Above Photo: A young woman holds up her fists as students march through the campus of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg on October 21, 2015, during a protest against fee hikes. Universities in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria and other cities have halted lectures during several days of protests against fee increases that many students say will force poor blacks further out of the education system. AFP PHOTO / MARCO LONGARI (Photo credit should read MARCO LONGARI/AFP/Getty Images)
Universities are at the center of the hopes, and the limits, of the country’s transition.
The University of Witwatersrand, known locally as “Wits,” is among South Africa’s one-time predominantly white educational institutions, which, during apartheid, sporadically butted heads with the government over their admissions policies. While a small number of black students were admitted to Wits and other similar, mostly English-medium, prestigious universities like the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Rhodes University, their student bodies remained largely white at the time. But within several years of the end of apartheid, the student bodies at many of these universities was majority black.
As a result, universities are now among the places that best represent the anger of the post-apartheid, or “born free” generation. This is a generation facing a grim irony: freer than their parents, but lacking the means and institutions to truly capitalize on that freedom. Many find themselves limited by what they’ve increasingly come to view as an incomplete social and political transformation, one that has simply entrenched the inequities of an age they’d been taught had long since passed.
South Africa’s universities—the very places where the vast economic and social disparities between whites and blacks enforced under apartheid could begin to close—are now among the places where a racist regime’s legacy remain starkly visible.
It did not. Today, South Africa remains one of the most unequal countries in the world, a place where poverty breaks down largely along racial lines. A black person is four times more likely to be unemployed than a white person, and the average income for a white family is six times greater than for a black family. White people dominate senior management positions at businesses across the country. Last year, South Africa’s Business Day newspaper reported that the number of CEOs who are black, a category that also includes coloreds—members of the country’s unique mixed-race culture—and Indian South Africans, had actually declined since 2012 (Africans, coloreds, and Indians are often all referred to as “black,” particularly in the political arena. All were marginalized during apartheid). The cost of higher education has risen as well, thanks to inflation and reduced government subsidies.
The son of a single mother, Anzio Jacobs, a slim man with a large afro salted with strands of white and a wrist tattoo of the Hindu god Ganesha, grew up in Woodstock, then a working-class suburb of Cape Town. Because apartheid had confined black families to communities located far from white city centers, Jacobs and his black peers would travel, sometimes for hours, to get to school. White students, he found, came to school with chocolates in their lunches; black students brought “doorstopper-size” hunks of day-old bread. They were also expected to conform. “When I went to school, I had to be a particular kind of colored,” Jacobs said. “I had to exist on the periphery of whiteness. Speaking the right kind of English. Dressing the right way.”
In 1996, Jacobs began attending a formerly white private school, where he learned that “racism is still a thing.” There, he and his fellow coloreds were bullied by their white peers; white administrators didn’t seem to care. Because he had to restart his degree after being forced to leave university when he couldn’t afford tuition, he is still only a second-year undergraduate at the age of 25. “I can sit here and write these exams and I know that next year I won’t have fees to pay for my study. And when I do get done with this system I’m going to go into an economy that doesn’t have enough space for me and I’m going to be overqualified. … I am the generation that gets to say ‘Fuck it all, I’m going to burn a building down.’”
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For the born frees, the root of the disparity is in the compromises between the ANC and apartheid authorities. Adam Habib, the vice chancellor of Wits, said that the hoped-for “transformation” never came to pass. The end of apartheid, he said, failed to establish a social democracy, instead establishing “a very weak neo-liberalism.” While the government opened institutions up to black South Africans, its pro-market agenda—which struggled to reform race-based economic and social injustice—simply replicated the brutal reality of apartheid’s structural racism.
Last year, anger over tuition increases—including a double-digit hike at Wits—along with South Africa’s ongoing struggling economy, boiled over. Students at UCT threw excrement on a statue of British colonial leader Cecil Rhodes, demanding its removal and the “decolonialization” of the university, though what that meant beyond the removal of colonial symbols was not always clear. On October 23, 2015 the movement, calling itself #FeesMustFall on social media, marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the seat of the South African government. Thousands of demonstrators, some bearing placards with messages like: “My parents were sold dreams in 1994, I’m just here for the refund,” and others hurling rocks, faced off against police who responded with rubber bullets and tear gas. The protest ended when President Jacob Zuma promised a zero percent tuition increase.
Among those university administrators seeking court injunctions is Habib. As a young man, Habib himself was an anti-apartheid activist and self-described “far-left” radical. But like many activists of his generation, he now finds himself in the role of an authority figure in the new South Africa. “There is a legitimacy to the demand. [#FeesMustFall] was essentially a cry by black students that they felt substantially excluded from their institutions. How you resolve them needs to be debated,” Habib said. “You mustn’t confuse radical with violence.”
Student protests also come amidst a moment of high drama in South African politics. In local government elections in August, the ANC, which has governed the country since 1994, lost two cities in Gauteng, the country’s economic hub. The economy has flirted with recession and struggled to improve the 26.2 percent unemployment rate. Local media frequently report on an alleged power struggle between Zuma and his rivals in the National Treasury.
On August 29, black students from the prestigious Pretoria High School for Girls staged a protest outside their school, accusing administrators and teachers of racism and alleging that the school’s code of conduct did not allow them to wear their African hair naturally and that they were forbidden from speaking African languages. An image of one of the students, her arms crossed above her head as she dared authorities to arrest her and a magnificent afro crowning her head (singer, and sibling to Beyoncé, Solange Knowles tweeted her support to Patel), went viral.
Similar protests with similar complaints spread to other schools. Older alumni of these schools, called “Old Boys” and “Old Girls,” soon started Facebook pages to share their experiences of racism. “Now when you look at these high-school students who are protesting racism in their schools. That’s the generation that’s coming into universities, and anyone who thinks they’re going to be easier is in for a rude surprise. The ‘94 settlement isn’t enough anymore and the country has outgrown it,” Mbete said. “The conversation is being driven for the most part by people who grew up in freedom. … I don’t think what they’re doing is new at all, but it’s who’s doing it.”
For her part, Shikwambane said the protests by high school students is part of the “conversation” young people were having with each other and the legacy of #FeesMustFall protests. “#FeesMust fall taught me about protest. It gave me a courage to stand for something,” Shikwambane said. “We’ve shook things up.”