Human Centered

Jonathan Jansen's Power of Craft

Episode Summary

Episode Notes

While you're listening to this episode, 2016-17 CASBS fellow Jonathan Jansen likely will write another few thousand words. As a scholar of education & leader of education institutions, Jansen is South Africa's most towering figure. To call him prolific is a gross understatement. He writes a steady stream of books & more books. As a public intellectual he writes a separate steady stream of columns & essays. And he's written a family memoir too. We bring 2022-23 CASBS fellow Zimitri Erasmus, a social anthropologist who is working on a book on writing praxis, in conversation with Jansen to unlock some secrets & insights into his most powerful & liberating weapon for engaging the world – writing.

JONATHAN JANSEN
on Google Scholar
Jansen website

Mentioned in the episode
Corrupted: A Study of Chronic Dysfunction in South African Universities (2023)
Song for Sarah: Lessons from my Mother (2017)

Jansen and CASBS
"Loving and Blacking" (symposium, 2017)
"Higher Ed at the Crossroads" (webcast, 2020)

Episode Transcription

Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.

Today on Human Centered, 2016-17 CASBS Fellow Jonathan Jansen. Jansen is a scholar of education based in South Africa, where he's a towering figure in the leadership of academic institutions and the discourse of racial politics. He serves as distinguished professor in education at Stellenbosch University, and before that he was rector and vice chancellor of the University of the Free State, as well as dean of education at the University of Pretoria.

He is president of the South African Academy of Science and past president of the Institute of Race Relations in South Africa. He's the recipient of numerous awards, including the Education Africa Lifetime Achiever Award. In 2023, he was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He earned his PhD here at Stanford and holds a number of honorary doctorates. We'll drop several links in the episode notes so you can explore more of his amazing career. Jonathan is known for a leadership approach based on compassion, humility, deep understanding, reconciliation, and unity during complex and difficult times.

But he is also known in some circles as a prolific writer. A really, really prolific writer. In this episode, we aim to bring you into this circle by exploring just how and why he writes at a seemingly superhuman pace.

In just the past 10 years, he's the author or co-author of more than 15 books, including The Decolonization of Knowledge, Corrupted, Learning Lessons, Decolonization in Universities, As by Fire, Fault Lines, Leading for Change, Who Gets In and Why, Learning Under Lockdown, and A Song for Sarah. And let's not forget his numerous articles and regular newspaper column. And of course there's more coming.

We can't wait to add copies of the books Jonathan worked on during his fellowship here at CASBIS to our Ralph Tyler collection. Joining Jonathan in conversation on the practice of writing is 2022-23 CASBIS fellow Zimitri Erasmus, a sociologist and anthropologist based at the University of Vietfaldersrand, also in South Africa, where she conducts research on race and bioethics as well as microbiomes and what it means to be human. Zimitri is currently working on a book on writing praxis, which makes her the perfect interlocutor for engaging Jonathan on the topic.

The two explore how Jonathan finds and matches purpose with audience, how writing is a powerful act of liberation, engaging with the world through expression, writing as a tool for telling and making histories, writing as nourishment, and much more. So let's listen in.

Zimitri Erasmus: So, Jonathan, it's just such a pleasure to be in conversation with you again. And what I'd like you to do is to think with me about your work through the prism of writing as a practice, where content, context, craft and process meet. And your column in the Times, Song for Sarah, and Corrupted, your latest book, are each of a different genre. Each addresses a specific audience and each is accessible to a wide audience. What would you say is different about the craft behind each of these forms?

Jonathan Jansen: Thank you. As you said, audience and purpose. So when I write my column every Thursday, which I've now done for 15 years or something, I'm very aware of the fact that my audience is a generalist South African audience of people who want to know what's going down in society, particularly with respect to what I write about, which is education.

And so I write with that audience in mind, assuming a basic post school education, inform people about people who are informed about state of the country and so on, and trying to say something that connects them to my thinking about complex issues. However, when I write song for Sarah, I have a completely different audience and purpose in mind. Here, my audience is mothers on the Cape Flats, who despite being stereotyped as, you know, vulgar, loud mouthed, alcoholic, you know, too many children or over sexed and all that nonsense, I try to speak to that particular community to basically present the alternative or, in my view, the truth about.

And so I'm expecting that the people who read this book are not very interested in long academic texts, you know, but are interested in a very different kind of writing. And then when I write Corrupted, I think primarily of an academic audience, but again, with a broader public in mind, people with a vested interest in higher education, and so on and so forth. So that kind of transition from one form of writing to another, initially I found quite difficult, like 15, 20 years ago.

Now it's relatively easy because I do it all the time, but I'm always conscious of the fact. Audience, purpose, audience, purpose. Also when I speak, let alone write books, that when I speak in a church or a mosque or a synagogue, it's a very different way in which I approach truth telling than when, for example, I'm in a university seminar. You know what that's like.

Zimitri Erasmus: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what was it that you found difficult in the beginning, you know, moving, transitioning from one form to another?

Jonathan Jansen: The most difficult thing for me is I used to only live in one form. Okay. So for most of my life, as you know, I've been in teaching and most of that in university teaching. So I was quite comfortable walking into a doctoral seminar and giving Gramsci's theories of the state and how that might apply to education as well. So that's what I did. That was what, you know…

So suddenly now I must write for people who don't care about Gramsci but care about the ideas perhaps, you know, behind the role of the state in education. Now I can't use big words. Now I can't use, you know, words like theory or epistemology and so on. Now I must translate all of that into a language that people find both accessible but also interesting and so on and so forth. So initially that was difficult because of the way I was socialized into thinking and writing.

Zimitri Erasmus: And tell me more about how the structure of Song for Sarah emerged. You know, you have brief chapters, you have your sister Naomi's voice, and you have, you know, extracts from specific poems.

Jonathan Jansen: Yeah.

Zimitri Erasmus: How did that emerge?

Jonathan Jansen: Great question. So in my mind, I have a sort of a mental picture of my reader, right? So when I wrote Song for Sarah, the mental picture is Mrs. Fredericks, who lives next door to us, who didn't finish school, but who is intellectually curious, who is fascinated by, you know, the world around her, but doesn't have formal education.

Now, I know she's not going to read any book cover to cover, but I know that if I can present the text in a way that mixes some narrative with photography, with, you know, little poems with and so on, that she would find that interesting. And you won't believe the joy I get because I go to the family home often to speak to Mrs. Fredericks and the neighbors and so on where I grew up. You won't believe the joy when they said we so much liked reading this book. We finished it in one sitting. We just sat down and read the book. Now, I know that was thick, dense text like Corrupted. They would tune out very quickly. So it's again, writing for your audience in a way that they find the reading enjoyable, you know, rather than hard.

Zimitri Erasmus: And what would you say drives you to write?

Jonathan Jansen: You know, a lot of things. One of the, as I think you know as well, one of the dilemmas of being a scholar is you constantly thinking. So when I drive home later tonight, I will be thinking about why is this homeless man standing in the middle of the highway with dark clothing on, with the traffic lights not working?

Is he not aware of the fact that he is putting his life at risk? I'm puzzled by that, you know. When I look at students on campuses burning down on a Friday, the very infrastructure they need on a Monday, I am puzzled by that.

And so writing for me is a way of basically getting things off my chest, so to speak, of grappling with these things in the public square. And sometimes just taking a point of view, you know, on something, especially when I sense in the academic community that there's ambivalence around things that in my view are right or wrong, you know. And so I would take that.

Now, of course, as you know, as a columnist, you will lose your contract very quickly if you don't write with a certain panache, a certain flair, a certain recklessness almost, you know, which of course you would never do in a serious academic article because people lose respect for you. So what I can honestly tell you, I love all forms of writing with, you know, academic, community-based columns, newspaper columns. But the thing that drives me most of all is the sheer privilege of sharing your thinking with people in the broader community.

Now, I need to just throw this in here if you don't mind. I wasn't planning to say this. Very often at a book launch or something, you know, somebody would get up in the audience and sort of say, what is the secret to being a columnist for such a long time?

You know, and they pay me fairly well, so obviously I might be doing something right. And I say to them, there's two secrets to maintaining your audience. The one is you've got to upset 50% of your readership every week. Rule number one. Rule number two, make sure it's not the same 50%. And so I quite enjoy not upsetting people, but just ruffling some feathers, particularly if those feathers think very important.

Zimitri Erasmus: So, you know, when we read about black experiences across the world, when we encounter black experiences and black people across the world, the act of writing often is a central part of liberation. What are your thoughts on that?

Jonathan Jansen: So, you know, especially when I was a doctoral student on that beautiful campus we are now, you know, I became very much aware of the fact that as a person committed to nonviolence, that I had a very powerful weapon at my disposal, and that was, you know, the ability, the opportunity to write. And I remember being very deeply moved by a collection of writings put together under the name of the Black South African activist, Steve Biko, and the cover of that book, as you know, is I Write What I Like. And there was something, if you just think back to the authoritarian, that authoritarian period in apartheid South Africa, where you couldn't think for yourself without consequences, at least not in public, where writing could end you, could get you banned, where, and so on and so forth.

And so this notion as a willful act of rebellion, to be able to write what you feel, what you see, what you experience, is for me a particularly liberating act. And so, I mean, I don't like these sort of, you know, quaint phrases, speaking truth to power, but it is that, you know, and using the power of the pen for that purpose, that then and now I find very, very liberating. And it's my preferred way of engaging the world critically, as opposed to throwing stones.

Zimitri Erasmus: So for me in my scholarly life, it was quite late that I realized that words and ink are mine to work with too. So could you share with me what the circumstances are that enabled you to see words and ink as yours?

Jonathan Jansen: Yeah, you know, I had the good fortune in this context of growing up in a evangelical church community in which there was lay preaching. There was no minister, there was no pastor. So all of you, all of us, and in this case, shamefully, just men, you were called on to preach if they perceived you had a gift for it.

And I was from the age of 16 already, you know. So I knew that in speaking and having a voice that I could express myself on issues of faith, on issues of life, on issues of love, on issues of, you know, just living, in a way that was very deeply personal, very much a heart issue as much as it might have been a head issue. So I never made this distinction between what I say, what I write, and who I am.

For me, it was the same thing. And so writing for me is a very personal, very powerful, very expressive act that I've never separated from, you know, who I might be as a scholar or an activist or whatever the case might be. That said, I also write with a certain tentativeness sometimes because I change my mind so often on the one hand.

And secondly, because I needed an emotional defense against, especially if you write in the public square, the inevitable criticism, which can be hurtful, which can be personal, which can be quite disturbing at times. And so I don't, you know, even though the writing is mine, the writing is personal, the writing is, you know, real for me. I don't attach to it in a way that if you criticize me, I fall apart.

You know, I hold on to it in a different way. I hold on to it in a way that engages the world with the understanding that I might be wrong, but also with the understanding that your argument is with the ideas. Your argument isn't really with me as a person. And that way of thinking enables me to be quite unperturbed by what people might think of me as opposed to what they might think of my writing.

Zimitri Erasmus: So that's really powerful, Jonathan, how the word with the capital W and the word with the small w actually shaped your working with words. And it makes me think of, I mean, James Baldwin was 14 when he, you know, was a preacher. So that's really, really powerful.

I didn't know that you were that young. When you, you know, when you started speaking in public in a sense about, I suppose, about the personal, the political and the spiritual, because those three were always intertwined.

Jonathan Jansen: That is correct. And that is why I always found enormous to this day, actually, enormous connection with the prophetic tradition in African American writing, you know, all the way from Jones Baldwin to, you know, contemporary scholars, thinkers, intellectuals, et cetera, for whom that distinction we make too easily in South Africa between, you know, the prophetic and the political, we don't think in the Evangel of those two things as being the same thing, which is very different from what a Martin Luther King, for example, you know, would have articulated about his faith commitment. So that made a lot more sense to me, as you might recall, black theology, you know, and also more broadly liberation theology in Latin America and so on. And that saved me from a very narrow fundamentalist, you know, commitment to faith and writing.

Zimitri Erasmus: And the non-attachment that you talk about, Jonathan, how does one cultivate that?

Jonathan Jansen: Yeah, it is, you know, the, the, I think one of the things, I just had a seminar today with some post-docs and PhDs and all of that, you know, and just teaching them how to, how to engage the critical, you know, feedback that they receive, whether it is from peer reviewers for a publication or whether it's your examiners for the thesis and so on and so forth. And trying to get them to understand something that is very difficult, as you know, for the young up and coming scholar, that it's actually not you, you know, it's actually not about you. Now and again, it might be when you have an immature reviewer, but mostly it's not.

Mostly it's people engaging ideas. And part of this game, as it were, is to understand that you need to both be involved in and committed to your intellectual work and at the same time, be able to look at it, you know, critically in a way that doesn't make you feel that the critique of the work is also a critique of your person. Because if you get stuck there, you're not hiding to nothing, you know, and you will not be able to develop, you know, in other words, so I had to learn how to take the best out of the critique.

And I never ever dismiss out of hand critical feedback on what I write, never, even when it's coming from a bad place. But I will also not attach to that criticism in a way that can be quite self-destructive, you know, if you don't engage and be distant at the same time.

Zimitri Erasmus: And we know, you know, those of us who write have intricate rituals. Sometimes they fall by the wayside, and sometimes there are periods in which we, you know, really can sustain them. And what are the rituals for you?

Jonathan Jansen: I love that question. I think one of the things that I've, one of those rituals, is that I write every single day, no matter when I was running a university, as you recall, or whether I was dean of a faculty, every day I would write a minimum of four or five hours. And I, without fail, most times much more than that.

And I get up at four or five o'clock, and I said by the time I get to eight o'clock, I've already done quite a bit of thinking, quite a bit of writing and so on and so forth. And then when I get home at night, you know, apart from the fun stuff with family and friends, I then sit down for another two, three, four hours and just write. Now here's the thing, when it becomes a habit, when it is something that gives you joy, you know, let me go back to my book launch questions.

So I go to a book launch and without fail, somebody says, Professor Jansen, where do you get time to write all these books? And then I have a stock answer to that. I say, you know, I only love two things in life.

As you can see from my circumference, I love eating. And secondly, I love writing. And nobody has ever asked me where I find the time to eat.

Zimitri Erasmus: Okay, so that's the place of writing in your life. It's like eating, it's nourishment.

Jonathan Jansen: Here’s, the thing, you know, one of my postdocs is a very accomplished classical pianist, even though her research is on high education. And, you know, she said something the other day, and I use that example very often, that if you're going to be at the top of your game as a classical pianist, you have to be at that behanoo for hours, you know, practicing. What you see, as you know, in the orchestral performance is something that just sounds like perfection.

But the hard work to get there, you know. So when a book comes out or even a column, people don't see the 15 different rewriting or revisioning, you know, of what you write. I've never written a book that I haven't rewritten at least 15 times, and that's at a minimum.

But again, you know, it fulfills something deep inside you. I love the life of the mind. I love being puzzled by my own questions. I love engaging difficult ideas. And a lot of that love came out of my experience, particularly in the American Academy at Cornell and then, of course, at Stanford. So I don't know if I can be cured.

Zimitri Erasmus: Yeah, well, that brings me to Corrupted, your latest publication, your latest book. And I must say I was and I remain sorrowful having read it cover to cover. And in the text, you emphasize resources, integrity and capacity as key to sustaining a strong academic project inside of an institution. Given the research that you've done, you know, for Corrupted, what gives you hope?

Jonathan Jansen: You know, in South Africa, there is a, in the Eastern Cape province, a very famous, very historic university called the University of Fort Hare. When the new vice chancellor, a relatively new vice chancellor, decided to turn off the taps, you know, for corruption, the next thing that happened is there was a, you know, millions of dollars that was committed to pay in car beat. Those are assassins to take him out because he was closing off the taps.

He fortunately escaped one or two attempts on his life. That's on the more extreme side of things. But there are many other ways in which ordinary South Africans take a stand against corruption and say, enough is enough. We care about the universities in this country. We care about the hospitals in the country. We care about public housing, et cetera, et cetera. We will not allow this minority of dangerous and venal people to take away the hope that South Africa promised the world when Nelson Mandela stood out of prison and we had our formal democracy in 1994. That gives me hope. I work in all the nine provinces on education projects.

I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, there are many more good people in this country who simply want their kids to have a decent education, who simply, when they're ill, want to get to a hospital where they are treated without having to pay a bribe, who simply just want to live not an extravagant life, but just a decent life. My God, is that too much to ask? And so my inspiration, and every day, tomorrow again I'm meeting a couple of thousand people that I'm speaking to who are trying to keep the primary school system together.

And so I don't look at these exceptional cases of corruption as the whole story, but I do believe it is an important story to tell so that we push back against this kind of, this attempt really, as you know, we call it state capture in South Africa, to really capture all elements of state and society.

Zimitri Erasmus: What would you say, Jonathan, is the history that we are not making in South Africa?

Jonathan Jansen: Lovely question. I think the history that we are not telling is the history of those who push against the established, this kind of corruption. We are not telling the story of African science and innovation. We are not telling the story because we have been so used to 350 years, you know, of colonialism and apartheid. We fail to see the creative works that come out of Africa. We fail to see.

Let me give you an example that I've just written a book about, by the way, with some colleagues. When South African scientists discovered the Omicron variant in Botswana and in South Africa, the rest of the world honestly thought that this was a joke, this was a hoax, right? And the payback for that, as you know, was to shut South Africa down in terms of international travel and to pretend that that discovery was a fluke.

Turns out that the Omicron variant was already in North America, in Western Europe and other parts of the world and so on. But it was the disbelief that South African scientists had the genomic sequencing capacity, had the sheer courage and intelligence to produce that kind of... Those histories aren't told.

We are still taught medical history as if Africa is only the starting point, you know, for distress and disease, not the place in which... Where you're sitting right now at Stanford University, there were two countries, you know, competing to do the first heart transplant. The one was right there at Stanford, and the other was in Krooterske Hospital in Cape Town.

And for complex reasons, the... As you know, the first heart transplant happened, not in California, but in Cape Town. I'm making the point not to talk about a sort of meaningless competitiveness in science, simply to say we don't tell these histories.

That is why, as you know, I was a critic of part of the excesses of the decolonization moment, because it was so anti-African, it was so anti-activism, it was so conservative in only telling the story of colonial distress and not also telling the story of African resilience.

Zimitri Erasmus: I think you know that we, you know, we differ somewhat on that point, in the sense that my reading is that the excessiveness is the public face of the decolonization movement, and that underneath that public face, on the ground, a whole range of other things are happening.

And it's almost my response to, you know, the decolonization project is almost similar to yours when you say they are these, there's this minority of venal people, right, who just want to take everything for themselves. But actually the majority of the people you encounter across the nine provinces are, you know, committed to just living a decent life with other people in, you know, in the country. And so I think that is, you know, that's how I see the decolonizing project.

Although, I mean, I also, I agree with you that there are limits to it and that the project, especially now, should be about what can we generate. How do we live and engage in generative ways beyond critique? And so I want to come back to my question. So when I asked you the question, you spoke very powerfully about the histories that we are not telling. And part of your work is about telling those histories. What I'm interested in is what is the history that we are not making?

Jonathan Jansen: Yeah, you know, I think one of the things we're not doing, I don't know if you, I'm going to go back to some of the basics here. You might have heard that two days ago in South Africa, there was the release of the PULS results. This is the project in the reading literacy study in which 30 odd countries get compared on the reading outcomes in grade four.

And it turns out South Africa once again is a rock bottom with respect to countries like Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and so on, comparable countries in terms of, you know, education and GDP. And we perform worse. Now, you're not going to make any history.

Let me be clear. You are not going to make any history when 81% of kids in grade four read a book and they don't have a clue what they just read, right? So I think the history that we are not making is a history that is constrained by our inability to take seriously the questions of education and underdevelopment because you can't build a country, you can't build a new history on the basis of ignorance.

You've got to build it on the basis of a competent, but also a confident citizenry and that we don't have at the moment. So when you look at the elite universities that you and I work in, in South Africa, of course, you know, there's a minority there of elites, of intellectuals and so on and so forth that make all kinds of history in fields from architecture to biochemistry and the like. But you see, if we restrict our ability to make histories plural, you know, across disciplines, across communities, across institutions, then we surely cannot be satisfied that only a small percentage of us get to participate, for example, in knowledge production in the broader sense of the term, when there is so much incredible talent, as you do know, across the country and indeed the continent.

Zimitri Erasmus: So I want to shift to writing and the classroom, particularly given, you know, that you are an educationist. At universities in South Africa today, most of our curricula are designed with the assumption that students have some skill at writing as a craft. Could you share your thoughts on this common assumption, the places from which this assumption might come, and its implications for encouraging and expanding writing as a lifelong practice in the way that you live with writing?

Jonathan Jansen: Yeah, you know, wherever I have worked in universities and indeed in some schools, I've always offered writing classes to this day, simply because of the enormous talent we will never see, unless we allow students to take pen to paper or fingers to computer, whatever the case might be. Now, here once again, you know, the reason we're not winning this game with respect to writing is that writing is very often for students an academic obligation, as opposed to a joyful way of expressing yourself. And while we retain that both in the formal curriculum, but also, you know, just in the way schools are organized, that you must write a long essay in order to pass the exams.

Forget it. It's not interesting. It's not self-induced. It's not, it can be penalized if it's wrongly written. And so what I would love to see is a lot more of our accompaniment in Africa, they don't come to the fore. And so much of academics is, as you know, punished. You know, did you get the right answer or not?

As opposed to saying, hey, you know, let's have a holiday workshop for high school kids. I was amazed when I did this at university. I would say to students, I'm going to help you write your first book. And they would come in droves because they have something to say. But the school system, the university system doesn't encourage them to do that. My main point here again is you've got to take writing away from academic obligation and make it part of the express of life, you know, of a young writer.

Zimitri Erasmus: Yeah, that's very powerful, Jonathan, because I did an experiment last year in my third year course at the University of the Vatvatasrant in the Anthropology Department, where, you know, in the 1960s, the idea of a zine emerged. And the title of my course was Race and What It Means to Be Human. And I asked students to produce a zine. So it's 16, you know, 16, well, about 4, 4A4 pages that you fold in half, and it gives you 16 pages.

And it's really powerful to see the hesitance at the start. And then, you know, as students get into the creative process, they really love it. And so that's what you've just said is really powerful for me as a teacher.

You were talking about children's stories, children telling their stories, students telling their stories as a way of making space for them to engage their imaginations and their capacity for critique through writing in whatever form, whether it be writing with pictures or writing, you know, poetry.

What are some of the other ways that you work with in order to trigger young people's imaginations? For the imagination, but also for the critique. And I emphasize the critique here because of the state of South African society at the moment. What we need is both imagination and critique, in my view.

Jonathan Jansen: Absolutely. Look, first of all, let me just say this about your writing course, which at Adverts University in Johannesburg, which is quite legendary. You are too modest because I saw some of that stuff, as you know, and it was absolutely mind blowing.

But that's because the kind of teacher you are, I think, you know, and so on. So there is a question about pedagogy and how that can also invite, because I think it's an invitational activity. I'm inviting you, you know, to express yourself.

So when you think of writing as expression, there are many other ways in which you can express. For example, I'm working with schools now, nine elementary schools, primary schools, as we call them in South Africa. And it's simply putting a whole lot of money into the performing arts.

So we want every school to work with young people, many of whom in this part of the Cape Flats in Cape Town, South Africa, have been traumatized at home in their communities, violence. You know the story. And you know the way these children come out in their numbers after school, during school holiday vacations, to be able to express themselves in dance.

And we get great South African actresses, for example, I don't want to mention all their names, and they come and volunteer to teach these children just to... So for me, writing is just another way of expressing yourself. Dance is another way of expressing yourself.

Reading a poem is another way of expressing yourself. And to be able to do that, and this is where I want to come back to the critique element, because these are elementary school kids, and then to get feedback from those who are more experienced, to sort of say, if you did it this way, you might get more out of the end, so on and so forth. So that's what we do.

But it's not about the performing arts. It's not about... It's about expressing yourself. So I see writing as a vital activity, but not the only activity. And sometimes these things are intermeshed. For example, we are now working with these kids to both help them read a script.

So there's a reading exercise, you know, as well as being able to use their bodies or their voices and so on to express themselves. This is... I mean, this is so much...There's just so much enjoyment in all of us.

Zimitri Erasmus: I want to shift a little bit to our linguistic context and ask you about how we might honor students' multilingualism and their trans-languaging through writing, especially for those of us of my generation who are weak in the core languages of the citizenry because of the history of apartheid.

Jonathan Jansen: Yeah, so I'm a great believer in mother tongue instruction, first of all, it starts there, and then a way of transitioning later on to whatever language might apply in senior elementary school or high school and so on and so forth. Because there's all sorts of really good arguments to teach children and to get them to read and write in the language, in the home language and so on and so forth. That said, in South Africa, we teach poorly in any language. There's good research evidence for this. And so there's also a limit to how, you know, I don't get carried away with the notion that if only you taught everybody in Isisulu or in Chivinda, then, you know, academic results will improve. That's not true.

That said, I think we have not honored the African languages, apart from Afrikaans, that have been systematically denied for centuries. You know, and so on paper, as you know, per the Constitution of South Africa, all languages are recognized. In fact, we've just added, thankfully, sign language to the 11.

But that is pretty meaningless unless you put the resources into preparing, for example, pre-service teachers to teach in the African languages. And yet we know empirically, there's a handful of graduates coming through in the teaching, for example, obviously Zulu and so on and so forth. So I'm not impressed with governments, you know, attempt to genuflect in the direction of all of the symbolism that goes with recognizing indigenous languages, but not putting their money where their mouths are when it comes to resources for reading and writing in the home languages.

Zimitri Erasmus: Okay..There might be ways, Jonathan, that we could work in our postgraduate.

Classes with honoring multilingualism. So, for example, sometimes I would ask students, what would the word for this be in Kosa? And then there would be this discussion, and then we'd write the word on the board. I work with the board all the time. And that partly teaches me, it's about how students can teach me. And then sometimes they integrate that conversation into their writing, which I've actually found quite powerful.

Jonathan Jansen: Yeah, and you know, I mean, I take your point. And in fact, just before we connected this evening, Norm Funeko, one of my student assistants, I was just playing my favorite Issaqqosa song, which is a hymn really called Liza Liza Ndingalaka, which is actually was composed by a great African intellectual Tio Songa. And while I understood the meaning of the song, she could give a cultural and historical and other kinds of context, which I didn't have.

And that was informally, that wasn't even a postgraduate seminar, you know. And I think the more we open ourselves up to learning, not just languages in a technical sense, you know, but languages in its fullest cultural, social and political sense, my goodness me, how all our lives would be enriched in the process.

Zimitri Erasmus: Jonathan, who is the author and what is the title of your best recent read?

Jonathan Jansen: I love almost anything written by Eva Afman, you know. I enjoy enormously, you know, the thinking and the reflections of Conal West. I enjoy the writings on partly because of the controversy, the writings on slavery, slave history by very prominent African Americans at the moment.

I love reading at the moment a book on the power utility in South Africa and its demise, our power utility being called ESCOM, and the book written by the former CEO, Andre de Reiter. And not the, I mean, the prose is fairly average, but the insights into the workings of power inside the utility of this kind is quite profound. So, yeah, so I enjoy reading cross-nationally, as you know, I enjoy reading also across, across ideological and other kinds of divides.

Zimitri Erasmus: What is the title of de writer’s book?

Jonathan Jansen: Truth to Power or something like that is the subtitle, which of course is a lovely pun.

Zimitri Erasmus: A Closing Thought on Writing as Praxis, Jonathan?

Jonathan Jansen: Here's the trick. In the hour or hour and a half, whatever it was that we were talking, I literally have seven research teams as we speak, working on drafts of different books that we're working on. I can call them right now and you'll know what they're doing.

And so on and so forth. So the thing that I have to tell you, and this is true for any kind of creative work, I mean, I often get the recognition because I'm the first author or something like that, but actually all of this is done through teams, very powerful teams, particularly post-docs who are smarter than me, who work even harder than I do. So I have to acknowledge that.

And maybe I'm part of this misleading picture to say I'm writing the books. Actually, I have incredible teams of very smart young people. And one duty, you know, as people who work in universities, in my case, working also with schools, it is really to unlock the expressive potential of all our students across the world so that they not only can speak with confidence, we're very good at speaking, as you know, in South Africa, but so that they can also translate that into writing powerfully.

And the best way to do that, I think, is for us, as you do, as I try to do, to model what powerful writing looks like and its incredible consequences in public life.

Zimitri Erasmus: Thank you. Bye bye Jonathan.

Jonathan Jansen: It's a great pleasure. Thank you for stimulating discussion, Zimitri. You are an amazing intellect. And thank you, Mike, so much for bringing together these conversations as you do, not just for now, but for so many of us as CASBS fellows. Appreciate you. Love you, man.

Narrator: That was Jonathan Jansen in conversation with Zimitri Erasmus. As always, you can follow us online or in your podcast app of choice. And if you're interested in learning more about the Center's people, projects and rich history, you can visit our website at casbs.stanford.edu.

Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.