Reflections of South Africa Student Leaders 1994-2017

Front matter

South African Student Leaders

Thierry M Luescher, Denyse Webbstock & Ntokozo Bhengu

FEATURING Kenny Bafo, Hlomela Bucwa, Lorne Hallendorff Mpho Khati, Kwenza Madlala, David Maimela Zukiswa Mqolomba, Prishani Naidoo, Jerome September Muzi Sikhakhane, Vuyani Sokhaba and Xolani Zuma

chapter 2 University of the Witwatersrand, SRC president 1994/95

Denyse Webbstock, Muzi Sikhakhane &§ Ntokozo Bhengu

Advocate Muzi Sikhakhane SC is a practising advocate and senior counsel in Johannesburg. He was the first elected group leader of Victoria Mxenge Group of Advocates, which is a group within the Johannesburg Bar, from 2011 to 2012. He is currently the national chairperson of the recently formed Pan African Bar Association of South Africa [PABASA]. He was admitted as an advocate in 2000, joined the Johannesburg Bar in 2002 and took silk in 2015. Sikhakhane has served as an acting judge of the High Court on several occasions.

This chapter is based on an interview conducted by Denyse Webbstock and Ntokozo Bhengu on 31 July 2018.

Early influences Childhood

Advocate Muzi Sikhakhane’s involvement in student politics began when as a young man fresh out of school he entered Indumiso Teacher Training College. It was to continue for many years, most notably as the president of the SRC at Wits in the immediate post-apartheid years. Asked about the factors that influenced him to become a student leader, he traces his motivation to the experiences of extreme inequality of his early childhood that engendered an abiding need to fight the injustices he felt and saw around him.

They are very unusual influences, in the sense that I come from a rural place that was completely apolitical when I grew up. It’s a far-flung rural area in Bulwer [in KwaZulu-Natal, or KZN] with no anti-apartheid struggle history. I come from what I would call one of the poorest families in that village. It was, and still is, a staunch Catholic family, surrounded by farms and mountains. We lived in a rural area with no services, and many that were lucky to work did so as labourers on the white-owned farms. I saw my mother work on a farm for about 60 cents a day and my father doing odd jobs. It was also what we as children did during school holidays. The flat, leafy vast land belonged to two or three white farmers, while the small rocky area was for hundreds of indigenous rural villagers, all of whom were poor. That contradiction, that stark reality always surprised me — that I lived in a village that was terribly poor, but three farms surrounded this village with just three white men owning probably 20 times the village where we lived. And our parents worked for them, and I think that was the influence.

I was, and still am, a Catholic. There was a Catholic mission in the area. The priests were white German priests mostly, and every time we went to this church, it always surprised me that the farmers, who were rude and harsh to our parents, had a special place in the church. When I was an altar boy, the priests allowed white farmers and their children to have a separate queue for the holy sacrament. Black people were to wear jackets when they went to church, but white kids and their parents from the surrounding farms always came in their sleeveless shirts and vests. Observing those things in a poor area made me question the way things were, and why it was that Africans — who as far as I knew were the original people — always lived a hard life. This reality was striking to me and seemed unjust and odd. My father and many of his peers lived a hard life. He died when I was 11. I saw my father work for SAPPI Forests, chopping trees for a wage that never seemed to make us live better lives. He was chopping wood from 6am to 6pm, with a teenage white supervisor calling him names. So I think that lived reality, that rural poverty, that blatant injustice, shaped how I saw the world and inspired me to rebel against it. Unlike many in the area, I was lucky that I was able to go to school. I think that is how we survived what I think was the dehumanising poverty of our family. We went to school in order to change that sad reality that humiliated us. A lot of my peers that I grew up with didn’t go to school because, I think, they were not as poor as we were, and I think, they had some false sense of security as their parents had some cattle or worked in the cities. I was personally able to survive that mindset and environment through my mother’s desire to get me to school. And I think when I went to school, I met other influences. My mother’s sense of justice and absolute honesty were the main influence. I can’t talk about my father that much. I saw him suffering and then he died when I was 11. My mother’s sense of justice, and the fact that my mother — as poor as she was — made it a point that whatever we had, we shared it with villagers who were poor, is what taught me to think I must fight for others. I still have an obsession with justice and fairness to date.

