Self-interest can blind us. Take, for example, four groups whose very different self-interests unite them: a black-led ANC government, many white South Africans, some older black higher education administrators and a sprinkling of old student activists (black and white) who are now 40 years or older.
These groupings are united by a near-disdain for students who have protested this year, demanding the decolonisation of our higher education system. The precise content of the criticisms differ, but there is a common, blinding self-interest that motivates much of it.
Let’s start with our government. It is obvious that the analysis of the status quo that has been sharply articulated by student activists indicts the ANC. While systemic societal problems predate 1994, the #FeesMustFall movement has laid bare the missed opportunities over the past 21 years. It is indicative of a failure to use constitutional powers to reduce inequities in the education system and in society at large.
This is why it is convenient for President Jacob Zuma, and other ANC leaders, to pretend that a mysterious third force is responsible for much of the discontent expressed in the form of protests over the past months.
There are two lies here. First, as a University of Johannesburg protester’s placard on Friday rightly retorted, “The third force is inequality”. That is true. And it is in the self-interest of the state to pretend that this is not so, because any admission to that effect raises the awkward question of what the party has (or hasn’t) done to reduce inequality significantly since democracy’s dawn.
The more painful lie about a third force is that it robs the mostly black protesters of agency. Effectively the president is saying that black people cannot think for themselves, and take decisions for themselves, without a puppeteer controlling them. This view of black non-agency from our democratic state is continuous with the racist apartheid’s state assumption that blacks are automatons.
All because the ANC wants to preserve a rosy view of the state’s performance.
Then there are white people – some columnists, some politicians, and many ordinary white folk in the blogosphere, on social media platforms, talk shows, etc – who ascribe to student protesters an addiction to lawlessness, anti-intellectualism and a refusal to pull themselves up by their imagined bootstraps, valiantly.
The self-interest operating here is an anxious desire for the restless young natives to calm down before they are tempted to invade the suburbs. Or, at best, to shut up and go back to class before “our institutions”, God forbid, “lose their international status” and alumni get upset.
Here, as with the ANC’s refusal to be introspective, many whites simply refuse to think through what it means for “our” institutions to be more democratic, more just and less exclusionary. There is here, too, a desire to preserve a rosy view of a glorious period of tertiary education journeys that never – in fact, ever – were the case. But we dare not have our memories upset.
Then, of course, there are some black administrators who were the first senior black management at many of our tertiary institutions, like UCT and the University of the Free State and the countless colleges in the higher education sector that get far too little attention in public debate. Some of these academic leaders, no doubt relieved to have retired, have been spectacularly silent. Others have simply condescended to students.
The self-interest motivating these individuals is a refusal to accept that they, like the ANC, have missed opportunities too.
The truth is that many of our most revered university academics-cum-administrators have let us down. To protect their own legacies, which until now have been uncontested publicly, it is important for them to resist the trenchant analysis of the student protesters.
Finally, there is the “Oh when we were student activists” types. Many in this group hate racism, hate white privilege and are deeply committed to fighting systemic, institutional and interpersonal racism. But they are motivated by a bizarre maternalism about how young people should behave, what they should be grateful for, and which methods, praxis and theories they should be guided by.
There is a softer self-interest at work here: a desire to be remembered as the cleverest student activists of the last 50 or so years, and not to be upstaged by these “children”.
The effect of this self-interest is that the student protesters continue to be reduced to straw-person descriptions. This manifests, for example, in inaccurate summaries of what students have said, continue to say and demand (yes, demand, and not request).
Actually self-interest is in no one’s interest. Because our interconnected futures are dependent on quality, inclusive education. Silos won’t help any of us.
* Eusebius McKaiser is launching his new book - Run, Racist, Run - on Tuesday at 6.30pm, Exclusive Books Rosebank, Johannesburg. RSVP [email protected].
** The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Media.
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