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AS BY FIRE
The end of the South African university
Jonathan Jansen
Tafelberg
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for grace
Preface
On 9 March 2015, a postgraduate student at the University of Cape Town (UCT) poured human waste over the campus statue of the colonialist Cecil John Rhodes. In the weeks and months that followed, a series of student demonstrations erupted across the historically English university campuses of South Africa, such as Rhodes University and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). Shortly after the dousing of Rhodes, on 26 March 2015, a statue of King George V was defaced at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Howard campus, the home of the original University of Natal.
The main focus of this first phase of student protests was against the colonial character and content of the old, long-established universities, and the general failure of transformation evident in indicators such as the very small numbers of black professors in these former white institutions. In time the call for transformation, a term associated with the increasingly unpopular ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), was replaced with the more radical demand for decolonisation of the universities, including their ‘colonial’ curricula.
A protest moment in the long history of student activism in South Africa became a movement which, by May 2015, would spread to the historically Afrikaans universities, where the demand of the protestors was the dropping of Afrikaans as a major language of instruction. The release of a video titled Luister (Listen), in August 2015, captured the deep discontent among black students at the University of Stellenbosch as one student after another recited his or her experiences of racism and exclusion within the university. These sentiments spread quickly to the University of Pretoria (UP), where again Afrikaans was targeted as the primary instrument for the marginalisation of black students in this large urban university.
Then things started to fall, consistent with the protestors being labelled ‘the Fallists’ as they promoted and made use of the hashtag #RhodesMustFall. On 9 April 2015, the gigantic bronze statue of Cecil John Rhodes was removed from the UCT campus exactly a month after the protestors’ first action against what they saw as a symbol of their alienation and exclusion on former white university campuses. A month later, on 27 May 2015, the University of Stellenbosch removed a campus plaque honouring the notorious apartheid prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd and replaced it with the flag of the new South Africa.
Over the next few months, buildings would be renamed and institutional policies changed as university leaders scrambled to accommodate the incessant demands of the Fallists during 2015. Processes of renaming already under way – such as at the University of the Free State (UFS), where a men’s residence named after the racial ideologue JBM Hertzog had already been renamed after struggle hero Beyers Naudé – were accelerated. Policies already under review, such as changes to the parallel-medium (English and Afrikaans) language policies of the universities of Pretoria and the Free State, were now claimed as Fallist victories by the growing student movement for change at former white institutions. University councils rushed to approve complex measures that would make English the primary medium of instruction at these universities – a trend already under way given the growing majority of black students at some former Afrikaans universities (UFS) and gradual changes in favour of English at others (UP). The new language policies would be challenged in the courts by conservative Afrikaans bodies, such as AfriForum, but gradually the law came down on the side of changes in favour of English-language instruction.
The student protest movement did not, however, start at UCT. In response to #RhodesMustFall, students at the historically black universities expressed frustration around the fact that they had been protesting for years about financial exclusion, but were never taken seriously until the protests began at the former white universities. Indeed, in the months preceding the attack on the Rhodes statue, there were continuing protests at institutions such as the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) and the Durban University of Technology (DUT). These protests were not about transformation (or decolonisation) but about financial exclusion. It is true that student discontent only made the headlines with the outbreak of protests at the former white universities in March 2015. But financial exclusion was about to become the next major rallying point for student activism.
As the first phase of the student movement appeared to fizzle out, a new wave of protests started at Wits University, this time focused on leaked information that the Johannesburg university was about to increase its 2016 fees by 10,5 per cent. On 14 October 2015, this second phase of the student protest movement was promptly dubbed with the enduring hashtag #FeesMustFall. On the day this protest started, Blade Nzimande, the minister of higher education and training, was hosting the Summit on Transformation in Higher Education in Durban with university stakeholders, including students. There were clear signs of trouble ahead with regard to the financial affordability of higher education for poor students. Those present reported a rather dismissive attitude towards students on the part of the minister and his senior bureaucrats when these concerns were raised. At Wits, in the meantime, the protests were gaining steam and the vice-chancellor, Adam Habib, hastily left the summit to meet with students.
The focus of the student protest movement had largely shifted from transformation and the affordability of higher education, and would gradually evolve into more radical demands for decolonisation and free higher education for all. By this time the higher education minister, and indeed President Jacob Zuma, had realised that what they now faced was much more serious than #RhodesMustFall. While universities were the sole targets of symbolic reparation, the purse strings that determine financial inclusion lay within the state.
Small steps were taken to try to alleviate the pressure. The minister thought he was being responsive by capping the fee increase at 6 per cent for all institutions – an illegal act, since only university councils could make that determination. That decision seemed to inflame the protestors. The president then stepped in and, under huge pressure, declared a zero per cent fee increase for 2016. As the 2015 academic year drew to a close, there was a lull in protest activity. But a realignment in student politics for the new academic year led to an eruption of the most violent protests on university campuses in the country’s history.
For the rest of 2016, university leaders were literally fighting fires. The student protestors, however small their numbers, took fire to lecture theatres, cars, libraries, computer laboratories, statues, university paintings, administration buildings, residences, and the offices of vice-chancellors. What was once a largely peaceful and broad-based student protest movement had become increasingly disruptive, violent and even racist in its character and demands.
As the 2016 academic year came to an end, leaders in government, universities, the private sector, and civil society scrambled once again to find ways of meeting the demand for free higher education without creating a serious financial crisis for the country and its public institutions. The general thinking in these quarters was to fully fund poor students, provide aid to middle-class students who fell between the cracks (the so-called missing middle, not rich enough to pay their way and not poor enough to qualify for state funding), and to require the wealthy to pay their keep. To many student leaders this was playing games. The demand was for free higher education, period.
Soon it became clear that for some of the more vocal and violent elements in the protest movement, the radical change agenda went far beyond the demand for free higher education to include the destruction of ‘colonial institutions’ and even a change of government.
What is going on?
I wrote this book for two related reasons. As the student protests escalated on South African campuses starting in early 2015, there were many questions in university quarters such as why, why now, and why in some institutions and not others. What was going on? It