Adam Small
“Revolt”, writes NP van Wyk Louw, “is as necessary for a people as is loyalty. It is not even disastrous that a rebellion should fail – truly calamitous, is that an entire generation would pass without protest”.
This is the most incisive statement on the import of protest in our literature.
The authoritative Afrikaans dictionary, WAT( Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal), in its definition of “protest”, provides examples of the use of the word from the work of various writers, without any mention of Louw.
I was completely taken aback, but then again, questioningly thought I understood: Have the lexicographers simply fallen into precisely the trap Van Wyk Louw warns about, that of being “kultuurleiers sonder kultuur” (cultural leaders without culture)?
“Protest” came to mind because of the (at times) unthinking noise of the moment at our universities.
This will be the last time, for long, that I’ll berate readers with the student shenanigans – it is such a bore! One cannot gainsay honest protest. Louw makes this quite clear.
But there is protest and protest: one cast in dignity and with clear focus, and one of mawkish hyperactivity.
Meaningful protest (such as some of the students are indeed practising) includes the possibility of dialogue and talking with those from whom you differ – on the contrary, a resort to violence and rudeness and crudeness indicates mean character. I thought some of the women, in particular, were graceless.
An aspect of all this that raises my anxiety, is the (implied) onslaught on the university as an institution. To undermine institutions, is to have no regard for historical sequence – a mindless thing, since there is no future in sight then. The idea of a university is that it exists for educating and training leaders who in future (and further future) will uphold and forward education.
Comforting, however, is that I know about our fiery students (“We will not stop carrying on,” one woman protester screamed, “until our demands are met” – a hairy old slogan): In a few years’ time, they will be sitting in the same seats and positions as those they are now maligning, and – lo and behold – carry the institution forward!
I recall some of the inanities of students during my time at the University of the Western Cape. They took on the ANC’s unfulfilled impossible promise of totally free education, with its motto “The doors of learning shall be opened”, with their own slogan: “The doors of learning shall be kicked open”!
Even the late Professor Jakes Gerwel – someone who did more than anyone else to advance their education – did not escape their scorn and ire.
What thankless, uninformed arrogance (of a kind that should forfeit, for them, their privileges as students, and for which, in fact, they should be suspended from university).
In my student days at UCT, it was much the same.
I remember how the angry coterie of those days – their fury then was directed against apartheid – wanted a professor in the department of philosophy removed from the university, and actually threatened to assault him physically.
Meanwhile, those of us who were serious students immersed ourselves in our studies, and did not waste our time or our parents’ money.
Van Wyk Louw writes that “the pathos of the human condition is that, time and time again, we go out seeking justice, and then our own effort ends in injustice (consider the French and Russian revolutions): We seek freedom for ourselves, and our own system culminates in the enslavement of others”.
This aligns with the press headlines of the moment: Apartheid has gone, the ANC is in power. But now, the “cream of the ANC youth rises up against it”. The pattern is everlasting: the passage of time and the institution survive the students. UCT (as I notice) is still standing up on the lower slope of Devil’s Peak; the literal ivy-clad buildings, as well as the place as an institution of sound learning!
In concession to the protesters of the moment: A real problem they have is about elders who are fickle in their attitude, so that the students do not know where they stand with regard to such governors, and to the government (who, of course – like Judas! – carries the money bags).
It is worth following up Van Wyk Louw’s consideration of protest. Protestation with integrity is averse to the “fat and satisfied small-townish people” who will never “say anything risky”, and always take to “spiritual carefulness” and – importantly – cherish “a hatred of the true artist”.
“The true artist”, the truly cultured person, thinks like a Van Wyk Louw or, shall we say, a John Steinbeck. Steinbeck, may I explain, is like his character Kino in his story The Pearl.
In its Latin-American setting, Kino the fisherman lives in poverty with his partner (and later wife) Juana, and their beloved baby-child Coyotito. To break out of this poverty, he seeks enrichment. In his world of pearl divers, he is after a sizeable pearl.
To find it becomes his mission. The parable unfolds, with Kino diving, time and time again. Juana fears for him: it throbs in her head, “it is not good to want a thing too much”.
At last he surfaces with the sought-for pearl. He has to sell it now. Then little Coyotito’s life is threatened by a scorpion, where he hangs in his sleeping basket, suspended by a rope from the roof in their “brush house”.
Kino is frantic. After a patient wait, to see what the scorpion gets up to as it descends the rope, he, in fury, plucks the creature from the rope with his bare hands and crushes it to a pulp, and he hears dark music “in his head”. He always hears music in his head, sometimes also “clear and soft music”. But the scorpion had already stung Coyotito.
They have to see the doctor (who does not wear sandals, but lace-up shoes, and who lives in a “stone and plaster” house in town). The little fat medical man (one of Van Wyk Louw’s “fat and self-satisfied small-towners”), apart from the pearl dealers, now seems to be his only succour.
He curses the idea of communicating with the doctor, a racist who has treated the likes of simple people like him like dirt for ever so long. Kino “was trapped as his people were always trapped”. This is reason – almost majestic reason – for protest, and not a child’s play kind of protest.
But Kino is ever so dependent on the little doctor. At the door of the healer’s nice home, he hates every moment of his necessary entreaty with a “hatred (that) rages and flames in his eyes, but he experiences fear too, for the subjugation was cut deep in him”.
Their priest also tries to help him get over his “wild imaginings”, but can only mumble religious commonplaces. Before the doctor ultimately moves to help them, the man scornfully says to the servant who opens the door and tells him what it is about: “Have I nothing better to do than cure insect bites for little Indians? I am a doctor, not a veterinary.”
Kino’s older brother Tomás thinks that for Kino to hate the little fat doctor, and to wonder about the hypocritical words of the priest, was for him to “defy the whole system”, and that is not allowed. Juana, in turn, thinks that she could “help him best by being silent and being near him”.
But even her nearness is not enough, and the tragic end of Kino’s protest is that – not unlike King Lear – he screams helplessly into the wind.
And the little fat doctor remains fat, and the measly priest continues muttering empty consolations, and Juana, despite the fact that she is “tactful with the gods”, finds herself “holding her dead bundle (Coyotito) over her shoulder”. The pearl had proved luckless, and Kino furiously throws it back into the sea.
My fervent hope is that our students, particularly those protesting without violent intent, will have an uplifting response from whomsoever and, above all, from life, and that, in mature age, remembrance of their protest will bring them an experience of fulfilment.