Lessons of cultural revolution
IRECENTLY had the opportunity to watch film director Francois Girard’s production of The Red Violin (1998) and it planted in my mind the idea that the student protests which are engulfing South Africa at present are nothing but the stirrings of a cultural revolution in the mould of that which overtook the PRC (the People’s Republic of China) during the tumultuous decade of 1966-1976.
The fact that the most militant of the South African student leaders demand not only free education but also a decolonisation and Africanisation of the curriculum, confirms my suspicion that we are dealing with a cultural revolution by any other name.
And if that is the case, we will do well to heed the lessons of the most recent and perhaps most violent cultural revolution of our time, the Chinese experiment mentioned above.
Note the similarities between the old and the new as I outline the historical precedent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution below.
Mao Zedong ignited the cultural revolution in an attempt to rid himself of his enemies (both imagined and real) and the assault on China’s cultural values, spearheaded by his infamous wife Jiang Qing, was all pervasive.
We should ask ourselves what political grouping has most to gain from destabilising the South African economy for the sole reason of advancing an agenda of their own. (The EFF comes to mind, but they may not be the only party to benefit from such destabilisation.) Rumours of a third force fuelling student resentment are not new.
Chinese youngsters calling themselves revolutionary “Red Guards” roamed the cities and the countryside, intimidating all and destroying irreplaceable cultural treasures. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed and many millions humiliated and forced to confess to “counter-revolutionary” crimes.
Members of varsity staff who support the South African student call should heed the warning from the Chinese Cultural Revolution when teachers were routinely humiliated, beaten and instructed to learn from their students rather than the other way round.
The assault on Max Price, vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, as he left a meeting of student leaders of the #FeesMustFall movement, illustrates this point.
This also gives the lie to the recent, silly suggestion that student protests at NMMU were “disruptive but not violent”. Whatever the merits of the #FeesMustFall campaign (something I am not concerned with here), intimidation, threats of violence and impatience with dissent (from the protesting student line) are nothing if not violence. The burning of the clubhouse on south campus testifies to this.
The Red Guards paid particular attention to destroying “bourgeois” Western artifacts, perhaps forgetting that Marxism, at whose altar they paid homage, was also a Western import.
Similarly, the university is an Islamic idea that was perfected in Medieval Europe. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, foreign books, clothes and even musical instruments were committed to bonfires.
Consider that to date students in South Africa have destroyed infrastructure to the tune of R600-million (and counting). Even today, the Chinese refer to life during the Cultural Revolution as “having been alive in the bitter sea”, which suggests that this is not the historical path the vast majority of Chinese would have chosen for themselves at that junction.
If there is any value to a historical perspective, it must be to alert us to the pitfalls of a particular path. Bear in mind that no path is a foregone necessity, as the French philosopher of history Michel Foucault helpfully pointed out.
If the Chinese Cultural Revolution is anything to go by, it offers three lessons for the present student protests in South Africa.
One: It is a mistake to allow youngsters with little or no life experience and even less wisdom to shout the odds (especially if they are used as pawns in a more comprehensive chess game of which they may not have the first inkling).
Two: A social movement premised on destruction, intimidation and discouragement of dissent is bound to leave a powerful legacy of intolerance, causing irreparable damage to our valued democracy.
Three: The cry for decolonisation (assuming that this is even possible, which it is not), as the Chinese experience has shown, is a longing for an absent ghost that is bound to be resurrected with some force in time to come.
Slavoj Zizek demonstrates Freud’s idea of the return of the repressed beautifully in his book In Defense of Lost Causes (2008) by reference, among others, to the phenomenal return of capitalism to communist Chinese shores since the 1980s (another “colonial” idea outlawed in 1949).
Irrespective of how loud students shout and irrespective of how much damage they intend causing in an effort to be “heard”, they remain youngsters with a circumspect or blinkered vision (epitomised by the proverbial Chinese frog at the bottom of its well), further limited by inexperience and lack of wisdom. For their own good (and ours), they need to be reined in urgently.
My suggestion is that students found to intimidate, disrupt and destroy should be arrested, removed from our campuses and detained without bail until the situation stabilises.