I am immensely proud of this book. It is innovative in its approach and method; it is fascinating in the life stories that it covers. Narend Baijnath, the current CEO of the Council on Higher Education calls it a 'must read' for university leaders and student leaders.
Indeed, it is extremely gripping to read the narratives about their student leadership experience of people as diverse as Honourable Hlomela Bucwa, who was until the 2019 election the youngest MP in the National Assembly, Advocate Muzi Sikhakhane (the lead counsel in former President Zuma's current trial), Jerome September (who is the Wits Dean of Students), or social media personality Mpho Khati.
What they all have in common - they were all once leaders in their university's SRC, and they all chose to tell their story in this book.... from the days when Mandela was President and established the first National Commission on Higher Education, to the years of university mergers under Minister Kader Asmal and President Mbeki, to the Zuma years with Dr Blade Nzimande as Minister and the large-scale #FeesMustFall protests.
Here is a summary of the twelve chapters in the book that each present the story of one of the the student leaders:
The accounts of Muzi Sikhakhane, Prishani Naidoo and Jerome
September start the chronologically arranged reflections’ chapters. Having been
involved in student leadership from the early to the late 1990s means that they
tend to reflect more deeply on their apartheid-era upbringing and the way this
shaped their views on and experience of higher education, governance and
student representation. Advocate Muzi Sikhakhane SC begins his reflections by
recalling his upbringing in rural KwaZulu-Natal, his involvement in struggle
politics in the mid to late 1980s, his memories of the violence between the ANC
and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), and eventually, how he got to Wits and was
roped into student politics and became president of the Wits SRC.
The reflections in chapter 3 also come from Wits, which is
where Dr Prishani Naidoo ended up becoming SRC vice-president in 1995, and
eventually president of the South African Universities SRC in 1996, after she
had a first experience of university life and student politics at the
University of Durban-Westville (now the University of KwaZulu-Natal) in the
early 1990s. Naidoo’s chapter is a reminder of how deeply involved student
leaders were in transformation initiatives in their institutions and at
national level in the mid-1990s. Fast-forwarding 20 years to a time when Naidoo
is back at Wits as an academic, her insights into the start of the #EndOutsourcing,
#October6 and #FeesMustFall campaigns at Wits in 2015 are equally invaluable.
Jerome September recalls the alienation he experienced when
arriving at UCT and settling into his residence in the mid-1990s. During his
two SRC terms, student representatives returned to the University Council and
Senate in 1998 after the proclamation of the HE Act (after years of having
boycotted them as ‘illegitimate structures’). He remembers the hopes that
student leaders had for co-operative governance to work and the consternation
he felt when his SRC lost the battle about outsourcing with the university
management under Vice- Chancellor Dr Mamphela Ramphele. This battle, which
would be taken up again and again over the next 20 years by students,
eventually led to the #EndOutsourcing campaign of 2015/16. Since his years in
student leadership, September has made a career in Student Affairs at UCT, Sol
Plaatje University and Wits University. His professional experience adds
greatly to the richness of insights he gives into the relationship between
student representation and protests.
Kenny Bafo’s chapter provides the bridge between the late
1990s and early 2000s. Bafo had a first stint at UWC from 1997 until he was
excluded at the end of 1998. He returned to UWC in 2000 and his chapter
provides a lesson on how to build a student political organisation from the
ground up in less than three years. With the SRC election victory of Bafo as
presidential candidate in 2002, PASMA came to run the SRC of UWC for the first
time – taking it from SASCO. Bafo tells in his inimitable way how his SRC
struggled to catch up with the load of expectation and responsibilities placed
upon them, while they had very little support and almost no institutional
memory to draw on at all. Bafo remained at UWC as an associate lecturer until
his election to the Council of the City of Cape Town in 2016 and thus was able
to observe (and comment on) the emergence of #FeesWillFall at UWC.
In chapter
6, David Maimela tells his story of arriving at UP in 2001 and encountering a
strange and oppressive residence culture on campus. Having been involved in the
Congress of South African Students at high-school level already, he became a
leader of SASCO at UP and was eventually deployed into the SRC where he soon
realised that black students’ concerns could not be addressed by an SRC that
had a majority of Freedom Front members. Reminiscent of student politics at
historically English-tuition white universities in the 1980s, Maimela ended up
having to represent black student interests outside the SRC, thus illustrating that
the SRC model of student representation might fail to represent the broad range
of student experiences and interests in large and diverse institutions like UP.
Maimela’s reflections also draw on his experience as SASCO president
nationally, and his involvement in ANC political structures during those years.
