The Politics of Loyalty: Accountability, Transformation and Redress in South African Higher Education

In South Africa, a notion that is often touted by "progressive" universities is that they were not supporters of the institutionalised system of racialisation called apartheid. Rather, they would lay the blame at the door of "Afrikaaner nationalists", and spurn the notion of whiteness as being nothing other than hate speech by the "previously oppressed" in an attempt to bring about "reverse apartheid" in South Africa today. This paper will address what it calls the politics of loyalty in an attempt to understand the paradoxes that are at play in this country, which is still a complex, intricate and largely defragmented jigsaw puzzle indicative of most societies in transition. The varied nature of contextual whiteness does not appear to have a unilinear trajectory, uniform expression, and/or a uniform approach to transformation. This paper is located in the South African Higher Education sector and will incorporate a comparative view on universities in two separate geographical areas; traditionally polarised by their historical positions, ideological foci, and so on but a shared location in the bedrock of privilege that necessitated transformation in South Africa in the first place. Questions focused on in the paper include: How are First Nation peoples' current realities understood? Which, if any, university programs of restitution exist in relation to South African First Nation peoples? How is resistance or pursuit of the achievement of transformational imperatives and the simultaneous protection of "diversity" identified?