Jonathan Jansen - Professor of Education

Professor Jonathan Jansen – South Africa’s Hope
Professor in education or pedagogy if you wish, Jonathan Jansen has in a few years already made his mark on relationships in South Africa.

Overwhelmingly gifted and with a doctorate from Stanford University in the USA, he has become a sign of hope for many of us here. A few months ago he spoke about his latest book then not yet published (now available: Jonathan D Jansen, Knowledge in the Blood. Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009, and Cape Town: UCT Press, 2009). He spoke at our university and it was one of those rare occasions when a packed hall of students and teachers listened extremely attentively. In between his phrases there was this expectant silence and the thick air that also had become quite hot, could be cut with a knife.

There is every reason to come back to this man, who once was classified Coloured, grew up in Montague, a gem of a small town in between the wine district of Robertson and the Little Karoo a semi-desert area, about 180 km from Cape Town and then in a township in the Cape Flats here in the city. The family lost their private property and also had to experience forced removal.

He many times has reason to stress or at least accept that he is a black person also these days. His assignment has been to try to transform an all white university like the University of Pretoria and he is just about to take on the task as Vice-Chancellor at the University of the Free State, one of the most conservative places in the country, still dominated by Afrikaners, students and staff, where there still are student hostels with only whites for example.

One of our best friends, Anders Göranzon, Kalmar, who would be very glad to know that Jansen has become the new Vice-Chancellor, has been a student chaplain on that campus and is now about to finalise his doctorate there (from Sweden).

In Pretoria Jonathan Jansen was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Education. He was almost the only black person in that kind of position as far as he could see at the year 2000. His role has been to try and get to know the Afrikaner community, students and staff, as they still dominate the scene there. It meant that he had to listen and learn from whites and try to hear them out how they perceive the needed transformation in the country.

In this piece of writing I will now conclude with two things that I have learnt from him. First of all, and I had not thought of it that way before, those who have experienced this society, both as a fully fledged apartheid society and then also a society under black rule with an at least party quite successful democracy, are unique. That is an experience that only one particular generation will be able to have. His message is: that generation with that kind of experience could be instruments of change in a way that no other later generation will be able to be. It is quite humbling to realise that we have been placed in that unique category.

Secondly, and this advice comes as a result from his years with the Afrikaners in Pretoria, South Africans will have to take people from the other groups than their own seriously. If you are black, you will have to learn to live with and appreciate ‘the other’ who happens to be white. Jansen himself is practising this and sets an example. Whites of course have to do the same thing. If such ‘going across the border’ does not take place this country is doomed already. I would add: if such crossing of borders does not take place, there will never be peace internally; the country will be ripped apart.