Why you should take the lead
Joseph Diescho
Leadership emerges in a context of angst or restlessness as people come to terms with the realisation that the current state of affairs ought to change and that there are risks that accompany any change. More than a decade after the first all-race elections in South Africa, there is angst within all communities about how to manage and navigate the changes that are generally celebrated as positive in the country.
Universities in South Africa have been part and parcel of the history from which the country is either emerging or agitating to regain. This is so because education, to all intents and purposes, is a framework in which adult members of communities pass on their accumulated knowledge and experiences, and instruct, formally or informally, the younger ones regarding the habits of living decent lives in relationship to other members. Education is more than mere literacy and numeracy: it also deals with conveying values and habits in order to guarantee that the communities continue to reproduce themselves. It also encompasses the passing on of the knowledge which teaches the young members how they fit into the broader schemes of human lives, and also about their leadership roles in their given communities.
Institutions of learning are part of these communities and can therefore not operate outside of the milieu of a given period and the power conflicts and contradictions of that time and place. It is in this context that students has the responsibility and opportunity to develop and act as leaders
Student leaders can bring meaningful change
Throughout the world, students have historically played significant roles in socio-political change. Here an immediate distinction must be drawn between students and youth. Youth has to do with age (those between 1 year and 35 years in post-apartheid South Africa), whereas students are an assemblage of young and not so young people engaged in the activity and praxis of exploring knowledge, ideas and phenomena for the purposes of improving the human condition. There are a number or reasons why students are in a strong position to be leaders.
1. Students are members of their communities who are in the privileged positions of receiving higher education. As such, students are located in the world of ideas, the universe of inquiry, the domain of investigation and of knowledge itself. The youth are there by virtue of falling within a politically-defined age category with very little choice in the matter. Students enjoy some degree of choice to attend university and to study in particular fields.
2. Student communities are recipients of the value systems of the times in which they live, but are at the same time has the opportunity to distance themselves from these value systems. Such is the history of student activism in South Africa in the hey-days of apartheid when black students were almost compelled to act. At that time, the black students, appreciating the risks, had to choose between what was a deteriorating situation and a better future. Thus Steve Biko, the leader of the Black Consciousness Movement (a movement which started among university students and spread to different communities and high school learners), wrote:
Now the response of the students [to the government crackdown in 1977] then was in terms of their pride. They were not prepared to be calmed down even at the point of a gun. And hence, what happened …1
3. The student must therefore interrogate the power relations in his/her community while he/she has the time, the leisure and energy to do so. This is when the question of student leadership arises, not by virtue of enjoying the privilege of higher education or being of a particular age cohort. At a time when students at black universities in South Africa, from black communities with apartheid-created problems realised the artificiality of the way the country was organised and reorganised to fight the white supremacist ethos, they stepped up to lead. Biko wrote:
[S]tudents have seen their role as being primarily to prepare themselves for leadership roles in various facets of the black community.2
To all intents and purposes the history of student activism in South Africa is tied into the history of apartheid and the activity of either defending or opposing apartheid. One of the unintended consequences of apartheid was the fact that it led to the founding of student and other non-governmental organisations that arguably would not have come into being had it not been for provocation by the apartheid ideology and its practices. Let’s investigate this expression of student leadership from our history in more detail.
A lesson from our own history
The creation of the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) in the early 1970s, a period during which the black students decided to view themselves either as part of the problem or part of the solution, was a direct consequence of the government disdain of black community interests. For instance, at black universities like the University of the North, Fort Hare, Zululand, Western Cape and Durban-Westville, the arrangement was that whites would lead and the communities for whom the universities were ostensibly established would serve only in advisory positions. What one found was that at formal events at these universities, whites, whose children were not even students at these institutions, would be on the stage whereas the black parents would be in the audience watching how whites were leading. These glaring racist overtones of higher education compelled students to seek disengagement from the then mainly English but multi-racial National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), which allowed them a critical distance in order to interrogate the power relations of the time.
In the period when white supremacy was in vogue, white students could not have as much reason as the black students did to agitate and develop leadership to fight for a better future. The present was pleasant enough. Yet, in the days before apartheid, when the English kept the Afrikaners downtrodden, Afrikaans students had reason to mobilise for unity and resist what was being done to them. This saw the establishment of the Rapportryers, and, in a sense, the youth wing of the Ossewa Brandwag.
The reactions to both English rule as well as to apartheid domination took the form of outbursts against the systems that were bent on subjugating others. Even the student riots in Soweto in June 1976 were more spontaneous than they were organised, contrary to many claims. John Kane-Berman who wrote the first book on the Soweto uprisings recorded:
On the morning of Wednesday 16 June 1976, twenty thousand Soweto schoolchildren marched to protest against a decree by the South African government’s Department of Bantu Education – that Afrikaans had to be used as one of the languages of instruction in (black) secondary schools. It is not altogether clear what happened to the initially peaceful march or what sparked-off the violence that was to claim at least 176 lives within less than a week.3
The culmination of the Black Consciousness Movement, the Black People’s Convention and the general discontent among school and university-going populations in the country led to more high-handedness by an increasingly besieged political system. With the murder of the most proponent of revolutionary change inside the country, Steve Bantu Biko in Pretoria on 12 September 1977, more voices were added to the resistance. At that point a growing number of white student formations began to sympathise with the black youth, black churches and non-governmental organisations that were agitating for change and non-racialism.
