Link to video of protest at parliament:https://www.facebook.com/mark.swilling/videos/10153651402076226/
In a decade or so we will look back on the Marikana massacre and say ‘that was where it all started’. We will be trying to explain either the further degeneration of South Africa’s democracy into an authoritarian regime, or the end of ANC dominance of the state after it suffers an electoral defeat. The former could precede the latter, but that is not a foregone conclusion. The difference in outcome, however, is being shaped as we speak on our campuses countrywide as the students protest against rising fees. What is the historical significance of these campus protests? Is there anything to be learnt from similar movements that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s? Before proceeding, I want to reflect on what I witnessed at the Stellenbosch protest, and the protest outside Parliament of Wednesday.
As has happened often before to extend participation in campus protest, the student leaders of the Stellenbosch movement created a space for students to tell their stories. Using the natural amphitheatre created by the circular stairs leading down to the Gericke Library, large numbers of students gathered to hear students tell their stories. I detected in this well managed democratic space four main narratives. The first, and most popular, was articulated by black students: “I am black. I am angry. And rising fees is just another way of ensuring my exclusion”. Articulated with great passion, anger and emotion in the familiar poetic ways of our African oral tradition, this position got the loudest applause. The second, often articulated mainly – but not exclusively – by white students was: “Fees are rising unjustly because of corruption in government.” This was at times mildly applauded, and quite often the speakers were surprised to be met with ‘booing’. Quite clearly, the speaker’s real motives were not always trusted. The third narrarative was a variation on this theme articulated by many, strongly applauded, but not always: “Fees are rising because government has not prioritized financial support for students to further their education.” Supported by numbers about declining real expenditure per student, this had a certain appeal and connected to wider societal contradictions. The fourth, clearly designed to deflect attention away from Government as the culprit, referred to Stellenbosch University making a profit last year and not using this to keep fees affordable.
Later that day I was supposed to have a meeting in Parliament with a Deputy Minister who read my recent article in Xolela Mancu’s new book entitled The Colour of the Future and he wanted to discuss it. I could’nt get in, and so his VIP unit smuggled him out, and we met in a cafe. But I spent 30 minutes in the crowd. Many ideologies were reflected in the T-Shirts – ANC, SACP, EFF, NEHAWU, various student associations, Steve Biko’s face, masked faces and red caps that emulated the Zapatistas, and like all protests the world over, the iconic image of Che Guevara. The crowd included the full spectrum – young black and white people, united in the exhilarating sense of solidarity, power and a sense of danger that goes with any protest action. There were the onlookers, of course, and the tired participants resting on the side, talking, flicking through messages on their phones, scanning the unfolding events. The crowd gathered around the gates, singing songs from the 1980s, but often with different words. Unsurprisingly, the leaders were making up the rules as they went along, judging the crowd, judging the opposition, handling the pressures of the moment and wondering about what happens next. For some on the side, the quicker this thing escalated into a full-frontal conflict, the better. While the Mama’s in their NEHAWU T-shirts talked excitedly, they also said they needed to warn the students against storming the gates because of how the police would react. Behind the gates stood agitated men in suits, flanked by larger men who were obviously security personnel. They chatted on their phones, now and then interacted with student leaders in gaps between the songs, and generally seemed bewildered, obviously failing to get clear instructions from their superiors. The tensions mounted, all through the crowd people were asking others what is going on ‘in front’, while the magnet of danger, action and youthful power continued to draw in more and more people. The student leaders needed government to respond to deliver something of value, or face being outflanked. I had to leave before it all turned nasty as teargas and rubber bullets were used to disperse the crowd. My guess is that the failure to deliver someone in authority to talk to the students coupled to rising pressure by some to escalate the pressure on the gates led to a security decision to ‘clear this crowd’. The scenes that followed were all over social media within seconds, and on TVs that night. Quite a few inside the Parliamentary buildings had children in the crowd outside.
This could just be another student protest about fees, and all actors could keep the issues narrowly focused – like the speaker who tried to focus attention on the University’s profits in order to deflect attention away from the state, and the announcement that Zuma will meet the students and University management to discuss the question of fees today (Friday). But the real challenge facing this movement is whether wider linkages will be made with workers and communities. And in this regard, there are precedents from which lessons can be drawn.
In the 1970s and 1980s, radicalized students did forge wider linkages that established the foundations for the social movements that eventually brought down apartheid. Black students mobilized, like today, by the ideas of Durban-based Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement, realized they needed to extend their work beyond the campuses. This resulted in the start of what became South Africa’s well-developed community-based development movement. Although ideologically this movement shed its Black Consciousness ideology from the mid-1980s onwards, there was always a regular supply of radical students from the campuses to support what eventually morphed into the “civic movement”. Radicalized white students, inspired by the writings of another Durban-based intellectual and academic, Rick Turner, and the international ‘New Left’ movement, set up campus-based Wages Commissions that, in turn, linked up with emerging trade union groups that eventually coalesced into FOSATU and then COSATU (in 1985). By the late 1980s, the civic movement and the trade union movement, together with the student movement on the campuses and in the schools, were the primary pillars of the so-called Mass Democratic Movement.
Will these students make the connections to workers and communities who are also feeling the consequences of South Africa’s self-imposed austerity programme that has been imposed to deal with the consequences of jobless growth, non-developmental welfarism and the collapse of commodity prices which has harmed the Mineral-Energy-Complex? Will the links between the causes of service delivery protests, job losses and rising fees be made? What form will this take? What ideological influences will shape the popular slogans and demands that could emerge from the re-establishment of a student-worker-community alliance reminiscent of the 1980s? For me, the multi-ideological nature of the crowd outside Parliament was encouraging because it reflected the unifying potential of an issue – and so was the presence of the NEHAWU workers, who thought they could share their hard-won struggle experience with the students when it comes to tactics. But while issue politics is good for unifying across ideological differences, it is not always helpful when building multi-constituency alliances. Linking ‘fees must fall’ to ‘services for all’ to ‘jobs for all’ will not be easy. But if this happens, then these student protests will have earned their place in the unfolding history of South Africa’s robustly fragile democracy. If this democracy is to survive, it may well depend on those who are prepared to defend it by joining the protests, and then forging linkages that could reshape the future direction of South African politics. Marikana was the turning point. Will the campus protests mark the start of a broader alliance of movements that could articulate genuine alternatives to the strange mix of austerity, non-developmental welfarism and job-shedding economic policies that we have now? Who from these student movements will forge the links? What skills will they have to avoid imposing their own views instead of listening and facilitating cooperation? How will less educated local community leaders relate to the students who have smart phones and cars? These are the questions we should be asking now, informed by a sense of our own history.
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