We are not simply celebrating their conquering of adversity, we are subconsciously romanticising the dehumanising black condition, writes Malaika wa Azania.
The release of matric results by the Education Ministry on Wednesday evening was inevitably followed the next day by newspaper articles and news interviews of matriculants who did well in spite of debilitating circumstances. Most of them were black pupils from poor working-class backgrounds, who had to face immeasurable hardships while writing matric exams.
Some of these pupils studied using a candle because they had no access to electricity.
Some of them are from child-headed households and were forced to play the role of full-time parent to their younger siblings while simultaneously playing the role of full-time pupil.
Some of these pupils, at the tender age of 18, have had to take care of sick mothers without
the help of absent fathers and relatives.
Some of them had to walk more than 5km to get to school every morning, passing under dilapidated bridges and unsafe narrow pathways. Some of these pupils had not had teachers for more than six months, and had to teach themselves without assistance.
In the Eastern Cape in particular, some had to study at schools with barely any infrastructure - schools that did not meet the barest of minimums of norms and standards of a basic-education institution. The media parades these students as strong and resilient, beacons of hard work and conquest.
For many years, these stories have dominated headlines soon after the announcement of matric results. The constructed narrative is that black pupils, in spite of the
violent systematic constructs
that define their existence, can make it in matric if they just
work hard.
With or without a conducive learning environment, with or without adequate support, with or without food in their stomachs and electricity in their homes, with or without basic sanitation infrastructure at their schools, black pupils can make it if they can just ignore their debilitating conditions and just study.
The narrative creates the impression that if these pupils study hard enough, they will do well in matric and access higher education.
The cruelty of this narrative lies in its romanticising of the dehumanising black condition. In celebrating these pupils, we are not simply celebrating their conquering of adversity, we are subconsciously (or very consciously) romanticising systematic violence against black people.
We are also perpetuating the ahistoric and apolitical narrative that suggests that the problem in South Africa is not systematic and systemic, that our society and the structure of our economy is not inherently problematic. Rather, we can all benefit if we just work hard enough.
We can all access higher education and then enter the labour market if we just work hard enough.
Such a narrative deliberately ignores the depths of structural and racialised inequalities in our country - inequalities that are laid bare by matric results.
It is not an accident of history that matric results have a direct relationship with patterns of income and, most important, spatial patterns.
It is not an accident of history that rural and township schools that are black-dominant perform significantly worse than multiracial and white-dominated schools.
As someone who wrote her matric barely six years ago, and a product of both township and former model C schools, I know first-hand how intense structural and racialised inequality is. And this is why it infuriates me when black pupils who have had to endure unimaginable pain are being paraded by the media as strong.
The romanticisation of the systematic violence meted to black people has created the normalisation of suffering. So normal is this violence that instead of fighting a system and a government that enables the creation of such violent and debilitating conditions for a black child, we want to talk about how black children must just work hard.
They must just endure the pain of poverty, the pain of neglect, the pain of being dehumanised, the pain of being second-class citizens in their own country, and they will be fine.
We want to measure the strength of black children by how much pain and suffering they can take without breaking.
When we say pupils who had to walk 5km to get to schools without teachers are strong, we are not pointing out a system that creates such conditions is problematic. We are normalising such conditions and saying black children must receive this baptism of suffering in order to be strong.
The distinctions that these pupils obtained are only truly meaningful because the students suffered crushing violence to have them. We applaud our children for surviving a ruthless system as if it is normal, when in reality it creates black adults who spend their entire lives recovering from their childhoods (and often failing).
We as black people have a lot of unlearning to do. One of the things we need to unlearn is romanticising conditions that dehumanise us. We need to understand that our suffering is not normal, it is a product of an unjust system that we must fight relentlessly.
We need to learn that it is not normal for us to live in squalor. It is not normal for our children to walk 5km to school with no teachers or infrastructure.
It is, in fact, dehumanising and extremely violent.
This violence that defines black lives in our country is not normal, and we must stop normalising and romanticising it.
* Wa Azania is a student at Rhodes University and author of Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.