A series of articles have appeared covering the UCT Executive’s attack on Professor Nicoli Nattrass’s work. Here are two opposing points of view.
Martin
Source: Daily Maverick
Power at UCT: When the ‘Executive’ follows the BAC’s lead, individuals are trampled
UCT academic Nicoli Nattrass.
The University of Cape Town’s Professor Nicoli Nattrass has written a response to an opinion piece published on Saturday in Maverick Citizen.
In their article in Maverick Citizen (20 June), Benson, Cooper, Favish et al portray me as part of a white supremacist establishment that continues to run the University of Cape Town (UCT). They dismiss my criticisms of the Black Academic Caucus (BAC) on the grounds that it, like the South African Students Organisation (Saso) founded by Steve Biko 50 years ago, provides a necessary bulwark against white racists.
I have news for Benson et al: The white (liberal) establishment no longer runs UCT. I myself welcome this change. UCT has a highly regarded black vice-chancellor (its third black vice-chancellor, following in the footsteps of Mamphela Ramphele and Njabulo Ndebele). One of the deputy vice-chancellors (DVCs) is black (and a former office-holder in the BAC) and many of our deans in recent years have been or are black. Two-thirds of the external members of the UCT Council are black, including the chair.
Benson et al say that I and my defenders are ahistorical. Benson et al suggest that the context facing the BAC today is no different to the context facing Biko and Saso fifty years ago. Really? Come on, perhaps they should be sensitive to the changing historical context.
“Over time the BAC appears to have been transformed from being a disruptive (and often productive) movement from below into a secret network (including individuals with executive power) institutionalising a new hegemony – not unlike the secretive, influential and highly divisive Afrikaner Broederbond in the past (which is not to say that they share the same ideology).”
Benson et al write that the apparent similarities between the BAC and the Broederbond – their secret membership and organisation – are justified in the BAC’s case because of the need for a safe space for black scholars. Perhaps that was true in the past. But Benson et al overlook entirely the success of the BAC in securing positions of power for its current or former members and allies. Like the Broederbond prior to and after 1948, the BAC has sought and continues to seek to manoeuvre its members into positions of power, including within universities, initially against the establishment and then from within the establishment, but always with the apparent objective of institutionalising a new hegemony.
As Benson et al acknowledge, the BAC played a key role in generating controversy over my commentary. In my previous piece, I worried about the rise of the “thought police” in universities. Benson et al do not appear to share my concern. They might like to look at the BAC’s statement calling on the South African Journal of Science (SAJS) to “withdraw” my commentary rather than allow scholarly debate. In the first part of my discussion of the “tumult” at UCT, I wrote that “If the SAJS was a book, they [the BAC] would be burning it in the main avenue of the university”. This is a hostile environment for scholarship and debate – including over the merits and demerits of my exploratory research.
Yes, let’s think about power. Who wields power within the university? It seems that there are no checks and balances on the use or abuse of power by members of the “Executive”, at least not in the short term.
In representing me as part of an all-powerful white liberal establishment, Benson et al misrepresent the power relations within the university. In my case, there is a huge imbalance in power between a powerful “Executive”, seemingly pushed by the BAC, and an individual professor. Whatever the merits or demerits in my published commentary, I believe that I have been subject to repeated abuses of power by an “Executive” which, following the lead of the BAC, threw me under the proverbial bus. As I have set out elsewhere (here and here), I have been denied fair process in the rush to judgment by the “Executive” and in their subsequent “investigation” in the context of this very “poisoned well” – a “well” that the “Executive” itself helped to poison.
What power does a professor in my position have to challenge a perceived abuse of power by the “Executive”? If I was a member of the hegemonic white establishment, presumably I would have a range of informal as well as formal channels. I can assure Benson et al that my many questions to the “Executive” about their actions and subsequent investigation have been ignored or deflected on the grounds that the investigation is underway.
I wrote to the university’s Registrar asking about the process for bringing a complaint against a DVC to the Committee for Procedural Review. This route, unfortunately, turned out to be impossible to use as two out of three members (including the VC) would have to recuse themselves in this case. I was then referred to the standard grievance procedures.
It seems that any grievance against a DVC would need to be considered by her line manager… who is the VC. Given that the VC is herself part of the “Executive” that issued the statement and may have discussed the subsequent investigation and may even have already discussed the DVC’s conflicts of interest, it cannot be appropriate to take a grievance to the VC. I can’t tell whether this is Kafka or Monty Python.
