Fighting racism important but condition of black people requires tireless attention: Ndebele

TIMESLIVE

Professor Njabulo Ndebele. File Photo
Image by: Shelley Christians / The Times

Although fighting racism was an important form of social activism‚ the condition of black people required the country’s tireless attention‚ University of Johannesburg Chancellor Prof Njabulo Ndebele said on Wednesday night.

Ndebele was addressing the 10 Annual Helen Joseph Memorial Lecture held at the university. “It seems as if whenever we take on racism and it glares back at us on a pedestal‚ we remove our gaze from the predominant condition of black lives where they really matter and require our tireless attention.”

Ndebele said the important question was what the fate of the townships were‚ where the overwhelming number of black people live.

“So when the fires rage and consume school after school‚ clinic after clinic‚ train after train‚ bus after bus‚ library after library‚ laboratory and family lives seem precarious and tender corruption takes away resources to improve black lives.

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“It is as if black lives matter only when they are insulted or shot at by white people‚ not when they conduct the daily business of life‚” Ndebele said.

He said it would be a mistake to come to the view that anti-racism action was not an important aspect of social activism. “It remains so. The challenge however is in how to characterise it.

“I choose to see it as part of how being black in the world ‘kind of norm’ previously contained in an oppressive environment‚ has been spreading beyond the township into the nooks and crannies of the South African landscape and the social configurations.”

“That it encounters barriers of the kind that we have been reading about in the news today‚ hair and everything‚ is a function of a normative expansion that requires greater definition and the determination to set the conditions of its character in place‚ so that they are known and not guessed at.”

Ndebele said since the burning of artworks at the University of Cape Town last year‚ fire as a weapon of protest had spread throughout the higher education system‚ to the horror of many.

“So‚ when the portraits of the colonials had been burnt‚ the timeless questions remain. What is the future of the townships. What is the link between that future and the schools and the university. What is the link between Sandton and Alexandra.”