Of Clubbing Springboks and Other Unspeakable Crimes

What does the assassination of UK MP Jo Cox have to do with South Africa and our government’s increasing paranoia about protest?

The suspect in Jo Cox case, Thomas Mair, has links to the far-right Springbok Club, an organization that sports the old South Africa flag on its Facebook page and which equates the era of colonialism and racist rule in Africa to “civilization”.

No doubt murdering an MP in broad daylight fits their definition of “civilized”.

Such is the horror of bigotry: attitudes despising the “other” lead to distain for the value of “other” life. Ms Cox stood for the UK’s inclusion in Europe; that made her subhuman in the mindset of the extreme bigot.

Back to South Africa today, the apparently “new” South Africa with a different flag.

Over the last year, there have been about 14,000 service delivery protests, 20% of them violent. There has also been a growing tide of student protest: #RhodesMustFull, #FeesMustFall and, lately, rape culture.

Last year, the response of universities was attempting to contain protest, while agreeing with the goals – at least partially. The effect was to deflect protest to government where it belonged, at least with the fees issue. The result was dramatic: the protest movement forced a change from government that 20 years of polite conversation had failed to achieve.

So where are we now?

Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande published a paranoid diatribe on Daily Maverick (14 June 2016), claiming that student protesters are a tiny privileged minority out to create mayhem and who belong in jail.

I strongly oppose the kind of protest that doesn’t value life and that destroys infrastructure. But that does not mean there is no valid protest and that all protest should be criminalized, which is where we are headed. There is a line between militant protest and unacceptably violent protest and a rights-oriented society has to be very careful to place that line accurately. We also need to be very careful about using “lawful” as too strong a stick to prevent inconvenient protest. In the UK in 2008, Greenpeace activists who were accused of unlawfully damaging a coal power station were exonerated because the outcome of their protests had a higher public good than the damage they caused.

When we reach a situation where bigots and supposed progressives are speaking with the same voice, we have to be very, very worried that we have not placed that line correctly, that we are edging towards police-state conditions and that the underlying causes of the protest have become too uncomfortable to address.

On bigotry, what does Comrade Blade have to offer? Consider this:

It is a narrative of anger, of ears sealed against rational debate, eyes shut tight against reality, including the nature of the real challenges facing us as a country as we change for the better. It is a narrative initiated during the 1999 election by another minority party, one which had absorbed most of the Broederbond-fuelled members of apartheid’s ruling National Party, and much of its ideology. A narrative under the simple catch phrase, “Fight Back.”

This, of course, refers to the DA and its predecessor, the DP, which merged with the National party to form the DA. What he fails to mention is that the Nats demerged and their leadership decamped to the ANC.

It is with this background that I return to the dangers of cozying up to bigotry.

In South Africa, the legacy of racism has an obfuscatory effect. When the ANC aligns itself with bigots, the old divisions of race make that less apparent than it should be. That both old-school bigots and the ANC only see criminality in protest makes them odd bedfellows. For this reason, this is a rather fractious alliance, one that must be punctured by the odd Penny Sparrow incident to bring things back to normal – the ANC is the party of opposition to bigotry.

Then an inconvenient protest breaks out – the bigots and the ANC line up – oops, someone has to post a racist comment on social media to bring things back to normal.

What is increasingly being laid bare is that the ANC is not itself immune to bigotry, even if it has the option of beating a comfortable retreat to moral outrage about racism. The danger that this presents is that the ANC can march deep into bigot territory and cover its retreat with the race flag – with the actual damage to rights the government has inflicted lost in the resulting righteous anger over racism.

Take the question of rape culture. Here at The University Currently Known as Rhodes (UCKAR), after anti-rape protests broke out, the ANC Women’s League sent a delegation to express concern. Where were they 10 years ago during the Zuma rape trial when they supported him to the hilt despite his atrocious attitudes to women that emerged in court?

