014) critical pedagogy and Todd’s (2007) concept of “judging without scripts”, the chapter discusses the civic aim of education and the ideal pedagogy for identifying and confronting social injustice, and how to enact the pedagogy. The chapter shows how the market ideology that has captured and inheres higher education is resulting in the invisibility of gender violence from the management, pedagogical and research agenda of the university. Ultimately, the chapter argues that there is need to centre critical dialogic pedagogy irrespective of the discipline students are studying if the structures of gender violence are to be laid bare and confronted.

State of the University in Africa The challenges of gender violence and xenophobia ironically characterize both African communities and higher education institutions. With much of Africa clocking more than two decades of democracy, which promises respect for individual freedom and respectful relations among citizens, the reality on the ground is that a dire need for transformation remains. Regarding the prevalence of gender violence, the situation at universities replicates that in the community (Hames 2009). However, the university ironically still retains its social transformation mission.

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The African university is in a challenging situation. While the university has generally supported public life since political decolonisation, even until the introduction of democracy, today its mission has taken a radical turn. The modern, competitive global order has exerted pressure on both African governments and the universities themselves to sharpen the economic competitiveness edge of the state. What the university should expect from the state has therefore changed. Budget cuts to universities worldwide have not spared Africa (Ward 2014: 470). Implicitly the African university is now on a mission to boost the competitiveness of the state by producing students and knowledge that are in demand in the global market (Zeleza 2009). Ultimately, the preoccupation with achieving global competitiveness now costs the African university a gradual loss of relevance of the local context, as universities in Africa are under pressure to be globally relevant (Divala 2016; Mungwini 2017). Rather than endeavouring to strike a balance by being critically loyal to the local and reflectively open to the global context and experiences (Hansen 2011), the African university is generally increasingly detaching itself from its local context as the university aspires to catch up with the rest of the world. Such detachment has had adverse normative implications on research and pedagogy within the university; desensitising the university from identifying, valuing, and confronting social injustice. Unless this detachment is re-examined, the African university will not only fail to play a meaningful, transformative role in confronting the scourge of gender violence, but it will continue materially sustaining the structures of gender violence.

Education Aims and Just Pedagogies This section discusses ideal and fundamental higher education aims and the relevant normatively ideal pedagogies that can help achieve the aims. The first subsection explores the mandate of higher education to the public as espoused by Yusef Waghid (2008). The next subsection discusses the nature of Freirean pedagogy as an instance of a normative prototype that seeks to recognise the value and place of the social struggles characterising the social contexts in which students are situated. On its own,

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conceptualising some normatively ideal aims of higher education without examining the normative implications guiding pedagogy and educational encounters would be inadequate to achieve the sought education. Examining the nature of prevalent dominant pedagogy (Todd 2007), the last subsection, therefore, highlights and challenges the normative implications of restricting teaching to mere performance of stipulated static roles.

The Civic Aim of the University The prevailing global order has in both principle and practice privatised and marketized higher education (Waghid 2008: 19). Higher education today is significantly motivated by the pursuit to produce an especially high-skilled workforce, while arguably reducing the research mandate of the university to the generation of high-quality scientific knowledge responsive to the demands of the industrial market (Waghid 2008: 19). Among its cardinal goals, the university is expected to serve civil society through the cultivation of attitudes of critical reflection that ultimately lead to the realisation of social justice (Waghid 2008: 20). A fundamental obligation of the university includes its practical and incessant commitment to “finding and dismantling social structures that sustain oppression” (Waghid 2008: 21). The university must, therefore, transcend a detached impartial knowledge generation and pedagogy, but instead ought to focus on raising critical consciousness, capacitating students with a responsiveness to the others in the immediate community and the globe who are in need, under deprivation, harassed, and largely oppressed by man-made systems (Waghid 2008: 21). For Waghid (2008), the indispensable motivation of higher education is to identify, demand and help resolve all social oppression, and necessitates that higher education must be democratic, both as a means of enacting the education as well as being the ultimate end of the education process itself (Waghid 2008: 22). In the academy, the marketisation of higher education has substituted a corporate culture for the culture of critical reflection on social justice, such that higher education today “subordinates the needs of society to the market” (Waghid 2008: 23).

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Freirean Education for Transformation Critical approaches to education, like that of Paul Freire, demand that education “philosophy must be engaged with the great struggles and social movements of its times” (Noddings 1998: 50). More importantly, critical approaches to education challenge the dominant tradition that conceptualises academic inquiry as endeavours that must necessarily demand inquirers to detach themselves from the subjective situatedness of the inquirers in pursuit of an ostensibly neutral form of absolute knowledge embedded in the language of objectivity by insisting that “such detachment is both intellectually and morally irresponsible” (Noddings 1998: 50). Critical of the humanist notion of the detached self that informs modern education, Freire (2014: 93) holds that “in its desire to create an ideal model of the “good man”, a naively conceived humanism often overlooks the concrete, existential, present situation of real people”. Educational practices that pursue individual freedom yet in their conceptualization deem subjectivity as incompatible and indeed, antithetical to universal knowledge, are simplistic. Such practices negate the indisputable existential condition of an actual human being where subjectivity is a constitutive indispensable aspect of being human (Freire 2014: 50). On the contrary, meaningful education for freedom must aim at transforming the human condition within which the student finds herself. It is, therefore, imperative that educational experiences should not be detached from “the existential experience of the students” in which “words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity” (Freire 2014: 71). One can thus glean from Freire that it is erroneous, as modern higher education intimates, to conflate the aim of freedom or authenticity of education with a detachment from the concreteness of the social, economic, and gender situatedness of the learner. To the contrary: Education as the practice of freedom  – as opposed to education as the practice of domination  – denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract

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man nor the world without people, but people in their relations with the world. In these relations, consciousness and world are simultaneous: consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it (Freire 2014: 81).

It is, therefore, evident that ideal education as freedom runs counter to the prevalent higher education approaches that detach the (female) student subject from her social and historical context that is characterised by oppression and dehumanisation. For Freire (2014: 109), People, as beings “in a situation”, find themselves rooted in temporal-­ spatial conditions which mark them and which they also mark. They will tend to reflect on their own “situationality” to the extent that they are challenged by it to act upon it. Human beings are because they are in a situation. And they will be more the more they not only critically reflect upon their existence but critically act upon it (emphasis in original).

Looked at this way, higher education spaces need not actively disregard the existential condition of the female student who is under the threat of gender oppression and violence. The student is part of the social structure that hosts and exacts the oppression. The university too, is hosted in the same society. Educational experiences that are liberating need not conveniently steer clear of such a context of violent struggles that are regrettably and forcefully constitutive of female existence. Unless the structures of violence are actively confronted, the female student faces the same threat of harassment and physical violation at both the university and in broader society. Such a university is not only incapable of transforming society but instead hosts such agents of gender violence. This is because the males in the university are potential perpetrators posing the same threat of violence to female students as they derive from the same society. Put differently, the university conceived merely as an institution of impartiality and fairness cannot be insulated from the character of oppression and gender violence, let alone effectively help transform the society.

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Non-scripted Education Despite education today being global in its scope and content and thus aspiring to a form of global impartiality, such impartiality is normatively compromised. Concerning the existential condition of otherness, much of the apparently objective education today only gives learners mere knowledge about the existence of an other in this diverse world. Such an approach that decentres subjectivity from education is, as Todd (2007: 27) holds, ironically advanced as “educating for cosmopolitanism”. Under this approach to education, what constitutes otherness, and therefore concreteness of the other (Benhabib 2011), is characterised by a sustained “faith in principles” (Todd 2007: 27). Educating for cosmopolitanism presupposes a common generalised conception of being a student and teacher. The roles are prescribed, and human nature and human aspirations are cast in permanent stone. Each should only pick their roles set against a backdrop of near-perfect equality. However, Todd (2007) contends that living by the script of rules and rules in educational encounters potentially fails to identify injustice, its perpetuation of the injustice an other suffers on account of their otherness, or both. Contrary to the dominant approach of teaching for cosmopolitanism, Todd (2007: 27) argues for an approach oriented towards “thinking cosmopolitan”, which entails an aspiration for justice for [one’s] neighbours”. As Todd (2007: 29) argues, in educational encounters, we should not put so much faith and trust in rules as the safeguards to our actions. Instead, what we need to reflect on is how judgment demands thinking beyond the standard scripts. That is, to think about our roles as opposed to letting those roles determine our thinking. This is particularly acute when it comes to a seemingly benevolent script such as cosmopolitanism, for it simply cannot provide the answers it sometimes professes to be able to offer.

The role of the teacher in educational domains, therefore, should not be one of merely following prescribed scripts. This is because such scripts deny recognising the vulnerabilities, and dangers the other faces as a concrete being. The prevalent generalized other (Benhabib 2011)

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conceptualisation of studentship in the university script does not recognise the actual elements that concretise being a student. Therefore, education for Todd (2007: 30) should not be reduced to pursuing an “-ism” such as the competition and market-oriented cosmopolitanism that higher education currently advances, because such static ideologies easily lead to thoughtlessness that ultimately results in the sustenance of evil. The daily educational judgements teachers in educational domains make as they teach whatever subject content, are “not about invisibles, but [the judgements are] concerned with actual persons and circumstances” (Todd 2007:31). It is, therefore, imperative that as academicians we should reflect on how we can propose a thoughtful orientation to our judgements; that is, to think about our roles, as opposed to letting those roles determine our thinking. Such a thoughtfulness … refuses both the simplicity of self-­ righteous moralising and the anonymity provided by standards and rules. It is a thoughtfulness that carries within it a cosmopolitan sense: a thought that is born from others who are my neighbours (Todd 2007: 31–32).

In the context of violence in higher education, this entails that pedagogical experiences should not pre-define in ostensibly objective terms what it means to exist as a (female) student, intentionally ignoring the subjectivities and vulnerabilities associated with such an existence. Instead, the relations between students and the university should be governed by norms that transcend the “standard” and “objective” rules, which, in principle, extinguishes the injustices female students face on the mere account of being female.

Detachment for Relevance and Competitiveness The mounting pressure on the university in Africa to be competitive and ultimately catch up with the leading universities of the world has largely led to the university in Africa defaulting on its very fundamental responsibility – a civic commitment to the democratic transformation of

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society. This is because, under the prevailing neoliberal order, the public has been weakened as the primary responsibility of the state, and now is to generate markets and encourage market-like behavior in its citizens. The goal is to establish a market society by collapsing all distinctions between politics and market and by generating a society where market principles are used to guide all institutions. ... [Ultimately,] the role of the state has shifted from being a facilitator and protector of various social provisions to an “enterprising state” or a “managerial state” that promotes market expansion and monitors the results of that marketization through elaborate and expansive auditing mechanisms. In the neoliberal age the practice of governing essentially switches from protecting people and social institutions from the vicissitudes of the market to dramatically extending the reach of the market and deliberately exposing people and institutions to it, including even the state itself through the quasi-markets introduced through new forms of public management (Ward 2014: 459–460).

One gleans that neoliberal thinking is premised on the assumption that the human condition as well social well-being are best served once the economic condition of the people or society improves. Such a line of thinking, however, ignores and de-problematizes the fact that under the current economic order, economic progress mostly thrives on gender iniquities. Furthermore, the reduction of primary human interests to economic terms relegates, to secondary level, the human normative interests for equality, justice and recognition that are above economic interests. From the neoliberal perspective, market models of competition “are so successful at creating discipline and social equilibrium that they should be used not just to guide economic matters but to completely overhaul and reinvigorate all social institutions” (Ward 2014: 460). The ultimate effect of market ideology reforms on higher education is that the ideology has stripped education of its social commitment because before the ideology, “public education at all levels became much too public and state centered, and, as a result, inefficient, unresponsive and unproductive” (Ward 2014: 460). This has had impacts on curriculum conceptualisation, education support and management.

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Education Funding and Management Domination by the ideology of market fundamentalism has led to reforms in the university with profound normative implications. For instance, state funding to universities such as in the European context has sharply reduced from an average of 60% of the university budget in 1975 to 34% as of 2014 (Ward 2014: 470). This means that much of the funds for the university budget are privately sourced. Market and private funding are designed to ultimately serve the interests of the funders, which scarcely involves prioritising the non-profit goals of public institutions. Besides, many universities have since adopted corporate management frameworks with the implication, among others, that universities are now expected to prioritise undertakings promising monetary returns in the long run. Looked at through this lens, investing in public life-oriented research is deemed not financially attractive; hence issues like confronting gender violence are just not regarded as a priority in either the structure of the university or its pedagogical and research initiatives. It should be clear that this critique is not aimed at demanding state control of universities. Instead, the concern is that if a university is privatised and marketized, opportunities of cultivating attitudes of identifying and committing to dismantling social injustices of the society are lost. The issue here is not one of whether the university should be under state control or should operate autonomously. Rather, it is an issue of restoring the role of the university concerning civic life. The market funding models of higher education have also resulted in reversing the processes of agenda-setting and decision-making in universities. Universities have radically departed from operating with management models that combined shared governance and bureaucratic administration. Universities now embrace “a corporate style of management, replete with top-down and streamlined decision-making, strategic planning, and slick-branding techniques” (Ward 2014: 469). The implication of this modern, top-down approach that exclusively snubs shared agenda-setting and decision-making is that it ultimately affects the substance and scope of academic research and the normative demands of a democratic pedagogy. As Giroux (2010: 186) observes:

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There is no talk in this [marketised] view of higher education about shared governance between faculty and administrators, educating students as critical citizens rather than potential employees of Walmart, or affirming faculty as scholars and public intellectuals who have both a measure of autonomy and power; nor is there any attempt to legitimate higher education as a public sphere. In fact, the commitment to democracy is beleaguered, viewed less as a crucial educational investment than as a distraction in linking knowledge and pedagogy to the production of material and human capital.

Higher education is thus effectively detached from the concrete experiences of its students. The goals of higher education exclude the social situatedness of its students. Such an alienation of the situatedness of students from the university only serves to rid higher education of its transformative potency. As Freire (2014: 96) holds, the conceptual and perceptual language in educational spaces, like the language of the people, cannot exist without thought; and neither language nor thought can exist without a structure to which they refer. In order to communicate effectively, educator and politician must understand the structural conditions in which the thought and language of the people are dialectically framed … It is to the reality which mediates men, and to the perception of that reality held by educators and people that we must go to find the program content of education.

The conceptualisation and enactment of higher education must necessarily centre the subjectivities and existential vulnerabilities of its students, especially female students. Higher education must commit itself to dismantle structures of violence and oppression as a matter of an indispensable normative mandate of the university that cannot be traded with economic utility.

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Re-conceptualising the Ends of Pedagogy The market ideology has spread its tentacles to the pedagogy of higher education in Africa. As a result, research and pedagogy that should, as a normative imperative, centre the problem of gender violence are now driven to the peripheral by market competitiveness. Since the reconfiguration of the university is modelled on a competitive enterprise, research relevance is grounded in business interests and expected to be product-­ focused, while teaching “is centred on creating the ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ skills needed in business and the new enterprising society” (Ward 2014: 470). Giroux (2010: 185) describes the pedagogy for such a competition-­ centred higher education as a “bare pedagogy”, which “is a political and social practice that … places an emphasis on winning at all costs, a ruthless competitiveness, hedonism, the cult of individualism, and a subject largely constructed within a market-driven rationality that abstracts economics and markets from ethical considerations”. Bare pedagogy in higher education in Africa strips “education of its public values, critical contents, and civic responsibilities as part of its broader goal of creating new subjects wedded to the logic of privatization, efficiency, flexibility, the accumulation of capital, and the destruction of the social state” (Giroux 2010: 186). Throwing overboard public concerns of social justice, this education reduces the preoccupation of education to “job-training sites” (Giroux 2010: 186). Bare pedagogy, according to Giroux (2010: 186), substitutes training for education. The notion of training presupposes some minimum shared attributes by the trainees, by virtue of them having qualified for the training programme. Predictably, under such a pedagogy, the trainees are ideally conceived as individuals who equally possess the requisite background, knowledge, experiences, and capacities. The training of students into their prospective professional or career roles wrongly assumes that these students have transcended any limitations to the effective performance of the roles of that profession by virtue of qualifying for registration as students in a particular discipline. The presumed background of equality of the trainees in both principle and practice de-problematises the subjective experiences and vulnerabilities of the trainees as individual human

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beings. Such assumptions conceive the subjectivities of difference and vulnerability to violence as being without normative value and inconsequential in the students’ becoming fit to take up the respective roles for which they are being trained. A conception of education only as training de-problematises both the past and present existential context of injustice of the (female) students as well as that of the roles they are being trained to assume in future. In the normative sense, as a matter of primary commitment ideal education ought to confront and help resolve such injustices that are embedded in the existential context of students, namely sources and structures of their vulnerability to gender violence. Concerning gender violence, the vulnerabilities of and oppression that the female “trainee” suffers are hidden. This is because the vulnerabilities are regarded as a private matter that pertains to the subjectivities of the individual, as the university ostensibly is committed only to the “objective” aspects of the human being. Gender violence, therefore, cannot be meaningfully centred in the pedagogy of higher education as a normative imperative under such frameworks. This is because the pedagogy assumes an equal and existentially de-problematised student’s background and future, yet the concrete situation of the students stands in stark contrast. The marketisation of the university results in neglecting the critical pedagogies of higher education that incessantly interrogate the structures of injustice and oppression in public life. The enactment of critical pedagogy is valued lower than how much funding professors attract from the industry. This ultimately renders the prevailing research less critical of the challenges posed by the industry, such as its role in unsustainable environmental mismanagement and other social or global challenges like poverty (Giroux 2010: 186). With market fundamentalism at the heart of a university, teaching staff are put under pressure to meet research and publication targets that will add value and prestige to the marketability of the university. On the other hand, students are also engaged in competition among themselves. The pedagogical experiences are, therefore, oriented towards standing out from the rest. A fellow student, in this regard, is not conceived as someone with whom to cooperate and to care for. She is not seen as a concrete human being with particular threats to her existence and dignity. Instead, she is just a general competitor like anyone else, who must beat others or

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risks being beaten. Competitive relations with other students are, therefore, in principle adversarial in nature (Ramose 2010). The implication of such student relations with and among students is that students conceive each other in generalities only. Since a competition assumes an equal footing and level playing field, the assumption in the university is that students have the same capacities and face the same challenges. In such a context, there would be little need and effort required to come to terms with the struggles of the other as such concern falls outside the core interests of competitive norms of relating. Against this backdrop, gender violence inevitably and permanently becomes invisible, as, in principle, it is a “private” matter inconsequential to the competition. Such an invisibility of injustice in educational practices ultimately makes higher education lose “its public character and commitment to public life” (Giroux 2010: 186). The loss is due to higher education losing its commitment to confronting injustice because higher education now “aligns itself with corporate power” (Giroux 2010: 186). Abandoning the virtue of the university as a democratic public sphere is hugely counter-serving democracy (Giroux 2010: 186). Thus, the major global aspect modern higher education pursues, is global competitiveness, conveniently ignoring cultivation in students of critical global citizenship that is aimed at confronting the myriad global challenges resulting from global economic competition. This is even more pronounced and adversely impactful in African universities whose governments have a desire to economically catch up to the status of developed economies. While democratic institutions in Africa need strengthening and concretising, as much of Africa has less than 30 years of democracy, the democracy-nurturing process appears to have not only been disrupted early; but it has also been actively frustrated by the devaluation of the public sphere in African higher education. By defaulting on its civic role, the university is in material collusion with social injustice and gender violence. Contrary to one of its fundamental ideal civic society goals, as a core political and civic institution, higher education no longer is committed to addressing social problems. Instead, it has become an institution that in its drive to become a primary accomplice to corporate

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values and power makes social problems both irrelevant and invisible (Giroux 2010: 186).

By over-embracing the market ideology at the expense of critical education, the university in Africa is in collusion with its own capture (Giroux 2010: 187). Demands for epistemological re imagination of curriculums, protests against high tuition fees unaffordable to the majority, and gender violence escalation on university campuses are evidence of the detachment of African higher education from its context and associated social injustices. These are, in principle, a response to the misalignment of the university with public life.

Confronting Structures of Gender Violence The detachment of the university from public life due to embracing market fundamentalism has resulted in the university being desensitized of the violence and oppression female students experience, even on university campuses. Most female students feel the university does not regard sexual violence as tantamount to the abuse of a fundamental human right (Collins et  al. 2009: 35). Since university spaces are replicating and sustaining the gender oppression of society (Walker 2018: 134), to redeem itself from this trap, the university must necessarily employ critical pedagogies if society is to be transformed at all and university spaces rid of structural gender violence and social injustice. Critical pedagogies necessarily hinge on dialogue (Freire 2014); therefore, confronting gender violence in and through higher education requires that the pedagogy be dialogic. Universities must adopt critical pedagogy rooted in empathy, respectful relations and attitudes. The subjective oppression and violated experiences of women must be centred in pedagogy as a present-day challenge. Higher education spaces can loosely be regarded as hosts of communities where members share common physical spaces and some aspirations. One of the features of gender-based violence and sexual harassment is that they are more often performed by those with social proximity to the female victim (Hames 2009: 42; Colpitts 2019: 426–427). The fact that

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the people encountering each other in higher education spaces collaborate and cooperate in achieving the curriculum goals of a given study programme, entails they have capacity to regulate their eccentric interests and consider the perspective of the other. The other-considering capacity upon which educational cooperation thrives is an enabler of critical dialogue. Critical dialogue would be both a means and an end for confronting gender violence. It would be a means in that by enabling students to cooperate with their colleagues; space will be created to deliberate on the dangers and unsafe conditions an other experiences when going about their daily lives that are never hazardous to them. Critical pedagogical approaches would be an end in that whatever content is learnt should not be detached from the gender-violence struggles of victims and potential victims. Unless these endeavours are undertaken, we will only artificially sanitise a massively problematic existential background context for victims or potential victims.

Centring Critical Dialogue Restoring the university oriented towards social justice does not necessarily insinuate that the prevalent ideology in higher education should be replaced with another dominant ideology. Rather, as Giroux (2010: 190) avers, taking back the university is about “reclaiming higher education as a democratic public sphere – a place where teaching is not confused with training, militarism, or propaganda; a safe space where reason, understanding, dialogue, and critical engagement are available to all faculty and students” (Giroux 2010: 190). The educational encounters with diversity are a fertile ground for a critical reflection of one’s entrenched attitudes, prejudices (Walker 2018: 134) and sheer lack of familiarity with the injustices, dread, and fear others have in just doing the ordinary routines of life. The critical self-­ reflection would be enabled and sustained by critical pedagogies which rely on reflective dialogues with and among students. Through critical reflections borne out of encounters with the other, ultimately, a male student not only empathetically sees the female student as a potential victim in need of protection but instead sees how he may be a potential

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violator. This demands the agency to re-examine one’s attitudes and to challenge such attitudes in one’s circle of influence. Critical pedagogy can challenge and confront potential perpetrators or equip those who can challenge socialisation. Critical pedagogy necessarily hinges on dialogue that aim at bringing to the fore hitherto normatively undermined subjectivities that are in essence worthwhile to female moral subjects bearing the subjectivities (Freire 2014: 48). Therefore, confronting gender violence in and through higher education requires that the pedagogy should be dialogic. A critical examination of patriarchy cannot succeed if it does not involve males (Magudulela 2017: 107) and this can only happen when the dialogue is embedded in all pedagogy across disciplines in higher education. Critical dialogue among students and with teachers will confront the background issues behind gender violence such as, “patriarchy and socialization of boys; acceptance of sexual violence as a norm; society not showing any outrage; silence and non-­ action against known perpetrators on reported cases of gender-based violence in tertiary institutions; absent fathers and a lack of role models to groom young men to become non-violent responsible adults; lack of safety; fear of being attacked; and policing of women’s bodies and clothing” (Magudulela 2017: 103). Since subjectivities are constitutive of being an individual (Benhabib 2011), it is imperative that educational encounters should be committed to examining how public institutions and public life conceive subjectivities. How higher education institutions and practices within institutions conceive, recognize, or structurally undermine subjectivities ultimately has a bearing on the dignity of others. When the academics and students assume their roles in the public domains of higher education, they retain these private cultures including rationalisation of gender prejudice. Such private attitudes are informed by the dominant cultures of the mainstream society. Without deliberately engaging critical dialogue in its pedagogy, the university cannot safely assume and claim that it is a “sanctuary” that produces fairness aimed at transforming the impaired society. This is not possible because a university bereft of critical reflection of the subtlety of the structures and rootedness of gender prejudice may not only fail to identify the violence, but may inevitably passively reproduce the prejudice. It is, therefore, imperative that there be engagement with each

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other and critical dialogue about oppression as a central part of pedagogy. The dialogical action would aim at “surmounting the antagonistic contradictions of the social structure, thereby achieving the liberation of human beings. Antidialogical cultural action, on the other hand, aims at mythicizing such contradictions, thereby hoping to avoid (or hinder insofar as possible) the radical transformation of reality” (Freire 2014: 179).

Facing the Future The university needs to critically examine its role abating and commitment to overcoming gender-based violence. The critical examination should be from the perspectives of the university as a public domain of gender encounters, and as part of fulfilling the higher education mandate of being an agent of social justice. As an agent of democratic social transformation, the university must aspire to centre concrete experiences of its students in the management and pedagogical endeavours of the university. In the prevalent higher education model in Africa, academics are exclusively committed to their “core” duties only, leaving the prioritization of confronting gender violence to university administrators who develop different formulate policies for implementation (Hames 2009: 45). However, confronting gender violence ought to much more be a matter of challenging the mental habits of students through pedagogy. This is a realm where academics other than administrators wield more effective influence. For pedagogy to properly, critically and dialogically challenge attitudes sustaining gender violence, among others, the university must confront the glaring under-representation of women in its academic staff. For example, across the European Union, just about only 18% of full professors are women, yet the proportion of female students at undergraduate and graduate levels is at 55% and 59% respectively (Teelken and Deem 2013: 524). The neoliberal pressure to meet performance standards through competitive research outputs, makes academic staff not to come up with innovative and meaningful mainstreaming of critical pedagogy and dialogue under the compulsion of the social justice mandate of higher

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education. Confronting gender injustice is apparently considered as largely pertaining to higher education administrative personnel, who are expected to undertake such initiatives as on-campus security provision and providing structures for support to gender violence victims (Hames 2009: 45). In the end, in universities there is only much rhetoric about commitment to overcoming gender violence that is not matched by proportional action (Collins et al. 2009: 34). Gender violence, should not be left in the hands of administrators who may only couch up some policy that largely fails to achieve its intended goal. Higher education approaches in confronting gender violence must not be conceptualised largely in university policy terms, but also more importantly in pedagogical terms. The latter perspective demands making the centring of gender violence in pedagogy that is critical and necessarily dialogic. As Freire (2014: 93) contends, ideal education must aim at achieving individual freedom from the structural oppression of the situatedness of the individual, and further that authentic education is not carried on by “A” for “B” or by “A” about “B”, but rather by “A” with “B”, mediated by the world  – a world which impresses and challenges both parties, giving rise to views or opinions about it. These views, impregnated with anxieties, doubts, hopes, or hopelessness, imply significant themes on the basis of which the program content of education can be built.

This entails that higher education pedagogical experiences must consider the subjectivities and existential condition of the female student if the education is to be authentic. Being vulnerable to gender violence is currently and regrettably a feature of being that cannot be divorced from the female student. Educational domains cannot choose to ignore the dangerous existential threat the female student faces due to an underlying ostensibly equality metaphysical framework that shapes modern higher education that regards the female student only as an abstracted self, equal to all other selves upon once normativity is left to objectivities alone and excludes subjectivities. The disconnect of the university from its social context renders it inhospitable to critical pedagogies. This desensitises the university from

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researching about and initiating a critical dialogue about the culture and socialisation processes that support and sustain gender-based violence (Walker 2018: 133–134). Embracing critical pedagogy in the university better situates the university as an agent of enabling the reflective disruption of structures and cycles of gender-based oppression that are in the social fabric but only manifest in the university. As a public space that also influences the shaping of social structures and producing leaders, the university spaces must be rid of structures that are insensitive and materially aid gender violence. We must deconstruct the African university to reconstruct the society. Given the deep-­ rootedness and subtlety of gender violence, Hames (2009: 45) holds that the common refrain that the university is a home away from home for the students is problematic in the sense that the actual homes of students are in the first place largely characterised by gender violence. As a replica home, the university then also reproduces such characteristic structural inequalities of the original home (or the mainstream society) as rationalization of gender violence and patriarchy, in educational practices and academic demographics (Teelken and Deem 2013: 530). Hames (2009: 45) therefore suggests that, other than making the university a home away from home, we should instead “burn down” the “safe home” that the university ostensibly is. This entails that the university should be re-­ imagined in order to capacitate it to stop reproducing gender relations from the mainstream society. This gives urgency for higher education to no longer conceptualize students only as generalised beings (i.e. knowledge consumers being prepared for future “unproblematic” roles) but more importantly also as concrete beings (Benhabib 2011) who can be treated as equals only when their subjectivities that render them vulnerable are taken account in educational practices. The experiences in the university as a domain for encounters, are key to the enactment of social transformation. Actual students are not a homogenous and generalised group of beings (Benhabib 2011). They are concrete beings with gender disadvantages. Since the gender biases against them are entrenched in the ostensibly neutral academic spaces, it is hard for their violation and oppression to be heard, and their injustice is institutionalised (Delgado Bernal 1998; Nieto 2008).

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In confronting gender violence, besides enacting pedagogies that will invoke critical dialogues, it is also instructive that engagement among agents in teaching and learning encounters in higher education should not be restricted to the performance of prescribed roles or scripts (Todd 2007). It is instructive to note that the prescriptive roles and scripts in higher education are ultimately informed and sustained by the market ideology that has captured higher education. The market fundamentalist culture demands performance of economic, quantifiable, and rigid roles on academic members (to teach, mark, and research to ultimately raise the university’s profile). On the other hand, student roles are reducible to serving largely individual-centric interests such as attending lectures, doing assignments and tests in order to pass. Performance of roles and the prescribed scripts marginalise concerns of social justice. Performance of such roles and observing such scripts therefore leaves no room for critical dialogue through pedagogy that examines the bearing of different social structures on the prospects of another person within the educational encounters. As such, students and teachers can hardly identify and confront social injustice. In the Freirean sense, education in such a context is only empty words. It is therefore imperative that the corporate ideology in modern higher education that largely links expenditure with probable economic returns be deconstructed if African higher education is to meaningfully confront gender violence as a fulfilment of the social justice mandate of the university.

Conclusion The contention in this chapter is that if the African university is to meaningfully identify and confront structures of gender violence both within it and without, it is imperative to re-conceptualize the mandate of higher education as an agent for social justice. The university has to revalue the virtue of being a public sphere for critically reflecting upon and enacting social justice. A meaningful commitment to its civic mandate necessarily deconstructing the market fundamentalism framework anchoring the university that has distorted, undermined the democratic and normative mandate of the university. Higher education

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has placed premium value on competitive research outputs aimed at attracting further research funding resulting in neglect of the focus and quality of pedagogy in as far as social injustices are concerned. Academics are pressured to publish more and attract more funding as benchmarks of their relevance for retention in the university. The market-inspired ends of higher education determine the nature of pedagogy. The resultant pedagogy is however incapacitated from confronting the subtle structures of gender injustice and violence, ultimately rendering the university complicit in social injustice. The university has been desensitised from centring gender violence in all its pedagogy. Even university managers operating in a framework of competitiveness scarcely invest meaningfully in effective and sustainable initiatives aimed at combating gender injustice. Academics should employ critical dialogic pedagogies that will centre the problem of gender violence, irrespective of the discipline a student is studying. In the long-­ term, it is still normatively worthwhile to challenge the hegemony of market fundamentalism in higher education that ultimately suffocates the university’s capacity to identify and challenge structural injustice. How to deconstruct the hegemony is beyond this chapter and calls for further research. Unless the hegemony is deconstructed, the university will be a colluding entity in gender violence.

References Benhabib, S. (2011). Dignity in adversity: Human rights in turbulent times. Cambridge: Polity. Collins, A., Loots, L., Meyiwa, T., & Mistrey, D. (2009). Nobody’s business: Proposals for reducing gender-based violence at a South African university. Agenda, 23(80), 33–41. Colpitts, E. (2019). Engaging men and boys to prevent gender-based violence in South Africa: Possibilities, tensions and debates. Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 40(3), 423–439. Delgado Bernal, D. (1998). Using a Chicana feminist epistemology in educational research. Harvard Educational Review, 68(4), 555–582.

