The Soapbox | Where South Africans Speak Out

I recently had an idealism-demolishing experience participating in a debate on behalf of the DA Students’ Organisation (DASO) with other student politicians at the University of Pretoria. The topic: transformation. The reason: probably to stir up a bit of emotive politics among students just in time to remind them to “vote with their kind” in the upcoming general election. The facilitator: the SRC, which is ruled by a solid majority of the Freedom Front Plus (FF+), despite attempts by the university management to “depoliticise” its institutions.  
 
A less sceptical observer might explain that the purpose of these debates is to give an outlet to the political thinking and contestation which has purportedly been banned in the “depoliticised” Tuks SRC. Whatever the particular motive of the SRC may have been in choosing the topic, on the whole the debates do represent one of the few opportunities for Tuks students to get exposure to politics. 
 
But, alas, anyone who has ever attended a student debate at Tuks knows that the “political discourse” degrades fairly quickly into a racial zero-sum game between whites and blacks but mainly between Afrikaners and blacks, characterised by a good match of jeers, accusations and insults. One almost has empathy for the reluctance of Big Brother in the university management to let these renegade young politicos have their way in the SRC. 
 
In fact the whole experience was sombre, if not completely depressing for a person who grew up with the idealism of 1994, the promise of a society which belongs to all who live in it and hope for a future in which nobody would be made to feel “lesser than” by anyone else.  
 
Listening to diatribe after diatribe by speakers against Afrikaans and white students, eagerly encouraged by ANC and COPE ringleaders, one could easily have imagined that apartheid had never ended and that South Africa wasn’t being ruled by a party that proclaims itself the “vanguard of the African majority”. Afrikaners in turn, with the exception of a few DASO and FF+ supporters, hardly bothered to show up for the debate, probably avoiding being called to account for the sins of their fathers.  
 
Aside from the ANC and COPE speakers, both of whom stopped short of chanting “down with Afrikaans and Afrikaners at Tuks”, a member of the audience launched into particularly hateful tirade, asking black students why they were busy “negotiating” with whites instead of “taking back” what rightfully belonged to them.  
 
The DASO proposal that racial quotas be abolished at the university in favour of redress measures based on the socio-economic living conditions of students, although well received by the audience was rejected by the ANC and COPE, the latter being slightly more confused about its own position on the matter. The ANC speaker repeated the well-known mantra that racial quotas will last as long as colonialism and apartheid lasted. 
 
The bizarre case for racial bean-counting – a policy sacrosanct to the ANC – is premised on the assumption that most whites at Universities like Tuks aren’t there because of their academic suitability, but because some sinister force of apartheid, probably University management, is acting on their behalf. If it were not for this force, so the young Comrades argue, the university would be 80% black and there would be no Afrikaans which, in the thinking of a racial turf warrior, advantages the “white cause”. (The truth is that only three degree courses at Tuks are still offered in Afrikaans from start to finish).  
 
When the comrades are reminded of the fact that all students are admitted to university based on an “M score” (basically their academic performance in high school) they rightly point out that many rural and township schools are still plagued by the legacy of apartheid education which disadvantages a great many prospective black students.  
 
What they of course don’t concede is that political power did in fact change hands in 1994, and that the people responsible for the dismal state of education aren’t the children of former apartheid beneficiaries who grew up under the new order, but the democratically elected ANC government with its parliamentary majority of 70%. Today, incompetent teachers, schools that lack adequate facilities and dismal matric pass rates aren’t so much consequences of apartheid than consequences of ANC rule.  
 
But what I probably found most depressing about our debate at Tuks was the reductionist idea of so many attendees that what we were in fact engaging in was a competition for state resources and recognition between races. In the hearts of its proponents, racial quotas not only meant guaranteed racial preferment for “our own” but also just racial punishment of “the others”.  
 
When I confronted a COPE speaker after the debate about the obvious contradictions between his own utterances and that of his party leadership about race, language and diversity, he responded that South Africa could not afford to be “held hostage” by a few Afrikaners. In the same vein the FF+ Youth Leader, Cornelius Janse van Rensburg, once angrily reminded the ANC at a similar campus debate that it was the tax money of whites and Afrikaners that kept the university as well as the country in business.  
 
Neither of these respective sentiments, expressed in the heat of crowd-pleasing exchanges, offer to move the debate beyond our unchangeable past to our quite changeable future. Both these arguments are essentially self-indulgent, taking young South Africans back to a crude and callous politics preceding the Constitutional Compact of 1993 and 1996. Moreover, they aim to deceive, obfuscating the fact that the income disparity AMONG whites and AMONG blacks are today far greater than BETWEEN blacks and whites.  
 
What is needed is a paradigm-shift (excuse the cliché) from that of racial competition to social cohesion. A cohesion-centred paradigm in our society, rooted in the Constitutional values of freedom, dignity and equality, can achieve so much more to channel the human and financial resources of the wealthy in aid of the poor than the ANC (and COPE) model of a racial tug-of-war. It will also force the government to face-up to its failures instead blaming everything by default on the past.  
 
With a cooperation-centred paradigm comes the realisation that neither white nor black can benefit from the disadvantage of the other. If our universities shun some of the best medical students today, tomorrow we shouldn’t be surprised by a dire shortage of doctors in public hospitals, where most patients are black. Yet if today we take no measures to create opportunities for the poor, black or white, tomorrow we shouldn’t be surprised that many young people have opted for a life of crime.  
 
We only have one nation with one future: it is our duty to shape this nation into one which where the rights and success of one contributes to the protection and opportunity of the whole. Here’s hoping 22 April 2009 moved South Africa farther from racial competition and closer to social cooperation and ultimate cohesion.

Cilliers Brink is DASO Branch Leader at the University of Pretoria.