Appendix: Interview with Brian Kamanzi
Interviewer How did the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) movement begin?
BK: Initially, there was a group of protestors, including Chumani Maxwele, and they were protesting at the site of the statue. Chumani brought feces with him from Khayelisha, a township about 20 min away, and threw it on the statue. He was making a statement about the realities of life in the townships compared to the opulence of Cape Town. He was saying that Rhodes’ vision is embodied by what the University of Cape Town (UCT) is: This is the filth that people must live in and endure. There was a huge uproar at the university in response to Maxwele’s act in March 2015.
There were three main groups comprising political parties, student societies, and non-aligned independent students. They combined under a Broad Church agreement understood as the principles of pan-Africanism, black radical feminism, and black consciousness. You could say these three pillars were embodied in groups prior to this, although they were not always clearly represented, and the various groups or camps were often antagonistic to one another. However, now that the groups were coming together, there was a lot of backlash from conservative whites who called this mobilization “barbaric.” It was becoming clearer by the day whose side you were on. From that, and based on a couple of public dialogs, students decided to turn this moment into an actual social movement that resulted in a few marches. There was an occupation in the admin building called Bremner (at UCT), which probably solidified and characterized certain elements of the movement. At first, there was no hierarchical framework, so decisions were made in a plenary session by achieving consensus. Second, the method of occupation was central to the conceptualization of the politics. This also represented the space in which the thrust for decolonization was acknowledged—and identified as encompassing those three pillars.
Interviewer Who played key roles in mobilizing the RMF movement?
BK Many people. I do not know if I can list all of them, but they included Ru Slayen, Leila Khan, Kealeboga Mase Ramaru, Masixole Mlandu, and Lufefe Malala. They were there from the beginning. Everyone who was in the movement came from UCT.
Interviewer Did they know each other?
BK Maybe; if they did not know each other beforehand, they probably shared mutual contacts. It was a fairly apathetic space before the movement and then things started to heat up on campus, certainly in terms of dialog, so people who had views were more or less aware of each other’s existence and even facilitated that kind of political collaboration in the first place. Also, I think there were groups like Palestinian Solidarity Fund, Worker Left Form, Left Students Forum, and ‘Imbizo’ which was related to a youth group of the pan-Africanist Congress called PASMA, and they had already been running dialog sessions at one of the residences. I think a lot of the popular education at the time was facilitated through such mass participation with these groups and others such as, for example, the South African feminist group, which had a very large constituency then.
Interviewer What was your role in that movement?
BK The model was all about self-participation; you decide what work you want to do. In hindsight, my role now links more into the education subcommittee. A lot of the work in RMF is not about protest; it’s more about educational material. In the beginning, I was involved in identifying speakers and curating the spaces in which we would hold seminars. Our methodology included disrupting lecture spaces; we avoided holding our events at elite venues and even tried temporarily occupying spaces such as reception areas by having reading groups there, for instance. At that time, there was a lot of energy. Many people wanted to speak to us. We had the luxury of thinking creatively because there were so many resources being thrown at us.
Interviewer How did activists mobilize the movement? Can you discuss more about protest, organizations, and the subcommittees you mentioned? What kind of structure did you have or how did you come to occupy reception areas?
BK Basically, we would call a plenary session at, say, 6 o’clock. However, we had a watershed moment: The first occupation might involve 3 or 4 days where no white participation was allowed, only blacks, in the broad definition of black. You are welcome to attend and you attend the plenary space. An agenda is drawn up, either from the minutes of the previous meeting or from people in the space who want to discuss specific issues. Then we report on outstanding tasks and remaining issues are raised. When an issue is raised, a team is appointed to resolve it. For instance, there might be a rugby match taking place tomorrow and we consider whether to disrupt it. There were actually two occasions when such disruption happened. In situations like that, you ask what is required for action: Do we have a radical action team already? Is it functional? If not, reconstitute it. It’s a voluntary process. You identify members who are willing to take a role and then disruption takes place. Afterward, these volunteers report on how things went, and they announce when the next set of actions are. To be honest, this did not always work well, despite our open-door policy. The work is voluntary, so we can only confront as many issues as people volunteer for. Moreover, accountability was difficult because we did not have a membership system, so we couldn’t do just anything. When emotions were running high and we had public sympathy on our side, it was easier and people were more willing to give their best, but at later stages and phases of the movement this was not the case.
