8 the state of science in south africa
H U M A N I T I E S A N D S O C I A L S C I E N C E S
beyond the country’s immediate borders The cultural roots of the so-called liberal
where, mingling with apartheid’s racial ide- universities drew them towards Oxbridge
ology, it caused death and destruction even though (as with all the country’s
throughout the southern Africa region. universities) they were originally depend-
ent on the University of London for the is-
These two examples highlight the difficul- suing of their degrees. In their academic
ties in describing the humanities (which programmes and their administrative form
includes, in the current understanding, the they were closer to the Scottish university
social sciences) in a deeply divided society tradition, however. These affinities strongly
like South Africa. As noted previously, how- influenced the early organisation and the
ever, there has not been one, but a number, content of the humanities, the arts and
of approaches to knowledge within the the social sciences, and the intellectual
country – each of which pursued separate hold of the cultural/academic metropole
epistemological niches, each drawn from – especially that of ‘the golden triangle’ of
(and contributing to) separate cultures. Cambridge, Oxford and London. Arguably,
Because they are so integral to the devel- the latter was broken only by the intellec-
opment of the humanities and the social tual ferment (and the progressive politics)
sciences in post-apartheid South Africa it is which followed upon the establishment of
necessary to describe these – albeit briefly. the University of Sussex in 1961. A number
of South Africans, who were to make a deep
Three waves of knowledge-making – ‘Liber- impression on the humanities in the 1970s
al/English’, ‘Nationalist/Afrikaner’ and ‘Pan- and the 1980s, did postgraduate work at
African’ – marked the path of the humanities Sussex; it was from the same place that the
in South Africa. The first of these descriptors country’s second democratically elected
are akin to the standard liberal rendition of President, Thabo Mbeki, graduated with an
apartheid history, and reflect the stance MA in economics from the School of Social
of these categories towards apartheid. So, Studies.
the liberal or English-medium universities
(Cape Town, Witwatersrand, Natal (now Lawrence Wright has described South Af-
called KwaZulu-Natal) and Rhodes) readily rican English-speaking universities as in-
embraced the idea of admitting students of struments for “transmitting metropolitan
all races. Although their enthusiasm for this knowledge and excitement in a colonial
approach to education was somewhat un- situation” (Wright, 2006:73). The resulting
even, this choice flew in the face of apart- sense of inferiority – the ‘cultural cringe’ as
heid policy, particularly of two notorious the Australian AS Philips famously called it
pieces of legislation: the Separate Universi- – slowed the indigenisation of the humani-
ty Education Bill of 1957, and the Extension ties in these institutions. Rarely was there
of University Education Act, Act 45 of 1959. any desire to challenge the metropolitan-
Cumulatively, these pieces of legislation determined paradigm. A number of inspir-
made the issue of race the only criterion for ing teachers did challenge the status quo by
admission to higher education. instilling what the late Richard Rorty called
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