Ndumiso Ngcobo’s sorry he paid his own way

Irecently read Dr Wamuwi Mbao’s stupendously brilliant review of Adam Habib’s book Rebels and Rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall, published on the Johannesburg Review of Books website. It carves through the book like an obsidian knife through tuna steak. I winced throughout because the massacre just wouldn’t end. I shared it with a few friends I went to university with some 30 years ago. One characterised it thus: “It was like watching the Normandy beach landings, there were so many take-downs.”

I’m hardly breaking any ground when I point out that fossils my age are extremely jealous of the social impact the #FeesMustFall movement had.

One of the cynics in my tribe of archaic dinosaurs predictably snorted derisively: “Spare me the dramatics of #FeesMustFall. They didn’t do anything we didn’t do in the late ’80s and early ’90s. They just had the advantage of Twitter and other social media.” I know where my T-Rex friend is coming from.

Back in our time we, too, were locked in mortal combat with the ivory towers of Western imperialist education. Armed with militant demands, rocks and pellets, boxes of matches we, too, wreaked havoc on

campuses from the then University of the North to the University of the Western Cape, or Bush, as it was fondly called. It was our own #FeesMustFall without the hashtag.

Another friend then entered the fray by pointing out that during our time, we had huge numerical disadvantages in our struggles. This rang true. As I recall, when I started university at the then University of Natal, black students made up no more than 10% of the student body. To strengthen his covetous malice towards #FeesMustFall, he reminded us all in a shrill voice that of that tiny group of black students, a huge proportion of them didn’t have tuition fee problems because the university’s admission policy favoured students from bantustans.

Students from the Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, Ciskei and other “self-governing territories” were heavily enrolled at universities and those administrations gave out scholarships and bursaries like Fikile Mbalula gives out T-shirts in Diepsloot. Only poor black SA seemed to be left to fend for itself.

I remember, like it was yesterday, pitching up at the Shepstone Building at the University of KwaZulu-Natal 30 years ago, trying to register and realising that I didn’t have enough money. I had been reliably told that there was a Financial Assistance office where one went if they didn’t have money. Problem solved. What no-one had told me is that because my parents were professionals (a teacher and a nurse), I was part of what Dr Blade has since assured us is “the missing middle”. I was turned away, told to go home and return with my folks’ payslips, which I duly did (in a heavily stapled brown envelope with the stern instruction from my dad to not open it under any circumstances or hell would break loose).

The lady from the Financial Assistance opened it and her Ricoffy squirted out of her nostrils, she was laughing so hard. She shouted at her colleagues to “nizongibonisa lomhlola” (behold this absurdity with me).

I was baffled. Were my parents’ salaries so pathetic as to warrant mockery? As it turned out, my folks’ combined salaries were way outside the parameters to qualify for help.

One of the more sympathetic ladies asked me, “Don’t you have a pensioner grandmother?”, to which I responded in the affirmative. Later I discovered that students without the backing of bantustan despots always registered pensioner grannies or unemployed aunts as legal guardians to beat the system.

To say that I envied my schoolmates from bantustans is an understatement. While we were fighting over the third edition of the Organic Chemistry textbook in the bargain bin of the secondhand bookshop, they appeared in class with a brand-new copy of the fifth edition, directly from Adams bookshop. While we survived on Chelsea buns and guavas from the cafeteria, they had fridges in their rooms, laden with Enterprise Vienna sausages, T-bone steaks and Clover yoghurt.

The missus was in a parallel universe at the same time, but at UCT. She says there was a girl from Venda in her residence who had so much extra money she would go out and purchase obscenely expensive puke-inspired outfits that were the source of much gossip and sniggering.

Mrs N and I agreed we were having this conversation because we are still envious of kids who didn’t struggle for money at university. Perhaps I’m still smarting from not having enough money to purchase a Ford Laser and strut around The Workshop in a lab coat, maroon leather shorts and a stethoscope around my neck like some fellow from Lebowakgomo.

Bantustans gave out bursaries like Fikile Mbalula gives out T-shirts in Diepsloot