INTRODUCTION

The #FeesMustFall student movement that started in late 2015 unleashed social and political power that challenged the established political order, brought university managements to heel, and changed the social fabric of universities and of parts of society. Foundational values were to be reconsidered, and their ideological bases laid bare and cast off; policies were changed and institutions transformed – and the power of direct action to get radical results was affirmed. October 2015, in the main, changed universities, government's relations with the youth, and government itself.

At the height of the national #FeesMustFall (#FMF) revolt, the protest was taken to the seats of power in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria. In Parliament, in the African National Congress's Luthuli House and at the seat of government power, the Union Buildings, the political parties and government braced themselves behind closed doors and security fences. In some instances they were shielded by armed security forces, under siege while the revolt unfolded on the streets.

Policy concessions and revisited practices were foremost among the gains – the students extracted significant compromises, substantial compared to what any opposition party, community protest, internal African National Congress (ANC) formation (such as a province or ANC league), or trade union federation had attained on comparable issues in the recent past. The parameter shifts of sociopolitical culture in South Africa were evident, if less tangible than the concessions on educational policy. The students changed the rules of the universities, held government to account and changed both national fiscal planning and higher education praxis. Even more, they served notice that the 1994 settlement was just the opening of the door and not an achievement in own right – that the sociopolitical compact was no longer carved in stone.

It is possible that no other legislation has so deeply affected the lives of black people in South Africa as the Natives’ Land Act of 1913. It created overnight a floating landless proletariat whose labour could be used and manipulated at will, and ensured that ownership of the land had finally and securely passed into the hands of the ruling white race. On it rest pass laws, the migratory labour system, influx control and a thousand other evils which affect the lives of black people in South Africa today. The passing of the Natives’ Land Act was devastating enough to evoke, for the first time, organised black protest of an intellectual kind. It stirred into existence the newly-founded South African Native National Congress (which later became the African National Congress) and gave voice to a new class, a black elite educated for the most part by missionaries in the British liberal tradition.

Sol Plaatje writes of an era in South African history almost unknown to succeeding generations. The wars for the land – spear and shield against cannon and gun – are over and he unfolds the history of a mute and subdued black nation who had learned to call the white man ‘baas’. The population at that time is about 1¼ million whites to about 5 million blacks. The black population is domiciled and occupied in various ways – in locations and reserves, in urban areas, in public service building roads and railways, or working on farms. But in vast tracts of the rural areas of the Cape Colony, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, a kind of zamindari system is in operation. About one million black people are squatters on ‘European’ farms. Having no land of their own, they hire a farm, or grazing and ploughing rights, from the white landowner. It is this population of one million squatters on European farms who are immediately hard hit by the Natives’ Land Act.

Prior to the introduction of the Natives’ Land Act of 20 June 1913, the Pass Law was introduced for the first time on 28 February 1913. Its aims were to prohibit black people from wandering about without a proper pass, from squatting on farms, from sowing on the share crop system. It facilitated the introduction of the Natives’ Land Act.

Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje's place in South African history is secure. ‘One of the greatest of all South Africans, the equal at least of Mandela’, who termed him ‘that giant among African men of letters’, Plaatje helped to shape the black press. Perhaps his ‘greatest achievement … was as a journalist’. This is evident in Native Life in South Africa that, as today's journalists observe, began as ‘a little book’ but left ‘a giant legacy’. It is a ‘remarkable narrative of lucid prose, vivid imagery and eyewitness reporting’; his ‘greatest work’, which ‘should be compulsory reading for all South Africans [and] translated into all South African languages’.

Native Life has endured although today few besides historians or literary scholars remember his reporting. Yet we can appreciate his journalism in the book. Plaatje included many extracts from the press and draws on his own and others’ reporting for argument, evidence and flair. Native Life is inseparable from his journalism, its style and content owing much to the press world, though ironically its writing coincided with the effective end of his primary press career. Plaatje's archive of letters, press articles and books provides scholars with more insights than did most other journalists of the day and reveal him as a canny investigative reporter and editor.