An individual professor has no power to get answers from the “Executive” in private emails. There are no appropriate university processes for raising a grievance. Given this, I aired some of my concerns in an “open letter” to the DVC on 19 June.
Benson et al urge us to think about power. Yes, let’s think about power. Who wields power within the university? It seems that there are no checks and balances on the use or abuse of power by members of the “Executive”, at least not in the short term. Perhaps Benson et al regard any invocation of checks and balances as appallingly “liberal”. Perhaps they think that no use of power to advance their favoured agenda could possibly constitute an abuse of power. I have a more pluralist vision of the university, where multiple paradigms and ideologies and approaches can coexist to the benefit of all.
This saga does not show that the BAC runs the university. I never alleged that it did. I said that it wielded considerable influence. The four-person “Executive” includes at least one former or current BAC leader.
What my case shows is that, if the “Executive” is rushed by a group like the BAC into an unprocedural and unfair course of action, then there is nothing much that their targeted professor can do about it within the university. When the “Executive” chooses to follow the BAC’s lead, individuals like me get trampled. There’s power for you, here and now, UCT, 2020.
Source: Maverick Citizen
The Nattrass case and the Dangers of Ahistorical Analogy
File photo – The Rhodes statue at UCT before being removed. Photo supplied. RhodesMustFall-response-to-Rebecca-Hodes.jpg
A number of inaccurate, problematic, and dangerous historical claims have been asserted recently in a flurry of articles attempting to defend Professor Nattrass’s South African Journal of Science publication ‘Why are black South African students less likely to consider studying biological sciences?’ against the critique launched by UCT’s Black Academic Caucus (BAC).
Nattrass has argued that the BAC is a cabal parallel to the Afrikaaner Broederbond at the height of Apartheid.
Her defenders have framed her as a Jew being silenced by a Nazi “German Academic Caucus, or the Deutscher Dozentenbund”; while her white allies at UCT published an open letter of protest, claiming to represent “the veterans of the 1968 Mafeje protest” evoking the 1968 protest as an arbiter for contemporary debates on race.
At the heart of these analogies is the argument that the BAC is dangerous, unnecessary, and unjustifiable. They present decontextualised comparisons and grave misrepresentations of power, distracting from the critiques of the actual weaknesses of Nattrass’s research, and defending against the long overdue, much needed, and difficult work of challenging the reproduction of white privilege and structural racism in institutions like UCT at this current time.
The critiques of Nattrass’s work have been well made elsewhere (see here, here, here and here).
Here, however, we are interested in the defensive reactions to the BAC as a caucus, as a black only, collective space, as if it is up to high ranking white academics to say whether or not this kind of grouping is necessary, and to decide that UCT is not a racist institution. Those making the argument are pulling up selective moments of history to make this point: this includes, their ‘struggle credentials’ (citing their involvement in the Mafeje Affair), claiming that any racial caucus is comparable to the Afrikaaner Broederbond, and any monitoring of academic output is comparable to Nazi-German era censorship.
These are decontextualised snapshots being weaponised to make the same arguments as those crying out ‘’reverse racism,” “All Lives Matter,” or “Not All Men”, used when people benefiting from the current power structures feel excluded from women only, or black only spaces, that exist specifically because of the need to organise outside of the gaze of whiteness/ patriarchy. It is a move to re-center a dominant group in debates and actions taken by subordinated groups attempting to challenge power.
The tears in support of Nattrass are not innocent tears. They fall in a context in which whatever antiracist gains have been made over the past 50 years are facing a global backlash, the reassertion of hard white politics redefining battle lines. We are compelled to write because we understand how quickly backlash can work to silence important and necessary critique. Let us unpack some of the historical claims being mobilised in this instance:
Nazi Germany
In an article entitled “Der Fall Nattrass” Paul Trewhela’s begins with an emotive historical analogy, in which he paints the picture of a lone Jewish academic, in the context of 1930’s Nazi Germany, writing a dissenting article that goes against the hegemonic will of ‘the volk’- the German people, as imagined by the fascist regime.
In Trewhela’s formulation, in 2020, the white South African academic, Natrass is the Jewish dissident, and the Black Academic Caucus are the Nazis (and then later they are the National Party). Just writing this sentence is already absurd. But, these are the conditions of the analogy to which we are called to respond.
Trewhela’s analogy is flimsily held on the charge of censorship; that the BAC’s critique of the article amounts to an infringement on Nattrass’s rights to academic freedom of speech.
