Universities across South Africa are on fire, and the casualties won’t just be the institutions of learning, but the very DNA of the country’s constitutional democracy.
It’s too high a price to pay, according to Judge Yvonne Mokgoro, former Constitutional Court judge and chairperson of the Social Cohesion Reference Group.
She launched #AccessThuto on Friday; a campaign to use dialogue, leadership and lessons from history to restore order to universities while addressing the broader issues fanning the flames of violence and rage.
The movement is a coalition between Mokgoro’s associations along with the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation and Brand SA.
The aim is for every South African to take collective responsibility for the issues that swirl at the heart of what has led to the crises exploding on South African campuses.
“What we have seen in the last few days has reached a crisis point. It has an uncanny resemblance to Apartheid South Africa, and before we have another Hector Pieterson, we, as active civil society, must speak up, and we must act.
We need to add our support to universities and to students (in order to) move away from this difficult climate of destruction and conflict to one of dialogue and conversation,” said Mokgoro at the launch of #AccessThuto at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Houghton.
Conversation and dialogue are not just nice-to-haves, according to Sello Hatang, CEO of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
They are deliberate mechanisms to avoid conflict, to deepen understanding and to make peace and tolerance realities in South Africa.
Mokgoro said that universities and students can leverage off the knowledge and experience of institutions such as the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation and the Nelson Mandela Foundation, that have a proven record of understanding the role of activism and struggle - but framed within the goal of fostering tolerance, fairness and sustained nation building.
Hatang said: “The level of anger we are seeing at universities is justified. But we cannot allow burning things to be the South African way of protest. We cannot normalise something that is abnormal. We have to name the things that are keeping us from having honest conversations and we have to acknowledge that somewhere in our journey of transformation things have gone wrong.”
He said that it’s issues of deep inequality in society, a sense of alienation of sectors of the population from opportunity, racism, a lack of leadership in all sectors of society, and the absence of personal responsibility from every South African.
Neeshan Balton, CEO of the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, said that the price of civil society doing nothing at this point is that racial conflict and intolerance will “become intractable”.
#AccessThuto is also about re-asserting the relevance of institutions of legacy and history in the current crisis narratives plaguing South Africa, as true transformation remains elusive.
The campaign will be a concerted effort to engage with vice chancellors, students and broader society, to support and mediate. It will begin with a meeting this month between #AccessThuto leaders and vice chancellors.
Saturday Star