Verdict: carrot
An extended meditation on the book by the University of the Free State’s Jonathan Jansen, whose inaugural address caused such a firestorm:
Jonathan Jansen is a prominent personality in the South African education landscape. Challenging, controversial and sometimes cynical, he has not been afraid to engage with the issues of the day. Knowledge in the Blood reflects on his experience as the first black dean of education at the University of Pretoria and asks why it was that young Afrikaners, born at the time of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, held such rigid ideas about black people?
The book and its lines of inquiry become even more urgent in light of Jansen’s recent inaugural lecture as rector and vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State and the institution’s intention to withdraw charges against four white Afrikaans students accused of demeaning black cleaning staff there.
Knowledge in the Blood is a reflection on the tremendous social change that was taking place after the demise of apartheid. Jansen originally set out to convey a story of how white students were changing, but he soon realised that these students changed him. Jansen was a witness both to the apartheid past and to the dramatic transition after apartheid and he provides an account of his appointment at the university in the first chapter. He tells of his interactions with colleagues, administration and students: “At UP I have had some of the most profound and life-changing experiences that any human being could expect to face in one career.”
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