As student unrest sweeps South Africa, the debate and discourse laid
out in youthful pronouncements and Twitter feeds is increasingly racist.
An old enemy has been brought back from the dead, and the “vampire” of
white racism is now apparently seen as the cause of the country’s myriad
problems.
It seems that South Africa’s educated young people cannot bring themselves to trust Julius Malema‘s crude leftist opposition to the ANC, and they certainly see the Democratic Alliance (DA), even under Mmusi Maimane‘s
leadership, as a front for white liberal interests. The
still-vanishingly small number of black professors at the University of
Cape Town, the old white liberal bastion, is taken as evidence of that.
But this new generation of articulate, well-schooled protesters seems
strangely unmotivated to rail against the tired, self-serving crony
politics of Jacob Zuma and the ANC—calcified, corrupt forces who no
longer have anything to offer South Africa.
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These young antagonists against all things white crib their
soundbites from Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon, but few really seem to have
bothered reading their writings in depth. (Try condensing Fanon’s Black
Skin, White Masks into a tweet.)
The result is that for all its nods to great post-colonial and
liberation thinkers, the debate in South Africa is about as
sophisticated as that in the American presidential election or the
U.K.’s E.U. referendum campaign. It’s become little more than a hateful,
trash-talking exchange of misapprehensions and fictions.
Everyone forgets, for instance, that white former DA leader Helen Zille
was once a courageous young journalist who investigated and broke the
story that Biko’s death had in fact been a police murder. Or that Biko’s
lover, Professor Mamphela Ramphele, had been vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town.
Or that it’s a black president, Jacob Zuma,
who has brought the country to its knees by having no technocratic
capacity, or instinct, at all. His power has been sustained via the
internal favor-trading and privilege structures of the ANC; history will
judge him as a disaster.
Forgotten History
In the midst of all this, the death earlier this year, aged 66, of
David “Oom Bolo” Meyers, a community activist in Kliptown, Soweto, went
unnoticed.
Bolo was a photographer whose work documented Kliptown
as it was during the liberation struggle. Back then it was a ghetto of
knifemen and gangsters, and in many ways it’s largely unchanged today.
While the ANC has plonked down dozens of chemical toilets, people
live much as they did in the days when Mandela and the activists chose
Kliptown as a hiding place from the police, and as it was in 1955, when
the Freedom Charter was signed by delegates who had smuggled themselves to the township from all over South Africa.
People who are now aged and wizened threw themselves in front of the
police to stop them arresting Mandela, as well as the leaders not just
of the ANC but many community organizations. They later used to gather
at “Bolo’s place,” an improvised community center, to tell stories
through which they relived the exploits and sufferings of 1955 and of
the 1976 Soweto Uprising.
None of the young student activists know these stories. Theirs is a
simple enemy that can be fought in soundbites and by burning down parts
of the universities that should propel them forwards—even as the
stagnant economy leaves them with little to be propelled into.
I myself am mourning Bolo, who just decided to adopt me as I observed
South African elections from the poorest parts of the great cities. His
nickname was filched from the Bruce Lee movie “Enter the Dragon,” and
as he strode the dirt poor streets of Kliptown, people of all ages would
sing it out in greeting. At the last elections in 2014,
he walked me around the polling booths, shaking hands with Malema’s
frontline activists in their red berets and DA supporters in their blue
ones (Kliptown is DA territory, the voters having rejected the ANC).
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