Abstract
The controversy surrounding the notion of national heritage and what constitutes a proper heritage in post-apartheid South Africa intersects with issues of identity and identity formation in a post-conflict society. That it impinges powerfully on social cohesion has been thrust into the spotlight in view of recent protest action related to colonial and apartheid era monuments. We have made the point elsewhere that conflict resolution in South Africa through negotiations, the National Peace Accord and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has, at best, been partial, that it has not always been taken sufficiently seriously to engage with the fault-lines of protracted social conflict in the country. This article has employed a qualitative methodology because it is both descriptive and explorative in nature. The main aim of this article is to provide a critique on how issues of intersectionality (race, class and gender) coincide with the attacks of the monuments by university students in South Africa. This article utilises two theoretical frameworks, namely, classical Marxism and Black Consciousness, simply because both the psychological and class analysis were invoked by the student bodies to diagnose and prognose the challenges of black South Africans within the context of higher education in South Africa. The central thesis of this article is that the attacks on monuments in South African universities were instigated by a group of young people who claim to be revolutionary in thinking and are calling for transformation, free education, dismantling gender oppression and doing away with institutionalisation of racism.
Highlights
A series of attacks in 2015 on apartheid and colonial-era monuments, beginning with an attack on the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town (UCT), have occurred, seemingly out of the blue, in the South African political space
The ontological and epistemological assumptions of this article are linked to the theoretical frameworks of this study that social reality is a subjective construct
How does all of this relate to the constantly changing nature of society? We find it telling that Christian brings in the notion of the negotiation of meaning and memory above, something which clearly resonates with the conflict management field, and to which we will return in due course
Summary
A series of attacks in 2015 on apartheid and colonial-era monuments, beginning with an attack on the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town (UCT), have occurred, seemingly out of the blue, in the South African political space. The pressure is justified, as some of the former white universities still do not reflect the South African demographics with respect to their staff and student profiles, or in their academic curricula. They remain very Western and white-oriented in many respects and, as with so much in the new South Africa, transformation lags seriously behind, and often occurs only in response to protest. The ontological and epistemological assumptions of the creation of knowledge are still a reflection of Westernisation
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