‘The reason you have this latter-day performance of racism at Stellenbosch University is precisely because the university is changing, not because it is untransformed… The more you push transformation as a university leader or leadership, the more the pushback becomes quite dramatic.”

These were the words of Jonathan Jansen, professor of education at Stellenbosch University (SU), at a panel unpacking the recent report on an investigation into racist incidents at SU. The report, authored by retired judge Sisi Khampepe, was released on 25 October and has sparked fierce debate about transformation at the institution.

Read more in Daily Maverick: “Race relations report reveals how donors, alumni and interest groups hold Stellenbosch University hostage” 

Jansen was joined on the panel by Dr Busisiwe Raphuthing, a medical practitioner and graduate of the SU medical faculty, and Professor Mark Smith, director of Stellenbosch Business School and head of its transformation committee. The discussion was chaired by Dr Armand Bam, the head of social impact at the university’s Business School.

The investigation into racism at SU was triggered by two incidents that took place in May. The first involved a verbal altercation at a Law Faculty dance in which a white student allegedly made disparaging and racist remarks about an Indian student.

The second took place in the Huis Marais residence. It involved a white first-year student, Theuns du Toit, entering the room of a black first-year student, Babalo Ndwayana, and urinating on Ndwayana’s possessions while intoxicated.

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Jansen drew parallels between the Huis Marais urination incident and a racist act that took place at the University of the Free State (UFS) Reitz residence in 2008. The latter incident involved white students from Reitz residence making black university cleaning staff consume food that the students appeared to have urinated on.

Jansen said the Reitz incident occurred at a time when black student enrolment was escalating at UFS — a phenomenon that has been echoed at SU in recent years.

“Stellenbosch [University] now has more black students than ever before in its 100-year history, and more black academics, including professors, than a mere decade ago,” he said.

“In the next five years, this will be a majority black campus, as far as student enrolments are concerned.”

Within this context, the urination incidents can be seen as a “strategy to protest [against] black incursion into the intimate [white] spaces, such as residences”, suggested Jansen.

Practical solutions

Raphuthing emphasised the need for practical solutions to the ongoing issues of racism at SU. These must go beyond transformation tools that “look really good on paper” but fall short of real impact.

“The problem of the University of Stellenbosch is the foundation, because my Afrikaans brethren — brothers and sisters — feel as though it is their university, it is their territory, it is their space and their language. That has come out strongly, and the university has entertained it,” she said. 

The university needed to stop undermining transformation by appeasing those who finance the institution and prioritise Afrikaans above other cultures, said Raphuthing.

One of the findings of the Khampepe report was that SU had previously tried to address the well-known discriminatory and problematic internal culture at Huis Marais residence by converting it to a mixed-gender residence. However, alumni then financed litigation on behalf of the current students to ensure the residence remained solely male.

“Many of the residences have very involved alumni who discourage and lobby against any changes that might, in their eyes, erode the identity and essence of their former residence,” stated the report. 

Stellenbosch University needed to make quick and firm decisions on the transformation of residences, said Jansen. The leadership problems and alienation of black students within these spaces should be addressed.

“My experience is … that there are many progressive white staff and students who can, alongside their black counterparts, completely rewire the social and cultural ethos of the residences, so that the alienation many black students and staff reported can be overcome,” he said.

Such changes would doubtless result in some financial and political backlash for the university, but they were necessary for the creation of an inclusive and affirming environment in the long term.

“We always think of transformation as only benefiting black people. Actually, it also benefits white people, to bring [them] out of modes of thinking that have shaped this university for over a century,” said Jansen.

In the wake of the release of the SU racism report, DA MP Leon Schreiber tweeted that the party was calling on the Het Jan Marais Nasionale Fonds, SU’s biggest donor, to defund the institution until Vice-Chancellor Wim de Villiers rejected the report’s “recommendation for the abolition of Afrikaans”.

Breaking: DA calls on Het Jan Marais Fonds, the biggest donor to Stellenbosch University, to defund the institution until Wim de Villiers rejects the Khampepe recommendation for the abolition of Afrikaans. Close the money taps until constitutional language rights are respected.

— Leon Schreiber (@Leon_Schreib) November 9, 2022

Khampepe’s report makes no mention of abolishing any language at SU. Under the language policy recommendations, it suggests that the university “consider reviewing and revising its language policy to remove the possibility of language exclusion through the preference of Afrikaans”.

During the panel discussion, Jansen suggested that there are those for whom the perceived threat to Afrikaans is not only about language, but also white identity and cultural preservation.

“They just cannot imagine a world in which Afrikaans is simply another language in a richly multilingual world,” he said. DM/MC