INTRODUCTION

Resistance by the national #FeesMustFall students’ movement in South Africa placed the governance of university spaces at the centre of public discourse and university policies in 2015/2016. At the outset, this phase of student resistance in South Africa involved a fierce symbolic struggle to remove the statue of colonial imperialist Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town. The man and his chair were finally dismantled and moved by crane in 2015. The historical hangover of colonial culture in an African university space, so many years after African independence from colonial rule, points to wider problems of governance at South African universities. Spaces of learning are organised under the gaze of white men and the postcolonial patriarchy. Transformation in higher education has not fundamentally disrupted hegemonic and racialised structures of governance at South African universities.

This chapter focuses on the importance of space and power, and how alternative approaches to higher education learning spaces – the physical organisation of learning, dominant knowledge systems, and the integration of the environment – may allow greater freedom for black Africans in university learning spaces. The premise is that the present university system still constrains the growth of black intellectuals and professionals. We present a radical alternative based in a grounded research method, in which a number of workshops called Green Leadership Schools (GLS) were run by the authors of this chapter. Key social problems and theories made up the curriculum of the GLS – land, gender and leadership – and these were related to crucial environmental issues such as climate change and indigenous knowledge(s).

The format and foci of the different GLS, organised over a two-year period as four residential workshops in 2014 and 2015, experimented with a different kind of learning space that stepped outside the modernist structures of the university learning space. The GLS initiative predated and then overlapped with the #FeesMustFall national students’ movement. The concerns for radical university transformation by these students intersected with the radical pedagogies envisaged by the GLS. The final (and fourth) GLS was organised as a writing workshop for these students. Themes of indigenous environmentalism, matriarchal leadership and green learning spaces informed our idea of green leadership, and were explored in various ways at the schools.