TRAINSPOTTER: Into a dangerous week, the #FeesMustFall shutdown will not be shut down

Last Friday afternoon, following the General Assembly that wasn’t, walking through the main University of the Witwatersrand campus was like strolling through Abu Dhabi.

The dust, the heat, the bits of unidentifiable flotsam whipped up by apocalyptic climate-change wind: Wits reveals itself just another of those late-stage capitalist whoopee cushions. Will the university come to promulgate what academics in the Gulf know so well: the Phillip K. Dick-ish sensation found within the AC-blasted corridors of Yale and Harvard and A&M franchises, where blank-faced oil scions and expat consultant spawn purchase brand-name educations while, outside, Bangladeshi serfs water tropical gardens, the streams from their hosepipes evaporating in mid-arc.

In the Gulf, the only thing worth learning is that the crude does the teaching.

But Wits last Friday held within its walls another of its possible futures: a flyblown, empty-roomed university compound I visited several years ago in Juba, South Sudan, where tall men yelled at each other through loudhailers, while the remainder of the student body stood under a tree waiting for war. War they got: South Sudan now tears itself asunder, and the rage-stalled curriculum at Juba U seemed like a not-so-subtle suggestion of the carnage to come.

And so Wits, which, like it or not, serves as the South African bellwether, finds itself full of alternate futures. The most welcome – a radically reconceived affordable South African tertiary education institution built for 21st century South Africans – seems off the table, largely because of an imagination deficit that starts at the very tip-top of our governance structures, and filters all the way down through the system. What will our universities become? Despite an Op-Ed avalanche and the usual Twitter puke-a-thon, no one with the influence to change anything seems able to answer that question.

Unthinking the market-priced colonial university paradigm, it turns out, is a bit of a trick.

Anyway, I came to Wits to get a sense of what will happen in the next perilous week, and I wasn’t particularly interested in talking to leaders from either side. They had made their arguments perfectly clear in competing memoranda and press conferences over the course of Friday morning. Last Tuesday's prime-time bout, between cops/private security trying to keep the university open vs. Fallists trying to shutter it, had ushered in the bad faith endemic to spirited episodes of ultra-violence. So, in the shadow of the Corinthian columns of the Great Hall, looking out over the General Assembly tent onto the Library Lawns, I waited for an SMS from an Economic Freedom Fighter named Khensani Masisi, a 19-year-old Fallist foot soldier with whom I am acquainted.

Now. I’m not suggesting that Masisi is representative of all the country’s Fallists. In fact, her affiliation with the EFF should be indication enough that she belongs to a cohort within a cohort, within which there are microcohorts that will force historians to munch Ritalin tabs like they’re, well, Ritalin tabs. But movements, we so often forget, are comprised of individuals, and Masisi is a whip smart, garrulous, pissed off version of same. She is, in her own words, “on the ground”—and don’t take my word for it. Her own words are right here, in her own words, as it were. 

***

“Where we are sitting right now, there are no factions,” Masisi tells me. “We are very sure of what we’re doing.”

We’re actually sitting on a concrete picnic table, gazing at Wits’s still-blue Olympic pool. Masisi is an extraordinarily unlarge human, and while I’m not sure I’d ever seen her wearing a colour other than red, today she wears denim shorts, a white tank top, and an EFF-branded camo bush hat. She hails from relatively privileged Bryanston, went to St Stithians, and is studying for a BA, majoring in psychology and sociology. Problem: she can count the black lecturers she’s had in her time here on the fingers of one hand.

“What type of black people and what type of white people are being created in these institutions?” she asks me.

Gone, says Masisi, are any lingering differences in opinion or approach between the EFF student command, the ANC-associated Progressive Youth Alliance (PYA), the Pan Africanist Student Movement of Azania (Pasma), the Student Representative Council (SRC), and the general student body. (We are excluding, of course, the ill-fated #TakeWitsBack countermovement, and, perhaps, what university management describes as the “silent majority”—those 21,000 or so cats who “voted” to keep the joint open in last week’s SMS poll.) Whereas during FMF’s nascency there were varying divisions between those arguing for a “zero increment” (a halt of fee rises), and those demanding free education for all, according to Masisi the movement unreservedly backs the latter.

“The general consensus is that we want free, decolonised education,” she says.

This uniformity of purpose has much to do with the lunkheaded tactics of the government:

“We were waiting for [Minister of Higher Education and Training] Blade Nzimande’s statements on the fees issue, and there were postponements and postponements. Then he comes here to Solomon Mahlangu House to make his statement with the cops behind him, and says what he says.”

Indeed, in the middle of September, the Minister made a commitment to backing free education for the poor and the missing-middle, but would not endorse free education for all – the precise increment of the 2017 fee increment, capped at 8%, was to be determined by the universities. The next day: FMF Reloaded locked and loaded.

“Clearly, Blade is not willing to compromise.”

Sure, but are the Fallists? While Vice-Chancellor Adam Habib has become the movement’s much-thumped piñata, Masisi has come to see him as utterly powerless.

“Habib – what can he offer? He can’t give us free education.”

So the university has become the weaponised portal through which the system is addressed – both a symbolic site of conflict and a genuine battleground for a social movement that is, insists Masisi, about more than just fees.