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Divala, J.  J. (2016). Re-imaging a conception of Ubuntu that can recreate relevant knowledge cultures in Africa and African universities. Knowledge Cultures, 4(4), 90–103. Freire, P. (2014). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary edition). New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Giroux, H.  A. (2010). Bare pedagogy and the scourge of neoliberalism: Rethinking higher education as a democratic public sphere. The Educational Forum, 74(3), 184–196. Hames, M. (2009). Let us burn the house down! Violence against women in the higher education environment. Agenda, 28(40), 42–46. Hansen, D. T. (2011). The teacher and the world: A study of cosmopolitanism as education. New York: Routledge. Magudulela, N. (2017). Tackling sexual and gender-based violence on campus: An intervention at the Durban University of Technology. Agenda, 31(2), 99–108. Mungwini, P. (2017). African know thyself: Epistemic injustice and the quest for liberative knowledge. International Journal of African Renaissance Studies – Multi-, Inter- and Transdisciplinarity, 12(2), 5–18. Nieto, S. (2008). Culture and education. In D. Coulter & J. R. Wiens (Eds.), Why do we educate? Renewing the conversation (pp.  127–142). Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Noddings, N. (1998). Philosophy of education. Colorado: Westview. Ramose, M.  B. (2010). The death of democracy and the resurrection of timocracy. Journal of Moral Education, 39(3), 291–303. Teelken, C., & Deem, R. (2013). All are equal, but some are more equal than others: Managerialism and gender equality in higher education in comparative perspective. Comparative Education, 49(4), 520–535. Todd, S. (2007). Teachers judging without scripts, or thinking cosmopolitan. Ethics and Education, 2(1), 25–38. Waghid, Y. (2008). The public role of the university reconsidered. Perspectives in Education, 26(1), 19–25. Walker, M. (2018). Aspirations and equality in higher education: Gender in a south African university. Cambridge Journal of Education, 48(1), 123–139. Ward, S.  C. (2014). From e pluribus unum to caveat emptor: How neoliberal policies are capturing and dismantling the liberal university. New Political Science, 36(4), 459–473. Zeleza, P.  T. (2009). African studies and universities since independence. Transition, 101(1), 110–135.

5 Re-examining Instances of Cognitive Damage in South African Universities: Invoking Democratic Action Through Educational Technology Zayd Waghid and Faiq Waghid

Introduction The South African government’s continued attempts – albeit twenty-five years into democracy – to redress the social injustices of the past is marred by the complex and complicated categorisation and identification of its citizens. Such categorisation of South African citizens through the state’s economic and social redress policies which to no small extent mirrors some of the remnants of the apartheid system in which individuals today are still categorised according to race, albeit under a democratic umbrella. Z. Waghid (*) Faculty of Education, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] F. Waghid Centre for Innovative Educational Technology, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 N. Davids, Y. Waghid (eds.), University Education, Controversy and Democratic Citizenship, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56985-3_5

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It, therefore, becomes quite contradictory to the ideals of democracy when those who advocate for non-discriminatory practices in specific economic and social contexts adhere to the very system that perpetuates discriminatory practices under the guise of economic and social redress in contemporary South African society. The way one engages with others in discourses of education and one’s subsequent interpretation of meanings of such discourses is unquestionably not neutral. While it is perhaps necessary for one to engage with others to make sense of the present, it may further prevent one from transitioning beyond the past. In his book, entitled Identity and Violence, Amartya Sen (2007: 89) describes the dialectics of the colonised mind as one who “lead[s] a life in which resentment against an imposed inferiority from history comes to dominate one’s priorities today” which by implication “cannot but be unfair to oneself ”. What Sen alludes to is that the dialectics of the colonised mind can lead one into a “deeply biased and parasitically reactive self-perception” (2007: 91). Sen’s (2007) notion concerning the dialectics of the colonised mind seems congruent with understandings around feelings of cognitive damage. An individual experiences cognitive damage when they accept and inhabit impositions antithetical to the self (Amin et al. 2016). Such an individual cannot recognise ways and means in which the individual experiences instances of marginalisation, and is treated unjustly or is rendered oppressed, invisible, erased, silenced, oppressed, disregarded, suppressed, ignored, mistreated, powerless or enslaved (Amin et al. 2016). Also, such an individual remains obedient and acquiescent to the imposition of these various forms of subjugation and is unable to overcome or resist these impositions when made aware (Amin et al. 2016). The individual further experiences instances of cognitive damage as a result of an absence of agency, revolt or retributive action (Amin et al. 2016). If Sen’s (2007) argument that the effects of societal injustices are what may invoke within specific individuals in society, the rationale for contributing to societal unrest and violence in society, then it makes sense to argue that cognitive damage may serve as both a cause and further perpetuate such social injustices in contemporary society. In this chapter, using Sen’s (2007) explication of the universality of democracy as a conceptual lens, we aim to explore three undemocratic practices linked to violence that further perpetuates feelings of cognitive

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damage among students in South African universities. We then explore a Rancièrian (2006) enactment of educational technology for the alleviation of cognitive damage in defence of democratic action. Last, we offer a pragmatic approach that draws on Diana Laurillard’s (2012) ways of learning regarding how university educators could disrupt instances of cognitive damage in the university classroom.

Instances of Cognitive Damage in South African Universities Sen’s (1999) claim regarding the merits of democracy and its claim as a universal value relates to three distinct virtues. These virtues include the intrinsic virtue of democracy, which is concerned with social and political partaking in human life and well-being; the instrumental virtue of political incentives, which is concerned with keeping governments accountable and responsible for its citizens; and the constructive role of democracy, which is concerned with the formation of values and in the understanding of duties, needs and rights (Sen 1999: 6). We now offer an account of three undemocratic instances below about South African universities using Sen’s (1999) three virtues of democracy as a conceptual lens.

Political Extremism Manus Midlarsky (2011) provides an interesting account of understanding around political extremism. For Midlarsky (2011: 8), political extremism is concerned with the idea of power by a social movement in service of a political paradigm typically in dispute with existing state authorities. By implication, individual liberties are to be curtailed in the name of collective goals of the social movement, which may include gross forms of violence on a large scale of those who would potentially disagree with the purposes of the social movement (Midlarsky 2011: 8). Midlarsky (2011: 8) furthermore, provides a fascinating account of the concept of political extremism to that of “totalisms”. For Midlarsky (2011: 8) political extremism like totalism is concerned with the movement’s perusal of

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a singular view of the human being that is total in its conception. The individual’s beliefs, cognitions, daily activities and worldviews are thus conditioned and even dictated by the ideals of the movement (Midlarsky 2011). In contrast to the way we understand political extremism, is South Africa’s 25-year old constitution that serves as the cornerstone of the country’s democracy and instrument for social transformation and development. The South African constitution explicitly states that the country is founded on values around human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms (Republic of South Africa 1996: 3). Student representative councils (SRCs) that aim to embody the fundamental principles of the constitution at their respective South African universities aim to serve and safeguard the interests of all students on the grounds of the principles of social justice. In line with Sen’s (1999) account of the intrinsic virtue of democracy, through the voting for an SRC, students receive a level of autonomy for participating in political voting for a representative student body on the grounds of its values and ideologies. However, the affiliation by students within certain student political parties in South Africa has been marred in recent times by a degree of violence. In reference to an incident at a university in South Africa in 2019, three students including a lecturer were grossly subjected to violence by students from opposing student political parties on the grounds of the former’s attire being linked to a specific political party. Also, students affiliated with the particular students’ political party were subsequently informed by the SRC to leave campus immediately as a measure to protect them from any subsequent violence. Such levels of violent intimidation send out a strong message to those who do not conform to certain beliefs of opposing political parties. What the incident further uncovers is the inherent struggle to gain a political advantage between student political parties. Power, therefore, remains at the fulcrum of the level of tension and instability between far-right and far-left student political parties concerning dominant discourses about social and economic redress in South Africa. During the heydays of apartheid South Africa, different factions emanated under the umbrella of the African National Congress’ (ANC).

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Within the ANC, members would either conform to free-market capitalism, communism or trade unionism, competing with one another as each faction opposed white minority rule. It seems the historical significance of these competing factions has further trickled down to contemporary South Africa today, including student political parties. It, therefore, makes sense to argue that political extremism – that is, a significant cause and effect of cognitive damage – is by implication counter to Sen’s (1999) stated virtue concerning the intrinsic importance of democracy, which leads to the student body being silenced concerning whom they affiliate themselves with regarding student political movements.

National Determinism During the 2008 economic crisis, South Africa experienced a significant economic problem in which the country fell into a recession for the first time in 19 years, which resulted in high levels of retrenchment, scarce employment opportunities and increasing levels of inflation. In 2019, the level of the economic crisis had further heightened the country’s highest level of unemployment at 29 per cent with increasing levels of poverty. There is no denying that poor socio-economic conditions and opportunities available to local South Africans have exacerbated the level of xenophobic violence in South Africa. However, xenophobic violence in South Africa has further had a detrimental effect on the democratic values of the South African constitution. The constitution, through the Bill of Rights, values equality and human dignity by stating that “everyone is equal before the law and has the right to equal protection and benefit of the law” (Republic of South Africa 1996: 5). In light of Sen’s (1999) second virtue of democracy, the mistreatment and violent intimidation exercised by vigilante groups in South Africa exercised towards foreign refugees undermines the constitution, guaranteeing individuals’ rights regarding freedom and security. The violation of the human rights of foreign African nationals through vigilantism had significant consequences for the realisation of ubuntu. If ubuntu, as an African philosophy, by implication means that the individual forms part of the community through its maxim, “I am because

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we are and since we are, therefore I am”, then the question regarding those who form part of the community and those who do not, erodes the very idea of establishing one holistic African community. It, therefore, becomes an instance of national determinism – that is, a significant cause and effect of cognitive damage. Through national determinism we infer, the national identity of an individual, be it an African from another country, for instance, determines at least from an economic perspective, who is entitled to have access to economic and social opportunities. The xenophobic violence may further have a negative influence on student enrolment in South African universities, particularly with regards to fear from possible forms of violence and intimidation towards international students. Furthermore, one of the significant contributing factors concerning the notion of national determinism, we argue, is attributed to negative stereotyping displayed towards others outside of one’s national identity. Certain politicians in South Africa often say that foreign nationals continue to undermine security, stability and economic prosperity. However, according to the Statistics South Africa Community Survey conducted in 2016, the number of foreign-born people is at 1,6 million out of the population in South Africa of just over 55 million at the time (Heleta 2019). It seems that foreign nationals continue to be accused of the South African economy underperforming and failing to ameliorate the many social ills.

Racial Essentialism In line with Sen’s stated virtue of the constructive value of democracy, it is important to unpack the issues concerning the formation of values and claims of needs, rights and duties. Diana Fuss (2013: xi) describes the most commonly understood explanation of racial essentialism “as a belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the “whatness” of a given entity”. For Fuss (2013: xii), critics would argue that essentialism merely functions as a philosophical enforcer of the liberal humanist idealism that strives to trace and inhibit the subject within a fixed set of differences. Fuss (2013: xii) furthermore

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calls for attempts to demonstrate, for instance, how racial essentialism historically underscores cultural racism and which tenaciously upholds its academic institutionalisation such as the ethnocentric theory regarding canonisation. Within the context of South African universities, instances of alleged racism continue to manifest and perpetuate levels of cognitive damage among some students. In a separate incident at a South African university in 2019, a university lecturer, through a provocative and controversial statement on a social networking platform, questioned the quality of his students’ work in their academic studies, with such students accusing the lecturer of allegedly stating that they prefer spending their financial resources on aesthetically beautifying themselves instead of prioritising their academic studies. Not only did the controversial statement create tension among students and lecturer but it further highlighted instances of alleged racism exercised by individuals in power, in this case, the lecturer as confirmed by the SRC and university management’s public condemnation of the lecturer’s claim. The lecturer’s rationale for the justification for the poor academic performance of some students as a result of spending their financial resources on advancing their aesthetic beauty may certainly come across as insensitive to most students. By generalising, the lecturer placed himself in a rather uncomfortable position concerning the stereotypical nature that may ensue around race (Waghid 2019). Of course, we are not condoning the actions of the lecturer. From the students’ perspective, the lecturer’s comments were deemed hurtful and racist (Waghid 2019). Students retaliated against the provocative statement by subsequently calling for the lecturer’s resignation from the university despite the lecturer publicly apologising for expressing his point of view on the social media platform  – that is, confirmation of controversy having raised its head.

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 Senian Account of the Universality of Value A in Disrupting Causes of Cognitive Damage Thus far, we have examined three significant causes of cognitive damage in South African universities through the lens of three democratic virtues that Sen (1999) espouses. These central issues undermine the legitimate functioning of democracy in South African universities. The problems of violence, whether through political extremism, racial essentialism and nationalist determinism to no small extent, is corroborated by what Sen (2007) links to the allegedly dominant system of classification. Sen (2007) goes on to argue that the inherent belief in the all-encompassing power of a singular classification of individuals in society can produce an incendiary environment premised on tension and violence. From the first scenario, it is clear that political extremism is the culmination of disagreement between political parties concerning distinct ideologies, thoughts and views regarding contentious debates in South Africa. Not being able to reason practically about one’s choices creates this level of tension. For instance, if a student views another student solely in terms of his or her political affiliation while ignoring the significance of the student’s social and cultural affiliations, then such a student categorises others as a result of cognitive damage. For Sen (2007), the fundamental need to consider the plurality of the identities of individuals is necessary for disrupting this singular categorisation. Furthermore, the role of student leadership at South African universities is undoubtedly vital in creating spaces necessary for students to be heard and to express their points of view. However, the rhetoric used by certain political parties in South Africa to reinforce political power merely silences students to the extent that democracy cannot be realised in university contexts. We contend that Sen’s (1999) account of the intrinsic virtue of democracy concerned with social and political participating in human life and well-being needs to include spaces necessary for students to question, self-reflexively, the movement’s ideologies and actions. Social and political participating without engaging in public reasoning and deliberative engagement ultimately fails to constitute sound democratic decision-making for the benefit of all students. Politics, as Nussbaum

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(2000: 58) argues, should not treat individuals “as agents or supporters of others, whose mission in the world is to execute someone else’s plan of life”. Instead, and in agreement with what Nussbaum (2000: 58) argues, politics should treat individuals as agents of change, worthy in their own right, with their plans, deserving of support as equals as not being subservient to someone else’s political agenda. Unless this power dynamic is addressed in the university context, violence and intimation guided by political extremism will continue to erupt sporadically at individual universities in South Africa. In the second case, from a university context, any forms of negative stereotyping displayed by university academics towards foreign national students, we infer, may serve as a contributing factor towards the marginalisation of such students. Such forms of marginalisation would further include foreign nationals who may be socially excluded from discussions with their peers and lecturers in the university classroom. The latter seems to be a recipe for cognitive violence, coupled with the level of cognitive damage that may ensue. If we were to disrupt any forms of cognitive violence, then university educators need to cultivate values concerning accountability, risk-taking and significant forms of deliberative engagement (Waghid et al. 2018). Also, the constructive role of democracy in the context of the African philosophical ethic of ubuntu, expects of all students, irrespective of their national identities, to be empowered and included in discussions regarding the establishment of values, duties and needs for the benefit of all students. Hence, it is not a question concerning who should be included but rather in what capacity individuals can contribute towards developing safe and equitable spaces for all students. In the third case, it is clear that issues around race in universities will continue to erupt sporadically unless the system in place and policies that racially categorise individuals in South Africa are scrutinised and questioned. The notion around classifying South Africans according to four races not only highlights the hierarchical arrangement of races but further confirms stereotypes that are quite apparent. In line with Sen’s (2007: 9) argument that “[m]any past practices and assumed identities have crumbled in response to questioning and scrutiny”, it makes sense to argue that if universities in South Africa were to disrupt instances of racial essentialism, tension and violence, current racial policies in place would

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need to be transformed towards disregarding the need for racial categorisation. Furthermore, student activism needs to escalate through social media acts as the driving force towards disrupting the status quo concerning discrimination, violence and other forms of power imbalances. The recent #fallist movements in South Africa, serve as the embodiment of social activism for just causes. Each of these movements came to be from the culmination of students who expressed a public concern and outrage against the inequitable power imbalances in both the university contexts and in society through social media. These movements served to disrupt the status quo regarding the perpetual increase in higher education, such as the #FeesMustFall movement, internal colonialism linked to the #RhodesMustFall movement and gender-based violence to the #AmINext movement. Although these movements hold government accountable and responsible, what they further highlight is the need to break the balance of power by shifting away from a dependence on the state towards establishing a community premised on understanding around the notion of ubuntu justice (Waghid et al. 2018). In sum, thus far, we have argued that the level of cognitive damage among students as byproducts of the continual categorisation by an apparent democratic, yet, highly unequal entrenched system, is of significant concern. The case whereby students are categorised by race, culture, language and identity, is perhaps one of the stumbling blocks denying democratic relations to manifest amongst students in both the university and societal contexts. This “artificial diminution of human beings into singular identities” as Sen (2007) argues against, is perhaps one the most potentially divisive contributors in a complex South African society, which may quickly unfold into an undeniable incendiary relation among students, universities and communities. The South African constitution is the embodiment of the capabilities necessary for individuals to value life. However, the system in place fails to embody these constitutional rights. In light of the three virtues of democracy, Sen’s (1999: 6) claim that universal consent is not required for something to be a universal value, but instead claims that a universal value where people may have reason to see it as valuable, is an essential point of departure. Of course, universities have an essential role to play and more specifically, the academics who

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teach the curriculum through pedagogic justice in disrupting instances of cognitive damage. A university curriculum, at least from a Senian account, would be more adaptable towards the realisation of its democratic aims as a means of contesting forms of violence in South African universities. Such forms of violence may ensue as a result of the three significant causes and effects of cognitive damage highlighted in this chapter thus far. Next, we examine how educational technology can be used to cultivate democratic action in universities in an attempt to address cognitive damage experienced by students.

 Rancièrian Enactment of Educational A Technology for the Alleviation of Cognitive Damage: In Defence of Democratic Action Rancière (2006) contests the procedures of democratic education, offering a more progressive way of thinking about democratic education. Contemporary teaching and learning practices, encompass teachers and students being assembled and organised so that they engage with one another and listen and respond to one another’s views in a critical manner. As a student of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser during the 1960s, Rancière drastically distanced himself from his teacher’s work, particularly his conception of equality (Masschelein and Simons 2011: 3). Rancière (2006) argues that Althusser views equality as a reward or promise that individuals have to aspire to attain through democratic education practices. Through this conception that equality is something yet to be attained, an Althusserian view holds that present inequality ultimately has to be eradicated through democratic education practices (Masschelein and Simons 2011: 3). Consequently, he argues that with this conception of equality, a void is maintained between a present inequality and distant equality, and consequently, the student and teacher remain isolated. Such a view of democratic education would be counterintuitive in attempts at alleviating cognitive damage as students who are unable to deliberate and those who can deliberate, continue to stay separated as the task of democratic education would be to ensure that

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deliberation is attained in classroom practices. Consequently, not all epistemologies, perspectives and experiences are represented during teaching and learning interventions. This has led Rancière to challenge the above-­ mentioned view of equality, and he argues that equality is an entitlement to be made by all considered as being “outside” the practice of democratic education (Rancière 2006: 18). Democratic education does not mean that those considered “outsiders” who claim equality, want to be included in democratic practices, but rather, as equals they “want to redefine the [democratic] order in such a way that new identities, new ways of doing and being become possible and can be counted” (Biesta 2009: 110). The implication is thus that democratic education “is no longer a process of inclusion of excluded parties into the existing [democratic] order; it rather is a transformation of that order in the name of equality ... [and the] impetus for the transformation does not come from inside but from the outside” (Biesta 2009: 110). This conception of democratic education may play a role at alleviating cognitive damage, as democratic education is now centred around those who have no or little power, those who are less qualified or less competent, but are yet able to intervene to instate a momentary disruption or dissensus. Rancière (2006: 18) explicates – “a dissensus is not a conflict of interests, opinions, or values; it is a division put in the common sense: a dispute about what is given, about the frame within which we see something as given” (Rancière 2006, in Masschelein and Simons 2011: 82). In this way, students can intervene and consequently verify their equality, able to disrupt hegemonic voices that marginalise the views of others. Equality for Rancière (2006: 18), is centred primarily around intellectual equality and intellect or intelligence (Masschelein and Simons 2011: 83). It can, therefore, be argued that all students should be able to participate in teaching and learning interventions, as equals, and are therefore able to disrupt traditional teacher – student hierarchies, which may perpetuate cognitive damage. The hatred of democracy, consequently, refers to the hatred of democratic practices in which dominant and more eloquent individuals think they have a reason to govern and control the practice. The dominant fear those who intervene in the name of equality, namely the less dominant, often marginalised, other. Such a

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call for equality may be able to ensure that the collective voices of our students, echoing different perspectives, experiences and epistemologies are no longer marginalised. For Rancière (2006), democratic education is sporadic; in other words, the less powerful or less democratic people can disrupt perceived democratic education practices in the name of equality. In Rancièrean terms, we may be able to alleviate cognitive damage as students have the ability to speak, to understand and to reshape an educational practice, through the sharing of their cultural, intellectual and political ways of being. In light of the aforementioned, democratic education practices would be beneficial for the learning of students if they were to be included democratically in educational practices. A concern, however, is that democratic education practice in itself is not interrogated. It is often assumed that the practice would, in fact, democratise students since something is done to them. In other words, they are organised under conditions of democracy. It is at this juncture that the work of Jacques Rancière on democratic education may be more apposite toward the alleviation of cognitive damage that we argue is perpetuated by teacher-centred pedagogies. The alleviation of cognitive damage as espoused in this chapter thus far necessitates the democratisation of pedagogical practices towards the adoption of more open and reflexive pedagogies, such as the educational technology practices that will be outlined in the section that follows.

 sing Educational Technology to Disrupt U Instances of Cognitive Damage In this section, we explore the notion of educational technology as a practice in an attempt to mitigate cognitive damage, perpetuated through excessive teacher-centred teaching and learning practices. Traditional conceptions of educational technology centre around technologies that may be used to augment or enhance teaching. In the context of this chapter, such an account of educational technology seems insufficient to address issues pertaining to cognitive damage, most notably learner

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exclusion. For instance, many higher education institutions invest large sums of money in Learner Management Systems (LMS), comprising many tools designed to foster deep student engagement and potentially critical reflection. Despite such opportunities, LMSs are primarily used as content repositories for PowerPoint presentations or PDF documents. Many lecturers would argue that they are using educational technologies to enact what is commonly referred to in higher education as blended learning, that is, the thoughtful fusion between face-to-face and online learning experiences. It may be argued that this conception of educational technology use centres around the actions of the lecturer primarily, and students are but recipients of knowledge in the classroom and beyond the classroom when students download their course content from the LMS. Such a conception of educational technology does little to disrupt traditional teacher-­ student hierarchies potentially at play and to alleviate cognitive damage. Additionally, it may also be argued that, in this instance, what constitutes a teacher-centred pedagogy may further perpetuate exclusivist constructions of society as little opportunity exists for students to share their perspectives, experiences and epistemologies. Teaching and learning interventions may thus be influenced by a dominant hegemonic group elucidated by the lecturers’ cultural, intellectual and political bias, which in effect, marginalises students from the teaching and learning process. Such a conception of educational technology use contributes little in enhancing public reasoning and deliberative engagement, say among students and teachers. Likewise, few opportunities exist to conscientise students about issues of social injustices. The above pedagogical problem is compounded by students coming from a deeply flawed schooling system. Students are predominantly subjected to teacher-centred pedagogies for many years. These students are consequently indoctrinated to believe that teaching and learning constitutes a teacher standing in front of a class to disseminate information. We would argue that this approach to teaching and learning perpetuates cognitive damage, as students are invariably marginalised and their voices silenced, oppressed, disregarded, ignored or even enslaved by dominant hegemonic understandings of the teacher and the curriculum they are required to regurgitate. Due to students being conditioned to this form

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of subjugation, they experience cognitive damage. When they enter higher education, it is hard for them sometimes to comprehend that teaching and learning constitute a form of pedagogical engagement, more specifically, teaching and learning encounters. For instance, within the higher education context in South Africa, many lecturers are often reported to management by parents of students for not “teaching” their children. These parents argue that they pay the university lecturers to give class and not to engage in frivolous classroom activities leveraging class participation. These parents believe that they are paying for their children to acquire knowledge that will prepare their children for the workplace. What is interesting to note is that the World Economic Forum suggests that by the time a student graduates from a 4-year qualification, 50% of the course content that they are taught will be obsolete. Yet, such parents believe that children are to acquire knowledge at a university in preparation for the workplace. Such indefensible and undemocratic practices have necessitated a critical reflection of the pedagogic approaches, such as problematising the traditional concept of educational technology. In a book titled Educational technology and pedagogic encounters: Democratic education in potentiality (See Waghid et al. 2016), we offer a more pragmatic approach to the use of educational technology. More specifically, we argue for educational technology as a practice that may afford teaching and learning practices a chance to become more democratic. Our ideas are also in harmony with Stefan Hrastinski’s (2019) ideas, whereby he posits that blended learning, a form of educational technology, affords participants opportunities to engage deliberatively. Such a conception of blended learning puts a range of didactic strategies that are informed by more inclusive teaching and learning theories at the forefront, leveraging student participation and engagement, augmented or enhanced by educational technology. Educational technology, as a practice outlined here, may play a central role in the alleviation of cognitive damage, as opportunities exist for teaching and learning to cultivate democratic action. It may, however, be argued that student engagement and participation, constituting democratic action, may not spontaneously occur and that at times, this participation and engagement has to be designed. This has

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challenged many staff developers within higher education in South Africa to assist lecturers in their conception of educational technology as a practice. Here the ideas of Diana Laurillard from the University College London (UCL) may provide some insights as to how democratic action can be accomplished and thus mitigate the violence and controversy of cognitive damage. Laurillard (2012) purports that the changing higher education context, characterised by an ever-changing cultural and technological environment, requires teaching and learning that move beyond the dissemination of content. She offers creative ways in which lecturers can design new forms of teaching and learning with technology that may contribute to the debates pertaining to democratising teaching and learning and concomitantly, the alleviation of cognitive damage perpetuated by exclusive teacher-centred pedagogies. Laurillard (2012) posits that there are multiple ways in which students are learning. These ways of learning she describes as a distillation of the main theories of teaching and learning, drawing, for instance, on established learning theories such as behaviourism, social constructivism and experiential learning to mention but a few. Laurillard (2012) outlines six ways of learning, namely acquisition, inquiry, practise, production, discussion and collaboration. Her work unpacks each of these “ways of learning”, examining which teaching and learning theory is drawn on, and how digital technologies can support multiple ways of learning. Her work is in congruence with our argument that educational technology is not merely a tool but rather a practice. In other words, it is not the tool that is important, but rather, how the tool can be used to support ways of learning. There is a tendency among some lecturers within the higher education context to jump on the bandwagon of new technology that comes to the fore, that may not have even been designed to support teaching and learning, rather than looking at how the technology can support teaching and student learning. Laurillard’s (2012) ideas about thinking of different ways in which students learn, represent an attempt to shift away from teacher-centred pedagogies that have for years dominated higher education teaching and learning practices, in the quest towards cultivating more open and reflexive pedagogies that leverage greater student engagement. Many staff development activities within the South African higher education context, centre around encouraging

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lecturers to think about how they can design for different ways of learning, ensuring teaching and learning are thought about more innovatively. Learning through acquisition centres primarily around the actions of the lecturer. This teacher-centred approach to learning is practised at many higher education institutions. Even if educational technologies such as podcasts were used to enhance more creative ways of learning, we are still potentially looking at recordings of entire lectures as podcasts, as few opportunities exist for students to share their perspectives, experiences and epistemologies. This further outlines our rationale for exploring educational technology as a practice that may necessitate us to think about different ways of student learning, fostering more democratised forms of teaching and learning, as a means to alleviate the dilemma of cognitive damage. We would prefer to think of learning through acquisition as an opportunity to initiate other forms of learning. According to Laurillard (2012), learning through inquiry involves learning through a process of self-­discovery. Students learn through finding out for themselves. We would argue that by creating opportunities for students, for instance, to search out the Internet using educational technology, the opportunity exists for students to be exposed to different perspectives, experiences and epistemologies, beyond the confines of what would be traditionally unpacked through a teacher-centred approach to teaching and learning. Learning through practice, Laurillard (2012) purports, is a way of students linking theory to practice. By designing opportunities by which theory can be contextualised as part of students lived experiences, an opportunity exists for students to become conscientised about issues of social injustice. Learning through discussion, according to Laurillard (2012), is described as a way in which students articulate their ideas, and then question, challenge and respond to the lecturer and/or peers’ ideas and questions. Learning through discussion represents an opportunity for students to shift teaching and learning beyond the confines of lecturers’ own hegemonic understandings of knowledge. We have already seen a plethora of examples citing how social networking platforms facilitating discussion brought about profound changes in society. Learning through collaboration, Laurillard (2012)

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avers, as similar to learning through discussion but requires students to come to some form of consensus. Learning through production, Laurillard (2012) states, is a consolidation of what they (learners) have learned by articulating their current conceptual understanding and how they used it in practice. An example of this is a student submitting an assignment to a lecturer for grading. As the lecturer grades the assignment, an opportunity for feedback exists. This feedback represents an opportunity for student engagement and for meanings to be further negotiated. Drawing on Laurillard’s (2012) ideas of learning design, an opportunity exists to design more inclusive forms of teaching and learning by incorporating different ways of learning and shifting away from teacher-­ centred approaches. Such approaches draw primarily on learning through acquisition and may play a role in alleviating cognitive damage. Thus far, we argued that in order for higher education institutions to play a prominent role in the alleviation of cognitive damage, teaching and learning ought to shift away from teacher-centred pedagogies toward more inclusive, democratised forms of teaching and learning. In this way, the issue of cognitive damage can possibly be addressed and a controversial matter within pedagogical action be resolved. Moreover, our argument for educational technology as a practice may support these less powerful or less democratic voices, enabling students to create new forms of learning and to discover new modes of action (Masschelein and Simons 2011: 6).

Conclusion In this chapter, we have argued, using a Senian (1999) conceptual lens of democracy concerning recent events in South Africa, that three undemocratic instances, namely political extremism, nationalist determinism and racial essentialism further perpetuate cognitive damage among individuals in society that potentially exacerbate instances of violence. The level of cognitive damage among students in South African universities as by-­ products of the continual categorisation by an apparent democratic, yet, highly unequal entrenched system is of significant concern. When students are partitioned into disparate affiliations in line with race, culture,

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language and identity, they would invariably be deprived of engaging in genuine democratic relations with others. Furthermore, we argued that a democratic education practice in itself, if not interrogated, might presumably inhibit democratic pedagogical practices on the grounds that something is done to them. It is at this juncture that we then revisited the work of Jacques Rancière (2006) on democratic education, which we argued may be more apposite toward the alleviation of cognitive damage further perpetuated by teacher-­ centred pedagogies in the university classroom. The alleviation of cognitive damage necessitates the democratisation of pedagogical practices towards the adoption of more open and reflexive pedagogies, such as the use of flexibly applied educational technology practices. For higher education institutions to play a prominent role in the alleviation of cognitive damage, teaching and learning ought to shift away from teacher-centred pedagogies toward more inclusive, democratised forms of teaching and learning. In this way, the issue of cognitive damage can possibly be addressed and, a controversial matter within pedagogical action be resolved. By drawing on Laurillard’s (2012) ideas about learning design, incorporating different ways of learning, the possibility exists to shift away from teacher-centred approaches to teaching and learning. When pedagogical actions are refocused on the use of educational technology that draws primarily on learning through acquisition, an opportunity becomes available to design for more inclusive forms of teaching and learning that may play a role in alleviating cognitive damage.

References Amin, N., Samuel, M. A., & Dhunpath, R. (2016). Undoing cognitive damage. In M. Samuel, R. Dhunpath, & N. Amin (Eds.), Disrupting higher education curriculum (pp. 1–16). Rotterdam: Sense. Biesta, G. (2009). Sporadic democracy: Education, democracy, and the question of inclusion. In M. Katz, S. Verducci, & S. Biesta (Eds.), Education, democracy, and the moral life (pp. 101–112). Washington, DC: Springer.

