By Simangaliso Dlamini
Students are calling for a Free Decolonized Quality Education Now. The response they get is armed police on campus shooting them with rubber bullets and throwing stunt grenades at them. Societies opinions are divided but the dominant rhetoric is that “I support the fees must fall movement but I don’t sympathize with them when they start destroying property, burning down the universities and acting violent”.
Desmond Tutu once said: “If you are neutral in the situations of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an Elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality”. With regards to Fees Must Fall you cannot pick and choose what you support and do not support on the movement because picking and choosing signals indecision and neutrality. Its either you are with the students or against them.
Black people calling on radio stations, writing facebook and twitter messages condemning student’s violent protests are missing the point. Students do not need your sympathy or your verbal support. They need Free Decolonized Quality Education Now. They tried to reach out through dialogue and submitting memorandums but no one in the government, private sector, civil society has responded with tangible contributions. The students where told how unrealistic they are, they must just get back to class and continue learning colonized textbooks while others are excluded because they can’t afford fees.
When black people start organizing themselves into a unit, white privilege is disturbed, people get scared. Police are called to “deal” with students who are now painted as violent to discredit the movement. Apartheid tactics are applied where students are told they are not allowed to meet as a group at Solomon Mahlangu House. The media propaganda tells the masses how violent the students are without reporting on the “why” the students are violent. Naïve individuals then distance themselves from the movement without realizing that police are there to guard white privilege which is now endangered because its foundation is on the backs of the blacks who are now aware of this fact and aim to change it.
How did the safety of property become more important than the safety of student protesters? We live in a society where the distraction of property is condemned but the distraction of black students is the norm. How are walls and papers more important than the people who built them? Students are violent because they burned down property to get a message across which the government and business didn’t respond to through peaceful dialogue? Violence is Afrikan poverty, it’s the child who can’t afford fees, it’s an uneducated black child, its cheap labor in unforgiving condition, it’s the skwatta camps we live in, it’s the presence of police on campus and most importantly violence is the white supremacy system that continues to oppress us.
This is not a students or a fees struggle, this is a black people struggle. Without accessible Afrikan centered education we will continue being excluded in the mainstream economy and only end up as cheap labor. We are poor because we are colonized, landless and uneducated. We are uneducated because we can’t afford fees.
Therefore
#FeesMustFall, #ColonialEducationMustFall, #WhitePrivilegeMustFall #OutSourcingMustFall and
#CampusPoliceMustFall
By Simangaliso Dlamini
Photo by Daylin Paul/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.
