Recently, my mother caught up with my shenanigans after my sister alerted her to an interview I was in. Very simply, she told me to stop, focus on my studies and get my degree. This response, although anticipated and consistent with how most parents would react to someone in my position, was nonetheless a bit of a hard pill to swallow and was in fact quite ‘deep’. For context, here is how it was exactly phrased:

“Which topic best suits your home situation?

1. House Of Hunger
2. Coming Of The Dry Season
3. Things Fall Apart
4. A Harvest Of Thorns
5. No Longer At Ease
6. Grow Up
7. Without A Name
8. Nervous Conditions

Methinks all of the above so do us a favour, get your 1^st and honours degree and give me money for bread and stop trying to have the vice chancellor arrested. Never be a fallen hero and live one day as a lion. I await a response.

With love
Mother?”

I received this text at 1 in the morning and was shell-shocked as I went through different emotions and reactions to this message. This prompted a lot of intense thinking, and subsequently me writing this.

When I went home during the December holiday, the house of hunger was awaiting patiently, and served as a constant reminder of obligations I had to those I’d left back home. The issue therefore of trying to reconcile my activism and how it lends to jeopardise my “future”, getting a job, graduating etc., wasn’t new and has been on my mind for a bit of time now. My mom’s message however accelerated the need to resolve this issue and tensions arising from it. Amidst the growing chaos of social movements in general, I’ve come to find the need to stay grounded and not be lost in the growing current which is often unguided but also self-destructive in nature. Therefore in this attempt to find some grounding, it is also my hope that I can come to reconcile some of these tensions and find a decisive way – one hopefully optimistic and positive – to move forward.

Familial Obligations and escaping the House of Hunger

There’s honestly a lot to unpack here before I can make meaningful headway with this, and some of the stuff probably deserves a dedicated post to address it. But I’ll just briefly attempt to reasonably flesh out what’s relevant to move forward.

Growing up in the ‘locations’ around poverty and suffering makes you question a lot of things about the world. Primarily for me this line of questioning eventually evolved to what I later discovered is called existentialism – which in essence, at least from my understanding, is questioning the intrinsic meaning and purpose of what exists. By the time I was in grade 4 I’d come to realise that I felt a greater affinity towards my friends than I did towards my immediate family and ‘blood relations’. I’ve since come to formalise this realisation as two things relevant for this section of the paper:

1. Family is a social construct
2. I randomly came to share the same DNA with people and for that I’m supposed to care more for them than I do for anyone else

Unlike friendships and other relationships like marriages which are formed based on ‘genuine’ human connection, the family unit is the only relationship which is just arbitrarily formed and the link, DNA, or the phrase “blood is thicker than water” is the only justification for the intrinsic importance of this relationship. Unfortunately I don’t know whether there’s something that makes the life of immediate family more intrinsically valuable than that of a friend you’ve come to share a connection with. I don’t know whether there’s something meaningful about sharing the same DNA, why I was born into that particular family, if it’s all part of some grand meaningful design etc. These questions are left to a somewhat more intuitive understandings of the world and what you’ve come to believe. Although personally, I’d also argue that there are some things you intuitively know to be true.

But maybe what I call intuitive is just social conditioning. Anyway, the above two premises still hold true for the sake of meaningful analysis. With that in mind we can then look to the idea of what obligations I have to immediate family and escaping the house of hunger.

The above analysis alludes to the position that I don’t feel a special kind of affinity towards my family than I would for any other person, perhaps with the exception of my mother (and the explanation for that can be found in the idea of the intuitive understanding and knowing mentioned above). Therefore, whatever obligations I have towards taking people out of the house of hunger extends not only to my immediate family, but to the people of the locality which I grew up in too. For me, this obligation arises out of two things:

1. In my search for a meaningful existence, I decided along the way that I’d devote my life towards the path of social justice. In so doing, I came to find a distinction between meaning and purpose in this nebulous thing called existentialism.
2. I came to accept that as difficult as it is to admit, that invariably, our circumstances in some way shape or form, come to mould us to be whom we are. My circumstances growing up, articulated beautifully by my mom in her message, are what also gave rise to these obligations

So finally to reflect on my mom’s message and tie all of this analysis together, I can conclude that there are real obligations that I have and that I must fulfil. Purpose if you will. The question then becomes how. Two years ago at the end of my high school career the answer was quite simple: go to university, get a job and lift your people out of squalor. I remember the exact day I turned my back on studying astronomy (search for meaning) a field where I’d need to get a PhD before I could earn a reasonable salary, after my dad drunk again had another blow out, and decided like most blacks that I needed to leave this wretchedness in search of greener pastures because this isn’t the way to live. I’d found purpose and decided I’d study Financial Accounting (because money runs the world and “blacks need to run the economy”) and primarily lift my family out of squalor, and somehow – god knows how – use that degree as a means of achieving social justice.

