PUTTING HERSELF IN HER PLACE…RECLAIMING THE PLACE

This is a rendition prepared for the launch of Dr. Sibongile Vilakazi's book "Putting Her in Her Place". It could not be read in full at the occasion. 

Seldom do we find a book written based on personal experience. In this maze of reading, characterised by envy, jealousy, power, appreciation, mentorship, and collegiality, society will encounter a mixture of themes that take turns on the author's person and the story. We are all born into this world with an identity and consciousness. We are received into homes and immediately after that in 'the village', then society, the nation, and ultimately the world. In these spaces, we choose and work for the places we want to put ourselves or claim a right to some.

As we navigate the contestation for those places, we create, generate, and almost always acquire friends, partners, mentors, adversaries, enemies, and destiny helpers who become stakeholders in our lives. These stakeholders abrogate themselves, rightly or wrongly, the right, privilege, or claim over our lives and the place(s) we chose. In most cases, their interest in us is inextricably linked to their interests and how our choices enhance, neutralise, diminish, or threaten their chosen spaces. Only when a conflict of interests arises in or about the spaces we have both selected that a race to put each other in their place becomes an unfortunate preoccupation of the relationship. 

Depending on the power, resources, influence, and command of institutional, political, social, and economic capital, our handling of the conflict can be fatal or rewarding to the weaker in the conflict. In a context where there is a preponderance of class, race, physical, and gender chauvinism, the implications become dire and potentially generational. The book under review is a kaleidoscopic and synoptic articulation of the life of an otherwise highly educated woman, commanding the highest National Qualification Framework level in South Africa.

In her rendition, which is a narration of true and actual events, Dr Vilakazi paints a picture of what happens or can happen in environments where we least expect certain behaviours purely because of the institutional power they have curated as political, social, and commercial capital. In the jungle called work, in the tranquillity of the walls that collectively attract the concept of an academic institution, the true meaning of knowledge can and should be expressed only by those entrusted to facilitate knowledge exchange. The story questions, without declaring so, the legitimacy of Wits Business School to claim this role beyond publishing the book.

It is true that in academia, academic habits can quickly become society's values. The justice, democracy, fairness, and the rule of law that Universities teach and their scholars interrogate should, as far as possible, be the abstract of a reality beyond the theory they espouse. Although an institution is composed of humans and thus vulnerable to fallibilities, a higher premium of expectations is placed on universities as institutions of higher and ultimate legitimation of knowledge acquisition to be leading in showing society how it is done.  

This expectation is based on the truism that a University is an institution that must be characterised by loyalty to the idea of truth, no matter how awkward its intellectual or social consequences. Having lived through a regime in which justice was sacrificed, consciously and methodically, to the supposed interests of those in or with institutional power, Universities, worse if they chose not to compact with their intellectual suicide by siding with the justice-seeking, cannot be forgiven for a lapse of social justice. Notwithstanding that, the best institutions at a University, which Wits Business School claims, are apt to deteriorate and become distorted; this is intolerable if it impoverishes the social justice vitality of the University.

As Nelson Mandela teaches us, "To be free is not merely to cast off one's chains but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others." The risk of mediocre academics in the practice of social, intellectual, and feminist justice to have their unjust acts preferred because they fit into a traditional scheme liquidated by a non-racial and non-sexist context of South Africa is an unignorable omnipresent as you traverse the book. In this book, Dr. Sibongile teaches that " putting a person in his/her place is to package yourself in a place reserved for putters of others in their place." Until the story is told, your narrative is safe. Now that the story is told, the guardrails are brittle, if not fractured, time to reconcile with the book's content has arrived.

The courage to take a pen and paper and sit to tell your story is the most significant sign of the absence of the fear of being accountable for your version or interpretation of the truth. It is a commitment to the consequences that might come beyond your on-record expression of events. It is your narrative versus other versions. With that, you choose what place you want to be put. This is where Sibongile took the courage to put herself in her place.

Sibongile takes us through the moments of her decision to enter the foxes and academia world. She went in there guided by the innocence of the perceived outcomes of academia. What Sibongile did not know, and the book pulls you there, is that in academia, “accidents never happen when the room is empty”; they happen when academics are in the room. To many, you are a chapter, if not a thread, that connects them to the rest you are attached to. Yet, Sibongile submits, “Whether I liked it or not, I was destined for academia because it has chosen me.

