Whose blood is thicker?
Why is there such a high level of hypocrisy? Why are the lives of Europeans put on a pedestal while the lives of others seem to be of less importance?
OPINION: When every song is seen as a protest
Men’s Hall Residence students were celebrating their fellow housemates at graduation today but bystanders assumed they were protesting.
Communication: Is there an app for that?
With social media becoming more inseparable from our lives the way we communicate and the way others communicate with us is changing. Is this the new communication frontier or a alienation? (more…)
OPINION LETTER: I love vandals
THE WRITINGS ON THE WALL: The words “Fuck white power” are sprayed onto the Great Hall staircase. Graffiti messages have popped up all over campus. While some find them offensive, the colourful messages express how some students on campus feel about power. Photo: Michelle Gumede
WITS University seems to have noticed the graffiti around campus and, in a performance of horrifying moral indignation, has sent out emails to all students condemning it as a form of vandalism. The email that the university urgently sent out proves shockingly ignorant to the content and the conversation that the graffiti was attempting to initiate. The university has, for a long time, consistently and tenaciously silenced and neutralised certain forms and articulations of protest. The university has been arrogantly denying students the space to participate in meaningful political action and active demonstrations that could potentially engage the fundamental problems in any substantial manner, or even at least attempt to alter the material conditions. Wits demonstrated this when it invited military-like private security to deal with students who were raising legitimate questions about the access and commodification of education. The university was more interested in the form in which the questions were raised instead of responding or at least acknowledging the substance of the questions. Through its actions and decisions Wits has criminalised certain ideas and modes of thinking.
If at all we are interested in understanding the intentions of the ‘vandals’ then it becomes necessary that we broaden the restrictive definition of protest that university has imposed on us. Protest comprises of both the material and symbolic and in most cases less emphasis is put on the latter. To protest is to resist against a discomfort and one cannot dismiss the efficacy of graffiti as a voice and medium of expression for marginal movements that have not in their favour traditional, established and dominant media outlets. The forms of graffiti at Wits could at the very least be considered of strategic importance as means by which it has been able to elicit responses from management. This alternative method of ensuring responses to the graffiti effectively allows for a possibility of a discussion that could potentially culminate in a substantive interrogation of the content of these expressions, which arguably, could be linked to arguments and critical analyses that identifies the university as anti-black and antagonistic to the poor and marginalised.
The graffiti connotes the existence of an activist. The graffiti stops being just vandalism but it becomes an assault against a dominant culture, a culture of silent protests and boardroom negotiations that have not changed anything. The graffiti reveals an emerging movement that is uncomfortable with and existentially displaced in relation to the university. Those that speak against the graffiti are not only repressing the act because of the message it conveys but more importantly could be seen as another reactionary attack on its symbolic dynamic. The graffiti symbolises a culture of resistance. It is a form of art that rebels existentially against the current order by brazenly confronting power. In the end, graffiti is sticking a middle finger at the university. It brutalises the sensibilities of management by effectively becoming a threat to what is most dear to them – order and suppression of an untamed radical voice.
The graffiti demands nothing and everything. The desperate attempt by the university to challenge it is obfuscating the intentions of those who have decorated the dull buildings of our campus with spray paint.
Mbhele is an activist and a Law student
Slice of life: Love in a time of revolution
February is commonly known as the month of love. But for me, love is not only about red roses, fancy dinners and cuddly teddy bears. Love is what spurs us on to act on some of our deepest passions. Love, for one’s people and the world, is the basis of all revolutions.
South Africans are a people fueled by passion. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that we are the model state with no foibles, psychopaths or greedy leaders. We are far from it. But we love. For the most part we love our food, our cultures, our soccer teams and our music. But most of all we love our constitution so much that we witnessed over 2 000 people marching to the Constitutional Court in defence of our Public Protector and our constitution this week.
Love is a peculiar thing. It ignites a flame in the hearts of those it imposes itself upon, breathing hope into the minds of the numb and giving a renewed sense of courage and self-sacrifice in the souls of the weary. Love fuels humanity’s drive to better itself in a system that is designed to belittle it.
Apartheid was a system that the National Party preferred to describe as a way of self-preservation. Preserving Afrikaaner culture, language and the material wealth that they violently acquired. As sick as it sounds, it’s a gluttonous love of self that fuelled the colonial project of separate development.
