(African Sun Media, 2020) Jansen, Jonathan; Walters, Cyrill
When a group of Stellenbosch University (SU) researchers published an article on
the “low cognitive functioning” and “unhealthy lifestyle behaviours” of coloured
women,2 there was immediate outrage across the campus and the country. Yet this
particular piece of published research was by no means exceptional. In fact, for the
past hundred years Stellenbosch – and other South African universities – had been
engaged in what is called race-essentialist research, that is, studies that insisted
that there are four racial groups (whites, Indians, coloureds and Africans) and that
certain aptitudes, behaviours and even diseases were directly related to these political
classifications.