On Violence and On Violence Against Women
Page 26
Over a period roughly between 2015 and 2017, I found myself receiving a steady flow of information – news articles, commentaries, leaflets, statements, official and unofficial, counter-statements – from the University of Cape Town and beyond about the protest campaigns that had been taking place in universities across South Africa since March 2015 (Rhodes Must Fall and then Fees Must Fall). In March 2017 I arrived in Cape Town from Great Britain, which, as the mainly white metropolis of empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has much to answer for in relation to the torn fabric of South African history. The 1913 Land Act, an act of sheer theft initiated by the British which laid the ground for segregation and then apartheid, would be a good enough place to begin, not least because the unresolved question of land – its still cruelly unequal distribution – is at the core of the continuing struggle in South Africa, one of the most enduring and troubling legacies of the past. In fact, my family were all Jewish migrants from Poland who travelled, under various forms of persecution and duress, to what was felt then to be something of a haven in the UK. Nonetheless, it is from this distance, and with this sense of historic responsibility and privilege, that I found myself immersed in the stories of the protests that had erupted across the educational landscape of South Africa – protests which initially arose within the universities, but which speak to, and drew so much more than, education in their train.
As I read the Daily Maverick, the Daily Vox and The Conversation, they seemed to me to constitute an alternative university space of their own. From their pages I heard voices speaking, analysing, protesting, voices calling for colloquia, dialogue, workshops, debates, for a form of radical understanding that can be politically transformative without, in the words of Dudu Ndlovu, black radical feminist and Fallist (Rhodes/Fees Must Fall activist) who chaired many meetings, ‘collapsing the space’.1 That suggestive formula gave me pause. I read her as calling for a space that somehow holds across the fractures and fault lines it must also expose and create, a space that emerges from a message of brokenness in both declaratory and imperative mode, a statement of fact and intent: this is already broken, this must break. Or in the words of Petrus Brink, farm worker and activist from Citrusdal, a township on the Western Cape, interviewed by Simon Rakei in the student-issued pamphlet Pathways to Free Education, ‘This is … this is … this is really not working.’2 Brink is a member of the Food Sovereignty Campaign and the Farm Workers, Dwellers and Migrants Forum, just two of the groups to whom the student protests reached out and who reached out to those protests in turn. I was struck by how far building solidarity nationally and internationally across struggles stood out as a key aim of the protests: the campaign against outsourcing, the challenge to the hierarchy between manual and intellectual labour, the call, issued by Brian Kamanzi amongst other students, for a socially responsive university which would offer asylum to fellow Africans and diasporas across the globe – a call which, in the face of Trump’s assault on migrants and refugees, not to speak of the UK’s own inhuman policies, has never felt more relevant.3
So how to move forward without forfeiting either the disruptive force of Brink’s deceptively simple statement (‘this is really not working’) or the space for dialogue and understanding – without collapsing the space? Or to put it another way, can politically motivated rage be generative, can it erupt and move us forward in the same breath? In her Ruth First memorial lecture on ‘Violence and Rage’, delivered in August 2016, Leigh-Ann Naidoo spoke of the ‘violent, pathological’ inequality which was scarring the nation.4 When Lovelyn Nwadeyi addressed the top two hundred South Africans selected by the Mail & Guardian in June of the same year, she described the time as ‘disjointed, out of sync, plagued by a generational fault line that scrambles historicity’.5 ‘Pathological’, ‘plagued’ – these are powerful, evocative words, all the more so as they resonate with today’s crisis of Covid-19. It is my argument in this chapter that the South African protests – subdued today in South Africa but by no means silenced – together with the outpouring of commentaries, was a unique political moment which raised the relationship between affect and politics to a new pitch.
As a young woman in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was part of the student protests in Oxford and Paris. In fact, shortly before going to Oxford as an undergraduate, I had taken the last plane home out of Paris in May 1968 before the airports shut down, to the accompaniment of headlines: ‘La France s’écrase’ – ‘France is crumbling.’ If the campaigns in South Africa evoked for me memories of those moments – the same hyperbole of destruction thrown at the protests (after all France did not crumble or fall apart in 1968) – the worlds could also not be more different. Up to that time, Oxford had been a site of unadulterated privilege, barely touched by questions of race, gender and class. Today it seems fair to ask if, or how far, any of that, at a deep level, has really changed. Taking their cue from UCT, students at Oxford initiated their own Rhodes Must Fall campaign in 2015, demanding first and foremost the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes from its prominent position at Oriel College as founding father and benefactor. Having first agreed to consider this demand, the college management revoked their offer when various alumni threatened to withdraw their donations and/or disinherit the college in their wills. A major donor whose legacy was rumoured to be in the region of £100,000 was reported to be ‘furious’. ‘Rhodes Will Not Fall’ was the front-page headline of the right-wing Daily Telegraph, which could barely conceal its elation at this climbdown.6 When, in response to the renewed protests in May 2020, the governors finally voted to have the statue removed, Husan Kuyai, tech entrepreneur and former Oxford student, pledged to make up the funds that ‘any racist donors pull’.7
There is an irony here. After all, it was Britain that was one of the first countries to import into the African continent the brute force of capital whose continuing sway in post-apartheid South Africa is the cause of so much that is broken today. It was, then, somehow ironically appropriate that, faced with the petulant omnipotence of money, the Oxford University management should in the first instance, without a trace of historic self-consciousness, so promptly and cravenly buckle. Those who defended the presence of the statue on the grounds that it needed to remain as part of historical debate; or who argued more bluntly that students wishing to take it down rather than engage in such civilised discussion had no place at Oxford and should seek their education elsewhere (Oxford’s chancellor, Sir Christopher Patten, no less); or that one of the main student organisers disqualified himself from any protest since, as a Rhodes scholar, he was indebted to Rhodes, of course never for one minute raised the question of the ongoing histories of material exploitation, of global capital shunted around an increasingly unequal world, in which the monies before which they prostrated themselves might be embedded.
