Cape Town - Black staff and students at Stellenbosch University must be feeling some form of vindication by the scathing findings of the commission of inquiry into allegations of racism at the institution.
Those readers familiar with this space would recall our October 27 editorial lamenting the slow pace of transformation at the university, which we described as window-dressing.
In fact, the report can be summed up as evolving around the word “transformation”. It’s mentioned 223 times in the 184-page report.
Our words were rather kind if the report by retired Justice Sisi Khampempe is anything to go by. She released her report following the commission of Inquiry into alleged racism at the university, established after two major racist incidents this year.
The first involved a verbal altercation between two final-year law students at the Law Faculty Dance in May.
The second and perhaps the most reported on was on May 14 in the Huis Marais residence when a white first-year student, Theuns du Toit, entered the room of a black fellow first-year student, Babalo Ndwayana, without his permission and urinated on Ndwayana’s possessions, including his laptop and textbooks.
Justice Khampempe’s report paints a grim picture of an institution that appears to be clueless on how to transform itself in practical terms in order to accommodate black staff and students feeling excluded. It confirms what has long been argued; the university’s history of whiteness and Afrikaans is a major stumbling block for its transformation agenda.
In her own words, the respected justice says: “Although the university has adopted a fairly comprehensive transformation apparatus, its transformation journey has taken place in a piecemeal and unco-ordinated fashion.
This is because its transformation apparatus comprises complicated, bureaucratic, multifaceted systems and structures, which are evidently left to perform their separate functions with little cohesion or overarching coordination.”
While the university has a long way to go in ridding itself of the ghost of the past, it is to be commended for taking such a complex and painful exercise.
There will always be resistance to transformation. Ask us at Independent Media.
We hope this report; its findings and recommendations will be implemented in earnest and not gather dust.
Cape Times