A few weeks ago, a first-year politics student at the University of Cape Town sent me a folder containing a set of seven audio recordings, each about 45 minutes long, of lectures recently delivered by Dr Lwazi Lushaba during the first half of 2026. I have shared this material publicly here.

The antics of Dr Lushaba are hardly new, nor are they unpublicised. In his magisterial book, The Fall of the University of Cape Town, Professor David Benatar devotes an entire chapter to Dr Lushaba and his radical rhetoric. In one notorious incident that occurred in 2019, Dr Lushaba was displeased with the result of an internal faculty election whereby a non-South African black woman was elected as the Dean of the Humanities Faculty. Professor Tim Crowe has alleged that Dr Lushaba responded to this outcome by stomping on the ballot boxes, eating the ballot papers and verbally and physically attacking fellow academics.

What is interesting is that we now have first-hand recordings from a student in Dr Lushaba’s first-year Politics class in 2026. The student describes classes in which “us versus them” racial rhetoric made several students, black and white, feel profound discomfort.

Having listened to large parts of the recordings, I can understand why. The lectures are often rambling and hard to follow. But the central message is very clear. The aim is not merely to teach students about racism, colonialism, political theory, or South African history. It is to train them to see social life through a totalising racial ideology in which white people are structurally guilty, black people are structurally victimised, interracial friendship is impossible, and nearly every human interaction is decoded as a disguised struggle over power.

For anyone who thought that, by 2026, South African society had passed peak woke, these recordings provide a sobering reality check.

Dr Lwazi Lushaba speaking at the EFF’s4th Plenum, January 2023

The Return of “Hitler Committed No Crime”

Dr Lushaba first came to public prominence in 2021 when he stated, in an online lecture, that “Hitler committed no crime. All Hitler did was to do to white people what white people have reserved for us, black people. And so, his crime – if he had a crime – was to do unto white people what white people had thought was right to do only to black people.” On 5 March 2026, Lushaba repeated his comment about Hitler doing nothing wrong, this time adding the boast that this was the “statement that made me famous years ago”. Students responded by murmuring in approval and laughing.

The charitable interpretation of Dr Lushaba’s remarks is that he is trying to make a point about colonial violence: that atrocities committed against black people in Africa were ignored, while atrocities committed by Nazis in Europe forced Western disciplines and international law to confront evil.

There is a legitimate debate to be had about the connection between colonial violence, German race science, Namibia and the later crimes of Nazi Germany. But the statement “Hitler committed no crime” is not a legitimate way of making that argument. It is a moral obscenity masquerading as political analysis.

In his lecture, Dr Lushaba then moves from provocation into historical confusion. Lushaba tells students that, when Hitler did to Europeans what Europeans had supposedly done in Namibia, “the world invents a crime called a genocide,” and then adds: “There was never a genocide up until that moment.”

This is patently false, unless we play a crude semantic game with the difference between an act and the later legal label for the act. The word “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 and later codified in the 1948 Genocide Convention. But the fact that the legal term is modern does not mean that the phenomenon was invented in 1944 or 1948. The law often arrives late. Murder existed before homicide statutes. Slavery existed before modern anti-slavery conventions. Genocidal violence existed before the word “genocide”.

Nor was pre-Holocaust violence perpetrated exclusively by white people against black people. Rome’s destruction of Carthage in 146 BC, the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1916, the Circassian Genocide of 1860-1864, and the Holodomor of 1932-1933 are all instances where we did not need the vocabulary of modern international law for us to recognise the nature of the violence.

Dr Lushaba’s own lecture undercuts him, because he invokes Namibia in the same breath. The Herero and Nama atrocities are precisely one of the examples historians discuss when they speak about pre-Holocaust genocide. It is entirely legitimate to argue that Western law was slow to name and punish mass atrocities committed against colonised peoples. It is not legitimate to tell students that “there was never a genocide” before the Holocaust.

Nor is it necessary. The serious argument is strong enough on its own: Western institutions often treated colonial victims as invisible, and the post-war legal order was shaped by the shock of Nazi crimes in Europe. That argument does not require Holocaust denialism. It does not require the phrase “Hitler did nothing wrong” or “Hitler committed no crime”. And it does not require telling students that genocide did not exist until Western law gave it a name.

Of course, an academic debate on the topic of genocide should probably also include a discussion of the Mfecane as well as more recent wars and genocides in Rwanda and Sudan, none of which had anything to do with Europeans. Dr Lushaba appears to have little interest in these aspects of African history.

“Black People and White People Cannot be Friends”

The Hitler passage is the most notorious of Dr Lushaba’s remarks, but it is arguably not the most revealing. In my opinion, the most bizarre theme in the transcripts is Dr Lushaba’s repeated insistence that black and white people cannot truly be friends.