Family

Sikhakhane’s mother’s placing importance on the value of education was central to his development, and allowed him to escape the narrow confines of his surroundings, both physically and mentally. As he explains:

I am lucky, because a lot of people that I grew up with — through no fault of theirs — couldn't escape. There is a book about Oliver Tambo, Beyond the Engeli Mountains,*! that I associate with, because I was really surrounded by mountains. Those mountains are physical — something you can see — but a rural area is both physical and psychological, because it hides you from the world. There was no TV, we had no radio at home until I finished standard 10... you actually had no direct contact with any other world, and so your ambitions are also limited — I think I once entertained the idea of working in the mines after standard 8 because those who were richer, were guys who had gone to join the mines in Joburg and would come back looking a little sophisticated. Having lived in Johannesburg all my adult life I came to know that the view I had of the mines was a little distorted.

That was as far as it went with the good life. I had never seen anyone who was a nurse or anything else. A teacher, or someone who worked in the mines, were my sort of reference point. I think you are lucky if you can get out psychologically, you can escape the psychological prison of rural poverty. And, if your parents like school, they are not seduced by short-term desires to have their kid work. My mother didn’t want me to work for any white farmers. Against my will sometimes, I thought. Self-reliance was very important to her.

Sikhakhane attributes many of the values he holds dear to his mother’s strong guidance and discipline in moral matters.

My mother was firm, had a good sense of justice. I think the idea that you must never steal somebody’s money comes from my mum. We would walk down the street, and I would find a R10 note and be very happy because that meant that day we would eat, and I would give it to my mum proudly. Up to today, I could never steal public money, or any money, because my mother would walk back with you for two kilometres and ask you, ‘Where did you

31 Luli, C. (2004). Oliver Tambo: Beyond the Engeli Mountains. Cape Town: New Africa Books.

pick up the money?’ and you would say, ‘Here,’ and she would say, ‘Put it back there. And you stay hungry, but with your dignity. You don’t take somebody else’s money.

High school

There were other influences too, particularly at the boarding school he attended, Polela High in Bulwer. There he met a boy who later became a bishop of the Lutheran Church, Bishop Emmanuel Nzuza, who had a profound influence on Sikhakhane’s intellectual development as a political activist.

When I met him in standard 9, he was this young fellow — we were both like 16 years old or he was slightly older than me — we were sort of ‘black consciousness’ at the time, and we discussed politics almost every day in the dormitory. This fellow, in solidarity with me, would even wear school uniform with me at social functions, just to ensure that my poverty did not stick out. I didn’t teach him much, but he taught me a lot, and we became close. We went our separate ways at the end of 83. By that time, both of us had been wrongly accused of organising some food boycott or something related to food, and the boarding master thought it was me and him behind it, because we always discussed politics ...

But this was unrelated to me — in fact I wasn’t even there when it happened. I had gone out. I had been asked (by the same boarding master who accused us) to leave as I was owing boarding fees. I think that shaped my political views, and just generally, if you go to Pietermaritzburg and you see the poverty in the surrounding rural areas ... So, in’84 when I got to Indumiso [Teacher Training] College, I joined AZASO [Azanian Students’ Organisation]? almost in the first week of getting there. That was the beginning of my formal involvement in political activism.

As he explains:

It [AZ ASO] was at first a Black Consciousness student movement which was one of the first to jump ship and join the UDF [United Democratic Front]. The name has always been misleading to other people because they think it is part of AZAPO [Azanian People’s Organisation]. It wasn't, they were called charterists. I joined a boycott that was happening in the first two months at college, and I think it’s my activities around that time that made me a student leader even in my first year at College and I led that throughout until I left in 1986. I had been part of that, I had been detained I don’t know how

32 Formed in 1979.

many times — I lost count — and that is how I knew Peter Kerchhoff.** Peter Kerchhoff and I were dragged from a meeting in his offices and detained for no reason in Pietermaritzburg and released on a Sunday. I still don’t know what we had done; they didn’t tell me what we had done.

Context of getting involved in student politics

Sikhakhane’s experiences as a political activist — he had joined the ANC when he was about 19, and later the UDF — and an AZASO student leader at Indumiso College in the mid-1980s in KwaZulu-Natal, were to prove even more traumatic and led to him, as he puts it, being ‘kicked out of’ the province. The context of the time was the violence between the ANC and the IFP. At the time, Sikhakhane was working together with Cassius Lubisi and Reggie Hadebe,** an ANC leader in the Midlands. His time in KZN ended brutally, with him being attacked and shot by members of the IFP.

