Psychosocial Pathways Towards Reinventing the South African University

Wrestling with the Ghost of a Bull

Sabrina Liccardo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030490355
• eBook ISBN: 9783030490362
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Psychology

?This book proposes a conceptual-empirical framework for exploring forms of continuity and change along psychosocial pathways in South African universities. It illustrates how the psychosocial pathways are grounded in the symbolic narratives and knowledges of young scientists, engineers and architects - all interlocutors in the research from which this book is based. Alala, Mamoratwa, Welile, Odirile, Kaiya, Amirah, Takalani, Nosakhele, Naila, Ambani, Khanyisile, Itumeleng, Ethwasa and Kgnaya provide collective standpoints in the multiplicities within and between the lived lives and told stories of young Black South African women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. In doing so, this compelling work advances possibilities for demythologising scientific endeavour as a white male achievement and shifting knowledge communities across gendered, racialised, class and national divides.
This book presents an innovative narrative methodology, utilising the myth of the Minotaur to examine the state of the university at the heart of the hierarchical labyrinth in "post"-apartheid South Africa. Throughout the work the author wrestles with and self-reflexively highlights her own positionality as a white, middle-class South African woman to examine how this affects the production of this research in ways which serve to preserve the colonial knowledge system. With the rise of the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall student movement in South Africa, demanding for the fall of institutionalised racial hierarchies, the author uses the cover image of narrative formations in the spirit of exploration to think with and through undulating networked forms that could possibly forge new psychosocial pathways towards decolonising and reinventing South African universities. This work offers a unique conceptual and methodological resource for students and scholars of psychosocial and narrative theory, as well as those who are concerned about the politics of higher education, both in South Africa and in other contexts around the world.

© The Author(s) 2020

S. LiccardoPsychosocial Pathways Towards Reinventing the South African Universityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49036-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Labyrinth of the Minotaur in “Post”-apartheid South Africa: Wrestling with the Ghost of a Bull

Sabrina Liccardo¹

(1)

Psychology, University of Pretoria, Tshwane, South Africa

End Abstract

Wrestling with a Ghost of a Bull

In the first month of moving to Pretoria/Tshwane in 2017, I had a vivid dream that the ghost of a bull was circling me and pulling me towards it, but I woke myself up. A few months later when I visited the Voortrekker Monument,¹ I saw this buffalo bull head over the main entrance, and I knew it was that space which contained the depleting energy from the ghost of the bull in my dream (Image 1.1).

Image 1.1

A buffalo bull head above the main entrance of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria/Tshwane, South Africa

Why is it that this bodiless head of a bull situated at the very centre of the Voortrekker Monument feels like a silent vacuum of space and time, and dominant energy that is stuck in limbo? I begin with this dream to situate myself in this research project and to situate this project within its historical context. As a white, middle-class South African woman and researcher of this project, I write from a position of systematically conferred privilege and unearned advantage. What does it mean for me to wrestle with the ghost of this bull? I have been troubled by this dream. Why did I wake myself up instead of confronting this bull?

I keep returning to the prologue of the Black existentialist novelist, Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Invisible Man (1995 [1952]) in which the unnamed narrator states:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. (p. 3)

The narrator who describes himself as the invisible man is invisible not because he is a ghost, but his invisibility is a product of white people’s refusal to see him because it benefits them not to see him (Milazzo, 2017). Instead of seeing the invisible man as a human being and recognising his complex humanity and individuality, white people only see his “surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except [him ]” (Ellison, 1995 [1952]) p. 3).

The narrator is trying to establish what the right norms of belief in a distorted looking-glass world are, because these make him invisible to white people (Mills, 2007). On the one hand, it has been argued that individuals actively conform to normative practices that not only contribute to the accumulation of capital specific to a field but also to the reproduction of the structure of social space (Naidoo, 2004). As Richard Dyer (1997) has shown in his incisive discussion of whiteness and the privilege which is associated with being the invisible norm, it is important to constantly interrogate what counts as “normal” and by implication what is either privileged or rendered illicit and “abnormal” (Vincent, 2015). Melissa Steyn (2012) describes what she calls the Ignorance Contract² as the systematic misperception and tacit agreement to misrepresent the world and entertain “ignorance” as a social accomplishment with strategic value; “ignorance” provides a comforting or “insulating medium” for white people from seeing how their privileges for their psychological well-being is maintained by realities of social injustices (Steyn, 2012). The normative practices that maintain unjustly conferred privileges go unquestioned, perpetuating unequal power relations and reproducing racial hierarchies ³ (Steyn, 2012). Steyn (2012) maintains that “ignorance” is important to world-making because dominant groups have the capital and power to deliberately institute an ignorance contract by imposing their interests upon social fields and in doing so effect social control.