Writing the history of the press and of book and print cultures in Africa proceeds apace, and at last places African newspapers and books within their own context. A book is ‘rehearsed in newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, letters’; so it was with Native Life, which – if not included in a recent list of books shaping empire – contributed to an open ‘imperial commons’ by its ironic, satirical pitch, simultaneously pro-Empire and subversive of white supremacy. Where does Plaatje's magnum opus fit? Is it a journalist's book or a book of journalism? It is much more. It conveyed his journalistic experience and skills over two decades, to which he added deep reflection on his long political involvement, extended British stay, and literary/linguistic acumen.

Plaatje could achieve all this because he was a courageous, forthright intellectual helping his people and others to understand their repression. Native Life contains much sober argument, well weighted with biting sarcasm designed to influence public opinion.

INTRODUCTION

Much is often made of South Africa's exceptionalism and its outlier position on the continent. In contrast, this chapter argues that examination of the recent student protests of South Africa, the continent's ‘last born’, is enriched by understanding the history of student protests elsewhere in Africa. In the chapter, we review the literature on student protests in sub-Saharan or ‘middle Africa’ (Mamdani 2008), drawing selectively on insights from Francophone, Lusophone and Anglophone regions. Reviews of student protests in Africa mostly categorise them in terms of political and historical periods: the colonial period; the post-independence period (1960–1985); the structural adjustment, protest for democratic reform and economic decline period (1985–2000); and the post- 2000 period of multiparty democracy (Federici, Caffentzis and Alidou 2000; Luescher-Mamashela and Mugume 2014). Mahmood Mamdani (2008) labels the first three periods as colonial, nationalist and neoliberal.

This chapter looks at significant forces that have shaped student movements in Africa as reflected in dominant academic and political literature. We examine student protests and looking at how they were shaped by political developments, particular policies and various governments’ provision of and coordination of policy in higher education – governance in Francis Fukuyama's (2013) terms. African countries share a historical experience of colonialism and subsequent periodic responses to it. Although the nature of the colonial experience may account for the differences in performance of higher education systems across the countries (Mamdani 2008), the colonial experience shaped the structure, organisation and governance of higher education systems and the production of the nationalist elite that would rule after independence. In most countries, post-independence, students were part of the new elite and also saw themselves as protecting its gains against external forces – but they also began to act as the social conscience and voice of the broader society. Student protests have responded to and – in some cases – shaped responses to externally driven and internally driven political and economic events in particular historical periods.

In this chapter we discuss the key features of these periods in terms of politics, public policy and patterns of governance, and include a table summarising these features (see Appendix 3). We examine each historical period in terms of these three issues and identify the patterns of student protest.

INTRODUCTION

In the #FeesMustFall movement, two distinguishing features produce a rupture with the past. The first is that womanhood is a contested space, along with sexual identities. The second is the contestation of forms of leadership, in which representational systems of leadership have been destabilised. These modes of selforganisation and self-expression of students in the #FeesMustFall movement are different to the dominant practices in the recent past of South African social movements. While ‘being woman’ has been the terrain on which feminists in South Africa and globally have countered gendered political identities, the prevalence of diverse sexualities among women on the university barricades – in protests, speeches, marches, meetings and blogs – is a radical discontinuity with the past.

This gendered difference in the #FeesMustFall social movement is producing a radical feminist political praxis that stands in stark contrast to the ‘domesticated feminisms’ that characterise older South African political activists today. In various ways – through elite formation, political incorporation, ageing and political fatigue – most of the older feminists who were part of the democratic transition no longer occupy the spaces on the barricades. This may be seen as a natural cycle of social protest. Leon Trotsky is credited with the saying, ‘Before forty, a revolutionary. After forty, a rogue!’ This chapter contends that the different political positionalities of what I term the ‘new African woman’ vis-à-vis the ‘domesticated feminist’ produces a generational rupture and leads to what I call ‘generational blues’. By this term I imply that instead of the significant chasm that potentially exists between the ‘new African woman’ and the older feminist, the older feminist should be the ‘organic political elder’ of the ‘new African woman’.