Given that rape is supposed to be a serious crime and we have evidence that it is not being handled adequately, are we attempting to remedy that? Possibly – but not as intensively as the government, with the connivance of universities, is attempting to criminalize protest. While naming someone as rapist is attacked as a contravention of the right to due process, Comrade Blade says that protesters deserve only one thing: jail. No hint there of a requirement of due process.

One of the more obnoxious manifestations of rape culture at UCKAR is a venerable tradition known as “seal clubbing”: a contest among senior students to have sex with as many innocent first years as possible. That this practice has such a repulsive name would be enough, you would think, to make it a target for eradication. But no: the university’s response is to warn new students of the practice, rather than target the problem at source. Has anyone said that anyone promoting this “tradition” belongs in jail? No?

Meanwhile, bigots applaud the university administration, in concert with the ANC government, for standing up to “unlawful” protests.

So here’s the real divide: those who truly want an inclusive, progressive society and those who have common cause with bigots. Let us stop pretending otherwise; if not the Springbok Club may find themselves in the awkward position of welcoming the ANC into its ranks.

How Justice Fails

At the university apparently still called Rhodes over the last week, there have been some disturbing events. A group of students published a list of 11 names of alleged rapists, and attempted to ferret them out of university residences. Protesters also invaded lectures and barricaded streets.

When vigilante justice arises, it is usually a consequence of the failure of regular justice. So you need to track back to the point of failure to stop it from happening.

Rape is notoriously hard to prosecute; this is true also in South Africa despite progressive legislation.

Where does this leave the victim, who is in a weak position versus the perpetrator? Do you report it to the police, undergo an invasive investigation, then find the perpetrator not only walks free but is able to threaten you?

Whether it is rape, sexual harassment or abuse of a position of power, there is an enormous amount of hypocrisy in our society. Remember Bill Clinton? His behaviour was at very least abuse of power, expecting sexual favours from people who looked up to him as president. And this was dismissed at the time as a right wing plot to discredit him (spot the irony: it was Clinton who pushed the Democrats well to the right of centre).

Then there is the mysterious case of IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn whose rape case was not prosecuted, yet the alleged victim was given a massive out of court settlement. This too was alleged to be a “political conspiracy”. Rape is not a civil matter; in the not too distant past, in this country and in many others it attracted the death penalty. Who ever heard of an out of court settlement for a serious crime?

To South Africa: in 2006, then-deputy president Jacob Zuma was tried for rape. The case has all the hallmarks of a person of power crushing a vulnerable accuser. Even if he was not guilty of rape (as claimed by the judge), he was at very least seriously abusing his position and his attitudes to women were revealed to be deeply problematic.

So what did those at the progressive end of politics, the natural home of feminism, do? They rallied around him. Every formation of the ANC including the Women’s League and Youth League supported him, as did the Communist Party. Cosatu’s support was the weakest, with a statement that the law must take its course, but even they did not break with him once his attitudes were a matter of public record and joined the rest of the alliance in welcoming his acquittal. Cosatu General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi was also accused of rape in 2013, a charge that was reduced to sexual harassment, But what was most bizarre about this was how Cosatu claimed they were considering pursuing a rape charge against him. Excuse me? Aren’t criminal charges a police matter? Why is the organization involved in any way?

Once again, a rape or sexual harassment charge is framed as a political vendetta rather than something that must be dealt with in the strongest terms as a matter of course.

We cannot excuse EFF leader Julius Malema from this malaise; when he took control of the ANC Youth League 2 years after the Zuma trial, he backed the Zuma version of events.

With this sort of thing happening at the apex of progressive politics in South Africa, why is anyone surprised that there is a rape culture amidst a general culture of patriarchy? Where is the leadership? Answer: at the core of the problem.

Back home, a student today told me that one of the 11 on the notorious list was well known for his predatory attitudes by his fellow residence inmates. Why did they not call him to account? If you know someone is like this and say nothing (or worse, encourage this behaviour), you are complicit.

So what is to be done?