However, on the other hand, at the end of the prologue, the invisible man challenges the notion of white ignorance by referring back to an earlier incident in which he demanded that a white man who had bumped into him apologise for his actions:

I won’t buy it. You can’t give it to me. He bumped me, he insulted me. Shouldn’t he, for his own personal safety, have recognized my hysteria, my “danger potential”? He, let us say, was lost in a dream world. But didn’t he control that dream world which, alas, is only too real! and didn’t he rule me out of it? And if he had yelled for a policeman, wouldn’t I have been taken for the offending one? Yes, yes, yes! (Ellison, 1995 [1952], p. 14)

The narrator does not state that white people are ignorant of how they rule out the invisible man from their “dream world”, but that they actively construct, control, perpetuate and are therefore responsible for this world (Milazzo, 2017).⁴ These normative centres of what it means to be “human” in a distorted looking-glass world continue to be written into the core of South African society structured in racial hierarchies by deliberately adding new layers of what George Lipsitz (2006) calls the possessive investment in whiteness . These layers include the active re-inscription of unjustly conferred white privilege, the refusal to see the complex humanity and individuality of Black peoples and the denial that history is not the past and that horrific inequalities and injustices produced by racial distributions of power persist, in our present. In a documentary film I am Not Your Negro, the African American novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist James Baldwin states:

History is not the past.

It is the present.

We carry our history with us.

We are our history.

If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals. (2017, emphasis in original, p. 107)

The Labyrinth of the Minotaur in “Post”-apartheid South Africa

The Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall student movement in South Africa for free higher education and decolonisation of the institutional practices and curricula have raised necessary debates about whiteness and the devastating effects of institutional racial hierarchies (Mbembe , 2019a). It is a reminder of the imperative for, as the Cameroonian philosopher, political scientist, and public intellectual Achille Mbembe (2015) notes, “the demythologizing of certain versions of history [which] must go hand in hand with the demythologizing of whiteness ” (n.d. emphasis in original). In his paper, “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive”, Mbembe (2015) explains that human history is beyond whiteness, history is about the future whereas “[w]hiteness is about entrapment. Whiteness is at its best when it turns into a myth. It is the most corrosive and the most lethal when it makes us believe that it is everywhere; that everything originates from it and it has no outside” (n.d).

The metaphorical illustrations of narrative forms that organise this book are firmly grounded in reality and the particular context which is depicted in Fig. 1.1,⁵ that is, the Minotaur’s labyrinth of White colonial domination and hetero-pat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Labyrinth of the Minotaur in “Post”-apartheid South Africa: Wrestling with the Ghost of a Bull
• 2. Decolonising the South African Higher Education System
• 3. Theorising a Biographic Visual-Narrative and Decolonising Methodology of (Non)being (Space), (Not)becoming (Power) and (No)belonging (Knowledge)
• 4. The Lived Lives and Told Storymazes of Young Black South African Women in STEM Fields
• 5. Pathway A: The Discursive-Circulatory System of (Non)being a Science Person—The Lived Social Life of Institutional Culture
• 6. Pathway B: The Storied-Nervous System of (Not)Becoming Modern Scientists—The Told Psychic Life of Pedagogy
• 7. Pathway C-entre. The Narrative-Respiratory System of (No)belonging to Knowledge Communities: The Collective Psychosocial Life of Social Scientific Research
• 8. Towards a Complex-Reproductive System of (Re)pairing Being, Becoming and Belonging to Knowledge Communities in South Africa
• 9. The Toroidal-Maze of Tragic Love in Motion: Proposing a Complex Systems Programme Model for Translating Theoretical Pathways into Social Praxis
• Back Matter