Interviewer Can you narrate the mobilization process chronologically?
BK As I recall, the feces throwing happened March 9, and an occupation took place March 21. It was massive; thousands of people came to UCT every day. It came to an end around the second week of April when the university served a court order (issued by Wynberg Magistrates Court) and we were evicted. Another occupation took place a few days later at the housing administration office in protest against dispossession. It was about the state of land reform in South Africa and also noted that the movement itself needed space to operate. At that time, sympathy was low because the university succeeded in convincing the public that our demand was essentially about bringing down the statue and pretended not to be aware of our other demands when, actually, we had presented the university administration with an extensive list of broad-ranging issues from basic minimum wages for the workers to curriculum issues emphasizing subaltern-centric Africa. But their propaganda was successful when the statue was removed. Everyone was saying to the students, “Why are you still in the occupation?” It took a while to make people understand why we were still occupying.
The second occupation occurred between June and July, as I recall, and was at a place called Avenue House at UCT, resulting in several charges. The building was used as a student accommodation office and part of the point we were making was to continue our insurrectionary position on “land” and, therefore, housing by occupying this space both for its symbolic value in highlighting the systematic exclusion of black people in general from these institutions and the pragmatic need to have a space in which to meet consistently and continue the project we had embarked upon. We had to carry it through a mediation process which took us into August 2015. There was a vacation period between early June and late July. In early August, when the disciplinary charges for all prior protest action (such as trespassing during occupation) were lifted, we successfully navigated through the mediation process which was conducted by representatives of the movement and the Senior Management Team of the university. The appointed mediators were Stanley Henkeman and Tim Murithi from the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. Then we started trying to re-establish participant numbers. During that time, we planned two landmarks occasions, one being the anniversary of Marikana and the other involved efforts to resolve the issue of outsourcing. This referred to a policy that transferred low-wage service jobs out of direct university employment to external employment agencies, often resulting in even lower wages and considerably fewer social security benefits. Thus, through our politics, we conceptualized the anti-privatization struggle as being “un-colonial.” For us, social justice is more complicated than Marxist ideology simply in direct confrontation with other ideals. On August 16, we had some public art for Marikana. We tried to connect with the workers. We tried to rename Jameson Hall as Marikana Memorial Hall to make a point.
Here, I think it’s worthwhile mentioning that the commissioner of the Marikana Commission, Ian Farlam, is on the UCT council. We found that about ZAR 2 M of UCT staff annuities had been invested in Lonmin, the mining company implicated in the Marikana massacre, and we wanted to call Farlam’s neutrality into question by highlighting that he would almost certainly have been aware of this financial arrangement. Therefore, he should not have been allowed to participate in the case because there would be a conflict of interest. It didn’t work, and Farlam’s position was never
contested within the council body. But it was an interesting attempt that helped our effort to conscientize and bring to the fore workers’ issues both nationally and on our campus, in the context of colonialism, helping us to change the public perception of us that, somehow, everything was about the Rhodes statue.
In late September, we started planning a documentary, “Outsourced,” which you can check out on our UCT page. We were trying to highlight the plight of outsourced workers and their working conditions. This led up to the first national protest, called “October-6.” It involved us, Wits University, and a couple of other universities. Together, we had built solidarity from the early RMF days. Shortly afterward, a call for free education was made from Wits University. When that call was made, and in light of the established networks and the success of the October-6 campus shutdown (conducted largely by students and some workers), it created a situation in which we were prepared to say, “Yes, definitely, that is within the scope of our politics. We support the objective of Free Education.” That was the time when Fees Must Fall became a national project and RMF participated in that and campus shutdowns. I contend that UCT students instrumentalized the work. Now, the Fees Must Fall project at UCT housed our third occupation in Avenue Hall, adjacent to Avenue House I mentioned earlier. But we were evicted, so we moved next door and established a central operating space for our movement and for Fees Must Fall. We managed to win the battle of outsourcing within a couple of days. Then, an agreement was reached between UCT and the labor union. That union wasn’t even driving the Fees Must Fall and End Outsourcing strike; it was affiliated to the African National Congress (ANC) and was uncomfortable with the students’ ideological line, particularly after the protests started to be directed at the state. Hence, we decided to assemble at parliament and another mobilization happened at union buildings. The students, who were protesting there for the first time, pushed through the gates. It was the first time in democratic South Africa that police repelled the students with stun grenades. The ruling party demanded that the labor unions, i.e., the allied movement, cut their connection with students. Also, the students were divided when the president announced a 0% fee increase. Actually, it wasn’t one of our demands but, at that time, many people were satisfied with that. Moreover, many people didn’t conceptualize the struggle clearly because the movement itself was vague and inconsistent about what exactly “Free Education” stood for. Many people felt that the state’s decision to cover the 2016 fee increases was a show of good faith and was grounds enough to break the strike, but this was fiercely contested internally. Essentially, certain groups were alienated because of that and RMF was crushed by disciplinary charges and internal splintering, being dragged in and out of court.
