Of Clubbing Springboks and Other Unspeakable Crimes

What does the assassination of UK MP Jo Cox have to do with South Africa and our government’s increasing paranoia about protest?

The suspect in Jo Cox case, Thomas Mair, has links to the far-right Springbok Club, an organization that sports the old South Africa flag on its Facebook page and which equates the era of colonialism and racist rule in Africa to “civilization”.

No doubt murdering an MP in broad daylight fits their definition of “civilized”.

Such is the horror of bigotry: attitudes despising the “other” lead to distain for the value of “other” life. Ms Cox stood for the UK’s inclusion in Europe; that made her subhuman in the mindset of the extreme bigot.

Back to South Africa today, the apparently “new” South Africa with a different flag.

Over the last year, there have been about 14,000 service delivery protests, 20% of them violent. There has also been a growing tide of student protest: #RhodesMustFull, #FeesMustFall and, lately, rape culture.

Last year, the response of universities was attempting to contain protest, while agreeing with the goals – at least partially. The effect was to deflect protest to government where it belonged, at least with the fees issue. The result was dramatic: the protest movement forced a change from government that 20 years of polite conversation had failed to achieve.

So where are we now?

Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande published a paranoid diatribe on Daily Maverick (14 June 2016), claiming that student protesters are a tiny privileged minority out to create mayhem and who belong in jail.

I strongly oppose the kind of protest that doesn’t value life and that destroys infrastructure. But that does not mean there is no valid protest and that all protest should be criminalized, which is where we are headed. There is a line between militant protest and unacceptably violent protest and a rights-oriented society has to be very careful to place that line accurately. We also need to be very careful about using “lawful” as too strong a stick to prevent inconvenient protest. In the UK in 2008, Greenpeace activists who were accused of unlawfully damaging a coal power station were exonerated because the outcome of their protests had a higher public good than the damage they caused.

When we reach a situation where bigots and supposed progressives are speaking with the same voice, we have to be very, very worried that we have not placed that line correctly, that we are edging towards police-state conditions and that the underlying causes of the protest have become too uncomfortable to address.

On bigotry, what does Comrade Blade have to offer? Consider this:

It is a narrative of anger, of ears sealed against rational debate, eyes shut tight against reality, including the nature of the real challenges facing us as a country as we change for the better. It is a narrative initiated during the 1999 election by another minority party, one which had absorbed most of the Broederbond-fuelled members of apartheid’s ruling National Party, and much of its ideology. A narrative under the simple catch phrase, “Fight Back.”

This, of course, refers to the DA and its predecessor, the DP, which merged with the National party to form the DA. What he fails to mention is that the Nats demerged and their leadership decamped to the ANC.

It is with this background that I return to the dangers of cozying up to bigotry.

In South Africa, the legacy of racism has an obfuscatory effect. When the ANC aligns itself with bigots, the old divisions of race make that less apparent than it should be. That both old-school bigots and the ANC only see criminality in protest makes them odd bedfellows. For this reason, this is a rather fractious alliance, one that must be punctured by the odd Penny Sparrow incident to bring things back to normal – the ANC is the party of opposition to bigotry.

Then an inconvenient protest breaks out – the bigots and the ANC line up – oops, someone has to post a racist comment on social media to bring things back to normal.

What is increasingly being laid bare is that the ANC is not itself immune to bigotry, even if it has the option of beating a comfortable retreat to moral outrage about racism. The danger that this presents is that the ANC can march deep into bigot territory and cover its retreat with the race flag – with the actual damage to rights the government has inflicted lost in the resulting righteous anger over racism.

Take the question of rape culture. Here at The University Currently Known as Rhodes (UCKAR), after anti-rape protests broke out, the ANC Women’s League sent a delegation to express concern. Where were they 10 years ago during the Zuma rape trial when they supported him to the hilt despite his atrocious attitudes to women that emerged in court?

Given that rape is supposed to be a serious crime and we have evidence that it is not being handled adequately, are we attempting to remedy that? Possibly – but not as intensively as the government, with the connivance of universities, is attempting to criminalize protest. While naming someone as rapist is attacked as a contravention of the right to due process, Comrade Blade says that protesters deserve only one thing: jail. No hint there of a requirement of due process.

One of the more obnoxious manifestations of rape culture at UCKAR is a venerable tradition known as “seal clubbing”: a contest among senior students to have sex with as many innocent first years as possible. That this practice has such a repulsive name would be enough, you would think, to make it a target for eradication. But no: the university’s response is to warn new students of the practice, rather than target the problem at source. Has anyone said that anyone promoting this “tradition” belongs in jail? No?

