Narrative Journalism

I’ve been sitting in a line for almost two hours. The narrow corridor is packed on both sides with students and their parents. Like me, they’re here to get financial credit so that we can study at least one more year. We’re all varying shades of brown crammed together between the concrete confines of the University of the Western Cape. As mothers fan themselves, shooing away the January Cape Town heat, their kids stare down at their phones or at their hands. Those of us who are turned away today face uncertain futures. Those who succeed do so in the knowledge that they’ve amassed even more student debt. Our common purpose hangs in the air alongside the sweat and the shame. We’ve all been told education is the key. We weren’t told we’d be required to beg for it.

Three years later, students in South Africa are angry and students all over the world share their fire. I’ve come to the University of Cape Town to meet with Wandile Kasibe, a member of Rhodes Must Fall’s central command team, a movement credited with the rebirth of mass student activism in South Africa. There is a clear-skied calm above, complemented by the lush greenery that clings to the university’s historic walls. At 4:45pm, the sun has yet to start its lazy descent, despite the Autumn chill creeping into the city earlier and earlier each night. Students make their way across the institution’s concrete pathways in dribs and drabs, alone, and in groups. I choose a table outside Molly Blackburn, a memorial hall named after a stalwart of the Black Sash, a woman remembered for revealing the human rights abuses perpetrated by the apartheid security forces of the 1980s.

Across from my table lies the university’s core, Jameson Hall. Towering above the main campus with Devil’s Peak and Table Mountain as its backdrop, the grand hall hosts graduation ceremonies, exams, important lectures and more. It owes its name to Sir Leander Starr Jameson, a British colonial statesman whose reputation landed him a spot next to Cecil John Rhodes, the infamous colonist who would enlist Jameson to take part in the violent land grabs that would later result in the establishment of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). He was imprisoned in England after leading an illegal raid on the Transvaal, which contributed to the outbreak of the Boer War. Upon his return to South Africa, Jameson became Prime Minister of the Cape and following his death, money raised and donated in his name funded the construction of the great hall. Despite his colonialist background, Jameson’s name still occupies one of the university’s most prestigious buildings almost 100 years after his death.

In this duality of struggle stalwarts and colonial figureheads, many argue that both sides of history deserve pride of place. It is in the face of this same contrast that students mobilised in their masses, forming a torrent of change to uproot remnants of a painful past. It was under Jameson Hall’s officious shadow that these students would ululate to the removal of the statue honouring Cecil John Rhodes and it is across Jameson Hall’s steps that Wandile Kasibe, who played an integral role in that historic moment, would make his way to my table just over one year later.

“In war, you want to force your enemy to act,” he says, once we get to talking about the events leading up to the 9 April 2015.

“We could have pulled that statue out of the ground, but it’s psychological, you want your enemy to concede.”

Dressed in a military hat and sunglasses, Wandile’s demeanour stiffens as he talks strategy. The 36-year-old student leader tells me he is a Fine Art graduate currently pursuing his Ph.D in Sociology. When asked about what shaped him as an activist and a scholar, he recalls that he received his first education in the streets of the sprawling township of Mdantsane in the Eastern Cape.

Over 400 000 people fill the homes that line the streets of Mdantsane, South Africa’s second-largest township after Soweto. Nestled between East London and King William's Town, it has its roots in the apartheid era. Here, displaced black bodies fill their communities with vibrant culture, music, fashion and food despite living on fractured lands, poisoned by oppression, racism, poverty, crime and drugs.

The narrow corridors that separated the shacks of Mdantsane would become Kasibe’s classrooms, the corners of the township his university halls, and through the coming together of experiences on these streets, he would find himself embedded in the struggle on the ground.

“The streets become the place where you learn things, where you overhear things, where you begin to experience political conversations and experiences,” he explains. “So for me, the streets were more than just a place where people moved through. It became a place of politics, a place of suffering.”

Twenty-one years after apartheid, the township experience is still largely confined to the informal settlements that lay disjointed from the established cities of South Africa. Urban racial segregation instituted by the Apartheid government sought to ‘protect’ white people from people of colour. The Group Areas Act of 1950 would become the legislated enforcer of racial segregation, relocating hundreds of thousands of ‘non-whites’ out of the inner cities and into clearly defined townships and slums where they could be easily controlled, disorganised, and dislocated. The City of Cape Town became a brick and concrete symbol of urban social control.