The following year saw an onslaught of propaganda which led to disintegration and poor discipline within the movement. We also struggled with the patriarchy in the movement space; there were many instances of sexual violence. Internally, things were not handled competently and, hence, both our internal and external credibility really suffered.
On February 16 and 17, 2016, there was a student protest called “Shackville,” in which a shack was erected on the campus as protest art in opposition to housing and academic exclusions. We never intended to protest against housing in 2016, but many of our members were kicked out in various ways because of housing inefficiency at the university. We discovered that first-year students had been turned away from the residences despite the fact that they had their acceptance letters. The reason was that UCT was oversubscribed; they had anticipated that students would not accept their offers. But it worked on a first-come, first-served basis, so when wealthier students first arrived, presumably due to their access to transportation, they secured the first spaces in the residences. As a result, the university management established a team to address this issue. But we refused to speak to the team; we wanted to speak directly to the Vice Chancellor. They told us that because were being disruptive we must move the shack onto the grass. Eventually, all this turned into a riot where the paintings were burned and a car, a bus, and the Vice Chancellor’s office were petrol bombed. I’m not sure that we were responsible for burning the vehicles, because this wasn’t really characteristic of our movement—we had been striking peacefully for almost a year—so there’s a possibility that agents provocateurs were involved. Other, disenfranchised people with nothing to lose may also have been involved; occupying the same space as us, their lives had been essentially ruined, having been financially excluded from the institution. Therefore, we were criticized for not condemning the violence. Our reasoning was that that, yes, it could be agents provocateurs and/or it could be poor students, and we would gain nothing by condemning them. It would be self-indulgent, if anything. Consequently, the UCT authorities used that opportunity to identify people who they perceived to be ring leaders and bar them from attending campus. Unfortunately, I was in that group. They later withdraw most of their accusations because they didn’t have any evidence against us, however they are still pursuing five of the students to obtain a final interdict, which would concretize the restrictions made in the aforementioned court order, and that’s where we are now.
Interviewer What is black pain? What’s the significance of this phenomenon?
BK It relates to setting up an antithetical argument and resolution of the master–slave dynamic. It says that South Africa was constituted through colonialism. Colonialism was deigned to maintain white supremacy and the hierarchy of racism. “Humanity” was benchmarked then by the white male, hence the “universal” and “objective” standpoint was European. “Inhumanity” is, thus, embodied by blackness, and black pain is the psychological and physical experience of having to live as a human who is subject to inhumanity. On one hand, you have the psychological trauma of experiencing white supremacy in age of neo-liberalism; on the other, racism exists but, by white definitions, without racists. You can see here all the elements of white supremacy in the context of UCT—not that different to 30 years ago. However, people with clever language can now evade responsibility for what is very clearly a problematic and racist society.
Interviewer How was black pain mobilized during the movement?
BK Rhodes was used emotively as representing the root of the matter, his legacy being the colonial experience for black people in South Africa, and that the black pain you are experiencing here is a direct result of colonial conquest. So, you could say the psychological remedy for the pain is decolonization—hence, the removal of the statue. Perhaps it should have been the destruction of the Rhodes statue; a catharsis to the subjugation of Rhodes’ project. This would create space for something else to develop and for people to live
Interviewer Did RMF only attract black students and communities or was there wider support for the movement in South Africa?
BK I think there was criticism against the movement from all sides. In the beginning, there was a lot more interest and support from black South Africans, although now the people most interested in RMF are white South Africans. They are obsessed with the space where they can commune to provide support and resources. Others would follow everything and comment on everything; perhaps they feel psychological guilt about the conversations taking place or fear that, somehow, we’ll ransack their homes or whatever. Moreover, I think that, recently, there has been significant tension brewing between younger South Africans and the older generation because the older generation is saying, “You guys are disrespectful” whilst the younger generation is saying, often without fully appreciating what happened, “They sold out.” Opinion is divided on the notion and role of “respect” and so support for the movement has definitely been skewed as a result
Interviewer How did the UCT authorities react to the movement’s demands?
