on being a black woman academic in South Africa

This is a reluctant account of how I've experienced academia in South Africa as a black woman. In the last two or three years in the wake of the #Rhodesmustfall and #FEESMUSTFALL student protests and calls for the decolonisation of the curriculum, of the university, of alles, much as been said about the black experience of academia in South Africa. I've stood on the sidelines, feeling inept and ill-equipped to respond, to contribute to the debate and discussion. I worried that I lacked the necessary or appropriate theoretical or conceptual languages of description most of the other commentators were using and that my 'story' wouldn't line up perfectly with the kind of narratives getting the most traction. The main theme of most of these narratives is that academia is a negative and toxic place for black academics and that most universities, but especially the previously liberal white institutions, make it almost impossible for black staff to reach the same levels of achievement as their white peers or that when black academics do succeed, it comes huge personal costs. While, I'm not going to dismiss the validity of this particular narrative or the experiences of individuals that might have lead to the construction of this perspective of being a black academic in SA, I think some refinement and nuance could expand the narrative and reaffirm the variation of experience. Thus while this theme might be rather prominent in our current discourse, it is but a narrative; not the only one.

What's academia like - according to Lynn

Academia is not an open, inclusive and welcoming professional environment. Rarely will you be greeted at the gates with warm, open arms by colleagues keen to offer you all the support and development opportunities you need to become the very best sociologists, physicists, historian, economists, educationalist you can be. The progression up the ladder of success is clearly demarcated and carefully policed; then further tainted with visible and invisible hierarchies of status and privileged conferred on certain institutions, departments, individual scholars. So that your hard earned PhD might not be bestowed with the same quality or legitimacy, as those of your colleagues. Then it is unlikely that your hand be held by an experienced, seasoned and gentle scholar as you attempt to 'break' into the publication world, affirming all your ideas and writing attempts and ready to offer sage advice and a shoulder to cry on when the article you pissed blood to write, is unceremoniously rejected. Also nobody will be at hand to walk you through the indecipherable and many times incomprehensible application processes for study, research or sabbatical leave or conference funding. You will find lots of networks, cliques and cabals that advance their own interests and privilege. These are defined on the basis of discipline, sub-discipline, race, gender, or any other delimiter, arbitrary or not. So just like in high school, but unlike high school, the stakes here can make or break your research career. Similarly, it is assumed that if you have a Masters or PhD, you can teach, develop a curriculum and understand and implement the necessary pedagogic strategies deemed crucial to enhance your students' learning. Again don't expect that anyone will show you the ropes.

Academia is a highly performative environment where the object of display and performance is your individual cognitive and intellectual ability - all your worth is locked down in your capacity to display and prove your knowledge and intelligence associated with your discipline. Furthermore, the manner of this display and how you represent your intellectual worth is governed by particular norms and conventions very often linked to language use specific to your discipline or sub-discipline. So it’s not enough to know, you also need to know and master how to express what you know. If you are keen to move up the ladder of success within the academy you have to show excellence in teaching and scholarship. However, in most university sectors, both locally and internationally, research trumps teaching. So in order to build your research profile and publish you will have to, especially in your early career, do most of your research and publication writing after hours, because most of your 'work hours' will be spent servicing your teaching and administrative obligations.

Unfortunately, the discrimination, prejudice, racism, sexism, ageism and meanness that pervades our society isn't blocked at the university gates. Instead it finds fertile ground and is accentuated in a professional environment built on the mostly subjective evaluation of intellectual acumen; with the one's doing the evaluation imbued with all the power. Add to the mix a healthy component of mean, egotistical people who come in all the race, gender and class shapes and sizes, and you have a setting for a perfect storm.

Insert Lynn - a black woman academic

• I've worked in higher education for more than twenty years, doing many different things. I started to lecture just over 15 years ago, but I only started to self-identify as an academic about 10 years ago when I started to engage and participate in the scholarly debates and dissemination of knowledge associated with my disciplinary field.
• I've only ever worked at a historically black institution (although now it’s part of a merged institution).
• The only position I was even held back from was for a more senior coordinating role. Even though I was more qualified (I was the only lecturer with a Masters degree) and had more experience than my colleagues, my black male boss at the time didnt think I was suitable. I was the only female working on the programme and the position was awarded to my male colleague.
• A request for conference funding was once turned down by my black male boss. I decided to pay for the conference myself.
• I was removed from my teaching allocation on a course by my black male boss, because I was deemed to be too critical of the curriculum content and pedagogic approaches used. He also refused to appoint me as course leader even though I was the only female PhD lecturer in the department, and the course I was teaching on was in my specialist area. I had to 'report' to a junior female member of staff who had a contract position.
• Male colleagues of all hues and persuasions have thought it ok to comment randomly on my appearance, clothes, weight, marital status, or disregard my title in communiques while paying careful attention to correctly apply the all important, prefix signifiers of rank, when referring to all the other male recipients.
• I have been referred to as a 'token black' by black female colleagues, who seemingly feel I'm not suitably qualified to work in my current domain, even though they don’t have any experience in the said domain.
• I have encountered black male colleagues who fail to acknowledge both my qualifications and reporting role, and constantly defer to my white male boss, even when I'm at the same meeting.
• I've seen how white research networks operate and how access to these networks are carefully controlled. Membership is bestowed to only the most suitable black academics. When you say no, you worry for your reputation and career progression.
• Friendships, authentic collegial and intellectual engagements are possible across race, class, gender and age divides. It’s hard to find, but I've flourished as an academic from the many genuine and supportive relationships I've managed to develop at my own university and with colleagues in my region and internationally. These relationships jump happily cross whatever  race, gender, class, age, cultural 'barrier' put in its way.