On the other hand it is also love that gave Bantu Steven Biko the will to write what he liked. Love spurred Hector Peterson on to march towards the bullets that fatally martyred him. Much like how love urged the miners of Marikana, and the students of the #RhodesMustFall movement to stand up for what they believe in. Love can bring people together for a diverse range of reasons, no matter how strange and taboo they might be.
The lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual community has had to endure prejudice, persecution, rape and abuse to be able to openly love. While Black girls still need to explain why they want to have safe spaces solely for themselves. Across the continent states are still illegitimatising homosexuality and ostracising those who love to love other people.
It is a love for education that kept students in South Africa marching on even in the blistering sun, protesting for free education during the #FeesMustFall protests. It is a love for our living environment that keeps activist groups ready to defend (and sometimes remedy) some of the wrongs done to the earth. And it is love for our fellow man that has sparked mass outcry against the killings in Palestine, Black America and Burundi.
Eusebius McKaiser once told a class I was in, “don’t be afraid of your own biases.” And we shouldn’t be afraid to love. If we had to take notes on love, comradery and passion, they are the excellent lessons to be taken from our global history. If there’s one thing I wish everyone on Valentine’s Day, its that we may all find something that moves us and we are passionate about. Something to love.
SLICE OF LIFE: The unpaid internship nightmare
A couple of weeks ago while lazily going through my Twitter feed, I saw Marie Claire magazine trending. Curious, I checked what the furore was about. What was circulating was a screen grab showing an advert for a 6-month internship at the magazine’s online platform. The intern would be required to work eight hours a day, five days a week. All for a stipend of R30 per day.
From Nyanga East, where I grew up, a return trip to Gardens (where Marie Claire and a number of media and advertising companies are situated) using public transport can cost up to R50. And considering Cape Town’s spatial make-up, the further away from the city, the poorer the neighbourhoods, and the more expensive it becomes to get to the city centre.
“the structural, spatial and economic layout of South African society has remained largely unchanged since 1994”
Not so long ago, Marie Claire’s sister magazine, Cosmopolitan, was also under fire for advertising an unpaid internship where the intern was required to have a driver’s licence, own transport, and to work fulltime plus overtime. The Marie Claire advert prompted a long conversation with a friend about the growing trend of unpaid and low paying worldwide. We came to the conclusion that given
the historical context of South Africa, one of dispossession and disenfranchisement for the black majority, such ‘opportunities’ are part of a larger system of exclusion; of privileging the privileged, and marginalising the marginalised.
THE UNPAID INTERNSHIP NIGHTMARE
The current South African reality is such that the structural, spatial and economic layout of South African society has remained largely unchanged since 1994. Meaning that the face of poverty is still black. So for the majority of black people in this country who don’t have access to personal vehicles, who live far from workplaces, the idea of being paid a stipend as little as R600 a month is a clear tool to exclude them.
My friend and I shared our experiences of how hard it was to try and make a living within the media space. I shared my experiences of how, even though I had the option to extend it, I had to quit my first magazine internship because I couldn’t afford to not get any income for another three months. That being an unpaid intern meant lunch hours with no lunch and trips home dragging because of the unbearable hunger pains.
My second internship paid R2,000 per month, but because I had to take a bus and a train to get to and from work, all my money went to transport. And when I received another internship in Johannesburg my family had to get into debt because I had to relocate and find accommodation, while I was getting paid R1,000 more than the previous internship. I felt like crying every time I had to pay rent, because afterwards I knew that the coming weeks would be bleak.
One is aware that newsrooms are currently running on paper-thin budgets, but surely employers have a social responsibility not to perpetuate inequality in work spaces? Is getting ‘exposure’, ‘mentoring’ and ‘experience’ – as Marie Claire said when justifying the R30 stipend – enough, when the ‘opportunity’ only benefits a privileged few?
Academic staff respond to presence of private security on campus
Following the presence of private security on campus during the #FeesMustFall2016 protests, concerned members of the Wits Academic staff community wrote a plea to Vice Chancellor Adam Habib to request that he to terminate the university’s contracts with these companies. The statement is re-produced below in full:
Dear academic colleagues
We are writing to ask for you to take a moment to respond to a grave threat that has been issued against academic staff at Wits University in Johannesburg: a threat which sets a worrying trend for times to come for all of us who teach at universities.
