The Cape Argus invited student co-editors to edit Friday's edition of the newspaper.
This article was written, commissioned and edited by students involved in the #FeesMustFall protest.
Cape Town - In a nation where education has been strategically commodified to maintain a historically colonialist status quo, we encounter the context of higher education that mirrors the stratified inequality in most of South Africa.
The division of power among bodies can be no more clearer than in the system of outsourced labour, wherein working class black people are locked into the rigid apartheid system of providing labour to the white supremacist machine, while living in “former” labour reserves, unable to provide basic living necessities to their families.
Poor people’s bodies are being objectified as tools to support a structure that actively excludes them.
By blocking relationships between workers and universities by using private companies, higher education institutions are able to ignore the plight of workers, cutting off any accountability for the violence they are responsible for.
This system is reproductive in nature, squashing any possibility of escape, and feeding itself by creating more generations of poor black bodies who are unable to find jobs that don’t directly benefit whiteness.
It is herein that we see black masses being appropriated by the system at every point, because through outsourcing workers, it becomes impossible for workers and their children to attend universities.
Through stealing this human right, universities clearly expose their commitment to protecting a colonialist state, where capital in the forms of access to land, income, and education remain largely white privileges.
This article therefore serves as a call to parents, workers and those who are being excluded from education by educational systems.
It is a call for a living wage and for the protection of workers provided by insourced labour.
It is a call to those workers who want to be educated, and those who want their children to be educated.
It is a call to those whose bodies are being exploited daily by an inaccessible education system.
It serves as an acknowledgment that the plight of workers nationwide reflects the same system.
It also serves as an acknowledgement that black police officers - who brutalise black students - serve a power structure that will never benefit them.
This is a call for an end to outsourced labour - for universities to operate from the space of blackness, restructuring to serve the majority in the country, and being open spaces wherein labour is not a hierarchy that prizes supposed “intellect” above the body.
This is a call to our mothers and fathers who are tired, as we stand in solidarity with the workers.
Cape Argus
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