On 24 March 2026, and again in substantially similar form in his lecture on 7 April 2026, Dr Lushaba spoke about “the impossibility of friendship between black and white people” because “friendship is impossible between unequals”. On 24 March 2026, he approached the idea through a subject-object distinction, saying that “friendship can only be between a subject and a subject” and “can’t be between a subject and an object”. On 7 April 2026 he made the point even more explicitly: “There is a structure that renders it impossible for friendship to prevail between black and white people. If you want friendship between black and white people – first attend to structure.”

He then gives examples involving restaurants, Mercedes Benz car dealerships, and interracial marriage. The lesson is always the same: individual goodwill is irrelevant; structural racial hierarchy decides the meaning of the relationship in advance. Even if a black person wants a white friend, and even if a white person says he has a black friend, the structure supposedly renders the friendship impossible.

A video of Dr Lushaba’s remarks on this topic can be found here.

This is racial fatalism. It teaches students that their classmates are not first and foremost individuals who are capable of friendship, loyalty, love, argument, forgiveness, or shared intellectual life. They are bearers of racial structure. Their relationships are suspect before they even begin.

The broad generalisations that characterise this rhetoric threaten to manipulate students into a state of animosity towards one another on the basis of skin colour. The student who sent me the recordings put it well by explaining that both white and black students were left feeling unsettled by the notion that racism is intrinsic to and produced solely by white people. Unsurprisingly, most normal people do not want to be taught that ordinary human friendship is an illusion until politics has first demolished the structure of society.

A lecturer is perfectly entitled to teach about the legacy of apartheid spatial planning, inherited wealth, language, class, and the ways in which institutions can reproduce old advantages. But the idea that interracial friendship is impossible does not form part of this. That is not some brave academic insight. It is the conversion of sociology into despair.

Culture Loss When Marrying a White Person

The same fatalism appears again in a discussion of interracial marriage. On 24 March 2026, Dr Lushaba stated that following a previous class a student had been troubled by his declaration that friendship between black and white people is impossible. His response to that student – delivered to the class – is telling: “So, I care less about how you feel. [Laughter from students.] I care about scientific knowledge. All I can do is explain to you what is a friend. Whether it makes you happy or unhappy is none of my concern.”

He then offered another hypothetical example. If a black woman marries a white man, he says, the black woman will lose her culture. He presents this not as a risk, tendency, or social pressure, but as “a given”.

Again, there is a subject worth discussing. Interracial families in South Africa can involve unequal language, class status, family expectation, and cultural pressure. English can dominate. White social norms can dominate. One partner’s family and language might become the default. These are all real issues.

But Dr Lushaba does not teach them as questions. He teaches them as settled structural destiny. The black partner loses. The white partner dominates. The relationship cannot be negotiated. Friendship and marriage become merely further evidence of an inescapable racial hierarchy.

This is a bleak pedagogy. It leaves students with no practical moral task except racial consciousness. It does not ask: how can people treat one another better? How can families negotiate language fairly? How can universities encourage common civic life? Instead, it says the structure decides, and until the structure is demolished, ordinary friendship is impossible.

There is another point of irony here, for African nationalists are generally far less sympathetic when Afrikaners express similar concerns about the future of their language and culture. AfriForum’s efforts to establish Afrikaans-medium educational institutions, for example, are more likely to be characterised in nationalist discourse as attempts to preserve racial privilege or resist transformation than as legitimate efforts to prevent cultural and linguistic loss.

Again, there is a glaring double standard at play. Cultural preservation cannot be regarded as a virtue for one community and a vice for another.

“Government Responds Faster to White Demands”

Another example of racial essentialism comes from Dr Lushaba’s lecture delivered on 10 March 2026, in which he discusses David Easton’s systems analysis and the idea that citizens make demands on a political system. Here again, what could have been a serious critique becomes a racial decoding exercise.

Lushaba tells students that in settler-colonial societies race determines whose demands are heard. He says: “When white people make demands, whether the government is black or white, it’s immaterial, the government responds faster.”

He then argues that white people’s demands are rarely expressed openly as white demands. Instead, they appear as “the demands of investors, the demands of the tourists, the demands of the market. They are never the demands of white people. The demands always come as institutional demands.”

Again, this is not rigorous political science. It is suspicion dressed up as analysis. It teaches students to look through every argument to the racial identity supposedly lurking behind it. Once that habit is learned, no opponent needs to be answered. He or she can simply be decoded and dismissed.

