Oh look, it’s protest season again. Wits students campaigning against a fee increase have participated in the time-honoured tradition of trashing the campus, invading lectures and intimidating non-protestors.
I was in first year when all of this first started, back in 1993. Back then, dewy-eyed liberals like me were trying to get our heads around the fact that, unlike the apartheid years when good and bad were clearly delineated, politics wasn’t so simple any more. Now there were organisations like Sasco, which chanted slogans and drank a lot of beer and seemed to do little else (unlike the engineers, for example, who walked around barefoot and drank a lot of beer and seemed to do little else). The liberals in the middle were lumped with the conservatives and dismissed as racist reactionaries, something that distressed us all deeply.
We had to grow thicker skins in a hurry.
A lot of white middle-class northern suburbs types were completely traumatised by the violence (which included dumping trash in the pool, unleashing fire extinguishers and flooding lecture theatres), and finished their degrees at Midrand Campus. (Remember Midrand? It was the sort of tertiary equivalent of Dainfern. I think it’s part of UJ now.)
The upshot of all those protests, for me at any rate, was that I became deeply cynical about the Left, which, when it came to our lecturers, seemed to consist of self-righteous lesbians who’d spent the last two decades railing against various-isms, and aggressively militant youths who would have achieved their degrees with distinction if the only subjects they were required to study were Spouting of Marxist Rhetoric 101, Denouncing of White Liberals 203 and Eating Slap Chips in Senate House 302. Most of them probably eventually graduated with a sociology degree, or something similarly useless* and are now working as government advisers, drawing massive salaries and driving SUVs.
Hey, come to think of it, their education was probably a whole lot more useful than mine.
I don’t have any fond memories of Sasco or their fellow mouth-breathers. We’re horrified by people like Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu, but our institutions of higher learning are infested with types like these, people who are great at mouthing off but not much else.
That’s not to say that there is no place for protest on campus — universities are, after all, forums for the vigorous contesting of ideas (or at least they should be). But there’s no thoughtfulness in the protests we see at South African campuses. From what I’ve seen, there hasn’t been any space for reflection or meaningful debate between all the trashing and intimidation for the last 16 years.
We laugh about Julius’s G for woodwork; we like to assume that he’s too dumb for university. Sadly, chances are he would fit right in.
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