BK I think a lot of university executives were probably sympathetic to our ideas. However, they tried to control the situation. Ultimately, it’s going to cause disintegration of the space. It was clear that a lot of the administration (even some of the white academics, although they won’t admit it) didn’t understand the intellectual questions raised by decolonization and what it is that we are asking for. They tried to convert all our demands into some kind of tangible desire—the statue being one of them—to work out how to appease these angry students: “If we just remove the statue, hopefully the aggrieved students will be fine.” They just weren’t getting it. There were fairly complex existential arguments about space, the nature of the curriculum, and the role of the university. It was a “Can the subaltern speak, now?” moment; we felt we were saying many sensible, complex things but nobody was listening to what
we said or reading what we wrote (through statements) in the public space. Everybody was just
analyzing our actions. Even academics, when they speak about us, don’t refer to our statements which are often lengthier than their articles. So, I think that, although RMF has many revolutionary objectives—it has been a fairly bourgeois movement—it will only be with the benefit of hindsight that people will understand what it was that RMF was actually asking for
Interviewer As you suggest that they tried to control the movement, did they use violence, or was it just rhetorical?
BK In the beginning, it was rhetorical on both sides. However, since the Fees Must Fall movement, it got violent. I think as soon as the labor questions were connected it became a different ball game because now you’re dealing with serious numbers of people and, inevitably, if it involves both students and workers then there’s likely to be violence
Interviewer What kind of violence did UCT use?
BK UCT actually had a policy during apartheid that they would never bring police into the campus. That was their commitment. It was broken on October 20, 2015, I think, with us. They brought police into the campus and evicted students. It spiraled into a situation where police were just there to pick up students. There was a lot of fighting: Police coming in with stun grenades and targeting students. Consequently, there was a backlash against the police during November 2015. After that, UCT hired private security. During exams, UCT hired a company called Vetus Schola, which was also doing work at University of Western Cape. This company was much more violent than the police. You could see that the strategy of how to deal with the protests had been conceived at Wits and at UCT and instrumentalized at the other campuses, University of Western Cape being one of them. When it is instrumentalized, it gets worse; you see the uglier elements at the universities that have more working-class people. UCT had the lighter, “civilized” version of what would be happening elsewhere in South Africa. Private security firms came in and UCT paid them ZAR 2 M per month. Their personnel can be pretty messed up, as some of them have said openly. A couple of them had been white mercenaries and spoke about having fought in Angola—a crazy situation with provocations left, right, and center. The university’s own security service wouldn’t touch the students because a good relationship had been established during previous solidarity efforts. They had, so to speak, been turned. Thus, UCT had to bring in an objective, third-party provider that had nothing to gain from the struggles on the campus, making it easier for them to exercise the necessary repressive force
Interviewer So, until now, security is enforced privately. How did the South African government respond to the movement?
BK Initially, they kind of ignored us. I think we were safe for a while because, in April 2015 when the movement was big, a lot of the politicians tried to affiliate with the movement; except the ANC. There were many others who tried to attend to show face, as if they were part of the movement. We rejected them because the movement is a non-partisan movement; we’re not interested in political games. We were safe in the beginning because we were targeting white liberalism, where our critique is strongest. Actually, we were unprepared during the fees protest to confront the state; our thesis was very centered and anchored on the white administration and peculiarities of UCT. Hence, the state was antagonistic toward us. At the same time, they described our activities as “violent.” They remain quite concerned—we have been pushing for decolonization—and I think they’re seeking to frame us as a terrorist organization. It’s no different from what’s happening at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India; what we’re saying is sedition because we are in a sense insisting that we are in a false democracy. We are joining others who suggest South Africa should participate in a revolutionary process and that there must be a radical redistribution of wealth
Interviewer Do you see the movement as a success?
