Jonathan Jansen, Breaking Bread: A Memoir (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2024)
This is the story of a transformational journey from exclusive fundamentalist religion to international inclusivity and a broad-minded approach to higher education. Jonathan Jansen’s parents were Anglican from Cape Town and DRC from the Boland; but they became devout Plymouth Brethren; in his father’s case a preacher and something of a rolling stone.
Jansen grew up in the Cape Town suburb of Retreat in a community that believed in beating good behaviour and learning into children. On top of that there were religious strictures: Jansen was beaten for attending a film about the 1968 Olympics. If mother, a nurse, were not around there were plenty of punitive aunties. His parents were an oddly assorted couple. Family relationships were complex and included past incest. With good reason, Jansen rejects the definition coloured and the concept of mixed race; but goes on to describe behaviours in close-knit communities that self-define thousands of South Africans.
Plymouth Brethren believe that they are in the world but not of it; in other words, just passing through. Entertainment of any sort was forbidden, although one female relative had a television in her bedroom just to watch the epilogue, or so she claimed. Jansen became a preacher on the trains and to various groups while aware of the petty-minded restrictions that governed church participation. Women were infantalised and due deference was paid to white brethren and the race laws of South Africa. This was predictably said to be non-political. As Jansen puts it, ‘Fundamentalism rejects you just as passionately as it first embraces you … many in the church live[d] comfortably with hearts full of hate and mouths full of scripture’ (p. 57).
At school he found embedded violence: ‘cruelty was everywhere’ (p. 64). Angry with teachers and rejecting academic work, he concentrated on football until called off the pitch one day at Steenberg High by Paul Galant the Latin teacher who told him he had academic potential. He was fortunate to grow up in the Cape where ‘education for liberation’ under apartheid was practised rather than the arid doctrine of ‘liberation first, education later’. His friend Archie Dick, subsequently a distinguished librarian, instilled study habits including all-night Friday sessions.
His start at University of the Western Cape (UWC) was rocky. It was an institution then still heavily under Afrikaner religious influence and a narrow curriculum dedicated to production of civil servants to populate coloured government institutions. Conservatism reigned, but black consciousness was beginning to have a significant impact. Jansen is surprisingly harsh about the rector Richard van der Ross at this this time; as well as about another head, Jakes Gerwel, whose attempt to turn the campus into the intellectual home of the South African Left he questions.
He left UWC in 1978 and started his career as a biology teacher at Vredenberg where he fretted against the wastage of good teaching time but organised middle-distance running. His teacher training courses were blighted by stultifying fundamental pedagogics. Transferring to Trafalgar High in District Six, he had to refurbish his own laboratory and was then accused by some colleagues of trying too hard. During this period in the early 1980s he also experienced teaching in Langa. At Trafalgar he had been set upon and robbed of exam papers that were burned.
But in the second half of the 1980s he studied at Cornell and Stanford universities in the USA. He eventually flourished in the competitive and innovative culture of American education and explains that it sees failure positively as a chance to start again. At Stanford he became an African student leader, but solidarity collapsed and the Nigerians and Afro-Americans broke away. Jansen’s specialisation was education curriculum development and reform, but he was denied the opportunity to research this further in Zimbabwe.
Jansen is often described as controversial; a label he disputes on the grounds that he simply tells truths others are too frightened to articulate. He predicted that outcomes-based education (OBE) would fail, was proved right, and then excluded from various platforms in what he describes as an ‘immature and insensitive democracy’. What is indeed controversial is his refusal to sing the national anthem because it reflects artificial, colonial boundaries. He is famous for questioning whether true universities any longer exist in South Africa. In a country in which higher education is a playground for political grandstanding, ethnic nationalist advancement and corruption of various sorts, Jansen’s belief that a university is defined by its intellectual life and culture is a truly revolutionary view. These attributes he sees as created by a high-quality professoriate, which he is presumably using in the American sense of the teaching staff as a whole.
South African universities he characterises as small-minded and petty places full of destructive jealousy and many lazy academics. Some, he argues, never had an original thought in their lives. This judgement comes from a man who works an eighteen-hour day. Then there is the rhetoric of transformation that masks black conservatism and resistance to employment of staff from other African countries.
At University of Durban-Westville (UDW) in the mid-1990s Jansen bumped up against a disruptive staff association (COMSA) and, among staff of Hindu inheritance, a caste system. Not for the last time he was accused of introducing exclusionary American standards. Then there was the disastrous tenure of Mapule Ramashala. At the turn of the century, he moved to University of Pretoria, being reminded that rectors at Afrikaans universities were close relations of the Almighty and that their culture was still tied to fundamental pedagogics and the mediocrity derived from ethnic exclusivity. Afrikaans was the language of command and control and assumptions were made about Jansen’s relationship to it as an assumed coloured person.
He was responsible for merging his department with a college of education on the Groenkloof campus. Here he had to establish his authority and teach whites manners in relation to black colleagues. In a biblical gesture appropriate to the locality, he washed the feet of staff in an innovative approach to racial reconciliation. Then he was parachuted by the national higher education minister into two Durban universities of technology – DUT and MUT – following governance collapse. But he is best remembered for his vice-chancellorship at University of the Free State (UOFS) from 2009 following some particularly visible incidents of racism at Reitz residence.
At UOFS he listened, consulted and assembled an advisory team. One of the problems underlying racism was identified as a culture of drinking. But his subtle approach to reconciliation between white students and black workers was widely and wilfully misinterpreted by various interest groups, although supported by Desmond Tutu and eventually backed by Julius Malema. Jansen was involved in the ejection of outside parties from student politics, but tackling Afrikaans as a teaching medium appeared a bridge too far. Then evidence appeared that it was being used in discriminatory fashion, so English became the language of most teaching.
Echoing Oprah Winfrey, he believes the secret of success is to surround yourself with a team of people that complements your weaknesses. And from experience of meetings, his approach is justifiably brutal. It’s well-known that control of the minutes gives great power; but do they really count for anything these days?
This book belongs to someone who is very much an independent-minded individual who could never have survived the brethren in the long term. There are frequent flashes of humour, but in the book’s later stages there is a hint of pomposity. As a youngster faced by a father with a birthday that fell on Christmas Day who anticipated two presents, he gave him two socks. Strangely for a member of the brethren he has had a long and healthy distrust of majority opinion and notes that he is an individual who fails to fit in with the country’s tribal structure. He believes South Africa must move beyond a racist/victim dichotomy and one of his mantras is ‘You are smarter than you think’, which has about it a distinct black consciousness ring.