No threat to African centre By Max Price 18 Mar

 David Macfarlane's report "UCT in war over 'bantu education'" (Mail & Guardian, March 11) refers. Macfarlane is an astute journalist, well familiar with South Africa's higher education issues and I regularly appreciate his insightful pieces.

The University of Cape Town's vice-chancellor says discussions about creating a new school, currently referred to as the New School for Critical Enquiry in Africa, have been been transparent, consultative and inclusive. (David Harrison, M&G)

UCT in war over 'bantu education'

" The spectre of "bantu education" has risen to haunt the University of Cape Town (UCT) again.
Controversy is erupting as UCT's administration moves in on the university's renowned Centre for African Studies (CAS). What these moves should be called is itself contested -- the "closure" of CAS, as some outraged students and staff see it; its "disestablishment" and "merging", as the administration prefers.

 Those who oppose the move are drawing provocative parallels with the volcanic "Mamdani affair" at UCT in the late 1990s. Formerly director of CAS, Mahmood Mamdani is the distinguished post-colonial scholar whose draft syllabus in 1997 for a foundation course on Africa was undermined by "administrative fiat" from UCT's liberal-academic powerbrokers, he later wrote.

 The revised syllabus that resulted was academically so third-rate that it prompted him to ask whether UCT was "a new home for bantu education". Mamdani had been appointed to the prestigious AC Jordan chair of African studies, but left UCT shortly after the syllabus saga for Columbia University in the United States.
 Now CAS's future is uncertain. Rumours last year that moves were afoot behind closed doors to move against CAS spurred students and alumni to form the Concerned CAS Students' group in February this year. Students who spoke to the Mail & Guardian asked that their names not be published.

Mobilising support

 Using the resources of social and other media, including a Facebook page, the group has mobilised support from scholars and former CAS students around the world and in South Africa. The M&G has received emails from locations as diverse as Ghana and Harvard, Mauritius and Australia, all enthusiastically endorsing CAS and bitterly denouncing any moves against it.
 Such pressure has forced the matter -- and UCT officials -- into the open. Last month humanities dean Paula Ensor issued two statements denying that CAS would be closed but acknowledging that discussions among staff had been going on for a year. Two weeks ago she convened a faculty discussion, one that students said was their first opportunity to air their views.
 This week Ensor sent the M&G a seven-page response to the newspaper’s questions. She said no decision had been taken to "close" CAS although its "disestablishment" had been part of discussions "taking place for well over a year now about the creation of a new school for critical inquiry in Africa".
 The administration's moves derive from budget concerns about the viability of small departments, which Ensor's faculty decided last year are those with fewer than six full-time academic staff. CAS has more than 300 students and only two full-time, permanent academic staff.
 Discussions had centred on merging CAS with the university's African Gender Institute and its linguistics and anthropology departments, Ensor said. The new school would "draw together cutting-edge research and teaching about epistemologies and representations of Africa", she said. "It would lay the basis for an extraordinary flowering of intellectual work and lift the academic game of the faculty to an entirely new level."

Concerned students

 The Concerned CAS Students are not buying this and said in a statement this week that they had been "excluded for more than a year of formal discussions around a 'new school'". They argued that what "Africa" meant was itself contested and said they "do not know what ‘Africa’ signifies for these [other] departments as seen through their disciplines".
 Responding to earlier arguments from Ensor that CAS was no longer needed because, unlike when it was established in 1976, Africa is now taught broadly across the UCT curriculum, the students said "a handful of 'Africa' courses in different departments does not constitute the study of Africa -- far less critical study".
 They said: "[G]iven the history of bantu studies at UCT ... a post-apartheid university committed to transformation should prioritise the critical study of Africa ...
 "Offering elective courses on 'Africa' seems to pay lip service to our concerns ... [But] how can we not be concerned that a new department of 'social anthropology, linguistics and gender' ... is not rehearsing an old model of colonial ethnography and area studies in the 'modernised' discourses of global multiculturalism?"
 Harry Garuba, the director of CAS, confirmed that the "processes of deciding what to do with the centre started a long time ago and are still ongoing. Our hope is that they lead to an outcome that is best for CAS and the university."
 Asked to explain what is at stake in retaining or losing a centre dedicated to the study of Africa, Garuba referred the M&G to his address at Michigan University in the US when it launched its centre for African studies in 2009.
 In this he dissected the ways in which he had been asked why African universities should have centres of African studies. These ranged from "genuinely puzzled ignorance" to "condescending arrogance".
 All, though, "ignore the agency of African intellectuals themselves", Garuba wrote. "We need to remind ourselves ... that the struggle against marginalisation and objectification within the domain of knowledge was not simply a struggle for seamless integration, as the liberal mind likes to think. It was more fundamentally a struggle for epistemological decolonisation ...
 "Every university in Africa has to answer [the question about the place of African studies] for itself."

