Separate Development and Self-Reliance at the University of Pretoria

In 2007, the University of Pretoria’s office of community engagement arranged for a group of black women from a Pretoria township to travel to the whites-only town of Orania.1 Located in the rural Northern Cape province of South Africa, Orania was first established in 1963 as a housing area for the workers of a dam project. In 1991, it was repurposed as a homeland for Afrikaners unwilling to live in the ‘new’ South Africa.2 Based on the principle of self-werksaamheid, which residents translate into English as ‘self-reliance’, Orania goes against the long-held tradition in South Africa of employing black workers as domestic helpers, builders and the like, requiring the Afrikaners who live there to do their own labour. While the principle of selfreliance serves as a way to live separately from ‘non-whites’, it is also meant to reinforce self-sufficiency and solidarity among residents,3 and it is precisely this form of selfreliance that the black women were meant to learn from their visit. Two arguments emerge from this encounter. The first is that the main objective of the University of Pretoria’s current community engagement initiatives – to foster selfreliance, as demonstrated by the trip to Orania – does not depart significantly from this institution’s history of alignment with separate development and its objective to create self-reliant black subjects during apartheid. By envisioning itself as a trustee of black communities in and around Pretoria, the university used the disciplines of sociology and social work to conduct studies and to intervene in black social problems with the intention of fostering self-reliance. The second argument is that the university’s continued preoccupation with building self-reliant black communities in the post-apartheid present constitutes both a realignment with separate development and a convergence with the neoliberal restructuring of the state and the university in South Africa. These arguments seek to demonstrate that the university’s approach to community engagement cannot be disentangled from the institution’s direct involvement in implementing separate development and suggest that a critical engagement with the effects of separate development must be central to the critique of the university in South Africa. In the 1880s, the first Act of parliament of the South African Republic (ZuidAfrikaansche Republiek, or ZAR) made provision for the establishment of a college