In the post-apartheid city, little has changed for the poor. The lines of inequality are still seen in the expanses of bush or highway infrastructures that separate affluent suburbs from the seemingly endless shacks stacked together haphazardly as if they simply grew out of any empty space in the ground. Mountains and streams made of trash and waste reveal a lack of adequate infrastructure or sanitation. Police are as scarce as the facilities. Here, people turn to one another for support. It can be seen in the way they congregate as someone cooks meat over an open fire, kicking up the dirt road as they dance to township beats made by men and women who’ve lived here too. It is also, as Wandile describes, a place of suffering, a world removed.

He strums his fingers on the wood of the table, looking towards Molly Blackburn. “The common enemy hasn’t changed, that’s the challenge that we’re facing today.”

The day Rhodes was pulled from his plinth was the day transformation was brought to the fore in South Africa’s institutions of higher learning. With his likeness marred by graffiti, Rhodes was lifted by crane to the cheers of protesting students. As he rose to the air, UCT Fine Arts graduate Sethembile Msezone raised her arms in a symbolic representation of the Zimbabwe bird. Hers would be one of a number of installations that would disrupt the status quo and challenge the notion of calm in university spaces.

As Wandile explains, “It’s truth speaking to power.”

Bayard Rustin, a leader in America’s civil rights movement and an advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, coined the phrase “speaking truth to power.” This was revealed in I Must Resist, a posthumous 2012 collection of his personal correspondence. When spoken, the phrase evokes images of raised hands balled into fists in a challenge to the injustices perpetuated by the powers that be. South Africa’s first democratic president, the late Nelson Mandela spent 27 years behind bars when he and others like him dared to speak truth to the Apartheid regime. In 1976, almost 200 students in Soweto died at the hands of police when they abandoned their classrooms to march against the forced inclusion of Afrikaans as a compulsory means of instruction for children of colour. The Soweto uprising is still considered to be the tragedy that reinvigorated the anti-apartheid struggle.

In October 2015, students in South Africa once again mobilised to have their truths heard. The infamous Rhodes statue had been removed but now students fight another symptom of colonisation: financial exclusion. A proposed 10 per cent increase in tuition fees would leave even more of the country’s poor without an education. Under the hash tag Fees Must Fall students used social media to mobilise at universities all over the country, leading to a national shutdown.

Leaving the relative safety of my place of work in the picturesque suburb of Gardens, Cape Town, I made my way to the city centre to link up with the masses that had positioned themselves at the gates of Parliament. The students were expected to disrupt the mid-term budget speech by Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene and call for free education for all. As they marched, the protesters, some dressed in the regalia of the political parties they support, danced, sang struggle songs and beat the ground with their feet and with sticks, their ferocity only matched by the searing summer heat.

I hear someone say, “stay in the middle in case the police come from the back or from the front.”

I hear another protester say, “Let’s not walk past all those police alone.”

Their concern would prove to be a foreboding of the chaos to come. All over the country, the National Shutdown protests would disintegrate into violent clashes with police and their arsenal of stun-grenades, rubber bullets and tear gas. Pictures of protesters being dragged by police, videos of students burning university buildings, and accounts of violent clashes with non-protesting students all become prominent features in the story of the Rhodes Must Fall movement.

As I watched the violent scenes build a narrative of destruction around the student movement, I was struck by the same hopelessness I’d felt years before. I’d been told that I hadn’t met the needs requirements for financial aid but that I also wouldn’t be allowed to graduate because I hadn’t paid my fees. I’d completed my three years, I’d done my time, I’d worked part-time jobs, I had done my part but it wasn’t enough. My post-apartheid Rainbow Nation had made an empty promise and now, as the youth make up two-thirds of the nation’s 8.9 million unemployed, my struggles were not unique.

According to the Labour Force Survey for 2016, unemployment is higher amongst young people. In the 15 to 24 year age group it’s 67.3 per cent compared to the national average of 36.3 per cent. When government leaders take to podiums under the theme “A good story to tell,” they often speak about how the number of black and coloured students in institutions of higher learning has increased exponentially since the end of the Apartheid era. But what they fail to mention is that only about 5 per cent of apartheid-category black and coloured youth succeed in any form of higher education.

I ask Wandile what his university experience had been while attending Rhodes University in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape.

“The only thing I had was my brain, myself, and the rest of the world,” he recalls thoughtfully. “So there was no other financial backup, you know mos with other kids, they know their parents have, you know, thousands or millions of rand so that when things fall apart for them financially they can still go back to their parents and they can negotiate and they will be given hundred thousand and fifty thousand.”

Removing his sunglasses, he recalls a moment that he’d been confronted with the divide between white and black.

