Ethnic Studies: South Africa Reflections

       Subject:     Some reflections of the visit to South Africa, July, 2015

       Submitted to: President Carol Quillen and Dean Verna Case

       From: Professors Brenda Flanagan, Hilton Kelly, Dan Aldridge, Alice Wiemers,

                     and Caroline Fache

       Date: August 17^th, 2015

Dear President Quillen and Dean Case,

I write on behalf of the six Davidson College faculty who travelled to South Africa in July 2015 under the auspices of the Innovation Grant received from Davidson College. Although the group will present its findings in more depth during the  school year on campus and beyond, and on the digital website that the Ethnic Studies Minors set up last year, it seems appropriate that we should send you, first, our deepest appreciation for the funds to make what, by all accounts, was a most intellectually stimulating journey, and second, to provide you with this brief glimpse of some of what we accomplished.

Five of the six of us who went on this trip have provided snapshots below of our main academic engagements, but during our visit to Johannesburg we were able to complete a full day of service as well as visit a number of museums, prisons, and other sites all related to our theme, Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in South Africa and North America. Still very fresh in my mind is the memory of the group packing books at the Rotary Club on the coldest day of the winter. Fingers freezing, we packed over a thousand books and then took them to a school that has no library in one of the sub-townships in Soweto. From Cape Town, we were able to visit Robben Island, where a guide who himself had been a prisoner on the island, showed us through the cells where leaders such as Nelson Mandela were held, and during my solo visit to Durban, I was able to visit the home and publishing house of Mahatma Gandhi, and the 100 acres he purchased; land that is now occupied by thousands of displaced people. About these visits, much more will be related in the coming months. For now, please see these brief responses:

Report from Hilton Kelly:

The highlight of our South Africa trip was sitting down with colleagues at several universities to discuss transnational racial struggles.  At the University of the Witwatersrand, we had the most stimulating conversation with Dr. Sarah Nuttal, the director, and several faculty in the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER).  The hot topics included, but were not limited to, criminal justice (high incarceration rates for blacks), education (savage inequalities), and post-racialism (or what they called “non-racialism”).  It was at WiSER that we began to see the “shocking similarities” and “subtle differences” between the U.S. and the RSA.  Out of this conversation, I met Professor Jonathan Klaaren who has invited me back next year to participate in a Socio-Legal Workshop; this opportunity will give me an outlet to present my new project on white faculty suing historically black colleges and universities in the United States.

 At the University of Cape Town, we continued making connections between the U.S. and South Africa with an intimate discussion hosted by Dr. Jane Bennett—the director of the African Gender Institute.  Dr. Bennett started the conversation frankly by telling us that there were clear remnants of the apartheid system in South Africa, which she believed had everything to do with continuing residential segregation.  In fact, she stated that South Africa was a “flag democracy” at best and that race and gender equality remain a struggle within the context of their multiracial society (Black, Indian, Coloured, and White) in spite of having one of the most liberal constitutions in the world.

 Report Daniel W. Aldridge, III:

During our conversation with teachers and scholars at the University of the Witwatersrand I had the opportunity to talk to teacher/scholars who taught African history and US history.  I was interested in hearing how the history of South Africa since the beginnings of majority rule in 1994 is contested in the society.  While Nelson Mandela is lionized in South African media and in “official” discourses such as presented at the Apartheid Museum, Constitution Hill, and the Robben Island Museum, scholars indicate that he is less popular among poorer blacks than we might assume.  While whites, Coloreds, and middle-class blacks are more likely to celebrate his memory, the poor black majority remain somewhat alienated and dismayed by the limitations of change in post-Apartheid South Africa.  One teacher compared him unfavorably to Malcolm X whom she praised for what she saw as his honesty and integrity.  While, as a civil rights historian, I thought her assessment of Malcolm X was somewhat romanticized, I was intrigued by the comparison which highlights the points of fruitful interchange between South African history and African-American history.

I was interested to hear about the work of the gender studies scholars at the University of Cape Town, but since I am by no means an expert on gender studies I’ll leave a detailed analysis of that conversation to others.