The backdrop is the militarisation of our university in the last few days in response to student protest. Private security forces which by appearance earn the label paramilitary have been brought onto our campus under undisclosed contracts and terms of engagement, in order to quell the sorts of protests that led successfully last year to a national agreement not to increase student fees for 2016. The South African student movement continues to fight for a fully publicly funded higher education system, but this year their planned protests have been pre-empted by the extraordinary act of using paramilitary forces to prevent disruption of the start of the academic year. We attach a few photos here to give an indication of what this means for the conduct of our everyday lives on our own university campus. We now work in a condition of occupation.
To come to the point of this request: on Friday this week the university sent an email that included a warning to staff that any resistance to the dictates of these private security forces amounts to a violation of our own terms of employment. This is a thinly veiled threat to discipline and potentially fire academic staff who refuse to recognise the authority of private security forces on the grounds of what still remains a public institution. This is a disgraceful act of intimidation against the rights of staff to peacefully protest the current structure of higher education in South Africa, as well as the occupation of our campus by paramilitary forces that, in at least one case — the company TSU Africa — have direct links to the repressive apparatus of the discredited apartheid regime.
Before the other materials mentioned, I copy below a statement that has been posted on social media, addressing South African colleagues. I urge you to read it, and if you are in agreement, to send an email of protest to our Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Adam Habib, at the address adam.habib@wits.ac.za. Please ask him (a) to rescind this threat against our colleagues, (b) to remove all private security forces from our campus, and (c) to enter into earnest negotiations with relevant parties to see how the university community can offer a united front in the struggle for a publicly funded higher education system in South Africa. Please also circulate this email to other colleagues who might be supportive.
Your solidarity at this difficult time is one of the most important assets we have at our disposal. Concerned academic staff are meeting in the coming week on campus and we may also ask you to sign a petition on this issue. In the meantime, your personal intervention by writing a short message to our Vice Chancellor would be a most welcome contribution to the attempt to de-escalate this gravely worrying moment.
With many thanks to for your solidarity.
Concerned Wits faculty and staff
The Vice Chancellor on behalf of the university’s executive has since responded to this plea. See the response here
LETTER TO THE EDITOR: International students speak out against ‘xenophobic behaviour’ at mass meeting
“As International students we note with a deep concern the xenophobic tone of Monday’s mass gathering called for by the SRC at Solomon Mahlangu House. We call on the university to conduct an investigation into the activities of that meeting, particularly on the virulent and hate-filled utterances that were directed at foreign students studying at the institution by some of the attendees, such views must be condemned to hold no place at our university.
We welcome the decision by government and the University to halt the fees increases that would have resulted in the systemic financial exclusion of many. We would like to commend the efforts of the SRC, other student organisations and the workers and academic staff of our university. We were proud to witness and be part of an extraordinary and noble effort to bring in tandem the policies of the University with the prevailing social and economic milieu in which the majority of the country’s people find themselves in.
We, like local students, found it to be unreasonable and indifferent of the university to impose a fees increase that was above the normal inflation rate. We also found to be senseless, the decision to increase fees for international students higher than for local students yet international students already paid more fees than local students. We could not comprehend why on so many ocassions the university has justified international students having to pay higher fees than local students on the basis that international students are not subsidized by the state, yet the reasons for next year’s increase was premised on a lack of state funding and reduction of state subsidies something that international students are not party to nor beneficiaries of. We call for the University’s management to provide clarity this regard.
We also call on the university to further elaborate whether its decision to revisit the upfront payment of fees will also apply to international students who are presently required to pay 75% of their fees before they are permitted to register at the beginning of each academic year. We unequivocally remain opposed to this stringent and excessive requirement that poses as barrier to entry for returning international students. We find the argument that international students leave the country without paying their fees in full (hence necessitating this requirement) to be manifestly unfounded and having no substantive facts or empirical backing. We must remind the university that an overwhelming majority of International students come from African countries, and the burden of affording tertiary education is no different to the one encountered by local students. It follows that international students must not be viewed merely as a lucrative source of income by the university. We propose, as an alternative to the present upfront fee benchmark of 75% ,that returning international students be subject to the same upfront payment regime as local students.
As international students our solidarity with the plight of local students has never been stronger and remains unwavering and unconditional. We believe free education should be the sole and ultimate goal of the state so that the doors of learning can be open and affordable to all those who are willing and are committed to pursuing tertiary education regardless of their economic status. South Africa is better served when its tertiary institutions are able to harness and nurture the potential of everyone, including the poorest of society. We , however, acknowledge the time and resources needed for this goal to be achieved.