MPhil, UCT 2007

So what is it like to be a black woman in academia in South Africa? It depends really - on where you work, who you work with and who you work for. All these variables along with who you are as a person will coalesce and determine what it means for you. It’s a tough space, generally, and there are personal and structural factors that either compound and exacerbate that toughness or smooth it over. 

For me being an academic is almost a constant struggle against all that I am, because who I am is in so many ways at odd with the norms, conventions and predispositions of academia. The academy and its many people, unfortunately, have a low tolerance for difference – so if you don’t look, sound, behave, think or share the same values as those who have the power to define the norms and conventions – then you are more likely to have a difficult time. And often time the structures inherent in the institutional fabric will allow those in power to exercise their power in harmful ways. I’ve been on the receiving end of this kind of power (and meanness) held by both white and black men and women. In spite of this I've been moderately successful, I believe because I have, in part, being able to harness social capital gained from going to a white university and then completing my PhD in the UK. But I also have a particular personality - 'I don't take kak from kabouters' - and if I want something I find a way, legally and ethically, to get it. And I 'graf''. I do the work. Some of the challenges I face are linked to my race, ethnicity and gender, others reference the cultural capital I either possess or don’t (manifested in how I sound when I talk or my writing style). Luckily for me, these challenges, have been only that - challenges, that I constantly have to work at and navigate around. And I’ve found support in the most unlikely places and so have avoided those perfect storm conditions, that can make your life as an academic truly toxic and negative. 

This is a reluctant and incomplete account of being a black woman academic in South Africa - heavily inflected by time and place. I've tried to make sense of my own experiences and how it 'fits' into other narratives and discourses circulating at the moment. Hopefully, my story doesn't deny the other stories being told, but builds out just how discrimination and power manifests within the university. 

talking about South African higher education in Sweden

On Monday I did a little informal presentation on the South African higher education landscape and my work in academic development, with colleagues in the Division of the Development of Teaching and Learning, here at Uppsala University. Although the timing of the presentation was a bit 'off' - it could have come earlier in my stay at the unit - I was finally given a chance to reflect on the sector I work in. Also opportunistic was the fact that I'm currently preparing to scope out the chapter of the collections book I'm editing, and this requires a good placement of the ECP within the contextual realities of the South African landscape. All very simple, right?

Many of the Swedish colleagues had been to South Africa, some even to educational conferences in South Africa, so they all had a view, however that may be framed, of the country. Mostly a combination of the shiny, positive stuff and some recognition of the more challenging bridges yet to be crossed (especially from those who went to conference in SA). Two questions I got asked made me think about the angle I had taken for my presentation. I was asked "How would one know you were White in SA under apartheid?" and "What about gender and disability, how are these reflected in student/staff profiles?" Are we as South African's obsessed with race? Is it the only lens we use to see ourselves and what and how we encounter the world around us? Did my presentation really harp on race as the all important factor shaping and driving the sector and the work many of us pride ourselves on doing?

It didnt help that the night before I was particularly aggravated by the inane but unashamedly racist mutterings of my CT neighbours in the 'whatsapp security group'. I lashed out, calling out 'their' inherent racialised beliefs that always linked 'blacks' to crime and their totally self-imposed removal from the realities of South Africa. Rather I should say - their efforts to recreate in a by-gone era where their neighbourhoods really were lily-white - without the slightest recognition that to achieve that status quo meant the denigration by force and law, of anyone who didnt look like them. So I was angry!

My race politics and the shape it takes, has little place in Sweden, and it had little place in the UK, while I lived there. It is uniquely South African. I know I also get irritated by 'the angry black 'x' or 'y' types' I encounter at work or via social media. I know I don't only see race and I know both black and white people can be 'despots' or 'humanitarians'. But I also feel the anger, the collective anger of being on the receiving end of racism in all its shapes and forms. Maybe our society in SA and world at large needs to change before I can take race completely out of the picture.

looking back some more, grounded in the present

I've been working at the UCT library since the end of last year. I've always found comfort in that library and it's become a place that gives me a sense of discipline and calm as I try to wrestle with the becoming of my thesis.

