Why I value art over destructive students

To some extent I value art more highly than the students who burnt it at University of Cape Town.

I suspect that most black people agree with me on this.

A lot of the art that was destroyed was from the legacy of Apartheid and colonialism – in that some of it was work that either portrayed anti-Apartheid activism, or was by anti-Apartheid activists.

Which goes to show that when you try to destroy the villains of history, you invariably also end up taking out quite a few heroes.

So let’s start with this:

I support a policy of free tertiary education for all who qualify. I believe that students should be given a stipend so that they don’t have to work their way through to university.

I also believe we should have a national research fund that gives grants on a BEE basis in order to nurture and grow our black scientific community. For most of our history, research has effectively had affirmative action in favour of whites due to racism, yet research carried on.

I do not believe redressing this injustice will hurt our scientific standing.

We need a future where the old racists are replaced by new black faces, honoured not for their politics but their great discoveries, their great works that took the world forward, great works that leave the colonialists as relics of shame.

And all of this will cost money.

University's case

This art that was destroyed was going to appreciate in value over time. It was an asset which we as a nation could one day sell if it came to that.

They were also used as teaching materials, as Associate Professor Fritha Langerman, director of the Michaelis School of Fine Art explained:

“The loss of five works by Keresemose Richard Baholo (1994), the first Black student to receive a master’s degree in fine art at UCT, is particularly tragic. These paintings, produced during 1993, are part of a valuable archive of a period in our collective histories, and have been used in several courses to teach about ways in which the past is signified in the present.”

The art, in short, wasn’t costing the university money, the students were.

The money spent on security was demonstrated as necessary – by the money burnt by those students.

University of Johannesburg's Ihron Rensberg put it thusly in a BDLive article:

"We are spending resources in order to protect life and the facilities and heritage that has been built up in our institutions over decades."

Adam Habib of the University of Witwatersrand also explained why they used private security firms:

"Some may ask why we did not use our own campus security, and the answer is … simple: they are not sufficiently trained for this scale of protest.

"We could bring in a more adequately trained campus security team, but do we truly want a ‘militarised’ campus when this scale of security and protection is not required?"

And UCT? Their executive had this to say earlier this month:

“The executive does not necessarily want private security operations on campus. We wish to return to an environment where these services are not needed.

 “We are currently spending some R2 million a month to retain these services‚ which we would rather spend on other essential priorities.”

The fact is that the universities aren't paying for security just for the fun of it – they're paying because protests like those at UCT have forced their hands.

The thing a lot of people don't realise about academics is this:Traditionally academia pays less than a similarly qualified person would get in the private sector.

The professors are there because they want to teach students and do research, and the faculty very likely supports the aims of #feesmustfall and decolonisation.

But neither project can be achieved, so long as the protests for them destroy university property. There just isn't enough money for it.

Self-destruction

This is the supreme irony of South African protest, the means by which we protest more often than not end up actually making it harder to deliver on the protesters’ demands.

When, for example, there are rates strikes this makes it that much harder for the municipality to do anything because it has no money to do anything.

And when we have violent service delivery protests – services suffer because everything that was broken has to be fixed.

As Gauteng MEC for Cooperative Governance, Traditional Affairs and Human Settlements Ntombi Mekgwe said in 2014, “These violent protest actions have also reversed key successes achieved over the years and add further financial strain to the provincial coffers.”

Our students come from the smoking tyres of those protests, their rage was grown in the flickering light of broken promises from leaders who seem to only read the needs of the people by the heat of the burning barricade.

Too many can only smell the winds of change, when they are tainted by faeces.

As researcher Trevor Ngwane told the Mail and Guardian that same year, "Often when people start hitting the streets they should have a banner saying 'all protocol observed.'

South Africa is not the first country where this wanton destruction has happened – Kenya has suffered similar protests in its universities and schools.

These protests have been ongoing since the 1970s, and have fees fallen?

Earlier this month Pwani university announced that it was closing down indefinitely, as students planned a protest over how it handled those who were in arrears – by deferring their studies.

So not only have fees not fallen in Kenya, but now Kenyan universities shut down completely before the protests over them can even happen.

We urge peaceful protest not because of some abstract sense of ‘violence is wrong’ or 'respectability' – but because violence reduces the ability to meet the protesters’ demands.

But we need our leaders to listen to those demands before they reach this point of self-destruction.

Injustice

UCT, and our other universities are currently spending millions on private security because there are students who will wreck the place if they don't.

These millions could have been spent on other students – who aren’t there to burn but rather to learn.

And yes I understand the anger – the deep personal wounds inflicted not just by history, but the present in which black youth are much less likely to find work, and have much more financial pressure on them.

You go to university, your family makes sacrifices to pay the fees, your family expects you to pay them back when you’ve got that high paying job that comes with the degree – and that job suddenly wants five years experience.

And the job that can get you the experience thinks you’re overqualified.

I also understand their racism; it is easy to fall into the trap of hating those favoured by injustice, rather than the injustice itself. It is easy to see the beneficiaries as active and current perpetrators.

Rwanda's economy suffered terribly in 1989 when the market for their main crop at the time, coffee, collapsed. By 1994, the economy had collapsed. Historically the Belgians had played up racial divisions between the Tutsis and Hutus, favouring the former.

Rwanda's Hutu government carried on what the Belgians started, it was easier to blame the Tutsis for the economic collapse than consider that maybe the ruling party should have diversified their economic policy to be less reliant on that singular crop. The Hutus were like you or I, and yet they committed genocide.