We would also like to affirm our commitment and support to the abolition of outsourcing of workers by the university. The continued and unwarranted exploitation of workers can no longer be tolerated. Outsourcing and the consequences that follow from it stands against the very ethos of the South African Constitution, those of Human dignity, equality and freedom. The university must accelerate its efforts to bring the outsourcing of workers to an immediate end.
The Fees Must Fall movement has demonstrated the collective power of students in our university. It has affirmed the long standing ideal that if we as students are willing to put our differences aside and work towards the achievement of a common endeavour, we are bound to succeed. In the past few days we have succeeded, while we are yet to see the tangible results of our struggle, we have offered a glimpse of what is likely to happen when the university and the state fails to consider the legitimate concerns of students. Any failure on part of the university is likely to trigger our collective ire in the future.
With this prospect in mind we call on the University to resume the academic programme without further delay. We believe the time has come for dialogue on what the university must do going forward in order to address the demands that were raised in the past two weeks. Students and including international students must facilitate that dialogue in order to ensure that the university meets its obligations. The process of engaging the demands that were raised must be inclusive, transparent and open to all.
A further delay in the resumption of the academic programme will affect international students most adversely. It will mean additional expenses for food and groceries, transport and accommodation; for those whose leases expire in at the end of November. This will also further strain international students financially as they are expected to meet the 75% upfront requirement at the beginning of next year. It will also inconvenience international students who are obligated to renew or extend their study visas at the end of the year. It is self-defeating to have fought against one form of exclusion and only to be confronted by another. Students stand the risk of academic exclusion if the current impasse continues.
In revising the exam timetable, we urge the university to take cognisance of the disadvantage; a prolonged and further delay is likely to have on international students.”
Issued by:
The Zimbabwean Students Association.
The Wits Congolese Society.
The Zambian Students Association.
The West African Students Union.
The East African Students Association.
The International Office of the Postgraduate Association.
LETTER TO THE ED: We are fighting for free higher education; the biggest salary increase our mothers will ever receive!
by Mukovhe Masutha
Mukovhe Masutha is the 2011 Wits SRC President. Photo: Wits Vuvuzela.
If you take my mother’s annual salary and multiply it by three years, she still wouldn’t afford to pay for a single year of study at the University of the Witwatersrand.
She is one of many cleaning mothers across my country who leave home at 4:30am and return from work around 6pm. Over the years, their salaries have been nothing but stagnant when compared to the ever increasing cost of food, transport, electricity and other basic necessities.
This has been my mother’s routine for the past 26 years and sadly, this routine has conditioned her to genuinely believe that what she receives as a cleaner is what is due to her, nothing more nothing less.
If this revolving door of poverty and marginalization is not militantly disrupted today, the majority of South African sons and daughters will follow in my mother’s footsteps of normalized pain and conscious submission to a humiliating system.
This is the lens through which one must look at the revolutionary anti-fee increment movement led by the Students Representative Council (SRC) at the University of the Witwatersrand and other campuses across the country.
It is for this reason that I argue that free higher education will be the biggest salary increment our mothers will ever receive in their lifetime.
Restoring the dignity of our communities and safeguarding our future and that of our country is an ideal that we must beg no one for.
The current wave of protest must mark a declaration of war to all those participating in the commodification of higher education as a product in the market.
The time for rhetoric has come to an end, we must take it from here.
Our movement as students must transcend the walls of individual campuses and move with the necessary speed towards the National Treasury and the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET).
Our employees at both departments must pass legislation that introduces a higher education tax on all monopoly capital industries, foreign direct investments and the wealthy as determined by their household income.
All funds collected from the higher education tax must fund the immediate widening of participation in higher education through the realization of free higher education by January 2016, massive investment in new higher education infrastructure, limiting universities’ institutional autonomy (particularly their ability to determine the cost of academic programmes) and the adoption of a “People’s University” approach to further decolonize the higher education landscape in South Africa.
Our call must be guided by the principle of redistributive justice and not another misguided rainbow nation approach. We must not fall into the trap of calling for free higher education for all.
Our call must be for free higher education for the poor and the working class as determined by household income. We cannot afford to subsidize the wealthy; they must continue to pay.
