Black Student Intellectuals and the Complexity of Entailment in the #Rhodesmustfall Movement
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Black student intellectuals and the complexity of entailment in the #RhodesMustFall movement Leigh-Ann Naidoo A thesis submitted to the Wits School of Education, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Johannesburg 2020 i Abstract The University of Cape Town (UCT), a colonial university established for the education of elite white liberals during the colonial and apartheid periods in South Africa, became subject to increasing anti-racist critique as it hosted growing numbers of black students and staff after the end of apartheid. This anti-racist dissent slowly accrued and broke in 2015 with the #RhodesMustFall (RMF) student movement. The protest was initially directed towards the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the centre of the university’s main campus but quickly became an important space for a broad critique of South African society and the university’s place within it. This thesis tracks the emergence and the sustained work of the students in the movement over the course of 2015, paying particular attention to the ways in which a cadre of powerful student intellectuals was built in and through the movement. Compelled by the movement’s ideas and its confidence to disrupt post-apartheid’s impotent nonracial consensus, the research took shape in solidarity with the movement and at the heart of the movements planning, coordination and conversation. Through a detailed account of the movement’s occupations of university buildings, its Subcommittee work (in particular its Education Subcommittee) and the creative disruptions of campus space, the thesis makes the argument that fierce intellectual activity was elicited because of the collective anti-hegemonic entailment of black students in the disruption of the white university. Anti-hegemonic entailment is read as grounded radical praxis that critiques and shifts the normative ground of oppression and privilege. The emphasis on entailment is to recognise the complicity that is created at the level of subjective experience in reinforcing oppressive practices and structures. The capacity to refuse hegemonic entailment in systems of oppression, especially as a generational cohort, requires immense intellectual work and collective action. The thesis uses several concepts from the literature on intellectuals to understand the work of the student movement. Most importantly Wallerstein’s notion of the “honest intellectual”, Said’s idea of the intellectual as oppositional and exiled, and a range of writers from the black radical tradition to argue that making explicit the political, moral and historical stakes of the white university allowed students in RMF to take over the intellectual project of the university. During 2015, black students became the new educators of a dishonest university institution, in so doing creating themselves as the more compelling intellectuals of the moment. The negotiated settlement that ended formal apartheid focused on the priority of racial desegregation, which opened historically white institutions of all kinds to black people. In education, this strategy included black students in white schools and universities, staging black proximity to white institutions without any reworking of their institutional culture. This thesis traces how black students began to reflect on their experiences of racism and other forms of oppression and marginalisation at the university as an experience of painful alienation and assimilation, an experience they described as “black pain”. These alienating experiences fuelled anti- assimilationist impulses and they began the collective intellectual and activist work of painstakingly revealing the hidden curriculum of colonial education and white subjectivity at the heart of the project of UCT. RMF took over the pedagogical space of UCT during the time of the movement. It also took on the responsibility for changing the nature of the institution, refusing the liberal form and politics of “transformation”, and asserting in its place a radical form and politics of decolonisation. The thesis makes careful account of the critical collective conversations and actions that the movement hosted, theorising that its critical confrontations across different politics and subjectivities within the condition of black struggle created a rich democratic and anti-hierarchical praxis. One of the most important expressions of this praxis was the experimental relationship established between plenary and caucus. RMF, along with other black-led student formations at historically white universities, gave shape to the decolonisation agenda at South African universities and beyond, and informed many of the ideas of the more mass-based anti-privatisation-focused national student movement that emerged in October 2015 under the name #FeesMustFall (FMF). Keywords: Black students; Intellectuals; Student movement; Entailment; South Africa; RhodesMustFall Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own unaided work. It is being submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. It has not been submitted before for any degree or examination at any other University. Leigh-Ann Naidoo 26th day of November in the year 2020 Acknowledgements None of this would have been possible were it not for the brave comrades of Rhodes Must Fall, named and unnamed. Special thanks go to the eleven intellectuals who made time to be interviewed in 2015 and again in 2016 in the midst of intense struggle, and from whom I learned so much: Alex Hotz Asher Gamedze Brian Kamanzi Duduzile Ndlovu Mase Ramaru Masixole Mlandu Mbali Matandela Mohammed Jameel Abdulla Ntokozo Dlala Ru Slayan Thato Pule Thank you to Kelly Gillespie for walking and talking with me for more than a decade and a half. You know this story intimately. You have heard about it the most. I look forward to ongoing questioning, conversation and action with you. I would like to thank my supervisor Yael Shalem for the guidance and support throughout this process. Even though we definitely did not always agree, the intense and robust conversations were such an important part of my learning and growing. To my friends and comrades at Wits who stood firm against the neoliberal and authoritarian management during the FMF struggles. Who stayed even after the stun grenades, police, and private security were unleashed onto students. And who continue to do the critical educational work required to critique and change the unequal and violent status quo. To my colleagues at UCT School of Education, in particular my Adult Ed family of Lyndal Pottier, June Saldanha, Salma Ismail, and Linda Cooper, thank you for holding a space for radical pedagogy inside the university and for supporting and caring for each other and our students the way you do. To Yunus Omar and Azeem Badroodien for always having an open door and helping me think through how to navigate the complexity and impossibility of an historically (some would say currently) white university. Support for this work was received from the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) through a doctoral scholarship as part of the Education and Emancipation Project of the Centre for Critical Research on Race and Identity (CCRRI) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) and the Teaching and Learning Development Capacity Improvement Programme (in partnership with the European Union). Also the Next Generation in Africa Programme of the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC). Dedication For Lerato Gillespie-Naidoo who has taught me so much Table of Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................................. ii Declaration ........................................................................................................................................ iv Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................ v Dedication .......................................................................................................................................... vi List of Appendices .............................................................................................................................. x List of Abbreviations ........................................................................................................................ xi Introduction: Making sense .............................................................................................................. 1 1. Common sense abounds ............................................................................................................................ 4 2. Building good sense .................................................................................................................................. 6 3. RMF’s Analysis ........................................................................................................................................ 7 Chapter One: Black Intellectuals and the Force of Entailment .................................................. 16 1.1 Gramsci and the opening of the category of the intellectual ................................................................. 16 1.2 Edward Said’s exiled intellectual .......................................................................................................... 17 1.3 Wallerstein and the