BK I think it’s too early to tell. Probably not. I think it created fertile ground for new possibilities in South Africa. I think it is the most sensible way of looking at what we always were. It may give rise to other movements. I think it has raised good questions about how we should move forward, even as individuals. Nonetheless, I think the movement itself is struggling. As we saw at the exhibition, 1 year later, on March 9 2016 (
http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/western-cape/trans-collective-trashes-rmf-exhibition-1996847), with our conceptualization of the problem from the perspective of RMF and the opposition students’ concerns about intersectional identity/rights and the possibility of waging an intersectional struggle, it was something we failed to uphold ourselves, and that led to the disruption of the exhibition
Interviewer How do you see the media’s portrayal of this movement, both in South Africa and the West?
BK Problematic. Especially the way in which it focused on individuals in the space in general and, unfortunately, on men in particular. I can recall many instances with the local media where they wanted to get statements. They asked whether we had a spokesperson. When we said no, they would identify whoever was speaking as a spokesperson because they were just not willing to accept our way of organizing and expressing ourselves. They were trying to force structure upon us—in the same way that society itself is structured. For example, society prefers to see male leaders. Media gravitates toward the men to speak by quoting or emailing them for an interview whilst ignoring women or transgender people in the space who are raising intellectual questions. Decolonization becomes associated primarily with some random guy who is chanting “Kill all whites” instead of the 30 or 40 points that were raised by the transgender women. Why does the media choose to go to with the random guy in this case? I have no doubt that there is no such thing as media objectivity. Maybe, for a couple of the South African media houses, we have been the goose that lays golden eggs in that people want to read what is happening, but they sensationalize a lot of stuff and they take things out of context. I have also been disappointed with the international media because they do not reference sites in which the movement articulates itself. They give a sense that they are objective, third-party observers, which means or speaks to the pedagogy of what is happening more broadly in South Africa, whereas they could actually concentrate on our writings and see the central question or refer to the first set of demands we have rather than portraying that the movement is all about the statue. Why don’t the media see that the students’ demands are about more than just a statue! I think there is extreme arrogance in their reporting; they just write about it as if they’re simply not interested in reporting the actual matter. This is a debate about media responsibility
Interviewer How can removal of a statue, which is a symbolic object, help in the fight against white supremacy?
BK I think it is about epistemic disobedience. It’s about undermining the entire project of UCT. This is important to contextualize because, often, when people say they know how to remove a statue—they have to consider all the elements leading to that decision. That call is made in a space which essentially glorifies this man in direct and indirect ways. Hence, attacking the statue was doing exactly the opposite
Everybody was questioning the point of removing a statue. They were not just saying what is the point of removing it, they were saying, “No, don’t touch it. It does not mean anything to remove it.” But, clearly, it does. There is a reason why those statues are built in such a way that it’s difficult to pull them down. I think statues in that era were built with the understanding that the political climate would change and they believed that they would outlive the world, like some maniacal fantasy. They believed that we would defy at some point. I don’t necessarily believe that destruction of artifacts is the way to achieve a [social] change. However, I think that these kinds of things are a manifestation of change itself and the removal of a statue provided us with a strategic device which, in effect, enabled us to articulate many issues that meant different things to different people. In the idea of removing the Rhodes statue, people saw their own meanings expressed through different emphases, for example how gender is constructed in colonial reality, or how migrant labor and capitalism functioned. It was a good learning device for many issues and I feel that we all learned a lot from this exercise. Also, in South Africa, history is not a widely taught subject. For example, during my high school years, they stopped offering history. After Grade 9, even if you wanted to take history as a subject, they stopped offering it up to the matriculation level [Grade 10] because nobody was talking about it. They wanted to emphasize the math and science because a high-skill economy needs engineers and doctors. I think that there is something to be said here about a movement—youth movements—asking particular questions
about history because we are a fairly uninformed society when it comes to our own history. I think persistent inquiry into the past is necessary so that we don’t repeat our mistakes
Interviewer Some have argued that Rhodes made a significant contribution to society. Because of his donation to the universities such as Oxford and UCT, these universities are improving their education systems and spreading equality and justice all over the world. For example, the Rhodes scholarship is quite famous, one that Bill Clinton for instance achieved…how do you respond to your critics?
