No doubt as black people we all sit and wait annually for the autumn season to witness the graduation ceremonies of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN).
We love its graduation editions mainly for three reasons.
First, they showcase who we are in every sense of the word: a peace-loving people who have a huge honour for another human being. We recognise a person in their fullness, background and culture, aspirations and journey, and heritage.
Second, they reveal the personalities and families behind just the student numbers. Universities erase the humanity of their students by categorising them into groups of numbers and colours that are treated as a homogeneous group. This is foreign to how we recognise people in our own communities where each person carries a name, surname, clan history, nickname, and social memory of how their character is and the impact of its behavioural patterns in the community throughout their upbringing.
Third, they are also an anti-establishment protest against the hegemonic decorum that our British-orientated universities share and impart on these young people – sometimes to the extent of their erasure and dehumanisation. In these British universities located in Africa, black students cannot speak their home languages and express their thoughts. The models of life from their own communities are disregarded, and they cannot freely express who they are.
The graduation ceremony is a platform of achievement for them to celebrate how they finally managed to overcome all the constraints that the university system has placed on their lives for so long.
I refer to universities in SA as British institutions because Professor Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni also reminds us that “the existing universities in Africa did not grow from the African seed, they were never a product of deliberate and slow growth from the African sociocultural and politico-economic developments. They were all transplantations from Europe.”
In addition, these universities were built specifically for white people during the colonial apartheid period and have existed under that period and right across the world for many centuries. During this period, black people were not allowed anywhere near them.
Today, our society has been undergoing a complex process of democratisation for almost three decades. Still, these British universities of colonial rule remain exclusionary towards black people in economic, epistemic, and in sociopolitical terms. These universities remain unaffordable and inaccessible to black families. They teach European modernity that has nothing to do with ordinary South African life and its challenges, which a black student will find irrelevant to their consciousness.
They conduct teaching, learning, and engagement in English, a language spoken in only 7% of family households in the country; and their cultural makeup and soft skills exchange are done in a framework and in mannerism that only white students find comfortable. In this environment, black students must be quiet, afraid, and invincible. They must behave, adapt, and go the extra mile just to live and learn.
They must make themselves smaller and lower their voices and music. They must be grateful for being there. They must obey white authority. They must tolerate racism.
They must be domesticated good blacks who must speak English like white people to stand a good chance of fitting in on the domestic economy to have a chance at a decent future. They must be black people wearing white masks. Their souls must be white and they must be heavily immersed in white culture.
This is how student life occurs in SA.
It was therefore ironic to witness UKZN graduation celebrations embracing an African rhythm on a Monday only for a racist incident to break out at Stellenbosch University on a Friday. This week demonstrated the crisis we still have to deal with in universities and SA as a whole.
The work and mission for the decolonisation of education, culture, the economy and society must never be postponed. It must be a daily struggle because it is clearly a mission for black people to fight for their humanity. We will never survive racist humiliation in SA unless we fight for the decolonisation of this country in radical terms.
Those who are watching and are disgusted and frustrated at UKZN graduations need to have their colonial mindsets checked, their contextual existence evaluated, their false sense of success and indebtedness middle-classness examined. They are imprisoned by a white mentality. They are jealous and never had the courage to express their blackness and resistance during their own time as students.
They need to shut up.
• Dr Mzileni is a research associate in the faculty of humanities at Nelson Mandela University
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