Meanwhile, bigots applaud the university administration, in concert with the ANC government, for standing up to “unlawful” protests.

So here’s the real divide: those who truly want an inclusive, progressive society and those who have common cause with bigots. Let us stop pretending otherwise; if not the Springbok Club may find themselves in the awkward position of welcoming the ANC into its ranks.

What’s Wrong with Universities?

At my university (Rhodes University in South Africa), we have a policy of not outsourcing things a university traditionally does itself – even if that sometimes adds to our costs. We may be paid slightly lower than average, but we are also a happier campus than average.


Our outgoing Vice-Chancellor (president, in US terminology) Saleem Badat is rare among university leaders in understanding the character of a university and maintaining it against outside pressures. We are in a small town and account for a large fraction of the local economy – if we outsourced basic services to out of town companies, we may save a little money, but at what cost? Our local community is depressed as it is, and being an island of plenty in a sea of poverty is an unpleasant situation for those in both places.


You could argue this is no different from corporate social responsibility taken seriously. A mine, for example, could also source all its supplies as locally as possible.

But it goes further than that.

Universities around the world have made the same mistake: hiring expensive business consultants who tell them to run more like a business. Universities have been around a lot longer than the modern concept of a business, and have not caused major financial meltdowns, wars or corrupted the political system. At very modest cost to society, they have spearheaded curing disease, inventing revolutionary technologies and transforming society in more ways than I can think of.

Academics of  course, do sometimes cause major problems – but not operating as academics, where they have limited scope to do damage. Academic economists, for example, have at times spread highly dysfunctional ideas but, even there, it is not universities that have done the damage, but politicians who are ready to take bogus advice if it suits their agenda. On the whole, when ideas are kept within academia, the bad ones are eventually rooted out. And an academic who is not subject to commercial pressures is more likely to be honest about such mistakes.

Why is it that places that are supposed to be the home of the smartest people on the planet take advice from people who have no clue about how to run their institution, when the people who know most about how to run a university are those already there?

The only reason I can think of is that, having paid big money to corporate consultants, you would feel a right idiot if your didn’t take their advice.

What is wrong with all this?

A university has aims that are hard to quantify economically. Sometimes it is necessary to maintain a discipline that does not cover its costs because it is required for other subjects, or is at the core of research initiatives. Or maybe it is a discipline that no one else supports, and it has to exist somewhere. Achieving equity in the face of an unequal school system also has costs and a simple bottom-line based accounting system cannot adequately capture the value of that kind of redress.

The real difference though between a university and a business is the time horizon. A university aims to build for the long term. There may be no immediate return from a PhD or even a slightly better quality undergraduate curriculum. The value may only be seen years or decades later when a graduate cures a disease, invents a new technology or discovers a new way of economically empowering the poor.

We recently held a farewell for Dr Badat, who moves on to a major private funding agency. I hope Rhodes continues with his philosophy because that is one of the things that makes this place special – I have done the big city university trying to be a “business” too often to want to repeat the experiment.

Moving back to South Africa

I take up a position as associate professor of Computer Science at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa on 1 April; I’m putting this article up in advance because stories with a 1 April dateline have a certain connotation.

This one’s for real.

After several years at the School of IT and Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland, St Lucia and slightly fewer years at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the same campus, why am I heading back to South Africa?

Several reasons.

• a place I can contribute more – while it’s great being in a large well funded institution for many reasons, it’s a lot harder to feel you are making a difference. And Australia’s economy isn’t going to grow a whole lot on the back of what I can do; South Africa on the other hand has many opportunities that I and my graduates can open up with the right skills
• small institution bureaucracy – or lack thereof: a university with 6,000 students has to be a lot less unwieldy to navigate on a day to day basis
• a place where Computer Science has respect – in more than one university where I’ve done time, I’ve been left with a feeling that computer science is seen as a second-class subject, without the venerable history of physics. The fact that it has led the fastest advance of any era of human technological history apparently doesn’t mean much. Rhodes computer science is a relatively big department in a small university, and its professors have been deans and deputy vice-chancellors.

And finally:

• going home – Rhodes is in a part of the country that I haven’t lived in but despite the many attractions of the land of Oz, it isn’t really home

I will still be in Australia for a while because I need to take care of a few details like selling a house. I will miss the possums that sleep on my top balcony, the great open spaces, the Great Barrier Reef, walks in the mountains and the appealingly weird wildlife. I won’t miss the dishonest media and the short-term self-serving politics. Not that South Africa is that brilliant on the latter score.

A Greens Party in South Africa, perhaps as a side project?