The case for renaming UWC after Allan Boesak

HISTORY does not permit stillness.

- DR. CLYDE N.S. RAMALAINE

CLERIC and anti-apartheid activist Dr Allan Boesak addressing a Palestine solidarity rally in Salt River, Cape Town, on October 22, 2025. To rename UWC the Allan Boesak University is to affirm prophetic courage, intellectual integrity, gender justice, and transformative imagination, says the writer. | AYANDA NDAMANE Independent Newspapers

(AYANDA NDAMANE Independent Newspapers)

It unsettles, disrupts, reforms, and renews. Change is not merely an accident of time; it is the architecture of existence. Institutions, like nations and persons, are compelled to evolve or risk irrelevance.Within this philosophical, historical, and ethical consciousness, The Thinking Masses South Africa Foundation (TMoSAF), which I was privileged to found and lead, advances a coherent argument for renaming the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in honour of Dr Allan A. Boesak.

This proposal is neither emotional indulgence nor symbolic opportunism. It rests upon a deeper claim: change is not only inevitable but constitutive of institutional legitimacy. It is the grammar of both being and becoming.

From ancient metaphysics to contemporary critical theory, permanence is an illusion. Institutions are historical processes; their legitimacy lies in reflexivity and ethical renewal. Universities, claiming intellectual leadership, must embody this principle rigorously.

To refuse transformation is complicity in inherited injustice. South Africa’s unfinished democratic project compels institutional interrogation. Names, symbols, and identities are not cosmetic; they function as repositories of power, belonging, exclusion, and memory. They shape epistemic horizons, determining whose knowledge is legitimised and whose histories are marginalised.