BOOK SA - News

Alert! Intellectual and “dissident educationist” Jonathan Jansen delivered his inaugural lecture as the Vice-Chancellor and Prinicpal of the University of the Free State over the weekend - and dropped a bombshell. The University, said Jansen, would drop all charges against the students who had humiliated varsity cleaning staff in 2008, in a racist incident that rocked South Africa.

Jansen has long been a thorn in the side of SA’s ruling party, and the ANC reacted to the news - which caught many by surprise - with a statement typically pouring cold water on the move:

“We agree with (Jansen’s) transformative programme of creating a nonracial, nonsexist and democratic institution. The ANC is, however, concerned about the dropping of charges … Contrary to (Jansen’s) claim … that such dropping of charges will lead to reconciliation in the university, our view is that such act will not lead to reconciliation but will again harden racial attitudes not only in the university but in the country broadly,” ANC national spokesman Jackson Mthembu said.

• Complete article in the Business Day

Apart from the scolds in the ANC, however, reaction to Jansen’s speech has been quite positive, with many lauding his gesture of reconciliation. (This observer, for one, takes some satisfaction from the fact that the political capital generated by incident has been deflated; suddenly, there’s no more hay to be made out of it.) Here’s Verashni Pillay:

He is attempting a holistic approach: tackling the entire institution and examining what allowed the atrocity to be committed in the first place. Dropping the charges is just one facet, designed to challenge every white UFS student tempted to play the victim in the wake of the incident.

Will it work? We’ve yet to see. But tempting as it is to exempt the Reitz quads from any kind of forgiveness, and direct our collective rage at them, that is too easy. What we demonise we fail to learn from. And what we dehumanise we treat in isolation, avoiding looking around and asking: what allowed this atrocity to be committed in the first place?

• Complete article in the Mail & Guardian

And here’s Jansen’s speech, delivered in honour of Bram Fischer - and employing the kind of inclusive language that many South Africans have been wishing should return to our public discourse - in full:

Welcome, welcome, welcome. I thought this would never happen. In fact, many of you told me it could never happen because of my refusal to snuggle up to power. Yet here you are, some from foreign lands like Chris and Lynette Abels from the United Kingdom, Joel Samoff from Stanford University (California), Josephine Allen from Cornell University (New York), and half of you from the Western Cape. All foreign protocols observed. To my South African friends of Indian descent, welcome to you too; you may stay overnight.

Thank you so much for honouring the University of the Free State this evening.

I am accompanied tonight by two high school leaders. Foster Lubbe was the first Free Stater to write to me, while I was still working in Durban, to welcome me to the province; he is the next head boy of Hoerskool Sentraal in Bloemfontein. Portia Lehasa is the first black head girl in 134 years of the famed Eunice High School also here in Bloemfontein. Foster and Portia represent our future as a country; they remind me of my first love, school teaching. And when I sit down and talk with these two youth leaders, I become profoundly optimistic about the future of our country.

I dedicate this Inaugural Lecture to arguably the greatest son of the University of the Free State (a law student here when it was still called Grey University College), the man who led the defence of Nelson Mandela, the patriot who laid down his life for black and white South Africans, so that we could all be free today. I am so delighted that his daughters Ruth and Ilse could be here this evening.

To the children of Bram Fischer, I now hand over a specially prepared version of the Inaugural Lecture.

• Read “A Place Like This” in full at IOL

Book details

• Knowledge in the Blood: Confronting race and the apartheid past by Jonathan Jansen
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  EAN: 9781919895208
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