Rhodes must fall: How things stand

THIS month marks the anniversary of the RhodesMustFall (RMF) movement, regarded by many as the most significant marker of social and political unrest since the student uprising of 1976.

Whether this is indeed the case is disputable, but what cannot be denied is that RMF has, within a single year, channelled some of the most desperately urgent instances of “Black Pain”.

While pitted against infrastructural racism, the movement’s most profound concerns were less material than they were psychological, for what continues to aggrieve the RMF is its contention that freedom remains in abeyance: that the custodianship of the black self remains deferred, that at the core of the country’s tertiary structure lies the maintenance of white power and the suppression of black agency.

How true these claims in fact are cannot here be vouchsafed. My job, rather, is to probe the psychic discordance at the root of the movement itself, because of course the problems they address — infrastructural racism, worker exploitation, academic freedom — are situations that are by no means peculiar to academia. Rather, the tertiary system has operated as a theatre for a greater sphere of contestation and despair.

Most famously, the movement kick-started its notoriety or fame — depending on one’s perspective — with the toppling of a statue of Cecil John Rhodes, perceived as the rotten embodiment of a white imperial and capitalist monopoly. It took the toppling of a figurehead to galvanise attention, because statues are graphic emblems, as easily revered as they can be shunned.

But of course what mattered all the more was not merely the removal of a monolith. Logically, such a literal move would lead to the destruction of the very buildings that too would come to be seen as embodiments of oppression. This way lies anarchy, or simply chaos.

One need only turn to the stark horrors of the French Revolution — embodied so vividly and grotesquely in the guillotine — to realise that protests are never quite logical. Rather, they harbour a far more toxic and gnawing grief. In retrospect, the toppling of Rhodes, or the cutting off of a nose to spite the face, is symptomatic of a more far-reaching and personal hatred.

Calls for the heads of Blade Nzimande and Jacob Zuma have followed, along with the abolition of student fees. As to whether these as-yet virtual protests will be realised is uncertain, but what cannot be ignored is the fact that in 2015 democratic optimism gave way to “Fallism”. Indeed RMF has also adopted the tag “Fallists”, which amounts to a reactionary and even nihilistic turn of phrase.

Trying to figure out Fallism as a culture felled by gravity, intrinsically reactive, incapable of perceiving a way forward that does not embrace annihilation — a movement not given to negotiation — should surely remind us of a death instinct: a situation in extremis with nothing to lose. Is this the situation?

Lest we forget, one of the most visceral images associated with the toppling of Rhodes’ statue was the fact that it was doused with human excrement. Here, surely, we have the makings of a very graphic but also very complex psychology that also involves self-abasement in a public sphere. Therefore, to interpret the RMF as a movement, one must first and foremost interpret its psychology. To do so, I will now turn to the thoughts of Athol Fugard, Frantz Fanon and Steve Bantu Biko.

In his finest play, Boesman and Lena, Fugard explores the existential travails of the homeless, whom he describes as “whiteman’s rubbish”. This notion of blackness as a form of nothingness, as a kind of human waste or dejecta, is something that the Algerian fighter and psychiatrist Fanon was also deeply preoccupied with. In seminal works such as The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skins, White Masks, Fanon chose to explore the damaging psychological underpinnings of colonisation: its unerringly ruthless subjection and evisceration of the black body, mind, soul and imagination.

It is this pathological inheritance of a state of nonbeing that continues to haunt the black body today. Witness movements such as Black Lives Matter or the placards brandished in protest against Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B in London, in which black bodies were incarcerated and displayed as objects and ciphers of a genocide. The protest placard achingly read “I am Somebody”, and served as a refutation of the right of anyone — in particular a white male South African — to reflect upon and perform that particular history of oppression.

What is remarkable is just how immediate and deeply felt this history of colonial oppression remains. As Fugard’s protagonist Boesman points out, “I’m thinking deep tonight. We’re whiteman’s rubbish. That’s why he’s so beneukt with us. He can’t get rid of his rubbish. He throws it away, we pick it up. Wear it. Sleep in it. We’re made of it now. His rubbish is people.” Here one need only reflect upon the provocative photograph by Alon Skuy of Gareth Cliff in his bespoke powder blue suit walking laughingly alongside his legal representative Dali Mpofu while a homeless black man in a dumpster looks on. Here however the divide is as much class-based as it is race-based.

Nevertheless, what Fugard has brought before us is just how invasive and corrosive the exploitation of others can become. One no longer merely represents the oppressed, one internalises the very psychic wiring of oppression itself. This was also Biko’s warning, which is why in I Write What I Like he declared that “the first step ... is to make the black man come to himself; to pump back life into his empty shell; to infuse him with pride and dignity; to remind him of his complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused and therefore letting evil reign supreme in the country of his birth.”

It is telling that Biko does not seek to merely pit black against white but everyone to recognise their complicity in the maintenance of an oppressive system. Like Fugard and Fanon, Biko understood the subtlety of abuse. His call to Black Consciousness was none other than the attempt to shatter the mirror that ensured the persistence of an afflicted state.

That Boesman should remind us that this affliction also haunts the oppressor reaffirms the perversely nuanced nature of oppression. And here the recent protest by the Trans-Collective against a retrospective exhibit of a year in the life of RMF should once again remind us of the fact that there are no clear lines between oppressor and oppressed. It is therefore never merely a matter of “us” versus “them”. Contradictions are often decoys, for to truly grasp the perverse root of colonisation and its apartheid and post-1994 offspring, one must (like Fanon) begin with the psychological root of its horror.

There is no doubt, in the light of Stefan Collini’s seminal text What are Universities For?, that SA universities — and institutions more generally — suffer from “a disabling lack of confidence and loss of identity”. RMF is culpable in this derailment. The serious matter however is whether the organisation has anything to offer other than the facile will to attempt decolonisation, which even the resistance movement’s greatest thinker and fighter, Biko, recognised as a far more complex battle.

The big question is whether, one year into the struggle over education, selfhood and agency, we are simply caught up in what Collini terms “the inevitable tensions between prevailing definitions of social purpose and the ungovernable play of the enquiring mind”. Judging from the mess our campuses are in, I think not.