Writers Sans Borders

• New Analysis by Sim Kyazze*
“I don’t want someone to think I am stupid simply because I occasionally mix up my verbs with my nouns.”
This was the emotional declaration of Television lecturer Alette Schoon (currently doubling up as Blogging Teacher in JMS 1 with this writer), before students on Thursday September 18, after she heard about their conduct during the previous day’s public lecture given by UNISA Vice Chancellor Prof. Barney Pityana.
Alette had minutes earlier heard that some of the students had been extremely disruptive and rowdy, while at least two of them had made monkey noises, a racist chant favoured by football hooligans against black footballers in Europe.
What explains this loutish behaviour? How did young people go from dressing badly, hating showers, and occasionally smoking pot, to appropriating the most reactionary habits of grown-up bigots?
Some context is warranted; starting with the ‘offending’ Pityana lecture.
During the week, the Term 4 Instructors had sent out a Forum notice requiring the 280odd JMS 1 students to attend the DCS Oosthuizen Academic Freedom Memorial Lecture [Link] in Eden Grove Red. They were required to take notes in preparation for a test scheduled for Friday September 19. For young people, the first inconvenience is of course the time—6.30pm! Add on the universal youthful resentment against authority figures, the huge numbers in a confined space, and fatigue (apparently 6.30pm is close to teenage bed-time), and you have the makings of a revolt.
The restlessness increased as Eden Grove Red began to fill at 6.00pm. Older members of the Rhodes and Grahamstown community were nearer the front, while most students naturally chose the nose-bleed seats up and back.
“Why are even here?” a young man with spiky blonde hair, a T-Shirt and khaki shorts asked.
“Apparently we have a f***king test; that’s the only f***king reason we are here,” a young blonde in Harry Potter glasses said, her voice dripping with disdain. She promptly lay on her note-pad and nodded off. ‘Ms Potter’ was soon joined by two party-types (She 1: Brunette, heavy blue eye-shadow, peeling red nail polish, large wooden earrings, cheap-looking finger rings, blue flannel skirt, body stockings, brown suede shoes, red scarf, note-pad; She 2: Blonde, white blouse, black jacket, glass earrings, sneakers, note-pad). You’d have been excused for thinking they were taking copious notes of the lecture. They were busy doodling pictures each other [Link]
Two seats above the Cyndi-Lauper wannabe and her chum, were two young men (He 1: spiky blond hair, white T-shirt, casual Billabong shorts and slippers; He 2: brown hair, similar outfit as He 1) were engaged in a derivative of Sudoku [link] with a female friend, and were talking and laughing so loudly that even some people their own age occasionally threw them dirty looks!
Behind this threesome was yet another couple whose only ‘crime’ was the occasional stifled giggle, as they furiously click-clacked on the cellphones, no doubt sending and receiving SMS. Around them (out of the seats) were miscellaneous groups of students, chatting, power-napping or using their cellphones.
Could all the JMS 1 students have been this bored and restless? Of course not. Some are even worse than that. Two of them made those aforementioned monkey noises when a Black student asked Prof. Pityana a question. They laughed and hissed as he soldiered on, in a language to which he was obviously a second user, and failed to heed his question about how institutional structures in academe can be reformed to rid them of sexism especially against black women teachers and staff.
An unnamed student later sent the instructors two caustic messages [link], going so far as to declare that: “the presence of many of the first years was incredibly inappropriate.”

Was it? To that in a jiffy. But first we return to the keynote speech.

Prof. Pityana is of course, highly acclaimed; an accomplished intellectual who happens to have ‘struggle credentials’ too, having been a personal friend and comrade of Steve Biko, after whom the Rhodes University Students’ Union is now named. In a wide-ranging speech that invoked classical texts, political theory and social theory from the 19th Century (W. E. B. Du Bois) and from the recent past (Archie Mafeje, Amartya Sen, Olukoshi Adebayo, Ngugi wa Thiongo), Prof. Pityana historised the struggle for academic freedom from apartheid-wrecked South Africa to contemporary times, citing the previous invocation of the moniker to prevent debate about academe’s complicity in articulating and defending apartheid’s racist agenda. The good man urged his listeners to jealously guard prevailing academic freedoms because they do so for and behalf of others less fortunate. “Higher education can never function in isolation away from the society it must serve,” Prof. Pityana said.

There are, no prizes for guessing why his statement that the “rantings of an uneducated mwalimu [Swahili for teacher]” who” lacks capacity to think” got Prof. Pityana the loudest cheers. Students especially love it when someone sticks it to teachers on their behalf. What most of the young people perhaps missed as they recovered was Prof. Pityana’s refrain that “mediocrity has never won prizes; and there are no short-cuts” in academe.

Mediocrity; and its celebration. It all boils down to that, now doesn’t it?

We could blame it on George W. Bush, the Anti-Intellectual-in-Chief, who made going to bed at 8.00pm and having others read books for him, cool. But Dubya is an American.

We could blame it on new technologies that spawned PlayStation I, II and III, Nintendo Wii, X-Box; Facebook on cellphones, etc. But youngsters from the rising Oriental East (especially Japan, Korea and China) have been swept up in the same global consumer culture, and are indeed far more techno-savvy than their South African counter-parts. They however, still obsess as much about becoming world-beating engineers, shooting off to Mars or discovering the cure for HIV/Aids, as they did a generation ago.

Educators, parents and public intellectuals are getting collective grey hairs at SA youth’s total lack of interest in anything other than themselves. Loutish behaviour would be OK if they still possessed a reading and questioning culture (distinct from swapping party-tales on Facebook and SMS).

Alette seemed to briefly hit a nerve when she reminded them of their responsibilities as citizens in the new South Africa.
“If you are man and you are in group of men making sexist jokes, have the courage to tell them to stop it,” she said.
“And if you are white student and happen to be in a group of students who are making monkey noises or racist jokes, ask them to stop.” Such proactive behaviour requires recognition of the difference between the private, and the public sphere, and the general rules and etiquette of participating in each.

Most of these young people obviously are fortunately free of the prejudices that have so shaped the history of this country. But judging from the glazed looks that many wear when anything remotely intellectual lands in the public sphere (like an engaged discussion of SA’s apartheid past, Jacob Zuma’s legal woes, the HIV/Aids scourge, BEE, etc), we should all reach for the panic button.

Some people worry about Jacob Zuma becoming SA’s president in 2009. What they should be frightened of is the time today’s youth come of age—as they will one day—and take over the leadership of the country.

• Sim teaches Writing & Editing at Rhodes University School of Journalism. He’s deeply interested in public affairs.