UNIVERSITIES
ADEKEYE ADEBAJO: Moving from ivory tower to ebony tower
After the formal end of apartheid in 1994, the imperative was to transform SA’s racist institutions so that they also reflected the cultures, identity and aspirations of the country’s black majority. Many government-funded universities, however, remain stubbornly untransformed both racially (at faculty level) and intellectually (at the curriculum level). They continue to lack a sense of a Pan-African intellectual awareness or identification with their roots in Africa. As Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani noted after a frustrating stint at the University of Cape Town (UCT) between 1996 and 1999: "SA lacks an Africa-focused intelligentsia in critical numbers ... the institutional apparatus of learning continues to be hostile to Africa-focused thought." One of apartheid’s most powerful weapons was to construct rigid identities that linger today in academia, the media and the popular imagination. Excellence is often equated with whiteness, and "lowering of standards" with blackness.South ...
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