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Fuss, D. (2013). Essentially speaking: Feminism, nature and difference. New York: Routledge. Heleta, S. (2019). Xenophobia and party politics in South Africa. https://mg. co.za/article/2019-09-03-00-xenophobia-and-party-politics-in-south-africa. Accessed 28 Mar 2020. Hrastinski, S. (2019). What do we mean by blended learning? TechTrends, 63(5), 564–569. Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a design science: Building pedagogical patterns for learning and technology. New York/London: Routledge. Masschelein, J., & Simons, M. (2011). The hatred of public schooling. In J. Masschelein & M. Simons (Eds.), Rancière, public schooling and the taming of democracy (pp. 150–165). London: Wiley-Blackwell. Midlarsky, M.  I. (2011). Origins of political extremism: Mass violence in the twentieth century and beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2000). Women and human development: The capabilities approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rancière, J. (2006). Hatred of democracy. Trans. S. Corcoran. London: Verso. Republic of South Africa. (1996). The constitution of the Republic of South Africa. Pretoria: Government Printers. Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Sen, A. (2007). Identity and violence: The illusion of destiny. London: Penguin Publishers. Waghid, Z. (2019). Examining an education for decoloniality through a Senian notion of democratic education: Towards cultivating social justice in higher education. In Y. Waghid & C. Manthalu (Eds.), Education for decoloniality and decolonisation in Africa (pp. 155–173). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Waghid, Y., Waghid, F., & Waghid, Z. (2016). Educational technology and pedagogic encounters. Rotterdam: Sense. Waghid, Y., Waghid, F., & Waghid, Z. (2018). Rupturing African philosophy of teaching and learning: Ubuntu justice and education. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan.

6 Responding to the Needs of the Republic: Investigating the Democratic/Social Role of the University in Contemporary South Africa Precious Simba

Introduction In South Africa, the university is constituted by law under the Higher Education Act of 1997. This instrument, while clearly recognising the role of the university1 to include pedagogy, research and obligation to the republic, it does not outline how the university should enact/dispense its responsibility to the republic in the same fashion that it outlines organisational audit or appointment procedures for example. Without a formal guide, the university is left to define its own obligation, which has, as we have seen in recent years, culminated in the university either being blind  In this chapter, I use the term “the university” to refer to an institution of higher and tertiary education in South Africa. 1

P. Simba (*) Department of Education Policy Studies, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa © The Author(s) 2020 N. Davids, Y. Waghid (eds.), University Education, Controversy and Democratic Citizenship, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56985-3_6

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to the issues plaguing broader South Africa or being part of the violence itself. This was seen by the controversy of the university hiring private security firms to “handle” protesting students. The need for a more apparent democratic/social role of the university has become exacerbated by the growing trends of violence within the country as well as within the university campus. The crime statistics of the South African Police Service (South African Police Service 2019) for the year up to March 2019 show 3974 reported cases of murder (an average of 10 per day), 7043 reported cases of rape (an average of 19 rape cases per day), 24,488 cases of extremely violent assault (an average of 67 people attacked per day). Compounded to these statistics are some cases that are difficult to enumerate, such as the recurring xenophobic attacks, cases of student protesters being beaten, exclusion and discrimination, and so forth. I paint these gory details not to tabloidise (from the journalistic concept of unnecessary sensationalism) my point but to underscore the context that the university finds itself in contemporary South Africa. I focus on these statistics to point to the immediacy of the moment and the critical role the university is called to play in such a society. What then is the obligation of the university in the face of an insidious culture of violence? How can the democratic/social role of the university be more clearly defined in situations where the university itself is also a perpetrator of violence? I advance that the university should act in loco humanus2 and in the “African” context to be human is circumscribed by the notion of ubuntu. If the university is to actualise its role as a democratic citizen or social agent, then its endeavours must be humanistic, guided by ubuntu. Considering the two questions posed above, I argue that the position of the university is a state of personhood both legally (juristic personality) and morally (in loco humanus) hence it indeed has an obligation to the broader society. I highlight ubuntu as a possible way for the university to actualise its social role and moral obligation to the republic, especially in the face of violence.  In loco humanus is a Latin term meaning in the place of a human or to be human. I use it here as a parallel to the often used education term in loco parentis which means in the place of a parent, that is, educators in schools given the mandate to act in the position of a parent while students are in their care. 2

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On the Issue of Violence Firstly, let me conceptualise the issue of violence briefly. The issue of violence is one that has plagued both pre- and post-apartheid South Africa. The decades since 1994 have seen a proliferation of violence as it takes on multi-manifestations from racial to institutional to gender based. Gqola (2015) considers this to be a short-changing of the hopes that people had of a “new” South Africa as such a profound problem for the future of the republic. Butler (2016) categorises violence as physical, ideological, and structural, while ŽiŽek (2008) sees violence as subjective, objective, and systemic. Prima facie, the scholars (Butler 2016; ŽiŽek 2008) identify similar notions of violence that it exists beyond the physical manifestations  – that it is tied to knowledge (in the Foucauldian sense of knowledge/power dynamic) and can be implanted into institutional processes. Arendt (1970) seminally notes that “power and violence, though they are distinct phenomena, usually appear together. Wherever they are combined, power … is the primary and predominant factor” (1970: 52). In this, Arendt makes clear the inverse relationship between power and violence. This understanding is productive in that it sees violence not as a forceful form of power but as the invalidation of power. She continues, “violence comes into play where power is being lost” (Ibid.: 53). In this Arendt presents power as a notion of agency and violence as a derivative of losing that agency. She extends her thesis on violence by noting that the power–violence dynamic also mirrors the human and inhuman where she notes how those who oppose violence must often come face-to-face with the artefacts (and technologies) of inhumanity – that is, violence. These understandings of violence are revelatory when we consider the instance of a mob demonstrating for jobs and better life turning xenophobic, burning Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, a Mozambican immigrant, alive in 2008 (Bevan 2008). Another such case can be seen in the actions of the South African Police Service at Marikana when the miners refused to be intimidated by the “artefacts of violence” in their plea for better working conditions (Thomas 2018); or the vandalization of the Cecil John Rhodes statue with excrement during the #FeesMustFall protests by

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a student who felt unheard by a supremacist institution (eNCA 2015). So, whether collectively, institutionally, or individually true to Arendt’s assertions, violence, and power (agency) are inextricably tied together. Violence represents an attempt to regain a sense of agency. What is the obligation of the university in the face of such a complex, multi-­ faceted issue?

 ecognising the University as a Democratic/ R Social Actor A close reading of the preamble of the Higher Education Act 101 of 1997 (Republic of South Africa 1997) puts the obligation question to rest. The instrument that constitutes the university into existence in South Africa also recognises that the university is called upon to “PROMOTE the values that underlie an open and democratic society based on human dignity, equality and freedom”; and “RESPOND to the needs of the Republic and of the communities served by the institutions” (Republic of South Africa 1997) [Capital letters in the original text]. This means the authors of the legislature intended (even at an aspirational level) for the university to also be a social structure that plays a role in addressing the republic’s needs. In other words, a university should respond when the republic is in need. The first part of the obligation question is answered – the university does carry an obligation to the republic and its immediate patrons to react in the face of social unrest. However, the constitution is not clear as to what the “needs” of the republic can refer to or what constitutes a “response”; thus, we find ourselves conceptualising pathways to delimit the university’s democratic responsibility. Although legally speaking this call to obligation is clear, the pathway of execution is vague; hence the university is left to its own devices. Mamman and Zakaria (2016: 246) note that African institutions need to work on a new paradigm that must be “…compatible with the African mindset and psyche”; hence the suggestion that follows draws from the ethno-philosophic practices of (South) “Africans”.

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The University Acting in Loco Humanus The law bestows upon appropriately registered institutions (and corporations), such as the university, juristic personality. This is when “a group of individuals, such as government organisations and corporations, are treated by law as if they are persons.” (Swartz et al. 2016: 2). French (1979: 208, 210) notes that “a juristic person may be defined as any entity subject of a right…[B]eing a subject of rights is often contrasted in the law with being ‘an administrator of rights.’” This, among other things, gives the organisations legal rights and obligations. Juristic personality is also seen when organisations like corporations, schools, and universities, are referred to in name and not by the sum of the people that manage them. French’s (Ibid.) investigation into the moral personality of an organisation shows the juristic endowment of an organisation has three tenets: agency, contractual ability and a moral obligation. It is the tenet of obligation that is the primary concern of this chapter. While commonly juristic personality is viewed only as an operational stance that allows organisations to function or remove the undue liability of the people that run them (Swartz et al. 2016), there are also calls for them to extend their obligation into society (French 1979). Regarding obligation, Chabal (2009) notes that it is the quintessence of being human, as such to demonstrate obligation is to be human. Chabal continues (2009: 48), “[O]bligations therefore, are…a means of sustaining one’s place in a network of belonging: that most vital attribute of humanity”. In its quest to address its obligation towards the challenge of violence within its hallways and the broader republic, the university’s approach does not need to be in the narrow juristic persona sense, but it has to act in loco humanus. What does humanus mean in the local? In the African worldview, the essence of what can be deemed humanus is to have ubuntu (Murithi 2009; Ramose 2002; Samkange and Samkange 1980). I now turn to the notion of ubuntu as a guide to addressing the second part of the obligation question, that is, how the university may actualize its social obligation and cement its democratic citizenship role.

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 buntu: Less of a Panacea and More U of a Guide Literature about ubuntu abounds in academia. A quick online trajectory search indicates that academic output around different notions of ubuntu has been growing exponentially since the early 1980s (Gade 2011). Ubuntu has been advanced as a panacea to many social ills (Broodryk 1997; Forster 2007; Naude 2019; Waghid 2019) and a guiding principle for many endeavours, including education. In presenting ubuntu as a guiding principle towards more substantive democratic citizenship, I do so with the awareness of the challenge in touting an “African” grand solution to the questions of the university’s democratic/social role. Firstly, because of the problematics in explaining what is meant by “African” (Mudimbe 1988; Oyěwùmí 1997; Ramose 2002; Santos and Ramose 2016; Tamale 2011) and secondly, because of the shortcomings or dearth of all-encompassing, grand social theories (Edstrom et al. 2014; Loevinger 1994). Instead, I present ubuntu as a way of starting a new conversation with different possibilities in the quest of (re)defining the social/democratic role of the university and addressing the pressing issue of violence. What do I mean by ubuntu? Beginning with a definition is an inescapable starting point to this section as it is a term that is fraught with controversy and contestation. Over the past three decades, it has been embroiled in various meta-narratives and disciplines from jurisprudence (Praeg 2014) to religion (Shutte 2001) and feminist studies (Magadla and Chitando 2014). The growth in ubuntu discourse, especially within the academy, is in many places prefaced with the question “what is ubuntu?” So significant is this question that Praeg (2014) and Praeg and Magadla (2014) developed a whole body of work around what it means to ask the question “what is ubuntu?”. Inadvertently, the growth in ubuntu scholarship seems to add to an air of inexplicability (Enslin and Horsthemke 2004). Mboti’s (2015) journal-title “May the real ubuntu please stand up” cements this idea of the perplexity in defining ubuntu. I, therefore, take a moment to explain and reason the understanding of ubuntu that is advanced in this chapter. There are many ways ubuntu has been translated and unpacked in academic discourse  – its translation

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evolving and splintering over time. Gade (2011) gives a timeline of ubuntu as captured in translated texts that span from 1846 to 2011, supporting the idea that ubuntu has not always meant the same thing in antiquity. As Gade notes, “analysis shows that in written sources published before 1950, it appears that ubuntu is always defined as a,… during the second half of the 1900s, some authors began to define ubuntu more broadly” (2011: 303). For some authors (Murithi 2009; Tutu 2013; Waghid 2019), ubuntu is simply humaneness/humanness. This is one of the most common translations of the term and was popularised by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission project and the work of Archbishop Tutu. Tracing the early translations of ubuntu (Gade 2011) reveals that ubuntu as humaneness/ humanness is also one of the earliest translations of the term (see timeline presented by Gade 2011). It represents a drive of early translators to find equivalent words in English to capture words in Nguni languages3 without an equal drive towards nuance (Doke 1961). It represents an attempt to find an English term that captures in a word what ubuntu means. Etymologically, though, it is sound as the abstracting prefix “ubu-“ can be considered to have a similar function as the English suffix “-ness”. However, in terms of nuance, ubuntu as humaneness/humanness leaves one with illimitable meta-translations such as respect, kindness, love, humility, honesty. Perhaps this is why one author equates ubuntu to all things good and leads another (Broodryk 2002) to assert, unequivocally, that ubuntu can be found in all cultures. Other authors (Letseka 2012; Mangena 2009; Molefe 2014; Ramose 2002; Samkange and Samkange 1980) view ubuntu as a philosophy or a foundation of philosophy. This has been a hotly debated translation of ubuntu as it has been tied to a separate debate on character philosophy – that is, the authenticity and possibility of “African” philosophy. In this understanding of ubuntu, it is tied to various other philosophies and presented as an “African” version of, for example, afro-communitarianism, afro-humanism, or afro-communalism. What is common in these philosophic splinters is a juxtapositioning of ubuntu, vis-à-vis reigning  Nguni languages are a group languages spoken in Southern Africa that share similar morphological structures (Crane and Mabena 2019). 3

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Western philosophical conceptions, such that to understand ubuntu one first needs to understand the foundations of humanism, communalism, communitarianism or critical theory [see Molefe’s 2014 review of Praeg’s 2014 A report on ubuntu]. Also, there is a sense that ubuntu is being inserted into philosophical conversations that are tied to capital (such as communalism) with which ubuntu may not necessarily be consumed (Molefe 2014). So, what is ubuntu? Is it an ethic as has been widely used in theology, a philosophy as has been used in philosophy and its applied branches such as education or, a worldview as taken in historical studies? Is ubuntu all of these things all at once? What is evident in the myriad of translations is the understanding of ubuntu as a thing which when you can see, you can tangibly identify as ubuntu. While each interpretation of ubuntu is useful within the discipline or context in which it is employed, some shortfalls and oversights (as demonstrated in the brief critiques above) emerge when ubuntu is narrowly defined or when templates outside its epistemic practice are used. In the context of this chapter, I find the seminal work of Samkange and Samkange (1980) as well as the intimations of Mogobe (in Coetzee and Roux 2003) useful in extending our understanding of ubuntu. Their erudition draws extensively from the progenitor cultures (aBantu), cementing the notion that ubuntu is indeed a lived and living philosophy. Ubuntu is a concept that has deep roots in “African” livelihoods. While many authors look at the actions that demonstrate ubuntu, Mogobe, for example, unpacks ubuntu intimately using language as an archive for reasoning. From thence, he postulates: It is best, philosophically, to approach this term as a hyphenated word, namely, ubu-ntu. Ubuntu is two words in one. It consists of the prefix ubuand the stem ntu-… At the ontological level, there is no strict and literal separation and division between ubu- and -ntu. Ubu- and -ntu are not two radically separate and irreconcilably opposed realities. On the contrary, they are mutually founding in the sense that they are two aspects of be-ing as a one-ness and an indivisible whole-ness. Accordingly, ubu-ntu is the fundamental ontological and epistemological category in the African thought of the Bantu-speaking people (Ramose in Coetzee and Roux 2003: 230, 231).

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Ramose also looks at the notion of ubuntu as a condition of temporality or being “in flux”, a becoming without situatedness. This probably may be his reasoning for stating that, “…ubu-ntu means, therefore, that ubuntu is a verbal noun” (in Coetzee and Roux 2003: 231). Samkange and Samkange’s (1980) work4 draws more from the historical, phenomenological, and ethnographic instances of the progenitor cultures.5 They give a series of examples and stories that signify ubuntu. Taken together, the works of Ramose (in Coetzee and Roux 2003) and Samkanga and Samkange (1980) present a different discussion around ubuntu – that is, the conditions that necessitate ubuntu. In this way, ubuntu is conceptualised not necessarily an act/thought/ethic but is a set of conditions that give reason to the act/thought/ethic, which makes ubuntu less of a thing (ethic, action. thought) and more of a framework that brings certain ethics or actions in concordial agreement6 within an encounter. Because ubuntu is, as eloquently expressed in the aphorism umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (a person is a person through other people), geared towards the other, it finds full comprehensible expression in the encounter with the other. The raison d’etre seems to be kinship – ukama/ ubuhlobo7 in some of the progenitor languages. I extract one such encounter presented by Samkange and Samkange (1980) to extend the understanding of ubuntu. As the story goes, in the early 1950s, Professor Samkange was travelling through rural Zimbabwe when his car got stuck in a ditch in one of rural dust roads. He elicited assistance from the nearby village where two boys, with the help of yoked oxen, came to his rescue. In a show of gratitude, he offered money to the boys. At this point, an old man from the village arrived, just in time to reprimand the boys for taking the bonsella.8 As directly extracted:  Samkange and Samkange (1980) did not follow up their seminal book as such what I present here are merely interpretations of the notions first presented in their book. 5  Samkange and Samkange (1980) draw examples largely from the Shona and Ndebele people of Zimbabwe. 6  I use concordial agreement from its linguistic implications to mean actions taken in an encounter that are commensurate with cultural norms what I later identify as a social script. 7  Ukama and ubuhlobo are respectively chiShona and isiZulu words which mean relationship or more aptly kinship. 8  In Southern African lingo, a bonsella is a tip, a bonus, or gratuity. 4

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…when an old man approached us, recognised me and greeted me clapping his hands and calling me father. I reciprocated his courtesy. ‘Now, my children,’ he said to the boys, ‘this is the father of Danny’s mother. We cannot allow ourselves to accept anything from him. It can’t be done. If there is anything you were hoping to buy with your bonsella, forget it. Nokuti hahungave hunhu ihwo hwo (because that would not be humanness). “Hazvingaitike (it cannot be done),” the old man went on, “kuti nditambire chinhu kwaari iye mwana wake ndiyi naye mumba (that I can receive anything from him whereas I have his daughter in the house)” It turned out that the old man was Danny’s grandfather and Danny’s father was married to a woman of my tribe, a tete – father’s sister, to me. So, all men of my tribe were the old man’s fathers-in-law. For that reason, he had addressed me as ‘father’. (Samkange and Samkange 1980: 35)

There are several components of this encounter that are productive to the understanding ubuntu that I pursue. Firstly, there is the performative component of the gestural clapping of hands. The gestures are dually symbolic and communicative. In the Shona cultures, the clapping of hands is a symbol of high praise often reserved for the most respected members of the community – elders, in-laws or officials (Murove 2007). The performative/symbolic is a way of entreating someone into an encounter, that Samkange reciprocated signified that the encounter was consensual. Also, that the old man in the story offers this respect to Samkange who is younger, is another key component – that of power. In entering the encounter, the old man claps his hands and Samkange reciprocates, that is, the old man offers his respect and Samkange accepts it. There is a determination of positionality and locus of power. Power is one element often omitted in the ubuntu discourse except where it is juxtaposed to Western thinking (see Praeg 2008). There is also an inconspicuous element of an agreed-upon script  – which can be taken as the epistemological foundation of the encounter if we are to evoke Ramose (2002). There is pre-historic sociology that informs the encounter, in the example, it is embedded in Shona culture, which becomes epistemological in the sense that it is the knowledge rationale of how the other tenets of the encounter related. The old man and Samkange engage in accordance with the dictates of the Shona culture of greeting. The script is

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accepted without question in this encounter; it governs the performative elements of the encounter. The working of the identified elements of the encounter gives concordial agreement to the encounter, that is, makes the actions in the encounter commensurate with the accepted social script. While reading the extract from Samkange and Samkange (1980), we can see the clapping of hands and say ubuntu has occurred because there is a show of respect. Alternatively, we can say that the refusal for a bonsella for assisting a traveller is a demonstration of ubuntu through the show of humility. These assertions would not be completely wrong but is incomplete. The other tenets of the performative/symbolic, power and the social script are what give ubuntu dialectical significance and differences from society to society and from encounter to encounter. The same scenario could occur somewhere in the Eastern Cape in South Africa and the encounter could be different not because the ubuntu in Zimbabwe is different from the one in South Africa, but because the social script informing the encounter (of the Shona in Zimbabwe compared to that of the Xhosa in South Africa) is different. However, the framework of the encounter is the same. Reading these components together, one can, therefore, with reason interpret Samkange and Samkange’s (1980) ethnographic extract as presenting ubuntu as a social framework of encounter employed to navigate the interface with the other whose praxis involves the creation of a social structure that permits the currency of power between the bodies in the interface. The goal is to create a plane for establishing a harmonious relationship – ukama/ubuhlobo. From the extract given above, it can be better understood that the act of respect (demonstrated by the clapping of hands) alone cannot be said to be ubuntu. To refer to it as such leaves the act devoid of epistemic reason, the informing script unaccounted for and power overlooked. However, if taken in the framework of conditions (the performative/symbolic, deliberation, positionality, power, the script, and ukama/ubuhlobo/kinship), we have a more lucid appreciation of ubuntu. What then does this mean for the university? Can this framework be imputed onto the university? Given this expanded understanding of ubuntu, how does it assist in the navigation of the impasse on violence on university campuses and the wider society? In the Samkange text, a (1980) sense to execute ubuntu is chiefly to place a premium on humanity

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as well as one’s role in it. Furthermore, bringing the notion of ubuntu as a framework of conditions geared towards creating harmonious kinship presents some options in the execution of the democratic role of the university. The scholarship of ubuntu, as demonstrated by Gade’s (2011) timeline, is still growing; hence it cannot be presented as an absolute panacea, but there are cobs to be gleaned to guide us around the obligation questions presented in this chapter.

Deliberative Engagement Deliberative engagement becomes of utmost importance in the context of the university where it encounters multiple diverse patrons and situated in an even more diverse country like South Africa. The first port-of-­ call is to create safe spaces for dissenting voices without fear of retribution. As argued by Waghid and Davids in this volume and elsewhere (Davids and Waghid 2019a, b) the instance of disinvitation, for example, is a detraction from the mandate of the university. For Jansen (News 24 Wire 2019), the ideal of the university is undermined when (News 24 Wire 2019) space for dissent is closed. In the broader society, the challenge of deliberative engagement is not necessarily with a lack of safe space for dissent, but space to give a voice to the poor, disenfranchised, and underrepresented, for instance. The university’s encounter with the broader society should create room and tools for these voices to be heard within the structures of power, such as the university. An example is the issue of ethical research as a key focus for the university, given instances of violation, disbelief, misrecognition, and misrepresentation. Earlier this year (2019) a panel of (white) academics from Stellenbosch University published a paper titled: Age- and education-related effects on cognitive functioning in Coloured South African women and was slammed for being racially essentialist (Jansen 2019). More importantly, the paper points to the need to evaluate ethical procedures for engagement with the other (Dano 2019; Le Grange 2019). Fricker (2006, 2013) terms the situation where the knowledge of others is misrepresented a case of epistemic injustice whose counter should be ethical (deliberative) engagement laced with virtue.

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Challenging Toxic Social Scripts In the Samkange and Samkange (1980) extract, I demonstrated how a script mediates the encounter with the other. When Samkange encounters the old man, they operate on a social script that is commonly agreed upon – that is, Shona culture. In the example, the script is cultural and understood by the encountering parties. However, the reality in the broader republic is that toxic social scripts exist that perpetuate violence, especially against the most marginalised such as women, queer people, foreigners, the poor, to name a few. The role of the university must be geared towards a pedagogy of re-writing and challenging toxic scripts for a more harmonious society. It is a controversy and a failure on the university’s pedagogical mandate, for example, that at many institutions in South Africa, there is yet to be a core curriculum on consent and anti-violence.

The Performative/Symbolic Actions The actions around #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall were a strong communique to the university on the violent experience from symbolic emblems and the need for institutional redress. Since the end of the protests, the university has made concerted efforts towards redress. Symbols of colonialism and apartheid have been taken down formally at some institutions (like the Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town), buildings have been renamed (Memorial Hall is now the Sarah Baartman Hall at the University of Cape Town), which is all commendable actions. As demonstrated in the Samkange and Samkange (1980) example, the performative and symbolic gestures need to move in tandem with a bona fide movement of power, as in the clapping of hands to demonstrate accordance of respect. This is a difficult tenet to determine because the genuineness of the performative/symbolic is often the preserve of the actor and the evaluative criteria, those of the othered party. This tenet, as reasoned from the extract, works hand-in-hand with deliberative engagement to determine the genuineness of the transfer of power and the level of the performative/symbolic redress that will satisfy the violated party.

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Chaudhuri (2016), reflecting on the symbolism in the removal of the Cecil John Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town, for example, implores the reader to think beyond the removal of a statue and calls for deeper meaning in the performative/symbolic. In a short chapter as this, I will not develop this any further other than to say that the performative/ symbolic tenet of an ubuntu-inspired demonstration of democratic citizenship is difficult, and yet still important.

Power This brings me to the last tenet  – that of power. Again, space here is limited to unpack the issue of power fully as it relates to ubuntu and the university. However, I will go back to Arendt’s (1970: 87) allusion of power as agency and how its loss is a culmination of violence where she says, “every decrease in power is an invitation to violence”. How then can the university disseminate its own power or create opportunities for empowerment? The ubuntu framework, in one way, mirrors a Foucauldian idea of power  – that power is not a thing, “it designates relationships between partners” (and by that I am not thinking of a zero-sum game but simply, and for the moment, staying in the most general terms, of an ensemble of actions that induce others and follow from one another) (Foucault 1982: 786). Thus, the framework of engagement, whether between the university and its patrons or the university and the broader republic, presents an opportunity to pass between the bodies (both metaphysical and structural) of power.

Conclusion In this chapter, I posed two questions: firstly, on the obligation of the university to the republic; to which a conclusive answer was found in the legal instrument constituting the university in South Africa and in literature. The second question posed was how that obligation could be executed given the levels of (visceral, pressing and complex) violence with which South Africa is presently riddled. In addressing the second

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question, I began by looking at Arendt’s (1970) notion of violence as conjoined to power or more aptly agency. I showed that this dynamic is also reflected in human/inhuman actions. In an era where the university is embroiled in the controversies of enacting violence on its own patrons – physically and symbolically as well as not having pedagogical pathways of addressing social scripts of violence – a more in-depth approach is needed regarding the manner in which the university dispenses its pedagogical role. I, therefore, argued that if the university is to address the reigning challenges of violence, it must view itself as a democratic actor and act in loco humanus. I advanced that being human in the African worldview is exercised via the notion of ubuntu. I saw a need to expand what I mean by ubuntu, drawing from the works of Ramose (Coetzee and Roux 2003; Ramose 2002; Santos and Ramose 2016) and Samkange and Samkange (1980). Ubuntu, as presented in this chapter, accords the university a framework for navigating the complexities of an encounter and pathways for establishing kinship/ukama/ubuhlobo.

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Coetzee, P., & Roux, A. P. (Eds.). (2003). The African philosophy reader: A text with readings (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Crane, T.M., & Mabena, M.P. (2019). Time, space, modality, and (inter) subjectivity: Futures in isiNdebele and other Nguni languages. South African Journal of African Languages, 39(3), 291–304. Dano, Z. (2019). Stellenbosch study on coloured women draws on colonial stereotypes. Cape Argus. https://www.iol.co.za/capeargus/news/stellenboschstudy-on-coloured-women-draws-on-colonial-stereotypes-22166233. Accessed 15 Dec 2019. Davids, N., & Waghid, Y. (2019a). Universities, pedagogical encounters, openness, and free speech: Reconfiguring democratic education. Lanham: Lexington Books. Davids, N., & Waghid, Y. (2019b). Why banning controversial voices from universities is bad practice. https://theconversation.com/why-banningcontroversial-voices-from-universities-is-bad-practice-112783. Accessed 15 Dec 2019. Doke, C. M. (1961). Contributions to the history of bantu linguistics. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Edstrom, J., Das, A., & Dolan, C. (2014). Introduction: Undressing patriarchy and masculinities to re-politicise gender. IDS Bulletin, 45(1), 1–10. https:// onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1759-5436.12062. Accessed 5 Mar 2019. eNCA. (2015). UCT statue defaced with sewage. https://www.enca.com/southafrica/uct-statue-poured-poo. Accessed 14 Dec 2019. Enslin, P., & Horsthemke, K. (2004). Can Ubuntu provide a model for citizenship education in African democracies? Comparative Education, 40(4), 545–558. Forster, D.  A. (2007). Identity in relationship: The ethics of Ubuntu as an answer to the impasse of individual consciousness. In C. W. du Toit (Ed.), The impact of knowledge systems on human development in Africa. Pretoria: Research Institute for Religion and Theology, University of South Africa. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777–795. French, P. A. (1979). The corporation as a moral person. American Philosophical Quarterly, 16(3), 207–215. Fricker, M. (2006). Powerlessness and social interpretation. Episteme, 3(1–2), 96–108. Fricker, M. (2013). Epistemic justice as a condition of political freedom? Synthese, 190(7), 1317–1332. Gade, C.  B. (2011). The historical development of the written discourses on Ubuntu. South African Journal of Philosophy, 30(3), 303–329.

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Gqola, P. D. (2015). Rape: A South African nightmare. Johannesburg: MF Books. Jansen, J. (2019). Racist medical myths persist with SA’s diseased apartheid mentality. https://www.timeslive.co.za/ideas/2019-04-25-racist-medicalmyths-persist-with-sas-diseased-apartheid-mentality/. Accessed 15 Dec 2019. Le Grange, L. (2019). A comment on critiques of the article age-and education-­ related effects on cognitive functioning in Coloured south African women. South African Journal of Higher Education, 33(4), 9–19. Letseka, M. (2012). In defence of Ubuntu. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 31(1), 47–60. Loevinger, J. (1994). In search of grand theory. Psychological Inquiry, 5(2), 142–144. Magadla, S., & Chitando, E. (2014). The self becomes god: Ubuntu and the ‘scandal of manhood’. In L. Praeg & S. Magadla (Eds.), Ubuntu: Curating the archive. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Mamman, A., & Zakaria, H.  B. (2016). Spirituality and Ubuntu as the foundation for building African institutions, organizations and leaders. Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion, 13(3), 246–265. Mangena, F. (2009). The search for an African feminist ethic: A Zimbabwean perspective. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 11(2), 18–30. Mboti, N. (2015). May the real Ubuntu please stand up? Journal of Media Ethics, 30(2), 125–147. Molefe, M. (2014). Review: A report on Ubuntu by Leonhard Praeg. Critical Views on Society, Culture and Politics, 1, 157–164. Mudimbe, D.  Y. (1988). The invention of Africa: Gnosis, philosophy, and the order of knowledge. http://artafrica.letras.ulisboa.pt/uploads/docs/2016/ 04/19/57163956481c1.pdf. Accessed 30 Mar 2020. Murithi, T. (2009). An African perspective on peace education: Ubuntu lessons in reconciliation. International Review of Education, 55, 221–233. Murove, M.  F. (2007). The Shona ethic of ukama with reference to the immortality of values. Mankind Quarterly, 48(2): 179–189. http://www. mankindquarterly.org/archive/issue/48-2/4. Accessed 14 Apr 2020. Naude, P. (2019). Decolonising knowledge: Can Ubuntu ethics save us from coloniality? Journal of Business Ethics, 159(1), 23–37. News 24 Wire. (2019). The ideal of the university is under threat, Jonathan Jansen warns students. The Citizen. https://citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/ education/2219193/the-ideal-of-the-university-is-under-threat-jonathanjansen-warns-students/. Accessed 15 Dec 2019. Oyěwùmí, O. (1997). The invention of women: Making an African sense of western gender discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Praeg, L. (2008). An answer to the question: What is [Ubuntu]? South African Journal of Philosophy, 27(4), 367–385. Praeg, L. (2014). A report on ubuntu (Thinking Africa). Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Praeg, L., & Magadla, S. (2014). (Eds.). Ubuntu: Curating the archive (Thinking Africa). Scottsville: University of Kwazulu-Natal Press. Ramose, M. B. (2002). The philosophy of Ubuntu and Ubuntu as a philosophy. Harare: Mond Books. Republic of South Africa. (1997). Higher education act 101. South Africa. Samkange, S.  J. T., & Samkange, T. -M. (1980). Hunhuism or ubuntuism: A Zimbabwe indigenous political philosophy. Harare: Graham Pub. Santos, B. de S., & Ramose, M. B. (2016). Conversations of the world – Mogobe B Ramose and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Part 1). https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=UEDNoZg3G4Y. Accessed: 6 Sep 2019. Shutte, A. (2001). Ubuntu: An ethic for a new South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications. South African Police Service. (2019). SAPS crime stats. https://www.saps.gov.za/ services/crimestats.php. Accessed 15 Dec 2019. Swartz, N. P., Ozoo, E., & Reasentse, T. (2016). Is a juristic person vicariously liable for maintenance of a child? A judicial analysis. Journal of Education, Society and Behavioural Science, 13(4), 1–13. Tamale, S. (2011). African sexualities: A reader. Oxford: Pambazuka Press. Thomas, K. (2018). ‘Remember Marikana’: Violence and visual activism in post-apartheid South Africa. ASAP/Journal, 3(2), 401–422. Tutu, D. (2013). Who we are: Human uniqueness and the African spirit of Ubuntu. Desmond Tutu, Templeton Prize 2013. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=0wZtfqZ271w. Accessed 15 Dec 2019. Waghid, Y. (2019). Towards a philosophy of caring in higher education: Pedagogy and nuances of care. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ŽiŽek, S. (2008). Violence: Six sideways reflections. New York: Picador.