Resistance to apartheid consequently gradually began to spread to white progressive quarters. Student leaders and university intellectuals such as Neil Aggett were perceived as dangerous in the white communities for their embracing of equality and non-racialism. In the early 1980s the University of the Western Cape (UWC), which was intended to be better than black-white universities and worse than white universities, took the lead in what came to be seen as the black intellectual left in the country. More and more coloured students and staff embraced the Biko-notion of blackness to include all the oppressed masses in the country. The students at UWC at the time became more radical than the system had hoped, and this affected the politics of black student and staff profoundly. The student leadership that emerged from this era, under the spiritual guidance of Allan Boesak and the intellectual guidance of Jakes Gerwel radicalised campuses to adopt the slogans such as “no normal education in an abnormal society” and “liberation first, education later”.
Further, students were united by their growing identification of the common enemy, apartheid, and the concomitant reaction of the government to what were actually legitimate expressions of a normal student population, raising questions about their communities and their future in such communities.
Challenges ahead
Like most countries also South Africa, faces significant challenges, and student leaders can make an important contribution to address these challenges. I take the liberty of naming a few:
1. Civil society needs to emigrate from the old South Africa to present day South Africa. The act of emigration is accompanied by an attitude of openness and a willingness to start anew. This attitude will enable civil society to reconstitute itself with a new vision and strategy based on the dynamics inherent in state-society relationships. This is important because most civil society formations are still fossilised in the issues of apartheid and continue to use anti-apartheid idioms.
2. The relationships between university, civil society and other societal role players need to be reinterpreted. Incumbent on civil society is the search for synergistic and organic relationships between the hitherto fragmented and adversarial sectors of society. However, an essential part of this relationship must be constructive disagreement. A search for a value-added relationship with a built-in commitment to give and take and complementarity ought to start in earnest, as this will strengthen the state-society relationship and accord it a dialogical purpose and an organic meaning.
3. An objective and critical stance needs to be maintained. A search for constructive engagement should not be at the expense of adopting a position relative to and critical of the government of the day. Not everything that government does is negative. Hence, credit is due.
4. A further challenge will be that of networking with other non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that are doing compatible work in order to be effective and avoid duplication of services. Escalating violence and crime in South Africa constitute but one area in which there is a need for effective and intersectoral networking. In this context another critical challenge is that of solidarity with non-South African NGOs, particularly those in the southern African region. Much of the crime menace has its tentacles beyond South Africa’s borders. Since crime syndicates operate across borders, mechanisms to combat crime should be developed at interprovincial and international levels.
5. The most important challenge, however, is the creation of a value system around which civil society can organise itself. This system must be undergirded by a set of fundamentals such as sharing compassion, empathy and sympathy, service and the desire to empower others to help themselves. This is in essence what is called for when government and civil society alike invoke ubuntu – that life becomes more meaningful in relation to and with others, amplified in campaigns such as the Masakhane (“Let us build one another”) campaign. Such a value system is a prerequisite for the establishment of a social order where a spirit of altruism and philanthropy is self-evident. Whereas previously the main tasks of the organs of civil society were to deal with the ills of apartheid, a return to dealing with the vicissitudes of life in general is required.
Final thoughts
The university student in today’s South Africa is a different person from the students of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and even the 1990s. Their central preoccupations were to think about life after the dreaded apartheid system for black students, and how to hold onto privileges safely, in the case of white South Africans. The black and the white student today do not and cannot see apartheid as the main reality. The reality in student life today is a better future for all.
In the process, race begins to play a diminishing role. In the main, class differentiation takes on a non-racial complexion so that most of the students dream less of being a political leader and more of being a successful man and woman in business and whatever domain they may excel in. Thus relations are being formed around different issues and different role models are being identified for them to emulate.
The renowned Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe warned of his native country Nigeria: “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership …”4 This warning is apt for South Africa and any African country for that matter. This is indeed a clarion call for the student leadership in South Africa who cannot continue to fashion themselves along the models of Mandela, or Sisulu, or Tambo or even De La Rey.
It is the university students who should be reminders of the values that initially fuelled the liberation struggle – compassion, empathy with the weak and vulnerable and the poor, sacrifice, humility, service, and ubuntu. It is they who can serve as moral compasses to the nation. It is they who ought to be asking affirmatively disruptive questions about and pursuing appreciative enquiry into the foundations of their future. It is they who possess the energy, the agility, the inquisitiveness, the imagination, the foolishness to be the child who noticed and could say that the emperor was naked. It is they with the dreams, who can defy, sing the songs of freedom and unity; it is they who can dream the big dreams. It is they to whom the future belongs!
Aldred Stubbs, Interview with Steve Biko, p. 1-5, quoted by Arnold, Millard W. 1987. No Fears Expressed, Skotaville, Braamfontein.↩︎
Ibid. p. 145.↩︎
John Kane-Berman. 1978. Soweto: Black Revolt White Reaction. Ravan Press, p. 1.↩︎
Chinua Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria, Heinemann, Oxford, 1984, p. 1.↩︎