“The liberation of the individual does not follow national liberation. An authentic national liberation exists only to the degree to which the individual has irreversibly begun his own liberation.” – Frantz Fanon
It was a cool August day in 1995 in King William’s Town, Eastern Cape, when 24-year-old Nontsusa Mbayi gave birth to Sinoxolo. His Xhosa name, meaning “we have peace”, was apt for the time.
This is young Sinoxolo Mbayi (Boyi’s) story: the child of post- liberation harvest – a time of hope to redress the unjust and oppressive conditions of the disenfranchised and dispossessed, yet the Steinbeckian grapes of wrath, a bitter chalice, were his inheritance: inflaming his desire, and those of his comrades, to action in liberating their minds and public institutions – challenging the hegemony of post-colonialism and national liberation power dynamics.
The year before, after three-and-a-half centuries of colonialist and apartheid violence, Nelson Mandela, a leader of a national liberation movement, was inaugurated as the president of South Africa. The dawn of the new democracy was hailed as a miracle with the birth of a “rainbow nation”.
However, Sinoxolo will grow to debunk this “rainbow nation myth” and like many others of his generation, believes that “1994 did nothing towards changing the material conditions of black people”.
Sinoxolo and his mother lived with his grandmother and aunts till the age of four. They lived in a green mud house ubiquitously dotting the rolling hills of the Eastern Cape.
Later, Nontsusa and her son moved to Cape Town, where she made a living as a street vendor selling steel wool to sustain her son and the family back in the Eastern Cape. Sinoxolo then joined his mother in street vending around the township of Wesbank in Blue Downs, 33km from central Cape Town, where they lived in a tiny “RDP matchbox” house. She later opened a tuckshop at her home.
He remembers initially growing up in a peaceful Wesbank community, despite the poverty and under- resourcing, though over time, many social ills plagued this community. “A great part of who I am is due to my teachers’ support, mentoring and encouragement at local Hoofweg Primary School, and then at Wesbank High School.
“However, Wesbank became a gang-ridden community, and gangsterism spilled into the schools.” His social world was disconnected from his peers at high schools in the affluent suburbs.
Sinoxolo held many leadership positions in high school, that is: SRC vice-president, peer mediator and class prefect.
Sino, as his friends call him, stepped into UCT confidently as he attained admission in 2014. He registered to study law, politics and public administration, starting his academic journey to become an advocate – his childhood dream.
He moved from Wesbank to university residence in the affluent Rosebank. He found the College House residence as “exclusionary as it did not set out to include everyone, certain classes, and lacking cultural diversity”. This year when he was appointed as a sub-warden, he set out to change this.
Until arriving on campus, Sino was vocal on social issues, though not politically aligned. His classmates, Masixole Mlandu and Athabile Nonxuba, “infused” in him the political ideology of pan-Africanism. The same year (2014) he was elected onto the Humanities Student Council. In 2015, he served as the research and archives commissar of the Pan-Africanist Student Movement of Azania (Pasma UCT). Now he serves as the secretary-general of the organisation.
He espouses three fundamental ideologies: Pan-Africanism, Black Consciousness and Black Radical Feminism.
These, he says, form the pillars of the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) and Shackville TRC movements that are “awakening the spirit of Black Consciousness (BC) and promote a decolonisation perspective”. Sino freely quotes Steve Biko (an anti-apartheid student leader in the 1960s and 1970s and founder of the BC Movement, also from King William’s Town) and Frantz Fanon (a Martinique-born French psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer).
He considers the ANC a “neo-liberal black party which panders towards whiteness, that is, those that have privilege through colonial conquest, generational oppression, apartheid dispossession and racism”. He eloquently uses Fanon to show the pitfalls of the national government, a “replica of the former government”. Furthermore, he calls for black self-determination and challenges white people to “acknowledge their privilege, positionality, make reparations and give back the land”.
Pasma is active in a number of “Let’s Build Institutions” social outreach projects, such as building a library in Centane in the Eastern Cape, and community conscientisation in Kilombo Village in Khayelitsha. As “poverty has been normalised”, their intention is to “seek to disrupt that way of thinking”.
In September 2016, the 2017 SRC candidates of Pasma (of which Sinoxolo was also a part), Vanguard, Bantu and 4wrd called for a Shackville TRC after the university, earlier in the year in February, demolished a shack built on campus, “a symbol of the socio-economic plight of first-year students without accommodation, and also the land dispossession of black people”.
Immediately thereafter, 12 students were interdicted, suspended and effectively expelled. He considers the UCT authority’s actions as “punitive and retributive”. Therefore, the movement wanted a restorative justice approach mimicking the TRC of 1994 – “not that this in anyway legitimises the TRC of 1994 as it was a whitewash”.
He argues: “We resorted to shutting down the institution as we were not being listened to. During the shutdown, the management acted in bad faith to many of the resolutions we reached; in addition to being arrested, vilified and harassed by their private security.
“Furthermore, some media outlets overexaggerated the violence on campus. For example, eNCA reported that ‘several buildings, including the Steve Biko Students’ Union, were set on fire’, though this was not the case.”
Sino contends: “Admittedly, there were some violent instances, but our response was in retaliation to the institutional, symbolic, psychological and systematic violence of the university and the State. For example, we had asked the university to review institutional paintings years ago.
“But they didn’t listen to us up until they got burnt. Burning them was a vindication and it felt cathartic watching those colonial, white-supremacist paintings burn.”
Further, he contests certain popular notions: “We equally reject the notion that we shut down institutions because we are lazy and don’t want to learn. No, we shut down the institution because we want to be here. But many of the poor academically deserve to be here, but they can’t afford the fees. This is a public institution – who does it cater for?
It is exclusionary and classist!” Sino is one of those students who are unable to afford university fees. He received a NSFAS loan in his first year, and an Allan Gray bursary in his second and third years of study.
A few weeks ago, he was arrested and charged with public violence and intimidation when he ejected private security in pursuit of protesters from his residence. The charges have since been thrown out of court.
Our interview last Thursday in his residence room was punctuated with Sino advising his comrades on lodging papers he prepared on behalf of Shackville TRC opposing UCT’s blanket interdict against students. On Friday, representing Shackville TRC himself, he got the Cape High Court to postpone the case to March 13, 2017.
He hopes the university will stand by the agreement for “free decolonised education that speaks to the lived experiences of the majority, and align itself with the students”.
With weary eyes, after studying through the night and preparing court papers, Sino solemnly says: “When you are tired of being tired and have nothing to lose, you are willing to make personal sacrifices and take on anything.”