Students time travel to a new future
Behind the rage and violence is a generational divide – the anti-apartheid activist generation refuse to recognise they are out of sync with the youth
Running through the Whatsapp feeds of many of us in the student movement is the constant reference to revolution. Revolution peppers daily expressions of solidarity, discussions of national strategy, media interviews and student activists’ descriptions of their actions and motivations.
This language of revolution, of comradeship and war, of tactic and strategy, runs deep in the political life of the student movement. It is in the mouths of #RhodesMustFall students, anti-outsourcing student protesters in Tshwane, in the rallying of the new student Pan-Afrikanists. It is a striking fact that warrants some attention.
It warrants attention particularly because it is starkly contrasted by the quick dismissal of talk of revolution by an older generation of antiapartheid activists. I have heard them say over and over again: “We are not in a time of revolution” as they shake their heads, knowingly. Or they say, with certainty: “You cannot justify such action because we are far from the conditions of revolution”, “It’s not the time for this or that because we are already in democracy”, “We have already achieved liberation”. Or perhaps, most earnestly, they say: “There is no need for revolutionary action because the laws and institutions of post-apartheid are sufficient.”
Quite simply — and this is what I wish to discuss in relation to the question of rage and violence — we are living in different times. Or at least, our time is disjointed, out of sync, plagued by a generational faultline that scrambles historicity.
The spectre of revolution, of radical change, is in young peoples’ minds and politics, and it is almost nowhere in the politics of the antiapartheid generation. In fact, even as they criticised young people just five years earlier for being apathetic and depoliticised, they have now thought student activists misguided, uninformed and mad.
You would think that it might be possible to resolve this difference in time with a careful reading of what is called the “objective conditions for revolution”: Are we in fact in a time in which revolution is imminent?
No matter the subjective experience of time — there must be a way of determining who has the better bearing on history, who can tell the time. What time is it? Yet to tell the time is a complex matter in this society. We are, to some degree, postapartheid, but in many ways not at all. We are living in a democracy that is at the same time violently, pathologically unequal.
Protest action against the government — huge amounts of it, what in most other places would signal the beginning of radical change — often flips into a clamour for favour from that very government. Our vacillations, contradictions and anachronisms are indications that what time it is is open to interpretation.
I want to argue that the comrades I have worked with in the student movement are not so much mad as they are time travellers. Or rather, that their particular, beautiful madness is to have recognised and exploited the ambivalence of our historical moment to push into the future. They have been working on the project of historical dissonance, of clarifying the untenable status quo of the present by forcing an awareness of a time when things are not this way. They have seen things many have yet to see. They have been experimenting with hallucinating a new time.
The first task in this hallucination has been to kill the fallacies of the present: to disavow or even to annihilate the fantasy of the rainbow, the nonracial, the commission (from Truth and Reconciliation to Marikana and Heher), even of liberation.
The second task is to arrest the present. To stop it. To not allow it to continue to get away with itself for one more single moment.
And when the status quo of the present is shut down the third task — and these have been the moments of greatest genius in the student movement — is to open the door into another time. It is difficult to work on the future while the present continues apace. There has to be a measure of shutdown in whatever form for the future to be called.
One of the most important venues for this work on the future has been occupation. Occupation by definition creates a new space-time. The #RhodesMustFall occupation of the University of Cape Town’s management building in March last year changed the building from Bremner administration into Azania House. It occupied the time and space of university management that both shut down UCT management’s right to continue to oversee the incremental transformation of the university and created the conditions for a vibrant intellectual space for imagining what could replace it.
It was during this three-week occupation that students clarified their vision of a future UCT, where campus was renamed and resignified with other statues, artworks and building names. Where black service staff were a part of the university community, not relegated to the dehumanising practice of outsourcing.
They called for a lecture series of black staff only, generated new reading lists and discussed the future of admissions. They experimented with a different version of the classroom in their meetings and educational programme where black, queer, trans and women’s experience became pedagogically valuable. Where the black student schooled the white professor.
A l l me e t i n g s a n d s e mi n a r s engaged both the theme or topic under discussion while at the same time engaging with the ways in which power was working to silence and alienate certain people in the conversation, and amplify others’ voices.
These sessions were chaired by students who tried to implement in the time of the occupation the philosophies and practices of the movement’s three pillars: Black Consciousness, Pan-Africanism and intersectionality. They called this work decolonisation.
At the University of the Witwatersrand, the occupation of Senate House during the October #FeesMustFall shutdown turned it into Solomon Mahlangu House. Here two mass meetings, small group discussions and strategising, experimented with the birthing of a different kind of praxis in the university.
The character of the Wits protests differed from those at UCT because of the strong presence of partypolitical aligned students. What the occupation of Solomon Mahlangu House did was allow for the emergence of nonaligned student politics and an experimentation with politics beyond the party and the leader.
Solomon Mahlangu House became a place in which a different kind of democratic practice started to emerge as the politically aligned student leadership at the forefront of the protests was challenged. While protesting Wits students were asserting their right to be part of the planning and decision-making processes during the shutdown, they were also highlighting their discomfort with representative forms of democracy.
This experiment with alternative forms of governance is of extraordinary importance in a country, indeed a world, in which government is, by and large, alienated from the people it is supposed to represent. Students began developing a critique not only of student representative councils, but also of the representation of workers by unions, the university community by senates and councils, and the people by political parties.
Perhaps one of the most important moments in this disruption and reimagination of existing orders of governance was the occupation of a Senate meeting by students and progressive staff, which served as an important claim on the political structures of the university, and on the taken-for-granted processes that reproduce the university in the interests of the status quo.
The stakes of the generational confrontation over the question of what time it is would be perfectly ordinary were it not for the fact that the generation that is in control of the reins of institutions and of the state, control — at present own — the narrative of struggle and liberation. This is what makes the fight awkward and its violence obscene. They are supposed to know better. And we are supposed to learn from them.
But when they use their bullets and teargas at the Union Buildings, when they spend their money on bringing private security companies on to campus, when they interdict us and suspend us and bring their expensive lawyers to put us down, one can but infer that the anti-apartheid generation has become afraid of the future. Many in the anti-apartheid generation have become anaesthetised to the possibility of another kind of society, another kind of future. They have become fatalistic in their “pragmatism”, their “hybrid models” and their evasiveness.
It is they who are nihilistic, more so than even the Afropessimist students, who at least have the decency to recognise the ways in which the present remains captured by the violence of the past. We have to recognise that the ruling elite, and in that I include the managements of our universities, have lost the capacity to dream us, to move us, into a new time. For you cannot bring a trespassing Act from 1959 against students and think you have any relevance for a more just future.
They have become advocates of presentism, reduced to what the feminist Audre Lorde calls “changelessness”. And they can no longer be trusted with the responsibility of the future. When they dismiss the student movement’s claim on the future, its experiment with time, when they belittle it, shoot it down, well, then pain becomes anger, anger becomes rage, even fire.