Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya
IN HIS opening remarks to launch the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic’s summer season last week, Bongani Tembe, the chief executive and artistic director of the KZN and Johannesburg Philharmonic orchestras, quoted an 18th and early 19th century American politician, John Adams.
“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”
It did not take long for the quote to be applicable in South Africa. The violent clashes between black and white students at the University of Pretoria showed me just how young people in South Africa continue to fight the wars that their parents and even grandparents thought they had dealt with.
Whatever one might think about the past, there were reasons for violence. You do not have to like or agree with the reasons for you to appreciate that the conclusion at some point in their struggles against apartheid was that peaceful activism would not lead anywhere.
I can imagine their grief and possibly sense of how futile their efforts were when they see young people at the universities of Pretoria, the Free State and Cape Town use violence as a tool of protest against some of the very struggles their forebears fought and died for.
At the heart of the violence in Pretoria and the Free State are the same issues that soaked Soweto’s soil with the blood of the young 40 years ago. At Tukkies they are fighting the same war that made Hector Peterson an accidental hero; a war to be taught in the language that will make it easiest for you to understand what you are taught, and thereby increasing your chances of passing and becoming a useful citizen.
In Cape Town, young people suggest that despite the doors of learning being open, there are invisible laser beams that trip them as they try to go through. These beams are a lack of adequate living facilities, a sense of alienation and fees that are just too high for their poverty-laced lives. It is not only insensitive but outright silly to suggest as some have that the poor should try their hand at boilermaking or take up a secretarial course and stop complaining about high fees.
Nobody is saying everyone must go to university. We are saying those who deserve to go should not be blocked by constraints that are not of their doing, and if the state can do something about it, it should.
Just like nobody accuses business of a culture of entitlement when they expect it to create conditions that are favourable for trading, students also have the legitimate expectation that the state will not shrug its shoulders when young people do their bit in pushing back against poverty, unemployment and inequality.
Those who say young people must just go find a job and study part-time should remember that Stats SA says over 60 percent of young people are jobless. The anger and disillusionment of young people in 2016 makes me feel for their parents on either side of the apartheid divide, who must have thought that 1994 would usher in a season of not needing to use the same methods to fight battles of the past. The year 1994 did not bring the end of injustice, but we were hopeful it would bring an end to the fight against it, and looking at the other person as a natural enemy because of their skin colour.
The bloodshed of yesteryear, the wasted years in prisons, recurring nightmares of those who did frightening things for and against the apartheid state, must not be in vain.
We still have among us the men and women who studied politics and war so that their sons and daughters may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
The struggles at the universities are societal struggles. The grown-ups cannot sit idly while their children return us to a past that we would rather forget and a story whose ending we know too well.
A race war is no plaything. Our forebears fought a gallant, if not perfect, war against racial and cultural intolerance, and economic subjugation and exclusion.
For our generation to sit back and do nothing but condemn will do nobody any good.
Those who studied war and politics must make the greater effort to engage with the young people on both sides of the divide so that we can expedite a generation of our sons and daughters who “study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain”.
@fikelelom