As students sang in a protest circle just outside the main entrance to the University of Johannesburg (UJ) in Soweto, Vincent Gabarone, 21, wheeled himself into the demonstration to join his peers’ call for free education. Although his main focus is for free education to be implemented in South Africa, Gabarone also has his own vision for changes he hopes the movement will achieve as part of its demand for decolonisation at tertiary institutions.
“I’m suffering from cerebral palsy,” Gabarone, an accounting student, said.
“I’ve been fighting with the management to say can you make a plan for the accessibility. It is there, but there are barriers along the way. At times, there are no ramps to access some premises, and there are no lifts to enter some offices.”
Cerebral palsy is condition caused by an injury to the brain or during the process of brain development in young children. The main concern of the condition is that it inhibits motor functioning, muscle control and verbal motor control. For protesters who have joined the fight to make universities more accessible to all, the need for universities to become more open to students with various needs is aligned to the demand for free education.
“I must be able to enter all the premises of this campus so that I can get as much knowledge as I can from wherever I want,” Gabarone said.
On Monday, UJ students returned to campus after they had been away on study leave. At the Soweto campus, students blocked the main entrance with two big rocks and their bodies as they sang struggle songs and held a brief meeting at the gates on Chris Hani Road.
As the movement is student-led, two representatives of the movement chaired the meeting and helped organise students. One of the students, Innocent Khumalo, 23, is a member of the ANC-aligned student party Sasco and chairperson of the SRC, and the other, Tshepo Goba, is the chairperson of the EFF student command at the campus.
Despite the competition between the two political parties, the two students have managed to put aside their political differences to unite for the mandate they say they have received from students.
“We’ve been promised this thing for 20 years now. It’s nothing new, it’s something that has been happening. Right now, we are tired. Why can’t the government take us seriously,” Khumalo said.
The students at the Soweto campus are also conscious of Soweto’s history in youth activism during apartheid. They haven’t forgotten the uprising of 1976 and, despite the focus placed on institutions such as the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town, they believe that Soweto is where the renewed fight for free education will begin.
“It’s a national call. Soweto is where it started. The questions we are asking began here. Forty years after, we are still stuck with similar questions in education. It’s going to be here in Soweto again,” Goba said.
“The plan is to agitate the rest of the masses in Soweto. It’s not a university struggle; it’s a societal crisis.”
As the students demonstrated, public order police kept an eye on them, wary that the students would cross over to picket in Chris Hani Road, where they would block the high flow of traffic. Goba said that the “police are here to shoot us” and in the past week of protests students have been angered by the rubber bullets and stun grenades that have been fired at them.
Gabarone is bound to his wheelchair and, although he knows that he is more vulnerable to violence than his peers, he is undeterred.
“If I must be hurt for getting free education, then let it be,” he said.