Rhodes: Tarred by the media and brutalised by the police
Black students at Rhodes University have been engaged in peaceful mass demonstrations concerning the high fees they are expected to pay. Since after midnight on October 19, we have barricaded entry points across campus as part of a campaign to force the university to shut down.
These peaceful demonstrations are taking place alongside those on other South African campuses under the banner #FeesMustFall.
If we are to rely on mainstream media coverage of these demonstrations one would believe that they are nothing but acts of vandalism and disruption at one of the most crucial times in the university calendar.
This lazy and reckless reporting does not come as a surprise. It is a reflection of the usual reading of black bodies in spaces they are not allowed access to, nor allowed the freedom to articulate themselves in the manner they choose.
Once black people operate outside the confines of colonial policing, as has been the case at Rhodes University and other campuses. We are immediately met with extreme repression and slanderous reporting. This is journalism that does not call into question the problematic and colonial tropes used to describe black bodies that students have been subjected to this week.
We’ve been described as irrational, childlike, violent and threatening. And such tropes feed into further dangerous “education is a privilege not a right” rhetoric, which leaves black students out in the cold and makes access to higher education the luxury of the rich, mostly white, students of this country.
Since this past Monday, students have been threatened with use of maximum force by the police deployed to quell the “racist storm” sweeping the campus.
Rhodes students have stood in solidarity with students protesting at Eastcape Midlands College, where students were shot at with rubber bullets and subjected to stun grenades and water cannons.
We agree with mainstream media that these protests have been violent: the police have used apartheid methods of containment to intimidate students from fulfilling their mission of ensuring lower fees.
It has been institutions of higher learning that have, without blinking, called on the police to take action against peaceful and unarmed students seeking to put an end to the system of paying high fees, so that no black student is barred from accessing higher education.