Nattrass herself has used the metaphors of book burning and thought policing in her responses, also invoking fascist state violence in her description of the BAC. But It is ludicrous to suggest that white academics in South Africa can claim to be victims of a Nazi-like policy in which anti-hegemonic views are silenced. White academics in South Africa occupy a position of historical, structural, and institutional power and privilege incongruous with the analogy which would read them as potential victims of a facist book burning.
The ahistorical mobalisation of the Nazi Germany analogy is a cheap and dangerous shot. It deliberately inverts current power relations, obscuring ongoing white supremacy, emboldening white conservatives and liberals alike. By casting the victim as perpetrator, it also legitimises further attacks against those fighting against oppression.
The Nazi analogy makes a mockery of the seriousness of the Holocaust when it is brandished about as a piece of historical ammunition to point at whatever ideas are challenging to the very system which caused it; white supremacy. The easy weaponisation of Nazi history is offensive and an insult to the memory of those millions who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazi regime.
It does not matter that Trewhela is Jewish, so are many of us. We read this particular use of the holocaust as a cunning diversion from the real issues of power and privilege at stake in our context, which is increasingly how it is used globally by right wing movements to quash legitimate criticism of the Israeli State.
Lastly, when the figure of the ‘victim’ is expressed solely through analogies to ‘the Jew’ in Nazi Germany, this privileges European history and delinks it from world history.
Nazi fascism did not only persecute Jews but also black people, homosexuals, Roma, placing Jews in a spectrum of targets for white supremicist hatred. Nazi techniques of oppression had after all been developed by Germany’s eugenecist, genocial and colonial history in Southern Africa. To lift Jews out of this spectrum misses the connections between antisemitism and other forms of racism, connections that should create solidarity between Jewish and black histories at UCT. Far from using the holocaust as a leverage for antiracist work everywhere, Trewhela’s Nazi analogy used against the BAC further entrenches the disavowal of world historical atrocities such as colonialism, apartheid and slavery.
Broederbond
The analogy that Nattrass makes to the Broederbond is particularly egregious in our context.
While Nattrass provides a disclaimer that does say that the BAC and the Broederbond do not share an ideology, she intimates that the Black Academic Caucus at UCT holds the same kind of institutional, violent, and secretive power that the Broederbond held in South Africa under apartheid. This is a reading that essentialises race and completely ignores any analysis of contextual power.
The Black Academic Caucus at UCT is an organisation formed because of the need for a black space in a University which still has overwhelmingly white power-structures. The BAC is an organisation formed against racism and systemic power, not as a tool to secretly wield and organise systemic power and spread essentialised racist apartheid ideology as did the Afrikaner Broederbond.
The Broederbond was an organ of those who held state power during apartheid, and had its tentacles in every aspect of South African society: every president of South Africa from 1948 until the end of apartheid was a member of the Broederbond. The Broederbond was a tool through which the Apartheid government, and white Afrikaner elites, enacted their politics and ideologies through white Afrikaans communities. It was a hugely powerful white-supremacist organisation deeply enmeshed within a white supremacist state and society.
The purported comparison between the BAC and the Broederbond draws on the so-called secrecy and anonymity of both organisations.
In the case of the Broederbond, the secrecy was a tactic of institutional power, as a way of carrying out the ‘dirty business’ of the racist state. the Afrikaner Broederbond was an all-male, secret “brotherhood” that was notorious for marshalling and directing power in the Apartheid state. The anonymity of the BAC comes from the fact that black academics at white institutions are targeted and often suffer greatly for speaking against institutional power. UCT is not the only university where black academics have felt the need to create forums and caucus spaces to think and work together in challenging the colonial legacies very much alive in South Africa today. Acting within a caucus, or collective, is important because it shields black academics from the real dangers of acting as named individuals in a hostile institutional context.
The Mafeje Affair
In the commentary on the Nattrass article, involvement in the 1968 Mafeje sit-in has been used as an historic event to defend Nattrass and criticise the UCT executive for not upholding academic freedom. It insinuates that participating in a protest 52 years ago translates into authority on debates about racism today.
The 1968 sit-in was led by white National Union of South African Students (NUSAS)-aligned students to criticise the university’s handling of the appointment of Archie Mafeje to a senior lectureship position at the university. The apartheid state had intervened to prevent Mafeje’s appointment on the grounds that as a black scholar, he should not be teaching at a white university. The university buckled to state pressure and did not appoint Mafeje.
While the students rightly protested the racist education policy, Lungisile Ntsebeza’s research into what became known as the Mafeje Affair reveals how little the 1968 students actually knew of Mafeje and his work, how little follow up there was after the sit in when Mafeje was not hired, and what a scandal it is that UCT and NUSAS use the Mafeje Affair to justify their progressive credentials.