Every revolution will be confronted by reactionaries who seek to protect and maintain the status quo. In this regard we must ignore co-opted anti-blacks like Mondli Makhanya, editor of some newspaper, and his masters who find it reasonable to refer to our peaceful protests as hooliganism.
When the University of Cape Town says our protest action is disrupting the academic project, we must remind Max Price that the continued commodification of higher education has disrupted our academic project for decades. The University of Cape Town’s response to students’ protests is as irrational as the judge who granted them a court order to stop students from demanding their constitutional right to education.
We must not be easily discouraged. We must remember that our struggle today is a logical continuation of the struggle of the class of 1976. If they could confront the apartheid regime’s live ammunition head on, surely we should be able to keep Mondli Makhanya, Max Price, police, judges and their masters in their lane.
If South Africans agree that access to higher education and training is a strategic tool to break the cycle of poverty and to undo the socio-economic legacy of apartheid, then we must also agree that prohibiting some youth from accessing the same higher education and training is an act of reinforcing the cycle of poverty and safeguarding the socio-economic legacy of the apartheid regime.
If we claim to agree with President Nelson Mandela when he said education is the most powerful tool we can use to change an unjust world, then we must also agree that prohibiting some youth from accessing education is an act of keeping an unjust world the same. It is that simple.
If the ladder of educational opportunity rises high at the doors of some youth and scarcely rises at the doors of others, while at the same time formal education is made a prerequisite to occupational and social advance, then education may become the means, not of eliminating race and class distinctions, but of deepening and solidifying them.
These words by President Truman in 1947 summarize how the higher education in South Africa continues to reproduce and reinforce social inequality while sabotaging the project of nation building.
Finally, I would like to commend student leaders at the University of the Witwatersrand for literally bringing university managers down to earth. I remember sitting on the 11th floor negotiating with Wits Management on why fees should not increase.
A mere 10 minutes into the negotiations, a very arrogant university manager would stand up and arrogantly say “we are clearly disagreeing, let’s vote”. She knew that the whole council, predominately made up of old conservative right wingers, would vote against the students’ lonely voice as represented by myself.
Thank you for turning the tables in your numbers and may the struggle continue!
Maaatla!
*Mukovhe Masutha is the chairperson of Thusanani Foundation and former President of the Students Representative Council at the University of the Witwatersrand, currently pursuing a PhD in Higher Education Management at the University of Bath (UK).
OPINION: I don’t mind my language
To my fellow English speaking South Africans, English is not my mother tongue. So no, I don’t speak my African languages to only skinner about you. My language is way more sophisticated than that. It is bold, descriptive, romantic and fierce.
It seems to me that there is a taboo around speaking vernacular languages in academic spaces. If you don’t speak with a Model C accent, you are viewed as a not so intelligent sub human species with a primitive understanding of the world. Its been 39 years since black students protested against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in schools, yet we have academic institutions like Stellenbosch University who blatantly refuse to welcome and facilitate language diversity among students.
I used to chuckle whenever I’d hear students say, “I go to Virrts”. But now it makes me sad to hear it. Sad to see my fellow African Witsies morph their speech to fit into a nonsensical and uniform mould of what an educated black person should sound like. Language should be a tool to communicate with a diverse people not a weapon used to exclude students from academic discourse.
I recently had the pleasure of meeting the author of the Sesotho dictionary, Zulumathabo Zulu. I was going to write articles in the seSotho language for the first time and he was going to be my guide through it. I was in awe of the man’s accomplishments but at the same time I was intimidated by him for two reasons. Firstly, the seSotho I speak has been infused with the other five languages that I use, so it’s not as sophisticated as his. Secondly, the man has written a whole seSotho dictionary and its focus is on my long time nemesis- MATHEMATICS!
The first question I asked him was how I as a young journalist could effectively use his book to write human interest stories? He smiled and eloquently explained that, “in seSotho, mathematics is derived from the ordinary and mundane concepts that people already understand.” He flipped through a copy of his book and randomly stopped on a page with the word ‘motshetshe’ listed on it. “As in the crease that is ironed down a pair of formal trousers?,” I naively asked. “Exactly, the angle that is formed by the crease is used in our language to explain the mathematical concept of angles and arches.” he replied.