She invites us to the world of being highly educated, holding the highest NQF level and yet surviving through income from other streams unless you have a multi-generational trust fund dealing with your essential expenditure items. The trust fund would have liquidated the need for a mortgage bond, private school education for your kids, and other similar niceties of being a young human before you become an old Professor who has little or no material pleasures to procure any more.

This is where her challenges began. She negotiated an arrangement. The arrangement was not tight enough, and thus, she became vulnerable to abuse as part of the envy, jealousy, and power projection vortex. There were people she discussed the options of augmenting her income with, and an impression was created that she could proceed to explore additional income options other than getting from trusts and other formal arrangements with which she had no sufficient experience to deal.

In the book, you find her reliance on a written performance contract when there are seemingly other not-on-record contracts she would later realise were equally essential to enter into. The innocence in her communication with those in her complex had complexities that generated a condition where power defined her as being at variance with a polyvalent interpretable policy of the University. A policy the University has since changed because it was flawed, and yet did not care to deal with reparations. Sibongile is now on a death sentence consequence for a policy framework that was changed, like the graves of anti-apartheid struggle martyrs; no one cared to apologise. She died at WBS and is now multiplying with the truth she represents.

As the story unfolds, the traditional view of policy as what becomes relevant when a conflict of interest does not always work in contexts when the power to define and interpret is skewed in favour of institutional power. Unless changed or reviewed, the supposed policy on externally funded work is, according to Professor Stacey, and I agree that it is ambiguous and vulnerable to patronage abuse, depending on who can define it at the moment of interpretation.

This introduces us to the theme of Sibongile, the social justice activist. In the book, she declares that “the purpose of (creating) is to provide clarity and guidelines to govern behaviour. To her, “policies…establish expectations regarding the organisation, …they regulate …behaviour, they hold management accountable to …standards. The entire book, and dare I say, her outlook on life, sometimes at a very great cost to her career path, is about how she demanded this accountability. The record of events is also a terrain of demanding the very same accountability. Sibongile is an accountability activist. This has put her at variance with those who thrive on a lack of accountability. There are other judgements in which she is involved that have liquidated the disdain for accountability and the impunity at which that was expected to be normal.

In her articulation of the moonlighting judgement, which she has made its content available from a de novo hearing, she introduces a theme on the independence of the judiciary (in specialised courts and) in circumstances where the judge or acting judge has an arguable conflict of interest. A casual search or connecting of the proverbial dots will lead you to exciting conclusions only history and posterity might want to define. What is unfair about the judgement is that it received sufficient media and potentially unwarranted legal precedence airtime. It would be interesting to know if the case is cited in scholarly labour law articles and if a rejoinder might be appropriate. It is worrying that the acting judge did not get the case to be reported.

Without sounding like an appellate division of the Court of Public Opinion, the facts of the case had a dimension of correctness, and the costs of contesting the substantive aspect of and about the facts compromised the expectations of justice from the said court. In her concluding chapter, Sibongile makes a case for justice being denied to her without vilifying the justice system. All that she says about the justice system is summarised in her statement, “It is a relief to know that, despite the glacial pace and tedium, the justice system does possess checks and balances”. 

The timelessness of the opening statement of the South African Constitution, “We, the people of South Africa, recognise the injustices of our past,” is her only solace. Once this book is appropriately read in the future, what happened to her will be an injustice of the past, and someone will realise that it needs to be corrected. However, the fact that it is on record is an enough indictment of the injustice.  If there is a Mandela lesson in the book, it is that “our choices should reflect our hopes and not our fears; we are the captains of our souls.”

In conclusion, Richard Siken, in his book War of the Foxes, states that because “there is rarely any joy in a frictionless space, we should find our inner thickness or viscosity.” This was a good read. It clarified a lot about what Dr Sibongile Vilakazi went through at the hands of Wits Business School. It brought her inner viscosity better than the public space and narrative did. As you slow down, now that your story is ventilated, it has an international standard book number, and you could not proceed to a legitimate not-guilty verdict, it might be prudent to reclaim the peace that was stolen from you.

The first step is to think of a second book.

Sibongile, Sibongile.