7 Identity (Re)construction in Higher Education Spaces Sinobia Kenny

Introduction This chapter explores the intersection of individual identities and the institutional norms practised within higher education spaces. There is a tacit assumption that identity (re)construction is an individual undertaking in higher education spaces. In a sense, there is an institutional assumption that identity (re)construction is the responsibility of an individual to navigate on his/her own, with the view that identities can only be understood and altered through the lens of an individual’s past experiences. There appears to be an (un)intentional (un)consciousness of the impact of an institution’s norms and practices on the identities of individuals when they enter higher education spaces. Since there is a naturalness for individuals to “check-in” on who they are, and whether they “fit in” at an institution, the argument I present is that there is, equally, a

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responsibility of the institution to be cognisant of the role they play in contributing towards individual identity (re)construction. Drawing on Axel Honneth’s (1995, 2007) theory of recognition, I argue that identity (re)construction in higher education spaces infers less institutional validation of individual identities. Instead, institutions of higher education could aim at minimising students’ sense of feeling vulnerable and subordinated. Therefore, there is a necessary proactiveness required of higher education institutions (HEIs) that lends itself to contributing towards the self-respect and self-esteem of all individuals in higher education.

 roblematising Identity (Re)construction P in Higher Education Spaces The rise of a democratic South Africa created new opportunities for individuals, such as students, who wished to pursue higher education. Massification of higher education opened doors to those students who, under colonial and apartheid rule, would less likely have been able to enrol at HEIs such as universities. A space that was previously reserved for a uniform group (whites), has now opened to all students in South Africa, creating a melting pot of identities to be contended with. In the process of building a democracy, the new government and HEIs were challenged with the mammoth task of addressing transformation in higher education. Badat (2010) points out that the transformation agenda had several challenges for HEIs. For example, Badat highlights inadequate and strategic funding, a lack of addressing historic and dominant discourses that affect and reproduce social exclusion and injustices, the low participation and success rates of black students, the under-­ representation of black and female students, the low throughput rates of black and working-class students in particular, and the lacking of a mechanism to transcend concretised institutional norms and practices. Davids (2016) highlights a range of broader issues that require further questioning by government and HEIs in the transformation process. Davids (2016: 3) identifies the decolonisation of universities, the social composition of academic staff, institutional culture, inadequacy of state funding

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of higher education, the level and escalation of tuition fees, dealing with student debt, and the question of free higher education to be further investigated. Badat’s (2010) and Davids’ (2014) examples bring to the fore, systemic challenges for government and HEIs, that add to the complexity of the massification of higher education. While HEIs like universities unlocked their doors of privilege, less privileged students faced new challenges.

Encounters of Vulnerability In 2013, students at eight universities across South Africa participated in a five-year research study; the students were tracked to understand their challenges and successes at university (Swartz et al. 2017). Some of Swartz et al.’s (2017: 8) findings revealed that “access to resources, student housing allocation, financial security and the ability to pay fees were all racialised”. Swartz et al. (2017: 34) also provided insight into how students’ home circumstances affected their experiences at university. Entering a higher education space for less privileged students, brought with it familial distress, weighted by impoverished home circumstances, and additional financial responsibilities (Swartz et al. 2017: 34). Badat (2016: 3) notes that by 2016, an increase in government funding to pursue the studies of black students, in particular, remained inadequate, despite the academic eligibility of these students. Fataar (2018: 598) concurs with Badat that the government’s inefficiencies in loan and bursary schemes became problematic and challenging for students. From my perspective, during a “free education” movement in 2017, some political leaders misled poorer students into believing that their studies would be funded by government. Consequently, the experiences of less privileged students became, in a sense, a mismatch to “mainstream” privileged student life. By “mainstream”, I mean having the opportunity to focus on their studies and to participate in ordinary student life, instead of focusing on the payment of university fees as an example. While I acknowledge that financial issues are not the only challenges experienced by less privileged students, I am making the point that less privileged students

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have to find ways of navigating themselves that help them to cope with their own vulnerabilities. The issue of navigating oneself with feelings of vulnerability is perhaps what Fataar (2018: 597) refers to as the “distancing” of less privileged students, that he equates to functioning in a “parallel existence” to their privileged counterparts. It is in this “parallel existence”, I argue, that students begin to reflect on their sense of value and worth. As Mann (2008: 12) alludes, privileged students enter higher education spaces with access to resources, and a sense of familiarity of the norms and cultures of university life, that poorer students are not accustomed to. Since universities are traditionally places where much of student life is taken for granted (Mann 2008: 12), universities may not be cognisant of the alienating day-to-day university experiences of poorer students. Luckett and Naicker (2019: 195) suggest that it cannot be expected of universities that the “emotional work of healing” of less privileged students be done on their own. In Swartz et  al.’s (2017: 10) study, students also noted “individual agency, supportive social networks, uptake of educational resources and commitment to faith-based spaces and relationships” as crucial catalysts to their successes at university. However, in my view, these successes depend on individual efforts on the part of the students, not necessarily achievable by explicit systemic support put in place by universities. Not surprisingly, 2015 saw the start of a spate of student protests, reminding government and universities that students were not at ease with their experiences in higher education.

Identity (Re)construction The proposal in this chapter is that HEIs like universities (almost by demand of the recent student protests in South Africa), should nurture the right of all students to be heard, and their sense of value and sense of worth recognised within higher education spaces. The proposal calls for a theoretical understanding of, firstly, identity (re)construction of students and, secondly, the possible (mis)recognition of students as they enter new and, perhaps, unknown higher education spaces. Following,

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consideration will be given to the role HEIs could play in minimising feelings of vulnerability by poorer students. For HEIs to be proactive does not mean increasing the enrolment of poorer students as an action to “make up” for the historical pain and impediments of those marginalised during apartheid. Instead, to be proactive means to intently and attentively hear the meaning of the voices of the students in lecture halls, corridors, libraries and cafeterias where they sometimes share their pain and impediments. Drawing on the work of Honneth (1995, 2007), the proposal is for universities to be more proactive in contributing towards building the self-respect and self-esteem of less privileged students. From Honneth’s perspective, there is a correlation between self-respect and self-­ esteem, and one’s identity. While there is a naturalness to understand who we are, there is also a consciousness required of ourselves to question our pluralistic, diverse and ever-changing identities. By examining our identities, we create the opportunity to (re)construct who we are. In the process of questioning who we are, we inadvertently “check-in” with ourselves to examine our (mis)recognition of another. In this space of encountering, we (dis)connect with each other, and (re)construct who we are. While there are several stances from which to theorise identity (re)construction, for this chapter, the particularised lens pursued is recognition as, it is in relation to others, that we examine who we are. Honneth’s (2007: 74) theory of recognition can be extended to the social encounters of students in their day-to-day experiences in higher education spaces. Honneth (1995: xii) believes that if social recognition is denied, the denial prevents or stunts an individual’s identity (re)construction. I believe, that the spate of student protests in recent years in South Africa, has synergy with Honneth’s view of students reacting with feelings that accompany the experience of a type of disrespect. When Honneth (1995: xii) refers to disrespect, he means “humiliation [and] degradation” as examples which, to some extent, is synergistic with the feelings of less privileged students. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, when entering an unfamiliar space, it is common for individuals to “check-in” on who they are, and whether they “fit in”. For Honneth (1995: xii), an encounter affects how we relate to ourselves and, how we relate to ourselves, is “an intersubjective process, in which one’s attitude towards oneself emerges in one’s

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encounter with an other’s attitude towards oneself ”. Therefore, how we relate to ourselves is dependent on our experience of encountering another. In the process of the encounter, we discover, in a practical way, who we are (a mutual recognition). To clarify, mutual recognition means that during an encounter, both individuals recognise each other, mutually, not necessarily equally. Notably, recognition does not make sense if the individual encountered is not perceived as someone who can bring value to the encounter. This statement is important because the hidden assumption is that it is non-sensical to expect that an individual wants recognition from every other individual, without establishing a relationship between them. Honneth’s (2007: 71) explanation of encounters is interesting because he points out that moral principles do not necessarily motivate protests of the subaltern as such (perhaps like the student protests in South Africa). Instead, he continues, protests of the subaltern are motivated by an “intuitive notion of justice violated”. Stated differently, student protests are motivated by a denial of student recognition, which the students internalise as a violation of justice. Taylor (1998: 25) avers that a denial of recognition is, in itself, a form of oppression that can give a false impression of who we are. Honneth (2007: 224) posits that identity (re)construction can only be developed and maintained by a necessary struggle for self-realisation. By self-realisation, Honneth (2007: 224) refers to the opportunity for individuals to “perfect themselves of their own free will”, for the moral and the ethical good of society. A necessary struggle occurs with oneself during moments when an encounter with another ruptures a sense of who we are. In my view, the student protests from 2015 to 2018 were missed opportunities for the self-realisation of students, and missed opportunities for their identity (re)construction with support and recognition by universities. For Honneth (2007: 224), the struggle for self-realisation is actually a struggle for the establishment of mutual recognition. In a sense, students were demanding mutual recognition in their plight to (re)construct who they are. As McBride (2013: 41) puts it, “What matters, then, is not whether the terms of recognition are, from some perspective, universal or particular, but whether these terms are under which one wants to be recogni[s]ed., and whether others will, or more accurately, can recogni[s]e you in this

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way”. Extrapolating McBride’s view to students, students want to be ­recognised in a particular way by universities as part of their journey of (re)constructing who they are and who they want to become. What follows from this statement is a (re)construction of identities that depend on (past and current) triggers that students experience during encounters in higher education spaces. These triggers become explosive when students do not feel that they have the spatial platform to voice their needs. In a country warped by race-class issues, for example, it is not surprising that students, as members of society, are feeling misrecognised and unheard.

Struggle for Recognition How we relate to ourselves, how we relate to others, and how others relate to us affects who we think we are, and so, we make sense of who we are in relation to others. Honneth (2007: 132) provides a useful structure for relating with oneself. He builds on Hegel’s (1952) thesis of recognition who stipulates three forms of self-relation: love (from the perspectives of unity), respect (from moral perspectives), and esteem (in the light of contributing to a social order). In turn, Honneth (2007: 135–136) builds on Hegel’s thesis with the theory of recognition that includes self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem. By self-confidence, Honneth (2007: 133) refers to the ability to be able to express one’s needs without feeling a sense of fear and abandonment, usually related to one’s experiences during one’s upbringing. While self-confidence is significant in identity construction, it is not what I want to focus on in this chapter. In this chapter, I prefer to draw attention to the importance of self-respect and self-esteem in the (re)construction of student identities. By self-respect, Honneth means to be recognised as having the capacity to be a morally responsible agent, that is, to be recognised as having the right to be part of decision-­ making that counts as “legitimate”. Luckett and Naicker (2019: 189) are of the view that recognition of students extend beyond individual rights. While I support the authors’ view, I also believe that understanding the effects of denying the rights of an individual, are as important. In many ways, the identities of the “born-free” generation of students (those born

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after the fall of apartheid) were left for the students to work out for themselves. In a context of higher education, when one is “structurally excluded from the possession of certain rights”, as Honneth (2007: 134) puts it, it means that, as a student, one is denied a right to be part of a decision-­ making process that counts as valuable by the university. For Honneth (1995: 133), a denial of rights in the decision-making of what brings value to the institution, is not only a restriction of a student’s autonomy, but also a denial of status as a full partner in society. In other words, by denying less privileged students a voice in decision-making that the university views as important, is similar to denying students to make moral judgements about their society. Self-respect, Honneth (2007: 135) articulates, is having an “awareness of being a morally accountable subject”, like a form of “moral respect” associated with equality between individuals. The space where self-respect operates is where individuals have an understanding of themselves as beings capable of participating on equal footing with each other. Therefore, to have self-respect means to view oneself as being entitled to the same treatment as every other person. Fataar (2018: 598), for example, alludes that the universities’ lack of providing students with a platform for engagement led to the student protests in 2015 and 2016. While I agree with Fataar, I am also of the view that the protests represented the frustration of less privileged students, who felt that their entitlement to have the same treatment as privileged students, were denied. In a growing democracy, not only are the interests of students important, but what matters most to them. There is another crucial aspect to identity (re)construction that affirms one’s social value to a community. When one is esteemed, it means that the qualities of the individual are viewed as opportunities for new possibilities within the community. Honneth (2007: 136) refers to self-esteem as an “awareness of having good or valuable capabilities” that is in solidarity with the community. What counts as worthwhile, both by the individual and the community, becomes significant. If students believe that they can make valuable contributions to a university community, and these contributions are not recognised as valuable by universities, then they will lack the ability to relate positively to their sense of value, diminishing their self-esteem (Honneth 1995: 121).

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The #FeesMustFall protests are, in my view, examples of value incongruence between students and university. Honneth (1995: 129) explains that a type of tension occurs during value incongruence, which calls for “symmetrical esteem”. For Honneth, symmetrical esteem does not mean deciding the most important value between the students and university. For Honneth (1995: 129), symmetrical esteem means acknowledging the significance of the value that the individual can bring to the shared institutional space. In other words, universities may claim that they recognise the value that students can contribute to higher education spaces; however, to build the self-esteem of students, the university should recognise the value that students can bring to their shared university space. Perhaps Fataar (2018: 603) is correct when he suggests that universities have a deficit understanding of the challenges some students face when entering higher education spaces; they need to adapt and use their survival strategies learnt in challenging communities to navigate their way in a university and, can stunt their ability to learn. Mann’s (2008: 13) words are promising as to how students and universities can think about higher education spaces: [The] interaction between individual and [university] context is not static but historical and dynamic. It takes place over time and involves an unfolding of the past and the future in the experience of the present. (Mann 2008: 13)

Students are asking for recognition “in the experience of the present” on terms and conditions that allow them to construct who they are in a higher education space to the best of their becoming. Luckett and Naicker (2019: 198) provide some insight into how universities can be proactive by suggesting public spheres where students (and other members of the public) can voice their lived experiences, their deliberations and their contestations. Providing these kinds of spaces echoes messages of “you have the right to be here”, “you have the right to share your lived experiences”, “you have the right to voice who you are”, “you have the right to grow”. For the two authors, it is the responsibility of the hearer (university) to be less passive in understanding the subaltern voices of students. To hear, then, is a first step to support the growth and (re)construction of

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student identities. To be heard is to know that one is being recognised. Through the encounter of mutual recognition, even if it is in the context of fears and struggles, the self-respect and the self-esteem of students can be ruptured and grown. My view of a public sphere includes a space for the collective participation of students and staff in public deliberation. For example, in November 2019, Robin DiAngelo (2019) addressed a diversified audience at the University of the Western Cape on the issue of why white people found it hard to talk about racism. DiAngelo made striking remarks of white arrogant ignorance to racism. Her remarks created a necessary struggle for recognition between black and white attendees in a safe, yet challenging space. The talk was well executed because, firstly, the talk took place at a traditionally black university, which necessitated participating white participants to enter a black space. Secondly, DiAngelo, who self-identified as white and privileged, opened an avenue that contested white privilege and power. In essence, her talk esteemed black people in a higher education space. In September 2019, Jonathan Jansen addressed students, staff and public at Stellenbosch University, which revealed five themes documented of “coloured” people (a racist label used during colonisation, apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa) in the academy of Stellenbosch University during the last century. Themes extracted from the research included derogatory foci of the “intimate lives”, “decrepit lives”, “criminal lives”, “drinking habits” and “pitiful lives”, slandered by misrecognition in the academy. Jansen (2019) brought to attention a denial to the right to defend oneself in the academy, which in my view, represented a denial to defend one’s self-respect and, ultimately, a denial to (re)construct one’s identity in the academy. DiAngelo and Jansen’s addresses highlight how perceived identities can be re-looked at in the “experience of the present” (Mann 2008) to re(construct) misrecognised identities of less privileged students in the academy, and in society.

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Conclusion In this chapter, I argued that feelings of vulnerability influence the self-­ respect and self-esteem of less privileged students in higher education spaces in South Africa. I argued that students want the university to recognise them in a particular way, as part of their journey of (re)constructing their student identities. Extrapolating Honneth’s (1995, 2007) theory of recognition, I demonstrated that less privileged students could remain misrecognised in democratic South Africa. In response to misrecognition, I drew on recommendations by Luckett and Naicker (2019), who propose that public spaces at HEIs offer opportunities for contestation and transformation. Within these public spaces, vulnerabilities can be shared, openly and without fear, to contest any misrecognition felt at HEIs. In turn, recognition helps to (re-)build self-respect and self-esteem. Essentially, it is a joint responsibility of HEIs and students to rethink and create contested and transformative public spaces and, therefore, not to avoid issues that are of value to less privileged students.

References Badat, S. (2010). The challenges of transformation in higher education and training institutions in South Africa. Development Bank of Southern Africa. https:// www.dbsa.org/EN/About-Us/Publications/Documents/The%20challenges%20of%20transformation%20in%20higher%20education%20 and%20training%20institutions%20in%20South%20Africa%20by%20 Saleem%20Badat.pdf. Accessed 1 Apr 2020. Badat, S. (2016). Deciphering the meanings, and explaining the South African higher education student protests of 2015–16. https://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/ files/documents/Saleem%20Badat–Deciphering%20the%20 Meanings%2C%20and%20Explaining%20the%20South%20African%20 Higher%20Education%20Student%20Protests.pdf. Accessed 11 Nov 2019. Davids, N. (2016). On extending the truncated parameters of transformation in higher education in South Africa into a language of democratic engagement and justice. Transformation in Higher Education, 1(1), 1–7. DiAngelo, R.  J. (2019). White fragility. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 8fvSXtGN2ME. Accessed 23 Nov 2019.

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Fataar, A. (2018). Placing students at the Centre of the decolonizing education imperative: Engaging the (mis)recognition struggles of students at the post-­ apartheid university. Educational Studies – AESA, 54(6), 595–608. Hegel, G. W. F. (1952). The philosophy of right: The philosophy of history. In G.  W. F.  Hegel (Ed.), Great books of the Western world: 46. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica. Honneth, A. (1995). The struggle for recognition – The moral grammar of social conflicts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Honneth, A. (2007). Disrespect  – The normative foundations of critical theory. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Jansen, J. (2019). Inaugural lecture: Prof Jonathan Jansen (2019). https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=cQzNp_DowF4. Accessed 20 Sep 2019. Luckett, K., & Naicker, V. (2019). Responding to misrecognition from a (post)/ colonial university. Critical Studies in Education, 60(2), 187–204. Mann, S.  J. (2008). Study, power and the university. Berkshire: Open University Press. McBride, C. (2013). Recognition. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Swartz, S., Mahali, A., Arogundade, E., Khalema, E., Rule, C., Cooper, A., Stanley, M., & Naidoo, P. (2017). Ready or not! Race, education and emancipation: A five-year longitudinal, qualitative study of agency and impasses to success amongst higher education students in a sample of South African universities. http://www.hsrc.ac.za/en/research-outputs/view/8966. Accessed 1 Apr 2020. Taylor, C. (1998). The politics of recognition. http://elplandehiram.org/documentos/JoustingNYC/Politics_of_Recognition.pdf. Accessed 28 Aug 2018.

8 Institutional Culture and the Lived Experience of Violence on University Campuses in South Africa Janine Carlse

Introduction South Africa is indeed in a time of crisis, 26  years since the dawn of democracy, and many social ills continue to face the nation. Given South Africa’s multi-layered history that systemically attempted to strip the vast majority of the population of their dignity, and how education systems within these regimes were appropriated to further their discriminatory aims, the new democratically elected administration had its work cut out for it. When the African National Congress (ANC) came into power in 1994, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, there were many expectations of the new democratic system. The higher education sector was understood to be an integral part of the democratisation project, in directing the discourse toward and educating for democratic citizenship and economic growth. If one considers the university as a microcosm of

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the society or community that it is located within, then the upheaval and violence on South African university campuses speak volumes about the psycho-social state of the nation. It can be argued, however, that this state of crisis has presented an opportunity for self-reflection at individual, collective and institutional levels. At the institutional level, confronting the institutional cultures on our campuses has presented a longstanding challenge to deep transformation, particularly concerning the creation of inclusive environments at historically white institutions. In the preface to this anthology, Davids and Waghid pose the question “how aware are universities of its own institutional and spatial cultures concerning the (tacit) perpetuation of violence?”. In response, this chapter unpacks some of the aspects that make up the beast that is “institutional culture”, showing how (when going unquestioned) these aspects can perpetuate violence against and the alienation of our students and staff. This chapter attempts to move toward an understanding of the roots of racist exclusionary institutional cultures as a form of covert violence inflicted upon the “non-traditional” students at (historically white) South African universities. I analyse the workings of institutional culture through the lens of “new materialism” – an interplay between the material and discursive. My argument is that these racist exclusionary institutional cultures are at the root of the lived experience of alienation and non-belonging that tends to lead to either silencing or challenging in the form “acting out”, such as through protest and other forms of controversial overt violence on campuses. Louise Vincent (in Tabensky and Matthews 2015: 21) provides a definition of institutional culture as “the lived experience of the university by all those who inhabit it, including students, academic staff, management, support staff, workers and members of the public who come into contact with the institution”. This lived experience is a web of policies and practices that overtly and covertly inform campus dynamics and ways of being. As stated by Davids and Waghid in the preface, the main argument in this book “is that non-violence, toleration, and peaceful co-existence ought to manifest through pedagogical university actions on the basis of university educators’ desire to cultivate reflectiveness, criticality, and

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deliberative inquiry in and through their academic programmes.” I would like to propose that these pedagogical university actions, as they are located within specific institutional environments, ultimately become a partial reflection of the institutional culture being promoted. This chapter considers the way that racism manifests as a form of violence on our university campuses, in its many covert and overt incarnations. Considering the long history of discrimination and dehumanisation that the South African higher education system embodies, the first section will look at the university as (1) product and (2) producer and purveyor of systemic and ideological racism. Second, Louise Vincent’s conceptualisation of institutional culture as operating at a nexus of intra-­ action of the material–discursive will be discussed through the lens of “new materialism”, the interplay of the material environment with the discourses promoted on our university campuses. Third, the lived experience of black students will be discussed in relation to institutional culture and covert racism on historically white university campuses. Before concluding, considerations and strategies for humanising institutional cultures will be proposed.

 niversity as a Product: The Ontology U of the South African University For more than a century, the South African university system has been deeply conditioned by racial and ethnic dehumanisation, exclusion, self-­ deprecation and trauma enforced through white supremacy in various ideological and systemic forms. As a product of systemic and ideological racism, the ontology of the South African university system – its colonial beginnings, apartheid appropriation, and democratic reformation – provides insight into the still stratified system. To understand the colonial legacy still alive on the campuses of our continent, Teferra and Altbach (2004: 23), in their article surveying the characteristics of and challenges within African higher education systems, allude to the fact that traditional centres of higher learning in Africa were destroyed by colonialism and replaced by the colonial institutions that

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still dominate on the continent, with few exceptions. It can be argued that Britain and France left the greatest legacy on African higher education, with South African academic institutions still implementing English as the dominant medium of research, teaching and learning. In South Africa, the academic compliment of the first universities comprised of imported British (male) professors with a scattering of South African (male) academics. The beginning of the twentieth century also saw the battle of wills between Afrikaans-(Boer/Dutch) and Englishspeaking (British) settlers, each wanting to stake their claim on the budding higher education landscape (Soudien 2015: 11). Meanwhile, South African natives, along with their African counterparts, were excluded from attending these institutions (with a couple of rare exceptions like Harold Cressy), but were often the object of study within them. In this way, Africa and Africans were posited as “devoid of epistemology”, and Africa remained a “field” for exploratory research by white European male “social scientists” (Odora Hoppers 2000: 5). Soudien makes the argument that the young higher education system, although at times ambivalently, played an integral role in the “complex race–class project” during this colonial (post-slavery) period and into the apartheid era (Soudien 2015: 11). The apartheid regime then “overrode major and significant interest groups in society” resulting in a vast majority of the population being “excluded from collective decision-making by being marginalized, ignored, silenced or eliminated” (Morrow 2009: 91). According to Higgs (2003: 5–6), the philosophical discourse about the nature of education during the apartheid regime was “dominated by [f ]undamental [p]edagogics which was seen to provide the foundational landscape for apartheid education in the form of the system of Christian National Education.” Fundamental pedagogics justified and legitimised the hegemonic Christian nationalist agenda that called for the separation of the races (African, coloured, Indian, white), with the education system playing an integral role in supporting this ideological position. We can still see the effects of this ideological position within the democratic higher education context. South Africa’s historically white universities still find their institutional cultures dominated by various conceptions of “whiteness” as the norm, while historically disadvantaged

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institutions tend to be compared to the “standards of excellence” that these historically privileged institutions uphold.

 niversity as Producer and Purveyor: Global U Influences on the Modus Operandi Globally, the modus operandi at universities has long been modelled on a Western (read European) model that has dictated standards of excellence in management, research, curricula and teaching. Penny Enslin (2017: 8), in her contribution on postcolonialism and education, notes the various ways that market fundamentalism (neoliberalism) has resulted in “a globally integrated economy and accelerating cultural and institutional integration.” This has largely resulted in perceptions of the value of education being limited to preparation for competition in the labour market, while encouraging mobility, intellectual labour and competition in what is understood as the “global knowledge economy”, in an international framework that prioritises the thriving of metropolitan (developed) economies (Enslin 2017: 8). Within this global context, a handful of historically white South African universities are rated among the top in the world, and these institutions remain somewhat of an anomaly on the African continent. Enslin further asserts that, to varying degrees, coloniality in education has intensified due to neoliberal discourse dominating and directing education policies and practices (2017: 9). This has resulted in the modus operandi at local higher education institutions being influenced by global imperatives that promote discourses and imaginaries that feed the neoliberal agenda (such as the entrepreneurial university, graduate employability, funding models, reliance on corporatisation, and treating students as customers). It can be argued that education within this neoliberal context just becomes a means to an end. Over the past decade, the term “students” has increasingly “become synonymous with the resources to be exploited, the talents to be mobilised, the object of investment, the guarantee of a country’s competitiveness or, when addressing the possible disobedient

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component of human capital, the consumers to be seduced.” (Masschelin and Simons 2012: 165). Students have, therefore, become a key component in the internationalisation agenda of the entrepreneurial university, while also being victims of “a cold war in the name of excellence, of the daily struggles in the war on talent and human capital, and the innovation race associated with academic entrepreneurship” (Masschelin and Simons 2012: 165). It should be no surprise then that this global push toward viewing students as consumers, coupled with the racist exclusionary climate on our campuses, has brought about what could be considered a student-led revolutionary moment within the South African higher education context. This student-led moment of reform feeds into Henry Giroux’s calls for a reclaiming of education as critical to the project of democratisation. If students are merely seen as customers, and the modus operandi of higher education is to feed a labour market or contribute to a country’s GDP, then this leaves little room for the institutional cultures at universities to be open to alternative discourses. Alternative discourses could offer a transformational lens through which the democratic value of education and the dignity of humanity can be reconstituted. This global neoliberal influence on the modus operandi of our higher education institutions, therefore, translates into the institutional cultures on our campuses.

 imensions of Institutional Culture: “New D Materialism” and the Understanding of the University as Institution and Idea One of the central conundrums associated with institutional culture at South African universities has been the surprising ways in which changes at the level of policy, leadership and demographics have not seemed to coincide with change to an equivalent extent in the way the institutions ‘feel’. Somehow the past, with its ways of violence, discrimination, exclusion and inequality, is being reproduced in the present, these other levels of change notwithstanding. Louise Vincent (in Tabensky and Matthews 2015: 25)

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Institutional culture has long been a buzzword in the South African democratic higher education context, and it can be argued that institutional culture may be the main obstacle to deep transformation within South African higher education institutions (Higgins 2007: 97). Historically white universities particularly bear the negative connotations of institutional culture, and inasmuch as colonialism has presumably left the African continent, coloniality embodying the ideological remnants of colonialism (and neoliberalism as a form of neo-colonialism) is still evident in the institutional cultures of universities. Louise Vincent, in her paper on the transformative potential of collective memory projects within university contexts, advocates for the usefulness of “new materialism” as a lens through which to make sense of the interplay between the material and discursive dimensions of our lived experiences on our campuses. Vincent asserts that new materialists “challenge the distinction between active/intentional humans and passive/ background matter to suggest that floors, tables, paintings, as well as the bodies we occupy and the stuff they are made of – the skin, the hair and so on – can be understood as powerfully acting upon us and implicated in the performative production of power.” (in Tabensky and Matthews 2015: 36). Through the lens of “new materialism”, Vincent identifies two levels at which institutional culture operates – the discursive and the material (in Tabensky and Matthews 2015: 23). According to Vincent, “new materialism eschews the distinction between the discursive and the material and offers, instead, the idea of “material–discursive”. This idea is not about interaction, but about how our sense of being emerges in intra-action – in the spaces between bodies, chairs, floors, discourses and narratives that pervade an institutional setting.” (in Tabensky and Matthews 2015: 23). For Vincent, institutional culture operates at this nexus of intra-action of the material–discursive. As clarified by Tabensky and Matthews (2015: 5), the “discursive dimension of institutional culture includes the beliefs and practices that define institutions  – the ‘worldview’ of institutions, […] The material dimension, on the other hand, relates to the actual physical features of institutions (buildings, furniture, artworks, lecture theatre design, the use of colour, security and so on) and how they affect how we experience institutions.”

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Vincent’s proposition of the material–discursive can be linked to Ron Barnett’s (2016) understanding of the university as both institution and idea. According to Barnett, “[a]s institution, it is moved inexorably by deep-seated global and national forces and depicting those forces could, in principle, amount to a full understanding of the university. But […] it is through ideas of the university that vistas for its becoming, its agency, its will in the world, develop. Despite the negativities at work, ideas can bring new life, new openings, to the university.” (Barnett 2016: 170). It can be argued that in this realm of intra-action between the material– discursive, granted that we agree that the university is also at once an institution and an idea, a university’s institutional culture can be understood as a set of social imaginaries. Barnett draws on the insights of Castoriadis (1997) in his assertion that “at any point in time society was in part constituted by a certain set of imaginaries”, while simultaneously there are “moments of potential disruption” that facilitate the reconstitution of these social imaginaries (Castoriadis 1997 cited in Barnett 2016: 171). One can consider the current moment of self-reflection on South African university campuses as embodying multiple moments of disruption of taken-for-granted discourses and institutional cultures. One such moment of disruption that directly challenged a powerful colonial material-discursive narrative of exclusion was that of the #RhodesMustFall student protest movement. The #RhodesMustFall movement took aim at the imperialist Cecil John Rhodes as a persisting symbol of institutional racism (white supremacy) that endorsed an exclusionary environment and culture for black students and staff on campus, and the eventual “fall” of the Rhodes statue became symbolic of the beginning of a transformative process that called for the fall of white supremacy and privilege at the University of Cape Town (UCT). The movement drew much needed attention to the low numbers of black South African students at universities, as well as the appallingly low number of black senior academic staff at historically white universities (particularly black women academics). The protests also highlighted the reality of the intellectual and social exclusion that “non-traditional” (read black) students face on campuses due to racist institutional cultures that are embedded in our undemocratic history.

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The insistence that the statue of Cecil John Rhodes be removed from UCT speaks to the way that “the continued influences of the legacies of apartheid and colonialism are perhaps most concretely felt in built environments, architecture, urban planning, monuments and other physical artefacts, design and physical planning choices.” (in Tabensky and Matthews 2015: 35). As argued by Vincent, the materiality of institutional culture goes beyond the symbolic or representational, and statues like that of Rhodes feed into the identities and subjectivities of these institutions. Much like discourses that “say something about how ‘we’ are and by implication suggest ways in which we are not” (in Tabensky and Matthews 2015: 24), the materiality of an institution, therefore, serves certain interests and discourses while negating or ignoring others, in this case inciting exclusionary attitudes (racism and white supremacy) and feelings of non-belonging.

 he Lived Experience of Black T “Non-­traditional” Students on University Campuses During the apartheid regime, education was a political battlefield. Since then student protest has occupied a prominent place in South African history, especially as a form of resistance towards discrimination within our education systems, where access to quality and inclusive education have been closely related to notions of freedom and dignity. It can be argued that this sentiment has carried over into our democracy, where the recent national student protests such as #RhodesMustFall (2015) have reminded us of the many challenges that still face black students (as well as staff, academics, and management) within our higher education system. The #RhodesMustFall movement ultimately opened up spaces not just within our universities but within South African society to talk about the challenges faced by the majority of black students (at all levels of education), and black academics within our higher education sector, which, in turn, shone a light on the widespread systemic and ideological dehumanisation still experienced by the black South African population.

