Varsities strife turns into tedious tango

28 February 2016 - 02:00 By CARLOS AMATO

The campus crisis has entered a depressing sysle of attrition - but not everybody is shouting, writes Carlos Amato. If South Africa's universities are the incubators of social progress, then we're in trouble. Because nobody is emerging with much credit from the neurotic theatre of campus conflict.Since the early triumphs of #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall - feats of peaceful mass action for achievable change - university management and student activists have danced a tedious tango of kneejerk, sterile politics.The University of the Free State's rugby thugs added a toxic dose of racist violence to the moment.It's a depressing story. And who you blame depends on which side of the ideological trench you're sitting.From my position inside the trench, I blame both sides.University of the Witwatersrand vice-chancellor Adam Habib and the University of Cape Town's Max Price, after responding so deftly to the challenge of #FMF, have both veered into kragdadigheid by hiring private security whom they have allowed to suppress peaceful protest.This is a reckless overreaction to isolated cases of student violence.story_article_left1But the fallist students have closed the circle of destructive nonleadership. The movement's core motive - to open the doors of higher education, practically and symbolically - is increasingly tainted by currents of lazy thought: economic illiteracy, crude racial essentialism, adolescent self-pity and jargon-drunk hysteria.Its refusal to adopt formal leadership structures has left it an inarticulate mess, unable to restrain or explain the arsonists and hate-mongers in its ranks.And the standoff between university managers and the fallists maps to a generational chasm in the reading of liberation history.Habib, Price, Rhodes University's Sizwe Mabizela and UFS's Jonathan Jansen are all veterans of various streams of the struggle. Now they confront born-free activists who deny that struggle's transformative value, in part because they never witnessed apartheid proper.The gulf was dramatised on 702's Friday morning show, guest-hosted by Nomboniso Gasa. Gasa interviewed Wanelisa Xaba, an #RMF activist at UCT, who outlined the ideology of "fallism" with a barrage of radical reductionism, shrinking the complexities of struggle history to a cartoonish fable of betrayal. The ANC had deviously sold out the black majority at the outset, leaving them tyrannised by an intact system of white supremacy.For Xaba, the entire edifice of the governing party's progressive record - welfare, affirmative action, the rise of the black middle class, mass service delivery and the antiretroviral roll-out - is invisible.Gasa was willing to hear this narrative, which is weirdly antiblack in its inability to acknowledge the flawed but real achievements of a black government, but the political analyst bridled when Xaba claimed that the ANC had "hijacked the narrative of the PAC"."Hold on," interjected Gasa, "what you cannot do is to distort other movements ... Just read the basic timeline: the PAC was a breakaway from the ANC." Gasa gave Xaba a taut lesson on the history of nonracialism and Africanism in the struggle, and asked her to reconcile her professed belief in "black love" with her sweeping dismissal of her black liberators as traitors.full_story_image_hleft1Then Xaba blundered by matronising Gasa. "First of all, I'm gonna need for us to have a basic respect for each other. So I don't appreciate the way you are speaking to me, and cutting me off."Gasa got the moer in. "I'm hosting ... and can kill this conversation right now ... You are not going to blackmail me into not interrupting you when you are making a very serious historical error."Xaba objected, but Gasa kept talking over her. "Listen! Listen! ... I don't have time for this. You are disrespectful and extremely rude."Xaba accused Gasa of paternalism.Gasa said: "Right now, we do not have a basis for a conversation.""I also don't think so," retorted the student activist.Gasa responded: "I don't think you are ready to have a conversation where there is disagreement."story_article_right2It was a micro-enaction of the campus wars, and showed how fractured the debate has become.Here were two strident black feminists, unable even to hear out each other's accounts of our history. What hope, then, for real communication across the barricades of race, gender, ideology?The antidote to my depression about this was a video of a speech at Stellenbosch University's convocation by Lovelyn Nwadeyi, an #FMF activist and a gifted orator of Nigerian heritage who grew up in Queenstown. She is fluent in Afrikaans, but her bilingual speech assails the defensive parochialism of Maties culture, using language that was humane, empathetic and poetic."Those who must listen, must listen. Those who need the chance to cry must be allowed to cry; those who need to be angry must be allowed to be angry; those who need to talk must be allowed to talk. But none of us gets to claim an easy victory, because there's no victory in our collective pain, there is only closure. And South Africa desperately needs closure."You can stay young and radical without being deaf on principle to other voices. You can reason with radical youth without shouting them down. The likes of Nwadeyi can teach us how to speak and listen back.sub_head_start STUDENT VOICES: CAMPUSES FULL OF PAIN, FRUSTRATION sub_head_endUNIVERSITY OF STELLENBOSCH SRC president Axolile QinaIt is troubling to see the hostility in terms of race and language at some universities, but this is a reflection of many underlying and unresolved issues we face as students and as a country. The problem is not so much about Afrikaans but more that students want to receive education in a language they understand, so that education is not a barrier to access within the classroom.The problem is the slow rate of transformation, as well as frustration and unanswered concerns which students really want to see addressed. Yes, there are challenges, in terms of misunderstanding and lack of sensitivity towards one another, in light of the diversity we share. We need leadership that calls each citizen and student to service and shared responsibility for the development of our nation, where values are lived and applied for the benefit and growth of each other.UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN SRC president Rorisang MoseliThe reason students are behaving this way can be understood as a venting of frustration, and it's valid. However, students need to bear in mind that violence is not going to sort out the problem. Students trashing colonial symbols is about students speaking out against the architecture, the curriculum and about the institutional culture. It's about the legacy of colonialism which was further reinforced by apartheid. Students don't want to be in an environment that glorifies colonialism and apartheid.story_article_left3RHODES UNIVERSITY SRC president Gift SandiIt is about time the youth realised where they are and where they are going and we can't have these symbols of colonialism and apartheid because for black people it's a reflection of the past and how black people were treated. It is time to transform institutions.Although there are buildings named after black icons, we can't have a situation where there are still symbols like statues of colonialism in our institutions. The Afrikaans language was a language used in Bantu education and it's uncomfortable for a black person to learn in a language that oppressed black people.As much as we need to talk about transformation and not burn buildings and destroy everything in our path, when it does happen it's because students feel they are not being heard. There are racial tensions at universities and we should understand that there are certain things we need to change.UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND SRC secretary-general Fasiha HassanThere is a common underlying factor among the university protests which is not only the fight for free and quality education but also about the decolonisation project. Post-1994, people who are born free have not overcome the racial dependencies we have faced over the last 21 years. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission tried to heal those wounds but the wounds are still here. We still experience the same animosity and oppression.Students are being forced to learn in a language they don't understand, but it does not mean that there is no place for Afrikaans people in this society. We as students have maintained the culture of nonviolence but there is a space to burn colonial paintings because we want our institutions to be named after a history we can resonate with as black people.We are anything but a lost generation, we are by no means lost. We know what we want, we know what we are going to do and I know we are going to achieve it. If we don't fight, we will be doing South Africa a disservice. We did not live under apartheid but there is still a lot of black pain and we want our institutions to resonate with us and our history. - Compiled by Shenaaz Jamal..

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