ASINAMALI UNDIVERSITY STRUGGLES IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

Asinamali is an edited collection of essays that includes work by Dennis Brutus, Shereen Essof, Jonathan Jansen, Mahmood Mamdani and Andrew Nash. It is a project of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA).

Asinamali marks CAFA's first enquiry into academic freedom in post-apartheid South Africa. Asinamali means 'We have no money' and is a phrase that was often sung in the struggles against apartheid. A key demand of the struggles against apartheid was, in the famous words of the Freedom Charter adopted at the Congress of the People in 1955, that 'The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall be Opened". But in the ten years since the end of apartheid the South African university system has been rapidly commodified with the result that students who are poor are increasingly being excluded from university education, often at gunpoint, and research and teaching are once again being organized in the interests of elites. But the commodification of education in post-apartheid South Africa has been vigorously contested by student struggles. Thus the old language of resistance is back on South African campuses.

The essays collected here cover a range of themes including the struggles to decolonize curricula, the nature and impact of the steady corporatization and commodification of universities and the student resistance to the exclusion of poor students from universities.

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