Mikaela Erskog, The Daily Dispatch
Events such as the
student-led #RhodesMustFall campaign at UCT and the recent formation and
actions of the Black Student Movement at the university currently known as
Rhodes reveal the extent to which South African universities have not been
central and progressive hubs of social transformation.
Concerningly, this moment
also indicates a lack of critical engagement with how seriously students are
invested in the transformation of historically colonial educational
institutions.
Yet, what really has had
many of the students at a loss is the complete ignorance shown by academics and
political leaders who are misreading the nature of the recent student activism.
Responses by the likes of Free State University VC Dr Jonathan Jansen and Dr
Thami Mazwai have coloured students as unintellectual, unthinking rebels without
a cause.
These reactions suggest
those supposedly at the helm of the transformation agenda are not critically
aware of the actional dimension of transformation.
Put simply, a vast
majority think of transformation in narrow, static and elitist ways – ways that
prevent them from recognising the lifeless quality of their conceptions of
transformation.
This has led to the
failure to recognise the actual significance of the student contribution in the
critical and political work of transformation.
“Transformation” in the
South African university has become as flat and as crudely drawn as the rainbow
sketched out by the infant nation of 1994. This is evident in the unreflexive
and condescending way transformation is predominantly contained and disseminated
by older generations. Whether it be the university’s upper administration or
the top tiers of academia, the transformation agenda is dictated from above. It
is then handed out to students in neat, colour-coded binders. For the old
guard, transformation is about imbizos, reports, demographics and speeches.
This is not to say that
bureaucracy-driven processes for transformation are entirely antiquated.
Research such as the report on the Rhodes University Institutional Culture
Staff Survey (2014) created by the office of equity and institutional culture
provides important information that should inform transformation initiatives.
It exhibited the concerns of staff about prevailing institutional inequities
and the lack of serious transformation.
Yet ultimately, when the
agenda for the transformation of education is driven from above it tends to
establish an uncritical, hierarchical relationship with students. These
processes position the least powerful (students, grounds staff) as perpetually
inferior to the “actual” drivers (teachers, chancellors, directors). Older
generations articulate and lead educational transformation, students are meant
to follow.
Bureaucracy-driven
transformation concretises the imagined relationship between academic and
student. By doing so, it undermines the intention of transformation – to create
an active, self-determining and critical student population.
What is actually frightening
about the “vandalising” of statues and black students occupying elite
institutional spaces is that transformation is no longer being legislated or
decreed from the institutions councils and senates. What is jarring for those
who cradle transformation-by-numbers is that students know that transformation
does not happen on paper. Real transformation exists in actions. Actions that
alter previously established norms. Actions that manifest from the will of
human beings.
The university currently
known as Rhodes is known [in this dispensation] for it’s apolitical student
body. Have students, in the 20 years of “democracy”, collectively voiced
dissident political opinions with such force? Have students openly and
collectively discussed and challenged the politics of oppression?
Is it not then
transformational to see a black student movement gathering in public to discuss
the institutional racism and it’s effects on those worst off in society? When
the apolitical shifts to political, that is in itself transformative.
At UCT students occupied
the Bremer building, renamed it Azania House and used the space to explore
African intellectualism. When students occupy, claim and remake previously
exclusionary spaces, they are actively participating in determining spatial and
intellectual transformation. As intellectual and theatre practitioner Augusto
Boal explained in his seminal text “Theatre of the Oppressed”, “The
[uneducated] mustn’t just liberate its Critical Conscience, but its body too.
It needs to invade the stage and transform the images that are shown there.”
Transformation does not
exist until it is enacted by those it seeks to transform. By the very action of
it being participatory and student-driven, the “transformation agenda” is
transforming.
The students involved in
the events at the universities are critically conscious of the horrors that
plague their society in general and their universities in particular. They are
invading exclusionary conceptual and physical stages. They are determined to
change exhibited image because this is part and parcel of the process of
transformation. As Boal put it, “The action of transforming, is in itself,
transforming.”
Students cannot consider
a university to be transformative if they are not involved directly in the
transforming. If the shape and form of student participation in transformation
makes some uncomfortable, that is a “you-problem”. For the likes of Dr Mazwai
to think they can dictate to students “their purpose” is deeply patronising.
That approach reinforces an authoritarian version of transformation that
continually treats young adults as unknowing children.
In an interview on Your
World on SABC news, Mbali Ntuli stated that taking down statues is not dealing
with “the real problems”. She, like many others, completely misses the point.
Taking down Cecil John Rhodes’s students indicates how students are using their
intellect to engage how our deeply troubling past is alive and well in the
present.
#RhodesMustFall has not
been about an inanimate object or a dead man, but about using the weight of the
collective to catalyse a national conversation about present inequalities. It
is about the political will of students to determine the physical and
intellectual spaces they inhabit in a way that reflects them as people.
In the Black Student
Movement at Rhodes, working class black students find that their daily
hardships come from a system that depends on their oppression. Responding to
this by exposing their discontent for the maintained norms and figureheads of
that system, is taking seriously the real problems of their lived experiences.
The nay-sayers and
finger-waggers are not taking seriously the transformative quality of recent
student activism because it would compromise their untransformed power and privilege.
Much like other dissident
activist groups in South Africa, the Black Student Movement is not interested
in perpetuating exploitative systems of oppression. We do not believe in an
education system that thinks of transformation as something accomplished by
conforming to bureaucratic channels that exclude student voices. Learners must
lead in the fight for real transformation.
