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Fallists’ booze, drugs and self-love

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Simamkele Dlakavu
Simamkele Dlakavu

‘Soloko ndinxilile, soloko ndiqhunyiwe Sima … Andiko right. [I am always high and drunk Sima … I am not alright.]” She is a black woman who has been involved in the #FeesMustFall and the campus decolonisation movements in the Western Cape.

She has been beaten by police, arrested and suspended from university because of her activism. On sharing her pain with me, I was taken back to the Wits protests, where some student protestors were reeking of alcohol. This had become a reality. Drugs and alcohol had become a crutch for coping.

It’s typical of South Africa to sweep issues under the carpet and romanticise a struggle. With the #FeesMustFall, #RhodesMustFall and #EndOutsourcing movements, inroads were romanticised. Students were hailed as heroes, making national headlines. What we have failed to reflect on is the personal toll that those actions have taken, the undiagnosed trauma and depression that lingers not only as a result of their activism, but as a result of being black bodies living in South Africa.

Last month, I asked other Fallists around the country if they were also noticing a pattern on their campuses of activists turning to alcohol and drugs to cope. A suspended Fallist at the University of Cape Town responded: “Yes, definitely! Too much ... Which, instead of helping people cope with the depression, worsens it.”

Another activist told me that “alcohol is a coping mechanism”, and that he uses it every day to escape.

Fallist students are wounded, and they are using alcohol and drugs as shields against the trauma brought about by the institutional and state violence that they experience; the brutality they suffer at the hands of private security companies and the police; the arrests, academic suspensions and exclusions.

How could we have expected student activists to just be fine under these circumstances?

It’s important that we tell our stories and tell them truthfully to avoid hurting each other. During the protests, some students encountered lashings by a male leader. He called them out on their tendency to abuse alcohol. A black male leader recently shouted: “Soloko ninxilile nina. [You are always drunk.]” His sentiments were speaking to the expectations of activists to hold “revolutionary discipline” and that activists need to represent “revolutionary model behaviour”. This leader was policing how these Fallists chose to cope, and was displaying his privilege at the same time. Instead of offering empathy, listening and thinking of exploring spaces and ways of healing, he scolded, which should never be our response.

Fallist activist and feminist Thenjiwe Mswane says the “drugs ruin lives” narrative is flawed. Instead, we should be looking at the system of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that ruins lives every day, because this is “the system that pushes black youth to drugs”.

A professor who has been involved in student and worker struggles affirms that we cannot “extract people from the society they live in”. The Central Drug Authority states that in our country, “the use of drugs is twice the global average, and South Africa is among the top 10 nations that consume alcohol”.

Black feminists have long taught us about the importance of creating spaces of love, healing and the encouragement of self-care because “the personal is political”.

As Lauryn Hill reminds us: “How you gonna win when you ain’t right within?”

The challenge we are facing as young activists is not just fighting structural violence and inequality. We need to look at ways of creating movements that not only have revolutionary rhetoric, but revolutionary love that places an importance on self-care. The answers to how that will be achieved are still vague.

Dlakavu is a master’s student in African literature at Wits and a Fallist

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