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On many of our historically white campuses, the “unwillingness to engage with the issue of race is often disguised as ‘colour-blindness’, which constitutes a form of denialism rendered pathological by the very fact that it dismisses critical analysis of the lived experiences of black people.” (in Tabensky and Matthews 2015: 119). National and international support for and participation in the #RhodesMustFall movement, therefore, encouraged public debate about exclusionary institutional cultures and the decolonisation agenda. Through social media students had found a way to make their plight hypervisible, inadvertently inviting critique on this seemingly deviant behaviour, while also opening a space for nationwide conversations on race and transformation that has since expanded into a broader questioning of discriminatory societal norms. The politics of race, with an explicit aim of dehumanising the black majority of South Africans (and Africans more broadly), has been systemically ingrained into our collective consciousness (Soudien 2015). Racism has acted as a blindfold when it comes to recognising and respecting the humanity of others through creating a visible marker of difference. The higher education sector is a stark reminder of this where even post-1994, black students have had to endure sub-standard institutions of learning or in the search for quality assimilate into dominant white institutional cultures that disregard their languages, cultures and lived experiences as people of colour. Because of the historical significance of racial discrimination in South Africa, attempts at transformation on university campuses have taken the form of increasing “the proportion of black staff and students and … eliminat[ing] racism” (Tabensky and Matthews 2015: 3), while also trying to address issues of “sexism, class discrimination, homophobia, xenophobia and other forms of discrimination made illegal by our 1996 Constitution” (Ibid). It can be argued that this change in demographics on a systemic level has had little effect on the ideological and pedagogical transformation where racism, sexism, class discrimination, homophobia, and xenophobia are still commonplace on our campuses. Thando Njovane (in Tabensky and Matthews 2015) draws from her own experience at Rhodes University when examining the intricacies of covert racial discrimination experienced by many black “non-traditional” students on South African university campuses. Her experience is one

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that encapsulates feelings of exclusion, alienation, silencing, shame and trauma, often hidden under the guise of “politeness”. Njovane examines the “dynamics of interpersonal relations in light of the race, power, entanglement and violence at Rhodes, focusing specifically on experiences of black females. […] in order to reveal how policy does not necessarily translate into ethical action.” (in Tabensky and Matthews 2015: 117). Speaking of black female postgraduate student perceptions at Rhodes University, Njovane notes that “all the black people at the institution have “white accents” and that those who do not are an anomaly and are marginalised.” (in Tabensky and Matthews 2015: 124). Coupled with this is the “perceived pressure to be a “good black”, who has the right accent, is interested in the things white people want to talk about, works hard to impress white people and who, above all, fits in.” (in Tabensky and Matthews 2015: 124). Njovane makes a poignant observation that within institutional cultures such as these, to avoid or mask feelings of alienation and exclusion, students must deconstruct their very identity. In essence, within these white institutional cultures, “the success of her academic endeavour depends on whether or not she is willing to part with who she is in order to pander what she is expected to be.” (in Tabensky and Matthews 2015: 128). Njovane and her fellow black females’ experiences on campus are illustrations of Sally Matthews’ assertion that “contemporary white domination is perpetuated less by explicit intent and action than by implicit attitudes and ‘whitely’ habits” (in Tabensky and Matthews 2015: 90). For this reason, Matthews advocates that “we have to recognise that confronting racism is about both revealing white privilege and trying to create environments that encourage the dismantling of privilege through changing the environments that feed whitely habits.” (in Tabensky and Matthews 2015: 90–91). In recognising the necessity of at once revealing white privilege and changing the environments or institutional cultures that harbour these attitudes and ways of being, one realises that attitudes of tolerance within these contexts are not enough. As stated by Njovane (in Tabensky and Matthews 2015: 119) “Tolerance is intimately related to denialism because it maintains hegemony by evading the question of difference.”

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 onsiderations Going Forward: How Do C We Cultivate Non-violent Humanising Institutional Cultures [The] African voice in education at the end of the twentieth century is the voice of radical witness of the pain and inhumanity of history, the arrogance of modernization and the conspiracy of silence in academic disciplines towards what is organic and alive in Africa. (Catherine Odora Hoppers 2000:1)

Many of our African universities harbour this voice, a voice that is still trying to make sense of diverse African educational needs and approaches, and the possibilities that are available to address the inhumanity, not only of history but still alive in the present. Odora Hoppers, therefore, calls for “a future built on new foundations” that invokes the rights of all people to “be” fully human (2000: 1). This call for a return to humanism within educational institutions considers an engagement with all students (and staff) as human beings who are “culturally and cosmologically located in authentic value systems” (Odora Hoppers 2000: 1), acknowledging the value that these human beings bring not just to the classroom but to the institutions they inhabit. Part of this humanising project is acknowledging and integrating various forms of knowledge production as central to the transformation and decolonisation mission. There is a need to destabilise dominant discourses within our disciplines and curricula that still present white experience as universal while objectifying any other lived realities and relegating them to a peripheral position in the canon. For instance, dominant white supremacist discourses have, for centuries, characterised human beings primarily as “economic man” (Mamdani 2016: 78) and the black body as cheap (or free) labour, and in recent decades this has vastly limited our imagining of higher education’s (and humanity’s) worth and purpose. Therefore, Mamdani (2016: 81) argues that moving away from the West as the main producers of theory (and others as merely applying or consuming it) is central to the transformation project, as

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Africans should feel empowered to theorise our own reality and take back the power of knowledge production. As discussed earlier in this chapter, our institutional cultures also feed the discourse of white supremacy in various ways, often creating a sense of alienation among the black “non-traditional” student body who do not fit into this category of “whiteness” that is taken as the norm, and the canonical and ideological privilege that this affords. In her essay, Talking Race and Racism (2003), bell hooks asserts that “confronting racial biases, and more importantly, white-supremacist thinking, usually requires that all of us take a critical look at what we learned early on in life about the nature of race. Those initial imprints seem to overdetermine attitudes about race.” (hooks 2003: 26). Unlearning white supremacist thinking, therefore, first requires an awareness that it still pervades our daily lives. For South Africans, this is particularly challenging as race (and class) thinking has been infused into our lived experiences not just ideologically but systemically (geographically, institutionally, politically). Within the post-1994 context, the seminal higher education policy documents (Education White Paper 31,997, Higher Education Act 1997, National Plan for Higher Education 2001) promoted structural (material) reform of the system while somewhat neglecting the ideological (discursive) aspect of reform. By overlooking the intra-action between the material–discursive in relation to the colonial and apartheid ontology of South African higher education institutions, the ideological stronghold of exclusionary racism and white supremacy remained. A confrontation of this institutional culture, therefore, requires what hooks (2003: 36) describes as an unlearning of white supremacist thinking within our institutions. This unlearning of white supremacist thinking requires that we interrogate the culture of whiteness on our campuses. This culture of whiteness that is taken as the norm needs to be challenged with alternate narratives being made visible and audible through narrative, systemic and symbolic forms. Njovane draws on Zizek’s conception of objective violence that operates in systemic and symbolic forms, with the symbolic primarily embodied in language “used both to victimise and exclude black students and staff.” (in Tabensky and Matthews 2015: 125). Narratives, therefore, have the power to change institutional cultures if

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they are shared and “analysed collectively and if those in leadership positions in the institution provide legitimate spaces for new stories to be told and heard.” (Tabensky and Matthews 2015: 5). It can be argued that it is when these legitimate spaces are not provided, and these alternative narratives are not taken seriously that overt forms of violence (such as protest) erupt. Opening legitimate spaces for alternate narratives to be brought into the centre and included in the epistemologies and knowledge canons of the university, therefore becomes a viable step toward more inclusive and non-violent institutional cultures. I concur with Vincent’s assertion that often our experiences are sharply felt but dimly perceived, and the “public telling of our stories provides the opportunity not only for our subjective experience to be “seen”, rather than remaining hidden, but also for that experience to be placed alongside other similar and different experiences and for its relationship to the determining influences of social structures and the possibilities for exercising agency to be analysed and theorised.” (in Tabensky and Matthews 2015: 41). Therefore, sharing our narratives and lived experiences has the systemic and symbolic potential to further “an alternative vision of what the university might be and what society might become” (Giroux 2009: 691). In this way, broader concerns of human dignity and social justice can be brought into the centre of higher education discourse, as academia remains one of the few spaces still available where questioning and dialogue can take place freely, ultimately fostering democratic citizenship.

Conclusion As shown in this chapter, there are many dimensions to what we consider institutional cultures and the lived experience of students (and staff) that, at once, navigate and negotiate their place within these cultures. If we are to take our role as democratic citizens seriously, then the current controversial moment in South African higher education has opened a space for challenging conversations and alternative narratives that encourage self-­ reflection and push us to acknowledge and question the modus operandi

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and the racist ideologies that underpin institutional cultures on our university campuses. When we consider, as Barnett (2016: 170) does, that the university is an institution that is “moved inexorably by deep-seated global and national forces”, we simultaneously cannot ignore that it is through “ideas of the university that vistas for its becoming, its agency, its will in the world, develop.” So, if we consider the university as both an institution and an idea, and institutional culture as an interplay between the material–discursive, then the potential malleability of the often taken-for-­ granted ways of being on our campuses becomes apparent. The space and place of the university, therefore, allows for it, at once, to be a product, producer and purveyor of what is considered normative within this context. The university and the institutional cultures it promotes, therefore, reflects the state of mind (or psyche) of South African society, and particularly our relationship with violence. Not forgetting that it is not just the overt forms of violence that we should be concerned about (such as protests and physical harm), but that many covert forms violence (fuelled by racist exclusionary attitudes and ideological standpoints) remain, which have become institutionalised on our campuses and ingrained in our communities. If we are to take the mandate of inclusion and transformation seriously, echoing Davids’ and Waghid’s call for “cultivating safe institutions as an enactment of peace and respectful co-existence”, then more thought and action has to be directed toward strategies that facilitate a changing of the controversial narratives and violent actions that dominate the material– discursive at our universities.

References Barnett, R. (2016). Understanding the university: Institution, idea, possibilities. London/New York: Routledge. Enslin, P. (2017). Postcolonialism and education. In G. W. Noblit (Ed.), Oxford research encyclopedia of education. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giroux, H. A. (2009). Democracy’s nemesis: The rise of the corporate university. Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies, 9(5), 669–695.

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Higgins, J. (2007). Institutional culture as keyword. Review of higher education in South Africa. Pretoria: Council on Higher Education. Higgs, P. (2003). African philosophy and the transformation of educational discourse in South Africa. Journal of Education, 30, 5–22. hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope. New York/London: Routledge. Mamdani, M. (2016). Between the public intellectual and the scholar: Decolonization and some post-independence initiatives in African higher education. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 17(1), 68–83. Masschelin, J., & Simons, M. (2012). The university: A public issue. In R.  Barnett (Ed.), The future university: Ideas and possibilities. New  York: Routledge. Morrow, W. (2009). Stakeholders and senates: The governance of higher education institutions in South Africa. Bounds of democracy: Epistemological access in higher education. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Odora Hoppers, C. A. (2000). African voices in education: Retrieving the past, engaging the present, and shaping the future. In P. Higgs, N. C. G. Vakalisa, T.  V. Mda, & N.  T. Assie-Lumumba (Eds.), African voices in education (pp. 1–11). Lansdowne: Juta & Ltd. Soudien, C. (2015). Looking backwards: How to be a South African university. Educational Research for Social Change, 4(2), 8–21. Tabensky, P., & Matthews, S. (2015). Being at home: Race, institutional culture and transformation at South African higher education institutions. Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Teferra, D., & Altbach, P. G. (2004). African higher education: Challenges for the 21st century. Higher Education, 47, 21–50.

9 “Burn to Be Heard”: The  (In)dispensability of “Revolutionary” Violence in Student Protests and Responsible Citizenship in African Public Universities Joseph Pardon Hungwe and Joseph Jinja Divala

Introduction During the 2015 to 2016 student protests in South Africa, a campaign message expressed as “Burn to be heard”, as a metaphor for mobilising and galvanising collective “revolutionary” violence was circulated through social media and word of mouth on the South African university campuses (Duncan 2016). Drawing from its metaphorical form, “Burn to be heard” is a clarion call which appropriates, legitimises and coerces for collective violent practices within the purview of student protests.

J. P. Hungwe College of Education, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa J. J. Divala (*) Faculty of Education, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 N. Davids, Y. Waghid (eds.), University Education, Controversy and Democratic Citizenship, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56985-3_9

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Violence as revolutionary mechanism is considered as probably the most effective device for the attainment of the set objectives. There is a student protesters’ perception that after submitted petitions and statements are not attended to, then institutional management can be forced to address student grievances when they resort to confrontational physical violence (Fomunyam 2017; Okey 2017; Holdt 2014). The “effectiveness” of violence as revolutionary mechanism in student protests is judged by its potential to solicit a favourable outcome from university management. Consequently, buildings and vehicles were damaged to the cumulative costs of South African 8 million rand (Daniel 2018). Though the metaphor for collective physical violence is drawn from the South African context, in this chapter we note the prevalence of violence in university student protests across all African countries (Fomunyam 2017; Zeilig and Ansell 2008). The pervasiveness of the seemingly embedded and indispensable violence that is considered to be revolutionary in student protests begs the question on the applicability of the notion of responsible citizenship within universities in Africa. In its generic conceptualisation, citizenship encompasses the political, legal, economic and cultural relationship of an individual to the nation-state (Waghid and Davids 2013). Citizenship concurrently bestows binding rights and obligatory relationships between individual and nation-states. However, adding the superlative of responsibility to generic citizenship implies that both university management and the students should deploy the ideals of deliberation and accountability towards collective actions. In view of the prevalence of violence in both universities and the broader society in Africa, we advance the argument that responsible citizenship needs to be reinforced within universities. Furthermore, we critically expose that revolutionary violence in student protests in African universities contradicts the educational efforts of enhancing the ideals of responsible citizenship in Africa. The idea of being revolutionary suggests that student violent protest is remedial through militant confrontation to the hegemonic system upheld by the university management. Within the responsible citizenship auspices, protests are an exercise of democratic expression. However, university student protests across Africa tend to be synonymous with property destruction, coercive tactics and intimidating militant singing as arsenals for “revolutionary” violence (Luescher 2016). In pursuing the culture of deliberation and accountability, we argue that the endemic and recurrent

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violence in student protests in African universities can be adequately counteracted by revisiting and teaching the notion of responsible citizenship. Moreover, we seek to counter the narrative that violence is a “necessary evil” as revolutionary and that the “Burn to be heard” mantra within the discourse of student protests is inimical to responsible citizenship. In countering a perspective that celebrates violence, the chapter is, therefore, critical in contributing towards a university education system that promotes responsible citizenry among the graduates.

 heorizing Revolutionary Violence T in Student Protests While student protests are typical of universities, it is noted that the more militant, physically confrontational forms emerged from the Francophone and Muslim African students around 1935 (Luescher 2016). In sync with the concomitant numerical increase in university enrolments and the imperative to dismantle colonialism, violent forms of student protests spread throughout the continent (Mlambo 2014; Nkinyangi 1991). Therefore, from a historical perspective, student protests are interrelated to dissent against the social, economic and political hegemonic status-­ quo. For the avoidance of conceptual ambivalences, we acknowledge that violence can manifest in multi-forms such as systemic, ideological, cultural and institutional. Accordingly, we acknowledge gender-based violence, sex-for-higher-academic-grades, racism, and xenophobia, amongst other things, as forms of violence prevalent in African universities. However, our primary focus for this chapter is the overt physical collective violence manifested in destruction, rioting, looting, vandalism and physical harm. Our choice to focus on physical, collective violence is motivated by our realisation that while all other forms of violence are unambiguously condemned, collective physical violence in student protests tends to get some justification. The “Burn to be heard” message is a typical example of justification of violence. Nevertheless, the deployment and legitimation of violence in student protests has remained a highly contentious issue in African universities. Conceptually, student protests are organised, collective actions in which students coalesce to express grievances or reservations against the

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unfavourable conditions within the university or the nation. Succinctly, student protests are “incidents of student revolt or unrest, which constitute a serious challenge or threat to the established order or to sanctioned authority or norms” (Nkinyangi 1991: 158). To protest is to express reservations and grievances over a concern. It is for that reason that under normal circumstances, student protests are an expression of democratic norms. Broadly, student protests are conceived as falling within the spectrum of student activism, which tends towards imparting responsible citizenship tenets within African universities. In terms of perspectives, student protests in Africa are specifically conceived as a struggle for democracy, human rights, the voice of the voiceless (Makunike 2015). However, in Zimbabwe, Sudan, Uganda and other African authoritarian governments, there are instances where protesting university students have been abducted, tortured and in some cases, murdered (Mlambo 2014). Forms of non-violent student protests include marching, singing, picketing, class boycotting and disrupting lectures within the university. Peaceful and democratic student protests are often stipulated and guaranteed within both the national constitution and the university charter Nevertheless, the practices of violence contradict the ideals of deliberation and accountability espoused in responsible citizenship. It is essential to state that violence during protests should not always be perceived in simplistic binary terms of student versus police clashes, but rather complex, as there are many instances where students are violent towards each other along political and other faction lines (Kujeke 2017). Students often damage infrastructure, attack one another and use intimidating coercive as well as disruptive measures (Fomunyam 2017). It is imperative to point out that we subscribe to the fact that protests are not necessarily inimical to an institution or organization. Hence, instances of violence in student protests can be opportune moments for institutional introspection which should eventually lead to improved service delivery. Violence, by nature, is designed to incapacitate university ordinary administrative and academic functions. For Aghedo (2015), violence is the intentional use of physical force, power  – threatened or actual  – against a person or group that may result in harm, injury, death, damage, destruction and disruption of the ordinary business of the university. The multifaceted objectives of violence tend towards forcing the university

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stakeholders to address the students’ highlighted issues. For instance, in Nigeria, there have been instances where the university management gets kidnapped and tortured as a means to advocate for students’ stated grievances (Okey 2017; Aghedo 2015). Apparently, “the Burn to be heard” call was regarded as an expedient means to force the South African government to implement the free higher education model. In this respect, student protests often result in the improved welfare of the concerned students (Duffly 2016). The logic of student violence as revolutionary is premised on its potential to extract favourable concessions. Perhaps, most students do not view vandalism as possible cases of criminality and hooliganism but rather as collateral damage in the course of a revolution. Like all revolutions, violent student protests are underpinned by an ideology that aims to, ultimately, alter university repression. Moreover, revolution is embedded in the historicity of African violent confrontations of colonialism and apartheid. In recognizing that violent student protests are a global phenomenon; the following subsection delineates the specific context of student protests within the African continent.

 ontextual Settings of Revolutionary, Violent C Student Protests in Africa From the colonial to postcolonial period, examples such as genocide in Rwanda, political intolerance and the resultant killings in Zimbabwe, civil war in South Sudan, high violent crime rate in South Africa, uprisings in Tunisia, and religious conflicts in Nigeria all attest to the fact that Africa is caught up in cyclic violent practices. In fact, the pull factor for an international study destination for most African university students is often premised on the need to study and possibly get employed in a country that experiences less political, ethnic and social violence than their country of origin (Lee and Sehoole 2015). The frequency of political violence in African countries can be attributed to the absence or weakness of state institutions and the general mismanagement of economic resources. It is in this politically and ethnic-prone volatile African continent that we juxtapose the specifications of violent student protests and

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the cathartic potentialities of responsible citizenship in eliminating violence. It should be noted that violent student protests are not exceptionally an African challenge, but worldwide phenomenon. For instance, in the United Kingdom, China, United States of America and Canada, students have, in several instances, been involved in violent protests (Maira and Sze 2012; Duffly 2016). Hong Kong has also recently registered violent student protests. However, this chapter primarily analyses the African context because of five intertwined specific contextual reasons. Firstly, Africa has a history of legitimized violence and impunity. In this respect, most countries engaged in military violence to dismantle colonialism and apartheid (Hlatshwayo and Fomunyam 2019). Consequently, heroic practices are sometimes defined within the historical canonisation and legitimisation of violent practices drawn from the liberation struggle. Violence has been a conventional device for resolving conflicts in Africa (Fomunyam 2017; Badat 2016). Over and above violence legitimisation in the broader society, it is historically documented that African students were at the forefront of confronting the colonial and apartheid administration. As a result, the narrative of political independence achieved through revolutionary violence has remained ingrained and is perpetually celebrated in most African countries. Moreover, the culture of celebrating the gains through violence is strengthened when university management grants students requests after spates of intense destructive violence. In a classic case in South Africa, it is observed that “students forced the university to reduce the eighteen percent fee increases to eight percent. This represents a partial victory for students considering that they demanded zero increment” (Cele 2008: 87). As in revolution, victory is utilitarianly quantified in terms of gains noted at the endpoint. Concerning specificities in Africa, Fomunyam (2017) argues that violence that accompanies student protests is a political inheritance from the African political movements that engaged in violent military operations to regain political independence. For instance, in contemporary Zimbabwe, the terms hero or heroine and ex-combatants (amaqhawe, magamba) are politically reserved for men and women who militarily fought during the liberation war. Equally so, the students who initiate and execute violent activities during protests are often held in heroic

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grandeur by fellow students. Illustratively, the court appearances of some students as violent lead protesters are often well attended with admiration by fellow students. Secondly, in Africa there is a concurrence of rapid expansion of the university sector and exponential growth in student enrolment (Garwe 2017; Bawa 2019). In this respect, the numerical growth of the African university student cohort implies that it is becoming a formidable social force capable of altering political, social and economic discourse in African countries. Bearing in mind the fact that most African universities are geographically located in the urban areas in proximity to national administrative centres, the methods of student protests can potentially cascade to other sectors of the society. It is, therefore, crucial to discuss the “violence of the educated” on the premises that university students, as an elite class, have much influence on the broader society. Thirdly, most African universities are reeling from financial limitations owing to a severe reduction in government subsidies (Glenn 2016; Wangenge-Ouma 2010). The ramification of subsidy reduction is that bursaries and scholarship that would have been afforded to students becomes scarce, thereby increasing the frequency and possibly the severity of violent student protest. Illustratively, the violent student protests in South Africa, Uganda, Swaziland and Lesotho over a high increase in tuition fees are often occasioned by a reduced government financial expenditure on public universities (Konik and Konik 2018). Fourthly, there is an observation that in most African countries, the police are either ill-equipped or not skilled enough to deal with mob control such as dispersing agitated protesters (Ntuli and Teferra 2017). Therefore, the police’s limited skills in crowd control have, on several occasions, entailed that they employ excessive force, which resulted in needless deaths and property destruction. For instance, eleven students were hospitalised after getting beaten by the police and military in Uganda (Human Rights Watch 2019). In many cases, the police’s endeavours to maintain public order are debatably attributed as igniting the violent student protests. Fifthly, some African universities are financially, materially and scholarly sponsored by a global financial donor community whose reputation may be tainted by student violence. The deleterious implications of donor

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withdrawal are that the economically-disadvantaged student cohort lose the opportunities of pursuing their education. Moreover, under the auspices of internationalisation, some African universities are partnered with other universities in the Western world. The benefits of such partnerships include student and staff exchange as well as research collaborations. Regrettably, the collective violent student protests have the unintended ramifications of bringing partnership into disrepute through brand adulteration. Against the backdrop of contestations of violence in student protests, an overview of violence in student protests in Africa is given attention in the following subsection.

 n Overview of Violent Student Protests A in African Universities In nearly all African universities, there is recurrence of violent student protests, which result in massive property destruction, injury and loss of human life. Owing to the over-valuation of credentialism, which is possible hindered by access issues such as the ever-increasing tuition fees, poor university management, political intolerance and the economic malaise, the African university is typically a volatile site of insurrection, unrest, and running battles between police and student protesters. A cursory assessment in countries such as South Africa, Nigeria, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Tunisia, Ethiopia and Sudan, among others, shows that violence seems to be an indispensable practise within the student protests discourse (Konings 2009; Aghedo 2015). Drawing from our discussion of the context of violent student protests, it has become apparent that the resort to violence is derived from the historical unfolding of nation-formation from the colonial or apartheid eras to independent democratic countries. We need to point out that it is not within the scope of this chapter to delve into the disputations of whether it is police or students who initiate violence. While there is abundant scholarly literature that apportions blame on the police or even institutional and symbolic violence perpetrated by the university management (Langa

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2017), our primary focus is to expose and analyse patterns of violence in so far as they hinder responsible citizenship. In Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia Algeria and Libya, the university students and the unemployed youths destroyed government property and other private buildings within the precincts of the university and beyond. The famous violent protests, which were later coined the “Arab Spring”, were centrally driven by students in response to broader societal issues such as unemployment and the general economic decline (Webb 2018; Moghadam 2013). As for Sudan, some students were fatally shot by security services at the University of Khartoum, while others were wounded during the confrontations with police. In these cases, the police often claimed that they used force in response to the violent conduct that university students have initiated (Dahlum and Wig 2019; Postma 2016). For Kenya, the universities of Nairobi, Moi and Egerton have experienced intermittent violent student protests that have led to long periods of campus shutdowns, thereby disrupting the academic calendar (Okey 2017). In Nairobi, the student protests usually go beyond campus bounds to stone vehicles on the streets, vandalising, and looting of shops. In the same violent patterns of protest, students at the universities of Ibadan and Port Harcourt in Nigeria have instigated the extended period of universities’ closure (The Economist 2016). Besides the violent student protests in the universities, several banditry organizations in Nigeria attack educational institutions to incite religious and political tensions within the university body. Furthermore, the relatively smaller African nations such as Swaziland and Lesotho have equally experienced violent student uprisings that culminated in enormous property destruction, student arrests and injury. For Swaziland, the university students protested violently over the poor campus food quality. In 2011, violent student protests broke out and swept across Mbabane; leading to the arrest and detention of seven students. Violence that ensued after soldiers swept through the campus resulted in tow students being seriously injured (Zwane and Dlamini 2019). In similar violent circumstances, Lesotho students, protesting over alleged poor management, engaged in running battles with the police. Property worth thousands of United States dollars was vandalised through torching of buildings and vehicles.

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In some cases, students protest against injustices occurring in other countries. For instance, in 2019, students of the University of Zambia protested violently against instances of perceived xenophobic attacks in South Africa (Mashininga 2019). In protesting against the xenophobic incidents in South Africa, the University of Zambia students burnt tyres, attacked and looted South African companies that operate in Zambia. In response, the University of Zambia’s management stated that the “university council and management condemn the mode of action taken by students in their attempt to express dissatisfaction with current developments in South Africa. The University of Zambia upholds high ethical standards for both its students and staff” (University of Zambia 2019). Perhaps there is no other comparable African country with frequent and intense violent student protests than South Africa. In 2015 and 2016, the student protests marked the high-point of intense violence within the universities of South Africa. Students occasionally undertook both violent and non-violent protest action against either the university management or the national government. During the protests for free higher education at the universities of KwaZulu-Natal, Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and Cape Town, the university spaces resembled war zones or military battlegrounds with the discovery of undetonated and thrown detonated petrol bombs, rubber bullets and tear-gas smoke (Kujeke 2017). Thick smoke engulfed the universities as buildings and vehicles were torched. Consequently, several students were arrested, detained, prosecuted and sentenced. With the appropriate coinage of student protests as uprisings, and riots (Maringira and Gukume 2017), violence reigned supreme in environments that are usually associated with serene academic intercourse. As the embers of violence spread throughout the country under the banner of #FeesMustFall, more university buildings, cars and other property were destroyed (usually through burning), while several students were injured (Langa 2017). University transport modes such as buses, trucks and cars were burnt to ashes. The University of Johannesburg incurred damages to property worth ZAR144 million, while the University of North West administration block was set alight thus incurring damages to the tune of R160 million (Kahn 2018). Considering that a substantial number of African international students were studying in

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South Africa at the time, the universities’ disruptions had disastrous consequences for their studies since some could not write their examination due to the expiration of study permits. In Uganda, at the renowned Makerere University, students embarked on violent protests in October 2019. As has become the norm, students were involved in running battles with police and military personnel on and off-campus. Characteristically, there was destruction of property and business premises, while non-protesting students were beaten and wounded (Daily Nation 2019). It is also critical to note that student protests are not only limited to university-related grievances but can extend to national issues such as poor state governance and corruption. In this respect, violent student protests in Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria have been carried out expressing discord over government tyranny and poor economic policies (Fomunyam 2017). The patterns of Zimbabwean student protest are rather anomalous within the volatile African context. While university students in Zimbabwe used to be politically vocal, the past two decades have witnessed a cowed student body that hardly protests. The increase in state suppression has suppressed the student democratic space. In concluding this subsection, it has become apparent that the patterns of violence within universities are heterogeneous. For instance, institutional violence occurs when the university management dismisses or ignores students’ plight or rejects opportunities for deliberations. Moreover, violence within a university can be structural, systemic, symbolic and historical. Ironically, security agents such as police sometimes tend to ignite violence through the improper use of force towards students. The imperative to balance between restoring order while not further exacerbating protests is critical within African universities. On the understanding that violence in whatever form is objectionable within universities, the following subsection problematises the notion of revolutionary violence.

