http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs
http://www.themercury.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4544608
The Mercury
UKZN may snuff out its left brain
What's next for Durban's best-known institute of social and
environmental justice?
August 06, 2008 Edition 1
By Dennis Brutus and Patrick Bond
Eye on Civil Society Column
University of KwaZulu-Natal vice-chancellor Malegapuru Makgoba is
expected to deliver an edict that the Centre for Civil Society will
close on December 31.
The reason given by dean Donal McCracken to a sceptical School of
Development Studies (where the centre is housed) is that staff do not
have "permanent" funding.
But neither do most of the university's research units, and there is
money in centre reserves for at least a couple of years, plus ongoing
donor support for many of our projects.
Hence this "execution" will be doggedly resisted in the Memorial Tower
Building, because UKZN still has many staff and students who remember
the struggle for non-racial democracy and don't mind speaking out to
challenge misguided decisions.
As the two most senior academics in the centre, holding an honorary
professorship and tenured research chair, respectively, we will resist,
despite what a UKZN internal report recorded - an environment of
"intimidation and bullying", in which management "deploys power rather
than intellect", as Rhodes professor Jimi Adesina put it.
The decision is misguided for many reasons, not least for overturning
the official recommendation of a five-month University Research Review
finalised in February, which advocated strengthening the centre and
giving it more autonomy: "Closing down or removing the centre from UKZN
does not appear to be an option as it was rejected by all interviewees
and panel members. Through its international recognition and standing,
the centre has put UKZN on a world map in social science, a position
the
university dare not risk to lose."
Newsmakers
On the local map, the centre has offered nearly 100 free events a year,
including seminars, conferences, micro film festivals, literary
celebrations and the Harold Wolpe Lecture, Durban's main lecture series.
In Howard College, several hundred community residents join academics
on
the last Thursday of each month to debate newsmakers and intellectuals,
global and local - such as, this year, commentator Xolela Mangcu,
Soweto
activist Trevor Ngwane, filmmaker John Pilger, Kenyan feminist Eunice
Sahle and Zimbabwe democracy activists Judith Todd and Joy Mabengwe, as
well as local anti-xenophobia campaigners Baruti Amisi, Pierre Matate
and Orlean Naidoo.
Among our inspirations is Fatima Meer, whom we host this Sunday in
Chatsworth in celebration of her 80 years of commitment and wisdom, as
well as her decade of support to the "new social movements" in the
original Concerned Citizens Forum which in 1998 helped renew urban
justice advocacy across South Africa.
Meer's Wolpe lecture last year called for a progressive,
post-nationalist liberatory politics to emerge from the grassroots,
like
the creative spark generated in 2001 when the World Social Forum in
Brazil rose against the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.
With our centre's assistance, the Social Movement Indaba network and
Diakonia Council of Churches hosted a local equivalent in January,
drawing 400 community and labour leaders.
Among those present were many who resisted Inanda Dam displacement,
Treatment Action Campaigners and Congolese inner-city traders who hang
in against all odds.
Evidence of abuse in the authorities' diktat to shut the centre ranges
from a flawed process, to extreme race and gender implications, since
contract termination affects a dozen black staff, most of whom are
working-class. The only paid staffer who should retain his job,
McCracken told us, is the sole white expatriate (a writer of this
article, Bond, whose government research subsidies more than pay his
salary).
In addition to UKZN's threat to this centre and a generation of new
critical scholars, a great deal of concrete research activity is now at
risk.
UKZN claims it has South Africa's "second best" research profile (after
the University of Pretoria).
A modest contribution comes from our centre staff's peer-reviewed
articles, chapters and books - 58 in 2007 with an average 50 a year
since 2005 (and no, these fortnightly Mercury columns don't count) -
which rank us at the top of the university, measured per academic
employee.
High productivity arises from documenting and interrogating the social
laboratories of Durban, South Africa, Africa and the world, where
contradictions generated by globalisation and the flawed character of
post-colonial politics create conflict.
We have sought sites and research areas - climate, energy,
water/sanitation, global and national political economy, survival
strategies and community philanthropy, the rise of social movements in
Africa - where these contradictions tell us more about society,
politics, economy, gender, race, environment and other social relations
than we would normally get from our academic armchairs.
Conflicts
Beyond merely trying to understand the conflicts, serious scholars will
contribute to addressing them in a non-violent manner, such as through
international legal strategies that the other writer of this article,
Brutus, contributes to.
He does this with the Jubilee and the Khulumani Support Group, aiming
for $400 billion (R2 951billion) in reparations to be paid by
apartheid-era US and EU corporations - which hopefully will frighten
them enough to think twice about their next investment in the Sudan,
Zimbabwe, Burma and the like.
The danger of the centre's approach to knowledge production, "praxis",
is that the research generated sometimes threatens the privileges of
power.
Two years ago, the same authorities banned Ashwin Desai from continuing
employment at the centre and at UKZN, amidst a haze of confusion and
weak excuses.
We lost a major Human Sciences Research Council "Race and Redress"
grant
as a result of this interference.
In 2003, the US Agency for International Development retracted a
multimillion-rand donation after centre founder Adam Habib spoke out
against the Iraq war.
That sort of style the centre encouraged from the outset: honest and
courageous, combining the left brain's love of rigorous detail, and the
left side of the body's beating heart.
UKZN management has stabbed this centre, but it cannot be allowed to
die.
So this is really all about politics, and whether a university can host
a critical mass of professional academics and community scholars
devoted
to social justice.
# If you have testimonials about the wisdom of closing CCS, for or
against, please let us know, at dennisbrutus2002@yahoo.com and
pbond@mail.ngo.za - or fax to 260 2052 - and these will be posted at
http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs
Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Director, Programme in 'Transformative Practice and Human Development'
Centro Internacional Miranda, P.H.
Residencias Anauco Suites, Parque Central, final Av. Bolivar
Caracas, Venezuela
fax: 0212 5768274/0212 5777231
http//:centrointernacionalmiranda.gob.ve
mlebowit@sfu.ca