“In fact, when I was at Rhodes University, someone had deposited R100 into my bank account. R100! R100! So I went to the ATM to get the R100. I thought this is really great. I was at the ATM, and there were a couple of white boys in front of me, they were also withdrawing cash and so on.

“You know mos, after you’ve withdrawn money a slip would come out. And this boy took his amount, whatever he had withdrawn. And then it was my turn and when I got close to the ATM a slip came out, and I was like okay, let me just take a look at this slip you know, and I was so amazed that this young boy, he had about more than one hundred thousand in his account,” he says laughingly before adding, “This is crazy, more than one hundred thousand and I only have one hundred and I’m starving to death and there are people here who have so much in their reservoirs and there are people here who have nothing, basically.

“So, it opened my eyes that we live in that kind of uhm… a deeply divided, a deeply unequal society.”

Unable to receive funding at Rhodes University, Wandile worked for meal chips, a system that would keep him fed with one meal per day. I wonder why he had later received funding at UCT but was refused at Rhodes? He tells me they had not believed him good enough to register and so, he was not allowed to apply for funding and instead was allowed to attend as a “special student.”

“At the time, the head of the school told me that she wouldn’t take the chance of allowing me to do this MA [Master’s Degree] because the environment and the standard was too high for me and I wouldn’t even make it and I shouldn’t even think of doing an MA at Rhodes.

“I just thought that it was a waste of time for me. I wasn’t in a position to basically, engage with people who already had their careers in front of them.”

His disillusionment was something I’d seen mirrored in my own community. Growing up in the Cape Flats, situated to the southeast of the central business district of Cape Town, I’d watched a number of people settle for dead-end employment or unemployment out of the belief that the opportunities for people of colour were not available or worth the fight. The foundation we’d received in mediocre public schools in communities riddled with poverty and gang violence had left us unprepared. According to a Statistics South Africa (SA) report released in 2016, the South African labour market continues to be racialised and gendered. It remains hierarchical, with blacks concentrated at the lower levels and the white group occupying decision-making positions.

“I left Rhodes University with that thing in me that it was rather odd that people wouldn’t even give me a chance to prove myself,” Wandile explains.

“That was the hurt that I had, you know, at least they should have given me a chance so that if I fail, I fail trying, you know what I’m saying? They wouldn’t even do that.”

Almost five months after the national shutdown of South Africa’s universities, I registered as a postgraduate student at UCT, and further student protests seemed to take on a looming quality. From poo-throwing to continuous clashes with police, the movement had been unpredictable, volatile and unwilling to compromise.

Shackville

“We had discussed Shackville a couple of days before. We had our own secret meetings because we were working under surveillance, not only from state machinery but also from those who do not like us,” says Wandile.

The result of the movement’s covert operation changed the landscape of the university and populated social media on the morning of 15 February.

“One shack! At the heart of this university,” he exclaims. “That shack was down there facing Jameson Hall. That shack was down there facing as if it was the David and the Goliath of the bible.”

Dubbed Shackville, the corrugated iron structure installed by the student activists was not unlike the informal dwellings in Khayelitsha or Langa. Only this particular shack had been erected on the steps of Jameson Hall, where Rhodes’ statue once gazed over the rugby fields and the Cape Flats and symbolically towards the interior of Africa.

Sprayed across its walls were the words, “UCT Housing Crisis” in reference to the claim that a number of students had not received the accommodation that was promised by the university. The students, many of them black first year students, were allegedly packed into transit residences where 30 or 40 students slept side by side in a hall. The portable toilet stationed next to the structure was reflective of the lack of adequate sanitation experienced in townships and informal settlements throughout the city. As students congregated around it to admire, question or simply stand in solidarity with its message, the silent repression that passes for calm in elite institutions like UCT was broken.

“Shackville became an experience on its own, it became home, being ikasi, being in the township,” says Wandile.

“It brought the township here so that people can actually see and have an experience of what it means to live in the township. Where you wake up in the morning and your neighbour is braaing chicken, braaing meat and all of those things. That experience, you smell the meat at a distance.

“It brought all of those things, those unsaid, unspoken experiences so that you know that you are actually at home. Even the noise, people greeting each other and others are singing. In a way, it disturbed the status quo at the university because people were all of a sudden exposed to a different experience.”

For Wandile, the Shack explored exclusion on the basis of affordability, a phenomenon he had experienced throughout his career. He recalls experiencing homelessness on the streets of Mdantsane as a fatherless 11-year-old:

“He passed away and then of course when you lose your parent under those circumstances then things became much more difficult because you don’t have the father figure to look up to,” he says. “So you become that father figure on your own. You make your way through the world by yourself.”