The real problem is that post-apartheid, we did not reconfigure civil society and interpersonal relationships to fit a new progressive democratic order. We have a great constitution, generally good laws and excellent public institutions – on paper. But these things do not work the way they are designed.

What is really needed is a new social compact, and one that is built from the ground up, not top down. One that is based on a new discovery of each other, that each person is entitled to self-worth and being treated as of equal value by all, that no one should be denied their dignity and that we do not build ourselves by tearing others down.

Ultimately we must change the apex power structure – but it will not help to replace those at the top with others who found their way there by the same logic. A grassroots campaign to establish the new normal – that predatory behaviour is not acceptable, that you do not define a person by their availability for sex, that everyone is entitled to physical and emotional integrity will make it impossible for those at the top to behave like self-serving jerks because they will be out of step with the rest of society.

We can start today. Whenever we hear someone talking up predatory behaviour, making light of rape, belittling someone else – or generally behaving as if any of this sort of behaviour is acceptable – call them to account. “Normal” is established as much by peer pressure as anything else. We can do it.

We can define the new normal.

Why Student Protest Matters

Now police have rioted outside parliament, attacking protesters in a style that could wake PW Botha from the dead, we have to understand why all this matters. And indeed, the government apparently does think it matters, hence the panicked offer to fund next year’s zero fee increase without thinking through how to pay for it.

So why should the rest of us care?

Students, after all, are in a position of relative privilege. Even those who struggle to make it through their degree and battle to fund themselves are better off than the rural poor who have nothing – no prospect of a job, ever.

Why this matters is that revolutionary change comes from frustrated hope, not from hopelessness. The French Revolution occurred not because France was the worst-off country in Europe but because it was one of the first to emerge from feudalism. It was frustration at the pace of change that caused the revolution. A feudal society on the other hand is very stable. The peasants are stuck in a state of hopelessness. The aristocracy are far too strong to challenge and what little the peasants have can easily be taken away, leaving them to starve.

South Africa today is the most unequal society on the planet. The rural poor and the urban unemployed have very little hope of things getting better. The ANC, like feudal aristocrats, hands down just enough largesse by way of social grants and free but inadequate schooling to prevent total hopelessness. The section of the population that has most reason to be upset about the broken promise of “a better life for all” continues to vote ANC loyally. In the same way, feudal peasants would have willingly given their life for their lord, despite the manifest unfairness of a tiny minority growing wealthy without offering a glimmer of hope to those left out. Why? Because in a state of hopelessness, the hand that gives out inadequate mercies is all you have.

Students are in a different position. They do have hope. Once they graduate, a range of better jobs becomes open to them. But that hope is frustrated because of the high cost of higher education, inadequate financial aid for the poor and a sluggish economy that doesn’t guarantee work even for those who do qualify. An unemployed graduate who has no debt is a potential entrepreneur. Ask Mark Shuttleworth. The NSFAS scheme is not a great substitute for full funding – even if it were adequately funded – because it limits the option of entrepreneurship for unemployed graduates.

Are demands like no fees or no increase ridiculous? No, in the light of the benefit to society. But universities have to cover their costs. Government has created the problem by encouraging universities to increase numbers without covering the costs adequately. Something has to change.

Ideally, government should fund students fully so there is no class or wealth difference at universities. To do so would cost about 10% of tax revenues. You could argue that is a good investment because students who are successful will add significantly to the tax base. However, this ANC government is not about working for the common good, but is about lining the pockets of its cronies, so that is not going to happen. The best we can really hope for is full funding for those who really can’t afford fees.

What student protest can do is to wake up the rest of the excluded population to the fact that this government is not interested in anything but themselves. The big worry is that this turns into another Arab Spring movement that forces change but has no clear agenda of what that change should be. In Egypt, a military dictator was ousted, followed by an elected government that had protestors back out in the street. Next thing Egypt had yet another military dictator. Forcing change is not enough: we need to know what we are demanding. For this reason, we need to start talking seriously about what is really wrong in our society – what the deep entrenched causes of inequality are and how to address them.