Critiquing the Critics of Youth Protest in Post-millennial South Africa
OPINION
Thursday 15 October 2015 - 7:33pm
Angelo Fick
JOHANNESBURG - A year ahead of the fortieth anniversary of the 1976 student uprisings in apartheid South Africa, young people across campuses in the tertiary education sector are again vocally objecting to the conditions under which they are expected to study.
In various projects and movements, students in universities, and their peers in tertiary and vocational training and education colleges, are objecting to the ways in which the habits and characteristics from the past which live on in the institutions and organisations of post-apartheid South Africa, shape inequality and injustice in education. They are directing their ire and impatience about this unfinished business at a government elected ‘by the people’, and criticise it for not delivering adequately ‘for the people’.
Ironically, this year also marks the sixtieth year since the adoption of the Freedom Charter, a document which is echoed in the post-apartheid Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. Its aspirations about access to education in a post-apartheid society informed the United Democratic Front’s insistence throughout the 1980s that “the doors of learning and culture shall be opened”. Not only are campuses increasingly fenced off from the rest of the country, but studying at them has become prohibitively expensive for many.
There is no denying that the increases in student fees in post-apartheid South Africa have been spectacular. Comparing a fees booklet from 1990 with the fees lists online, and comparing my father’s salary then with my own salary now, even though my salary is comparatively better than his was then, I would find it less easy to send a child to university in South Africa today than my parents did then. At its recent national general congress, even the governing party’s president had to admit that the party, and the governments it forms, continue to ‘grapple’ with realising the vision of the Freedom Charter.
The responses from many middle class observers to current student protests reveal a worrying but not unexpected trend symptomatic of contemporary political debate in South Africa. Young people, vocally objecting to the debt they must take on in order to get a tertiary education in post-apartheid South Africa with its high youth unemployment figure and less than inspiring economic growth prospects in the medium term, are subjected to ridicule and hectoring from people who mis-remember the privileges afforded them by the mediocracy which was tax-funded Christian Nationalist Education.
Derisive and sarcastic remarks about the cost of protestors’ clothing, ridiculing them for being involved in protests when they should be studying, and jeering at their supposed ingratitude for finding fault with systematised inequality and not appreciating opportunities given them, are only some of the responses from folks who believe themselves to be entirely reasonable in their criticisms. These responses echo those to the 1976 insurgency from conservative elements in black communities, as well as the dominant responses from apartheid apparatchiks and beneficiaries. With little irony, and seemingly less awareness of assuming the postures of the defenders of inequity and inequality in our recent history, they are quick to denounce contemporary youth political insurgency.
The political schizophrenia at the heart of such ‘fauxgressive’ responses to post-millennial social dynamics in South Africa is structured by sentimental objections to inequality which simultaneously object to the dismantling and abolition of structures and practices which are foundational to such inequality. This, too, is a familiar trope in South Africa: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. In apartheid South Africa, white liberals often objected to the style of white supremacist oppression and its unpalatable consequences, not to the substance of such inequality which was foundational to their privilege.
Today, in South Africa, those ensconced in suburban middle class privileges, often object to the unpalatable inequality which spoils the view, while enjoying the privileges which accrue to them in a society as unequal as ours. Some go so far as to suggest that structural inequality is phantasmatic, not material, issuing such opinions from behind high walls and expensive coffee shops. But such hypocrisy is not surprising; it is, in fact, a form of political schizophrenia which ought to induce cognitive dissonance in any person who is neither morally indolent nor intellectually torpid.
Folks who are accommodated to and interpellated by power through the privileges it affords them often preach resistance to injustice while simultaneously adopting oppressive positions and practices. They hide behind the transparent lie of bourgeois respectability, the sanctity of private property and the need for propriety, rendering resistance to – and self-defence against – injustice, ‘monstrous’, or ‘unruly’. They agree that things are bad, and could be better; they just believe in using the system which designs and constructs the inequality to address the inequality.
The bogeyman, the monster of the conservative bourgeois imagination, is the ‘unruly’ insurgent mass, thus undifferentiated, whose re-individuated members are hectored back to order, the status quo. The idea of resistance to injustice is fine, but the forms such objections take must be palatable, and not threaten the way we live now, the way we have always done things, those standard operating procedures of this time and this place.
These views, accepted as unquestioned truths, underpin the pronouncements on young people’s protests from both the political establishment as well as the conservative middle class commentariat. They are unruly; they should return to classes; they should focus on their studies; they are ingrates who do not appreciate their fortune. Worse, they are preventing those who have paid for their education from learning. The pronouns are revealing of the constructed deictic distance between commentariat and the objects of their critique.
Other ‘truths’ echo across the millennial divide as well. Many of us once insisted that there can be no normality in an abnormal society. With the levels of resource access and income inequality, and the ways in which these shape the material experience of post-apartheid liberty, it is hard to describe the contemporary South African space as ‘normal’. Could this be that ‘new normal’ which we are asked to accommodate ourselves to: inequality as ineluctable, inevitable, and immanent?
Objecting to inequality while also objecting to the dismantling and abolition of the structures and practices, the habits and ‘standard operating procedures’ which ensure that inequality, is a primary symptom of political schizophrenia which ought to induce cognitive dissonance. But while we have all been taught to fear and resist the imminent descent into the dystopian nightmare of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or Animal Farm, we have become addicted subjects to the dystopian nightmare of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
The doors of learning and culture are not yet fully open; they are coin operated, and members of the commentariat are only too eager to denounce those who object to the exorbitant costs.