Shackville became a unifying experience for students who had been taught to link the concept of “normal” to the concept of “whiteness.” UCT has come under fire for their lack of transformation within the academic caucus. Most recently, the UCT Association of Black Alumni (UCTABA) in the Western Cape accused the university of not doing enough to find suitable black candidates for top tier academic positions. The group said that out of eight dean appointments in the past three years, only two were black African men, one was a coloured woman and the rest were white people. This creates an environment in which the key figures of knowledge creation at the institution are for the most part removed from the reality that their students face in every aspect of their lives.

“When the moment of freedom came, people expected black people to, all of a sudden, flourish,” says Wandile referring to the 1994 democratic elections.

“Even today, black people, we’re not free as a race. White supremacy comes in many different forms. At university for example, the culture here is very much Western.

“The curriculumn draws its knowledge from Western epistemology as if Africa as a place and as a continent does not have scholarship, it’s never been a place of scholarship.

“Look at the representation of black professors at this university, it’s appalling, The majority of people who teach here are white. Not too long ago, this university didn’t even have a black female professor.

The underrepresentation of people of colour at UCT means that the culture at the institution is skewed towards Western ideals, says Wandile.

“You go into lecture halls to memorise what you’ve read. You bring into that lecture hall your own cultural experience. But here, other cultures are not prioritised. So you’ll come here and think there are no black people who can teach.”

The socio-political issues affecting South African society are complex and ladened with baggage older than the people left behind to fight it. I question then how can an installation like Shackville have any tangible effect on the existing condition? For Wandile, the answer is simple:

“I read about black artists who were able to use their art as a tool to express sentiments. To them it was a tool, that was the purpose.

“Art and life are conjoined. If art does not speak to the realities of the people on the ground then art is dead. It must speak to the real issues of people on the gound.”

Shackville, the experience of living in the Cape’s informal settlements, stood its ground for two nights. On the third, students gathered around the structure to listen to speakers tell their stories of victimisation and financial exclusion as they had on each night before. In the air hung the university’s order that the shack moved, it was obstructing traffic. Alongside the institution’s request stood the conviction that protests are meant to be desruptive not convinient.

As the 5pm deadline approached, students braced themselves for what was to come. Forming a human shield around the installation proved to be futile as private security dressed in white t-shirts broke through their resolve. Bolstered by the South African Police Service (SAPS), private security forces made quick work of the shack while the crowd of students was dispersed under the continous flash-bang of stun grenades and tear gas.

“This is an illegal gathering,” states a police officer, replacing the visor that completes his riot uniform. “You have two minutes left.”

The police line advanced and the flashes of two more stungrenades illuminated the students as they scrambled for saftey on the otherwise dimley lit streets of Rosebank, Rondebosch, the deafening sound drowining out their cries and fuelling their rage.

“From who must I run!” screams one activist as she’s piled into a police van.

In another part of campus, students set fire to rubbish bins and respond to rubber bullets with rocks. After they’re dispersed, they convene in a different campus location to continue the battle. By the end of the night, 16 students were arrested, and a car and univesity shuttle were set alight. The next day, art was stripped off the university’s walls and set alight in retaliation.

Wandile’s good humour visibly becomes solemn as he attempts to answer my question about the chaos that followed Shackville. The sky had begun to darken at UCT’s upper campus, and the tranquil scene we’d witnessed that afternoon was a strong contrast to the warzone that had taken place in that same space.

“People of Shackville will always remember Shackville even though the university destroyed it,” he says. “Shackville was like a home, it taught us a lot of things.”

“The aggression of the university, they demolished Shackville, thina we are saying they may have demolished Shackville physically, but we know for sure that Shackville lives on in us. The day that they demolished Shackville, a part of us was demolished as well.”

Art has the power conjure emotion, bridge divides, and connect people that would have otherwise continued to live oblivious to each others’ struggles. But can it on its own effect change? In the aftermath of Shackville, headlines and opinion pieces rallied around the joint condemnation of the destruction of UCT’s artworks, while others spoke to the fact that the violence displayed was done by students who live with the violent reality of poverty, exclusion and oppression. The debate had once again turned away from students’ demands for free education.

To gain some insight on the power of art as a tool for resistance, I spoke Peter Anderson, the chairman of UCT’s Works of Art Committee.

