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18 May 2022 | Story Nombulelo Shange | Photo Andre Damons
Nombulelo Shange is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the UFS and Chairperson of the University of the Free State Womxn’s Forum.

Opinion article by Nombulelo Shange, Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Free State and Chairperson of the University of the Free State Women’s Forum.


Overview of African Union’s role in apartheid resistance 

 

South Africa’s democracy might not have existed today without the sacrifices and support of African states and their citizens who supported the Pan-Africanist ideals of a free and united Africa. Ideals that were pushed by the then Organisation of African Unity (OAU), later named the African Union (AU). Africa Day is a celebration of the formation of the AU, which was founded on 25 May 1963. The political and financial support that the OAU extended to South Africans resisting apartheid differed with the changing tides of the struggle. When the apartheid police were violently crushing student resistance in the 1970s, many fled to different African countries, where the OAU funded their stay. They did the same to support the rise of the armed struggle; uMkhonto weSizwe soldiers were assisted by the OAU, especially when it came to living expense while in exile. They also threw a lot of their efforts into international lobbying for the liberation of South Africa. 

Influential figure in the formation of the OAU, post-independence Ghanian leader and scholar Kwame Nkrumah, said: 
“The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the continent.”

The OAU maintained this outlook for decades, with South Africa being one of the last African states to gain freedom in 1994, where most gained their freedom from colonial rule between the 1950s and 1970s. There is a long history of how the OAU and various African states fought for our freedom as black South Africans, a history so long that this brief overview does not even begin to illustrate the depth of the solidarity we received from different African countries. 

A xenophobic South Africa

The xenophobic South Africa we find ourselves in today is a huge betrayal of the work and sacrifices of leaders such as Nkrumah and the citizens who backed his dreams of a united and liberated Africa. The colonial governments left many social challenges, and it was not uncommon for them to purposefully destroy infrastructure as they left the colonies. Citizens would have been justified in demanding that the OAU direct its resources and attention solely to the rebuilding of independent African states rather than supporting the anti-apartheid resistance. 

The even bigger betrayal within xenophobic South Africa is that we maintain the colonial borders that were drawn up in the scramble for Africa while the west was determining our value based on the mineral wealth in our land and our importance only as free or cheap labour. When we fight for a South Africa that exists in silos from the rest of the African continent and question the mobility that once existed before the drawing up of colonial borders, then we allow the goals of our colonisers to continue to live and encumber us. We halt the much-needed free flow of life-affirming and possibly lifesaving ideas between us and our neighbours to tackle the many social ills that colonialism has left us with. When we maintain these decisions that were constructed to keep us oppressed and reliant on the West, we strengthen the legacy built on our oppression.  

The self-hate rooted in xenophobic South Africa

A lot of our resistance to ‘outsiders’ coming in is almost always directed at African immigrants, and this is a betrayal of our own identity and sense of self. It shows the deep self-hate that we as black South Africans carry with us and maintains the ‘better black’ narrative usually enforced by whiteness. South Africans are starting to see themselves as the ‘better blacks’ based on oppressive racist reasoning such as colourism, where lighter is perceived as better. We see ourselves as ‘better blacks’ because of our aspirations to be ‘white adjacent’, sounding white, mastering Western culture, looking white, conquering Western languages, etc. 

In his discussion of Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalysis on blackness, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah said: 
“Black children raised within the racist cultural assumptions of the colonial system, can partially resolve the tension between contempt for blackness and their own dark skins by coming to think of themselves, in some sense, as white.”
So, if you do not fit these categorisations, you are seen as dangerous, unsophisticated, ugly, or uneducated. You mirror the false stereotypical ideals of blackness or the blackness we have been taught to run from or conceal. African immigrants coming into South Africa tend to be perceived as not ‘white adject’ enough and end up being victimised on those and other grounds. Another dangerous dimension is ‘tribalism’ – if you can’t or don’t adequately assimilate to South African culture or speak the languages because you are an ‘outsider’, then you are victimised or further excluded. 

Drawing comparisons between xenophobic South Africa and the Rwandan genocide

The Rwandan genocide is one of the most dangerous illustrations of what happens when these two systems of oppression come together. The genocide took place in 1994; within a few months, the conflict claimed the lives of 800 000 Tutsis who were killed by the Hutus. Many issues sparked the genocide – ‘tribalism’ and the desire to be ‘white adjacent’ were just some of the reasons. The Tutsis were the favoured minority by the Belgium colonial government. When Rwanda gained its independence, the Belgium government transferred much of the political and economic power to the Tutsis, because they were believed to be closer to whiteness and therefore superior to the Hutus. Vulgar racism classifications, which were considered scientific knowledge, were used to draw this conclusion. The Tutsis were seen as having more Western features, such as sharper, smaller noses, being taller, etc. Rwandans internalised these oppressive classifications and it created tensions that eventually sparked the genocide. 