I was particularly interested in learning more about the politics and sense of identity of the Cape Colored community while talking to scholars at the University of the Western Cape.  While some of the Cape Colored identify as “black” in the sense of being victims of white supremacy they also maintain a distinct identity of their own.  For example they seek to preserve speaking Afrikaans although their version of Afrikaans apparently differs from that spoken by white Afrikaners.  I speculate that the differences are similar to those between African American Vernacular English and notionally white Standard American English.  For many African Americans retaining aspects of African American Vernacular English is a way of preserving their identity.  I was also interested to learn that many Coloreds feel alienated by the African National Congress and have become supporters of the ANC’s main opposition the Democratic Alliance which currently governs local government in the Cape.  I was struck by how similar the Cape Colored are to African Americans.  We are both in fact mixed-race populations who speak European languages that we have adopted and made our own.  We are also both very much a “Western” people who are also “black.”

Report from Alice Wiemers:

Beyond generating valuable ideas for my individual coursework (described last), scholarly activities in South Africa suggested that continued transnational conversations could be a source of innovation for Africana Studies at Davidson.

Discussions at Wits, WiSER, and UWC helped me understand how, as in the US, Africana scholars in South Africa have been deeply influenced by national contexts of (and struggles against) racial oppression. As a historian, I was particularly interested to learn about academics’ involvement in debates over public memorialization. The University of the Witwatersrand, a center for anti-apartheid scholarship in the 1970s and 80s, was responsible for creating much of the official history of apartheid and anti-apartheid struggles at many of the historical sites we visited (most prominently in the Apartheid Museum). While some of the historians at Wits seemed to rest on these narratives, other scholars we met challenged their implications in so-called “non-racial” South Africa. At WiSER, staff argued that memorialization projects had created exclusionary “national” narratives out of a deeply regional history—playing into post-apartheid politics of xenophobia.[1] At the University of Western Cape, I was able to talk to Ciraj Rassool and Mogamet Kamedien (an independent historian and community activist) about their efforts to change not only the content but also the process of public memorialization—an effort that has led to “community museum” projects like the District Six Museum and the Slave Lodge in Cape Town. More broadly, South African academics are challenged to engage in discussions and criticism of the academy itself, evident in struggles over public space at the University of Cape Town (http://rhodesmustfall.co.za) and language policy at Stellenbosch University (https://twitter.com/openstellies). These South African struggles suggest multiple openings for Davidson students and faculty to engage in comparisons and parallel conversations about knowledge and memory in the US.

I was encouraged to find that our South African colleagues also saw benefits to having conversations with us. In many of our meetings, we discussed how Davidson’s Africana Studies Department hoped to bridge (and critique, and understand) historical divides between scholars trained in African Studies, Black Studies, and Africana Studies traditions. Our South African colleagues were excited to talk about convergences and divergences in imaginaries of race, diaspora and African-ness within and beyond South Africa. Departments in South Africa have few faculty members with specialties outside of southern Africa, and they struggle to define the relationship between national, regional, and diasporic histories. Historians at Wits described equal, if not greater, challenges teaching West African history as they did teaching US history.  (Not surprising when one considers, as Keith Breckenridge at WiSER pointed out, that South Africa currently employs fewer professional historians than Michigan State University.) Their enthusiasm suggests that future collaborations will be welcome on both sides.

The trip also yielded important material and insights for my courses at Davidson. In my Urban Africa course this fall, I will be teaching WiSER directors Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe’s book Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis as well as a number of works from historians at Wits. It was invaluable to my teaching to be able to discuss our impressions of Johannesburg with these scholars, and to hear their critiques of the sources I will be using in class. Conversations about memorialization also led me to start planning a course on memory and memorialization in African history that would tie these issues to long-standing debates about orality, memory, and “tradition” in African Studies. I hope to offer this as a 200-level course in the 2016-17 school year.

Report from Caroline Fache:

The scholarly activities were one of the highlights of the trip for me. The discussion forum with our colleagues at the WISER Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand and colleagues at the University of Cape Town were very engaging. I was struck and impressed by the amount and quality of the research produced by our South African counterparts.

A most wonderful aspect of our conversations was the transparency and frankness around the apartheid. Not to say that South Africans have managed to reach all their goals successfully, it is still a society with great inequalities and issues, but the official discourse and overall attitude towards a painful, shameful history seems honest, which is refreshing. I am aware that we only met a very limited sample of the population, but through the people we met, as well as the discourse in the media, and the work on and around the memorialization of the Apartheid regime. Horrendous sites of memory are not hidden or transformed into sites of celebration of the end of Apartheid only. Rather, they remain painful images for all to see, so that such horrors do not happen again.

