Publications
Partners
#FeesMustFall
“The issue of free university education is a very laudable one and we discussed it at the Senate meeting only very briefly recently and the Senate, in principle, supported it.”
#FreeQualityEducation
“What do we mean? Should it be free for all students?”
#UPShutdown
“We want to engage with the students.”
#WhereIsCheryl?
“We also said in the Senate that we commit ourselves to a process of structured engagement. The design of it was to allow everyone, in a safe space, to express their view and have it debated.”
#UPHonourSenateResolution
“[I]f we have a mass meeting, we would have to hire Loftus [and] how do we hear perspective in a venue like that? So what do some people mean by ‘mass meeting’?”
#OpenTuks
“The vast majority of staff, in principle, just want to get back to stability…”
#UPIsRacist
“Black academics at UP are a minority, so majority is who?”
Soundbites. These tell the story of #FeesMustFall at the University of Pretoria. These and the 140 characters on Twitter that express the consciousness of powerful, developing minds, the passion and pain of the black child. The Twitter feeds and soundbites echo the hypocrisy of the establishment, the forked tongue of the vice-chancellors, the double standards of their moral claims. White privilege must be protected.
#OpenUP for the #SilentMajority, but when students articulated the need to address social injustice, favouritism, exclusion and inequality during #AfrikaansMustFall, the response was “minority rights must be respected.” The desperation to preserve the status quo where white Afrikaners continue to be the gatekeepers of the institution have visibly manifested during the #FeesMustFall and #AfrikaansMustFall protests.
This specifically refers to the way in which Economic Freedom Fighters student leaders have been targeted for suspensions and disciplinary hearings.
I was witness to the actions of these apartheid securities on the Piazza on September 20 as student protesters were peacefully protesting and singing. It was obvious that there was a “hit list” and that these individuals took pleasure in identifying the students and then instructing the private security to catch them, so that they could be humiliated in the crowd. The language was imbued with arrogance, “Ja, (and the finger points), vat hom!”
Naledi Chirwa, a University of Pretoria student and Economic Freedom Fighters Students’ Command member, mother of a five-month-old baby boy and one of the #RememberKhwezi activists who stood in silent protest at the Independent Electoral Commission during President Jacob Zuma’s address, was arrested at 4am in her home by Brooklyn police in what appears to be a witch-hunt and placation for wounded white-Afrikaner pride because of her activism and contribution to the movement during #AfrikaansMustFall.
Her outspokenness and articulate expression of black pain and the nature of whiteness did not resonate with the gatekeepers. Without a doubt, Naledi’s sense of black pride and appreciation for her own blackness, her beautiful smile and strong words would be confrontational to the sedimented ideas of white privilege and racist mentalities. How dare the black child speak?
But what must have been more aggravating was the fact that she articulated so proficiently and eloquently. It certainly must have been unsettling to see the intellectual maturity, critical engagement and lived confidence of a people they (the apartheid justifiers) have deemed as “stupid, backward and ugly.” Significantly, a tweet that captures the nuances of these dynamics read: “The demonisation of South African students struggling for what they are in fact owed and elites have already received is outrageous.” Another brought humour to the violent realities saying: “Years from now you won’t find anyone who was against #FMF like you couldn’t find anyone today who backed apartheid. We keep receipts though.”
The arrests of 24 students during the #AfrikaansMustFall protests by the Brooklyn police - arrests that were veiled in misinformation have to be thoroughly interrogated, considering that all charges were dropped after seven months of malicious intimidation.
Again, it has been a matter of “we will teach you a lesson, just because we can.”
In these days of October targeted arrests of EFF student leaders, victimisation and brutal physical assaults on the black child have abounded. I say ‘malicious intimidation’ because the body language of the University of Pretoria’s white security personnel permeated with a wicked joy as they hit unarmed black activists because they dared to ask for what is theirs.
Then of course, the justifications from the vice-chancellors – Cheryl de la Rey, Adam Habib, Max Price and their ilk for the use of violence against the protestors. The Twitter community has captured the mentality of these gatekeepers in ways that reveal the generational and intellectual gap between the protesting community and those who oppose them.
Jamil F Khan tweeted, “White people challenge government: Democracy; Black people challenge government: Barbarism” while another wrote, “I am asking for free education from a man whose name is Max Price.”
Certainly, the student’s know that free education does not come from the vice-chancellors, but their call to the vice-chancellors was a strategic move to consolidate the power of the student and academic community to force the government to commit to a necessary and realisable goal. The reactions from the vice-chancellors are what have baffled me. While claiming to uphold the principles of #FeesMustFall, they have suspiciously guarded against engagement and very rapidly militarised their campuses. The question is why? As always, the most obvious answer would be to follow the money.
I believe that much of what has been unfolding specifically here at the University of Pretoria, Wits, UCT and Rhodes will make sense when a forensic audit of the finances of these institutions is realised. Until that does not happen, the real reasons behind the gatekeeping by the vice-chancellors for this incompetent government will not surface, and we will just have more spectacle and theatre that plays out on the body of the black child. As I conclude these reflections, tweets are rapidly updating, student leader Shaeera Kalla has been shot 13 times in her back, at close range, this is #HabibsApartheid. Both the centres of economic and political power, Johannesburg and Pretoria, remind us once again, #BlackLivesDontMatter.
» Sooliman is a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Law at the University of Pretoria
