Zimitri Erasmus

This report will be of value to those studying and researching transformation in higher education in post-apartheid South Africa. Over the past few years the Faculty of Health Sciences at UCT embarked upon a series of transformation processes. Despite these efforts, students at Medical School continue to lodge complaints about racist practices on the part of staff at the School and to claim such practices undermine their learning and academic performance. Following some complaints lodged early in 2001, the Dean of the Faculty convened a meeting where a study was commissioned to provide a scan of issues to inform terms of reference for a panel to be tasked with an in-depth evaluation of processes of transformation at Medical School. These issues are specifically related to students' experiences and perceptions of 'race' and racism

How does Sylvia Wynter’s theory of the human depart from Western bio-centric and teleological accounts of the human? To grapple with this question I clarify five key concepts in her theory: the Third Emergence, auto- and socio-poiesis, the autopoietic overturn, the human as hybrid, and sociogenesis. I draw on parts of Wynter’s oeuvre, texts she works with and my conversations with Anthony Bogues. Wynter invents a Third Emergence of the world to mark the advent of the human as a hybrid being. She challenges Western conceptions that reduce the human to biological properties. In opposition to Western teleology, her counter-cartography of a history of human life offers a relational conception of human existence which pivots around Frantz Fanon’s theory of sociogeny. She draws on Aimé Césaire’s call for a conception of the human made to the measure of the world, not to the measure of ‘Man’. This makes Wynter’s theory counter-, not post-humanist.

Studies of affirmative action in South Africa generally pay attention to its successes and failures in particular sectors of the economy and at various levels of the social division of labour. This article situates the outcomes of affirmative action at the nexus of a series of contradictory processes: (a) increased wealth concentration among a few South Africans concurrent with growing local struggles among the poor about social exclusion from basic rights; (b) occlusions produced by neoliberal globalisation, narrow African nationalism and injunctions to forget about ‘race’ and (c) the logics of debt inherent in neoliberalism, affirmative action and worn nationalism. This examination of the convergence of affirmative action with intensified neoliberal macroeconomic policies at South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy shows that affirmative action in post-1994 South Africa is about the state’s re-calibration of ‘populations of privilege’ and ‘populations of need’. These ...

This article provides a counter-history to liberal conceptions of non-racialism. It outlines historical landmarks in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South Africa that shaped anticolonial non-racialism. These reveal the ways colonial authorities used conversion to Christianity, “tribe,” and “race” to undermine resistance to colonialism, and they show that political approaches to anticolonial resistance were divided about (1) participation in colonial institutions for “Natives” and non-collaboration with the colonial state; (2) political mobilization on the basis of race, and non-racialism; and (3) assimilation into the Western, racialized capitalist order as British subjects, and a radical transformation of this order. Contrary to prevailing understandings that anticolonial non-racialism advocated forgetting, transcending and evading race, this article posits that it accounted for racialized difference, contested colonial uses of race, offered a radical critique of the idea o...

Using a study about students' experiences and perceptions of 'race' and racism at a medical school in South Africa, this paper demonstrates that qualitative data analysis can be systematic, procedural and rigorous. The paper initially outlines the analytical procedures followed during the study. We then reflect on the value of these procedures in optimising our research outcome and finally we illustrate the development of our thinking by tracking steps in our analysis in relation to one cluster of key findings. We also note ways in which the qualitative software package NVivo contributed to systematic and rigorous practice. We conclude that in order to contribute to best practice in qualitative research, qualitative researchers need to make their analytical procedures transparent in research reports.

Drawing on research among medical students at the University of Cape Town's Faculty of Health Sciences, this article explores two questions: How do students and staff work with `race' in their relations to one another? What challenges do these relations pose for transformation? Data was gathered using in-depth interviews with forty-one students during 2001. Standard methodological and analytical procedures ensured increasing reliability and validity of the study. This study revealed an unyielding racialisation of every day life, consciousness and knowledge in the learning environment. The work of Frantz Fanon frames this analysis. It concludes staff and students work with a conception of `race' as a fixed essence. This presents certain chaIlenges for transformation: to free `race' from the grips of absolute difference; to articulate an expanded conception of `the human'; and to shift from the human family towards the human polity as a unit of solidarity. South African Journal of Higher Education Vol. 20 (3) 2006: 413-425

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... the politics and complexity of black hair; a way of moving away from binaries. ... straightening he is person dyed talking about deconstructing this essentialist view of blackness, where hair ... a purist, essentialist view of hair-straighteners as 'negating the "natural" beauty of blackness ...

