Jonathan Jansen
a second look
There are three, among many other, cases that demonstrate the growing threat to intellectuals in our democracy, and to a democracy for all South Africans. These cases are the debate on HIV/Aids, the debate on the presidency and the debate on education.
The debate on HIV/Aids was striking for the silence of the intellectuals about what constituted, in my view, nothing less than a public health crisis. Official doubts about the causal links between HIV and Aids and the efficacy of AZT created confusion and uncertainty among the two most vulnerable groups within our society: women and young people.
It took a very long time to obtain a tame rebuttal in the public domain from our eminent scientists, such as Professor Jerry Coovadia and Dr Malegapuru Makgoba, on what had remained a relatively unchallenged official position from the president’s office.
No doubt the many scientists with expertise in this area calculated the risk factor to careers and institutions if they dared to challenge official wisdom on HIV/Aids. But their silence might well have added to the erosion of a democracy that should have insisted on “a fairer deal” for people living with HIV/Aids and for criticism and dissent in the face of state authority.
The debate on the presidency was remarkable for illustrating the growing campaign of intolerance and defamation waged against black and white intellectuals in the media, in universities, in public life: Howard Barrell, Sipho Seepe, Mashuphe Kghapole and many others.
Public writings on the expanding powers of the presidency after Nelson Mandela, and the silence of ministers and others in power on issues where they should have disagreed (like HIV/Aids), would have constituted grounds for a healthy and open debate in most genuine democracies.
Instead, those in power launched scathing and personal attacks on the writers, the net effect of which was to try to silence such voices.
Another disturbing development was how official condemnation and attack on critics of the presidency spread into the public, with other voices now also intent on demeaning and silencing the dissenters. It is this kind of intolerance that poses serious threats to the viability of our young democracy for which so many persons suffered (including those in power) and for which so many died.
The debate on education is perhaps the most puzzling. Every public commentary or disagreement with official policy elicits a response from the minister’s office. Every criticism is met with personal attack on the colour, credentials or credibility of the critic.
A lecturer at the University of Zululand writes a polite and persuasive educational case for six-year-olds to attend school; she is attacked with the most vicious assault on her race and privilege that I have yet witnessed in the pages of a newspaper.
Issues are not addressed; instead persons and their integrity are attacked.
I remain puzzled by the angry and repeated “name-calling” addressed by Minister of Education Kader Asmal at those who dared to question the sharp increase in the 2000 matriculation results.
Studies to explain these results are dismissed as “commissions of inquiry” that will be “treated with the contempt it deserves”. It is this arrogance of power that not only disregards persons and undermines democracy, but gradually chips away at any effort to build strong, democratic practices in our fragile transition from apartheid.
For the viciousness of official attacks on intellectuals might very well end up preventing any other potential voices from daring to assume that criticism and dissent are useful qualities in a democracy.
Official attacks on intellectuals come with another sinister twist: on the one hand, those in power are frequently heard to decry, as a fashionable practice, “the absence of black intellectuals”. “Where,” ask those in power, “are the intellectuals?”
On the other hand, having called for intellectuals, the same are bombarded for being unpatriotic and weak. The idea, it seems, is to ensure that intellectuals provide criticism within the confined spaces of power, not in the public domain; that criticism be absorbed within party structures, not in open and public debate; that the terms and the territory of public dissent itself be determined by those in power.
Shall we ever get a fair deal in this land? I think we will. But it will require an assertion of the right to occupy public space, to exercise public dissent, to provide public criticism.
It will require the courage of Onkgopotse Tiro. In the closing paragraph of his testimony delivered as student representative council president before the entire University of the North assembly in 1972, Tiro says: “In conclusion, Mr Chancellor, I say, Let the Lord be praised, for the day shall come, when all men shall be free to breathe the air of freedom and when that day shall come, no man, no matter how many tanks he has, will reverse the course of events.”
One need not think of literal “tanks” to understand the importance of the quest to resist attempts to stifle criticism or deny dissent in the building of our democracy.
This is an edited extract from the second Onkgopotse Tiro Annual Lecture, delivered by Pretoria University educationist Professor Jonathan Jansen in the Windybrow Theatre last month. The lecture commemorates Tiro, a black consciousness leader assassinated in exile in Botswana in 1974 by a parcel bomb sent to him by South African security forces