adminNduduzo Tshuma
LAST week university students in South Africa took to the streets to protest the proposed 10-12 percent fees hike by tertiary institutions and successfully forced the Government to declare a zero percent tuition increase for 2016.
The developments were celebrated as a revolutionary across the South African student circles who argued that already the prohibitive fees marginalised the ordinary black South African child as it was pegged beyond the reach of many working parents.
To their credit, the students managed to keep the demonstration strictly about their fees and blocked attempts by politicians and celebrities to score points at the expense of their plight. Former Democratic Alliance leader Ms Helen Zille was embarrassed by one student when she was told, “don’t touch me,” as she tried to grandstand patting her on the back as she expressed their discontent at the proposed 10-12 percent hike of university fees by the government.
The president of the DA, Mr Mmusi Maimane was also booed by the students while trying to address them while Economic Freedom Front chief whip Floyd Shivhambu was told to go back inside when he tried to address the protesting students outside the South African Parliament.
The students were not going to let anyone hijack or dilute their movement. Theirs was on the fees issue alone and rightly denied politicians and celebrities alike a chance to steal the show and gain mileage from an issue that affected their future.
The varsity students had just made history but that revolutionary movement was hugely dented by widely publicised images of white students forming a human wall to protect black protestors from being assaulted by the police.
The images, celebrated in some circles of the South African white liberal society, actually raised a number of issues afflicting the country 21 years after attaining ndependence.
Even some sections of the country’s media, tellingly, celebrated the images heaping praises on the heroic privileged white students who had stepped out of their comfort zone, affluence to defend their black brothers and sisters from the perceived brutality of the South African police.
However, in the process of “defending” their brothers, the white students actually confirmed that, like W E B Dubois wrote in the Souls of Black Folk in 1903 in case of America’s intersection of race and class as both modes of domination and modes of resistance on the national and international level, that 21 years after independence, the problem of South Africa’s post-Independence lies in “the colour line.”
The white students inadvertently exposed how the South African police selectively enforce the law on the grounds of race. How the South African police would think twice before waving their batons and striking the white student but would never actually think before hitting the black one.
By merely volunteering to form the “defensive wall” the white students are actually aware of their place in the celebrated rainbow nation.
They are aware that their skin pigmentation places them in a higher class than their black counterparts hence their “heroic” decision to form a wall to defend the black students. These are the kind of white liberals who incensed the likes of Steve Bantu Biko, South Africa’s symbol of black resistance who met his brutal death on 12 September 1977 in a Pretoria Prison cell at the hands of the racist apartheid security forces.
Biko, the leader of the black consciousness movement, wrote in his book, I Write What I Like, under the chapter Black Souls in White Skins? He said of the so-called white liberals, “We’re concerned with that curious bunch of non-conformists who explain their participation in negative terms: that bunch of do-gooders that goes under all sorts of names — liberals, leftists etc.
These are the people who argue that they are not responsible for white racism and the country’s inhumanity to the black man. These are the people who claim that they too feel the oppression just as acutely as the blacks and therefore should be jointly involved in the black man’s struggle for a place under the sun. In short, these are the people who say that they have black souls wrapped up in white skins.”
“The role of the white liberal in the black man’s history in South Africa is a curious one.
“Very few black organisations were not under white direction. True to their image, the white liberals always knew what was good for the blacks and told them so.
“The wonder of it all is that the black people have believed in them for so long.”
The black student by allowing themselves to be defended by this infamous “white wall” cemented their status of being the perennial “white man’s burden” and allowed the white students to steal their glory.
They accorded themselves the second class status and that they could not do anything of their own without the protection of the white man. In 1899, Rudyard Kipling wrote The White Man’s Burden calling on the United States to take up the “burden” already taken by Britain and other European countries in colonising Africa.
Kipling justified the Western imperialist agenda in conquering Africa as a quest to “save” their wild, angry and both devilish and childish captives and impose the white man’s culture on the natives.
Now, the South Africa’s white student’s “burden” has morphed or rather allowed by the black students to morph into that of protecting the native darker-skinned student from the brutalities of the police 21 years after Independence.
More critically, the images of the “white wall” not only exposed the ironies of the #FEESMUSTFALL movement, itself a manifestation of the class struggle in South Africa, but how the nation has failed to address the unresolved racial privilege.
Celebrated Nigerian author Chinua Achebe once opined, “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
The Nigerian proverb was expressed by Achebe as he emphasised the need for Africans to record their own history in order to burst the stereotypes carried and detailed by the Europeans.
Similarly though, the black South African student must be careful not to allow their struggle to be hijacked by those pursuing different interests from those they are advocating for.
derick.khumalo
Online Reporter