:Studying While Black: Race, Education and Emancipation in South African Universities

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsStudying While Black: Race, Education and Emancipation in South African Universities by Sharlene Swartz, Alude Mahali, Relebohile Moletsane, Emma Arogundade, Nene Ernest Khalema, Adam Cooper, and Candice Groenewald. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2018. 258 pp. US$29.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-7969-2508-4.Crain SoudienCrain SoudienNelson Mandela University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreStudying While Black is the outcome of a longitudinal study completed in 2017. It provides a view of the Black student experience in the complex environment of the South African university and, as such, offers itself as a good complement to the range of perspectives of the social situations in which Black people find themselves around the world. South African higher education has a small but influential literature.1 These have been supplemented by a recent flurry of memoir-type texts reflecting the experiences of significant vice-chancellors of the contemporary era.2 To be published shortly, too, is a coffee table–style book, built around a photovoice project of the Human Sciences Research Council, on the reflections of significant student leaders of the #FeesMustFall Movement.3 Valuable as these are, they do not privilege student voice. South Africa has not yet had the benefit of a strong scholarly reflection on the experiences of students themselves. Studying While Black deliberately seeks to correct this gap. It presents itself, moreover, at a critical time in the history of the South African university. Institutions find themselves in the penumbra of the student protests of 2015—the largest in the post-1994 democratic era.The book was conceived out of a research project which began in 2013. Its objective was to track the academic journeys of a large sample of students to understand who succeeded and who did not. Eighty students from eight universities, 74 of whom were Black (people are classified as African, Coloured and Indian in terms of the apartheid order), were followed for 5 years.As the authors say, the turn of events with the onset of protest in 2015 provided them with the unique opportunity to understand the issues which students were raising about the nature of South African higher education. The book, as a result, is significantly enriched. It brings together, more than anything which goes before it, student voice on a number of facets of the academic experience. The range and timbre of this voice are wide and deep and, significantly, diverse and multiphonic in its views of and perspectives on what it means to be a Black student in a South African university. As the researchers say, the stories the students related to them included “complicated” personal and structural explanations of both their backgrounds and their experiences in the institutions they attended. Focusing on their experiences in universities, some spoke positively, but many more spoke of the severe dis-ease that they were undergoing. A Black male spoke, for example, of experiencing persistent racial profiling: “How do I put this?—because when they see Indian people chilling together … the security people don’t even bother them. But as black guys you huddle around for too long … security is going to walk close” (39). Classrooms and lecture theaters were sites of intense racial and class discomfort. A student, who insisted on his right to speak isiZulu at the University of Zululand, had a confrontation with a White lecturer resulting in his telling the lecturer, “No, it’s fine. … Go tell your dean, tell whoever that I spoke isiZulu. If speaking isiZulu is a crime, arrest me” (72).Chapters 3 to 5, on the students’ experiences of life on campus, deal with racism; sexism; and language and power. Important about these chapters is that, while they portray a thoroughly variegated picture of what the South African university is like for students, unavoidable for the authors was the reality that “these experiences culminated in a broader feeling of not having a sense of belonging and not being accepted as legitimate students” (37). Not being accepted is described by the authors as the result of intersections of race, class and gender: “Understanding the ways in which identities such as race, gender and class intersect and shape the educational experience is critical to understanding factors that either hinder or facilitate opportunities and obstacles within the higher education landscape” (10). To these social factors, the authors also bring in questions about mental well-being. They show, for example, the physical and existential precarity that many students experience. Bringing these factors together provides the authors with a broad definition of intersectionality. There is an opportunity, however, to do a great deal more with the evidence that has been gathered. There is room to explore interesting psycho-social themes, such as alienation, going in one direction, and strong consciousness formation, going in the other.While “race” inflects the student experience in persistent ways (language use, for example, marks speakers in unmistakably racial ways), the question of social class is a burgeoning factor for many. Students are very aware of their comparative disadvantage, readily evident in relation to most White people, but increasingly now so, too, in relation to the growing Black middle class in their midst. While there are now significantly more females than males in the system, female students were conscious of being herded into what were perceived to be appropriate fields for them to study. This intersectionality is brought together well in what is probably the centerpiece of the book, chapter 6m “Obstacles to Access.” It reveals the utter precarity that characterizes the general South African student experience. Important about this characterisation is its direct relationship to the social world that the student brings with him/her/them into the university. It is hallmarked by financial and material insecurity. Everybody in the students’ immediate zone of trust—parents, family, friends—is on high alert. They have to pitch in. The students themselves have to improvise and make a plan—sometimes in ways that are not savory. Difficulty accompanies students at almost every step of their academic journey and, as the authors say, “make the 2015 and 2016 fee protests at South African universities more understandable” (82).Studying While Black is an important addition to the small corpus of writing we have on the South African university student experience. It contains a rich combination of student voice and academic analysis. The testimony of the students is powerful and is gathered here in quantum and depth in the most comprehensive compendium yet assembled. Made available for sociological analysis is the evidence, from below, of how systems of privilege and abjection work. They constantly reconstitute themselves. In this work, Swartz and her colleagues show us how power is being deployed in the South African university to reproduce old forms of privilege and constitute new ones.Notes1 S. Badat, “Educational Politics in the Transition Period,” in Education after Apartheid: South African Education in Transition, ed. Peter Kallaway, Glenda Kruss, Aslam Fataar, and Gari Donn (Cape Town: UCT Press, 1998), and The Challenges of Transformation in Higher Education and Training Institutions in South Africa, 4 (Midrand: Development Bank of Southern Africa, 2010); N. Cloete, “The South African Higher Education System: Performance and Policy,” Studies in Higher Education 39, no. 8 (2014): 1355–68, https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2014.949533; N. Cloete and T. Moja, “Transformation Tensions in Higher Education: Equity, Efficiency and Development,” Social Research – An International Quarterly of the Social Sciences 72, no. 3 (2005): 693–722.2 A. Habib, Rebels and Rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2019); J. Jansen, As by Fire: The End of the South African University (Cape Town: NB Publishers, 2017).3 T. Luescher, “In the Aftermath of #FeesMustFall: Violence, Wellbeing and the South African Student Movement” (unpublished ms.). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Comparative Education Review Volume 67, Number S1February 2023Black Lives Matter and Global Struggles for Racial Justice in Education Sponsored by the Comparative and International Education Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722334 Views: 35Total views on this site HistoryReceived August 26, 2022Accepted August 26, 2022 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.