KEEPING SHAKA’S DAY
If you have not taken time to understand what your opponents in a debate think and say, you should not engage them
The Daughters of Shembe (Amakhosazana) congregated at Moses Mabhida Stadium for Umkhosi Welembe (King Shaka’s Day) on Saturday.
The event, held on Heritage Day, celebrated 200 years since King Shaka formed the Zulu nation and the 45th year of the reign of King Goodwill Zwelithini.
LEADERS are taking aim at the parents of protesting university students, accusing them of handing their children over to the state and standing by as the ensuing chaos has led to extensive damage to property at some universities.
King Goodwill Zwelithini, while addressing thousands of people at the Umkhosi Welembe celebration in Durban on Saturday, said parents needed to lead.
And SACP General Secretary Blade Nzimande told SACP members attending the Moses Mabhida Memorial lecture in Pietermaritzburg on Friday that the parents had “pawned” their children off to the state.
“The parents of students in universities are nowhere to be seen when their children are facing off with the managers of the universities and the government,” said the king at the Umkhosi Welembe event, which celebrated 200 years since the formation of the Zulu nation and the 45th year of his reign.
“The protesters are destroying the infrastructure that was used and enabled the oppressors to govern us. If we destroy it, it means we will never reach the level where we are able to govern ourselves,” said the king.
King Zwelithini said, “Parents need to take their role, no child belongs to the government. It cannot be that the government could talk until the process is finalised and the parents are nowhere. Who do these children belong to?”
Nzimande, who is also the Higher Education Minister, said while speaking in his capacity as SACP general secretary that parents were failing their children and the government.
“Where are the parents when their children are marching for Nzimande? It cannot be that they hand over their children to our institutions and then fold their hands when there are problems.”
The recent student anger over tuition fees has been directed at Nzimande after he announced that universities could increase fees for next year, but not by more than 8%.
Nzimande also offered a commitment that the government would pay the increase for students from poor backgrounds.
He said on Friday that zero fee increases were not possible, as that would impact on the quality of the work of those universities.
He said the government had done a lot of work to ensure that students received quality education. About 700 000 student in universities would be subsidised and about 600 000 in the former FETs.
He described the leaders of the protest as hired guns for the rich and imperialists.
Nzimande said the students were failing to emulate the sacrifices of the likes of Moses Mabhida, who juggled school and work to put himself through school.
“Some of our students are spoilt, Mabhida started late in school because he had to look after cattle. At times he had to stop studying and go to work where he earned 10 shillings a week so he could put himself through school,” he said.
PUBLIC debate around the student protests has become rather odious. And if some of the really unfortunate strands in the debate don’t disappear soon, the possibility of making any kind of dialogical progress in puzzling through the issues confronting our society, will get smaller and smaller.
First, the space for disagreement about some issues, while in agreement about some other issues, is getting smaller by the day. Many of us are developing an attitude that seems to say: “Either you agree with my position completely, or you are part of the problem.”
I recall how writer and commentator Sisonke Msimang was trolled for an analysis in which she merely rehearsed some of her concerns about the destruction of some artistic and other iconography in a context where the purpose of violent tactics had not been adequately theorised and practically considered by some protesters.
Being the careful thinker she is, she did not even advocate in any adversarial way for a rejection of any particular tactic or strategy as a priori wrong.
She made a cogent case, without trying to be a moral coward hovering above the proverbial fray, for complexity. And in part, her embrace of complexity is a recognition that two people might have overlapping consensus about aspects of the struggle for justice, yet still disagree on the finer details.
My goodness, what followed after the landing of her analysis was something of an online lynching. Suddenly she was deemed by some to have revealed her “true” self – an older black South African drunk on reconciliation motif and rainbowism, an enemy of the student movement.
The reaction, of course, was simply an instance of this tendency to think that only complete agreement with one’s views is a sign of empathy for one’s position. Msimang handled it all with grace, but it was an exemplary instance of the odiousness of current public debate.
Never mind the fact that Msimang already has an established archive of analysis and activism that has shown consistency in its commitment to justice struggles.
And, of course, examples exist on both sides. A second feature of the odiousness is a tendency by some to ascribe views to interlocutors that they never expressed, in order to knock down the misrepresentation of their actual views.
In this regard, student protesters and activists are often the ones who are the victims of this particular intellectual vice. It is amazing how little of the writing of the activists is actually read, and accurately described, before it is engaged.
There are some commentators who clearly have not once bothered to talk to students, or even just googled their work, or followed some of them on social media with a view to understanding their arguments and viewpoints.
I am astounded how, at times, an article based on a complete straw person fallacy about the student protesters can go viral. It is a bit like writing a review of a book you have not read. If you have not taken time out to understand what your opponent in a debate thinks, and says, then you should not be engaging them at all.
I have read some enviously brilliant essays and social media commentary on everything from curriculum reform, racism and feminism, to iconography, free education, and many other themes salient to our contemporary justice struggles, written by South African students – including some undergraduates.
Usually at this point someone who disagrees with aspects of the student movement will sheepishly ask me, “Oh where?”, but after they have already spent hours telling you why the students are a bunch of anti-intellectual militants.
Which raises an obvious question: If you had not actually done your homework to learn what it is that students are saying or arguing, then on what basis did you earn the entitlement to opine so sharply, and confidently, for many hours, on their strategies, tactics and viewpoints?
Asking for the work of some of these students after dissing them is, to extend the earlier analogy, like asking for a copy of a book after you have already published your review. It is shameful.
Finally, I have also noticed a tendency to galvanise support among those who share one’s viewpoints and to ignore those who disagree with us. The clearest example here is to tweet and retweet each other as friends, which isn’t a problem in itself, but to then pretend that your Twitter echo chamber constitutes the full truth, and all those outside the echo chamber are mere idiots to be sneered at, ignored, and laughed at when you meet a fellow echo chamber buddy off-line.
The truth is that one’s favourite echo chamber should not be confused for the entire public domain. It is just that: the digital equivalent of groupthink. Our public discourse is poorer because of these odious habits.
It is amazing how little of the writing of the activists is actually read, and accurately described