At Wits University last year, same disruptive protest, same free-speech debate, same white moderates up in arms. Here was how Dennis Brutus put it the following week in SA's main paper, the Mail and Guardian:
It's time for new confrontations:
A just protest at my alma mater
by Dennis Brutus
Last Friday afternoon, I joined a demonstration that led to the disruption of the Urban Futures conference final plenary session at Wits University's Great Hall. The delegates are owed an apology, but the two lead administrators of Wits and Johannesburg Metro who were prevented from speaking are, on reflection, not.
I was in transit between literary and political engagements in Grahamstown and Okinawa. In virtually all such contemporary meeting grounds, the power of the market is now being popularly received with profound reservations.
So it did not surprise me that the heavily corporate-biased agenda that both the university and Johannesburg Metro are pursuing, in the Wits 2001 and Egoli 2002 plans, has generated such angst and resistance. The emergence of a Johannesburg Anti-Privatisation Forum to link the two campaigns shows an awareness of "town- gown," local-global connections that people of conscience must applaud.
In fact, it is not stretching matters to draw a thread from Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, through the anti- apartheid struggle, through the civil disobedience that I witnessed at the World Trade Organisation summit last November in Seattle and at the April World Bank meetings in Washington, and on through the Anti-Privatisation Forum's actions this month: sit-ins and sleep-ins at administrative offices, water balloons playfully tossed into a pro-privatisation Urban Futures workshop, and the non-violent storming of the Great Hall stage.
They all cause discomfort, and in some cases they humiliate. But they are done with the idealistic intention of drawing attention to injustice. They are essentially non-violent, even if annoyingly confrontational. And like fine grains of sand in the cogs of a terrible machine, the grating of such protest generates noises that can wake us all up. Something is not right. The machine must be stopped, even if bodies must be put on the line to do so.
Indeed, the days of thinking that enlightened elites generate progress in small committees are far behind us. Only such cries from below will eventually make enough of a racket to change society, the city, the university, for the better.
That is why I am convinced that at stake last Friday was not, as might at first be assumed, freedom of expression for the scheduled speakers Colin Bundy and Kenny Fihla, who wield enormous power to market their message. What are sometimes faux- liberal notions of free speech run the risk, as in this case, of decontextualisation. Thus tobacco advertisers have been told not to market their wares to children, and rightfully so.
A university is different, no doubt: a tranquil place where ideas intersect, a site therefore to uphold complete freedom of expression. But by last Friday, a newly- corporatised Wits had lost enough of this status to justify an interruption to the Bundy and Fihla speeches. (Regrettably, a very different speech by Xolela Mangcu was also jettisoned in the commotion.)
For while Bundy pronounces eloquently that There Is No Alternative, through an array of university loudhailers, there were by Friday no practical possibilities of debating the fait-accompli defunding of arts and education faculties at Wits, or the fate of more than 600 workers recently fired or outsourced, and who now are without a substantial part of their pay packet, without benefits, without a chance for their kids to grow up and go to Wits.
That plan was, I'm told, inadequately consulted. When a group of the university's-- and country's--leading industrial sociologists pointed out profound methodological flaws (not to mention cut-and-paste plagiarism and spelling errors!) in a R4,5 million consultancy report on outsourcing, the Wits Council dogmatically refused to rethink the plan.
What Bundy, to his credit, did put on offer to those protesters was 15 minutes to make their case to last Friday's plenary. But the offer was considered contrived and meaningless, a last-minute amendment that emerged only because of rumours of unrest. The university's strategy, protesters felt, was to channel, contain, sanitise and snuff the passion for social justice that students, staff, trade unionists and Johannesburg residents brought into the Great Hall.
What therefore is truly at stake in such confrontations is whether profound pain inflicted upon ordinary people by a new elite acting much the same as their predecessors, has an appropriate vehicle for expression. The well-paid administrators don't feel the desperate pangs of those whose very ability to feed their families is now in question. The demonstrators' goal was to make that pain more viscerally understood, and they succeeded marvelously.
Likewise, over the past eight months, in all corners of the globe, a great deal of nonviolent civil disobedience has drawn the world's attention to systematic "neoliberal" injustice: market imperatives ruining ordinary people's lives. Dramatic protest settings have included Seattle, Davos, Bangkok, Cochabamba, Washington, Chiang Mai, Bombay, Buenos Aires, London, Istanbul, Lagos, and Windsor. Mass strikes of millions of people, as happened in South Africa on May 10 and India the day after, reflect the demand for change.
My Friday afternoon was memorable because to my surprise, a spirit of resistance pervaded a university I remember with mixed feelings. A half-century ago, I learnt some fine lessons at Wits, it is true, but these also occurred in a context of systematic pain. My own law studies were abruptly terminated by a spell at South Africa's other elite university, Robben Island.
Then, as now, a school that taught me much also left large gaps in my education. For then, as now, Wits leadership had a choice to join the struggle for justice; then, as now, it seems, the moral responsibility has been forsaken at the top.
But not at the bottom.
It's time for new confrontations.
Brutus is a poet, international activist and Professor Emeritus of Africana Studies at University of Pittsburgh.