By Rachel Hatcher
[This is the third post in the Learning and unlearning history in South Africa’s public spaces series.]
South Africa and its universities have been working for over two decades to eliminate racism from their midst and become metaphoric rainbows of inclusion and equality. This project faces serious challenges from various quarters, some unexpected.
Briefly imagine, if you will, growing up in a conservative Afrikaner family and community. Though apartheid had ended a dozen years before, you encounter few black South Africans in your daily existence. There are no black students or teachers at the Afrikaans school you attend, just as there are no black congregants or priests in the Dutch Reformed Church which has such an important impact on how you see the world. You have no black neighbours in the gated, suburban community you live in. Those blacks who do appear in your life have peripheral, and subordinate, roles—they clean your house and tend your mother’s garden. Outside the home, they perform similar functions. You have never been explicitly told blacks are inferior or can and should only have a secondary place in society, but nor have you ever been told blacks are equal.
Now imagine entering university, even a traditionally conservative and Afrikaner one like the University of Pretoria (UP), and suddenly being confronted with the reality that blacks are, in fact, your equals. Indeed, they might even be in positions of power over you and be able to control your future. The experience, according to then Dean of Education at UP, Jonathan Jansen, is jarring, to say the least. In his auto-biographical work, Knowledge in the blood: Confronting race and the apartheid past, Jansen credits this kind of culture shock, and the normalization of blacks as subordinate that lies behind it, as being at the root of South Africa’s and South African universities’ difficult journey toward “transformation,” a journey punctuated by physically and non-physically violent incidents of racial (i.e., anti-black) hatred. Continue reading
When I first arrived at Harvard University in August, I was introduced to the person with whom I would be sharing an office. An assistant professor at Wayne State University, Tracy Neumann has served as the other William Lyon Mackenzie King Postdoctoral Fellow in the Canada Program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University for the 2015-2016 academic year.