Xolani Zuma spent his first year in the SRC in 2005/06 and became SRC president
for 2006/07 at UZ. In his chapter, he reflects on partisanship in student politics
and particularly the rivalry between ANC- and IFP-aligned student organisations.
His chapter further stands out by his reflections on the many lessons he
learnt: on personal and political ethics, managing resources and corruption,
and on the importance of understanding the distinction between politics and
real life. 16 / Reflections of South African Student Leaders
Zukiswa Mqolomba reflects in chapter 8 on her SRC presidency
at UCT in 2006/07, drawing frequent comparison between the issues her SRC dealt
with and what was taken up almost a decade later by #RhodesMustFall. In the
final part of her chapter, Mqolomba reflects on the huge impact the experience
of student leadership at UCT has had on her professional career and others who served
with her in the SRC.
Having been SRC secretary-general in 2009/10, speaker of
student parliament in 2012 and SRC president in 2012/13, and being the current
chair of Convocation, Kwenza Madlala has vast amounts of insight into the
governance of MUT. He starts his account by recalling how he was roped into the
SRC in the midst of rivalry between SADESMO and SASCO at MUT. Madlala then
shares his reflections on his SRC’s approach to student representation in
committees. His chapter stands out for his condemnation of managements that
first impede institutional progress when students raise an idea and then
appropriate the same idea to take credit for it. Madlala is also among those
student leaders who comment in detail on the differences of student politics at
historically white and black universities in South Africa, and on the
continuities and discontinuities in student politics leading up to the
#RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall protests.
Lorne Hallendorff became SRC president of UCT for 2012/13,
running as an independent candidate after he had spent a first term in the SRC
in 2011/12. During his SRC presidency, he made a concerted effort to work
through the university’s system of governance structures and committees –
similar to Mqolomba – to address matters as diverse as financial exclusions,
the academic timetable, and the divisive debate on UCT’s race-based admission
policy. The latter is often cited as part of the ‘origin story’ of
#RhodesMustFall. Thus, Hallendorff’s chapter is highly instructive for a better
understanding of the emergence of #RhodesMustFall in terms of a longitudinal
perspective of student politics at UCT. Like the other former student leaders
in this book, he argues that 2015 did not take him by surprise at all: for too
long had student leaders been frustrated on the same issues.
Chapter 11 tells the story of Hlomela Bucwa when she was
first an SRC member and eventually became the SRC president (affiliated to
DASO) at NMU. Bucwa recalls how she sought to pursue her organisation’s
principles by putting students first and running a corruption-free SRC at NMU.
She counts among her achievements that her SRC fundraised R9 million for
students in the face of the inability of NSFAS to respond to students’ dire
needs. In her reflections on #FeesMustFall, NSFAS features as one of the main
sources of students’ frustration with an uncaring and unresponsive system.
An important story running through the first part of chapter
12 is the so-called battle of the two Brians at UWC. Vuyani Sokhaba was deputy
secretary-general of the UWC SRC then. Sokhaba’s second term as SRC president
extended into 2015 and the time when #RhodesMustFall and #OpenStellenbosch
activists sought to inspire a similar decolonisation movement at UWC. Sokhaba
critiques #RhodesMustFall from the UWC point of view, explaining why no
decolonisation movement ever took off on a campus where students had fought
apartheid and colonisation almost since it was founded as part of the extension
of apartheid to the higher education sector in 1959.
Mpho Khati was also active for two terms in the SRC, in her
case on the Bloemfontein campus of the UFS from 2014 to 2016. While her first
term focused on improving the plight of black first-generation and first-year
students, her second term was distinctly defined by the #FeesMustFall campaign
at the UFS which, in the aftermath of the #ShimlaPark violence of February
2016, became increasingly consuming and eventually traumatic. Khati’s chapter
also gives various examples of the way university governance processes fail
students and how university leaders fail to understand student issues and
student political culture.
Different readers will find the reflections of the former
student leaders important for different reasons. In a book where every chapter
can stand alone as an important insider reflection on leadership and governance
in a specific institution and the sector at large, and where each chapter also
represents an autobiographical excerpt from a young student leader’s life, it
is impossible to do justice to each chapter in a few lines’ overview.
The final chapter of this book draws out a first set of
findings from a crosschapter analysis, pointing out continuities and
discontinuities over a quartercentury of student leadership, and concluding
with a call to take student leaders more seriously and to collectively
reimagine a new, democratic and responsive system of higher education
governance in academic and support departments, faculties, institutions and at
national level.
