Earlier this week I published an article entitled How Racial Ideology Continues to Poison the University of Cape Town. In it, I argued that although the excesses of critical race theory may have begun to lose their grip on wider society, the intellectual machinery that produced them remains largely intact within the University of Cape Town (UCT). That particular poison factory is still functioning, producing the ideas, activists, and orthodoxies that eventually flow downstream into schools, the professions, government, and public life.

But it is not just at the UCT that Marxist psychosis has entrenched itself.

At the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), Critical Social Justice and Citizenship has become a university-wide compulsory module. General Academic Rule BR11 states that bachelor’s degree students must complete the approved, non-credit-bearing Critical Social Justice and Citizenship module to qualify for graduation. This means that not just humanities students but everyone – engineering, medical, law, science, commerce, and other students – must pass through a compulsory ideological curriculum that is not part of their core degree.

The university presents the course in the language of compassion and civic virtue. It says the module addresses gender-based violence, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, disability, class, and other forms of difference. It claims that it aims to equip students with knowledge, skills, values, and conceptual frameworks to engage with oppression, discrimination, and violence in South Africa.

But the module’s own materials also make the ideological character clear. UKZN’s School of Education material says the module focuses on “exploring power relations and oppression” and draws on frameworks including critical social justice, African/Black feminist perspectives, and critical race theory, and lists concepts such as oppression, power, ideology, discourse, positionality, intersectionality, patriarchy, decoloniality, sexism/heterosexism, xenophobia, and “other forms of oppression and privilege”.

I am not sure what phrases such as “implicit gender-based violence” are supposed to mean in practice, or how a student is meant to contest them without being treated as morally suspect. That is the deeper problem. The more contested the theory, the more cautious a university should be about making it compulsory. A compulsory module should be broad and pluralistic. It should expose students to competing views, not march them through a single ideological worldview.

Ideological Zealots

I am told that the course originated in the School of Education, which is apparently where most of the ideological zealots are to be found. These activists are reportedly driving the “Africanisation” of the curricula at the university. The same source tells me that anyone who questions or criticises the module faces strong informal pressure. I cannot independently verify every part of that claim. But the logic of compulsion is visible enough. If the course were simply an optional humanities elective, students could take it or leave it. Instead, the university makes everyone endure it.

That tells us something. It is a clear sign that something is wrong when you have to make your ideological course compulsory. I suspect that they make it compulsory because, if it were not compulsory, hardly anyone would take it. As the Soviet and Russian author and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn understood: socialism cannot be implemented without coercion.