The story unfolds as follows:

When I finished [college], I realised I couldn't teach in KZN because I couldn’t teach in a KwaZulu government school. All of us at AZASO had been detained at some point or another. We didn’t know why they said they couldn’t employ us. I went to a high school near KwaMashu, and after two hours the principal came back from the regional head office and said he had been instructed not to employ me. And then I ended up in Bulwer, in a KwaZulu government secondary school, where I taught from February to October 1987, until I was told that the KwaZulu government wanted me to leave. I was expelled. I was suspended for no reason. I was just teaching. I loved the rural community and worshipped with them every Sunday. Of course, I had been in the UDF in those years. But there was no politics in the school. I was just teaching and hoped to make a difference in the upliftment of that community. One day the principal told me he had been instructed to let me go. I left only briefly, as there was a boycott and students demanded that I stay because there were exams coming, and I taught more classes than were allocated to me. I was teaching English, Zulu, and history because there was a shortage of teachers. It was a rural area. I was also the choir master and music teacher. I was then attacked on 12 November 1987 by a group that purported

33 Organiser of the anti-apartheid organisation Pietermaritzburg Agency for Christian Social

Awareness (PACSA).

34 Cassius Lubisi was a student at the time and is now director-general in the Presidency. Reggie

Hadebe was an ANC Midlands executive committee member who was shot dead when the car in which he was travelling was ambushed by named members of the IFP between Richmond and

Ixopo, Natal, on 27 October 1992.

to be Inkatha members, accompanied by police, and that’s how I left KZN. I survived the battle with them.

How had Sikhakhane understood the motivation for the attack?

You know, it was just Inkatha. I had refused to join the Inkatha Party — most teachers in rural areas there joined — and I had made it clear that I was not going to do that. I had clashed with Inkatha people who frequently came to take kids from the school every day, as I thought it was anti-education to take kids to rallies or meetings during school hours. It was not because I wanted them to go to an ANC rally or UDF - there was no political activity in KZN, except Inkatha activity.

I had raised it with the principal that this idea that someone from Inkatha walks in, kids must leave classes and assemble, it’s a bit anti-freedom struggle. So, there was the clash, and that is how I left and how I ended up in Joburg. I can tell you about sleeping in the streets of Joburg and all of that. But, ja, I was injured — I was stabbed and shot by those people.

Sikhakhane had to leave KZN in a hurry, and was helped to make his escape by train within two days by Reverend Lund,” who had sheltered him after the incident.

So that’s how I got here. Anyway, when I was here, I was already a member of the NEUSA. That was a union of teachers called the National Education Union of South Africa led by Reggie Hadebe with Thami Mseleku. I could only teach in a Catholic school because had I gone to a government school I would have been followed and I would have been arrested or killed.

That his home province had become dangerous for Sikhakhane is illustrated in the story he relates about having to bury his mother twice. She died in 1998, and even after the end of apartheid, he was not able to bury her near her birthplace but only in KwaMashu, to where they had escaped. It was only in 2007 that her body was exhumed for a proper burial in the Midlands.

Becoming involved in the SRC at Wits

That Sikhakhane went to study at Wits was not part of his original plan. Fleeing KZN, he had decided on 14 November 1987 to leave the country altogether. He was to meet fellow comrades in order to facilitate his leaving, but they had

35 For details, see: P. Denis (2013). The churches’ response to political violence in the last years of apartheid: the case of Mpophomeni in the Natal Midlands. Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae, 39(1).

suggested that he work in the Transvaal UDF. With the help of his long-time friend, Aubrey Matshiqi, and Reggie Hadebe, he managed to get a position as a teacher at a Catholic school, St Mathew’s High School in Soweto, and there he started a period of intense political activism.

My political life as an activist was bigger in Soweto in the UDF Area Committee, but remember at the time, I was also an MK [Umkhonto we Sizwe] operative, and I joined the Transvaal-based units of MK at the time. And so I remained in Soweto as a teacher and a member of the UDF Area Committee and became more known as an activist in Soweto than in KZN. Because in KZN, I had left in 1987 when no one was watching — and that’s why most people think I am a Sowetan. I also regard myself as partly a Sowetan because the place allowed me to be an activist without harassing me. I am still indebted to Rockville Township, my second home.

