This week, as I watched buildings at the University of Fort Hare’s campus in eDikeni (Alice) on fire, I was forced, yet again, to reflect on the eight years that I’ve worked at this historical institution. To me, protesters’ allegations of weak management are out of tune with what I have witnessed.
When I arrived here in 2018, I encountered a campus where it was difficult to find a functioning toilet, my teaching venue was not equipped with furniture, and the windows were covered in tattered curtains from the 1970s. It was not a dignified space for my students to learn in.
It took several years just to stabilise the institution after so many years of neglect and looting, because right from the start, those responsible for the looting ran a campaign of “VC must go” – calling on the removal of Sakhela Buhlungu, an internationally recognised scholar and former Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cape Town. He was tasked by former university council chairperson Thandi Orleyn to clean up the mess.
Buhlungu took a bold step by inviting the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) into the institution to investigate corruption. Several cases are about to be brought to prosecution. This, I would argue, is part of the context of these renewed calls for our vice-chancellor’s head.
In response to the clean-up campaign, there have been attempts to assassinate Buhlungu’s character by means of smear campaigns, as is yet again the case with this protest wave.
Politically, the aim has been to get the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) to intervene by putting the university under administration. It is hoped that this would bring an end to the investigations and prosecutions into corruption and murder.
By murder, I refer to the assassination of our colleagues Peet Roets and Mboneli Vesele, Roets for attempting to clean up the transport department, and Vesele as the vice-chancellor’s personal protector. Then there are the bullets that went through neighbours’ and colleagues’ windows, lodging shards of intimidation in their walls.
Despite this push-back against renewal, improvements started to kick in. There is still a long way to go to restore Fort Hare’s reputation as a primary institution of higher learning, but in eight years, I have noticed the University of Fort Hare improving on multiple fronts.
For five years now, up until last week’s events, we have not lost a single day of teaching due to protests. This was because our student leadership understood that the standing of their degrees depended on stability, management was responsive to student grievances, but also because there were consequences for students who broke the law. Protest at a university is good, but arson and intimidation are not.
We have seen an increase in the number of publications in quality journals and a decline in predatory publications (once a disturbing quarter of all our publications), we have witnessed the introduction of a more strenuous process of assessing master’s and doctoral degrees, the renovation of the classrooms where we teach, universal access to buildings being constructed so wheelchair users can enter spaces they have been denied.
We have seen resources turned away from companies that benefit at the expense of students and staff, new residences built, unqualified financial audits (now four in a row), and the beginnings of a process where our students can study with dignity.
In my reading, the reforms at the University of Fort Hare have redirected resources away from politically connected businesspeople and staff towards students and the institutional infrastructure that supports the project.
We have seen large-scale renovations, beautified gardens, the completion of the early childhood development centre in East London, and we will soon see the expansion of the Alice library and a new student centre on the East London campus.
The water treatment capacity in Alice has doubled due to an intervention from the university, benefitting the entire town, not just the university.
We have seen the improvement of academic governance and the selection of students, all leading to what I experience as better prepared students in my classrooms. We have also seen resources directed towards an increase in academic appointments, especially in a context where only 25% of the staff budget was spent on teaching staff in the recent past.
After decades of apartheid and post-apartheid institutional capture and neglect, there is still a long way to go, also to restore institutional autonomy to levels experienced at more privileged universities.
At times, I wonder what motivates our academic leadership to stay the course and not give up. Why would anyone risk their life stopping corruption, especially given the number of high-profile attempted or real assassinations of both character and body?
My impression is that a nationalist project underlies these attempts to limit rent-seeking and corruption and to redirect resources from politically connected businesspeople and staff who are linked to their interests towards the benefit of committed staff and our students.
In building post-colonial countries, the development scholar Thandika Mkandawire made a case for a civic nationalism as a developmental driver. This kind of nationalism is a soft nationalism, as opposed to nationalisms directed at the advancement of networked elites, what Franz Fanon called the comprador bourgeoisie, at the expense of ordinary people.
In the South African case, this civic nationalism is by necessity one directed at the improvement of the lives, livelihoods, and futures of black South Africans, but in my experience, it is also a nationalism that has room for involving people like me.
It is pertinent that the leadership of this project is black, as counterbalance to internalised racism and the exploitation of this by populist politicians who claim resources for themselves and reward support accordingly but sparingly.
In contrast to populist nationalisms that serve corrupt elites, this renewal project is redistributive in nature – its aim is to enhance the lives of excluded people and to achieve this, those with access to resources must give up their claim to unlimited upward social mobility for the greater good.
Brand new, state-of-the-art laboratories were destroyed this week. The buildings that were burned down will be restored and renovated yet again. What we need at Fort Hare is recognition of what has been achieved and support to not allow this important experiment at uncapturing an important institution to be derailed.
Andries Bezuidenhout is Professor of Development Studies at UFH’s Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Development.