What Jason and the Technicoloured Dreamcoat of Academia reveal about othering

The death of Professor Jason Arday raises urgent questions about othering, inclusion and the responsibilities of universities in confronting prejudice. South Africa’s own struggles with xenophobia and exclusion make this a deeply relevant reckoning with how fear can turn difference into division.

Robert J Balfour is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Western Cape.

I am a graduate of Cambridge; and also a recipient of its Commonwealth and other bursaries. In that sense, I am a beneficiary, as also an advocate, of what excellence stands for. Reading about Professor Jason Arday is by turns sad, disappointing and, at a visceral level, gut-wrenching because of the fractures that appear concerning othering and inclusion.

It is the same feeling that prevails when, in recent years, some South African social movements have contributed to the othering of foreign nationals by portraying people as responsible for, or contributing to, increasing unemployment levels or crime, often in distressing ways.

In some ways these developments arise from the imperfections of our government’s historic approach to porous borders and weak immigration controls (and by this I mean weak documentation measures rather than only weak control of access) so that the belief distorts the reality.

Of course, measures of proper identification and access control should be in place on matters of migration; rigour and quality controls should be in place in academic contexts. We expect from both the bureaucratic, as also the education functions of the state, adequate quality controls.

But when controls become, even in their absence, the justification for displacement, othering and judgement, we need as society to pause. Professor Jason Arday died alone. Many migrants having to return to places they had either fled, or been driven from, have felt themselves alone at the mercy of communities they had come to think of as home. It was Hannah Arendt who made the point about how fear aligns with tyranny to become a political means to foster suspicion and isolation.

Professor Jason Arday was born in Britain to Ghanaian parents. Evidently this form of belonging and inclusion in a multicultural and multilingual society seems in retrospect to be weak: too weak to counter or prevent racialised othering in a society in which immigration is presently a vexed and divisive issue; opening up the wounds of a state that was shaped imperial practices concerning enslaved, indentured and migrant labour.

Othering does not take on an altogether different shade with respect to foreign nationals in SA.