Letter of Support for Dr. Lwazi Lushaba

Dear Prof. Butler,

We, the undersigned, completely support the efforts of Dr. Lwazi Lushaba who used an innovative and creative pedagogical practice to teach students on political culture and political socialisation by inviting speakers from #RMF [Rhodes Must Fall] to address his students in a politics class at UCT.

Teaching from history, especially on notions of political culture and from a culture steeped in struggle through protest is as important as a lecturer/professor taking her class of students outside to experience their environment rather than reading of it from a textbook.

In addition, we do not believe that anyone at any South African institution should undermine the pedagogical practices that scholars, trained in their respective fields, bring to the classroom.  

If we are educated and trained to teach within the university context, one that purports to function under a system where White students are no longer educated towards prosperity and Black students towards perpetual servitude as per the apartheid years then recognize that it is a context from which we have to work diligently and creatively to undo those deeply colonial and oppressive styles euphemistically called "teaching practice"in order to foster thinking and imagining within a context fitting to meet the needs of a democracy now twenty-two years in the making and from which one does not overcome simply by perpetuating old practices, which as we all know maintain the very system we all -- these days--claim to be against.

What Dr. Lushaba sought to do, in bringing young people to the classroom to offer insights into the segment "political culture," shows a decidedness about teaching politics from the narrative of those embroiled in struggle, who through their verbal articulations defined the very meaning of the word politics.  The whole point of this exercise, as per Dr Lushaba's words, was to "breathe life into this segment" of his teaching, which we endorse and affirm. We therefore request that you and your colleagues within your department do some self-examination and self-reflection as you unlearn your old practices, one of which is the assumption that your way is the correct way and the only way to teach any aspect of history and politics, and rethink your position by reading and drawing broadly from texts unbeknown to you, for a change and which I suspect are not difficult to come by, as to what constitutes knowledge dissemination and knowledge production in a democracy where to have agency means to act and be an actor, not simply to perpetuate, maintain and reproduce the system democracy broke from in order to call itself democracy.  

Prof. Rozena Maart    Contact the author of the petition