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 roblematising Revolutionary Violence P in Student Protests: Towards Responsible Citizenship in African Universities In navigating towards responsible citizenship in African universities, our point of departure is that all forms of violence that can be found in universities – institutional, systemic, symbolic and physical – should be recognised as problematic. Therefore, no form of violence should be rationalised, explicated as contextually “necessary” or justified as “revolutionary” by either students or university management. As noted already, violent university student protests are historical and ideological continuities of the legacy of apartheid and colonialism in Africa (Holdt 2012; Langa 2017). The suggestion that violence in student protests is a historical and ideological contingent is based on the idea that most African countries underwent violent revolutionary wars for the attainment of political independence. However, we do not absolve violence on the basis of historical and ideological continuities. On the contrary, our argument is that university students and management are supposed to transcend the trappings of historicity and ideology. As expert practitioners in the application of critical academic inquiry and possibly researchers upon graduation, university students cannot be parochially determined by the national historical circumstances of their countries. University students and management should not be imprisoned by the national historical circumstances that legitimised violence as an avenue for the pursuit of political independence. On the understanding that student protests are attempts to influence forms of institutional governance, the choice of responsible citizenship in this chapter is guided by multiple-question analysis. Is the student body through its representative organs, such as student representative council, involved or consulted in the drafting of the university’s annual financial budgets? To what extent is the culture of financial transparency promoted by university management in African universities? Through protests, students will be making claims on the presupposition that universities have funds to address their grievances such as housing, food, transport and bursaries. We contend that if university management promote semblance

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of financial transparency and students are aware that their university is cash-strapped, then violent protests may be minimised. Moreover, are students formally and regularly represented in the important university management structures such as senate in decision-­ making? Finally, could the tendencies to resort to violence, as encapsulated in the “Burn-to-be-heard” call, not be a sign of the limited spaces for deliberation between students and management in African universities? It is in endeavouring to respond to these pertinent questions for the university body (students, staff and management) that we refer to responsible citizenship. Responsible citizenship is undergirded by the imperative of mutual dialogue in debates that are informed by critical thinking. In addition, responsible citizenship espouses the civic value of fair access to resources and the obligation to take into account the welfare and sustenance of future generations (Colby et al. 2010). In problematising violence within the student protests, we draw on deliberation and accountability as two central notions espoused by responsible citizenship. The deployment of these two notions is necessitated by an attempt to disentangle the notion of protests from violence. Our point of departure is that the enhancement of responsible citizenship can curtail violence. There is a need to reinforce the idea that instances of violence in higher education can be remarkably reduced by teaching students to tolerate diversity in opinions and perspectives (Waghid and Davids 2012). In deliberation, students and university management must constantly be in dialogue and engage each other over pertinent issues. Deliberation should ideally enable “students and staff to speak their minds and take risks that will prepare them well to enhance justice in their society” (Waghid 2009: 86). However, it is our observation that due to an entrenched cultural hierarchy in most African cultures, there is often the elder–junior individual binary relationship. The binary of elder-junior concurrently bestows unquestionable authority to university management as the elders, while the junior cohort is students who are expected to offer loyalty. The concept of responsible citizenship, which supposedly is one of the key objectives of African higher education, espouses the transmission of critical thinking, dialogue, and robust debate as the means to address immediate concerns amongst all stakeholders (Davids

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and Waghid 2016). Furthermore, responsible citizenship advocates for the establishment of systematic and regular interactions for dialogue between university management and student union organizations. In deliberation, critique is a matter of augmenting the possibility of discord and diverse interpretations, of obfuscating what is taken for granted, pointing to what has been overlooked, and in establishing identities. It involves an active opening up of one’s own thought structures that are necessary for others to find an entrance. Consequently, the deliberation of equals within the university body at African universities remains a challenge. It is for this reason that when students finally resort to physical violence, they are often termed as rogue, rebels and uncultured. Often responsibility, as encapsulated in responsible citizenship, is deemed as a provincial area for the elders (university management). At the heart of responsible citizenship is the centrality of how to resolve conflicts, misunderstanding and misconceptions. In a continent that is littered with perennial armed conflicts such as in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic and the seemingly unending political squabbles in Zimbabwe, Lesotho and South Sudan, university student protests should not be seen to canonise and sanctify violence. In consideration of the fact that universities reflect the broader society, then it is crucial that instead of resorting to violence, the culture of “aggressive” deliberation is promoted rather aggressive physical violence. Perhaps, universities in Africa do not provide platforms for constant deliberation in which the student, through their student union organizations such as student representative councils, regularly meet to discuss immediate concerns. Responsible citizenship is, thereby, undergirded by the tenet of multiple stakeholders in communal decision-making. On such platforms, it would be stressed that through responsible citizenship, the university belongs not only to all who study and work in it but to the broader society it serves as well. In most universities in Africa, student representative councils (SRCs), different political parties and other civic organizations are permitted to recruit and establish structures that are an indicator of the democratic freedom of expression. The activities of such student union organizations are premised on the imperatives of consultation, discussions and debate on immediate student concerns. In other

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words, student unions in African universities are supposed to facilitate engagements and the mediator role between students and university management. In other universities, each faculty, such as the education faculty or the engineering faculty, may have their own student unions. Such student unions are often granted access to have audiences with the top university management. University students, as immediate beneficiaries, must be the prime protectors of university infrastructure such as libraries and lecture halls. It is noted that “we respect the right of those who wish to protest lawfully but cannot under any circumstances condone acts of violence and criminality, we have to balance the right of lawful protest with the right of those who want to learn and work” (South African Government 2020). Secondly, the notion of accountability entails that both students and staff facilitate reflections on objectives, achievements and challenges of protests. The fundamental question in accountability should be: Is it a worthy cause to destroy property and harm human life in pursuit of sector interests? Fundamentally, accountability implies that the university body is enabled to retrospect, evaluate and pass judgments on the actions taken during protests. In other words, responsible citizens imply that there should always be post-protests reflections. Accountability should enable the university body to distinguish actions that are aligned with responsible citizenship’s expression of grievances from delinquency. Universities should not be seminal institutions for training violence-­ mongers. Moreover, instead of constricting post-protest analysis to research and academic publications, universities should facilitate open lectures, seminars and conferences that explore accountability in the aftermath of wanton destruction of property. In its multiplicity, violence is a contradiction to accountability, as underlined by responsible citizenship. In accountability, violence in any form should be regarded as a social anomaly and a socially unacceptable avenue of expressing grievances. In terms of people’s perception of Africa’s governments, responsible citizenship should be buttressed by the need for a paradigm shift from the colonial to a politically independent government. During colonial times, all property that was associated with the government was violently destroyed as an expression of a general dislike of colonial or apartheid government. The entity of government was a symbol of oppression, and

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by extension, government property was considered tools for suppression. Violence was tailored to disassociate the protesters from the government. In South Africa, “the defining theme of the post-apartheid state was to replace its narrative of a politics of struggle with the one of reconstruction and development” (Davids 2014: 1514). However, it may be an epitome of contradicting responsible citizenship when African students burn down their university libraries and administrative blocks as the logic of violence to express grievances. Ironically, often violence in student protests leads to the destruction of the much-needed university infrastructure. The delineation in the preceding subsection has exposed that violence is seemingly indispensable within the discourse of student protests in African universities. It has become apparent that responsible citizenship can adequately eliminate the seemingly entrenched perception that violence is indispensable within the purview of student protests in African universities. On a continent that is already paralysed by persistent violent practices within the social spheres, violence in student protests should be combated by the tenets of responsible citizenship.

Conclusion Fundamentally, the indispensability of violence in university student protests is diametrically opposed to the ultimate tenets of responsible citizenship. The notion of responsible citizenship espouses non-violence, critical thinking, accountability and civic engagement while contrastingly, violence is deviant from the ethos of responsible citizenry. The orthodox/ conventional thinking suggests that higher education students are not prone to violence. Violence, as espoused in the “burn-to-be-heard”-aphorism is hailed as rational violence because it tends to achieve collective objectives. This thinking is, in itself, controversial. It is our submission that violence in student protests fundamentally contradicts the imperatives of open dialogue, robust debate and the application of critical thinking in solving social, economic and political issues as envisaged by responsible citizenship.

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In confronting the seemingly embedded tendencies towards resorting to violence within the student protest realm, this chapter has advanced the argument towards responsible citizenship. More specifically, the chapter departs from the ordinary and uninterrogated approach of the blame-game of authorship of violence between students and university management.

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10 On the Controversy of Democratic Citizenship and Its Implications for University Education Nuraan Davids and Yusef Waghid

Introduction This book revolves around expositions of controversial matters pertaining to university spaces and education discourses in South Africa. Inasmuch as we attend to controversy in relation to university education, we seem to be silent on democratic citizenship itself as a controversial action. We want to conclude by firstly affirming and recognising that notions of a university, its cultures, its practices, its discourses, and its people, cannot be divorced from its communities and society; and hence, the politics in which it finds itself. In the case of South Africa, therefore, the university and its education, cannot be dislodged from its context of democratic citizenship. As has been repeatedly highlighted and discussed in the preceding chapters, what happens at a university – its education and controversies – are

N. Davids (*) • Y. Waghid Department of Education Policy Studies, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 N. Davids, Y. Waghid (eds.), University Education, Controversy and Democratic Citizenship, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56985-3_10

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embedded in notions and practices of citizenship. In other words, whatever the conceptualisation and enactment of citizenship are what is encountered within university spaces. The issues of violence, discrimination, xenophobia, and racism lived and reviled on campuses, are as symptomatic of a controversial democracy as they are an indictment on the university to rise to the moral responsibility to confront these controversies. Secondly, as has also been alluded to in several chapters of this anthology, neither democratic citizenship nor the university can ever be without controversy. Notions of difference, pluralism, and diversity necessarily imply disagreement, contestation, conflict and controversy. The expectation, therefore, that a university, or a society, can be without controversy is flawed at its basis. Indeed, the absence of controversy suggests deeper concerns of apathy, passivity, and uncontested agreement – attitudes that suggest the absence of oppositional voices and actions that can neither be in the interest of democratic citizenship nor a public good. In recognising this, we conclude this book by addressing the notion of democratic citizenship as a controversial practice and then set out to examine some of the implications of controversy and a lack thereof for university education itself.

 hat Is So Controversial About W Democratic Citizenship? At first glance, the concept of democratic citizenship seems to be quite innocuous without posing any sort of controversy for the notion of a human practice itself. Indeed, in most parts of the world – most recently in Hong Kong  – democratic citizenship is posited as an ideal state of being and living. Let us examine whether the understanding mentioned above is tenable. In the first place, democratic citizenship invokes ideas of democracy and citizenship. That is, people engage iteratively in an atmosphere of belonging as they endeavour to exercise their rights as citizens of a given public space such as a country or continent. So, Africans consider themselves as attached to the continent and in this way, collectively experience

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a sense of belonging. At first glance, it does not seem untenable to posit that Africans are citizens of the continent where they exercise their rights as political and moral beings. But this is also where the problem with citizenship lies. To exercise one’s rights as a political and moral being on the continent, and thus enjoy recognised African citizenship, does not always seem possible. When an African journalist, working for a global network station, is imprisoned in one of the continent’s nation-states without any recourse to the rule of law or a trail (even after more than one thousand days) then his citizenship is unquestioningly compromised. The idea that one enjoys citizenship of the African continent on account of one’s belonging to a community of political and moral beings is under considerable strain. This seems to be a validation that citizenship is not an unbridled political and moral right. The point is, although African citizenship is a right that Africa’s people enjoy, that right is debunked when the failure to exercise such a political right is vehemently and unacceptably constrained. What is so pernicious about a journalist’s reporting that his right to speak against state corruption is taken away from him? On what basis does a country justify his imprisonment without any recourse to any form of litigation? Therefore, it is not far-fetched to claim that the notion of African citizenship is somewhat indefensible when the African Union (AU) cannot even resolve a civil matter with the particular nation-state involved. How can the AU allow one of its nation-states to act unilaterally in violating the political and moral rights of an African citizen whose journalism was deemed justifiable by a government not to put him on trial? If the journalist has been accused of undermining the state, why, hitherto, has there not been any legal hearing convened for his apparent prosecution? In this sense, to talk freely about the notion of an African citizenship is problematic. The question remains: what makes the notion of African citizenship contentious? African citizenship is contentious when African nation-states cannot hold one another accountable to the principles of the rule of law. It is unacceptable that a nation-state can simply imprison a journalist without trial and for other nation-states to just look on. This is hypocritical, to say the least, and a vindication that the idea of an African citizenship is not defensible when nation-states can blatantly contravene the rule of law in the presence of other nation-states.

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Moreover, when some citizens of a legitimately constituted nation-­ state are prevented from protesting against a government’s repressive laws, then such citizens would not have the freedom to speak their minds and, by implication, the idea that citizens would engage in democratic iterations would be seriously undermined. In other words, the idea of citizenship ceases the moment when the state denies its citizens the right to enact their rights. There have been several examples of state dissidence resulting in some citizens being excommunicated from their countries of origin, or even assassinated because they spoke freely against state corruption. When some of the ardent political supporters of a corrupt president fail to speak out against state corruption, then a country’s democracy becomes highly contentious. In such cases, citizens on the African continent can justifiably claim to have been denied their democratic rights to speak freely against such corrupt political rulers on the basis that they (citizens who speak out) might face expulsion or recriminations on the part of the state for showing dissent or might be assassinated for questioning a political dictatorship. Dissent is a crucial element of democratic iterations, that is, if citizens are prevented from speaking out against what they perceive to be unjust actions, then any form of iteration would evade them. The consequence is that acts of dissent  – a necessary aspect of democratic iteration – would not transpire. The point about democratic citizenship being denied some people implies that the practice, which requires agency, seems to be challenged or curtailed. If some people on the continent are prevented from practising democratic citizenship, then the problem is compounded on the basis that conditions are incommensurate to its practice. Even if democratic citizenship were the aspiration, the practice would not manifest unless political and societal conditions are in place for a genuine democratic citizenry to evolve. In much the same way, a country cannot claim to honour the electorate and democratic voting if the state rigs the election or prevents its citizens from exercising their franchise freely. In this way, democratic citizenship becomes a controversial practice in the sense that political and societal conditions on the continent seem to be unconducive to legitimate democratic decision-making. The controversy surrounding democratic citizenship happens when conditions are put in place that work against its occurrence. If an authoritarian state simply

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undermines the democratic rights of its citizens to vote freely and to express themselves freely and openly, it becomes unrealistic for democratic citizenship to mature. The controversy about democratic citizenship happens when the practice cannot take place freely. In Africa’s most recent history, the removal of a legitimately elected democratic president by the same government that continues to deny a journalist his right to a trial, shows how controversial political rule can be in some nation-states on the continent.

 hat Are the Implications of a Lack W of Democratic Citizenry for University Education? University education is dependent on the exercise of freedom of speech and rational deliberations. Likewise, university education cannot genuinely unfold when university teachers and students do not experience a sense of belonging to the university and exercise their rights to question and challenge the structures and practices about their flourishing. Higher education, in the first place, depends on the deliberative engagement of its teachers and students; otherwise, the idea of a free university would cease to exist. So, the question is, when universities do not take the cultivation of democratic citizenship seriously, such institutions fail to address two poignant aspects that constitute university education. Firstly, the idea that teachers and students engage freely and iteratively about institutional and societal matters that concern them; and secondly, the notion that universities ought to respond to matters of public concern, including the freedom and lack thereof to engage in legitimate deliberations about public life. For instance, when universities become intent to coerce students to comply with practices that run contrary to the very idea of a university, such as students engaging in legitimate protests about a crackdown on freedom of expression, then such universities would not be enacting their roles as higher education institutions – that is, to undermine, question, analyse, and most importantly to create conditions for free and open deliberation.

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Any university that seems remiss of cultivating democratic citizenship education would deny its teachers and students opportunities to enhance their capacities to think intelligently, differently, and innovatively. Put differently, such a university would fail to enact its responsibility to think, and to think anew. In this way, a university loses its soul because it does not live up to its responsibility of a thinking university. Furthermore, if such a university abandons its responsibility to extend its thinking, it can no longer function as such on the basis that it has not succeeded to enact its responsibility purposefully to produce a community of thinking. It is Jacques Derrida (2004: 147) who claims that such a community of thinking pursues “new ways of taking responsibility”. That is, thinking that reappropriates and reinvests its task of drawing out possible consequences of its questioning instead of just reducing its analyses to technique. It is a community of thinking that prepares students to undertake new analyses and to re-evaluate the ends of their analyses (Derrida 2004: 148). In expanding the task of a thinking university, Derrida (2004: 151) is adamant that such a university would assume a new responsibility because thinking would be accompanied by suspicion  – the core of academic responsibility of a university. Only when a university produces a community of thinking which remains suspicious about its endeavours, it has developed the capacity to teach – that is, to direct, steer and organise its theoretical work in particular controversial, yet, pedagogically defensible ways (Derrida 2004: 152). It would then happen that university education would take its students beyond the profound and radical, on the basis that such an education would become concerned with the enactment of thinking that is always risky (Derrida 2004: 153). In this way, a university would become more inclined to exercise its “freedom of play”, take time for more reflection, and embark on chances towards that of which the institution does not know the ramifications (Derrida 2004: 154). For once, such a university would provoke thinking and risk the responsibility to work towards “what is not yet” – a matter of being controversial as it (a university) is prepared to risk its thinking towards opening up to a future that does not yet exist.

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 niversity Education as Moving Towards U the Light As alluded to in the introduction to this chapter, controversy can neither be extricated from democratic citizenship nor the university. The unrest, conflicts, controversies, or what Barnett and Bengtsen (2019: 95) refer to as “darkness”, are what constitutes the life of a university. The university and its knowing effort, explain Barnett and Bengsten (2019: 95), have long been understood “through metaphors both ocular and of light: “enlightenment”, “seeing” the truth (or even the light), being “transparent”, being “clear” and so on. Light and clarity are prized”. Yet, as they contend, not only is some darkness unavoidable, but darkness must be valued because it may bring forth life – “even if its own kind of life, restless and agitated, but perhaps with a value of its own”. To Barnett and Bengsten (2019: 95), “something emerges out of the darkness that was impossible in the light”. As a result, “Darkness cannot be avoided in any serious effort to understand the world. So, there is no question of darkness being shunned. Rather, it has to be lived with. Accepted. Embraced even” (2019: 95). At first glance, Barnett and Bengtsen’s (2019) inviting attitude towards darkness might seem at odds with how we conceive a university, or what we expect of it in terms of being transparent and open. Students expect, for example, to know the contents of a particular programme, why they are required to read what has been prescribed, how they will be assessed, and so forth. Similarly, teachers or academics at an institution will insist upon knowing the policies and procedures of a university, such as the basis of appointment or promotion. At the time of writing, the Rector at the institution where we are based was placed under investigation after being accused of attempting to interfere in a Constitutional Court litigation related to the university’s 2016 Language Policy by trying to convince a sitting judge to accept the nomination for the election of the university’s Chancellor. The university’s convocation demanded transparency and accountability in terms of when contact was made with the incumbent Chancellor. Such was the demand for transparency, and seeming lack thereof, that when the investigation concluded that there was no

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evidence to support a finding that the conduct of the Rector constituted a serious violation of the law or serious misconduct, the President of the Convocation, as well as two others, duly resigned from their positions. Their resignations confirm Barnett and Bengtsen’s (2019: 96) contention that “[u]nless a university practice can be visible and immediately transparent, its value must be doubted if not repudiated”. The above notwithstanding, knowing the world or the university, as Barnett and Bengtsen (2019) assert is not easy. Not only does research into this or that topic reveal unknown complexities, but the world and the university are continually shifting towards new insights, rendering true the adage that the more we seem to know, the less we seemingly understand. Serious efforts to understand the world, state Barnett and Bengtsen (2019: 96), “are situated on a threshold, between knowledge and (present-day) ignorance”; “[o]n one side, light; and on the other side, darkness”. The very idea of embarking upon research or seeking to understand a phenomenon suggests “a venturing into strangeness, beyond transparency and predictability” (Barnett and Bengtsen 2019: 96). Universities and university education, therefore, following Barnett and Bengtsen (2019: 97), “are not merely institutions for intellectual ascent, they can also be places for torn ideas and broken thought”. “The darkness is not just the void of knowing, but is an active, though possibly menacing, power in its own right”. In this regard, they describe darkness as a prerequisite for knowledge creation – “[i]t is a necessary void for knowledge even to fall into, and from which to remerge transformed” (Barnett & Bengtsen 2019: 105). If students, for example, do not protest against the darkness of racism and exclusion, or xenophobia, or gender-based violence, then how else will the darkness of these controversies be lifted? How else will we know about the plight and pain of students as they struggle to scrape together university fees, while simultaneously trying to ensure meals for themselves and their families back home if these are not brought to the realm of the public sphere? Yet, when students take to the public sphere and reveal their pain, anger, and disillusionment with that which alienates them and renders them useless, we tend to focus on their contrary actions – as in their audacity to protest in the first place – rather than what they are protesting against. Alternatively, for fear of how it might look to the outside world, universities prefer to underplay the

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prevailing climate of gender-based violence – “knowledge itself becomes unsettling. Knowledge assumes its own dark life and becomes other to the knower. Knower and knowledge are torn apart” (Barnett and Bengtsen 2019: 106). It is this unsettling nature, this tearing apart between the knower and knowledge we believe, gives the university its defining role. Universities are not supposed to be places of complacency and uniform thinking. This is not to say that controversy should be sought for its mere chaotic state. Instead, that unless there is controversy, there is no dissent, and hence, no right to speech. To acknowledge darkness is to recognise that there has to be light. However, the attainment of light – that is, to know, or to be known – is paradoxically unattainable. This is the moment at which something or someone is known, they realise something, or someone is not being known. We can never fully be in the moment of light. Democratic citizenship can never fully be enshrined in rights and freedom for all citizens. Justice for an individual or one group might simultaneously imply injustice for another. Consider, for example, India’s recently approved Citizenship Amendment Bill 2019 that provides a path for Indian citizenship for religious minorities  – namely, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhist, Jains and Parsis – from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh who had arrived in India before December 31, 2014. In sum, people belonging to these religions, coming in from these three countries stand a chance to become Indian, even if they do not have the requisite documents. They will not be deported for not having documents. Specifically excluded are Muslims. The bill has provoked protests on two fronts. On the one hand, Indians fear that the amendment will lead to a flood of immigrants, who will not only reduce their (Indians) chances of employment but alter their demographic and linguistic uniqueness. On the other hand, are the protests against the exclusion of Muslims, alleging it to be against the ethos of the Indian Constitution. In South Africa, which has served as the primary context of this anthology, notions of democracy and citizenship are blurred in conflicting discourses of reconciliation, redress, transformation, decoloniality, and social justice. The ongoing result is that while historically advantaged communities enjoy the benefits and privileges of democracy  – even if they might not be in support of it, given the greater benefits of apartheid

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for the minority – the majority of historically disadvantaged communities continue to live under conditions, where issues of rights and responsibilities are drowned out by the daily grind for survival. The darkness, therefore, is inescapable, and the responsibility of university education is unending. The responsibility of university education is as much to respond to controversy as it is to provoke it – that is, to be unafraid to confront any forms of discrimination, inhumanity, and injustice. This is how vulnerabilities are laid bare; this is how dissenting voices are heard, and light is lit, until, of course, it dims again. Finally, the position we have taken in this concluding chapter is one whereby we posit that university education will remain unstable or displaced if a university does not hold on to an understanding of democratic citizenship that would inspire its teachers and students to act with profound freedom and responsibility as a community of thinking. Such a community would not hesitate to act controversially as long it endeavours “to tell the truth, to judge, to criticize in the most rigorous (and controversial we would add) sense of the term, namely to discern and decide between the true and the false, … the just and the unjust, the moral and the immoral … insofar as reason and freedom of judgment are implicated as well” (Derrida 2004: 97). In this way, a community of thinking teachers and students would internalise a sense of democratic citizenship that allows them to act with suspicion and controversy. It is the notion of democratic citizenship that makes possible an enactment of freedom and responsibility concerning education that entrusts universities, particularly on the African continent, to usurp the right to judge, and to exercise its freedom with power (Derrida 2004: 96). Unfortunately, there are several universities on the continent, which so easily succumb to undemocratic practices that do not consider suspicion and controversy as tenable pedagogical actions to enhance higher education discourses on the continent. In such cases, and there are several on the continent, a university would have given up its right to openness and freedom in and about knowledge (re)constructions and deconstructions.

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References Barnett, R., & Bengtsen, S. (2019). Knowledge and the university: Reclaiming life. London: Routledge. Derrida, J. (2004). Eyes of the university: Right to philosophy 2. Trans. J. Plug and others. Redwood City: Stanford University Press.



Coda: Old Wine in New Skins: Why Decolonisation May Be a Failed Project in Rising Africa Rumbidzai Mashava and Joseph Jinja Divala

Introduction Decolonisation of the university in Africa has become one of the elements in re-imagining transformation in higher education. But the extent to which decolonisation can be a reality remains controversial. This chapter argues that decolonising the university is more likely to remain a pipe dream given that post-independent states within whose conditions African universities exist and operate have other interests to protect. In proposing this argument, the chapter first examines the concept of decolonisation, drawing from the colonial period. The chapter argues that the meaning of decolonisation mutated over time. The chapter also sheds light on the context from which universities in post-independent Africa were generally created, and how the colonial legacy remains influential in different forms of university life. Through a variety of strategies (some of which are political, legislative and economical) the post-independence states, such as Zimbabwe, operate and control the university in ways that are anchored on postcolonial nature and interests in much the same ways

R. Mashava • J. J. Divala Faculty of Education, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 N. Davids, Y. Waghid (eds.), University Education, Controversy and Democratic Citizenship, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56985-3

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that the nation-states find themselves. Scholars who are focussing on decolonisation observe that the new interests are sometimes indicative of a new form of colonialism, which they characterise as internal colonialism (Quijano 2000). It has been observed that the post-independence initiatives informed by the postcolonial thinking failed to sufficiently decolonise the university in the socio-politico-cultural and economic sense (Mayo 2012). Following the #RhodesMustFall and later #FeesMustFall euphoria in South Africa in 2015, which Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2016: 2) terms the “struggle for African universities”, it became evident that education in Africa needs to be rid of colonial vestiges to meet the needs of its consumers. It is argued that the student forms of life are as much a result of how universities, in real life, exhibit the desired forms of life without which decolonisation will remain a mirage. In making its argument, the chapter has tried to engage in the following questions: Do universities in the current trajectory have the capacity to decolonise? What dispositions are necessary for the century-long awaited identity? Can we morally live with the complexities of a decolonised university or we would rather hide in the easy culprit – the introduction of the decolonisation report card?

 he Historical Elusiveness of Decolonisation, T Coloniality and Decoloniality While decolonisation seems a simple and clear concept, defining it is not easy. For decolonisation in its broad sense to be possible, we have to develop a deep understanding of what it entails otherwise we may decolonise only to replace the old structures with similar arrangements as can be demonstrated from the case of Zimbabwe. The word decolonisation has acquired different meanings over time. In much of the postcolonial literature, decolonisation refers to the retreat of British influence and transfer of power to African elites (see Collins 2013; Jöns 2016) or the end of European Empires (see Thomas and Thompson 2014), a substitution of Whites by Blacks (Fanon 1967). The word carried implications beyond this during the colonial period. For the colonised people of Rhodesia

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(now Zimbabwe), after the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965 that signified settler declaration of independence from Britain, decolonisation would have meant the end of settler rule. Ironically, decolonisation in the context of the post-war period has arguably been referred to as the transfer of political power to the most erudite and westernised Africans with the expectation that they would perpetuate the structures that cultivated them (Austen 1987). This understanding of decolonisation meant the existence of neo-colonial arrangements and associated forms of life. Thus, decolonisation in this context, would not only imply the end of colonial rule but its perpetuation under a new model. To the ex-colonised, we argue, the term has been misconceptualised to mean the end of colonial rule. Decolonisation, perceived as the absence of colonial government and its attendant structures, has been seriously challenged and described as mythical (Grosfoguel 2007; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015) because it ignores the power differentials that perpetuate Africa’s subaltern position in the global system (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013). Within the decolonial school, colonialism is pervasive. For some, decolonisation cannot be equated with the end of European rule and its structures because formerly colonised nations continue to live under the colonial milieu (Grosfoguel 2007). For Maldonado-Torres (2007: 262), [t]he decolonial turn is about making visible and about analysing the mechanisms that produce such invisibility or distorted visibility in light of a large stock of ideas that must necessarily include the critical reflections of the invisible people themselves.

Similarly, Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013: 11) sees decoloniality as engaging with and deconstructing three major concepts: coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge, and coloniality of being. “Coloniality of power” refers to the division of the world into beings and non-beings, “coloniality of knowledge” created an academic metropole and a periphery in terms of knowledge production, and “coloniality of being” casts doubt on the very humanity of Africans. One can then argue that decolonisation can only happen within the context of the deconstruction of these dominant notions through which global inequalities are maintained.

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Le Grange (2016) describes decolonisation as a response to two aspects of colonialism: the first generation involving colonisation of physical spaces and human bodies, the second anchored in the colonisation of the mind. On the other hand, Mbembe (2015) suggests that decolonisation should not just be about de-Westernisation but, as cited by wa Thiong’o (2008), it largely refers to the ability to clearly understand who we are relative to ourselves and other citizens of the world, including nonhumans. For Mbembe (2015), decolonisation is also about demythologising colonial history and whiteness and should thus focus on decolonising knowledge and the university as an institution. From the decolonial school, decolonisation is the process of revealing and eradicating all aspects of colonial vestiges, forms of domination and discriminatory legacies (Quijano 2007). This is the version or intimation decolonisation has pointed to currently in the South African context. However, Jansen (2016) intimates that such an understanding of decolonisation is conceptually muddled. Decolonisation of any sort should engage with broader national issues. It should include a political understanding, which should focus on the transformation of institutions through which racial and ethnic subjectivities were preserved; economic understanding that targets the transformation of “both internal and external institutions that sustain unequal colonial-type economic relations”; and the epistemological dimension, which has to do with ways in which we conceptualise the world (Mamdani 2016: 79). Given the varied meanings of decolonisation, it is clear that presenting its meaning or its practical implementation in simplistic terms is itself an aversion. Following political independence in Africa, the word decolonisation carried a meaning like economic, political, cultural and epistemological transformation (Mamdani 2016). Yet, for others, it meant the emergence of a new Africa (Ahlman 2011). For most African leaders, decolonisation represents the ability to steer their nations and university education systems in the direction they want – the creation of a subaltern reality. In this context, decolonising the university has in some instances been open to abuse with authoritarian regimes on the African continent, like that of Robert Mugabe, using the concept to intensify state control for personal aggrandisement rather than for the benefit of the citizens.

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The cyclone for decolonisation, which began in South Africa in 2015, despite its origin being centred in the student mass movement for change, has its “eye” on university policy and practices. In addition, Ndlovu-­ Gatsheni (2016: 3) suggests that the student struggles “impact on the… very idea of the university, on curriculum, on epistemology, on institutional cultures, on funding of universities, and on pedagogy”. Ndlovu-­ Gatsheni also confirms that “the decolonisation that has returned to haunt the universities is not the one that was simply anti-colonial … [but] a new form of decolonisation which others term decoloniality… that which strongly advocates… multiplicity of knowledges” (2016: 20). We concur with others that when South African students make demands for decolonisation, it is a resistance against coloniality that others view as a globalising power structure, which is capitalist, racial and patriarchal (Grosfoguel 2007; Mignolo 2000). In this regard, coloniality refers to “an imperial logic of domination that derives from colonial and imperial experiences” (Shahjahan 2013: 677). As such, coloniality can be evident in the way universities go about their daily business: their policies and practices, in the knowledge transmitted, in material symbols such as statues, names of roads and buildings on campus, in the interaction of students in and out of the classroom, in academic writings, in lecturer identities and their lived experiences, in university ranking and staff assessment methods, among many other indicators. Maldonado-Torres (2007) broadly describes coloniality as a worldwide power structure that is omnipresent and is evident in books, in the aspirations of people, in common sense and in daily experiences. Coloniality is not easily observable by formerly colonised peoples. Thus, a narrow conception of coloniality is likely to yield a simplistic view of decolonisation, blind to the controversies that arise with it. From a broader perspective, we argue that decolonial education should go beyond the content of education and its epistemologies to question other salient issues like funding regimes, affordability and quality.

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Colonial Legacy and the Post-­independence Trajectory Calls for decolonising the African university are not new. As early as the 1870s, Edward Wilmot Blyden, a pioneer West African educated elite, called for an African university with a focus on African traditions and languages, free from European influences. This was a conversation that other educated West Africans like Dr. James Africunus Beale Horton, Reverend James Johnson of Sierra Leone, J.E. Casley Hayford of Ghana and Nmamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria later continued with (Van Rinsum 2002). The colonial authorities ignored these calls on the pretext that Africa needed educated manpower for it to develop. In East Africa, calls for decolonisation and Africanisation of the curriculum became stronger following the collapse of the Federal University of East Africa in 1970 and the establishment of national universities (Mngomezulu 2012). Colonial universities were to be responsible for the training of local elites needed in modernising African states according to British standards (Hargreaves 1973). Thus, they functioned as ideological apparatus meant to indoctrinate Africans to serve the colonial state efficiently. The apartheid universities in South Africa were similarly meant to serve the political elite. Calls for decolonisation have been made since the independence of most African countries without much success; for example, student struggles described as the “Akivanga crisis” at the University of Dar es Salaam (Mngomezulu and Hadebe 2018) through to the 1990s and beyond, sometimes with an inclination on philosophy (Ramose 1998; Wiredu 1998) before 2015. However, African states have not remained consistently focused on decolonising university education because they have looked at them with suspicion.

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 onceptions of University Decolonisation C After Independence Following political independence in Africa, there were serious discussions by prominent Africanists like Nkwame Nkurumah and Julius Nyerere about decolonising education, which was seen to be too westernised and thus irrelevant to African needs. Decolonisation of knowledge in the 1960s and 1970s was used synonymously with Africanisation, an ideological project supported by the black middle class to disguise “looting” by people who now enjoyed the unfair advantages formerly enjoyed by the colonisers (Mbembe 2015), with emphasis placed on curriculum transformation (Lulat 2005). However, other authors believe that Africanisation cannot be used synonymously with decolonisation because the latter means making something African, which tends to exclude others (Ndofirepi et al. 2017). To some extent, decolonisation is used to refer to the “the process of removing the colonial element(s) from academic institutions”, or as was conceived by wa Thiong’o (2008) in Decolonising the mind, the first step towards decolonising knowledge involves a process of removing colonial elements from the mind (Mngomezulu and Hadebe 2018: 70). For Fanon (1963) decolonisation was a violent act which should see Africans claiming ownership and departing from the Western tradition that created colonialism and coloniality. These perceptions call for a reincarnation of the university. In some African states, in its understanding of decolonisation, the state chose to integrate elements of colonial university education from which it drew benefits such as state control. In others, such as Zimbabwe, the state uses various strategies to ensure a specific type of university is maintained, one which reflects and ensures the perpetuation of its interests and those of the political elites in ways that are reminiscent of the colonial state. In general, it is noted that certain predispositions about the university, such as the notion of universities as sites for radical thinking and rebellion against the state, were passed on in most parts of Africa (Mamdani 2013; Thiaw 2007). The more the state has tried to control the university, the more resistance it faced. The quest by the state to control the university is supported by the thinking that apart from being an

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instrument of nation-building, it has to meet the needs of the people, the state, and more importantly, its political elite. In view of the different ways in which the state positions itself, one can further infer that decolonisation is not a simple concept because it means different things to different people depending on their positionality. Given this confirmation, we proceed to argue that the process of decolonising the university is not simplistic either. It is, in itself, riddled with controversy. Resultantly, African countries failed to institute viable changes to their university education systems at the onset of independence. South Africa and Zimbabwe are no exceptions. Oelofsen (2015) acknowledges that there are racial inadequacies and superiority complexes operational in South Africa and are evident in the university. On the other hand, studies on Zimbabwe indicate that university curriculum remains largely Eurocentric (Chemhuru 2016). Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2016: 12) adds that “decolonisation of the state did not translate into decolonisation of universities in Africa”. Hence, we argue that in countries like Zimbabwe and South Africa, decolonisation of the state remains an unfinished project pushing the prospects for decolonising the university farther away. The university transformation, which was initiated after 1994 in South Africa, was an unfinished project hence the student protests that took place in 2015 directed against rising tuition fees, university governance, curriculum and the nature of pedagogy (Godsell et al. 2017). Black students summarised their grievances centring on the racist nature of the institutions; they questioned the role and nature of the university in society, curriculum content, staff composition, and criticised the limited access for blacks culminating in the unpleasant experiences of being black1 (Hendricks 2018; Naicker 2016). In examining the prospects for decolonisation in Zimbabwe and South Africa in the sections that follow, we demonstrate why decolonisation, amidst its controversies, may remain a distant possibility.