As a young student, I was the beneficiary of a free state-provided education. Like many in the UK, I have watched appalled as the right to free higher education, a key demand of the protests in South Africa, has been systematically dismantled, while an increasingly instrumental version of learning, wedded to ‘impact’ and quantifiable forms of knowledge in tune with the calculations of capital, has spread across universities. That these fees impact disproportionately on the disadvantaged goes without saying (a manageable loan for the middle class being an insurmountable debt for the poor). So it seemed to me crucial to start by expressing my solidarity with the basic demand for no fees – whether in the form of free education for all or free education for the poor which was also a subject of often fierce debate. I have witnessed the deleterious effects on the house of critical thought of any whittling down of that fundamental right in the so-called free world. Certainly in the UK, the introduction of university fees has been accompanied by an increasing impatience, bordering on contempt on the part of the Conservative government, for the questioning attitude which is the lifeblood of the humanities.8 In South Africa, subsequent to my visit, the demand for free university educa
tion appeared just for a split second to have been met, a progressive parting gesture of then President Zuma, although it later turned out that nothing would happen and that he had not even consulted the Treasury. Students marching on the government buildings to make this demand in October 2015 chanted one of the famous ‘revolting songs’ of the apartheid era, a song which they pelted ‘like a rock at the glass house now run by those erstwhile radicals of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s’.9
* * *
The question of this chapter, which the reality in South Africa has so sharply helped and obliged me to focus, is: what, in moments of historical crisis, is being passed down from one generation to the next? In a struggle which is also a reckoning with the past – as all political struggles may be, but this one surely was – what both can, and cannot, be borne? What do we not want to know about the past? What do we not want to know about ourselves? What forms of anger and recrimination might one generation be carrying on behalf of the generation that came before, a generation which believed and still believes in – which yearns above all for – a world that could resolve the injustices of the past and put an end to violence? In everything I read about the situation in South Africa, the word ‘free’ was central, first in the context of the demand for free education, and then again in the concept of the ‘born free’, the term applied to the generation born after the legal and political dismantling of apartheid in 1994. When the journalist Eve Fairbanks visited South Africa to investigate the protests for the UK’s Guardian in November 2015, she was driven from the airport to UCT by a fifty-year-old black man from the township of Langa who, without prompting, told her how he had reacted when his fourteen-year-old son had asked him what apartheid had done to him: ‘“I don’t want you to know about the past,” he responded angrily, “you are free of all that!”’ Sociologist Xolela Mangcu told her that he tries to avoid conversations about black history with his daughter who is attending a privileged mainly-whites school: ‘I’m afraid of how she’ll process it. How she’ll relate to her friends. So I haven’t had the courage to do it.’ The historic and persisting division between black and white must not be spoken. I assume he fears that if he told her, she would from that point onwards see her white school friends only through the lens of apartheid and that she would hate them.10
At their most simple, both these parents were simply expressing the desire of all parents for their children to have a better life, a desire raised to the highest pitch in South Africa. But they also carry a subliminal message or instruction: This is not your story; do not hark back to or think about it; forget. Such an injunction is impossible for any human to obey, and in fact coils the recipient even more tightly inside the rejected legacy of the past. During the course of her investigation, Fairbanks found that many people who expressed outrage about the police killings at Marikana in 2012, when officers turned on striking miners, killing thirty-four, were more hesitant and wary in response to the student protests, a difference she read not just in terms of the greater quotient of violence of the former, but also in generational terms. There is a history in relation to the miners, whose demands recalled the days of apartheid when their brute exploitation was the hallmark of the regime (that their condition is still so appalling underscores the persisting class and race inequalities of the nation). For many, Marikana was a turning point, the moment when belief in the new dispensation collapsed – remember the minister, Susan Shabangu, instructing her police officers on how to deal with offenders the previous year: ‘You must kill the bastards if they threaten you or your community.’11 Whereas the students, the ‘born frees’, often privileged – as in the UK, the most deprived never make it to university in the first place – were meant to be coming from a new place. They ‘were not supposed to feel that degree of historical pain’. ‘How South Africa’s Youth Turned on Their Parents’ Generation’ was the title of Fairbanks’s article.12 ‘A kind of poignant switch had therefore been flipped,’ observes Neo Muyanga, musician and cultural activist, ‘transposing a new band of revolutionaries at the door – in this case, the kids – out where the parents once revolted.’13
