MLK & Direct Action (was Re: racist opinion a crime?)

[Patrick Bond]

> Date:          Sat, 31 Mar 2001 16:09:15 -0500
> From:          Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
> ...
> Our heckling -- which local liberals & conservatives criticized then 
> & later as evidence of our "lack of respect for free speech," etc. -- 
> was much more effective than polite questions with no disruptions 
> would have been.  

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.