A Luta Continua!
- eNCA
Thursday 15 October 2015 - 7:33pm
Angelo Fick
JOHANNESBURG - A year ahead of the fortieth anniversary of the 1976 student uprisings in apartheid South Africa, young people across campuses in the tertiary education sector are again vocally objecting to the conditions under which they are expected to study.
In various projects and movements, students in universities, and their peers in tertiary and vocational training and education colleges, are objecting to the ways in which the habits and characteristics from the past which live on in the institutions and organisations of post-apartheid South Africa, shape inequality and injustice in education. They are directing their ire and impatience about this unfinished business at a government elected ‘by the people’, and criticise it for not delivering adequately ‘for the people’.
Ironically, this year also marks the sixtieth year since the adoption of the Freedom Charter, a document which is echoed in the post-apartheid Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. Its aspirations about access to education in a post-apartheid society informed the United Democratic Front’s insistence throughout the 1980s that “the doors of learning and culture shall be opened”. Not only are campuses increasingly fenced off from the rest of the country, but studying at them has become prohibitively expensive for many.
There is no denying that the increases in student fees in post-apartheid South Africa have been spectacular. Comparing a fees booklet from 1990 with the fees lists online, and comparing my father’s salary then with my own salary now, even though my salary is comparatively better than his was then, I would find it less easy to send a child to university in South Africa today than my parents did then. At its recent national general congress, even the governing party’s president had to admit that the party, and the governments it forms, continue to ‘grapple’ with realising the vision of the Freedom Charter.
The responses from many middle class observers to current student protests reveal a worrying but not unexpected trend symptomatic of contemporary political debate in South Africa. Young people, vocally objecting to the debt they must take on in order to get a tertiary education in post-apartheid South Africa with its high youth unemployment figure and less than inspiring economic growth prospects in the medium term, are subjected to ridicule and hectoring from people who mis-remember the privileges afforded them by the mediocracy which was tax-funded Christian Nationalist Education.
Derisive and sarcastic remarks about the cost of protestors’ clothing, ridiculing them for being involved in protests when they should be studying, and jeering at their supposed ingratitude for finding fault with systematised inequality and not appreciating opportunities given them, are only some of the responses from folks who believe themselves to be entirely reasonable in their criticisms. These responses echo those to the 1976 insurgency from conservative elements in black communities, as well as the dominant responses from apartheid apparatchiks and beneficiaries. With little irony, and seemingly less awareness of assuming the postures of the defenders of inequity and inequality in our recent history, they are quick to denounce contemporary youth political insurgency.
The political schizophrenia at the heart of such ‘fauxgressive’ responses to post-millennial social dynamics in South Africa is structured by sentimental objections to inequality which simultaneously object to the dismantling and abolition of structures and practices which are foundational to such inequality. This, too, is a familiar trope in South Africa: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. In apartheid South Africa, white liberals often objected to the style of white supremacist oppression and its unpalatable consequences, not to the substance of such inequality which was foundational to their privilege.
Today, in South Africa, those ensconced in suburban middle class privileges, often object to the unpalatable inequality which spoils the view, while enjoying the privileges which accrue to them in a society as unequal as ours. Some go so far as to suggest that structural inequality is phantasmatic, not material, issuing such opinions from behind high walls and expensive coffee shops. But such hypocrisy is not surprising; it is, in fact, a form of political schizophrenia which ought to induce cognitive dissonance in any person who is neither morally indolent nor intellectually torpid.
Folks who are accommodated to and interpellated by power through the privileges it affords them often preach resistance to injustice while simultaneously adopting oppressive positions and practices. They hide behind the transparent lie of bourgeois respectability, the sanctity of private property and the need for propriety, rendering resistance to – and self-defence against – injustice, ‘monstrous’, or ‘unruly’. They agree that things are bad, and could be better; they just believe in using the system which designs and constructs the inequality to address the inequality.
The bogeyman, the monster of the conservative bourgeois imagination, is the ‘unruly’ insurgent mass, thus undifferentiated, whose re-individuated members are hectored back to order, the status quo. The idea of resistance to injustice is fine, but the forms such objections take must be palatable, and not threaten the way we live now, the way we have always done things, those standard operating procedures of this time and this place.
These views, accepted as unquestioned truths, underpin the pronouncements on young people’s protests from both the political establishment as well as the conservative middle class commentariat. They are unruly; they should return to classes; they should focus on their studies; they are ingrates who do not appreciate their fortune. Worse, they are preventing those who have paid for their education from learning. The pronouns are revealing of the constructed deictic distance between commentariat and the objects of their critique.
Other ‘truths’ echo across the millennial divide as well. Many of us once insisted that there can be no normality in an abnormal society. With the levels of resource access and income inequality, and the ways in which these shape the material experience of post-apartheid liberty, it is hard to describe the contemporary South African space as ‘normal’. Could this be that ‘new normal’ which we are asked to accommodate ourselves to: inequality as ineluctable, inevitable, and immanent?
Objecting to inequality while also objecting to the dismantling and abolition of the structures and practices, the habits and ‘standard operating procedures’ which ensure that inequality, is a primary symptom of political schizophrenia which ought to induce cognitive dissonance. But while we have all been taught to fear and resist the imminent descent into the dystopian nightmare of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or Animal Farm, we have become addicted subjects to the dystopian nightmare of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
The doors of learning and culture are not yet fully open; they are coin operated, and members of the commentariat are only too eager to denounce those who object to the exorbitant costs.
A Luta Continua!
- eNCA
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