"The poor man’s conscience is
clear; yet he is ashamed…. He feels himself out of the sight of others, groping
in the dark. Mankind takes no notice of him. He rambles and wanders unheeded.
In the midst of a crowd, at church, in the market… he is in as much obscurity
as he would be in a garret or a cellar. He is not disapproved, censured, or
reproached; he is only not seen… To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are
intolerable. If Crusoe on his island had the library of Alexandria, and a
certainty that he should never again see the face of man, would he ever open a
volume?"
John Adams, quoted by Hannah Arendt
In a dramatic student accommodation protest
that mirrored the drastic inequalities that persist in post-Apartheid South
African society 21 years into democratic rule, University of Cape Town
#RhodesMustFall students pitched a tin shack and a portaloo at the bottom of
the steps leading up to Jameson Hall. The protest, dubbed #Shackville, drew a
great deal of attention, following close on the footsteps of the
#RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall campaigns. The ‘site’ of #Shackville was
located a mere thirty metres away from the site of the now-deposed statue of
the arch-colonialist and mining magnate Cecil John Rhodes.
Had #Shackville been a performance art or installation
piece that was officially sanctioned and approved by the authorities of the
institution, it would likely have been praised for its boldness and ingenuity
for bringing the persistent realities of inequality and the dual economy to the
doorstep of the most privileged institution in the country. Accompanied by a
few performances about black exclusion, perhaps a mock service-delivery protest
to boot, and a climactic mock protest consisting of strewn dead bodies that
mirror Marikana and ‘76, it would probably receive a decent grade, purely for
its ‘power’ as an artistic intervention on “the doors of learning”. That is, if
#Shackville had been suitably sanitised enough to raise no official ire, its
sterile appropriation of the realities of life in black South Africa would have
been acceptable, even commendable.
However, that is not the way it turned out.
Instead, the realities of protest culture in 21st Century South
Africa made a genuine and serious incursion into university life at UCT.
Instead of a compliant, symbolic performance, what unfolded at UCT over the
past two weeks, where students engaged in pitched battle with police (and even
other students), closely resembled the mayhem and chaos that many South
Africans who occupy the ranks of the poor and marginalised are all too familiar
with.
The rapid rise in service delivery protests –
since circa 2007 – has largely gone un-acknowledged as a phenomenon in its own
right in the South African political spectrum. While service delivery protests,
as they are referred to, are awarded a lot of media and public attention when
they erupt violently enough to disrupt everyday life in the public realm, they
are scarcely recognised as an emerging medium of protest that deserves its own
place and recognition as a political phenomenon in 21st Century
South Africa.
To be sure, while these protests have their
roots in the 1980s; where youth and communities were encouraged by
anti-apartheid movements to “make the country ungovernable”, they have taken on
a life of their own two decades after the advent of democracy. The term
“service delivery protest”, however, is not an apt or adequate description.
Service delivery protests are about much more than service delivery. They are
about exclusion and invisibility of the poor and marginalised, as much as they
are about drastic and unjust inequality, as well as a long-overdue and
suppressed anger and frustration at the slow pace of change for the poor in
post-Apartheid South Africa.
It is this anger and frustration at a
pathologically unresponsive and sluggish institutional and state system that
lies at the core of the protests that exploded at the end of 2015 across the
campuses of tertiary institutions across the country. The explosion led to student
marches upon parliament in Cape Town, the Union Buildings in Pretoria, Luthuli
House (ANC headquarters) in the City of Johannesburg, and many other official
government buildings across the country, culminating in a sudden back-down by
government over fee increases.
Yet strangely, instead of being met with
energetic new visions and comprehensive plans by the establishment, which
acknowledge the legitimacy of the anger and frustration that students – who
after 21 years of democracy – suffer much the same struggles as students did in
the early 1990s, the students have been met with the drudgery of the
bureaucratic ‘ground-game’.
Moreover, to add insult to injury, the ‘would-be’
appropriation of black struggles (as parodied earlier) is mirrored by the
institutional and bureaucratic responses to the communications[1]
from the #RhodesMustFall protesters. Instead of an unequivocal acknowledgement of
the right to protest the authorities/establishment deigned to ‘educate’ the
protesters as to the ‘correct’ way to go about protesting. Astonishing in the
extreme, this distinctly paternalistic attitude itself lies at the root of the
anger with the institutions that has bubbled up after incubating for over two
decades i.e. it makes the protesters invisible, unable to gain legitimacy on their own
terms, despite the fact that they have been profoundly let down by a heedless,
inadequate system that – in terms of real action – has effectively remained
deaf to their plight for many years.
The mind
boggles at the temerity of the authorities to adopt a leadership trajectory
that seeks to ‘resolve’ matters by heading straight into the tedium of rules
and regulations, when the seething anger of the youth has turned into palpable
rage that has infected both the popular and academic discourses. Race, has once
again come to occupy the centre of the South African socio-political realm, by
no small means catalysed by the recent blatant racist incidents that have occupied
the public imagination over the past few months.
In this context, is the kind of leadership that
has been provided by the establishment and its bureaucracies suitable? Indeed,
will it effectively serve to exacerbate or quell the frustration and anger that
has bubbled up into rage?