Mafeje died without accepting UCT’s very late apology because the university’s 30-year handling of the case was so deplorable. The case does not stand as a record of UCT and NUSAS anti-racism, but a record of weak politics and shame.
It was around the time of the 1968 sit in that black students who had been part of NUSAS split away to create the South African Student Organisation (SASO), the predecessor of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. They split and formed precisely because the white liberalism at the heart of NUSAS and UCT was experienced by black students not as anti-racism but as racial paternalism: ineffectual, patronising, and far too complicit with the racist status quo.
SASO was a necessary black caucus against the slippery politics of ‘non-racial’, white-led politics in racist institutions and a racist society. After reviewing the long history of the Mafeje Affair, Ntsebeza (in ‘The Mafeje and the UCT saga: unfinished business?’ Social Dynamics, 40:2, 274-288, DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2014.946254, 2014) concludes that the 1968 sit-in was founded not so much on any serious commitment to anti-racism but was based rather on a limited and formal liberal defense of academic freedom.
“It is interesting to note that almost all the students of 1968 that I interviewed in 2008 not only claimed that they never met Mafeje, they never made attempts to find out what happened to him, a clear suggestion that the Mafeje affair was, in the eyes of the students, not about Mafeje, the person, but about themselves and at best, the principle, in this case, academic freedom and the autonomy of universities.”
This is certainly corroborated by the fact that those writing in the name of the 1968 sit-in now defend – without making any comment on the substance of the contentious paper itself – a white professor in a majority-white university against a mostly-black university executive and a small black academic caucus. To use the historical case of the 1968 sit-in as an innocent vector of the academic freedom argument is to repeat, uninterrogated, all of the problems of that moment in the present.
Conclusion
Gathering as a black caucus, as in the cases of SASO, or Rhodes Must Fall or the BAC, is a tactic used in the struggle to overcome the essentialisation of race purported by white supremacists and the continuities of racism denied by white liberals. To ignore or dispute SASO’s explanation for why a black South African student organisation was needed, why BAC is needed today, points to the legacies of liberalism well outlined by Terri Barnes in Uprooting University Apartheid in South Africa: From Liberalism to Decolonization (Routledge, 2018).
All throughout Rhodes Must Fall, white liberals dismissed the calls for decolonisation by the student movement, by claiming to know better, and to have already fixed the problem; ‘we led you, now listen and wait’.
In so doing, they were washing their hands clean of their culpability in upholding the very oppressive structures against which the student movement was pushing. Trewhela, supported by a generation of white liberal academics, has formed a version of history in which the movements they participated in, NUSAS, CP, ANC which embraced multiracialism and assimilation at the cost of radical change, still hold the only legitimate claim to historical and current ideological correctness. These manoeuvres to monopolise the terms and terrain of transformation by flexing unsubstantiated historical analogy need to be questioned.
Part of the problem is in the ways in which dominant narrative histories of the South African liberation struggle have been cemented and sealed in the interest of post ‘94 Rainbownationism at the exclusion of alternative perspectives and politics beyond the liberal approach embodied by the TRC and in the ANC rhetoric of multiracialism, reconciliation, and forgiveness.
Capitalising on the ways that historic struggles against racism have been demobilised and cemented into apolitical and ahistorical narratives that dismisses the structures of racism that were left intact by the process of the negotiated settlement in the 1990s, makes the kinds of comparisons we are seeing in these debates possible.
The misreadings of power and deliberate misuses of historical analogies being used here are a continuity of these debates about who and where we are in history. In other words, they are debates about the reading of power in historical context. Inversions and reversals of Black/White, Jewish/German, are part of a broader conservative discourse that is weaponising academic freedom to defend against any shifts threatening white privilege.
Unsubstantiated ahistoricisms like those used in the Nattrass matter prevent acknowledging the real historical task we are faced with, which is to open our history to critique, and with courage, in order to undo the long violence of colonial and apartheid structuring of our institutions, our knowledges and our lives. DM/MC
Koni Benson , University of the Western Cape, Department of History; Linda Cooper, University of Cape Town, Emeritus Ass/Professor; Judy Favish, University of Cape Town, Retired Director of Institutional Planning; Kelly Gillespie,University of the Western Cape, Anthropology Department; Sarah Godsell, Wits School of Education, Social and Economic Sciences Division, History; Mitchell Hunter, University of the Western Cape, Department of Sociology, MA Student; Talya Lubinsky, University of Western Cape, Department of History, PhD student.
Martin Plaut 