[Tweet] Lwazi Lushaba addresses Herschel Girls School under their DEI program

https://twitter.com/wilkinsoncape/status/1488723849944485894?s=21

In response to Richard Wilkinson's tweet, below are our additional comment about Dr. Lushaba.

Dr. Lwazi Lushaba was suspended by Wits University for his involvement in a Student Representative Council (SRC) election debate which ended in physical altercations between members of Wits EFF and Project W – a non-politically affiliated student representative group.

He left Wits and was employed in the Politics Department of UCT the following year.

Prof. David Benatar’s book “The Fall of the University of Cape Town” devotes a chapter to an article he originally wrote for Politicsweb on 15 April 2021. CHAPTER 22: COMMANDANTE LUSHABA AND THE FÜHRER and it examines a statement made in a pre-recorded lecture posted online that ‘Hitler committed no crime. All Hitler did was to do to white people what white people have reserved for us, black people.’ 

Prof. Benatar in CHAPTER 18: SELECTING A DEAN: RACISTS V RACIST XENOPHOBES explores a tortuous process held to appoint a new dean to the Humanities Faculty. A selection committee had to be constituted. After the nominations and elections, Dr. Lushaba objected to a component of the committee.

When a member of the Philosophy Department said that it would not be right to re-open nominations and effectively discard the result, Dr. Lwazi accused the lecturer of being one of the ‘beneficiaries of racial privilege…[who arrogate unto themselves to (sic) right to tell us victims of racial injustice how we ought to comport ourselves’ and that the lecturer ‘can as best as whiteness does always summon institutions of British colonial violence and kill us.’ 

The process was tortuous and extended, too detailed to go into. Save to say, that when votes were being tallied he, inter alia, ‘began tearing up ballots, kicking ballot boxes removing some ballots and putting at least one in his mouth. He also “manhandled” two administrators when they tried to stop him.’

Famously Dr. Lushaba told his students that “blacks” and “whites” cannot be friends and then set an exam question in which he asked students to “specify the reason for the impossibility of such friendships. He also complained about the abundance of “white female” postgraduate students in his department.

Over and above what Prof. Benatar has said, during 2016 and 2017 the following public utterances were made by Dr. Lushaba:

“Comrades and Black people, a called for the “defeat of White settlers”.  

“Free education is a problem for Black not White people.  This struggle is not for poor people.  It is for Black people.   Until we face the realities of history, will not be able to deal with the present, let alone prepare for the future.  If you are Black, you are disadvantaged in every respect.  If you are White, you are advantaged in every respect.  The struggle for free education is not about money.  The problem is the value system of education.”

“UCT continues to “teach precisely the same ideas it taught during Apartheid in order to perpetuate the colonial system.  The task of thinking has been made an exclusive preserve of White people.  Blacks cannot produce knowledge.”

“There is a structure [current ad hominem promotion procedures] that ensures that we are kept outside of the academy.  This is not accidental.  It is by design.  Those who are beneficiaries of colonialism and Apartheid [Whites] and, consequently occupy positions must have the decency to listen to the oppressed.  They will learn, even if it’s painful, they will learn.”

“White people provoke us and tell us how to respond to the provocation.  We have no autonomy of thought.”

“Currently, UCT graduates only seek jobs within the overarching “System” saying: “Please employ me because I’ve gone to a White racist UCT and survived.”

“We must tell the White people who are threatening to walk away that a time will come along soon when we will run UCT on our own and give them a new value system and not at the whim of ‘White’ sentiment”

“….our enemies, white people”