“The DA Is a White Party”

The same method appeared the following day. On 11 March 2026, while discussing the political continuum and whether parties should be classified as left, right, or centre, Lushaba said that political parties are not always organised around ideology. That is true enough. Parties can represent class interests, regional interests, religious interests, ethnic interests, or racial interests.

But then he turns the point into a blunt assertion about the Democratic Alliance (DA), saying that: “The DA is organised as the white party to preserve white interests primarily.”

That is a remarkable thing to teach as if it were settled fact. To start with, it is difficult to reconcile the 21.8% share of the vote which the DA won in the 2024 election with the idea that the DA is an exclusively white organisation, considering that official census data from 2022 estimates that white South Africans make up just 7.3% of the national population. Even if every white person in South Africa voted DA (and that is certainly not the case), basic arithmetic dictates that the other 14 or 15 percentage points that it received must come from people who are not white.

Indeed, a troubling feature of Dr Lushaba’s scholarship is how often its sweeping claims appear detached from credible quantitative or qualitative research. His conclusions do not seem to be grounded in opinion polling, election results, census data, economic data, or rigorous interview-based research. Instead, assertions about how people think, how they behave, and how they relate to one another are frequently presented as established facts when they appear, in reality, to be Dr Lushaba’s own opinions.

This is not serious analysis. It is propaganda. It is profoundly anti-intellectual. And students are not invited to join an argument. They are being handed a conclusion. “The DA is white. Therefore, it represents white interests and it preserves white minority power.” End of analysis.

If a White Person Insults You, Just Spit On Them

Perhaps the most extraordinary of Dr Lushaba’s remarks occurred on 7 April 2026 when he said the following: “So race and racism is a structure. All I am saying is that race and racism is a structure. When you encounter a white person and the white person insults you – that is not racism. Settle that on the spot by fighting… [Laughter from students] That is not racism. Spit on each other and resolve the problem on the spot…

Racism in that encounter between you and the white person is simply: what are the ideas that made it possible for the white person to think that you were fit for that kind of treatment?”

I don’t really know what to make of this. Perhaps the comment was made in jest. But it is consistent with the tone of estrangement running through these lectures: a politics that encourages contempt and confrontation rather than constructive coexistence.

Dr Lushaba’s Office Door

A notable feature of the University of Cape Town’s Humanities Faculty is Dr Lushaba’s office door, which I personally witnessed when visiting the campus in 2024.

Scrawled on the door are various inflammatory slogans including:

1. “White people need to know that universities belong to black people.”
2. “By what right was this place named Cape Town?”
3. “We want our land. The land is ours.”
4. “Why did you kill Biko?”
5. “End the cognitive appropriation of our land.”
6. “For how long are you prepared to exclude and despise us in our own country?”
7. “Who will write of the moral ruin we the black colonised suffered at the hands of white people?”

One of those slogans – “End the cognitive appropriation of our land” – connects directly with Lushaba’s lectures. In the 10 March 2026 transcript, he argues that colonialism does not only physically appropriate land; it can also remove land from the “mental map” of its indigenous owners by renaming places. At least that is the academic theory behind the slogan on the door.

There is nothing wrong with studying place names, colonial memory, or the politics of land. Those are real subjects. But the atmosphere created by the door is unmistakable. It is not a neutral invitation to inquiry or debate. It is a declaration of racial grievance, aimed at students and colleagues walking down a university corridor.

All of this is, of course, completely mad. More importantly, it is also completely unrepresentative of the real South Africa that exists beyond the university campus.

One of the great advantages that contemporary South Africa enjoys is that the bulk of the country’s population is not radicalised. Extensive research by the South African Institute of Race Relations and the Social Research Foundation demonstrates that the broad mass of South Africa’s people – black and white – are moderate, centrist, and, if anything, quite conservative in their ideological orientation.

I think that critical race theorists would be astonished if they actually visited the cities, townships, and rural areas of South Africa. If they interacted with regular people and – most importantly, if they spent more time listening rather than lecturing – they would discover that most ordinary people do not think and speak like Dr Lushaba. Most South Africans desperately want jobs, safety, schools that work, electricity, water, roads, dignity, family, faith, and a normal life. They are not sitting around theorising about the impossibility of interracial friendship and the need for total revolution.

It is only among the university elites that you find this stuff. Of course, ideology spills over into adjacent professions: journalism, law, politics, NGOs, education departments, and high schools. Our newsrooms and opinion pages have been saturated for years with the vocabulary of critical race theory and critical social justice. The same moral grammar then travels downstream into policy, school curricula, corporate training, and public debate.

