The University of Cape Town (UCT)’s Student Representative Council (SRC) has launched a formal bid to rename Smuts Hall, the men’s residence founded on the university’s Upper Campus in 1928 and named for Smuts after his death in 1950.
The SRC has approached the UCT Council through the university’s Naming of Buildings Committee (NOBC), to find a more “appropriate and representative name” for Smuts Hall.
The SRC wants a name that is “in line with the direction the institution aspires to”. The NOBC has apparently given the nod to the process and will make its recommendation to the UCT Council at the Council’s next meeting on 19 June.
The SRC’s submission decries the “colonial, imperialist and racist legacy of Jan Smuts”. It claims that the residence’s moniker “contributes to the character of its inhabitants”, who are “usually…private school matriculants”. The“perception”, according to the SRC, is that there are “a greater number of white students” in Smuts Hall. Moreover, the occupants are “perceived through their residence and by extension through their residence name [sic] as being racist and classist.”
Worst of all, said the SRC, those who dwell in Smuts Hall are “emboldened by the pride the residence alumni have in the name”. To the SRC, Smuts Hall – located in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes’s fallen statue and overlooked by (the now renamed) Jameson Hall – is one of several geographical markers that “signify an architecture and a space that negates Black humanity and dignity”.