This work provides a counter-history to liberal conceptions of non-racialism. It outlines historical landmarks in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century South Africa that shaped anticolonial non-racialism. These reveal the ways colonial authorities used conversion to Christianity, " tribe, " and " race " to undermine resistance to colonialism, and they show that political approaches to antico-lonial resistance were divided about (1) participation in colonial institutions for " Natives " and non-collaboration with the colonial state; (2) political mobilization on the basis of race, and non-racialism; and (3) assimilation into the Western, racialized capitalist order as British subjects, and a radical transformation of this order. Contrary to prevailing understandings that anticolonial non-racialism advocated forgetting, transcending and evading race, this article posits that it accounted for racialized difference, contested colonial uses of race, offered a radical critique of the idea of race, and contributes to a new vocabulary for thought about race. zimitri erasmus

How on earth does one reconcile reparations…with reconciliation or remission of wrongs? Truth alone is never enough to guarantee reconciliation. It has little to do with crime and punishment but with inventiveness – devising a social formula that would minister to the wrongs of dispossession on the one hand, chasten those who deviate from the humane communal order on the other, serve as a criterion for the future conduct of that society, even in times of stress and only then, heal. (Soyinka 2000: 23, 81) On 9 March 2015, a student of the University of Cape Town, in full view of the public, the press and other students, threw faeces on the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the foot of the steps from the university's Jameson Hall. This act ignited the #RhodesMustFall student protest movement that spread to other campuses within the country and abroad and made national and international headlines. To put this act in context, it should be noted that protests of this nature, generally known as 'poo protests' , are not uncommon in the Western Cape province. These protests often take place or begin in the townships and informal settlements and are usually about the lack of toilets, poor housing, poor service delivery and other such injustices suffered by poor, marginalised communities. What was different this time was that the act was not about a lack of toilets or poor service delivery, nor was it happening in a neglected part of the city. Rather, it was happening within the hallowed precincts of the university, one that prides itself on being the best in the country and in Africa. And it was a protest about the contested heritage of postapartheid South Africa symbolised by the figure of Rhodes; a protest about ways in which the legacies of Rhodes persist in our daily lives, in our buildings, in the statues that dot the landscape of the country. It was therefore not so much about the material conditions of living that the poo protests usually focus on; this was about the symbolic conditions that frame everyday lived experience. And later in the year, just as this first round of protests was subsiding, a proposed fee hike at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg brought students back into the streets. The #FeesMustFall protest movement began at Wits and took hold in virtually all universities in the country. Marching to Parliament in Cape Town and to the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the students disrupted classes and university management had to shut down institutions of higher education until one of the primary demands of the students – that there be no fee increase for

Drawing on research among medical students at the University of Cape Town's Faculty of Health Sciences, this article explores two questions: How do students and staff work with`race' in their relations to one another? What challenges do these relations pose for transformation? Data was gathered using in-depth interviews with forty-one students during 2001. Standard methodological and analytical procedures ensured increasing reliability and validity of the study. This study revealed an unyielding racialisation of every day life, consciousness and knowledge in the learning environment. The work of Frantz Fanon frames this analysis. It concludes staff and students work with a conception of`race' as a fixed essence. This presents certain chaIlenges for transformation: to freèrace' from the grips of absolute difference; to articulate an expanded conception of`the human'; and to shift from the human family towards the human polity as a unit of solidarity.

South Africa's government requires information on apartheid race classification to implement and monitor racial redress. This has sparked resistance to race classification as a criterion for redress in higher education admissions. I argue 1) that jettisoning apartheid race categories now in favour of either class or 'merit' would set back the few gains made toward redress; 2) against common sense uses of 'race' and against the erasure of 'race' through class reductionism; and 3) for developing and testing new indicators for 'race' and class disadvantage with a view to eventually replacing apartheid race categories. I offer a critical-race-standpoint as an alternative conceptual orientation and method for transformative admissions committed to racial redress that is socially just. I conclude that admissions criteria should encompass the lived realities of inequality and be informed by a conception of humanism as critique. This requires resistance to ways of knowing orchestrated by apartheid's codes.

Studies of affirmative action in South Africa generally pay attention to its successes and failures in particular sectors of the economy and at various levels of the social division of labour. This article situates the outcomes of affirmative action at the nexus of a series of contradictory processes: (a) increased wealth concentration among a few South Africans concurrent with growing local struggles among the poor about social exclusion from basic rights; (b) occlusions produced by neoliberal globalisation, narrow African nationalism and injunctions to forget about 'race' and (c) the logics of debt inherent in neoliberalism, affirmative action and worn nationalism. This examination of the convergence of affirmative action with intensified neoliberal macroeconomic policies at South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy shows that affirmative action in post-1994 South Africa is about the state's re-calibration of 'populations of privilege' and 'populations of need'. These adjustments have meant a re-articulation of 'race', class, nation and meanings of liberation that sparks contestations of affirmative action from both its beneficiaries and its 'victims'. When situated within this global and local matrix, these reconfigurations of power, domination and exclusion reveal post-colonial iterations of both the 'ethnographic state' and the well-worn statecraft of divide and rule.

This article extends critiques of contact theory. It notes four deeper limitations: (1) what I call a “psychometric imaginary”; (2) an assumption that “race” is given, homogeneous and stable; (3) contact/noncontact dualism; and (4) inattention to whiteness. These limitations locate contact theory within raciological thought, making contact a reformist, rather than transformative antiracist strategy. I suggest an alternative: a critical literacy for the use of “race.” Contrary to Pettigrew's (1998) call for conceptual economy, I argue that conceptual expansion better serves understanding the tenacity of “race” and complexities of racism(s). Contrary to the psychometric imaginary of contact theory, I suggest that we need a visionary political imaginary for an antiracist world. I conclude that the key question for transforming intergroup relations in South Africa is not “which conditions,” and “what kinds of” contact are necessary, but “what kinds of politics, knowing, seeing and belonging” are necessary for critical antiracist praxis.