Wits: ‘Who are the real hooligans here?’

It is a common error of thought that violence is only what you can see. Condemnation arrives in record time when a tyre is burned, a building torched or windows broken; however, silence arrives just as quickly when students speak of the violence committed against them daily.

It is violence when an institution shuts its doors to a student because their parents don’t share in the wealth of this country it is violence when examinations become a privilege only the rich can afford and it is violence when universities pay parents of these students R2 700 a month and expect them to fork out R10 000 in January, just to register.

Somehow, in the psychology of the elite, that violence is normal. Caring about the state of old tyres is more important than the state of black youth. How easy it is to say students at institutes of higher learning, deemed smart enough to write papers on Foucault, are the same students who are called “mindless” when their anger inconveniences you.

How intellectual is the argument that student protesters —who, in one day, are beaten, run over by cars, threatened with guns and knives, teargassed and pepper-sprayed by the police — are hooligans?

Universities put in student leadership to fill chairs and eat catered lunches, not for meaningful engagement. Engagement assumes that a legitimate argument that is offered against the system has the power to change the system.

It doesn’t. If it did, we could have talked our way out of apartheid.

Remember when you told your younger sibling they could play Super Mario with you but you unplugged their controller? Did you think they wouldn’t find out? Did you think they’d give you a hug when they did? Did you “intellectually engage” with them before you unplugged it? Exactly.

Universities commit violence: physically and symbolically, against students. Who are the real hooligans here?

Make no mistake: students read, they can articulate their argument, they have developed tools of analysis. But they can also chant, sing and smash the walls they’ve been talking to. One need only visit Solomon Mahlangu House at Wits, Winnie Mandela House at Stellenbosch, Azania House at UCT or Amina Cachalia House at Rhodes to see it.