We are going’
lier this year was removed from the post of Wits SRC president, and Wits Economic Freedom Fighters chairperson Vuyani Pambo.
It was on Monday, day five, that Mkatshwa herself took centre stage. She led the students in song as they blocked nearby Empire Road.
“We are here to frustrate the city and we want the mayor, Parks Tau, to intervene,” she said.
It was at this protest that a motorist sped through the crowd and injured nearly 20 students. Others chased the car, smashed his windshield and overturned the bakkie. He emerged with blood on his face and was helped from the car by police.
It is Wednesday: day seven. Mkatshwa yawns. She places her hands on her head. Her eyes are red. We are in the SRC offices where she is about to type the day’s agenda and reply to some of the emails sent to her by students.
“We are tired, we have not slept,” she says.
Mkatshwa says the media want to rob this protest of its legitimacy and have been biased in their reporting.
“They said we held people hostage, that we attacked people,” she says. “They are painting us as violent and as hooligans. We are beginning to ask who owns the media. Don’t delegitimise our protest because you have ulterior motives.”
Mkatshwa said Wits students are ultimately fighting for free education. She says the system is fundamentally flawed and designed to keep black people poor and as a permanent underclass.
“A student who is poor works extra hard because they are poor. In September, they worry about fees because they won’t be allowed to write their exams. In December they worry about fees because they can’t access their marks. In January, they worry about fees because they can’t register. It is a constant worry. It is oppression,” she says. “It is abuse.”
She reads an email aloud. One of the “liberal” students, who says she understands the plight of the poor, asks why they don’t postpone the protest until after exams.
“People who say let’s study and protest after exams, we say to that child, ‘You are selfish.’ Who gives them the right over the other child, who also woke up, but can’t write exams because they are poor?” she says. “These are people who don’t see their privilege.”
Asked whether she is not scared of leading students into danger, or placing their lives in jeopardy, she says: “We are scared. A student was shot at NMMU [Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth] this morning. Students are being arrested in Cape Town, they are being shot at — it’s hard in Cape Town, they are anti-black. But we tell the students, at no point should you feel like you are wrong. We are on the right side of history. We are victims of untransformed institutions with apartheid legacies entrenched deeply within them.”
An SRC member comes into her office to say students have been waiting for her at “Solomon Mahlangu” house — occupied on day six because, they say, it is a space in which they as students feel safe and can ensure the safety of others.
“They are waiting to hear the way forward,” he says.
She leaves for Solomon-Mahlangunée-Senate House, where she tells the waiting students that Wits management has cut wifi, shut down libraries, cut access to toilet paper and refused to give them chairs and tables — a week before exams.
“They don’t want us to be academically active. They want to shut us down. They are trying to frustrate us. But we must say no! The moment we give up because of chairs and tables means we have lost the plot,” she tells the students before she leads them in song.
Mkatshwa was born in Johannesburg, living with her mom in Ponte City, Hillbrow, until the age of three.
They then moved to Pretoria where she matriculated at Pretoria High School for Girls.
“Most likely to be the country’s president” was how Mkatshwa’s fellow students thought of her in her matric year.
These past days have certainly pushed her on the learning curve towards leadership, even if it is just as SRC president. So far.