Recently, as is always the case at the beginning of the year, students are involved in protests primarily against financial exclusion and the appalling state of residences they reside in while expected to excel academically. From all corners of society there is condemnation of the violence that erupts from these protests. As it is obvious that it is students who are protesting, the blame directly is apportioned to them without any rational thought of what underpins the eruption of violence.
Students are not to blame but the entire commodification of knowledge is to blame for the crisis.
One of the major achievements of apartheid was the marginalisation of black people from accessing knowledge that will allow them to be independent thinkers, to be able to have their own way of life, sense of self and humanity. This was done by imposing on them an education system that would pervasively marginalise them and turn them into inferior beings.
Generations and generations of blacks have resisted against this system, they have confronted it directly and often the blame goes to them and not the system that produces such resistance.
Following the democratic breakthrough in South Africa, government sought to regulate access to higher education by offering debt sentence to black working-class students. Tewnty-six years later that debt sentence continues to haunt us. Many have benefited from this debt sentence; however, the fact remains that nothing notable has changed, the entire system continues to be anti-poor.
The reality of higher education as a commodity produces violence, it is not students that produce violence. As long as vice chancellors operate as CEOs of corporate companies and council members as board members, nothing will ever be fixed because their goal is to make profit out of poor students. How universities in South Africa operate is no different from any other corporate sector in South Africa, such as mines for instance. Just like when workers in Marikana demanded R12 000, students at UKZN are demanding the scrapping of 15%, but management chooses to invite police and private security, armed and prepared for war.
I have to say that all those who focus on condemnation are prisoners of history. They sure lack the fundamental theoretical understanding of what brings about physical violence in a capitalist mode of operation. It is not true that universities have no money, if that was the case we would not have vice chancellors earning not less than R3 million a year.
Furthermore, we would not have in addition to police presence and university security, private security companies being hired at exorbitant inflated prices. This is further evidence that universities in their design were made to be anti-black and by default anti-poor, not only students but staff as well.
Essentially what I am trying to demonstrate here is that black students and colonial institution are antagonists who oppose each other daily. The former is expected to succumb in the name of good image while the latter invites violence of all sorts to exclude, marginalise, and worse indoctrinate. I do not know how you don't expect there to be flames in this pretence relationship.
Our condemnation must be to the system that produces violence through its violent means and fundamentally we need to intensify thinking around how we will resolve this violent relationship between the colonial university and the black students. This is where we will get answers on financial matters and academic issues.
For every black person not only those who are students, the universities in South Africa are violent towards them. Black academics are loudhailers crying about epistemic exclusion as if they cannot think. At UKZN there are lecturers on contract paid as little as R4000 a month; students at Masters level have no supervisors, they end up spending more than 3 years doing a qualification of one year. The problem is more than what spokesperson of building understands, the problem is the epistemic violence, exclusion, and violent system of oppression that has not fundamentally changed since the so-called democratic breakthrough.
There is no amount of donations that will take away the problem, no amount of prayer, no amount of R10 000 reward for identification of an alleged attacker that will change the problem. The solution lies in resolving this violent relationship between the university and black poor students. There is no way we as black poor students can be creative in an uninvited space which at every chance strives by violent means to get rid of us.
The piling up of student debt is a lack of creative thinking which the UKZN VC calls for now. He and many others are too obsessed with titles and not the responsibilities that come with those titles. Having a rational thinking mind, how do you expect an NSFAS beneficiary to now pay for themselves? It is an absurd demand. If they were true academic activists, they would have rejected this 15% demand of UKZN because they would have had a historical narrative and analysis of what had brought us here. The lack thereof results in this social media badmouthing of students.
We as student activists must spit intellectualism to these people who assume that black students are born violent not created violent or not in
a violent relationship with these higher education institutions.
I, together with those who are quiet, raise my voice that students must be registered without paying a cent, for they do not have a cent anyway.
* Sbonelo Radebe is a Master’s Student at the UKZN PMB Campus and a student activist.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of IOL.