In Soweto, together with many comrades, I formed branches of the ANC when it was unbanned, but it’s because fate brought me to Soweto. But as I said, that is not where I was born. It’s still an important part of my life because I think it was the first time I got to be active politically without being harassed. I am not saying it was easy, we were running away from the police, but KZN was a painful place for me. I was trying to help poor people, but the same poor people were calling people to kill us because we were regarded as terrorists for demanding that chiefs treat them with dignity. The same poor people we were trying to help. It was a contradiction in a way, because as I told you, the farmers — I resented the wealth they had at the expense and toil of our parents — but actually, it’s our neighbours who called us out, because they were convinced we were terrorists and all of these things. Soweto was a very different place for me. For the first time, I joined forces with other activists and we were all running away from the police, not our own neighbours.

Sikhakhane and Matshiqi were arrested in 1990 for MK activities. Sikhakhane’s MK unit was directly linked to Chris Hani, who arranged bail for them. Sikhakhane remembers that Hani had said to him that he must go back to school (study) because, having seen what had happened in liberation movements all over the world, it would be important to be independent when liberation came and not rely on government or liberation movements for a job. Sikhakhane declares he is still indebted to him for that advice.

That’s when I went to Wits. I had already been studying through UNISA [University of South Africa]. While I was teaching, I was studying at UNISA. So, I went back to Wits after I went on trial and Chris died in 1993, in April, and I think it was after that I put in my resignation letter without knowing where I was going. But I knew I was going to school and I went to Wits in

94, and I didn’t want to be active at all. I went there to study and not do anything and I still attribute my involvement to Kenneth Creamer and the guy who is now the CEO of the IEC [Independent Electoral Commission], Sy Mamabolo.

I was sitting quietly as a student, and no one knew where I was from, but these comrades seemed to know who I was because I had been active in the area, and they asked me to be part of the student activism at Wits. I was tired, I had been an activist all my life, I had come from a trial and this time I wanted to go back to school to prepare for my future. Well, fate had other plans. And that is how, accidentally, I got involved in SASCO at Wits and then I was elected SRC president, together with a varied group of activists.

From activism to student politics

Sikhakhane was to spend five years at Wits, doing first a BA in English and history, but he studied political science and philosophy as well, before doing his LLB. For the term he was SRC president, Sikhakhane remembers that he did not take the usual sabbatical that SRC presidents took. Nor did he, on principle, accept any allowance that was available to SRC presidents who so chose. Sikhakhane’s life experience was very different to those of his peers in student leadership. Having had a decade’s worth of intense activism behind him, he had a different frame of reference from students who were new to activism. He relates how he had to balance his own activist experience with students who were now as radical as he had been in the 80s. This was his second round in student politics.

To balance that is very difficult, because sometimes experience teaches you to be wiser and cautious and it moderates you in a way, and I was trying to manage a student movement in a changing South Africa. And SA [at the time] was not only changing physically, it was changing psychologically. There is a Mandela, there is the ANC, but the lived reality of students in these historically racist, white institutions had not changed. Nothing much had changed — except hope. Yet, there was an expectation to tone down our historical anti-establishment posture and rhetoric.

And hope is a funny commodity, because it’s elusive. You are being told to tone things down but these institutions are still racist, they are still doing what they used to do, and I think the white liberal institutions are more difficult because people there almost don’t think of themselves as prejudiced. When you are at loggerheads with them, you have a tougher battle than someone fighting an Afrikaner in Ventersdorp because you may be fighting someone who has a reputation as a liberal, yet in your lived encounters with them, you face their prejudices head-on.

And at the same time, the historical conditions of white racism in institutions persisted. The country was expecting it was the end of protests, because there is a new government. Conditions outside are not conducive to protests, but your lived realities in these institutions are such that very little has changed. Black students are still sleeping in the libraries, they have no accommodation and they are excluded every year, so the conditions that faced the students in 1990 are still facing them in 1994, but we have a government that has credibility, and when you protest you face a barrage of criticism from people who believe you should not protest because we now have an ANC government. Mandela had been unleashed — he is still being unleashed now. You can’t complain about something without people unleashing Mandela on you. Be like Mandela, and all of that. So sometimes we were faced with difficult conditions.

I don’t think it is criticism that is unjustified, but it came from ANC people who are now in government — and they don’t understand why you are protesting because they are trying to fix things, but you are also faced with situations that are difficult for you and whenever you protest it’s regarded as embarrassing the ANC. But you are protesting against administration at these universities, and so it was a very difficult time to manage because the contradictions, I think, were sharper in 1994. There was hope, and hope lived side by side with the hard conditions that black people had always experienced and found difficult to manage.

