South Africa

South Africa

Op-Ed: #RhodesCanBeFixed; it begins with an idea

Op-Ed: #RhodesCanBeFixed; it begins with an idea

(Mostly) white South Africa is up in arms over the horse memorial; Sunette Bridges is chaining herself to statues; the EFF has snookered the ANC and the FF Plus into saying the same thing. And Rhodes, after weeks of teetering on his post, was due to fall at the time of writing. What came first, and more importantly, what’s next? By MARELISE VAN DER MERWE.

I had promised myself I would stay out of the #RhodesMustFall debate. Previously, the extent of it had been to post on social media the following status:

#RhodesMustFall has left me with a deep sorrow on many levels, for our country/ past/ present/ future, and not all of which I can articulate. I can’t help thinking it would all be going better if people were giving opinions less and listening/reflecting more. Almal wil saampraat en niemand wil luister. And that is all I wish to say.

But things have changed. The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has raised the stakes, as it tends to do. Steve Hofmeyr has entered the fray, as he tends to do. And President Jacob Zuma has awkwardly backed into a corner and tried to pretend none of it is happening, as he tends to do. So, everyone has assumed their positions. And it’s all looking startlingly familiar.

There are two differences this time, though. The first is: As much as the African National Congress (ANC) might have liked to keep quiet about the EFF’s statue-whipping crusade, the arrest of two EFF members outside Parliament pushed them into a corner, forcing Chief Whip Stone Sizani to say something fairly generic about law-abiding citizens. Mission accomplished, then: the ANC, in one swift move by the EFF, has been forced to align itself with the conservative camp. The promise to take down all colonial symbols, clubs in hand, is a signature move by the EFF: it could be dismissed as clumsy by those who don’t know better, but on closer inspection, it’s politically shrewd. Say what you like about the EFF, but their speciality is forcing their opponents’ hands.

A second feature of the Rhodes debate is that it’s the first successful student-driven protest of its magnitude in decades; and moreover, it did not stop at the student body. As pointed out by my colleague Marianne Thamm, it is being driven primarily by journalists, academics and students; in other words, scholars and thought leaders. Its source was initially the University of Cape Town (UCT); similarly, there has been heavy debate amongst academics themselves – an example being the debate between Professors Xolela Mangcu, Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass – who all positioned themselves differently, regardless of their affiliations.

The importance of this is that ultimately the role of academia in transforming everyday life is significant. Change does begin with an idea. At a workshop held at the self-same UCT last year, philosopher George Hull cited Miranda Fricker, who writes of hermeneutical injustice, which she describes as “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from understanding owing to prejudicial flaws in shared resources for social interpretation”. In layman’s terms, this is the capacity of people to be understood. Where there is hermeneutical injustice, the person or people’s experience is misunderstood because there is an inequality of representation. An example would be that many more South Africans know about Christmas than, say, the sacred nature of the Lake Fundudzi to the Venda people. (It can be argued that the Venda may prefer it this way, not wishing to have thousands of tourists descend on the lake, but that is another issue altogether.)

When one thinks of national symbols, is any of this sounding familiar?

It’s a fine line, of course. The reality is that probably a lot fewer people would give two figs about Rhodes sitting triumphantly on his horse if his legacy were not quite so visible in everyday life. It would probably be a lot easier to walk past him each day and say, “Sorry, bra. Your day came and went. Pity about the pigeon crap – ” if one’s family were not unemployed, disempowered, prejudged, or otherwise disadvantaged.

That said, it’s also true that human beings often paradoxically care more about issues of identity than issues of human suffering (although the two are often inextricably linked). There will be a greater media outcry about the destruction of a statue than the massacre of 147 Kenyan students. Citizens will galvanise over the falling of a long-dead colonial hero faster than the slaughter of dozens of mineworkers at Marikana or illegal evictions all over the country. Citizens will be sooner see their tax money being spent on sport than feeding the hungry. And, of course, the ever-political Hofmeyr’s solution to the monument problem is to “build more monuments”, which would be fine, if it wouldn’t cost money that could be spent on, say, schools, food or healthcare.

But, believe some scholars, there may be a reason for this. Fricker believes that in some cases, the absence of just thought – or, to use her own language, the presence of hermeneutical injustice – is linked to this kind of injustice on the ground. According to Hull, there may also be a ‘hermeneutical lacuna’, or a gap in understanding: an issue arises where there is not yet language to describe it. In other words, the thinking is not yet progressive enough even to describe the pain. There is a desperate need for conceptual understanding.

In a country like South Africa, this kind of injustice becomes deeply insidious. It takes the form of marginalisation, where less powerful groups do not often enough take part in the production of knowledge or the telling of stories: they do not direct research projects or as many TV documentaries, their books are not published as frequently, they do not have as much access to the Internet and their stories are eventually simply absent, to a certain degree, from the collective understanding of the world. They are effectively silenced.