No decision yet

 So has UCT decided? Ensor maintained again this week that no decision on CAS's future had been made. But the M&G has a copy of an email she sent to several staff members on November 26 that appears to suggest she at least had already made up her mind. In this Ensor wrote: "It is expected that the disestablishment of the three present departments [including CAS] and the formation of the new department (probably by then described as a school) will be approved at faculty board in March, [and] by council in the months following, with effect from 1 January 2012."
 Responding to M&G questions, Ensor said only the UCT council could "establish or disestablish a department" and then only on the recommendation of the senate and faculty board.
 "The email you refer to is a summary of a discussion with all the participants in the new school discussions, and contains a set of PROPOSALS, not decisions. The proposals emerged from a consensus within the group and the intention was that these would be put to faculty board for discussion and approval ...
 "In terms of the proposal all the activities of the participating units would continue and indeed be augmented."
 About 30 staff had been involved in the year-long consultation, Ensor said. This showed UCT was not repeating what Mamdani identified 12 years ago as the "administrative decision-making in academic affairs" he encountered.
 "You will find no evidence of such decanal high-handedness in the present situation," she said.
 For now at least, the Concerned CAS Students appear to have been heard. The March meeting of the faculty board to which Ensor's November 26 email referred took place on Wednesday, but it did not issue the approval for disestablishing CAS that her email predicted.
 Instead, "heads of the participating units indicated that they are still committed to taking the discussion further", Ensor said after the meeting.
 "In terms of student participation we will ensure ... that their views are canvassed and considered. They are certainly not excluded and we welcome their views," she said."

 The article in question draws attention to current debates at the University of Cape Town with a longer history, primarily within the humanities faculty, on what constitutes "African studies", its disciplinary bases and appropriate institutional location, what it means to be African, how appropriately to write about Africa and how to invigorate an interest in Africa at UCT.
 Part of the debate, given UCT's new mission to be an Afropolitan university, is about whether having a dedicated Centre for African Studies undermines or undervalues the vast amount of work done and to be done in other departments and faculties in, on and with Africa.
 Or, on the other hand, does it perhaps absolve some, whose focus remains firmly Eurocentric, from the responsibility to engage with African knowledge production and attendant epistemological issues -- because they can say that that gets done in the centre?

 These are pertinent questions and it is understandable that they generate divergent responses. It is completely in line with the argumentative traditions that make and shape university life.
 Unfortunately, Macfarlane's article has been sensationalised and distorted by the misleading headline, which has almost nothing to do with the content of the article. Plastered on billboards and smacking of scandal, it colours the article with insinuations of a debilitating conflict and a deep institutional conservatism.

Interpretation

 The headline also places bias on the interpretation of Macfarlane's comments on the processes followed, suggesting that it was a top-down administrative decision and has generated a rebellion from the academics and students below; and finally that this behind-the-scenes manoeuvring by the faculty leadership was "forced into the open" by student social networking (North African revolutionary strategies come to mind).
 The facts are that from September 2009 a group of academics based in the centre, the African Gender Institute, department of social anthropology and the linguistics section, have been involved in discussions about the idea of creating a new school, currently referred to as the New School for Critical Enquiry in Africa.
 If this school were to be born it would be the second largest in the faculty of humanities and would draw together exciting, multidisciplinary research and teaching about epistemologies and representations of Africa, heritage and public culture, archive studies, language and migration, indigenous knowledge systems, feminism and violence, land reform and democracy, and much more.

 For such a new school to be formed, if this is what the faculty decides, all the participating units would need to be dissolved as departments to become part of the new larger formation. Some units might continue as research groups within the new school. It has also been proposed that a version of the centre might continue as an umbrella forum across departments and faculties.
 There is a controversy about the process that derives from an anonymous group of students that has been active online to register their strong concern about "plans to close" the centre and who allege that they have not been consulted. While we appreciate their commitment to the centre and have invited them, via their Facebook page, to participate fully in the discussions, they have chosen to remain anonymous. This makes the discussions they themselves urge somewhat more complex.

Transparent proposals

 The process underpinning the new school proposals has been transparent, consultative and inclusive. It has involved a large number of senior staff in the faculty.
 It included at least two full workshops and four working groups that met to develop perspectives for discussion on the issue. An open-to-all faculty forum was held.
 At a subsequent faculty board meeting on March 9 the heads of the participating units, including the centre, remained committed to taking the merger discussion further. The board strongly supported the process and decided that professor Lungisile Ntsebeza should facilitate ongoing discussions to include some new ideas that were raised. These discussions are open to anyone interested, certainly students, and will eventually require the formal support of the humanities faculty board and senate prior to placing them before council.
 While anxiety about the "closure" of the centre is understandable, it has been made clear from the start that there will be no closure of the courses, programmes, research projects and exchanges currently offered through it. Nor are any jobs at risk. Similarly, the African Gender Institute will retain its unique identity as a research unit and all its teaching programmes will be offered through the new school.
 I do hope we will be able to refocus the discussion in the M&G pages on the important issues of the nature and place of African studies in an African university, rather than the somewhat technical and parochial processes of restructuring departments.

Dr Max Price is vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town.

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