One example is Herschel Girls School in Cape Town, which in 2021 invited Dr Lushaba to deliver a guest lecture to History students entitled, “Can there be non-racialists in a racist society?” The school’s newsletter subsequently described Dr Lushaba as being an expert in the field and his lecture as being a “deeply meaningful experience”. This illustrates how ideas incubated in university humanities departments travel far beyond the academy and are imported uncritically into schools. It is precisely why what happens in our universities matters so much.

Dr Lwazi Lushaba at Herschel Girls School, 6 May 2021.

Genuine Diversity and Freedom of Thought? Or Grim Uniformity and Compliance?

It might be argued that Dr Lushaba’s views are not worth getting upset about. That there is a loony professor in the University of Cape Town’s Humanities Faculty is hardly breaking news. And, if you believe in freedom of speech and freedom of association, then you should tolerate a wide range of strange, offensive, and foolish speech. After all, the world is big enough to accommodate all sorts of eccentrics – and that accommodation can also be extended to you.

But in practice, this is not how the academy works. A glaring double standard applies. Resist Marxist orthodoxy within a university and you risk being ruthlessly targeted and cancelled, one way or another. But when the ideology runs in the approved direction, the rules change and the academy becomes remarkably indulgent. Provocation and even physical violence are regarded as “critical pedagogy”. Racial fatalism becomes “structural analysis”. Hostility becomes “decolonial thought”.

The intellectual exodus from the University of Cape Town in recent years is testament to this. Professor David Benatar, Professor Adam Mendelsohn, and Professor Anton Fagan are among the prominent scholars who have left the university or retreated from the centre of its public life. There are many others. The tragedy surrounding Professor Bongani Mayosi also casts a long shadow over the university’s recent history. Yet as such figures have departed or receded, the intellectual space they once occupied has increasingly been filled by a more radical strain of academic politics, exemplified by figures such as Dr Lushaba.

The result is a striking inversion of the principles the university claims to uphold: heterodoxy is treated as dangerous when it challenges the prevailing ideology, while extremism is recast as scholarship when it advances it.

The Upstream Poison Factories are Still Functioning

In a recent podcast I recorded with Gabriel Makin of The Common Sense, Makin asked me whether classical liberals were finally winning the battle against critical race theory in education. “Have we turned a corner? Is peak woke over in South Africa? Or is the cost of non-woke education eternal vigilance?” he asked.

I replied that I think we have made progress and that we have, hopefully, stopped the worst of it. And there are good reasons for thinking so. The novelty and the “shock factor” of critical race theory has clearly worn off. More parents understand the problem. More teachers are quietly resisting. More ordinary South Africans can see through the jargon and the bullying. Perhaps most importantly, all over the world “woke” has become a joke – increasingly derided, satirised, and stripped of the moral authority it once commanded.

But what I did not say to Makin – and what I think I should have added – is that, upstream of the rest of society, the poison factories of the university humanities faculties are still functioning. They remain as woke, as ideological and, in many cases, as detached from reality as ever. This trend has repeated itself across universities throughout the English-speaking world, with the recent controversies surrounding Jason Arday at the University of Cambridge and Claudine Gay at Harvard providing two prominent examples.

How is it that the likes of Dr Lushaba came to infiltrate and ultimately dominate our great universities? The answer lies in decades of selective hiring, ideological conformity, and the gradual marginalisation of dissent. Dr Lushaba is not merely an eccentric outlier. He is a symptom of a much deeper problem – a faculty culture that has become increasingly intolerant of intellectual heterodoxy while rewarding ever more radical forms of ideological conformity.

Crucially, the system is self-replicating. Like a spinning vortex, the faculty becomes more radical with each successive generation of students and junior academics, as yesterday’s radicalism becomes today’s orthodoxy and the boundaries of establishment opinion shift ever further. I half-suspect that, at some point, Dr Lushaba himself will be cancelled by his successors for the crime of being insufficiently radical.

We can try to contain the worst effects of critical race theory on society. But if we are truly to win this battle, we need to address the source: the universities – these relatively small but enormously influential institutions that train the teachers, lawyers, journalists, politicians, judges, civil servants, and activists who will shape the next generation.

Universities are, by design, open institutions. That openness is one of their great strengths, but it also makes them vulnerable to capture by small, highly organised groups united by a common ideology. The Marxist Left understood this and, over several decades, successfully captured large parts of the academy.

The good news is that institutional capture need not be permanent. If universities can be captured, they can also be reclaimed. It may take only a relatively small number of organised and determined reformers – people who understand that academic freedom, the pursuit of truth and the ideals of the Enlightenment are worth defending – to begin turning the tide.

Wilkinson is a lawyer who has written on the influence of critical race theory in South African schools and universities. You can read more of his work at school-capture.com.