Thankfully, we have substantial historical
precedent to draw on in South Africa to answer that question. In particular,
the fraught transition to democracy, in which my generation threatened to
destabilise the entire country, can provide many insights into what is required
in the current moment. Sensitive, sincere and visionary leadership is the
answer, not automatic, defensive responses that reinforce the establishment as
legitimate and the dissenters as misguided youth who require lessons in how to
go about voicing their dissent.
Yet the spotlight has been on the protesting
youth, much the same way as it has been on service delivery protests. They are
painted with the same brush as protests in the 1980s were; a bunch of unruly
radical types, who are in effect directionless anarchists who are up to no
good, and from whose activities no good can come.
It begs the question; can we expect visionary,
enlightened leadership through a crisis from young, frustrated, marginalised
students who until now have been largely ignored and de-legitimised by the
establishment? Or should this kind of leadership be coming from seasoned
leaders who have the benefit of long-term experience of uncertainty and the
challenges of transition?
Clearly, it is the latter with whom the
responsibility lies, as they are – presumably – the ones with both the
experience and power to effect meaningful change.
When anger and frustration is met with rules
and regulations, and a patronising tone, it quickly turns to rage. Precisely
because it is unacknowledged and has no avenues for expression and legitimacy
it bottles up and explodes in unpredictable and destructive ways. There is
nothing new about this. Indeed, this is precisely how service delivery protests
erupt at local levels. We, the privileged public, armed with the telescopic
lenses of the frivolous media, only see the eruptions, and not the lead-up to
them. Those who are invisible in daily life remain invisible until they explode
into action in the public realm.
So perhaps it should come as no surprise that
having reproduced the same, unimaginative and staid leadership responses, that
the university establishment up on the mountain in effect catalysed the
degeneration of the protest into a cascade of disruptive and violent events.
Predictably, the university, armed with its legal team, eventually obtained a
court interdict against the protesters and suspended a number of students,
after #Shackville was demolished overnight by armoured police vehicles.
As events escalated a petrol bomb was hurled at
the Vice Chancellors office and a research vehicle and bus was burnt down. What
received the most attention, however, was that the protesting students had
burned a pile of paintings that were hanging in the residences (most of which
were of little actual artistic merit).
“Oh the horror!” the suburban dwelling middle
class voices have exclaimed, and many comparisons with the Nazis have been made
(i.e. over the burnt paintings). Yet these comparisons are inaccurate, for it
is the Nazis who occupied the bureaucracies and wielded their incontestable
power over rules and regulations to their ultimate destructive and impersonal
ends. It is they who mechanised death, made objects of human beings, and used rules,
regulations and systems of classification to deny them their humanity. Many
valuable paintings were in fact hoarded by the Nazis, in the same way as they
pried the gold out of the teeth of those who they murdered in the gas chambers.
It is ironic, that even those who are quick to
view these events through the lenses of the holocaust, find it difficult to
understand how a youth, only 21 years after the Apartheid project ended, would
see the realities around them through the lenses of Apartheid.
Yet the explanations for this are plenty. South
Africa has the highest levels of inequality in the world. Spatial inequalities
in current day South Africa mirror those that existed under Apartheid. In the
public realm, the majority of the black poor remain third class citizens whose
daily experience is a completely different reality, dictated by dual systems of
economics, employment, service provision, law and justice. Even when black
people enter former white institutions, they are regarded as outsiders, who
should be grateful that they have been included in former white bastions of
privilege. It is as though in invisible shack cloaks one despite having
undertaken a long and arduous journey to join the ranks of the would-be
educated elite.
It is not difficult to understand why the youth
are angry and frustrated by the condition they have inherited. It is not difficult
to understand why, when faced with immovable and resolute bureaucracies that
specialise in a taunting “double-speak” that delegitimises their very
existence, much less their cause, that they would turn to rage and explode in
destructive and unpredictable ways. Indeed, as history teaches us, one of South
Africa’s most celebrated post-Apartheid activists, Zachie Achmat, attempted to
burn down his school in Salt River during the 1976 youth uprisings, when he was
just 14 years old. Apparently he proudly states this in the introduction of his
CV.
And as the situation escalates across the
country, there will perhaps be no cause for reflection until lives are lost. What
is difficult to understand, however, is the inability of government and
institutional leaderships to rise to the occasion and provide decisive and
clear leadership when the mandate to act has been impressed upon them in such
certain and unequivocal terms. It is difficult to understand how experienced,
and presumably competent leaders have responded to the crisis by retracting
into bureaucratic processes, playing the blame-game, and descending to a level
unworthy of experienced, enlightened intellectuals.
Instead of bringing a calm, focused and
determined sincerity to the current crisis, the leadership of tertiary
institutions have effectively added fuel to the fire, and it is a great pity
that the narrative that is being promulgated has placed the blame for the
crisis at the feet of the students. While it is an unmistakable fact that the students have taken the initiative to conceive of and take protest
action, they are not the ones who hold the key to the solutions. Those keys are
tucked tightly away in the forbidding hands of the establishment, and they will
only be grudgingly released, if ever!