 “Black” as a racial category in South Africa constitutionally refers to black African, Coloured, Indian, Asian. 1

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 rospects for the Decolonisation of P the University in Zimbabwe The postcolonial state in Zimbabwe, in many ways, controls the university to make sure that it reflects postcolonial interests that are unique to the modern state. It shows how, like the colonial state, the post-­ independence state puts in place a variety of measures to ensure that a specific university that reflects its interests is maintained. These distinctive ways are legislative, political and economic. In the legislative sense, the state has created overarching legislation that spells out the essence and mandate of the university. State intervention in university affairs intensified in the 1990s when students and lecturers began to use the campus as the site for political mobilisation against the state (Chikwanha 2009; Zeilig 2008). State control of the university becomes justified because the state creates and funds the university for its political purposes and results in compromising efficiency in its management (Divala 2008). Politically, the Zimbabwean state uses human resource instruments to control those in charge at various scales of the university. For instance, state machinery appoints the top leadership of the university, usually based on observed affiliation or sympathy to political elite interests. State control of universities ensures that universities do not become centres of government criticism, as evidenced by the history of the University of Dar-es-Salaam (Eisemon and Salmi 1993). Economically, the state uses funding or economic support to influence how the university should go about its normal business. The government provides lofty packages, including luxurious vehicles, hefty salaries, holiday trips, etc., designed to keep the leadership of the university functionally tied to the cause of the state. State control resonated well with the former President Robert Mugabe, who upon his inauguration in 1980, announced that higher education is so important that it cannot be left in the hands of deans and professors (Mugabe 1981). These arrangements have remained unaltered under the new dispensation. Thus, the elite conception of a university is one that is inimical to a truly decolonised university space. Repressive politics has been characteristic of Zimbabwe since 2000 (Muneri 2016; Raftopoulos and Mlambo 2009) and continues

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post-Mugabe as evidenced by the authoritarian reaction to non-violent post-election demonstrations of July 2018. Space for critical discourse is not provided. Matereke (2011) notes that Zimbabwe has become a case of a decolonised society without democracy. Hence, others regard this state of affairs colonisation from within (Hwami 2016). The economic and political challenges that Zimbabwe faced between 1998 and 2008 resulted in state restructuring (Raftopoulos and Mlambo 2009). In this process, a nationalist discourse emerged that centred on issues such as land, a discriminatory interpretation of the liberation struggle’s history, and the history of Zimbabwe (Tendi 2009). The restructuring  – spearheaded by the former President, Robert Mugabe  – also included an elite nationalist definition of decolonisation characterised by radical anti-white and revolutionary stance aimed at creating a Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans only (Raftopoulos 2003; Sadomba 2011). Ndlovu-­ Gatsheni (2010) characterises this as nativism derived from the pan-­ Africanist mantra “Africa for Africans” and academics that are co-opted by the state as “nativist scholars”. Ranger (2007) identifies them as “regime intellectuals” following socio-economic and political disorders that have strongly allied themselves with the ruling elites and appear on national television to defend its cause. Although it is true that nativism has largely shaped how things are conceived and interpreted in Zimbabwe, we argue that it is a distorted version of decolonisation which is meant to serve the political interests of those in power, leaving the masses colonised. Hence, the usage of decolonisation in these cases makes the concept even more controversial. Nativist scholars are unlikely to become harbingers of decolonisation of the academy because nativism cannot sit together with the decolonisation project given its exclusionary and violent tendencies that can only lead to the creation of new colonial spaces. Evidently, academics who go against the grain are labelled unpatriotic and deserve to be kept under the radar, reminiscent of the situation in colonial Rhodesia (Ranger 2013). As Hwami (2016) succinctly puts it, nativist education for decolonisation should go beyond race and the colonised–coloniser dichotomy and question all hegemonic predispositions. Decolonisation of the university is not easy to come by on a continent like Africa where citizens are embroiled in struggles against despotic rulers who have no respect for

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either collective or individual rights (Makumbe 1998). While the ruling party in Zimbabwe argues that the process of land acquisition from the white minority, which began in 2000, marked the completion of true decolonisation, we posit that the decolonisation process, spearheaded by the political elites ends up being exclusionary. Such purported processes of decolonisation in university spaces are as a mere ideological vehicle.

 he South African Context and Prospects T for Decolonisation Similar to Zimbabwe’s case, the literature on South Africa suggests that decolonisation is a process that is yet to get underway in the wider society in general (Naicker 2016) and the university in particular (Etieyibo 2016). The student movements that began at the University of Witwatersrand, and ultimately spreading to other universities  – #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall – are indicative of broader societal problems rather than signalling the need for curriculum reform. They require a more systematic understanding given that they have ramifications for the future rather than immediate responses to spontaneous student demands (Jansen 2016). In this regard, Jansen (2016) believes that real decolonisation, in the context of South Africa, would address a dysfunctional school system that produces underprepared students for university study. Kangwa (2016) believes that the #RhodesMustFall movement merely exhibits the frustration that South Africans, in general, have towards their government for its failure to deliver the promises made at independence. These failed promises have appeared to hamper real transformation in the university and society in general. Many point to the fact that whites continue to enjoy socio-economic privileges, while the majority of Black South Africans remain in abject poverty (Kessi 2017; Rudwick 2018). The inequalities that characterise society can be observed across universities, with historically white universities enjoying more economic privileges compared to formerly black universities. Racism and other colonial practices are rampant despite the rhetoric of transformation and

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a myriad of transformation policies since the end of apartheid (Soudien 2010). While it is easy to argue that decolonising the curriculum is in itself incomplete without decolonising the university, it is critical to note that inequalities that characterise the South African society and the university are not easy to eradicate because they have become a common feature of society. This situation is compounded by rampant corruption that makes ordinary South Africans lose faith in the ruling elite and the promise of a democratic society (Kangwa 2016). Hence, Sakala (1998) thinks that real decolonisation in Africa will only occur in a context where citizens enjoy freedom and democracy. We argue that without the much needed political transformation in both South Africa and Zimbabwe, decolonising the university in its broad context is unlikely to become a reality. Besides, decolonising the university alone is a hollow victory that may be difficult to sustain, given that the university is part of the societal fabric. In the next section, we focus on external forces that are likely to keep the prospects of decolonising the university even further away.

Neoliberal Globalisation and the Decolonisation Project Can decolonisation happen in a silo without global partners? Does it imply divorce from the global world? Forces of globalisation have arguably been considered on the African continent as a new form of colonialism perpetuating “coloniality of power” (Quijano 2007). In university spaces, this is manifest through the power of neo-liberal discourse with its emphasis on markets, performativity and consumerism – a project not far off from colonial objectification that results in further inequalities (see Aina 2010; Zeleza and Olukoshi 2004). Under the neoliberal policies, African governments lost charge and were unable to decide on the future of their universities, most of which are in crisis. In this regard, it results in the inability to shape one’s identity from within. To date, we are of the conviction that the current university rankings are a clear example of a neo-liberal measure. Could this be a form of

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epistemic violence aimed at defining universities from a Western perspective? Can an envisaged truly decolonised university be accommodated or ultimately sink into obscurity? Some scholars have argued that given the pressure for African scholars to publish in internationally-recognised journals to earn recognition, they are likely to write what interests the international market rather than what is relevant to their communities (Nash 2006). This logic suggests the presence of ideological influences, which make it hard for the creation of strong universities able to shake off any forms of colonial or neo-colonial influences.

Complexities of a Decolonised University A decolonised university likely faces a variety of complexities. Among them might be what Carman (2016) characterises as a problem of methodology referring to the challenges related to the feasibility of the decolonisation project. Metz (2015) acknowledges that there is inadequate scholarly work on how norms in higher education should be changed given the varied nature of coloniality, as discussed earlier in this chapter. Any kind of prescription aimed at addressing the colonial pathology is not likely to succeed because there is a whole range of issues that need to be addressed  – all at the same time. Some measures would likely hurt those believed to be beneficiaries of the colonial legacy and reward those defined as victims. In this way, it solves a problem by creating another, a typical conundrum of decolonisation processes. By replacing that which is Western with that which is local and African, as suggested by Mngomezulu and Hadebe (2018), we may become victims of ethnocentrism. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2016: 19) foresees a number of problems associated with decolonisation poorly conceived as Africanisation because it follows a “remove and replace” format. Removing Hegel and replacing him with Cheikh Anta Diop may even turn the university into a village and rob it of its universality. Patronage, which is common in Africa, may come to haunt universities. Borrowing from Wiredu (1998), Carman (2016) argues that there are aspects of thinking that cut across cultures or reflective practices that can help in cross-cultural analysis, which we cannot dispense of in the name of decolonisation. Similarly,

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certain values are universal for every institution that claims to operate as a university. Thus, debates about decolonisation should be more sophisticated to go beyond the demands of one constituency, such as students (Berdahl 2010). Given these complexities, one is bound to agree with Hendricks’ (2018: 16) assertion that: The universities that we are trying to decolonise are rigged spaces as they have been fashioned in the image of Western universities… To break this foundational epistemological and cultural bedrock requires a complete overhaul of the structure, ideology and functioning of the universities. Without major shifts in the power relations, orientation and forms of knowledge production at these universities, there can be no decolonisation.

In the above case, taking up a decolonisation agenda, although apparently simplistic at first sight, ends up in controversial re-imaginations. Thus, the achievement of decolonisation not only requires addressing structural problems within the university but developing a new conception of a university by redefining its function, goals, philosophical underpinnings and a reconfiguration of its relations with the state and other societal actors. Such a perspective might prove viable in building institutions that are applicable to Africa’s socio-politico, socio-economic and cultural context. This means creating a new reality, which certainly is not simplistic as the current decolonisation project purports it to be.

 hat Could Be the Necessary Dispositions W for the Decolonisation of the University? The chapter has so far revealed that decolonisation in Zimbabwe is difficult to achieve because state interests do not accommodate a decolonised university. In the case of South Africa, as is the case with Zimbabwe, the ruling elites are not focused on genuine decolonisation at the state level. Thus, it is clear that decolonisation cannot start at the level of the university. Instead, for the decolonisation project to succeed, the state must transform itself into a decolonised entity first. Such transformation

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requires the removal of all legislation that constrains the work of the university in ways that are not people-centred. However, legislative changes on their own are inadequate without the political will to adhere to them. This also means democratising institutions and changing the function of the university from being state-centric to unshackled organic entities whose sole goal serves the needs of citizens. Doing the above is not an easy task either. In part, that imperative requires ruling elites to change their attitude on how power ought to be gained and retained. Within the academy, this demands serious reflection at all levels, including top leadership, on what true academic freedom and institutional autonomy should constitute for a decolonised space, let alone a full understanding of what exactly needs decolonising. One would argue that such introspection will inevitably affect the development of a new work ethic and new identity where political and other forms of patronage are refused. Other than curriculum reform, Alvares (2012) suggests many conscious measures on the part of lecturers, including the reconfiguration of the process of teaching and learning to do away with “classroom tyranny” and the re-examination of content and the use of textbooks. Bogues (2007: 210) refers to the old axiom about the link between power and knowledge “that our training shapes our categories, and that these often shape the very answers we formulate”. Thus academics need to move beyond the mental frames established during their training and embrace new ways of thinking and acting to make decolonisation of knowledge possible. In the case of South Africa, the decolonisation project would go beyond demystifying history, to include demythologising whiteness (Mbembe 2015). In addition, Mbembe suggests that decolonising the university starts with a redefinition of “public” because if the university is a public space, no-one should claim ownership. In a sense, decolonising buildings and public spaces are tied closely to decolonising access in all its senses for both university staff and students. Mbembe further advises that black students and staff need to create certain “mental dispositions” (or mental capital) that is being assertive enough to get themselves recognised within the university through their influence. In itself doing this also requires a reconstitution of “publicness” and the rules governing it. A simplistic “tick-box” approach is not one of the solutions. Freire (1970)

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advises that the oppressed must clearly conceptualise and uncover the world of oppression themselves. Some take a deconstructionist posture after Jacques Derrida and see the potential for decolonisation through deconstruction because it “explores accepted assertions to find other meanings than the one constructed” (Adebis 2016: 437). Still, others believe the solution to the deep-seated legacy involves: • invention and searching for solutions within Africa and elsewhere other than Europe (Mamdani 2013) • devising indigenous solutions (Assie-Lumumba et al. 2013), • indigenisation of ideas and knowledge and decolonising the mind (wa Thiong’o 2008); and • a collective effort towards intensifying the incomplete process and challenges of decolonisation (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015). Oelofsen (2015) suggested the need for developing concepts rooted in Africa as a means of decolonising both the academy and the mind. Afro-­ centric solutions, as those discussed, have suggested that their feasibility is remote because what it means to be African is complex amidst its many struggles. This includes ethnic wars, genocides, terrorism, and rampant corruption, among others. Trying to create a common understanding of “Africanness” drives one through thick and deep mad.

Concluding Remarks The chapter discussed ways in which the concept of decolonisation has mutated over the years, how coloniality continues to present itself within the university, and what decoloniality implies. Using the case of Zimbabwe and South Africa, it discussed the challenges of decolonisation within the current arrangements in which states are less focused on citizen concerns. The chapter also invoked the controversies and deep moral dilemmas associated with decolonisation. Thus, it is clear that engaging with decolonisation would require a sober understanding of what it is, what is doable or not, and what may be its strengths and weaknesses. More importantly, it also means engaging with broader national politics beyond

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the university itself. Decolonisation thus far requires redefining what the university is and what it is for. It might even mean a rebirth of the university, which is unlikely to be progressive. These considerations and many others epitomise the controversy in dealing with the decolonisation of the university. Given the African condition in which political elites are more focused on personal economic and political aggrandisement than the people whom they are supposed to serve, decolonisation has a long way to go. The task of unsettling coloniality in the university is not one that can be won within the walls of the university alone, but rather by clearly understanding postcolonial politics and then collectively challenging the hegemony of the local elites and the global North.

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Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS

#FeesMustFall, 13, 90, 103, 113, 127, 156, 180, 189 #RhodesMustFall, 13, 90, 113, 138, 139, 180, 189 #SilentProtest, 32, 36, 36n2, 39–42, 47n4, 50, 53, 54 A

Abuse, 19, 39, 48 acceptance of, 37 forms of, 58 gender, 58 of human rights, 71 open to, 182 racial, 58 sexual, 34

vulnerable to, 38 woman, 22, 36 xenophobic, 58 Academic, 2, 3, 8, 18, 24, 73, 74, 78, 90, 112, 139, 173, 188, 193 accountable, 3 black, 139 body, 4 calendar, 155 compliment, 134 conferences, 18 demographics, 76 disciplines, 142 discourse, 106 eligibility, 121 endeavour, 141 entrepreneurship, 136

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 N. Davids, Y. Waghid (eds.), University Education, Controversy and Democratic Citizenship, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56985-3

201

202 Index

Academic (cont.) female, 19, 24 freedom, 3, 193 functions, 150 group of, 3 inquiry, 61, 158 institutionalisation, 87 institutions, 134, 185 intercourse, 156 Israeli, 4 members, 77 metropole, 181 output, 106 performance, 87 programmes, 16, 87, 132 publications, 161 research, 58, 66 responsibility, 172 responsible, 3 societies, 18 South African, 134 spaces, 76 staff, 74, 120, 132, 138 studies, 87 university, 2, 89 women, 138 writings, 183 Access, 13, 18, 26, 27, 36, 86, 161 to all, 14 concerns of, 25 decolonising, 193 easy, 22 to education, 139 equal, 37 fair, 159 individual’s, 25 issues, 154 limited, 186 open, 25

to resources, 121, 122 unequal, 25 Accountability, 89, 148, 150, 159, 162, 173 notion of, 161 Act anti-social, 34 controversially, 176 with freedom, 176 of pluralistic communities, 12 of respect, 111 with suspicion, 176 unilaterally, 169 Action cooperative, 7 dialogical, 74 mode of, 156 modes of, 98 pedagogical, 98, 99 prophetic, 32, 38 proportional, 75 protest, 156 remedial, 16 retributive, 82 socially just, 27 Africa, 102–104, 107n3, 111, 114, 120, 131, 133, 134, 142, 148, 15, 150–154, 156, 158, 160, 167, 169, 171, 179–182, 184–186, 188–192, 194, 33, 33n1, 47n4, 58, 59, 64, 68, 70, 71, 74, 84–86, 89 African, 2, 13, 15, 16, 20, 23, 31–39, 43, 45, 46, 52–54, 57–78, 81–99, 106, 109n8, 134, 147–163, 186n1, 189–191, 194 authoritarian governments, 150 challenge, 152

 Index 

citizen, 169 citizenry, 169 citizenship, 169 communities, 58, 86 condition, 195 context, 102, 152, 157 continent, 135, 137, 151, 169, 170, 176, 182, 190 counterparts, 134 countries, 148, 151–153, 158, 184, 186 country, 156 cultural practices, 20 cultures, 159 educational needs, 142 elites, 180 expressions of culture, 38 expressions of religion, 38 faith contexts, 43 governments, 59, 161, 190 higher education, 70, 71, 77, 133, 134, 159 institutions, 104 international students, 156 journalist, 169 leaders, 182 livelihoods, 108 mindset, 104 nationals, 85 nations, 155 nation-states, 169 needs, 185 philosophical ethic, 89 philosophy, 85, 107 political movements, 152 scholars, 191 solution, 106 states, 184, 185 students, 138, 149, 152, 162

203

thought, 108 traditions, 184 Union, 169 universities, 57–78, 142, 147–163, 179, 180, 184 violent confrontations, 151 voice, 142 worldview, 105, 115 Africanisation, 184, 185, 191 Africans, 104, 134, 142, 168, 185, 188 humanity of, 181 West, 184 westernised, 181 Agreement acceptable, 12 concordial, 109, 109n6, 111 shared, 2, 7, 11, 12 uncontested, 168 Alienation, 67, 132, 140 feelings of, 141 sense of, 143 Antagonistic, 74 Apartheid, 13, 34, 38, 84, 123, 126, 128, 151, 152, 154, 184, 190 administration, 152 appropriation, 133 benefits of, 175 era, 134 government, 161 legacies of, 138, 158 ontology, 143 past, 2 post-, 34, 103, 162 pre-, 103 regime, 37, 134, 139 rule, 120 symbols of, 113 system, 81

204 Index

Apathy, 168 Arab Spring, 155 Argumentation deliberative, 7 form of, 6 mode of, 2 substantiation, 4 Authoritarian governments, 150 reaction, 188 regimes, 182 state, 170 B

Belonging atmosphere of, 168 non-, 132, 139 sense of, 169, 171 to a community, 169 Burn to be heard, 147–163 C

Change agents of, 43, 89 attitude, 193 beliefs, 9 democratic, 58 institutional cultures, 143 levels of, 136 motivation to, 22 movement for, 183 in society, 97 teaching for, 46 viable, 186 Citizens of the continent, 169 Citizenship, 148, 168, 170

democratic, 175 enactment of, 168 generic, 148 global, 70 notions of, 175 practices of, 168 responsible, 147–163 Civic aim, 58, 60 commitment, 64 engagement, 162 life, 66 mandate, 77 organizations, 160 responsibilities, 68 role, 57, 58, 70 society, 70 value, 159 Class, 2, 13, 18, 22, 26, 40, 94, 95, 125, 134, 143, 150, 153 black middle, 185 discrimination, 140 discussions, 52 modalities, 15 Classroom, 10, 94, 142, 183 activities, 95 practices, 92 tyranny, 193 university, 83, 89, 99 Co-existence peaceful, 132 respectful, 145 Cognitive damage, 81–99 endeavour, 43 functioning, 3, 112 violence, 89 Colonial administration, 152

 Index 

authorities, 184 elements, 185 experiences, 183 government, 161, 181 history, 182 influences, 191 legacy, 133, 179, 191 ontology, 143 pathology, 191 period, 134, 151, 179, 180 practices, 189 rule, 120, 181 spaces, 188 state, 184, 185, 187 universities, 184 university education, 185 vestiges, 180, 182 Colonialism, 133, 137, 138, 149, 151, 152, 158, 180–182, 185, 190 internal, 90, 180 remnants of, 137 symbols of, 113 Coloniality, 135, 137, 180–183, 185, 191, 194 of being, 181 in education, 135 of knowledge, 181 of power, 181, 190 Colonisation of the mind, 182 of physical spaces, 182 Colonised masses, 188 mind, 82 nations, 181 people, 180, 183 Communities, 9, 18, 19, 21, 25, 27, 31, 33, 38, 43, 47n4, 50–51,

205

53, 58, 60, 71, 85, 90, 104, 110, 126, 127, 132, 145, 167, 169, 172, 176, 191 awareness, 47 broad-based, 53 caring, 50 donor, 153 faith, 31, 32, 38, 39, 43, 53 historically advantaged, 175 historically disadvantaged, 176 leaders, 43 moral, 34 pluralist, 27 of practice, 18 of reflection, 48 of thinking, 172, 176 Competitiveness economic, 59 global, 59, 70 Compromise, 8 moral, 8–12 normatively, 63 shared, 12 understanding, 26 unquestioningly, 169 Conflicts, 7–9, 37, 92, 152, 160, 168, 173 religious, 151 Contestation, 106, 127, 129, 168 of violence, 154 Controversial issues, 2, 5–8, 10 matters, 2, 6, 7, 11, 167 political rule, 171 practice, 168, 170 re-imaginations, 192 situations, 6 thinking, 9–12 university, 4

206 Index

Controversy, 2, 4–12, 54, 87, 96, 98, 99, 102, 106, 113, 115, 132, 144, 145, 162, 167–176, 179, 183, 186, 188, 192, 194, 195 absence of, 168 disallow, 5 implications of, 168 recurring, 7 Cooperate, 7, 8, 69, 72 Cosmopolitanism, 63 market-oriented, 64 Criminality, 151, 161 Critical approaches, 61 citizens, 67 consciousness, 60 contents, 68 dialogue, 72–74, 76, 77 education, 71 engagement, 53, 72 examination, 73, 74 pedagogical self-reflection, 32, 45–53 pedagogies, 69, 71–76 public scrutiny, 5 reflection, 9, 26, 31, 38, 47, 48, 60, 72, 73, 94, 95, 181 self-reflection, 72 thinking, 159, 162 Criticality, 132 Cultural, 20, 113 action, 74 affiliations, 88 bedrock, 192 bias, 94 constructions, 39 context, 20, 36, 192 discourses, 20 diversity, 8

environment, 96 forms, 149 framework, 9 hierarchy, 159 integration, 135 norms, 20 pluralism, 8–9 practices, 20 racism, 87 relationship, 148 styles, 25 transformation, 182 ways of being, 93 Culture, 9, 11, 13, 17–20, 22, 24, 27, 32, 38, 40, 44, 50–51, 76, 77, 90, 98, 107, 108, 110, 113, 122, 140, 144, 152, 158, 160, 167, 191 African, 159 conceptions of, 20 corporate, 60 of deliberation, 148 exclusionary, 138 institutional (see Institutional, culture) marginalised, 44 organisational, 23 private, 73 projenitor, 109 rape, 20, 52 spatial, 132 of violence, 37, 102 violent, 50 of whiteness, 143 Curriculum, 91, 94, 183, 184, 186 conceptualisation, 65 content, 186 core, 113 decolonisation, 190

 Index 

goals, 72 inclusion in, 44 reform, 189, 193 re-imagination of, 71 transformation, 185 university, 91, 186 D

Debate, 6–7, 24, 107, 159, 160, 162 critical, 1–5 engage in, 1 mode of, 2 public, 1, 6, 140 rational, 5 Decision-making, 6, 7, 66, 125, 126, 159 collective, 134 communal, 160 deliberative, 6 democratic, 88, 170 process, 126 streamlined, 66 unquestioning, 5 Decolonial education, 183 school, 181, 182 turn, 181 Decoloniality, 175, 180–183, 194 Decolonisation, 120, 179–195 achievement of, 192 agenda, 140, 192 challenges of, 194 concept of, 194 genuine, 192 of knowledge, 185, 193 meanings of, 182 mission, 142

207

political, 59 processes of, 189, 191 project, 188, 190–193 prospects for, 189–190 of the state, 186 understanding of, 181, 182 of universities, 186–189, 192–195 Decolonised entity, 192 space, 193 university, 180, 187, 191–192 Decolonising access, 193 buildings, 193 the curriculum, 190 knowledge, 182, 185 the mind, 194 public spaces, 193 the university, 179, 182, 186, 190, 193 Dehumanisation, 49, 53, 62, 133 ethnic, 133 ideological, 139 racial, 133 systemic, 37 Deliberate, 6–8, 24, 72, 91 Deliberation, 4, 6–9, 12, 25, 92, 111, 127, 148, 150, 157, 159 aggressive, 160 collective, 9 common, 9 constant, 160 culture of, 148 legitimate, 171 open, 171 pluralist, 1–12 public, 6 rational, 171

208 Index

Deliberative argumentation, 7 decision-making, 6 discomforting experiences, 44 encounters, 32 engagement, 3, 5, 88, 89, 94, 95, 112, 113, 171 inquiry, 132 process of reflection, 8, 9 Democracy, 26, 34, 58, 59, 67, 70, 81, 84, 85, 88, 89, 92, 93, 98, 120, 126, 131, 139, 150, 168, 170, 188, 190 controversial, 168 ideals of, 82 merits of, 83 notions of, 175 role of, 83 universality of, 82 value of, 86 virtue of, 83, 85, 90 Democratic action, 81–99 actor, 115 aims, 91 change, 58 citizen, 52, 102, 144 citizenry, 170–172 citizenship, 105, 106, 114, 131, 144, 167–176 decision-making, 88, 170 education, 91–93, 99 expression, 148 freedom of expression, 160 iterations, 170 norms, 150 order, 92 people, 93

practices, 92 president, 171 reformation, 133 relations, 90, 99 right, 170, 171 role, 101–115 society, 190 space, 157 transformation, 58, 64 value, 26, 85, 136 virtues, 88 Demographics, 136 academic, 76 change in, 140 Development current, 156 of democratic citizens, 52 empathy, 44 of leaders, 53 of moral imagination, 44 of pressures, 25 professional, 18 of the protest, 48 reconstruction and, 162 social, 84 staff, 96 of a work ethic, 193 Dialogical action, 74 experiences, 7 process, 6 Dialogue, 36n2, 71–74, 144, 159 critical, 72–74, 76, 77 give-and-take, 8 interactions for, 160 mutual, 159 open, 162 reflective, 72

 Index 

Disagreement, 168 culmination of, 88 Discourse, 14, 16, 20, 26, 27, 34, 110, 120, 131, 133, 135–139, 143, 144, 149, 162 critical, 188 dominant, 26, 84, 142 economic, 153 of education, 82, 167 form of, 6 higher education, 176 institutional, 21 nationalist, 188 neoliberal, 135, 190 philosophical, 134 public, 34 of reconciliation, 175 student protests, 154 ubuntu, 106 white supremacist, 142 Discrimination, 24, 90, 102, 136, 168 class, 140 covert, 27 forms of, 176 history of, 133 racial, 140 resistance towards, 139 sexual, 23 Dis-invitation, 4, 5, 8 of scholars, 8 Disputation, 154 Disruption, 14, 76, 150, 157 moment of, 138 momentary, 92 potential, 138 of the structures, 14, 76

Dissent, 149, 175 acts of, 170 showing, 170 space for, 112 voices of, 112, 176 Diversity, 27, 72, 168 cultural, 8 tolerance, 159 Domination, 36, 66 forms of, 182 logic of, 183 male, 18, 25 negative, 5 practice of, 61 violent, 22 white, 141 of women, 22 E

Economic, 19 ability, 37 abstract, 68 competition, 70 competitiveness, 59 condition, 65 crisis, 85 decline, 155 discourse, 153 growth, 131 interests, 65 malaise, 154 matters, 65 order, 65 perspective, 86 policies, 157 progress, 65 prosperity, 86 redress, 84

209

210 Index

Economic (cont.) relationships, 18 resources, 151 returns, 77 roles, 77 support, 187 terms, 65 understanding, 182 utility, 67 Education, 13, 19, 37, 45, 58, 60, 61, 63–65, 67, 68, 75, 77, 82, 92, 95, 101n1, 102n2, 106, 108, 112, 135, 136, 139, 142, 154, 167, 171, 172, 176, 180 approaches to, 61 authentic, 75 authenticity of, 61 content of, 67 critical, 71 decolonial, 183 decolonising, 185 democratic, 58 democratic citizenship, 172 discourse, 167 faculty, 161 as freedom, 62 Freirean, 61–62 funding, 66–67 higher, 17, 31–54, 58–62, 64–78, 90, 94–99, 119–129, 131, 133–136, 139, 140, 142–144, 151, 156, 159, 162, 171, 176, 179, 187, 191 inclusive, 139 management, 66–67 modern, 61 nativist, 188 nature of, 134 policies, 135 public, 65

support, 65 systems, 131, 133, 139, 182, 186 theological, 32 university, 173–176 Educational domains, 63, 64 encounters, 60, 63, 72, 73, 77 experiences, 61 judgements, 64 practice, 70, 76, 93 resources, 122 technology, 81–99 Elite African, 180 class, 153 conception, 187 educated, 184 elites, 184 local, 195 nationalist definition, 188 political, 184–187, 189, 195 ruling, 188, 190, 192, 193 Encounter, 109–111, 109n6, 113, 115, 123, 124, 128 with broader society, 112 deliberative, 32 domain for, 76 educational, 60, 63, 72, 73, 77 gender, 74 human (see Human, encounters) individual, 124 with the other, 72 pedagogic, 95 pedagogical (see Pedagogical, encounters) social, 123 social framework of, 111 teaching and learning, 16, 77, 95 of vulnerability, 121–122

 Index 

Engage, 2, 7–11, 32, 50, 52, 53, 82, 159 in classroom activities, 95 collectively, 40 controversy, 11 critically, 2 in debate, 1 issues, 43, 45 realities, 54 socially, 52 with difference, 5 Engagement, 4, 61, 73, 77, 95, 110, 112, 139, 142, 161, 180, 182 civic, 162 collaborative, 43 critical, 3, 48, 53, 72 critical-rational, 4 deliberative, 3, 5, 88, 89, 94, 95, 112, 113, 171 ethical procedures for, 112 framework of, 114 free, 171 human, 9 humane form of, 5 iterative, 168, 170 non-contextual, 39 pedagogical, 95 platform for, 126 practical, 47 robust, 53 student, 94–96, 98 theoretical, 52 Environment built, 138 changing the, 141 cultural, 96 exclusionary, 138 incendiary, 88

211

inclusive, 132 institutional, 133 material, 133 professional, 18 social, 19, 57 supportive, 50 technical, 96 university, 24 Equal access, 37 background, 69 drive, 107 entry, 18 footing, 70, 126 freedoms, 6 protection, 85 Equality, 7, 63, 65, 75, 84, 85, 91, 92, 104, 126 conception of, 91 distant, 91 intellectual, 92 of trainees, 68 Equals, 26, 76, 92 deliberation of, 160 support as, 89 Ethical action, 141 clearance, 3 compliance, 3 conduct, 4 considerations, 68 engagement, 112 good, 124 interrogation, 45, 46 procedures, 112 research, 112 responsibility, 45 standards, 156