The crisis in South Africa seemed, therefore, to be driven by a logic, or rather illogic, of generational time: disjointed, out of sync. According to Nwadeyi, the term ‘illogical’ has more than once been thrown at the protesting students in order to discredit them. ‘The challenge of being young in South Africa,’ she observes, ‘perhaps, is having a past that you can never know enough about and having a future that was prescribed for you by those who themselves weren’t sure of what that future would look like.’14 This formula stood out for me. It defies the normally understood temporal state of things while also touching on the limits of human knowledge. Neither the past nor the future can be fully known. The passage from the one to the other, which is the time we are living, can therefore only be hesitant, messy and unsure (Leigh-Ann Naidoo’s lecture had the title: ‘The Anti-apartheid Generation Has Become Afraid of the Future’). However much we yearn to know the past, our legacy, like the psychoanalytic unconscious, one might say, escapes our mental grasp. The problem therefore is not just denial, but the false mastery it tries to exert on what will be, and on what has gone before.
But, although the past is not fully knowable – or rather for that very reason – it is no less part of who we are, shadowing the future it beckons. One cannot control the future any more than one can leave the past behind. We cannot, ever, just wrap the events of history under our belts and move on. Or in Nwadeyi’s words again, ‘South Africans, young and old, are now being forced to deal with the ghosts of our very present past.’15 The legacy of the born frees is the ‘present past’. Their task, although they were not thanked for it, was to bring back to the surface what the previous generation, in sway to unspeakable anguish, thought, prayed, was buried and done with. Writing in the 1970s, psychologist Chabani Manganyi had already described his ‘chronic, silent, secret anguish’. Refused employment in South African universities on grounds of political activism, Manganyi left South Africa to take up a post at Yale University in the US. ‘You and your society’, he said as he walked out on his therapist at the time, ‘have exhausted the revolutionary possibilities of your life.’ ‘You will never know what my people have to go through in the land of their birth.’ Manganyi was apartheid’s exile. He described himself as a ‘pilgrim turned refugee in search of a gaping grave’.16
It is of course different now – how different, to what extent, and in what ways is the question. But this new generation were not meant to rise up against today’s iniquities:
– the racially unequal dispensation;
– the crushing of the poor under the weight of a lawless, criminal capitalism which Sampie Terreblanche traces back to Reagan’s licensing of transnational corporations across the world in the 1980s, giving them entry into the global south (a move he describes as ‘pure madness’);17
– the stranglehold of the Mineral Energy Complex (MEC), the mining and energy sectors of the economy, over South Africa’s economic development, which, as students have pointed out, extends its reach into many university Electrical Engineering departments;
– the ambiguity – although this is contested – of the Constitution’s property clause on the key issue of redistribution of land;18
– the deal struck by the ANC to secure political victory which, many argue, was at the cost of a potentially more radical, fairer, economic agenda; an agenda that had to be dropped from the historic agreement with the National Party in 1994 (as I was told more than once during my visit, a white army ready to provoke a civil war was standing at the door).
Finally, most crucially for the universities, there is the incomplete project of decolonisation, which democratisation has not secured (it has been a central contention of the student campaign that decolonisation has barely begun). ‘The neo-liberalisation of universities’, writes South African literary scholar Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, ‘produced a set of silences in the producti
on of their histories.’ She was making her remarks in response to this chapter when it was first delivered as the VC Open Lecture at the University of Cape Town in 2017. Black suffering, she continued, citing Jamaican novelist and philosopher Sylvia Wynter, ‘angrily denied by many’, became the ‘victim of a version of historical amnesia and bad faith’. This was the deal which the students had broken. For Collis-Buthelezi, the problem is therefore ‘the how of history-making’, the challenge therefore not so much the future (‘a precarious continuum on which to set our hope’) as the here and now.19 To put it most simply, the next generation were not meant to cry foul, or claim that apartheid had not ended, or that their future was blighted by a past that had not gone away. They were meant to embody a new ideal of progress; although not of course the distorted version of progress, the foil to so-called ‘barbarity’, through which the colonisation of Africa had historically been justified. None of which is to minimise the radical, in many ways revolutionary, constitutional, political, legal transformation of 1994, nor the human struggles of those who made it possible.