This is illustrated in more than just the #RhodesMustFall debate. Think of media, television, books, even our schooling (despite the fact that numerous studies have shown that children’s learning is severely hampered by not being taught in their mother tongue). As far as academia goes, #RhodesMustFall has further developed a long-simmering debate about a lack of support and respect for African scholarship. Worldwide, black voices have simply not had the space to speak as loudly. More locally, many of South Africa’s English speakers have been quick to call out Afrikaans universities as teaching in the language of the oppressor, while merrily calling, without a trace of irony, for all the country’s universities to switch to English medium. Colonialism has not died, it has merely changed shape. The debate has been dying to come to a head for generations.

None of this has an easy practical solution, although awareness is a start. Charles Mills writes of “white ignorance”, which has been evident in the number of #RhodesMustFall columns and letters arguing, “But it’s just a statue” or “you can’t erase history; it happened” (evidently these folks never learnt the difference between connotation and denotation). But, more importantly, myriad studies have been conducted on the link between this kind of marginalisation – the feeling of being unable to express oneself, tell one’s story – and violence. Van der Merwe and Gobodo-Madikizela write in Narrating Our Healing of the relationship between creating a coherent narrative, or life story, and healing from trauma; Bradbury writes in Till Violence Do Us Part of the role of being able to communicate in preventing violence; Ruth Kluger relates the role of storytelling in healing in Landscapes of Memory. Cano and Vivian, Babcock and numerous other scholars have developed the notion that the ability to be understood, and fairly represented, reduces rage and/or violent tendencies. In layman’s terms, being silenced is a one-way road to violent fury. Given that the issue at hand is under-representation, is it any wonder that protestors are so angry?

It is deeply ironic that critics have complained that it is a thuggish act to toss faeces at a statue, that the EFF’s threats are barbaric, or that the student protestors are – to use a startlingly colonial term – “savages”. Oppression is itself violent, although the violence may be systemic. Furthermore, in the same way that the Democratic Alliance (DA) walks out of Parliament when it feels that it is not being heard, these are acts of protest. Protest occurs when speech has failed, or is perceived to be inadequate. These are acts that go beyond talking, when talking is not believed to be an option. Nobody is saying it is ideal to toss faeces or to commit vandalism, but to facilitate dialogue, the willingness to listen has to be there, and communicated clearly. When someone commits a violent act – and to toss faeces is, in its way, violent – it is not good enough to reply, “You’re a thug, shut up.” You have to provide an alternative. And ensure that that alternative is sincere, and remains there. Otherwise you are part of the problem.

It’s instructive that, as reported by Rebecca Davis, the students appeared so afraid of a decision not being taken that they were prepared to storm the UCT council meeting until they were reassured that a vote would be taken. Anger and anxiety simmer very close to the surface, and having been released, my guess is that neither will disappear until the protestors believe there is a safe space in which they will be fairly represented, and their stories told.

“Revolution is not necessarily violent and if it is, then you need to reconstruct,” Professor Raymond Suttner recently said. “One of the things common to all the great leaders of our time is that they listened. Mandela was interested in people as human beings; he spent hours with them. Listening is very important. When you have a solution, people must see themselves in the solution.”

The solution, therefore, has to be twofold. Academically, the debate must stop being a debate – we need to stop arguing. In the words of race scholar Robin DiAngelo, those in positions of privilege must stop laying down the law for how marginalised people talk about how they’ve been marginalised. “It’s like if you’re standing on my head and I say, ‘Get off my head,’ and you respond, ‘Well, you need to tell me nicely,’ says DiAngelo. “I’d be like, ‘No. Fuck you. Get off my fucking head.’ There has to be an immediate focus on reconciliation, and like the debate itself, it needs to begin with the thought leaders. If acts of violent communication are expressing marginalisation, the immediate solution is to stop marginalising the minimised parties. Step back, start listening, where we have the power to do so. Not just in universities. In media, in broadcasting, in publishing – everywhere. There needs to be a real commitment from the country’s storytellers not only to tell the stories of the powerful. Like the debate, it can be driven by those of us who deal in words and narratives. This may require a total overhaul of what we view as news; what we view as scholarship; what we view as important; and, of course, most centrally to the Rhodes debate, how we frame our heritage. That’s fine. We need a change.

Secondly, government and universities alike need to take a serious look at why these contested symbols – countrywide – are so bothersome, and treat the disease, not just the symptom. Symbols become symbols because of the meaning we attach to them. They gain power because of the lives we live. The EFF is not vandalising statues because it doesn’t like the statues. It’s capitalising on anger about inequality. Therefore we need to fix inequality at ground level. This is the challenge to government, business, academia and citizens in the next two decades of democracy. Here’s looking at you, Number One, and those alongside. Those of us who deal in ideas are listening; we’ll do our best to write a new story. We’d like you to be in it.

If colonialism were not still alive and well, Rhodes would just be some guy we once knew. This debate hurts us – black and white – because we know it to ring true. DM

Photo: The statue of Cecil John Rhodes is bound by straps connected to a crane prior to its removal from the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, 09 April 2015. EPA/NIC BOTHMA

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