I arrived at this office in the art block of UCT to find a tweed-jerseyed man installed in a square room lined from wall to wall with books, many of them old English classics. To explain his views he immediately turns to celebrated poet W.H Auden who in In Memomry of W.B Yeats expressed that “poetry makes nothing happen.”

“He said, you know, every single poem taken into account, how ever engaged it was, whatever its purport, saved not a single Jew from the gas chambers. It’s the sense that the political project of art is an essentially futile one,” explains Peter. “That may be true in terms of direct action. I don’t know of an example anywhere of someone who’s looked at a picture or read a novel and felt sufficiently inspired by that to make a discernible difference in the political history of the world.”

We’re interrupted by a student and Peter assists in his capacity as an advisor before continuing. Sitting back down to meet my gaze, Peter says, “There is an idea of protest art, a dubious one, that says it has the ability to bind the community around which it is coherent. It allows for the expression, the reexpression, the incantation, the visual representation as a form of propaganda that is preaching to the converted, not in order to change their minds - I think very little protest art ever does that – but instead to confirm the already converted.”

Taking off his professor’s hat for a second, Peter tells me about a student he had mentored who had been brought to his attention because he’d been struggling academically on the back of over one hundred thousand rand in student debt.

“There’s nothing really that suggets that the problem is going to be met by talking about critical analysis or how an introduction can function in an essay.

“Frankly, it should be illegal to loan anyone with his utter zero income, at his age a hundred and ten thousand rand on the back of a degree.

“You know as well as I know that the degree isn’t going to cough up a decent income any time soon. It’s criminal. The whole system is criminal.”

The Death of a Dream

By the time I had met Wandile, the movement had disintegrated from a nationally united vanguard for change to a fractured body whose key members had begun to doubt the legitimacy of the cause. The divide within the RMF was made apparent when the Trans Collective, once active members in the RMF, called out the movement for its rigid loyalty to patriarchy, cisnormativity, heteronormativity and the gender binary within the space the Collective had helped claim.

Members of the Trans Collective used their naked bodies to shutdown an RMF exhibition held in March titled, “Echoing Voices from Within.” Students smeared photographs with red paint and blocked the entrances to the Centre for African Studies Gallery. In one instance, the Collective smeared the word “rapist” over a photograph of activist Chumani Maxwele throwing human excrement at the Cecil John Rhodes statue on UCT campus the year before, the act that is said to have given the movement life.

The Collective later released a statement saying that it had become apparent that the cishet black men at the helm of the movement were not addressing patriarchy, heteronormativity and gender essentialism as colonially demarcated powers:

Following a year of literally wrestling with patriarchy and trans antagonism in the shadows of running from stun grenades, tear gas, jail cells and private security, the Trans Collective has decided to give content to what has been popularly known as ‘radical black feminist militancy’.

A judge delivered the second blow to the movement on 13 May. An interdict against five students involved in the Shackville protests was made an order of the court. The students found themselves effectively expelled and were also ordered to cover UCT’s legal fees, reportedly amounting to upwards of R250 000. In response, a number of RMF activists lined Jammie Plaza with dead bodies.

“Body bags symbolise the social death of people who came to university, and now they’re expelled,” Dorfling Mahlabela, a 21-year-old student excluded for outstanding fees was quoted as saying in an article by the Daily Maverick Chronicle.

The installation featured two mounds of miscellaneous objects and corrugated iron sheets. One pile was marked, Shackville and the other, Marikana, a reference to the massacre of over 34 striking miners in August 2012. A line of body bags lay alongside the mounds, dressed in graduation caps under the banner, A Death of A Dream, stretched across the Jammie steps.

A sombre mood clouded the activists as they sang for their fallen comrades. This time, the songs were not of triumph but of defeat. Of the meagre turnout, Mahlabela was quoted as saying, “UCT is winning.”

“They’ve exhausted us with the legal costs. People are scared to protest. No one wants to come out, because literally, it could be you,” she added.

As it stands, the mass mobilisation of South Africa’s students staved off the increase in tuition costs in 2016. But students and their parents are still required to pay in upwards of R40 000 per year in the pursuit of a degree. In the instances where financial aid is not converted into a bursary, students entering the workforce for the first time carry student debt of over R100 000.

Only time will tell whether the movement has been irreparably demobilised. But as the remaining activists struggle through fear to express their demands, I’m reminded of the moment Wandile cut-off the telling of his story to ask me, “Are these the kinds of challenges that you could attest to or are yours different?”

In asking this, Wandile essentially wanted to know if I saw him and if I knew him in the way that he knew himself or had my gaze also been tainted by privilege. Perhaps the role of protest art is as simple as that.