He explained that African people have mathematical knowledge which is integrated as part of their lives, unlike the Western communities, where mathematics is more abstract. I experienced pure enlightenment and joy as I came to realise how beautifully simple and complex my language is. It became so vividly apparent to me in that moment, that my language transcends barriers, it is versatile and far more refined than society gives it credit for.
Nasal speech does not make you sound more intelligent and speaking your mother tongue doesn’t make you stupid. Our language is an important part of our heritage, something that comes or belongs to one by reason of birth. If we are not able to speak it and learn in our native tongues, I fear it may end up on the endangered species list.
So no, I don’t speak my mother tongue to just skinner about you. I choose to speak the languages that I do to be more imaginative, passionate and practical than that.
Wits Students react to Luister
The Critical Thinking Reading Group (CTRG) held its weekly meeting at the CALS Seminar room on Monday. However instead of adhering to the group’s regular program a screening of the documentary, Lusiter and a discussion around it occurred instead.
Photo: YouTube
While many students expressed their heartbreak and disgust with what they saw, Anele Nzimande, fourth-year LLB student highlighted how it is hard to be black and to be a black student in South Africa because some of the things you go through don’t have vocabulary to articulate.
Nzimande also emphasized how it is problematic to demonise Stellenbosch and the language policy, pointing out that we are dealing with white people, whether they are British or Afrikaans.
“I think sometimes we get lost in the demonization of Afrikaans because we think 1976 and the Afrikaans policy, but, I think being at Wits is as violent.”
One of the points highlighted at the screening was how there is a lack of cultural adaptation at Universities.
She added that, “Wits’ vision is a global one, what does that even mean for a university that is in Africa. I think that we really need to interrogate [that idea] because as black people we have become very sensitized to Afrikaans dominance and the Wits, UCT kind of dominance always slips through the cracks because it’s much more subtle and gentle. It strokes us as opposed to the very harsh brutality of Afrikaans.”
CRITICAL THINKER: PhD Constitutional Law student Sanele Sibanda highlighted that we are living in a confounding time in South Africa, especially as black people. Photo: Sibongile Machika
PhD Constitutional Law student Sanele Sibanda highlighted that we are living in a confounding time in South Africa. “Different places have different issues but have similarities especially if you are a black person living in these spaces.”
Sibanda critiques how TranformWits as a movement has not gelled. “Why is that in this particular time at UCT a movement managed to form, and why OpenStellenbosch has managed to grow some feet and continue? What is it about Wits that makes it different?”
Sibanada told the reading group that is made up largely of black students that “This is not a black critical thinking group. This is an open group for everybody on this campus. But you look around this room and what do you see?”
One of the highlighted questions was the issue of ‘intellectualizing’ suffering. Sibanda notes there are talks about institutional culture that is oppressive what does this mean?
“The idea that there is no vocabulary to articulate this space we’re in, the suffering we feel, the victimization- what does this ultimately mean for struggle because I identify with this notion, but what does it mean for struggle at wits?”
With the burning issues of transformation at hand, Anele Nzimande pointed out how university education does not deal with black issues.
“I think the problem with many of the Vice Chancellors and students have been produced in the past twenty years, it hasn’t produced the kind of Vice Chancellors, Alumni’s and students that can deal or speak directly to black issues,”
Nzimande also said that she has wasted four years of her life on education that has done nothing for her. “For me, the fact that I cannot explain some of the things I know to my father is problematic and highlights how this education is not very useful.”
The Lusiter documentary was created in collaboration with Open Stellenbosch. The documentary shares the lived experiences of black students at Stellenbosch. It highlights the white violence, discrimination, exclusion and racism black students go through at the university.
Stellenbosch has recently been in hot water for their language policy, a policy described as “a clear intention not to transform and a way for Stellenbosch to maintain the status quo while pretending to change,” by CTRG speaker Nomonde Nyembe.
CTRG at the Wits Law School was formed in 2013 as a desire to establish a platform for intellectual stimulation that extends beyond the lecture and tutorial domains.
The CTRG members hold weekly meetings to discuss and critique thought provoking materials that will stimulate intellectual conversations among Wits students.
Marikana memory fades for students
The third anniversary of the Marikana massacre came and went on August 16.
The massacre, one of the worst atrocities committed by the South African police against civilians since Apartheid, has been extensively documented through the Farlam Commission that followed and documented the lives of the families of the deceased miners since 2012.
In contrast, it appears the events of Marikana are quickly fading from the memory of the student community at Wits University, one of South Africa’s top tertiary institutions.
