CHAPTER 22 The Language of Mastery
Mastery of language affords remarkable power.
—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1967)The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people’s
definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed
in relation to the entire universe.
—Ngu ̃gi ̃ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind (1986)
Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact lan-
guage remains the master of man.
—Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (1975)
Yes, I have only one language, yet it is not mine.
—Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, Or, The Prosthesis of Origin
(1998)
In the spring of 2015, after weeks of campus protests, a statue of the British
colonial magnate Cecil John Rhodes that symbolically lorded over the com-
munity was removed from the University of Cape Town’s campus. The pro-
tests were initiated by an activist who threw human feces on the statue, an
act that repudiated the enduring legacies of racism at uct. The subsequent
public debates around the removal of the Rhodes statue brought to public
attention the extraordinary racial inequality of uct’s campus environment.
Across South Africa and beyond, the removal of the Rhodes statue came to
signal the necessity of refusing the legacies of colonization, emphasizing the
critical relation between symbolic spaces and material realities. As Rhodes
continued to reign symbolically on the campus decades after the formal
end of apartheid, it made a certain disturbing sense that uct should have a
scant five South African– born black professors on its faculty.