Living Politics in Grahamstown

Sanele Ntshingana and Paddy O’ Halloran, The Con

The room is walled with grey, cracking plaster, and the ceiling is sagging. Its only adornments are angular burglar bars over the single window and a tilted picture on the wall. A dozen women, maybe more, sit or stand, shoulder to shoulder. They are shouting: not to be heard, but because what they have to say can only be said in a shout. They are some of the women whose shops and homes have been emptied in five days of xenophobic looting in Grahamstown, whose families are left with nothing.

Xenophobia in Grahamstown: Police Fail the Community

Paddy O'Halloran, Daily Maverick

On Monday 19 October 2015, Grahamstown police reinforced by officers and equipment from East London twice dispersed protesting students at Eastcape Midlands College (EMC). Students at the college were protesting corruption by their institution’s administration. They had been joined by students from Rhodes University, down the hill, who had shut down their institution early in the morning as part of the national protest against unaffordable tertiary education. The police threw stun grenades and, in the second dispersal, chased students with a water cannon using chemical water that caused severe itching. When the students retreated to the Rhodes University campus, the police gathered in force at the campus entrance until the vice-chancellor went to the police station to officially request that they stand down. Elsewhere in South Africa so far this week — in Cape Town, Stellenbosch, and Port Elizabeth — protesting students and academics have been met with arrest, tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets. With the exception of Rhodes, the reaction by state and universities has been to break the protests using force.

The ‘African university’ as a site of protest

Paddy O’Halloran, Pambazuka

Photographs of dozens of black intellectuals, artists and revolutionaries decorate the walls of the Black Student Movement Commons, formerly the Council Chambers, at the university currently known as Rhodes in Grahamstown, South Africa. Among the many people honoured there are Angela Davis, Steve Biko, Albertina and Walter Sisulu, Bob Marley, Frantz Fanon, Ellen Kuzwayo, Frederick Douglass, Maya Angelou, Robert Sobukwe, Harriet Tubman and Malcom X. Unlike the dreary portraits of Vice-Chancellors of bygone years that hang in the hallways outside the doors of the Commons, the many faces stuck up by the Black Student Movement (BSM) exude no pomp, none of the unearned arrogance of tradition, nor the security of age-old hierarchy. The assemblage of poets, fighters and thinkers provide inspiration for BSM members, who have occupied the Chambers for two weeks demanding a long-term resolution to the problem of vacation accommodation in university residences as a first practical step toward transforming their university.