Wits Vuvuzela spoke to a number of students on campus about their recollection of the massacre, their thoughts about the Farlam Commission and whether they commemorated the anniversary in any way.
What do you know about Marikana?
“Marikana is the human rights violation, the killing of the miners that happened in North-West,” said Boniswa Mdangi, 2nd year BA Social Work.
“I just know the strikes and the killings that happened a year ago or a year and a half ago, whenever it was,” said Michael Sithole, 3rd year Accounting.
“Absolutely nothing. This is definately the first time I have heard about it,” said Didi Allie, 1st year BA Fine Arts.
“I know there was a shooting between miners and the police and things got a bit ugly, some people died,” said Wandile Mgwenya 3rd year Accounting Sciences.
“Marikana is in the North-West where we have a platinum mine called Lonmin. I know about the massacre that happened there,” said Lutendo Mulaudzi, 1st year Mining Engineering.
“I know that Marikana was a very gruesome event that shook South Africa. I know a lot of people failed to take accountability. I know a lot of miners died,” said Lindelwa Didiza, 3rd year Bcom Accounting.
“I know it has to do with mining and it’s been going on for a long time. There’s a lot of politics around it. I’m not 100% sure what it’s regarding,” said Nthabi Maine, 1st year BA Film and TV.
“I know Marikana is a mine in Rustenburg where there was a strike and people got killed during that strike by the police,” said Mthetheleli, 3rd year BCom Accounting.
“Miners were rioting for higher wages and it’s all around the police reaction because they started shooting,” said Nicky Patchitt, 1st year Film and TV.
“There was a strike because miners were unhappy about conditions on the mines and pay. And the strike ended in miners being shot by police,” said Lunga Mputa, 3rd year Economics and Finance.
What did you do to commemorate the 3rd anniversary on the 16th August?
“No, but we were planning to do something about it since we have the Marikana killing as part of our assignments for human rights, social work,” said BA Nomasonto Bore, 2nd year BA Social Work.
“I kind of feel there’s other things we could have celebrated and gone back to, just simple protestings and shootings like, in Apartheid era, the Soweto strikes and people that were shot there, that’s old news now and now they’re worried about miners?” said Daniel Jean van der Merwe, 2nd year BSc Archeology and Anatomy.
“No, I’m very aware of what happened at Marikana and the stuff that happened but I didn’t do anything, in my heart I’m not satisfied with what they giving them, I’d like for them to get more than what they are getting [referring to a statue he saw being build near the site]. Rembering is good but people want more than that,” said Philani Ntuli, 3rd year Business Management.
Why is Marikana important?
“This Marikana issue has shown us that it’s not always a race issue, it’s also a class issue and power struggle … It’s not always a race issue, even our own black people can oppress us,” said Thato Mokoena, 2nd year BA Social Work.
What is the Farlam Commission?
“I think I’ve heard about that but I don’t know what it actually is,” said Nicky Patchitt, 1st year Film and TV.
“It’s a commission that was set up to enquire what happened at Marikana. The results were talking about questioning the authority of the SAPS (South African Police Force), if they were experienced enough to be in power,” said Lutendo Mulaudzi, 1st year Mining engineering.
“Some people that were set up to enquire about the whole thing, that’s all I know,” said Wandile Mgwenya, 3rd year Accounting Sciences.
“Not much except that it never really addressed the problem or come up with any solutions. What I know nothing really happened for the miners, which I think is unfair,” said Lunga Mputa, 3rd year Bcom Economics.
The Marikana reality
Despite media coverage, the lives of miners and their families have not changed, as explored in a recent article in the Daily Maverick. “Marikana looks the same”, the article states. Living conditions of the miners and their families have not improved significantly despite government and Lonmin mines promising to build better housing, improve infrastructure and provide support for families affected by the massacre.
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We Should Be Writing podcast
- Bonus Episode: There's a Zille on my stoepSince her announcement as the Democratic Alliance’s mayoral candidate for Johannesburg, Helen Zille has dominated national headlines. In this bonus episode of We Should Be Writing podcast, hosts Lulah Mapiye and Bonolo Mokonoto dissect a media meet-and-greet with the mayoral hopeful. From her extensive political résumé to her controversial public utterance, we examine why the Democratic Alliance has chosen Hellen Zille as their candidate for the 2027 local mayoral elections. Additionally, […]