It was all very clear and simple. Granted I had heavy tensions in making this decision and keeping to it in my first two years at UCT as I saw other people studying what they loved etc. My work with TDL – Thethani Debating League (formerly known as Township Debating League) and Ubunye highlighted these tensions but simultaneously served as a reminder of why I needed to stick to this path as I interacted regularly with young people in the same context that I came from. So it was all bearable.

But the tensions grew. As I found myself pouring myself more and more towards my work in TDL as I withdrew my focus and attention towards my degree which in but all aspects is meaningless, I also found the work I was doing in an attempt to drive social justice and social awareness through debating becoming increasingly futile. The realisation that debating, and indeed other liberal processes such as working “in the system” whether by serving on structures and governance bodies such as faculty council, SRC does little but only to produce incremental change. The lack of locating the problem at its roots and solving it from there grew to be an enormous frustration and heightened said tensions.

It was therefore in this dialectical quest for meaning that I turned to activism, and joined #RhodesMustFall.

The Chimurenga

The struggle, the revolution. Call it what you will. I only became an active ‘member’ of RhodesMustFall during mid-August last year.

During the early days in the movement’s formation, I found the space quite alienating and classist in its politics and withdrew from it. In what was a harsh and narrow outlook, all I saw was a bunch of privileged blacks who went to rich private schools, came from the suburbs crying about assimilation and Black Pain. I guess then, I had a hierarchy of pain which placed these cries at the bottom of the rudder. At one of these meetings which was meant to be a meditation on Pan-Africanism, the discussion ended up falling on Black Consciousness politics and more whining on white privilege, racism and how being black at UCT is horrible. Frustrated, I gave a tongue lashing about how these people don’t know what real suffering is how they have it easy etc. It seemed questions of the working class didn’t belong in the movement’s immediate aims, so I left. I was pretty immature then and in a sense I guess I’ll always be.

But what drew me to the movement – in line with what I found to be meaningful – was when the Remember Marikana campaign was launched. This was at the same time when the dialectical question of meaning and purpose had reached its peak and when I’d made a decision to turn towards more concerted efforts at activism and writing. The Remember Marikana campaign it seemed was the beginning of an RMF cognisance of class, which later manifested into the #FeesMustFall and #EndOutsourcing campaigns which saw the formation of the student-worker alliance.

In the weeks leading up to the first shutdown I had one of my first ‘official’ RMF tasks. This was attending a conference on transformation with the department of higher education and training and minister Blade Nzimande. As representatives of RMF our mandate was to:

1. Insert the politics of decolonisation into the space and
2. Occupy the conference and direct the program so as to demand free education and an end to outsourcing

In attempting to achieve these aims, ironically, I found myself saying “this has always been a race struggle. It has never been a class struggle” to win over the crowd and student delegates who were buying into the rhetoric of class as the problem and not white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

I specifically mention this conference because it was a major turning point for me, which has since resulted in me caught in a massive wave, that growing current which is often unguided and self-destructive in nature from which I’m now trying to find ground and not be lost in. Briefly, what happened was I discovered the need to be more radical and militant when the student coalition we’d formed to occupy the conference reneged on the plan and left the RMF cadres to hang and dry. I’ve never felt a greater moment of betrayal. But what was more saddening, was that these same students acting as representatives were buying into the persuasion rhetoric of being reasonable and engaging with the minister in negotiations. Needless to say that after that meeting the fee increase did not fall, outsourcing didn’t fall, no agreement on scrapping historical debt which prevents students from registering (financial exclusion), nothing on free education. Nothing. Had the conference went as planned the #National Shutdown wouldn’t have been necessary. But this was a turning point for me and it’s the subject of another paper.