BK I think that education should be free. I think the fact that there are scholarships is an aberration. I think that they contribute to uneven distribution of political and social power. The Rhodes scholarship is actually one of the finest examples of that. It is complicit in producing global elites within the Third World who hold a monopoly on knowledge. It also gives elites access to governmental power. It is like a rubber stamp for life that you are going to be an important person as a Rhodes Scholar. Of course, it’s a certain kind of Third World hook for whoever manages to make his way through. Similarly, I think Rhodes’ legacy permanently damages physically and epistemologically the space in which he operated and overcame, so to say that he contributed to equality is backwards. In fact, we have to do the equality work. We have to repair what he has done in the space. We cannot be penalized and we do not have to thank Rhodes for the skeletons of his project that he left behind for us to reconstruct our society. People say that he “donated” the land. But if you call into question the very notion of “private” when describing the principle of property in our society, then how can you credit him for donating that which he should have never taken? If you look at the university infrastructure itself, an important question arises: Who built the university? In fact, Rhodes is quoted as saying that he built the university out of the “stomachs of kaffirs,” one of the most vicious and derogatory phrases to describe black people in our context. It was black workers who built the university. Who owns the product and the labor? For sure, Rhodes did not pull those stones up the steps that I walk on. He may have provided certain ideological boundaries or tools with his architects, but it was the laborers who at the end of the day played the most significant role in creating that space. I think that it is precisely these reasons that we are able to embody those works and give them different kinds of meaning. It’s not necessary that we have more universities like UCT to have an equal society; UCT could burn down tomorrow and we could still have an unequal society. It’s a similar thing with the Rhodes scholarship; we don’t need the Rhodes scholarship to have a more equal education system. There are many other ways to achieve that. It’s backwards to say that Rhodes’ contribution—the emphasis here is in particular on what has been done to the colony—has to be weighed against his imperial legacy: His contribution to creating things like race in particular and the differentiation in class is irrecoverable. The benefits of any society belong to those who struggle for it and not those who act against it
Interviewer Why do you think that students in the UK and activists have failed to make the authorities remove the statue in Oxford?
BK Part of the problem I think is that they held the South African movements at arm’s length. Our movement was promoted by occupation. Collaboratively, there could have been various debates around strategy that could have taken place across our contexts, but to my knowledge we didn’t make it happen. I think the questions about expectations of solidarity link to how each group had different objectives and, thus, they conceptualized the struggle differently. All fair and fine. But, on our side, the statue was removed and the other changes that we achieved because of radical actions at various levels and direct actions together formed a part of that. The differences in the ways risks were taken in our context is stark and I think that has to really factor into what we think it would take to break the epistemic foundations of privilege that embody a place like Oxford. From a distance, it makes me wonder what other local forces and/or communities would have been crucial to making “decolonization” the dangerous call it could be at institutions like Oxford
Interviewer From your experience, are violent or non-violent protests more effective?
BK It’s tricky to
answer because of how we choose to understand violence. I think that protests are always violent. If they are not violent, then they are not protest. It’s either epistemologically violent, or physical violence, or both. I don’t have a particular desire for physical violence. However, where I am now, I see it being permissible as it is reactionary or it is self-defense. Yes, many paintings were burned, however from what I witnessed, it’s neither “good” nor “bad.” It simply is, i.e., when people are frustrated and you have a chaotic situation, it serves no one to say whether they are good or bad and it often ignores the, often structural, violence that led to that particular flare up in the first place. I think that in a mass protest and an armed struggle, both violence and non-violence have their uses, and they must be decided upon, with their attendant consequences, by those who are resisting. Anyone who believes in a modern democracy is far from being a pacifist because they are saying that violence is permissible, but the state has a monopoly on violence and that’s how you permit a police service, an armed force and, now, private security forces. I think that people who have different versions of justice but who are not pacifist have a similar view that violence has a particular political utility and therefore can be used to implement their form of justice; but this really deserves a longer, separate discussion
Interviewer How do you see the legacy of Nelson Mandela who was in favor of non-violence in post-apartheid South Africa?
BK Well, I think that it is not true that he was in favor of non-violence for two reasons. He was part of Umkhonto we Sizwe and he was part of the operations. I mean, he was a terrorist on the CIA list for a long time, even during his presidency. Again, in a similar comment that I made about pacifism, he was the president of a modern democracy. He simply believed that the state has a monopoly on violence, that’s all. I don’t believe that there has ever been a president of a state that has ever supported non-violence. I think that Nelson Mandela’s legacy on non-violence should be seen as part of the capitulation of the pursuit of the armed struggle alongside the impossibility of continuing apartheid in its brute and crude form due to international pressure for reform. I think that, to some degree, political power was transferred and power sharing took place, and that’s what Nelson Mandela was a part of. It’s an incredibly compromised, complex legacy that is going to mean different things at different times, but something that has unfortunately become crystalized within the name of an individual. There are a lot of young people looking at him very critically now in comparison to maybe 5 or 10 years ago
Interviewer And they have a different kind of understanding of Nelson Mandela?
