How mass action made me change
ITRIED to set a building on fire once. It was 20-odd years ago when I was a student and I was very angry. I have no clue what I was angry about. All I know is that we were incensed at some perceived injustice or another and the university management wasn’t “taking us seriously”.
The issue was probably the texture of the meat in the dining hall. Maybe it was donkey meat. But, like all student protests, the issue had probably morphed into a general outcry about inequality and “the need to create a stateless, classless society” leading to a “dictatorship of the proletariat”.
If you don’t understand what all of that gobbledygook has to do with eating rubbery donkey flesh, you’re barking up the wrong pseudo-Marxist. All I know is that we were sufficiently infuriated to gather dry leaves and attempt to set the Shepstone Building on fire. Of course it didn’t work. Blame it on the inadequate curriculum, which didn’t offer Arson 101 as a course.
Looking back, it occurs to me that the dumbest, most ill-advised things I have done have been committed under the influence of whatever dopamines, acetylcholines and whatnot are secreted by the brain when one finds oneself part of a mob. Something about being part of a herd makes you discard your personal values, principles and dreams in favour of whatever murky collective objectives you share with your “comrades”.
My own flirtation with crowd activities ended during another incident at the same campus. My Damascus moment came as I lay on the floor of the EH Malherbe Library foyer, using my ribcage as the last line of defence against the boots of an enraged police constable. Afterwards, I thanked my ancestors that he hadn’t dragged me into the back of a van and locked me up with common thieves, burglars and wife-beaters. I resigned from all participation in mob activities. From that day onwards, this lowly columnist has been flying solo.
I had these thoughts while following the tribulations of protesting University of KwaZulu-Natal students. The media reports describe scenes eerily similar to the ones I remember from my day; marching with placards, planks and sticks while venting against students who were not participating in the protest. The source of disgruntlement seems to be accommodation. My eyebrows rose when the leader of the student representative council was quoted as saying the students’ demands included being housed at the Royal Hotel in central Durban. This made me realise that we lacked ambition when we were students.
A few years later I was working as an administrator for an NGO in Joburg. The pay was pathetic, which meant augmenting my income by signing up for the research projects commissioned by the government as part of its RDP plans. During one of these projects, deep dissatisfaction was brewing among some of my fellow field workers. Apparently we were being exploited.
A meeting was convened in a dingy pub in Braamfontein. Speaker after speaker railed against the NGO running the project. Remembering how the last mass action I’d participated in had ended, I attempted to be the voice of reason by presenting the likely counter arguments. I pointed out that we were contract workers without any guarantees. I reminded my colleagues that we were part of a larger pool of field workers who were called upon at the discretion of the NGO administrative staff and that our stand might only serve to ensure we were never called upon again.
Of course, the real reason I was saying all of this was that Natalie Cole was about to appear at Sun City and I needed my fieldworker income so I could afford to buy tickets. I was called a sell-out, a counterrevolutionary and a “yellow-bellied enemy of change”. One fellow known for his fiery leftist rhetoric had this parting shot: “Count yourself lucky we’re not in the township. We necklace people like you.” Yeah, I also think that necklacing cowards over a R5-an-hour wage increase is a bit excessive. So I finished my beer and excused myself to go and do what counter-revolutionaries do: catch a movie at the Carlton Centre.
Major turning points in history have been influenced by people getting together for a common cause. The storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution, the mass protests that culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall, our own Mass Democratic Movement and the protests on Tahrir Square are a few examples. But I hope we live in a world that acknowledges that some of us do not have the stomach for being part of a crowd that changes things. Some of us would rather play observer, and record how a 51kg bespectacled weakling got pummelled in the ribs by an angry constable’s boot.