A few days ago, former premier of the Western Cape and federal chairperson of the DA, Helen Zille, made a curious post on Twitter. She shared an image of the Times World University Rankings from the year 2011 to 2022. The rankings show that in 2011, UCT was ranked number 107 while in 2022, it was ranked 183.
In the years in-between, the rankings fluctuated within the 103 to 155 range. The impolitic Zille captioned her post: “The Woke Fall of the University of Cape Town now starting to reflect the Times World University Rankings. The tragic story of our times.”
The insinuation was that the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements that played a critical role in demanding transformation at UCT and other universities were to blame for the “poor” performance of Africa’s best performing university.
The argument that protesting for institutional change is linked to a decline in the quality of education offered by the institution is very common. It is championed by those who benefit from universities being exclusionary and anti-black.
It is no secret that Zille is an incorrigible racist. She has demonstrated this many times, with the recent incident being just a few weeks ago when she boldly stated that being poor in Langa, a township in Cape Town, is better than being poor in any other township in SA.
It escaped Zille that Langa, like all other townships, was designed precisely to cement the disenfranchisement and poverty of black people. Townships by their nature were created with the specific objective of keeping black people locked in a cycle of lack and hunger. They are dehumanising and de-civilising spaces in which millions of black people have been hurled by a system that Zille has once claimed benefited our country.
And because she is a racist, it stands to reason that she would also harbour elements of philistinism. After all, racism goes hand-in-hand with bigotry and mindlessness. Racism, an ideology that is born from pseudo-science and legitimised through violence and conquest, is deeply unintellectual. Racists, by extension, are unintelligent despite their claims to cognitive superiority.
Zille is the evidence. In sharing the Times World University Rankings that showed that UCT was ranked 107 in 2011 and 183 in 2022, she neglected to study the methodology that was used to arrive at these numbers.
Had she done so, she would have known that in 2011, there were roughly 200 participants in the rankings while in 2022, there were about 1,600. This means that contrary to her argument that UCT’s global ranking is declining, it is in fact improving. Coming out at number 183 out of 1,600 universities is far more impressive than coming out at number 107 out of 200.
This is a simple statistical fact – one that Zille either intentionally ignored because racists generally resent facts, or one that she simply does not understand because statistical analysis demands a level of cognitive ability that racists generally do not possess.
The reality of the situation is that Zille, and many others like her, want SA to remain exactly as it is. They want us to maintain a country of two nations – with a white nation that thrives and a black nation that resides in poverty. She wants black people to remain diminished to a permanent state of childhood and a zone of non-being.
Her post was not about UCT rankings, it was about young black students who are fighting every day for institutions of higher learning to transform. She hates them because they represent a future that scares her and other racists – a future in which black people reclaim their rightful place in civilisation as, above all else, intellectuals.
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