Because it is easy to see the beneficiaries of an injustice as being active and current perpetrators. That I can understand why it happens, does not make it excusable.

We have a black government, addressing that injustice is in their hands. They have not adequately done so. While it is easy to look at Max Price as a “colonialist” it is much more difficult to consider the demands of his job, and who put him there.

This is part of why corruption is a transformation issue. Transformation is not in the short term interests of the very rich, who are mostly white, but a minority amongst whites. A government that goes to the highest bidder – isn’t going to transform our economy with any haste.

Where the power lies

I see many possible futures for our country – and the most positive is in black hands. The black majority has the power to build our nation in a way that whites just don’t.

Say we elected a successful white president, a president who did everything right and cleaned up the country – we would end up with a situation where racists credited that president’s white skin with his or her success, rather than the policies and hard work that went into it.

Any benefit from that leader would thus be temporary and undone by the failure to learn from it, from mechanisms that produce superstition rather than knowledge.

We need a historic success in black leadership to take us forward, for the sake of the leaders who will come after, much as we need more of those black South African voices of scientific authority.

But that power has to be recognised to rule – not by just by whites, but by black people. Power is responsibility – it more often attracts blame than praise.

And when that power is sold – it hurts all of us and builds a situation where frustration and anger boil over into destruction.

This is true whether it is black people or white people engaging in acts of violence.

Wisdom?

In her big read castigating the older generation who actually went through the struggle against apartheid, Panashe Chigumadze wrote “Is it not this very wisdom that has seen "our parents" roundly condemn the damage of white property in protest and yet remain silent when black bodies were injured and black lives threatened by armed security guards?”

These assets that are destroyed do not hurt whites. They aren't 'white property', they're university property. That property is there for the benefit of the students, all of them, and its destruction reduces the resources that in all honesty should be being used by the black majority.

This is why the older generation is so often dismissive of the youth – the choice isn't between black and white students, but between their kids getting the education they're paying for, and a bunch of brats whose temper tantrums are destroying that education.

Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Higher Education's chairperson Yvonne Phosa Phosa put it:

"It’s almost at the end of the first term but the environment is not conducive for learning in many of our universities‚ and that is of concern."

The older generation doesn't particularly care about white people, it cares about having to foot the bill for the repairs. That is the perspective that our students lack.

In order to have greater value than those works of art, our students have to offer some future benefit in excess of those works of art. They have to be able to honestly say that one day they will contribute more than they cost.

Their worth is in their power, and how it is used. By failing to acknowledge that power, and take responsibility for its abuse, they become a net cost rather than a benefit to our country.

This is a heartless way to look at things, but resources are not infinite and we have a nation full of people who do not have the opportunity to study full time.

We have issues that need to be addressed, and we need to allow those in authority the ability to address them. Part of that is recognising that those in authority are there because our nation, which is majority black, put them there.

The power resides with us, as much as it does with our country’s chosen leaders.

When a politician makes the decision to keep things the way they are, it is the politician’s decision to do so whether they were bought or not. We use corruption in our discourse as a weird way of avoiding that fact, we build conspiracy theories in which the ones we put in charge aren’t really in charge.

But politicians don’t have to take bribes, and we don’t have to vote for ones who do.

That suspicion of unseen powers filters into everything, builds an impression that we need riots to outshout the clinking of coins – and we don’t actually.

What we need is to hold our leaders to account, to recognise that they are the ones who make the decisions, and if those decisions hurt us, we have the vote.

The sentiment expressed by the likes of #Rhodesmustfall are not the sentiments held by the majority of black people in South Africa.

As Sihle Ngobese put it on Twitter:

We never will. #RhodesMustFall claim to represent black students, YET they never stand for elections to prove that! https://t.co/zb4pSzLdFl

— Sihle Ngobese (@SihleDLK) February 23, 2016

Well, that might have something to do with the fact that black students are getting pretty disgusted too. As one told City Press:

“They are taking something that was pure and good and turning it into a fight: black against white. It’s that narrative, these generalisations which I don’t like.

“I have white friends, coloured friends and Indian friends. It was terrible to eat while they were watching from outside. Then Rhodes Must Fall took down the paintings in the dining room, at least 22 paintings, some dating from the 1930s...

“I used to support the #RhodesMustFall movement and Shackville [a campaign to support students looking for accommodation], but on Tuesday that changed.”

The sentiments held by the likes of #Rhodesmustfall are the sentiments held by a loud minority ignored for too long. We have both been too tolerant and too dismissive of this minority – flicking off its words with the annoyance one shows a fly.

But the fact is that we have a portion of our country which feels powerless, but actually isn’t. We as a nation need to be able to address this, to build that sense of ownership of our nation that is missing for far too many.

And for those who just will not take ownership, to condemn them when necessary.

We do not just need economic and political transformation, but a sense of psychological transformation. Until that comes, we are going to have scenes like UCT students destroying the resources that can help build their futures, because they feel trapped in our history.

Now as to white students misbehaving, I honestly think that they should be expelled. You don't get to attack peaceful protesters because you wanted to watch the rugby. There is an investigation, those students will probably face disciplinary action, and such is the way it should be.

What you see isn't silence on the issue of the UFS incident 'because it is okay' – but silence because so far as I can see there is no serious defence there. It is silence, because there is nothing left to say.

I don't have to write upwards of 2,339 words explaining why I think their behaviour is unacceptable, I don't have to justify not valuing them over anything else, I don't have to be sensitive about their side of the story. The point is pretty much settled.