My chapter focuses on the ways in which lesser-known coloured feminist activists of the 1980s and the 2010s have challenged their social containment as women in order to give fuller self-expression to their political activism. The 2012–2013 Red Tent research project (Miller 2013a, b, c, d) of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) conducted personal interviews with ten middle-class women from 1980s social movements in the Western Cape; a personal interview with a key woman leader from the Proudly Manenberg organisation active in the 2000s; two focus groups with middle-class African women immigrants in Edinburgh; and working-class women (the dominant profile of the male leader, Mario Wanza, has often overshadowed the role of the women's leadership in Proudly Manenberg).

One of Sol Plaatje's earliest responses to the passing of the Natives’ Land Act, a foundational piece of segregationist legislation that would define politics in unionist South Africa, was to visit Bloemhof, a village 170 km north-east of his home in Kimberley.

Setting off early one morning in the first week of July 1913, Plaatje, accompanied by an unnamed group of friends, arrived by train in this small agricultural and mining settlement on the northern banks of the Vaal River. The purpose of his visit was existential as much as journalistic. A month earlier, white parliamentarians in Cape Town had voted in favour of passing the Natives’ Land Bill. Shortly before the Bill's adoption, Plaatje had written that, if passed, the new law would deprive black inhabitants of what little they possessed and ‘make them roving wanderers and potential criminals’. Its subsequent passage into law motivated Plaatje to embark on ‘a tour of observation’ regarding the new law's early operation in the Orange Free State.

Native Life in South Africa, Plaatje's petitionary dissertation on the Natives’ Land Act, threads together first-hand observations made during a series of investigative journeys to far-flung parts of the Orange Free State and eastern parts of the Cape Colony. These descriptions are in many ways the fulcrum of Native Life: they humanise Plaatje's grand-scale political history, lending it a human-scale dimension, often in stark terms. Many of the most compelling reports were recorded in and around Bloemhof.

Beginnings matter. Arriving in Bloemhof in June 2015, intent on revisiting the places visited by Plaatje during his investigative sorties, I found myself wondering: why Bloemhof? It is an unremarkable place to start a journey. A town of 27 000 inhabitants, Bloemhof has no defining prospect. Like many of the rural towns and settlements Plaatje visited in 1913, Prince Street, Bloemhof 's main boulevard, is a muddle of formalised businesses and informal street hustle. Franchised food retailers and fuel stations, most of them owned by white businessmen, neighbour on cut-price retail stores established by recent migrants from Asia. Large diesel trucks are a constant feature of the town's life. Bound for markets in Kimberley, Klerksdorp and Johannesburg, at night they audibly disturb the quiet of Bloemhof 's idiosyncratically named guest lodges (Why Not, Villa de Rosa, Place of the Fish Eagle).

Lefatshe bulega ke tsene.

Fa o mpona ke leba kwa le kwa jaana

Fa o mpona ke ebaeba jaana,

Itse fa ke le senyae;

Ke tlhoka le bona boyo.

Ga go na fa nka ipayang gona,

Fa nka tlhomang mogwaafatshe teng.

Lefatshe nkometse:

O fetoge legaga le le boteng,

Le le botengteng, le le sephara.

Gongwe nka bona lefelo,

Ka alela mamphorwana a me.

Lefatshe bulega o nkometse.

Gongwe nka kopana le batsadi ba me

Ba mphimola dikeledi.

This chapter examines the long-term economic and political significance of the arguments that Plaatje presented a century ago in Native Life in South Africa. I have it in mind to unsettle two largely dismissive readings of his work that are influential today. The first of these comes often from our students, who view the mission-educated elite as liberal agents of imperialism, or as stooges of international capitalism. These criticisms are rarely based on a careful reading of Plaatje's book, but they are nonetheless powerful and pervasive, justifying the neglect of the oldest black South African writers and their arguments. The second emerges from the scholarship that has been produced in South Africa over the last quarter-century on the social history of the countryside. The assessment of Plaatje offered here is more careful, but it also suggests that the arguments in Native Life were neither representative of the desires of the majority of Africans on the land, nor – most importantly – of the actual conditions under which farming continued for much of the twentieth century.

