To paraphrase the honour of addressing the eighth Tsietsi Mashinini Annual Lecture, I draw from the Bapedi, who say: kgakakgolo ga ena mabala, ha e fofa e ntsho, mabala a dikgakaneng — the success of a leader is not in herself or himself but seen in the successors. This Sepedi proverb places the burden of trust on future generations, how those not yet born manage public affairs. My lecture uses this kgakakgolo philosophy to reflect on our management of public affairs.
Mashinini would be exactly 66 and five months today had he not perished in Guinea in 1990 at just 33.. He and his student comrades mobilised themselves into the most profound of formations in 1976, when Mashinini was 19. Theirs shook the roots of apartheid and accelerated an irreversible path to freedom. They brought an indelible visibility to the struggle. They juvenilised an en-masse presence of black South Africa internationally and mostly densified their presence in the frontline states. Lesotho, my home, became one of the epicentres of refuge and an intellectual home for the fleeing youth.
Alas, 30 years after his demise, the same issues he fought for emerged as Fees Must Fall continued the struggle for education in 2016.
What are we, those of us still alive, doing with the political freedom created for us by those whose lives were short but impactful? Let us consider that a militant high school youth of 1976 would be on average aged 65 today. These youth were inspired by their creative revolutionary elder counterparts whose ages would range between 70 and 75 on the average today.
It must be heartbreaking for these men and women to look around their townships and villages that were their battlefields and sources of their early education and to witness the social decay undergirded by economic exclusion, which ironically intensified after the apparent gain in political inclusiveness after 1994. Did the youth of 1976 drop the ball given the persistence of their communities’ economic exclusion about five decades later?
Any sound memorial lecture about Tsietsi Mashinini must make an honest attempt to answer these and similar questions.
“Lost generation” immediately entered our lexicon after June 1976. Today as we sit and reflect on the past six decades, we look very empty. What is it that we the dikgakana do as beneficiaries of the colours that the kgakakgolo bestowed on us?
Thirty-three years after the demise of Mashinini, education in South Africa has deteriorated to levels worse than what he fought for. Our centres of learning have become hotbeds for drugs that destroy our children’s future. The culture of teaching and learning has faded fast. Riches and bling have replaced right thought and empathy that marked the lives of Soweto. In I Am a Man, Jerry Mofokeng wa Makhetha narrates life in the 60s in Soweto and how the elders took care of matters. That the shebeen became the centre of learning and how his mother’s shebeen became a school of life for him. His rendition of the hard life they led shows how Soweto elders were poised for victory over adversity. Leading a purposeful life in a purposeless environment. The class of 1976, led by Tsietsi Mashinini, led this purposeful life in a purposeless environment.
But alas, 30 years after his demise, the same issues he fought for emerged, as Fees Must Fall continued the struggle for education in 2016. Our education policies lack the design that ensures that doors of learning are open. To illustrate the index of black performance relative to white performance at university has deteriorated from a 1:1.2 in the 70s to 1:6 20 years into democracy, and Fees Must Fall was an outcome of this deterioration. For every black graduate there were 1.2 white graduates in the 70s, and now for every black graduate there are six white graduates; this reflects the rapid deterioration of cohort after cohort of black entrants into university education. This does not reflect blacks being stupid but the utterly hopeless support system for blacks once they enter university.
The list of lamentable and monumental failures is too long..
Today’s politicians lack empathy. Mashinini led with empathy, and that is why his thirty-three years of life have been so impactful. What we need is not the tired theory of political will. Those who lack empathy cannot out of nowhere imbue political will. The parent of political will is empathy. Anton Lembede had men and women of principle who imbued empathy and kept the promise alive, Steve Biko imbued empathy, and Mashinini exuded empathy. They have all shown that short lives, regrettable to us as family and society as this can be, does not mean short-changed lives. These short-lived stalwarts are the classic Bapedi kgakakgolo. This is Tsietsi Mashinini’s message to us.
* Pali Lehohla was addressing the eighth Tsietsi Mashinini Annual Lecture in Soweto.
Dr Pali Lehohla is the director of the Economic Modelling Academy, a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a Research Associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa.
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