They are the custodians of the future

RUNNING through the Whatsapp feeds of many of us in the student movement is the constant reference to revolution.

Revolution peppers expressions of solidarity, discussions of national strategy, media interviews, and student activists’ descriptions of their actions and motivations.

This language of revolution, of comradeship and war, of tactic and strategy, runs deep in the political life of the student movement.

It is in the mouths of RhodesMustFall students, antioutsourcing student protesters, in the rallying of the new student PanAfricanists.

It is starkly contrasted by the dismissal of talk of revolution by an older generation of anti-apartheid activists.

I have heard them say over and over again, “we are not in a time of revolution”, as they shake their heads, knowingly.

Quite simply, we are living in different times. Or, at least, our time is out of sync, plagued by a generational fault line that scrambles historicity.

The spectre of radical change is in young peoples’ minds and politics, and it is almost nowhere in the politics of the anti-apartheid generation.

We are, to some degree, postapartheid, but in many ways not at all. We are living in a democracy that is at the same time violently, pathologically unequal. Protest action against the government – huge amounts of it – what in most other places would signal the beginning of radical change – often flips into a clamour for favour from that very government. Our vacillations, contradictions and anachronisms are indication that what time it is, is open to interpretation.

The comrades I have worked with in the student movement are not so much mad as they are time-travellers. They have been working on the project of historical dissonance. They have seen things many have yet to see. They have been experimenting with hallucinating a new time.

The first task has been to kill the fallacies of the present, to annihilate, the fantasy of the rainbow, the non-racial, the commission (from the Truth and Reconciliation, to Marikana…), even of liberation.

The second is to arrest the present. To stop it. And when the status quo of the present is shut down, the third task – and these have been the moments of greatest genius in the student movement – is to open the door into another time.

It is difficult to work on the future while the present continues apace. There has to be a measure of shut down in whatever form, for the future to be called.

One of the most important venues for this work on the future has been occupation. The RMF occupation of the UCT management building in March 2015 changed the building from Bremner into Azania House. It occupied the time and space of university management that both shut down UCT management’s right to continue to oversee the incremental transformation of the university, and created the conditions for a vibrant intellectual space for imagining what could replace it.

It was during this three-week occupation that RMF students clarified their vision of a future UCT, where campus was renamed and resignified with other statues, artworks and building names. Where black service staff were a part of the university community, not relegated to the dehumanising practise of outsourcing. They called for a lecture series of black staff only, generated new reading lists and discussed the future of admissions. They experimented with a different version of the classroom in their meetings and educational programme, where black experience, queer experience, trans experience, women’s experience, became pedagogically valuable. Where the black student schooled the white professor.

These sessions were chaired by students who tried to implement in the time of the occupation the philosophies and practices of the movement’s three pillars: Black Consciousness, Pan Africanism and intersectionality.

They called this work decolonisation.

At Wits University, the occupation of Senate House during the October FeesMustFall shutdown turned it into Solomon Mahlangu House.

The character of the Wits protests differed from those at UCT because of the strong presence of partypolitical aligned students. What the occupation of Solomon House did was allow for the emergence of a non-aligned student politics, and an experimentation with politics beyond the party and the leader.

While protesting Wits students were asserting their right to be part of the planning and decision-making processes during the shutdown, they were also highlighting their discomfort with representative forms of democracy.

This experiment with alternative forms of governance is of extraordinary importance in a country, indeed a world, in which government is by and large alienated from the people it is supposed to represent.

Students began developing a critique not only of SRCs, but also of the representation of workers by unions, the university community by senates and councils, and indeed the people by political parties. Perhaps one of the most important moments in this disruption and re-imagination of existing orders of governance was the occupation of a senate meeting by students and progressive staff, which served as an important claim on the political structures of the university, and on the taken-forgranted processes that reproduce the university in the interests of the status quo.

We are in the midst of an intense politics of time. How do we sit, collectively, in the middle of that discomfort, prepared to not know quite where we are going, but be convinced that we have to move?

If we are to be custodians of a future that will have dismantled the violence of the past and its stubborn hold on the present, then we cannot get stuck in a politics of shut down. Shutting down is indeed necessary for the arresting of the present. But if we do not use the space that shut down grants to work on our vision of the future then the door that we have opened will be closed again.

May we live in a time of difficulty, of critical immanence, and always, always towards justice.