In this, Masisi considers Habib’s recalcitrance, however toothless, as part of a larger pattern. She tells me that the General Assembly idea was the result of the melee last Tuesday, where mega-lawyer and EFF chairman, Dali Mpofu, along with a range of other VIP alumni and supportive academics, pushed for some kind of consensus-building apparatus to be put into effect. (That doesn’t square with what Habib said to me when I spoke to him prior to the latest outbreak of violence – the university council was aiming for a General Assembly as a last ditch effort at least a week before Mpofu’s cameo.) When an accommodation on a General Assembly memorandum could not be reached because the university would not – could not – agree to an early morning demand by the movement insisting on a shutdown until fees were eliminated, the powwow was postponed indefinitely.

In the latest statement from the university, on Monday they are planning to keep all campuses open. And so: World War VII looms.

But in demanding free education now, is the movement not engaging in what Professor Achille Mbembe describes as the “politics of the impossible”, with the outcome as obvious as if it were written in the disconsolate stone of the Great Hall? What happens if this thing is pushed beyond the thermonuclear tipping point? What is the thermonuclear tipping point: five dead students? Ten? Thirty-four?

Or the opposite: the complete liberation of the South African university one week from now, whatever that would look like, with all the venal monsters circling to occupy the gap in the so-called market.

“Look, these things have obviously come up among us,” says Masisi. “If we don’t write this year, it’s not a train smash. We’ll write in January, the university year only starts in February, we’ll make a plan. But we’ll deal with the afters after.”

Revolutionary sanguinity. Don’t we all need ourselves some of that?

She takes a breath, and says the following very slowly:

“We will continue to protest, up until we get free education.”

***

Yeah but okay: who is “we” really? This is a properly agenda-less movement, with every meeting wrapping up with a full-throated “Kumbaya”?

That isn’t how the world works, no?

“Sure, sure. What’s disappointed me is the agendas,” she says. “Like for one thing, the donors and the alumni have pulled out – this year in residence, we had no toilet paper. There are students with no food.”

But at the same time, she wants to remind me that most of the student leadership are those who already have diplomas to their name. Mcebo Dlamini, the Hitler-loving deposed SRC president and one-time Sisulu wannabe, earned himself a BA last year – in the current populist political climate, his career is all but made. The list goes on.

“They are not students,” says Masisi. As for the in-coming SRC president, Kefentse Mkhari, who has yet to graduate? “Well, he’s been pushed aside,” she says, “hasn’t he?” What’s more, where this was once a case of a women-led movement, shit’s gotten a little macho of late.

“I don’t trust this movement. Students’ lives are being played with here,” she says. “If you want to be on TV, and want to be a media star, that’s fine. But….”

When I ask her about the shadowy forces about which even acting national police commissioner Lieutenant-General Khomotso Phahlane has spoken, her face sort of melts into a much older version of Khensani Masisi – the version that knows much disappointment and pain.

“Yes,” she says. “Look, why must we entertain state politics? Who mandated the ANC Youth League to come on campus and make statements? How did they even get on campus – you can’t just walk in here?” (It’s a good question—Colin Maine, ANCYL president, is nearing the retirement age for a lecturer.) Big game political maneuvering is occurring on the campuses of the country; in order to complete the perfect loop of apartheid-era nostalgie de la boue, the SA Council of Churches claims to be pushing for a State of Emergency – can you just fucking imagine the barely restrained glee with which President Jacob Zuma would read out such an order on the boob tube?

Meanwhile, closer to Masisi’s political home, EFF president Julius Malema – followed shortly by his deputy, Floyd Shivambu – mentioned that they’d consider joining up with a re-upped, rebranded version of the ANC post the 2019 elections. This dizzying little nugget of extreme political opportunism was dumped into one of the year’s busier news weeks, when the EFF’s natural constituency was occupied with the effort of dodging rubber bullets and ducking stun grenades.

“It was sneaky,” says Masisi. “I called around when I heard about it, and lots of people didn’t know. It will have very bad consequences for him. We believe in a very radical left politics—and the ANC has never been revolutionary.”

Yeah, well. Everyone is a revolutionary until.

***

Under this cascade of competing agendas, what does Khensani Masisi, EFF student command member, Fallist, South African human of a certain age, believe will happen next?

“Half and half,” she says, sounding like a coffee creamer commercial tagline. “If they shut down the institution for six months, it kills the movement. This is where we meet. If they let us stay, then we will push them as far as it can go.”

How far, no one knows. “Look it’s been a year,” she says, educating me on time and its relativeness. But the mop-up, however things flush out, will take much, much longer. Will Wits be spit-shined by the dons at Oxford, pennants from the metropole hung from its Corinthian ramparts – in order to teach the kids of the hideously rich how to stay that way? Will it be flattened into the post-liberation African university, a proxy for independence’s manifold miseries – in order to teach nothing to no one?

Or will it be something else – something at the cutting-edge of liberation’s possibilities, something we haven’t quite formulated yet? DM

Photo: Students from Wits University are thrown to the ground after a stun grenade exploded near them during running battles on the campus as ongoing protests continue against the cost of higher education in Johannesburg, South Africa, 04 October 2016. EPA/KIM LUDBROOK