My research interests and references around race relations and racial struggles are located outside of the US sphere and focus on West, North and East African migrations to Europe, where race is defined and experienced in different ways. Historically the human and cultural landscapes were very different in Johannesburg and Cape Town, because of the populations that inhabited the different regions, the languages, the Dutch vs. British influence, the mine land vs. coastline, etc. However, it was amazing to see how racial categories were claimed in different ways in both spaces. In Johannesburg, where people were Black and Anglophone, the conversations centered more around socio-economic disparities and the black/white divide whereas in Cape Town, there were many nuances within the non-white community, Afrikaans speakers, Cape Coloureds, Blacks, Xhosa speakers. There were clear tensions between the different linguistic communities, which echoed some of the ongoing debates in Francophone West Africa, namely with French, which some speakers reclaim as an African language. The current intricate re-organization/ new organization of the South African society is one that piqued my curiosity, and will inform my teaching of the Francophone postcolonial West African societies.

Report from Brenda Flanagan:

   While my colleagues were at Wits University, I was able to visit four secondary schools in two different townships near Johannesburg. At each school, the main audiences were seniors. My primary objective with these young people was to provide them with the motivation to not only continue their education, but to try to meet, with optimism, some of the tremendous challenges they are about to face in a future with bleak prospects. My lectures, readings, and conversations were a mixture of the history of the struggle for civil rights both in the U.S. and in South Africa, and the valuable ways in which writers inscribe and transmit some of that history, with stories of my own background and achievements. Of the South African writers available to us in the US during the years of apartheid, these young people know nothing, so it was important for me to let them know about the ways in which writers like Nadine Gordimer inspired our views of the South African struggle, and to encourage them to become writers themselves. To that end, I also conducted writing workshops at two venues in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

From administrators in Johannesburg I learned that one of the schools has adopted innovative afternoon programs that keep students in classrooms until their parents return from work. These programs are academic, and have proved to be successful in raising student achievement. It’s possible that lessons can be learned from this program and put to use in other African countries, and perhaps in areas of the US, so there’s more to be explored here. In the meanwhile, beneath the surface of many of South Africa’s problems, and the future for its young people,  is race.

In Cape Town especially, racial identity is a confusing and complex issue, and one that I will be trying to understand in the coming months. In Durban, the mix of  the descendants of indentured laborers who were brought to work in the sugar cane fields  with locally born people took me back to the West Indies where tensions have arisen between the two groups, and the nature of the relationships between these groups need to be explored, analyzed, and more importantly, fixed for they have the sure potential for more trouble. Durban, then, presents a very different racial conundrum than either Johannesburg or Cape Town, and is a source ripe with research possibilities.

My visit to Durban was perhaps the most informative of all the places I went to in South Africa. Durban’s population is very much like that of several West Indian communities, and I was curious to see and learn about the mix of the descendants of indentured laborers brought in to South Africa from India, and the local native population.

Driving in from the airport I thought I was back in Trinidad or Barbados—or even parts of Louisiana-- as we made our way through miles and miles of cane fields jutting up out of the hillsides. My Indian taxi-driver, who would prove to be my essential guide during my stay, talked about the tense relationships that exists between “Black” South Africans and the Indian population in Durban. These communities still live separately, and according to my driver and others with whom I spoke in Durban, the tension has existed because Indians were classified at a higher social, and therefore economic level that “Blacks” during the period of apartheid. Nothing, since the dismantling of that system, has been done to improve relations between the groups.

The most prominent Indian in South Africa, and revered especially in Durban, is still Mahatma Gandhi. I was able to visit his home in the Durban hills, and to see the township that now houses thousands of poor non-Indian South Africans who have set down their stakes on land that Gandhi purchased.

The small museum near his former home, just above the township, is open for use by this community for meetings, and other events.

In the splendid Valley of 1000 Hills, the descendants of the might KwaZulu nation still thrive. They have established the site as a major tourist attraction, and visitors are treated to dances and a condensed history of the nation.

As Durban is on the coast, many people are employed in the service industries. The sea is warm in Durban during South Africa’s winter, so many  wealthy South Africans own beach-front apartments and homes. The disparities between rich and poor are most profound in the downtown areas where I was constantly warned that my life was in danger if I were to walk the streets alone.

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By Bukelani Mboniswa.

Proud to be black
Titi from Claremont High School

Who am I
Well
As for me
Black is the definition of proud
Black is not just my definition of proud black is who I am
Things might be said it does not bring me down
I am not defined by what people say or think
My main definition for black is
Being who I am
The loving and cherishing of my body (umzimbawam)
Appreciating and being who I am
Confidence is running in my blood
Khuluma ndi lalele (talk and I listen) khuluma ndi vile (talk I have heard)
I am proud to be who I am because
I am
African