South African Higher Education as Mutating Plantation: Critical Reflections on Navigating a Racialized Space

Abstract

In 1994, South Africa’s political governance changed from being a White minority-controlled apartheid state to a democracy—a relatively peaceful transition underpinned by a social cohesion and reconciliation ideology, namely, that all (both perpetrators and the oppressed) were victims requiring healing in the new proverbial “rainbow nation.” Reconciling racial fractures, anti-Blackness and unevenness of the higher education landscape, however, remains elusive. In this paper, we engage narrative inquiry to reflect as academics of color on our experiences in the last two and a half decades, of negotiating a mutating higher education space still haunted by residual racial hegemony and anti-Blackness in almost every sphere of the fraternity. We draw on Grosfoguel’s Fanonian-inspired constructs, namely, the “zones of being and non-being” and his conception of racism as beyond mere color racism but as a “dehumanization related to the materiality of domination.” We argue that color racism as it relates to the traditional apartheid plantation model has morphed into a neoliberal plantation in the higher education space with new colonial masters (managerial elites in the zone of being) and that Black students and Black academics continue to experience the university as alien as they assimilate hegemonic western Eurocentric culture and epistemology. We consider how we might stand in the cracks, look through and prise open such cracks in agentic contemplation of a resistance to emerging new forms of racism and anti-Blackness that present in South African higher education and how we might respond to student activism (the #RhodesMustFall movement) that calls for curriculum transformation and decolonization. An agenda at risk of subversion by the neoliberal grand narrative.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Data generated from personal memories are corroborated in several research works produced by the authors (the most recent one is Maistry et al., 2021).

2 While colonization/coloniality, neoliberalism and anti-Blackness are complexly connected, anti-Blackness in particular, is a deliberate, antagonistic construction of Blackness as non-humanness, in which racialised Black bodies (Dumas, 2016) are rendered sub-human, imbued with animalistic, primitive traits, inherently irrational and deviant (Wallace, 2022). Coloniality sustains a reification of anti-Blackness—of Black as slave and therefore sub-human (object) “deserving” of aggression, violence and humiliation.

3 “Swart gewaar” is an Afrikaans term which translates into English as “black danger.” It was invoked during the apartheid era and referred to the security threat that a Black majority population would have for South Africa.

4 Whitely thinking was invoked by Taylor (2004) alongside concepts such as whiteness and whiteliness. Whereas whiteness is the idealized human experience, whitely thinking is the mainstream epistemology of the modern world which has displaced and subjugated the ways of knowing of Black people to mere culture/lived experience. Whitely thinking is relevant to this research because whitely thinking engenders anti-Blackness. For more detail on whitely thinking (see Lamola, 2018; Taylor, 2004).