South Africa’s frequent violent xenophobic outbursts are not too far removed from the Rwandan history. The emergence of violent groups such as Operation Dudula, which spreads hatred on social media, is reminiscent of the anti-Tutsi propaganda that Hutus spread through radio in Rwanda before and during the genocide. Superficial categorisations such as skin colour are usually used to determine who is South African and who is not. Often South Africans end up also being attacked in the process, because the idea that South Africans do not have dark hues is a false social construct. Like Rwandans, we are uncritical of dangerous black constructs created by whiteness. And like the Hutus, we scapegoat the challenges created by colonialism and apartheid and which our government fails to adequately address. We blame our poverty, rising unemployment, and other social ills on African immigrants, who are also experiencing dehumanising abuses in workplaces that see them as easily disposable, while also navigating a violently xenophobic South Africa. 

This goes against the Pan-Africanist dreams of important leaders like Nkrumah, while distracting us from the problems that really matter, such as land, the economy, access to dignified work, health care, education, etc. These are all structures still largely owned or controlled by white beneficiaries of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa. So, while we attack African immigrants for low-skilled work and opportunities that are not enough to go around even without the presence of immigrants, patriarchal whiteness maintains its dominance and control over our land, economy, and our sense of self.

News Archive

During 2011: Prestige Scholars Programme (PSP)
2011-12-01

The University has designed the Vice-Chancellor’s Prestige Scholars Programme (PSP) to promote and support the intellectual breadth and depth required of young scholars to pose questions and generate knowledge in their disciplines and hence to occupy the vanguards of contemporary intellectual enquiry. The programme specifically targets members of the academic staff who are near completion, or have newly completed, their doctoral studies.

The goal is to select no more than 100 of the most promising young scholars and to make substantial investments in their development towards becoming full professors. A tailored, intensive programme of support is designated that combines international placement working alongside leading scholars in the discipline of the prestige scholar, with intensive mentorship and support from within the university.

 Description: 2011 PSP_Thuthuka  Tags: 2011 PSP_Thuthuka

Elite young scholars on the Vice-Chancellor’s Prestige Scholars Programme generated R1,2 million in National Research Foundation Thuthuka and Blue Skies funding in 2011 alone. Dr Katinka de Wet in the Department of Sociology was awarded Blue Skies funding for her work on the Hybrid Identity of the HIV/Aids patient. Thuthuka Grant holders Drs Cilliers van den Berg, Olihile Sebolai, Dirk Opperman and Diaan van der Westhuizen work in the fields of German and Afrikaans trauma literature, microbiology, structural and evolutionary biology, and architecture, respectively. This broad disciplinary range typifies the depth and extraordinary range of scholarship present among junior academics at the UFS.


 Description: 2011 PSP_Liza Coetsee Tags: 2011 PSP_Liza Coetsee

Dr Liza Coetsee, a Y2-rated physicist, is the first of the Vice-Chancellor’s elite cohort of Prestige Scholars to submit for National Research Foundation rating. Dr Coetsee works on the latest of the Nanotechnology Surface Science systems housed in our Department of Physics. As Prestige Scholar, Dr Coetsee conducts research on phosphor solar cells. Her aim is to establish a new Phosphor Solar Cell field at the University of the Free State with Proff. Hendrik Swart and Koos Terblans. As a member of the Prestige Scholar Programme, Dr Coetsee will work in collaboration both with colleagues from the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University and Prof. Eray Aydil from the University of Minnesota and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology.


 Description: 2011 PSP_Olihile Sebolai Tags: 2011 PSP_Olihile Sebolai

Dr Olihile Sebolai is one of the 2 Vice-Chancellor’s elite Prestige Scholars and a microbiologist. In 2011, Dr Sebolai was awarded a Thuthuka Grant for his research on the yeast pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans, the cause of life-threatening Aids-defining illnesses such as meningitis. Dr Sebolai considers how cryptococcal lipids mediate infectious processes leading to illness. An understanding of these cellular processes will offer hope for future drug development to combat the scourge of cryptococcal meningitis, annually causing the death of over half a million people in Sub-Saharan Africa. Dr Sebolai is also interested in mapping the prevalence and distribution pattern of cryptococcal meningitis in the Free State. This, in turn, will assist health authorities to manage current infections and plan appropriately for potential outbreaks. The Prestige Scholars Programme, with the assistance of the National Research Foundation, will afford Dr Sebolai the opportunity to pursue his research in laboratories in the United States and India in 2012 and 2013.