I like being on Upper Campus, you get to look down on the world below you, marvel at the space in front of you (the whole of the Cape Flats right until the Hottentots Holland mountains), but feel a sense of safety that you are so far removed from that reality figuratively and rather literally too.

It's 'Orientation Week' at UCT, so there are loads of somewhat bewildered, somewhat bored 18-20 year olds walking around with an orientation leader across the campus. Most often the pack of young beings come into the library, taking in the space, as best they kind while being overloaded with useful'ish information about where the audio-visual viewing area of the library is. I was having my lunch in the open air food court close to the library the other day and just taking in all the new students and their orientation leaders. This group of students are so diverse in relation to the obvious demographic categories and the less obvious aspects of clothing style, sexual orientation, religion, accent, you name it. The level of diversity is certainly more obvious than you would find at CPUT for instance. Somehow I felt good, warm about this. From what I could tell Black students get involve in their university - they are orientation leaders, members of the SRC, RAG, Faculty Student Councils.

I thought back to my first few days as a students at UCT 24 years ago (and I had to count on my fingers to establish how long ago it actually was since I came to UCT). I also did a Orientation tour, I was lead around the campus by some hippie White guy who was a member of the SRC - I don't remember what he looked like but I remember him. It wasn't something the cool students did - by going on the tour you sort of signaled you were new and didn't know things. And in terms of gaining any 'street -cred' you couldn't really advertise your novice identity. I don't ever remember feeling like anybody wanted me to be part of the university or wanted to make me feel at home, or comfortable in that space, or develop a sense of belonging. In fact as I moved through my undergraduate years this feeling of disconnection and alienation intensified. I had no intention of fraternising with my oppressors - I was there to get my degree and piss off, I wasn't interested in speaking to some White person up at UCT who would then politely ignore me if they saw me down in Rondebosch, at the foot of the mountain. In the dying days of Apartheid my time at UCT was not about getting cozy with the oppressors, it was about getting a good education and taking it back to my own community.

Those were such different times, but even then I sought solace in the library. It was a different library then, not the modern, open space environment I often find myself sitting in these days. Back in my day it was a musty, wood-panelled, almost claustrophobic place. Back then, like today, I had my special spaces to sit and would always retreat to little hidden away areas to read and study. And in that way the UCT library symbolises my success, my academic success.

I've been reading again about the higher education sector in South Africa - a system in crisis - and one that can only ensure that less than 40% of the students who enter its doors leave with a degree after five years of undergraduate study. And while that statistic might sound marginally ok, when you disaggregate it for race then only about 5% of the Black student population are successful in obtaining a degree after five years of study. Bottom-line most Black students therefore aren't successful in finishing their course within the stipulated period.

Again I'm taken back +- 24 years ago - I finished my degree in the stipulated period - I am a stark exception. I also know that if I had been in the schooling system today I would never have seen the UCT light of day - it just would not have happened, all sorts of circumstances would have acted against me I think. I can't explain why I was successful with my studies. I just did all my assignments, went to most of my lecturers and tutorials and sat in the library studying (probably the hard, inefficient way). The courses I took didn't always make sense to me, in fact I don't particularly remember feeling a real sense that I understood the discipline I was learning about. I seem to recall that all I ever got access too was a surface level understanding of things. But I passed within the recommended time frame and didn't do too badly (I didn't do well by a long stretch of the imagination, but I didn't scrape through either).

My research, my work, my identity as a teacher are all wrapped up in finding ways to improve student learning. At the moment I'm drawn to uncovering and understanding my own undergraduate learning experience within its specific historical moment within the larger HE project at the time (yes I was a ASP student too, but really didn't understand what that meant, I signed up for the course because I had to - I wanted to do Psychology and couldn't get into the mainstream course without taking the ASP supplementary tutorials) and mapping it onto the research that exposed the realities of South African's current higher education system. In some ways my own learning experience is a helpful reflective lens, and in other ways the contextual realities of contemporary South Africa are so fundamentally different  that trying to bring the two experiences together feels to me like a ridiculous proposition.

I like what I see around me when I sit in the library though - students getting to know their institution and feeling a part of it (these are my perceptions and I know they don't necessarily match the realities that students experience and I know, from the research (and anecdotal evidence), that Black students at UCT are still marginalized and alienated by what they find) - even though my undergraduate experiences at UCT weren't always positive or inviting, and even though I'm critical and cynical about the grand ideals that institutions like UCT project into the world, at a very basic level I have a strong affection for, maybe a kind of loyalty to  UCT and am surprised by the degree to which I have internalised and taken on so much of its values and symbolic capital. Especially at postgraduate level UCT has been the site of much of my academic success. In a way I am because of it  and I think I came to it at just the right times in my life so that I have been fundamentally shaped by all that is good about the institution and all that is/was bad.