The SRC and internal organisation

The role of the SRC

The role of the SRC at Wits in the immediate post-apartheid years, was, according to Sikhakhane, circumscribed by the external political conditions.

We learned to engage the African National Congress [ANC] as students in order for them to understand that the only way you could bridge that gap [between the hope and the lived realities] was by interacting with our government, and the ANC in particular, to say, “Yes, you do expect us to tone it down because you are now in power. Yes, we can do so, but we need your help with these institutions that continue to brandish your name in our faces when they continue with things which we feel we should challenge.’

And I think the ANC in 1994/95 was quite involved. As students we were invited to Shell House to meet with the ANC, and we continued to protest, but we did make the ANC understand what our issues were at the time, and that it was not about them, but we needed them to help us by engaging with the institutions of higher learning so that we could not just use the new political dispensation to blunt student struggles, but use it to tell universities it’s time to think differently. It’s time to confront their own prejudices.

Main issues

Among the main issues of the time, Sikhakhane lists student exclusions, student fees, and what he calls ‘soft issues’, such as the need for management and academic staff to reflect the demographic of society.

The biggest issue had always been student exclusions, particularly at white universities because what happened is that poor students found themselves in tough conditions because they didn’t have accommodation, some of them just made it by the skin of their teeth to be there, and could not afford what a student needs in order to get on with their work. So when January came, a lot of them had failed and we used to intervene on their behalf just to see whether the university could be more compassionate about it. We were not encouraging that people should fail forever, but we felt that conditions of students had to be understood.

Secondly, I think students all the years had problems with fees. It’s an old battle, so we always wanted the university to accommodate those who had travelled far to seek education and to find them accommodation. And there are soft issues, but they are big ones. That when people go to university or a school — it happens today when my children go to school — I worry that the only black person they see is the one who is cutting the grass and the teachers are white, and in their heads psychologically they draw a distinction that knowledge is white, and hard labour is black, and we engaged the university that as students we would also like to be in a university where management reflects our society, the demographic of our society. We engaged management about how we wanted to see more black lecturers. We wanted to see more black people in management structures. We confronted it, and formed a structure which included academics, administration and students — it was a transformation committee at Wits. While things were changing, our universities were not, but I think changes started to happen. Makgoba became the deputy vice-chancellor, and we saw more of that.*°

There were things we didn’t confront, and I wish we had. I am happy that students after us did. The students who led #RhodesMustFall are my role models sometimes. Because they challenged things we didn’t have time to challenge, what are called institutions of whiteness in society. We had other, bigger problems, but I think we confronted the issues of the time which were management issues, and issues of black poor students. But we hardly had time to engage with the curriculum. We tried, but I wish we had done more

36 Prof. Malegapuru William Makgoba was the first black deputy vice-chancellor at Wits, appointed in 1995.

because the curriculum was important, but I suppose the issues we were facing were more bread and butter issues for us.

Communication

Communication with students mostly followed a direct strategy, and as SRC President, Sikhakhane made it a point to go to faculty council or house committee meetings, and would try to engage directly on matters of concern. One example he cites is when he had been called an anti-Semite as he had allowed Muslim students to march, and he went to the South African Jewish Student Body to explain that they would have been allowed to march against a position as well. In general, the methods of communication involved noticeboards, mass meetings and general lectures with invited speakers on specific topics.

As the SRC, we engaged more with students face to face. We went to their meetings, we called mass meetings a lot, and spoke to students and whenever there were others who differed with us, we would call meetings and go there. So I think that was the method we used at the time.

Choosing the issues on which to focus attention was also part of a strategy.

We tried to focus on issues that the students could relate to. You can call a march on Palestine all you like, or what’s happening in Syria, and students will hardly understand that. I don’t think we ever had a protest that did not include issues that students felt strongly about. Even there, you would smuggle in something about what is happening in the country — about NEHAWU, the workers — but basically, the march would be about students. It’s about exclusions, it’s about accommodation. Of course, it could be broader, you could have demands that talk about the curriculum, talk about management of faculties as well, but we dealt with those issues that students are faced with on a daily basis — as long as we won the issues that were immediate and close to the hearts of students.

We wanted a black vice-chancellor — you can’t get that over the seven days of a march, we knew we were not going to get that, but we made the point that the management should change. And it’s a very hard thing to do because you are faced with people who all their lives have been socialised to see you differently.