Original Date: August 6th, 2021
A work of interpretive social history, this book uses the political biography of a philosophy professor at the University of Cape Town, a public intellectual who vigorously supported the apartheid state – to recalibrate understandings of South African liberalism and link the University’s past to the dynamics of movements calling for academic and workplace decolonization.
About Teresa Barnes
Dr. Barnes main research project focuses on a South African philosophy professor who was also a state censor, prosecution witness and perhaps even a spy in the apartheid era, 1950s and 1960s. She is working on this project because there is not enough historiography of higher education in South Africa in this period – not enough to allow us to understand how people were educated to accept injustice. She is intrigued by this particular professor because he held a prominent educational position for a long time and was also very outspoken in the South African national media about his support for apartheid.