The University of Cape Town (UCT) and its merry-go-around of naming buildings
As a child I loved when my Dad took my sister and I to the local carnivals in Mitchell’s Plain. Each school would host one at least once a year. We would go on all the rides,and my favourite was the BIG WHEEL. Like clockwork we would come home, and I would throw up. I knew from an early age that going around in circles makes you nauseous.
This is UCT with renaming and naming buildings to pay homage to icons. It is all fake, and makes you want to mamok. On the face of it, it comes across as some noble act. It is not. It is pseudo-intellectual snobbery, deluded by thinking renaming a building after a local icon brings about some redress. Redressing the past is about systemic change. Something we can touch and hold onto. Now some would argue a building you can see, touch and reside in does that. It doesn’t. It abates this guilt, and always feels like a rushed decision to come across as transformative.
Harold Cressy was the first Coloured BA graduate in South Africa. Do we even need to imagine his experiences at UCT during the 1900's? He only got admitted after they were pressurised by a local councillor, Abdullah Abdurahman. Harold has been honoured way more auspiciously and with dignity by having a high school named in his honour. That school stands in District Six; an area destroyed by the bulldozers of the Apartheid spatial planning crews. Like a lone flower sprouting out of dust.
The heartbreaking irony being that the land today is desolate and unused. All the Boeta Dickie’s and Aunty Maureen’s are in their eighties now still awaiting the outcomes of their land claims. They had been subjected to the horrors of the Group Areas Act. The Group Areas Act was a law that assigned racial groups to different residential and business sections in urban areas in a system of urban apartheid. So UCT swoops in on the playground and names a residence after Harold. This does not make a statement, except to look inclusive. It is not a tribute. He struggled to gain access to your hallowed halls. He was an educator of substance. Not the poster child for your surface level transformation committee plans. Create a bursary in his name for kids from KZN where he was born, establish education units in marginalised areas, spark a dialogue that does not center your institution. Your reach to appeal to the Western World has no place in an Afrocentric context. Our country is a former colony, and the remedies that needs to be applied has to include those traditions and practices. Colonisers came here and renamed everything from the coastline to the mountains.
This circus of naming buildings after our icons is not what it purports to be. It is a speck, a pebble that makes no impact except to have non-European names on the campus map guides. Kindly and truly keep the colonial names on stolen property; its egregious but makes more sense than tainting indigenous icons with your constant failed and lazy attempts of transformation. I see the appeal to name a building after someone, but not on the land your institution has stood on for 200 years. It is neither blessed and never will be. It also smacks of disrespect, and again shows the lack of care and research into finding out how indigenous folk celebrated each other.
South Africa in its post-democratic state is having all its growing pains exposed as the carnival it has always been. We want transformation that trickles down, that affects our lives. We want to see tributes that change’s a child’s life, we want truth, justice and beauty. This is equity, this is systemic change. Each time UCT names a building after iconic indigenous and slave descendant folk a Renosterbos stops growing on Hoerikwaggo.