The Politics of Loyalty and Dismantling Past-Present Knowing

Abstract

Indigenous sovereignty would be the first Khoisan¹ concept to submit for South Africa to move toward education for humanity. Drawing on “outsider inside” experiences in two prominent South African universities, this chapter encourages the reader—whether academic, academic manager, university council member, local, regional and/or national politician, educators, students and parents of students who have the desire and ambition for their children to enter higher education—to pay attention to the metamorphosing of the old guard and to understand what this could mean to the throughput rates of students, the student experience, the lecturing staff’s experience depending upon their stance toward the expectations of the entrenched politics of loyalty and how proponents of the latter impact on reviving the latent building blocks of historical forms of oppression as well as resistance. Of particular importance are practices of purposed erasures, self-serving denials, and transformation² rhetoric belied by verifiable realities.