Lalela: occupying knowledge practices and processes in higher education in South Africa
June Bam-Hutchison presented a paper at the HUMA Anthropology seminar held at UCT on 1 March 2016. The paper proposes the practice of Lalela in higher education teaching as a form of restorative justice and healing:
Through a historical and autobiographical reflection, this paper proposes Lalela (deep listening) as an ‘anticipatory’ rather than ‘reactive’ transformation intervention in higher education in South Africa - with UCT as case study. I consider Lalela pertinent to resolving burning political, epistemological and economic issues in contemporary South Africa.
One of the widely recognised limitations of the TRC is that the majority of the intergenerational wounded in South Africa was not ‘heard’. For many young black South Africans, who are fiercely critical of the negotiated settlement in 1994, of the TRC and of ‘not being heard’, statues and monuments provide the spatial proximity for accessible physical attack unlike a complex historically deep and powerful economic system that is globally entrenched, intransigent and inaccessible. And it is this realisation (amongst others) that informed the #RMF campaign for the removal of the Rhodes statue on UCT campus on 9 April 2015.
Today, where the statue of Rhodes once sat imposingly, there is a dull grey painted wooden box. A haunting black shadow of Rhodes is painted over the few steps below. The removal of this statue (however debatable) was catalytic and cathartic for many. The notion of UCT as the ‘gift of Rhodes’ is perceived as a form of deep psychological violence and an entrenchment of the disavowal of the Khoi people and their centuries of occupation of southern Africa. Hence, through reflecting on my own strong maternal Khoisan ancestry, I argue for Lalela as key to scholarship for social justice.
Inspired by Xolelwa Kashe-Katiya’s paper at the APC’s October 2015 workshop on ‘South Africa’s Heritage of Woundedness’, this paper argues that it should be recognised that UCT is part of a larger haunting landscape archive: Van Riebeeck’s first hedge of segregation in nearby Kirstenbosch and the campus is also in close proximity to the 17th century Cape of Good Hope Castle with its dark history of the torture chamber and execution space – poignantly, the people descendant of those once incarcerated there, remain largely today’s excluded.
We live and work in the intimacy of the university’s Hoerikwaggo space with little acknowledgement of such intergenerational trauma. Indigenous people of the Cape remain largely invisible as both staff and students. Much of the space that UCT occupies is now not surprisingly being questioned, claimed, occupied and appropriate intellectual intervention is required through new listening. As Kashe-Katiya reminded us, there is a need to understand the nature of this festering wound and also of continued "historical wound-making". Over twenty years later, we are only at the beginning of Lalela. What is this new listening that requires us to go beyond the limitations of 1980s voice discourse in South Africa?
It is clear that historically white universities in South Africa have no option but to become these boundary-less spaces, places of ‘ritualistic cleansing’ and of healing of intergenerational trauma. Real wisdom lies in listening, careful listening, respectful listening in a form of mutuality that sustains our humanity. Where Lalela is valued, notions of inferiority and superiority of knowledge are problematized to their very core; indigenous perspectives and presence are genuinely valued. The Lalela framework for higher education teaching and self-reflective practice advocates a nurturing approach to education; it is a form of ethical scholarship built on equal partnerships of knowledge production and in research. It is a form of restorative justice and healing.
Read an edited, fuller and updated version of the paper presented at the seminar.