212 Index

Ethnic dehumanisation, 133 modalities, 15 subjectivities, 182 violence, 151 wars, 194 Ethnicities, 18, 25 racialised, 25 Ethos, 16, 175 of responsible citizenry, 162 Exclusion, 25, 94, 102, 133, 136, 174, 175 feelings of, 140, 141 narrative of, 138 social, 120 Experiences of discomfort, 52 lived, 15, 27, 44, 54, 97, 127, 131–145, 183 F

Faith communities, 53 contexts, 43 institutions, 53 landscape, 39 leaders, 32, 38, 53 Female, 18 academics, 19, 24 students (see Students, female) subjugation, 25 submissiveness, 20 Financial budgets, 158 donor community, 153 expenditure, 153 issues, 121

limitations, 153 resources, 87 responsibilities, 121 security, 121 transparency, 158, 159 Free deliberation, 171 education, 121 engagement, 171 from European influences, 184 expression, 171 higher education, 121, 151, 156 labour, 142 -market capitalism, 85 speech, 170 university, 171 voting, 171 will, 124 Freedom, 61, 62, 84, 85, 104, 190 academic, 3, 193 act with, 176 aim of, 61 for citizens, 175 equal, 6 express, 1 of expression, 160, 171 individual, 58, 61, 75 of judgment, 176 notions of, 139 of play, 172 with power, 176 practice of, 61 of speech, 170, 171 women’s, 35 Fundamentalism market, 66, 69, 71, 77, 78, 135 Funding, 66, 69, 78, 187 government, 121

 Index 

models, 66, 135 private, 66 regimes, 183 research, 78 state, 66, 120 straregic, 120 of universities, 183 G

GBV, 13–27, 31–40, 36n2, 38n3, 43, 46, 47, 47n4, 49, 52–54 experiences of, 22 issues of, 39 malaise of, 24 realities of, 49 survivors of, 38, 39, 42, 47 understandings of, 16 Gender, 13–27, 31–54, 47n4, 57, 69, 103 biases, 24 constructions of, 13, 14 disadvantages, 76 encounters, 74 identity, 33, 36 iniquitites, 65 injustice, 75, 78 oppression, 62, 71, 76 prejudice, 73 -queer, 17 relations, 76 roles, 37 situatedness, 61 -specific roles, 24 theorists, 32 theory, 46, 52 violence, 58, 59, 62, 66, 68–78, 90

213

Gender-based violence, 71, 149, 174 anti-, 13, 16, 23 Global aspect, 70 challenges, 69 citizenship, 70 community, 153 competition, 70 competitiveness, 59, 70 content, 63 economy, 135 forces, 137, 145 impartiality, 63 imperatives, 135 inequalities, 181 influences, 135–136 knowledge, 135 market, 59 network station, 169 North, 195 order, 59, 60 partners, 190 phenomenon, 151 push, 136 relevance, 57, 59 system, 181 warming, 10 world, 190 Globalisation, 190 neoliberal, 190–191 H

Harassment, 14, 16, 27, 62 sexual, 14, 16, 17, 22, 23, 71 Hegemonic, 13, 19, 20, 22, 94, 97, 134 masculinity, 19

214 Index

Hegemonic (cont.) norms, 13 predispositions, 188 status-quo, 149 system, 148 understandings, 94 values, 44 voices, 92 Hegemonies dominant, 27 normative, 15 patriarchal, 26 Higher education, see Education, higher Higher learning, 133 Historical canonisation, 152 circumstances, 158 contexts, 15, 36, 62, 127 contingent, 158 continuities, 158 elusiveness, 180–183 instances, 109 legacy, 4 legitimisation, 152 pain, 123 perspective, 149 significance, 85, 140 studies, 108 trauma, 4 unfolding, 154 violence, 157 wounding, 4 Historically advantaged communities, 175 disadvantaged communities, 176 disadvantaged institutions, 134 documented, 152

maligned category, 3 privileged institutions, 134 white campuses, 139 white institutions, 132 white universities, 132–136, 138, 189 Homophobia, 24, 38, 140 Human activity, 6 acts, 4 aspirations, 63 beings, 26, 27, 61, 69, 74, 84, 90, 142 capital, 67, 135, 136 condition, 61, 65 dignity, 8, 84, 85, 104, 144 encounters, 11 engagement, 9 interests, 65 life, 83, 88, 154, 161 nature, 63 practice, 11, 168 quality, 107 relations, 1 relationships, 18, 45 resources, 187 rights, 26, 71, 84, 85, 150 suffering, 33 Humanism, 61, 107, 142 I

Identities, 9, 15, 90, 99, 119, 123, 128, 139, 141, 180, 190 assumed, 89 changing, 123 comprised, 15

 Index 

construction, 125 establishing, 160 gender, 33, 36 individual, 88, 119, 120 institutional, 27 lecturer, 183 melting pot of, 120 misrecognised, 128 national, 86, 89 new, 193 new, 92 perceived, 128 (re)construction, 119–129 sexual, 33 shifting, 27 singular, 90 students, 125, 128, 129 Imperial experiences, 183 logic of domination, 183 Inclusion, 13, 25, 43–46 in the curriculum, 44 mandate of, 145 process of, 92 Independence, 184, 189 declaration of, 181 onset of, 186 political, 152, 158, 182, 185 post-, 179, 180, 184, 187 Inequality, 50, 91, 136, 181, 189, 190 global, 181 structural, 76 Inhumanity, 142, 176 artefacts of, 103 of history, 142 Injustice, 9, 58, 63, 64, 69, 72, 76, 97, 120, 156, 175, 176 context of, 69

in educational practices, 70 epistemic, 112 gender, 75, 78 injustice, 78 situations of, 53 social, 59, 70, 71, 77 structural, 78 structures of, 69 In loco humanus, 102, 105, 115 Institutional assumption, 119 autonomy, 5, 193 commitment, 53 cultures, 25, 26, 53, 120, 131–145, 183 environments, 133 governance, 27, 158 image, 23 integration, 135 language policy, 2 level, 132 management, 148 norms, 119, 120 peace, 8 practices, 16, 120 processes, 103 setting, 137 spaces, 16 stability, 8 Institutions disadvantaged, 134 educational, 142, 155 higher education, 58, 73, 94, 97–99, 120, 135, 136, 143, 171 historically white, 132 of learning, 140 privileged, 134 public, 66, 73

215

216 Index

Intellectual ascent, 174 bias, 94 equality, 92 exclusion, 138 labour, 135 public, 67 regime, 188 tension, 10 ways of being, 93 Intolerance political, 151, 154 Issues, 40, 188 of access, 154 to be addressed, 191 background, 73 broader national, 182 broader societal, 155 of broader South Africa, 102 central, 88 of class, 125 of class discrimination, 140 of cognitive damage, 93 confronting gender, 66 contextual, 47 controversial, 2, 5–8, 10 of discrimination, 168 financial, 121 for further questioning, 120 of GBV, 39, 43 with gender, 47 highlighted, 151 of homophobia, 140 intersections of, 43 of less privileged students, 129 of masculinity, 43 national, 157 pertinent, 159

political, 162 of racism, 168 for reflection, 46, 53 of rights and responsibilities, 176 salient, 183 of sexism, 140 social, 45 of social injustices, 94, 97 underlying, 36 of value formation, 86 of violence, 168 of xenophobia, 140, 168 J

Judgments, 161 express, 1 Justice, 39, 43, 53, 63, 65, 159, 175 notion of, 124 pedagogic, 91 ubuntu, 90 K

Kinship, 109, 109n7, 111, 115 harmonious, 112 Knowledge, 18, 59, 63, 67, 68, 76, 95, 103, 110, 112, 144, 174, 182, 183, 185, 192–194 absolute, 61 coloniality of, 181 construction, 176 creation, 174 deconstruction, 176 economy, 135 generation, 60 production, 142, 143, 181, 192 recipients of, 94

 Index 

scientific, 60 understanding of, 97 universal, 61 L

Language, 2, 48, 67, 140, 143, 184 of choice, 8 in educational spaces, 67 of her choice, 3, 8 and identity, 90, 99 of instruction, 2 of objectivity, 61 of the people, 67 policy, 2, 173 progenitor, 109 Learning, 11, 93, 94, 96, 97 approach to, 97 blended, 94, 95 design, 99 encounters, 77, 95 experiences, 49, 94 experiential, 96 forms of, 97, 98 ideas of, 98 institutions of, 140 interventions, 92, 94 practices, 32, 91, 93, 95 process, 54, 94 of students, 10, 93, 96, 97 teaching and (see Teaching and learning) theories, 95, 96 through acquisition, 97–99 through collaboration, 97 through discussion, 98 through production, 98 ways of, 83, 96–99 with doubt, 10

217

Legal framework, 16 hearing, 169 instrument, 114 norms, 23 relationship, 148 rights, 105 Legislative, 179, 187 change, 193 sense, 187 LGBTQI, 15, 16, 24–27 individuals, 15 M

Male, 18 absorption, 22 academics, 24 authority, 20 dominance, 19 -dominated systems, 53 domination, 18, 25 fatherly, 34 norms, 18 power, 37 social scientists, 134 students, 17, 72 superiority (see Superiority, male) Maleness, 18 as central, 18 Management, 58, 65–67, 95, 132, 135, 139, 158, 187 in African universities, 159 endeavours, 74 frameworks, 66 institutional, 148 models, 66 poor, 155 public, 65

218 Index

Management (cont.) style of, 66 university, 4, 87, 148, 151, 152, 154, 156–161, 163 Marginalisation, 26, 34, 82, 89 Marginalise, 3, 77, 92 Marginalised, 44, 92, 113, 123, 141 cultures, 44 women, 4 Market, 65, 190 -like behavior, 65 competitiveness, 68 -driven rationality, 68 expansion, 65 fundamentalism, 66, 69, 71, 77, 78, 135 fundamentalist culture, 77 funding, 66 global, 59 ideology, 58, 65, 68, 71, 77 industrial, 60 international, 191 labour, 135, 136 models, 65 -oriented cosmopolitanism, 64 principles, 65 quasi-, 65 society, 65 Masculine, 14 norms, 22 prerogative, 14 Masculinity, 37 constructions of, 32, 38 hegemonic, 19 issues of, 43 redemptive, 43 representations of, 43 undermine, 15

Materialism new, 132, 133, 136–139 Moral beings, 169 challenges, 34 claims, 12 community, 34 compromises, 8–12 convictions, 8 frailty, 34 imagination, 44 judgements, 126 obligation, 102, 105 principles, 124 rights, 169 subjects, 73 values, 8 N

National administrative centres, 153 constitution, 150 determinism, 86 forces, 137, 145 government, 156 historical circumstances, 158 identity, 86, 89 issues, 157, 182 politics, 194 student protests, 139 subject, 34 television, 188 universities, 184 Nationalist agenda, 134 definition, 188 determinism, 88, 98 discourse, 188

 Index 

Nativism, 188 Nature, 27 adversarial, 70 of coloniality, 191 of conceptualization, 57 contestatory, 27 of dominant pedagogy, 60 of education, 134 of Freirean pedagogy, 59 of GBV, 17, 20, 36 human, 63 of pedagogical intervention, 45 of pedagogy, 78, 186 postcolonial, 179 of race, 143 racist, 186 of sacred scriptures, 39 stereotypical, 87 of the university, 186 unsettling, 175 of violence, 37 Neo-colonial arrangements, 181 influences, 191 Neoliberal age, 65 agenda, 135 context, 135 discourse, 135, 190 globalisation, 190–191 influence, 136 measure, 190 order, 65 perspective, 65 policies, 190 pressure, 74 thinking, 65

219

Neoliberalism, 135, 137 Non-conforming, 15, 17, 52 people, 53 O

Opinions, 6, 75, 92, 159 express, 1, 5 Oppression, 53, 60, 62, 67, 69, 71, 74, 76, 194 form of, 124 gender, 62 gender-based, 76 of society, 71 structural, 75 structures of, 69 symbol of, 161 P

Patriarchal, 17–19, 24–26, 39, 43, 183 constructions, 17 ideology, 22 parents, 19 prototype, 18 system, 39 Patriarchy, 17–19, 22, 24, 32, 53, 73, 76 constructions of, 39 incubators for, 24 promotion of, 38 secrets of, 22 Pedagogical approaches, 72, 95 concepts, 2 encounters, 11 engagement, 95

220 Index

Pedagogical (cont.) experiences, 64, 69, 75 initiatives, 66 interrogation, 45 intervention, 45 pathways, 115 practices, 32, 43, 45–47, 93, 99 praxis, 45 problem, 94 self-reflection, 31–54 spaces, 45 terms, 75 theory, 46 transformation, 140 understanding, 2 university actions, 132, 133 Pedagogically committed, 32 Pedagogies critical, 69, 71, 72, 75 reflexive, 93, 96, 99 teacher-centred, 93, 94, 96, 98, 99 Pedagogy, 32, 43–46, 50, 52, 53, 58–60, 67–75, 77, 78, 101, 113, 183 bare, 68 critical, 57, 58, 69, 71, 73, 74, 76 democratic, 66 dialogic, 58 of discomfort, 44 dominant, 60 experiences in, 44 Freirean, 59 ideal, 58, 59 just, 59–64 nature of, 186 teacher-centred, 94 violent, 31–54

Philosophical conceptions, 108 conversations, 108 discourse, 134 enforcer, 86 ethic, 89 underpinnings, 192 Physical artefacts, 138 collective violence, 149 confrontation, 149 features, 137 force, 150 harm, 17, 145, 149 manifestations, 103 planning choices, 138 spaces, 71, 182 threat, 35 violation, 62 violence, 14, 17, 103, 148, 149, 160 Pluralism, 8–9, 27, 168 cultural, 9 Pluralist, 1–12, 27 activity, 11 deliberation, 9 public reason, 9 views, 9 Pluralistic communities, 12 public forums, 9 Policies, 15, 16, 89, 173, 183 economic, 157 education, 135 framework, 15 GBV, 16 for implementation, 74 legislation and, 22 neoliberal, 190

 Index 

overarching, 16 prioritisation of, 16 and procedures, 17 racial, 89 response, 24 sample of, 16 social redress, 81 stand-alone, 19 transformation, 190 university, 16 web of, 132 Political aggrandisement, 195 beings, 169 bias, 94 challenges, 188 conditions, 170 dictatorship, 170 discourse, 153 disorders, 188 elites, 184–187, 189, 195 extremism, 83–85, 88, 89, 98 incentives, 83 independence, 152, 158, 182, 185 interests, 188 intolerance, 151, 154 issue, 34, 35 mobilisation, 187 paradigm, 83 parties, 84, 85, 88, 160 power, 88 purposes, 187 realities, 35 rights, 169 roles, 37 rulers, 170 supporters, 170 transformation, 182, 190

221

understanding, 182 violence, 151 Politics, 35, 65, 89, 140, 162, 167, 187 national, 194 Postcolonial interests, 187 literature, 180 nature, 179 period, 151 politics, 195 state, 187 thinking, 180 Postcolonialism, 135 Power, 13, 14, 18, 19, 37, 67, 71, 83, 84, 87, 88, 90, 92, 103, 104, 110, 111, 113–115, 131, 140, 143, 150, 174, 176, 181, 188, 193 coloniality of, 190 corporate, 70 currency of, 111 differentials, 181 dynamic, 18, 89, 103 forms of, 36 imbalances, 90 intrinsic, 35 narratives of, 18 negative, 5 political, 88 position, 39 production of, 137 relationships, 14 relations of, 18, 192 structures of, 112, 183 transfer of power, 180 and violence, 103 –violence dynamic, 103 white, 128 of women (see Women, power of )

222 Index

Privilege, 48, 138 of democracy, 175 dismantling of, 141 doors of, 121 economic, 189 epistemological, 47 ideological, 143 socio-economic, 189 white, 128, 141 women with, 22 Privileged counterparts, 122 institutions, 134 less, 121–123, 126, 128, 129 student life, 121 students, 122, 126 Professional development, 18 environments, 18 prospective, 68 Programmes academic, 16, 132 Protest, 16, 32, 40, 42–44, 49, 52, 54, 71, 103, 113, 124, 126, 127, 132, 138, 145, 148, 150, 152, 156–158, 174, 175 action, 156 activities of the, 52 activity, 42 against exclusion, 175 anti-GBV, 23 challenges of, 161 day of, 48 development of the, 48 finding, 47 heart of the, 47 lawful, 161 legitimate, 171

notion of, 159 participants in the, 47 in pedagogical practice, 46 in pedagogy, 43–46, 52 place for, 52 realm, 163 role of, 32, 45 silent, 45, 52 slogan, 41 space, 48 student, 13, 122–124, 126, 138, 139, 147–163, 186 student violent, 148 theme of the, 39 violent, 152, 155–157, 159 violent patterns of, 155 voice of the, 42 Protested for access, 13 Protesters, 42, 147, 153, 162 silent, 41 student, 102, 154 Psychological condition, 10 consequences, 37 terrorism, 18 Public concern, 6, 35, 90, 171 deliberation, 2, 5–7, 9–12, 128 good, 168 institutions, 73 life, 59, 66, 69–71, 73, 171 management, 65 pressure, 3 reason, 6, 8, 9 reasoning, 88, 94 sphere, 1–12, 14, 22–27, 67, 70, 72, 77, 127, 128, 174

 Index 

Publicity conditions of, 6, 7 of dialogical experiences, 7 norms of, 25 vortex of, 5 Q

Questioning, 17, 89, 120, 123, 140, 144, 170, 172 R

Race, 13, 18, 22, 26, 36, 39, 40, 81, 87, 89, 90, 98, 125, 134, 136, 139, 140, 188 nature of, 143 Racial, 3, 25, 86, 88, 89, 98, 103, 133, 140, 143, 182, 183, 186n1 essentialism, 3, 86–89, 98 inadequacies, 186 policies, 89 Racism, 37, 87, 128, 133, 138–141, 143, 149, 168, 189 covert, 133 cultural, 87 darkness of, 174 exclusionary, 143 ideological, 133 Racist, 87 exclusionary attitudes, 145 exclusionary climate, 136 ideologies, 145 institutional cultures, 132, 138 label, 128 nature, 186 research, 3 term, 3

Rape, 102, 20, 21, 33, 33n1, 35, 36n2, 38n3, 40 culture, 52 likelihood of, 34 reality of, 42 silence surrounding, 41 statistics, 34 survivors of, 33 victims, 20 Recognition, 9, 13, 15, 16, 18, 24, 25, 27, 65, 122–128, 191 mutual, 124, 128 theory of, 120, 129 Reconciliation, 4, 175 Reflective, 11 dialogues, 72 disruption, 76 practices, 191 thinking, 2 Reflectively open, 59 Reflectiveness, 132 Relationship, 18, 37, 109n7, 122, 124, 144, 145, 148 between partners, 114 binary, 159 contextualised, 43 cultural, 148 dyadic, 22 economic, 18, 148 harmonious, 111 human, 18, 45 intersections of, 21 inverse, 103 legal, 148 power, 14

223

224 Index

Religions, 13, 19, 20, 22, 26, 32, 38, 47, 106, 175 Religious, 20 affiliations, 40 conflicts, 151 constructions, 39 fanaticism, 9 institutions, 32, 38 minorities, 4, 175 scholars, 31, 38 tensions, 155 traditions, 20 Research, 3, 8, 31, 68, 77, 78, 101, 128, 135, 174 academic, 58, 66 agenda, 58 collaborations, 154 ethical, 112 exploratory, 134 funding, 78 initiatives, 66 -intensive universities, 4 life-oriented, 66 mandate, 60 medium of, 134 normative implications on, 59 outputs, 78 and pedagogy, 58 prevailing, 69 publication, 161 racist, 3 relevance, 68 study, 121 targets, 69 type of, 3 Researchers, 8 Response, 16, 71, 104, 132, 156, 182 to broader societal issues, 155

dominant, 26 immediate, 189 initial, 3 initiatives of, 24 institutional, 23 to misrecognition, 129 to questioning, 89 violent, 5 to the violent conduct, 155 Responsibility, 3, 21, 23, 26, 45, 64, 101, 104, 119, 127, 148, 160, 168, 172, 176 joint, 129 risk, 172 Responsiveness, 60 Revolutionary, 136, 147–163, 188 mechanism, 147, 148 violence, 147–151, 157–162 Role, 63, 64, 73, 77, 171 career, 68 democratic, 102, 106, 112 economic, 77 gender, 37 gender-specific, 24 normative, 14 pedagogical, 115 performance of, 77 political, 37 prescribed, 77 quantifiable, 77 respective, 69 rigid, 77 social, 102, 106 static, 60 student, 77 of the university, 57, 58, 66, 101–115 unproblematic, 76 visible, 18

 Index  S

Scholars, 5, 8, 39, 67, 103, 191 Israeli, 4, 5 nativists, 188 religious, 31, 38 Scholarship, 52, 153 advancement of, 18 of ubuntu, 106, 112 Self-confidence, 125 Self-deprecation, 133 Self-esteem, 120, 123, 125–129 Self-realisation, 124 Self-reflection, 132, 138, 144 Self-respect, 120, 123, 125, 126, 128, 129 Sexism, 24, 32, 140 endorsement of, 38 expressions of, 38 Sexual abuse, 34 assault, 14, 17 assault survivors, 14 contact, 17 discrimination, 23 harassment (see Harassment, sexual) identity, 33 images, 14 intercourse, 20 menace, 34 misconduct, 16, 23 modalities, 15 violence (see Violence, sexual) Sexuality, 19, 26, 34, 39, 43, 47 -related disadvantage, 24 Silence, 21–22, 49, 73 challenging the, 41 conspiracy of, 142 corners of, 26

225

pervasive, 39 rule of, 22 societal, 39 students, 88 Silenced, 42, 82, 85, 94, 134 Social agent, 102 anomaly, 161 anti-, 34 commitment, 65 composition, 120 construction, 18 constructivism, 96 contexts, 57, 59, 75, 82 control, 38 dictates, 14 discourse, 21, 153 encounters, 123 environment, 19, 57 equilibrium, 65 exclusion, 120, 138 force, 153 framework, 111 groups, 25 ills, 86, 106, 131 imaginaries, 138 inequities, 44 injustices, 58, 59, 66, 70, 71, 77, 78, 81, 82, 94 institutions, 65 issues, 45 justice, 13–27, 43, 45, 52, 57–78, 84, 144, 175 media, 14, 23, 87, 90, 140, 147 modalities, 15 movements, 61, 83 networking, 87, 97 networks, 122 obligation, 105

226 Index

Social (cont.) opportunities, 86 oppression, 60 peace, 9 problems, 70, 71 processes, 20 recognition, 123 redress, 81, 82 redress policies, 81 script, 109n6, 111, 113 situatedness, 67 spheres, 162 stability, 9 state, 68, 132 structure, 1, 60, 62, 74, 76, 77, 104, 111, 144 struggles, 59 theories, 106 transformation, 44, 58, 74, 76, 84 unrest, 104 value, 126 violence, 151 Societal conditions, 170 fabric, 190 injustices, 82 problems, 189 unrest, 82 Society, 14, 18, 34, 37, 54, 58, 60, 62, 65, 66, 68, 71, 73, 76, 82, 88, 90, 94, 97, 98, 102, 104, 105, 111–113, 124–126, 128, 132, 134, 138, 144, 148, 152, 153, 159, 160, 167, 168, 186, 189 civil, 1, 60 contemporary, 82 decolonised, 188

just, 52 mainstream, 73, 76 market, 65 Socio-economic conditions, 85 context, 192 disorders, 188 privileges, 189 realities, 39 South Africa, 101, 101n1, 102, 104, 111–114, 120–124, 128, 129, 131–145, 147, 15, 151–154, 156, 157, 162, 167, 175, 180, 183, 184, 186, 186n1, 189, 190, 192–194, 2, 22, 31–33, 33n1, 36, 38n3, 40, 42, 47n4, 8, 84–86, 88, 89, 95, 96, 98 post-apartheid, 103 contemporary, 101–115 South African, 85, 89, 104, 140, 143, 156, 189, 190 academics, 134 campuses, 23 citizens, 81 constitution, 84, 85, 90 context, 32, 33, 38, 43, 45, 46, 52–54, 148, 182, 189–190 economy, 86 government, 81, 151 higher education, 133, 136, 143, 144 higher education context, 96, 136 higher education system, 133 history, 139 landscape, 31, 33, 38, 39 natives, 134 police, 31 population, 139

 Index 

society, 36, 43, 82, 90, 139, 145, 190 students, 138, 183 universities, 13, 81–99, 132–136, 138, 140, 147 women, 33, 36, 112 Spaces discursive, 18 higher education, 62, 72, 119–129 public, 129, 193 unequal, 26 university, 18, 20, 22, 24, 71, 76, 156, 167, 168, 189, 190 Speech free, 170 freedom of, 170, 171 Stability, 38, 39, 86 of cultural constructions, 39 institutional, 8 social, 9 Standards, 8 British, 184 ethical, 156 of excellence, 134, 135 performance, 74 and rules, 64 for a thriving university, 57–58 State control, 66, 182, 185, 187 Stereotyping negative, 86, 89 Student, 102, 102n2, 120–128, 132, 133, 135, 136, 138–144, 148–159, 161–163, 16–19, 171, 172, 174, 176, 187, 189, 192, 193, 2, 23, 24, 32, 43–45, 49, 52, 54, 58–61,

227

64, 67, 69–74, 7, 76, 77, 83, 84, 87, 88, 90–98, 9–13 activism, 90, 150 African international, 156 African, 162 black, 2, 120, 121, 139, 186, 193 claims, 11 demands, 189 directivity, 10 engagement, 98 enrolment, 86, 153 female, 13, 17, 21, 62, 64, 67, 71, 74, 120 foreign national, 89 international, 86 leadership, 88 less privileged, 121–123, 126, 128, 129 life, 121, 122 male undergraduate, 17 Muslim African, 149 participation, 95 poorer, 121–123 protest realm, 163 protesters, 154 protests, 13, 122–124, 126, 139, 147–162, 186 protestsPROTESTS, 147–163 South African, 183 training of, 68 unions, 161 university, 14, 150, 155 violence, 153 violent protest, 148 working-class, 120 Superiority complexes, 186 male, 37 of men, 38

228 Index T

Teaching and learning, 94–99, 134, 193 encounters, 16, 77, 95 interventions, 92 practice, 32, 40, 43, 91, 93, 96 process, 54, 94 spaces, 46 theories, 95, 96 Thinking conventional, 162 enactment of, 172 radical, 185 reflective (see Reflective thinking) university, 172 ways of, 50, 193 white supremacist, 143 Tolerance attitudes of, 141 Transformation, 44, 58, 61–62, 92, 120, 129, 140, 142, 175, 179, 192 agenda, 120 cultural, 182 curriculum, 185 deep, 132, 136 economic, 182 epistemological, 182 of institutions, 182 mandate of, 145 policies, 190 political, 182, 190 real, 189 of reality, 74 rhetoric of, 189 university, 186 Transformative potency, 67 potential, 137

process, 138 public spaces, 129 role, 59 Transparency, 173, 174 financial, 158, 159 Truth, 176 axiomatic, 11 claims, 11 pursuit of, 10 regimes of, 18, 19 touchstone of, 1 U

Ubuntu, 85, 89, 102, 105–107, 109–111, 114, 115 discourse, 106 notion of, 90, 102, 105, 109, 112, 115 scholarship, 106 understanding of, 108, 111 Unemployment, 85, 155 Unequal access, 25 economic relations, 182 power relationships, 14 social groups, 25 spaces, 26 system, 90, 98 Universities, 2, 4, 17, 22, 23, 25–27, 58, 59, 64, 66, 75, 89, 90, 105, 120–122, 125–127, 132, 134–136, 138, 139, 145, 148, 149, 153, 155–157, 159–161, 171, 174, 176, 183, 185, 187, 189–192 academic, 2, 3, 89 affairs, 187 in Africa, 186

 Index 

African, 57–78, 142, 147–163, 179, 180, 184 authorities, 21, 24 body, 159 campus, 102 campuses, 131–145 campuses, 16, 21, 71, 111, 132, 133, 138–141, 145, 147 classroom, 83, 89, 99 climate, 17 council, 156 decolonised, 191–192 education, 167–176 education, 2, 149, 167, 168, 171–172, 174, 176, 182, 184–186 educators, 83, 89, 132 entrepreneurial, 135 environments, 24 fees, 121, 174 funding to, 66 governance, 186 historically white, 136, 138, 189 level, 15 life, 1, 122, 179 management, 4, 87, 148, 151, 152, 154, 156–161, 163 national, 184 Nigerian, 21 policies, 16 procedures, 16 profile, 77 public, 153 public, 2–5, 7, 8 rankings, 190 repression, 151 research-intensive, 4 scales of the, 187

229

South African, 13, 16, 81–99, 132, 135, 136 South African, 87, 132–134, 138, 140, 147 spaces, 71, 156, 167 sphere, 26 stakeholders, 151 structures, 18 students, 2, 150, 155, 157, 158 teachers, 171 thriving, 58 to openness, 3 transformation, 186 Unrest, 150, 154, 173 social, 104 societal, 82 V

Value universal, 83, 90 Vandalism, 149, 151 Victims, 21, 23, 33, 42, 72, 75, 135, 191 Violation, 26, 34, 39, 62, 76, 85 instances of, 112 of justice, 124 of the law, 174 Violence, 13–16, 18, 19, 21–23, 27, 31–33, 37–40, 47n4, 48–50, 52, 57–78, 82, 84, 88, 89, 96, 102–106, 111, 113–115, 132, 140, 145, 148–150, 152–154, 156–160, 162, 163, 168 acts of, 161 against women, 14, 19, 36, 37, 52 artefacts of, 103 authorship of, 163

230 Index

Violence (cont.) characterised by, 19 cognitive, 89 collective, 149 constructions of, 16 covert, 132 culture of (see Culture, violence of ) degree of, 84 destructive, 152 domestic, 14 economic, 14 effects of, 26 embers of, 156 emotional, 14 epistemic, 58, 191 ethnic, 151 experience of, 36, 37 expressions of, 49 forms of, 22, 83, 86, 91, 133, 144, 145, 149, 158 gender, 58, 59, 66, 68–78 gender-based, 13–27, 31–54, 71, 73, 74, 76, 90, 149, 174, 175 in higher education, 64 historical, 157 incidence of, 37, 39 indispensability, 162 instances of, 98, 150, 159 institutional, 154 intense, 156 interpersonal, 37 intimate partner, 14, 33 invitation to, 114 issue of, 103 justification of, 149 legitimation of, 149

legitimized, 152 levels of, 114 lived experience of, 131–145 logic of, 162 manifestations of, 16, 36 -mongers, 161 nature of, 37 non-, 132, 162 notion of, 18, 115 notions of, 103 objective, 143 objectives of, 150 occurrence of, 39 patriarchal, 19 patterns of, 155, 157 perpetrator of, 102 perpetuation of, 132 physical, 14, 17, 148, 149, 160 political, 151 power and, 103 practices of, 150 problematising, 159 rational, 162 realities of, 54 recurrent, 148 relationship with, 145 revolutionary, 147–163 scripts of, 115 sexist, 19 sexual, 14, 16, 17, 23, 33, 34, 41, 42, 71, 73 situations of, 39 social, 151 in society, 82 structural, 157 structures of, 58, 62

 Index 

student, 153 in student protests, 158 symbolic, 154, 157 systemic, 157 trends, 102 understandings of, 18, 103 in university spaces, 22 vulnerability to, 69 ways of, 136 xenophobic, 57, 85, 86 Violent act, 185 actions, 145 circumstances, 155 conduct, 155 context, 48 intimidation, 84, 85 military operations, 152 patterns of protest, 155 practices, 147, 151, 152, 162 protests, 152, 155, 157, 159 student protests, 151–158, 162 tendencies, 188

231

Women, 113, 14, 15, 152, 17, 18, 21–27, 3, 33, 33n1, 36–39, 45, 47n4, 50, 53, 71, 8 academics, 138 bodies of, 33, 38, 53 disciplining of, 37 domination of, 22 freedom, 35 lives, 14 marginalised, 4 narratives of, 15 policing of, 73 position of, 39 power of, 37 risk of, 39 in society, 37 South African, 33, 36 subjugation of, 20 under-representation of, 74 violence against, 14, 36, 37, 52 vulnerability of, 39 with privilege, 22 Worldview, 108 African, 115

W

White anti-, 188 power, 128 privilege, 128 supremacist, 143 supremacy, 133, 138, 139, 143

X

Xenophobia, 58, 140, 149, 168, 174 Xenophobic, 57, 103 attacks, 102, 156 incidents, 156 violence, 85, 86