BK I would say Nelson Mandela is an abstract, because he has reached a sort of divinity in public discourse. But he sits on two planes. People have distinct views of Nelson Mandela the icon: Either for or against
Interviewer Why didn’t the black communities in South Africa flourish after the end of apartheid, given that the ANC and the anti-apartheid party was in power for more than two decades?
BK It’s about the negotiated settlement and the conditions required for flourishing. In a situation where the majority of the economy is still owned by white South Africans and where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process was not fully implemented, those people didn’t come to deliver testimony. In fact, a large proportion of white South Africans claim not to have understood what was taking place. You have a situation where forgiveness was given prematurely. There is no radical plan for the redistribution of land. There is willing buyer/willing seller which has proven to fail. South Africa isn’t quite an egalitarian society or hasn’t made firm decisions whether it wants to be. I think that the conditions for flourishing were difficult to create and that is also seen in the structural adjustment plans of the 1980s throughout the continent. Is it a reasonable question to ask why Africa is not flourishing, given that it was set up to fail more than three decades ago? As far as individual decisions are concerned, we made mistakes: We sold our pre- and post-apartheid parastatals and sections of the economy to the West and, more recently, to China. The growth of the black middle class that has accompanied the capture of some degree of political power cannot be ignored and has its consequences for what sort of progressive changes and politics we might conceive in the future; this is an aspect I don’t think the student movement considered clearly enough, even at an ideological level—after all, many of us are from that class! We are also struggling to pay off loans, loans that we’re unlikely ever to be able to repay. I think it’s a fundamental element of the global economy that the Third World will remain as it is. Nevertheless, what I do think is that we missed an opportunity to codify certain principles of our society and, for me, I think that the next stage of our democracy is to fight for specific principles and attain them. For example, free education would be one of them because we are in a highly constrained environment. Also, we will never be able to compete through military might with the West, so we will have to identify ways for social protection for our citizens or call into question the very notion of citizenship itself
Interviewer Are there any other issues that we should discuss, which you think are important to tell the world in terms of representation?
BK Perhaps I failed to emphasize the importance of the black feminist section of our movement and how they were central in posing interesting questions around decolonization and the future of these kinds of movement. The previous decolonization lobby pushed for independence but they didn’t really pay attention to this issue enough or they silenced the voices in their movement to the point where it was not addressed. Unanswered questions, then, include what a feminist state looks like, and whether direct action is imbued with patriarchal elements or ways of constructing power. It may be less interesting to some of my other comrades, but what I would like to emphasize about RMF is that it tries very hard to be decentralized and so it means a variety of things to different people. This is both its strength and its weakness. This may not be fully understood in our time, which is fine, because there are moments which are catalytic and, when the dust settles, we try to figure out what happened. I am not entirely sure myself what happened here, but what I am sure of is that change is coming in South Africa and it’s a good sign that the youth are willing to fight for it
Interviewer You mentioned earlier, sexual violence against some students; who was responsible for that?
BK In some cases, it would be members of our movement and, in other cases, it would be newcomers—because its membership is fluid—but I think you often have this in social movements where sexually assaulting, harassing happens
Interviewer Was any action taken against the people involved?
BK There were actions taken, driven especially by the women in the space. I think that a lot of efforts tried to emphasize the educational element that people must educate themselves. I think, over time, frustrations grew. I think it’s just a conundrum of how do you respond, and who responds? Because, on one level, you also know that if people go to jail, no one is going to be reformed there; it’s a terrible place. However, whose needs are we prioritizing when we consider that? What about the victim? It’s complex and we failed, particularly the men in the space, to rise to that complexity. You know, jail is not a restorative, reparative space, so the question of how to deal with it is still unclear. If that kind of behavior is allowed to flourish, then what South Africa needs is an independent, mass feminist movement that could be in solidarity with other kinds of struggles; for example, it could be a united front against some other issue. That would be more sensible because South Africa is one of those countries with high levels of gender-based violence, so feminism deserves to be at the forefront and not an element of another movement—it’s a legitimate issue on its own
Interviewer Thank you very much