 Description: 2011 PSP_Louis Holtzhausen Tags: 2011 PSP_Louis Holtzhausen

Dr Louis Holtzhausen, member of the Vice-Chancellor’s Prestige Scholars Programme, has been named by the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (SASCOC) as team doctor for Team South Africa during the All Africa Games, the largest sports event in Africa. National teams from African countries participated in 23 sports events. As an esteemed South African academic in sports medicine Dr Holtzhausens’ participation was an extension of the work already being done under his supervision at the UFS’s Sports Performance Unit. Many of the athletes who prepared at the Unit were also part of the team. Elite athletes’ illness and injury profiles are one of Dr Holtzhausens’ research focus areas. The exposure to this group in competition was of great value in the identification and development of research niche areas.


 Description: 2011 PSP_ Chantel Swart Tags: 2011 PSP_ Chantel Swart

The South African Society for Microbiology awarded Dr Chantel Swart-Pistor, a Prestige Scholar on the Vice-Chancellor’s elite programme, the top prize for her PhD during a recent gala dinner in Cape Town. Dr Swart-Pistor accomplished a breakthrough in the field of nanotechnology with The influence of mitochondrial inhibitors on zoospore and ascospore development. Her supervisor, Prof. Lodewyk Kock and co-supervisors, Dr Carolina Pohl and Prof. Pieter van Wyk, also stressed the important collaboration with Proff. Hendrik Swart (Physics) and Pieter van Wyk (Centre for Microscopy), which made Dr Swart-Pistor’s work possible. She has presented her work in Beijing (Medichem 2011) and Philadelphia (Biotechnology-2011). She has been invited to return to China in 2012.


 Description: 2011 PSP_ Lizette Erasmus Tags: 2011 PSP_ Lizette Erasmus

Dr Lizette Erasmus, scientific chemist and one of the Vice-Chancellor’s Prestige Scholars, has just returned from a three-month-long research visit to Prof. Hans Niemantsverdriet at the Technical University of Eindhoven in The Netherlands and the University of California, Davis. Dr Erasmus specialises in heterogeneous catalysis. Her visit to Prof. Niemantsverdriet, one of the global experts in the field of surface science, served to round of existing research. In California, Dr Erasmus visited her mentor, Prof. Bruce C. Gates, as part of the objectives of the Rector’s programme for the internationalisation of young researchers. Prof. Gates, an expert in catalysis, could contribute to Dr Erasmus’ research on the characterisation of heterogeneous catalysis and catalytic reactions. In exchange, her expertise in organometallic synthesis added value to Prof. Gates’ existing research. Their continued collaboration gave availed them of the opportunity for interdisciplinary interaction between engineering (Prof. Gates’ speciality) and chemistry, and promises to contribute to increased collaboration between the two universities in future.


 Description: 2011 PSP_Dirk Opperman Tags: 2011 PSP_Dirk Opperman

Dr Dirk Opperman, specialist in structural and evolutionary biology and National Research Foundation Thuthuka Grant holder, joined the Vice-Chancellor’s Prestige Scholars Programme after his postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute (KOFO) in Germany. Dr Opperman is the recipient of institutional seed funding to establish a protein crystallisation unit, which in turn led to the donation in 2011 of a multi-million Rand X-ray diffractometer¬ from the University of the Western Cape to complement his existing access to international synchrotrons. Dr Opperman is spending part of 2011 at the University of Exeter (UK) to further his research into the three-dimensional structures of specific enzymes and their trajectories of evolution to specific functions.


 Description: 2011 PSP_Abiodun Ogundeji Tags: 2011 PSP_Abiodun Ogundeji

Abiodun Ogundeji is a member of the Vice-Chancellor's Prestige Scholars Programme. Abiodun's work was recently recognised when he and his co-authors received an award for the best contributed paper at the 49th annual conference of the Agricultural Economics Association of South Africa on the topic, Impact of climate change on planning and dealing with flood disasters in South Africa: A case study of Soweto on Sea. The paper was co-authored by Prof. Giel Viljoen from our Department of Agricultural Economics and Herman Booysen, as well as Gawie du T. de Villiers, Research Associates in the Department of Geography. Abiodun is currently conducting invaluable research on the quantification of the economic value of climate change impacts and the benefits and costs of adaptation in South Africa.

 

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