This dissertation is concerned with the politics of the production of a new post-apartheid nation out of the ethnic and racial identities of the immediate past. Particularly, I look at the institutional sites, and the contradictions accruing within them, of the production for a post-apartheid citizenry commensurate with the emerging "nonracial, nonsexist, unitary South African nation."
The dissertation focuses on tertiary education as one of the crucial sites in the making of citizens and human resource for the new nation. Confronted with the problem of relevance and identity following the end of apartheid, South African universities embarked on internal processes of institutional transformation to remake their images to fit the ethos of the new nation. I look at the discourses of transformation and their consequences as they happened at the University of Fort Hare, where transformation was led by a group of black administrators closely associated with the new national political elites. The first institution of higher education for black South Africans dating back to 1916, Fort Hare produced most of the country's new black nationalist leadership. The dissertation focuses on the symbolic uses of this past by the university administrators in the 1990s to, among others: (a) legitimate their own vision of institutional transformation by locating it within the politics of national reconstruction, and (b) coerce and isolate internal opponents to the project of transformation--particularly students, workers and some members of faculty. Here the past served to delimit historical memory and to provide a nationalist framework for current processes of social transformation. Using the concept of conversation to map the debates, actions and conflicts around this official narrative of transformation at Fort Hare, I in turn locate these debates within a historical context by looking at Fort Hare's relation to the politics of nationalism and black education from the mid-19 th to the late 20 th centuries.
My Research