Johannesburg — NOT long after I moved from the United States to South Africa six years ago, I took a walk in a city called Bloemfontein. The scale of the downtown is huge, reflecting the ambitions of South Africa’s white settlers. The avenues feel as wide as highways, the department stores soar. Statues of military leaders and politicians from South Africa’s white-ruled past keep watch over the street corners.
But the top-floor windows of the department stores were dark. When apartheid ended in South Africa in 1994, the formerly whites-only downtown rapidly became black-dominated. The department stores ceded to African hair salons, storefront churches and tailors selling the colorful dresses favored by Bloemfontein’s liberated black majority. These sellers prefer to be seen at street level.
The shops reminded me of flowers sprouting out of the hull of a shipwreck. Above them loomed the hulks of the dreams of an earlier era, one in which Cecil John Rhodes, the famous British colonialist, could write in 1877 that “we” — the Anglo-Saxons — “are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.”
I felt awed by the way South Africa’s black majority, barred from the country’s centers of power for many years by racial segregation, had adapted, apparently very quickly, to the infrastructure that was already there. They had adjusted it to their particular, vibrant uses. But I also wondered what it felt like to live in the buildings devised by your former oppressors, among the statues of their heroes.
How long could they look at those statues and not want to tear them down?
Not that long, it turned out. South Africa has been convulsed this year by protests on this very issue: how to live as free people in the physical infrastructure of the past. The conflict is also metaphorical. In March, students at the University of Cape Town demanded that a statue of Rhodes be removed from campus, and in April it came down. Young people called for the removal of other statues of colonial heroes in Cape Town and the capital, Pretoria. In October, after tuition increases, university students around the country boycotted their classes, saying that the higher fees would harm poor, mostly black students, and moreover that their campuses still prioritized the history, the literature and the emotional needs of white students rather than black ones.
These protests are remarkably similar to those now occurring in the United States. Students in South Africa alleged that the older generation of activists had betrayed them. At the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, tearful black students surrounded a top administrator, himself a person of color — just as anguished students at Yale surrounded Jonathan Holloway, the school’s first African-American dean, on the main quad.
At Stellenbosch University outside Cape Town, students occupied an administration building, just as two dozen black students at Towson University in Maryland did in November. The debate over whether Princeton’s buildings named for Woodrow Wilson cause black students pain perfectly echoes the University of Cape Town’s conversation over its statue of Rhodes.
In America, people have been talking about student protests as if they were a particularly American phenomenon — either a result of the distinctive legacy of American racism or, as the critics would have it, a byproduct of helicopter parenting, of grade inflation, of our cultural obsession with affirmation. We coddle our kids, the theory goes, and now they’re demanding a feeling of safety from any kind of danger because they’re fragile.
But how could helicopter parenting explain the same phenomenon occurring halfway across the world in a society known for its absent parents, not its overprotective ones?
In fact, all of these students, whether they are in America or South Africa, are making their demands because they’re feeling more powerful. In South Africa, black students now make up the majority on most university campuses. They’re now willing to criticize their universities, asking for an administration attentive to their financial and emotional priorities and for the statuary and the building names on campus not to honor people associated with a history of black dispossession. They’re no longer happy to see one campus African studies center devoted to black intellectual thought, reminding them that black thought is still considered by academia to be a counterpoint and an accessory to thought itself.
They make these critiques in the form of what can seem like very insistent demands that brook no compromise. That aggressiveness captures a yearning: to be the deciders in their world and no longer the petitioners.
In America, we’ve been focused on the first word in the phrase “safe space.” We should be focused on the second. These student protests are about space and who wields power within it.
They’re a subset of a bigger range of protests now erupting all over the world. In the Netherlands, protesters have demonstrated against Zwarte Piet, the blackface jester who’s a feature of the country’s Christmas parades. Zwarte Piet’s defenders argue that the figure’s origins were not racist. The protesters’ rejoinder has been: Who are you to decide? In Australia, people in Melbourne demonstrated against racially discriminatory random visa checks. In Brazil, a new civil rights movement has emerged to give land to descendants of former slaves. The students who object to Princeton’s buildings named for Wilson represent merely a corner of a second, global anti-racism movement, one probably still in its infancy. This movement takes on not who has the right to have access to our public squares, as the first civil rights movements did, but who owns them.
In South Africa, there’s an idea that has hovered at the fringes of the national consciousness ever since the establishment of Nelson Mandela’s first democratic government in 1994: the “second transition,” also called the “second revolution.” South Africans weren’t exactly sure what it would entail, only that another great political, economic, social, even psychological and moral upheaval felt bound to happen. For many, even some black architects of liberation, it was a frightening concept, best filed away to the unopened cabinet at the back of the mind. The first revolution, after all, had been so painful to achieve.
And yet the dissonance engendered by daily life in the post-apartheid country was too uncomfortable to ignore. On their way to and from the Cape Town train station, black workers pass through a gantlet of 19th-century white military heroes. South Africa’s secondary school curriculum is now under review, but throughout the 2000s, black students studied a history curriculum that began in the 15th century, as if places came into being only with European contact. To be taken seriously, young black professionals feel pressure to “twang,” or speak with a “whiter” accent, on work calls. In 1994, black people achieved their freedom, yet they still lived in a society that communicated that white people’s history and habits were the ones to respect. But everybody knew that sooner or later many features of the society itself would have to be renegotiated.
For some 50 years, since our civil rights movement, we’ve held up the idea that equality in the form of tolerance and integration is the pinnacle of justice. I sometimes wonder if that derived, in part, from exhaustion after all the grinding conflicts of the 20th century. We wanted to believe we could have a society without power struggles. This was naïve. It pretends there’s no such thing as a public culture, no such thing as territory, and no such thing as the desire to see ourselves commensurately represented within it.
As American demographics changed, as people we once consigned to minority status became more and more prominent in public life, we were never going to avoid having our own version of the “second transition.”
Even in South Africa, there’s the sense that the country is still at the beginning of its upheaval — one that could be dangerous. It threatens to both erase a culture and to sow anger and division among black and white people who still, in myriad ways, rely on and need one another.
But Bloemfontein, where I walked soon after I arrived in South Africa, contains a clue to how this cultural renegotiation might be managed. At the University of the Free State, there’s a dormitory called Karee, named for a South African desert tree. In the late 2000s, the dormitory’s student council began a project to debate and reconsider every element of the dormitory culture, from the pictures on the wall to the way festive days were handled to the tea ceremony each afternoon.
Before this project began, people thought it would be joyless. And for some students, it was. But for others, including some who didn’t expect to enjoy it, it was thrilling. These were the ones, both black and white, who brought an attitude of curiosity to the endeavor — about themselves and about the other people who inhabited their dormitory. It was listening that made the difference. Why is this painting important to me? Why is that ritual valuable to you? What roots and dreams do we share?
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