‘Hitler committed no crime. All Hitler did was to do to white people what white people had normally reserved for black people.’
These comments came just days before Holocaust Remembrance Day was observed by South African Jews on 9 April. They were made by Dr Lwazi Lushaba, lecturer in department of politics at the University of Cape Town (UCT).
Lushaba’s comment was made in a pre-recorded online lecture shared with first-year political science students.
The Cape South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) and students from UCT have slammed the academic for his comments.
Tzvi Brivik, chairperson of the SAJBD, said: ‘To deny the tragedy which was the Holocaust or the culpability of those involved is to deny deep pain and lifelong trauma inflicted upon entire generations of Jews globally.
‘To represent genocide as a justifiable action against a minority in a political education space is shameful at best and devastating to students reliant on educators to help form their views.’
A student pointed out that Hitler didn’t just persecute Jews; he persecuted black people, gypsies, and disabled people, among others.
‘If you are a professor or lecturer in political studies, you should know that it is a terrible thing to say and to say that in a lecture is super-unprofessional and just a bad move.’
‘… Lushaba has been saying similarly egregious things since he got his doctorate,’ said another student.
A third student said: ‘Any time he gets hauled before the powers that be he claims either racism or free speech.’
Lushaba’s only response to the media was, ‘If you knew what university lectures are, you won’t be asking me that question you are asking me.’
But Lushaba has come up against university authority before.
History of disruption
In August 2015 Wits University Vice-Chancellor Adam Habib suspended Lushaba, who was left with only two months to graduate with a PhD from that institution.
This occurred as a result of a student election debate between the Wits Economic Freedom Fighters Student Command (Wits EFF) and Project W, a student representative group that was not affiliated to any political party or movement.
The debate ended in physical altercations and Habib suspended the Wits EFF and seven other students. ‘We suspended violent students and de-recognised a society only after it broke electoral rules and provoked violence,’ Habib said at the time. He also said that the Wits EFF was welcome to return to campus if it reconstituted, committed to peaceful engagement and respected the code of conduct.
This incident ended up on social media platforms where some ascribed the banning of political parties at public institutions to a lack of transformation at former ‘white’ universities.
The incident also led to Lushaba’s suspension. The letter from Habib to Lushaba, announcing his suspension, said that Lushaba had participated in activities that were not conducive to free and fair elections, and were intolerant to a democratic society.
‘The University has received reports of various statements made under the auspices of the Wits EFF, the thrust of which indicates a propensity to interfere with proper governance of the University….’
Lushaba said that the ‘commotion’ expressed by Wits EFF and other student organisations was ‘fairly proportionate to the intensity or pulse of the political contestation [that] erupted on the stage of the Great Hall, aborting what was supposed to be an SRC Election debate among different contending parties’.
Habib said, however, that the suspensions were warranted. ‘This is not about ideas,’ he said. ‘It is about violence and not being willing to commit to peaceful engagement.’
One can only speculate as to why UCT appointed Lushaba in light of Wits’s experiences. An anarchical racist is always going to be a risk.
Jameson Hall incident
Another incident happened on 26 September 2016 when Lushaba addressed a packed Jameson Hall at UCT.
The occasion was a protest under the banners of #BringBackOurCadres and #FeesMustFall. Classes, lectures, and tutorials were suspended.
One demand was to ‘implement a curriculum which critically centres Africa and the subaltern . . . By this we mean treating African discourses as the point of departure through addressing not only content, but languages and methodologies of education and learning and only examining Western experiences as far as they are relevant to our own experience’.
‘We talk about decolonising education. It is not a matter of accumulating capital,’ said Lushaba. ‘If our education remains colonial, our being remains colonial.’
Referencing Chairman Mao, Lushaba told the gathering: ‘To rebel is just. If you don’t rebel as a black person, your life is already damned.’
Decolonise education
Lushaba, giving an example of decolonised education, explained Tanzania’s post-independence spirit of ‘Uhuru na Kazi’, meaning freedom and work. He added that this extended to ‘Uhuru na Utajiri’, meaning freedom and wealth, and ‘Uhuru Utamaduni’, meaning freedom and culture. Then there was ‘Uhuru na Elimu’, meaning freedom and education. Tanzanians held these values dear in the aftermath of colonialism.
‘So when they ask us what we are going to teach in a decolonised university, these are things we are going to teach.’
Then came the nadir of disrupted events at UCT. In October 2017 a new students representative council was elected. Nine of the 15 elected candidates were members of the Democratic Alliance Students Organisation (DASO). The five candidates which had received the most votes were also all DASO candidates.
The outgoing SRC called a mass meeting in Memorial Hall. Speakers demanded there be no fee increase for 2018.
In late October protests began and an exam was disrupted. On Sunday 26 October UCT suspended classes for the Thursday and Friday following the disruptions.
On 1 November UCT management obtained an interdict in the Western Cape High Court to prevent further disruptions. Then-vice chancellor Max Price convened what turned out to be a heated public meeting on campus to discuss fees. The meeting was called by Price in response to demands by the protesters, who then berated him. The person who received the most votes as the newly elected SRC chair, DASO’s Karabo Khakhau, was jeered by the crowd.
Claims of exclusion
Lushaba popped up again, making a racially charged speech.
Lushaba said black academics would not sit on the sidelines ‘and watch black students protesting alone’. He continued: ‘It is no longer enough for our black academics to continue going to class to teach, when our black students are here.’
Lushaba criticised the decision to bring private security onto campus to deal with the chaos of the protests.
‘The process of decolonising these institutions cannot be driven by white management,’ he said.
‘The success of these white institutions has depended on our exclusion as black people,’ Lushaba said. ‘People like me are called black academics, but white academics are not called white academics. They are called academics.’
Lushaba said white critics of the protests were hypocrites. ‘Why is it when black people are asserting themselves, white academics are now speaking in the language of rights?’
‘The curriculum in these institutions must reflect to whom these institutions belong,’ he said. ‘Our taxes—the taxes of the poor people in this country—are being used at UCT to reproduce white privilege. All we’ve done is to try to make this place habitable for ourselves as black people.’
Tensions at the university were high after this, which saw property damage on campus and human excrement being dumped on university property.
2019 – another incident. This time Lushaba received a letter of reprimand from UCT for conduct that was ‘unacceptable, inappropriate and disrespectful’ when he stomped on ballot boxes and carryied out verbal and physical attacks over his unhappiness with the outcome of a vote for the dean of humanities.
Lushaba’s preferred candidate for the job — a black South African woman — received only 27% of the votes.
Lushaba has a long history of disruptive behaviour and – dare one say it – inappropriate behaviour for a university lecturer.
As Tzvi Brivik of the SAJBD points out: ‘Universities hold a lens to the socio-economic and political issues in the broader public and in this way help shape the minds of the future leaders of our country.
‘The personal views shared by this UCT lecturer were hateful and deeply offensive, and should have no part in the academic syllabus of a public university, nor be disseminated as such.’
And this wasn’t just one of Lushaba’s racist rants; this was a planned lecture given to impressionable students.
UCT will have to decide what to do with him, but a racist antisemite is not the kind of person a university should be relying on to shape young minds.
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend