After my post yesterday on Iain Banks's acknowledged double standard in calling for a cultural and educational boycott of Israel, a certain twitterer tweeted as follows:
Shorter Professor Norm - Fuck yeah, of course I'd have played Sun City with Queen.
Oh, ouch, how I am discomfited! Or rather, not. Naturally, I don't accept the implied analogy here between Israel and apartheid South Africa, and I never did play Sun City. But, for the record, in 1986 I went to South Africa, as a visiting lecturer at the universities of Cape Town and Witwatersrand, and spent three weeks giving papers, lectures and talks on one topic and another. On how to defend the system of apartheid? On why racial discrimination is sometimes justified? On optimal policing strategies in the face of unruly crowds? Er... no. Amongst my topics were: Marx and human nature; the relevance to South Africa, if any, of Rosa Luxemburg's mass strike idea; the vacuous post-Marxism of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe; the ideas of Robert Nozick; socialism and democracy; and possibly some other stuff that I've now forgotten. And how was I received by left and liberal academics and anti-apartheid activists, from amongst whom my invitations to these two universities had come? Why, with great warmth and friendliness. What about the reaction of friends and colleagues on the left in this country when they learned I was going to South Africa? What about the reaction of those I worked with on New Left Review? Well, if any of them even raised an eyebrow, I didn't see it. My piece on Laclau and Mouffe, first given as a paper in South Africa, appeared in due course in the pages of the Review.
From this the Flying Rodent may learn at least two things. First, about me if he's really that interested: I do not support educational and cultural boycotts. To cut a long story short, it's not the country you're going to so much as what you're going there for that matters. Thus, there are certain places I wouldn't care to take a holiday in - think foul dictatorships - but to go for a genuine educational purpose, or to liaise with people fighting for democracy there, or for any number of other valid reasons, that's something else. Second, even against apartheid South Africa there was not, in this country in the 1980s, the kind of demented obsession about an academic boycott that there is in certain leftist quarters today when it comes to Israel. The Rodent might like to think about why that is.
Those interested in looking further into the difficulties of the academic boycott experience in South Africa should read this piece by Jonathan Hyslop, as it happens one of the people at Wits whose hospitality I enjoyed. I particularly commend to you Jon's conclusion:
If we do believe that scholarship is more than a job, that ideas do make a difference in human affairs, that the clash of ideas is essential to change, then it is difficult for me to understand how stemming the flow of people and ideas assists us toward a better world. The great achievement of South Africa's present is surely that it is an attempt at sharing the earth, to which nobody has a greater right than another. My experience of the South African boycott makes me doubt whether a refusal of academic hospitality is a means to bring about the conditions for that kind of sharing.