Since then, I’ve been caught in a wave of being in and out of jail, dodging rubber bullets, recovering from flash bangs and stun grenades. I’ve come to meet and find a people with the same yearning and commitment to social justice, moving up the ranks (despite rmf being a flat structure), gaining mobility and currency within the movement, to eventually being able to influence and control the narrative and strategy of the movement and wrestling internal politics, it’s been a constant wave that’s been pulling me to the epicentre of the movement.

The thing about #RhodesMustFall and indeed activism, is it gives life and takes it proportionality. In all honesty there’s nothing more meaningful I’d rather be doing, nothing more purposeful, nothing else which comes close to achieving the dialectical aims of the existential question. It is the culmination of the dialectic convergence of meaning and purpose as the answer to the existential question which makes it precisely so easy to be lost in the ocean and current that is RMF.

To elucidate on this idea of being lost in the growing tide and current, what I mean is the unabated devotion to the movement and the decolonisation project. Not only on the level of purpose – because the logical extension and conclusion of the decolonisation project is the upliftment of people out of the House of Hunger – but it is also equally meaningful and a true quest of self and meaning in the existential sense, because decolonisation is also the creation of a new human face. It is the process of answering the existential question: what does it mean to be human? This dialectical approach to decolonisation which I’ve taken lends itself to two extremes which I’ve become subject to simultaneously. The quest to free my people and myself. Purpose and meaning.

Why and when does this become a problem? For starters living out two extremes which lie on the same spectrum is a bit of a stretch. Decolonisation on a personal level – the discovery of true humanity and meaning to the existential question – requires the negation of the self as I currently understand it. It requires abandoning the world as I know it in search of a new conception of life. For this to happen comes the 2^nd limitation: a radical restructuring of society and the world as we know it. The two go hand in hand and one can’t happen without the other. The former requires a complete attitude of recklessness, abandonment and cutting of all restrictions in the quest for true freedom. Yet, the latter, being part of a revolution, requires a degree of discipline and level headedness. A cool temperament and mind with a constant awareness of reality.

It is out of this contrast in the dialectical approach by being a part of RMF that the need to find balance becomes evident.

Finding Ground

As indicated earlier at the beginning of this post, the urgency of finding ground has been accelerated by more pragmatic questions in addition to the above analysis on the dialectic question. There are pressing issues which need to be attended to.

I haven’t been to any lecture for at least the last three weeks of term. It would be disingenuous to lay the cause of this on the Chimurenga of course. A large part of it is simply the dearth and meaninglessness in being in lectures around oblivion which permeates UCT and its students.

Questions of how I’ll go back home at the end of the year and explain to my parents why I’ll only be graduating next year, because my degree was extended by a year as a result of not meeting progression requirements for a third year course. These simple facts give rise to the need to find some grounding outside of my involvement in the movement, because by virtue of being in UCT, they speak to a purpose and obligations I undertook.

But more than that, even in the event that I succumbed to the fact that this degree is meaningless and that I ought to devote my entire being to this movement, I’d need to accept various possibilities, which I’m comfortable with and can live with, but can also not live with. This kind of thinking, the recklessness, is what will find me excluded at the end of the year. Homeless in a few years’ time. The story of the child who showed so much promise. To be honest I’m perfectly fine with all these outcomes, but there’s also the part of me which just hates failure and the disappointment. Lest in myself but also to those who ‘legitimately’ had been expecting whatever from me. As I write this I remain unfazed which is scary.

As I attempt to weave through all these conundrums, I’ve made attempts to find activities which will help keep me grounded and disciplined. One of which is writing. The problem I’m realising is that all I want to do nowadays is just write (this is also probably because of the fact that after my little adventure with smoking which was rapidly becoming something of an addiction I turned more towards writing). The second attempt which may prove to be more useful is reading. That I think I’ve yet to exhaust and should be helpful for a while before I reach a point where I’ll need to balance out the reading and writing. And finally, the third grounding tool I’ll attempt to use will be that of telling my story – making more connections and writing for a broader audience. Speaking more – talks and panel discussions. Maybe even revisit debating again.

Amidst these three attempts I hope that somehow my participation in the Chimurenga will remain a core part and be the nucleus of my activities. In fact, if this method of grounding will work, it will fulfil the role and importance of discipline I mentioned earlier, allowing me to play a more lucid and guided part – if any, in the Chimurenga.

For myself, and for others.