Is there anybody who still believes the Rainbow Nation myth, asks Buhle Zuma.
Those among us who would like to believe that 1994 marked an existential rupture that brought an end to colonial and apartheid histories and signalled a new order of life and co-existence must be troubled by the episodes of student political and social activism at the universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch.
There are, to be sure, troubling practices that are part of black student activism as much as there are problematic institutional practices that are antecedents of black student activism.
Equally troubling are some of the reactions and practices of some of the white students at Cape Town and Stellenbosch.
Much can be said and should be said about what each of these three parties – university management, white students and black students – are contributing to the current tensions.
I will sidestep this task today. I would like, instead, to think about what the tensions and activism in higher education tell us about the circumstances that we are caught up in as a society.
It seems to me that the student activism (and now violence between black and white students) is, in one sense, a continuation of both black struggles for a humane experience in the world and the racial and structural violence that resisted those struggles.
In fact, black struggles for a humane existence have never stopped in South Africa. They have, until recently, mainly continued being staged in their “default” contexts – black communities.
The struggle is centuries old and it has only now begun to shift its battlefield to the historically white university. Why the shift now? I suppose there could be a number of reasons and I would postulate that one of them is the increase, over the last two decades, in the admission of black students to historically white universities.
Yet, it is not the increase in black students that is the crucial issue here but rather what black students find in historically white universities.
In this country, when we say that a university is historically white, what we mean is that such an institution of higher learning was demographically white in the constitution of its staff and students.
It is this demographic constitution and only this demographic constitution that has been relegated to the dustbin of history in post-apartheid South Africa. Culturally however, these institutions are as colonial, save for a few cosmetic changes, as they were intended to be.
It is therefore, this neocolonial culture, which articulates itself in the content, symbols and heritage, academic staffing, language policies and practices and so forth, that black students are struggling against.
Their struggles are, of course, equally resisted in what is clearly a symbolic, cultural, intellectual, political and social war for space and the power to set the tenor, priorities, values, rhythm and the spirit of the ways of life in these institutions.
It seems to me that what we are witnessing at the universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch is a resurfacing of the “pitfalls of national liberation”, as Frantz Fanon saw it.
One of the pitfalls of national liberation in South Africa was the misapprehension of political liberation for freedom in its spiritual, psychological, economic and cultural articulations. Two decades later, we witness, almost simultaneously, struggles against two versions (liberal and conservative) of the same and nuanced neocolonial culture.
The tensions and activism in higher education present us with yet another chance, as a society, to live up to the promise of 1994. If we mistook political emancipation for forms and practices of freedom we also mistook it as an end rather than a beginning – 1994 should have marked the beginning of a multi-layered political, economic, spiritual, psychological and cultural human revolution and evolution. It is this work that awaits all of us in South Africa and which for as long as it remains postponed and denied will be passed on from generation to generation.
The law of unresolved challenges is applicable here: the residues of centuries of white domination will multiply until we decide to face and ethically respond to the ugly facts of our not-so-post-apartheid-condition. The myth of the Rainbow Nation and the magic of the late Nelson Mandela are not enough for the task before us.
Fanon asked: “What does the black (person/people) want?” I suppose that in South Africa today for millions of black people the answer to this questions might be no different then what it may have been during the colonial/apartheid era – to live life without any forms of bondage.
Today, we must give this question a companion by asking: “What do white people in South Africa want today?” I will resist the temptation to guess at an answer. There are other question to be asked: “How might we begin to imagine our interests, wellbeing and futures in constructive, collaborative and progressive ways? What kinds of psychological, political and ethical work would black and white need to do as a prerequisite for undertaking this overdue national project? What kinds of political, religious, civil, and business leaders would we need to help us facilitate such a project?”
Universities as cultural institutions are appropriate spaces to begin raising such questions not, however, in the usual spirit of the “empty politics of appearing transformative”. We need to raise these and other questions as a basis for a cultural revolution. We need a revolution against a white culture of psychological insecurity and fear, arrogance, baseless superiority and the hatred of black people. Similarly, we need a revolution against a black culture of spiritual and psychological enslavement, material overcompensation, corruption, forms of self-hatred and denial and the delusion of capitalism as freedom. Above all, we need an alternative politics, a politics of the human, as a weapon of collective struggle towards a collective culture of human emancipation.
* Dr Zuma is a lecturer in the psychology department at UCT.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Weekend Argus