In this chapter I want to draw out the global importance of the claims that Plaatje presented about the obligations and promises of African imperial progressivism. This is in part a matter of political significance, allowing Plaatje – like M K Gandhi – to assemble an international movement, based mostly in Britain and North America, against the forms of white supremacy that were developing in South Africa. In his own lifetime these efforts produced only bitter defeat but, arguably, it was the same movement that ultimately defeated the apartheid state. Plaatje's book is also an economic prediction about the consequences of stripping Africans of formal legal rights over land. Here I suggest that we can assess these claims – and the importance of their history – by comparing the linked but substantially different legal and economic developments that have taken place across the border, in Botswana. In both cases I show that we have good grounds to think again, and in new ways, about what was at stake in the writing of Native Life.

One of the more energetic debates about postapartheid South African literature revolves around the question of why genre fiction, and more particularly crime fiction, so heavily saturates the book market. This debate has often been conducted anecdotally or superficially in reviews and comments on literary websites, despite scattered journal articles and one or two special issues on the topic. Particularly contested has been my own suggestion that crime thrillers may have come to stand in for what used to be seen as political or engaged fiction, in response to which some academics have argued that the generic or formulaic nature of detective novels precludes them from a nuanced treatment of sociopolitical issues. A common strand has been the contention that it is far-fetched to assume that genre fiction can engage with political themes in the manner of Gordimer, Langa, Mda or Serote. A great deal of this commentary appears in the form of stabs of opinion in the comment threads of digital media, and as such does not penetrate much beyond provisional position-taking.

An exception to this trend is Michael Titlestad and Ashlee Polatinsky's essay ‘Turning to Crime: Mike Nicol's The Ibis Tapestry and Payback’, in which the authors argue that Nicol's own turn from serious fiction (as exemplified by his 1998 novel The Ibis Tapestry) to the popular form of crime fiction (as in his 2008 novel Payback) represents an unfortunate withdrawal from more serious literary writing in which matters are, fittingly, in a state of unresolved tension. Instead of keeping faith with the open-form novel, Nicol gives way to the temptation of neat but ultimately superficial gestures of closure. Although Titlestad and Polatinsky do not say so explicitly, there is in their argument a strong sense of disappointment that an outstanding South African author, in the older, more serious vein of South African writing, should ‘sell out’ to the seductions of a popular market where trite ‘answers’ are laid out in accordance with the norms of the genre. For Titlestad and Polatinsky, the intense grappling of pre-2000 writing with the challenges of cultural difference – how to give people of all ethnic, gender and class variations their due – appears to have given way to ‘thriller’ computations of the social totality.

The previous chapter opened with a consideration of discourse about crime, and the manner in which public discussion about wrongdoing has contributed to the disorienting nature of the postapartheid period. The argument explored a ‘white phenomenology of crime’, as perceived by Steinberg, and moved on to a consideration of Bloom's Ways of Staying, where it found, instead of a contraction into a psychological laager, a breakout impulse, a widening of the authorial lens, the effect of which is to suggest a more widespread sense of contingency. Similarly, in Krog's Begging to be Black, the greater reach of integration among races also results in increased states of fear and growing suspicion. The expanded range of intersubjective encounter, along with states of peril differently distributed to those in the past, distinguishes nonfiction narratives of detection in the postapartheid period from earlier chronicles of unbelonging, namely travelogues and journeys into the interior, despite the persistence, if not compulsion, of the trope of journeying. In spite of what I earlier typified as ‘compulsive (re)iteration, a literature seemingly always, and repeatedly, at the frontier of not-knowing, on the brink’, there are signs in this literature that the writer now understands more than ever before that his viewfinder must include the larger race, class and gender picture; in addition, his or her tone must be stripped of all forms of paternalism. There is a new impatience to move on, working in Ginzburg's ‘conjectural paradigm’ of detection, based on a more general evidential paradigm (as noted in Chapter 3). So, despite black and white writers alike finding the symptoms of democracy perverse, brimming with ‘bad’ difference, it is also true to say that the return, in the sociopolitical sphere, of ‘frontier’ conditions is rendered deeply problematic, and subjected to what one might call a more stringent, peculiarly postapartheid critique. This critique, unlike many past reckonings with apartheid, cannot settle the matter in struggle preconceptions. It is a critique, rather, that must define the material details that underpin ruptures in the feverishly imagined discourse of democratic South Africa. The devil is in such detail, since master-narratives no longer hold sway.