Johannesburg - As Rhodes fell at UCT on Thursday, Wits student Moshibudi Motimele told The Star she was excited for the real work of transformation to start.
“What they’ve done at UCT is key,” said Motimele, a spokeswoman for the student group, Transform Wits.
“Now the struggle is, how do we replace that symbolism with something else that we can be proud of?”
Transform Wits holds similar demands of racial justice as UCT’s Rhodes Must Fall movement. Students hope that in light of UCT’s removal of its Cecil John Rhodes statue on Thursday, the national attention on transformation will pressure Wits to change in the long run.
Aside from the replacement of colonial figures and names on Wits’s campus with black historical ones, the students of Transform Wits want the university to revise its curricula to include more black scholars, hire more black academics and provide more financial and academic resources to black students.
Recently, Transform Wits has also demanded better treatment of campus workers, who Motimele said were often not paid on time by their employers and couldn’t access the facilities that they clean. The students held a picket at Wits on Wednesday to show their support for the employees.
Motimele, a politics masters student, said Transform Wits began late last year, when postgraduate students approached the politics department with requests for transformation.
Inspired by the department’s agreement to make changes, the students decided to take the movement to other universities.
One area in which they hope to see change is the racial composition of Wits’s academic staff. As of last month, Wits had 425 professors and associate professors, 16 percent of whom were black, according to Wits spokeswoman Vivienne Rowland.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor Tawana Kupe, who manages transformation issues at Wits, said the university used a fund to specifically hire black South African staff.
“However, we do not have enough funds to hire as many black academics as we would want, so that we (can) diversify the profile of academic staff more quickly,” Kupe said in an e-mail.
The Star