On April 24 he came in at precisely five minutes.
Jonathan Jansen, provocateur, rhetorician and renegade academic delivered a graduation speech to a group of new graduates at Wits. What was remarkable about this feat is only, in part, owing to the succinct delivery. More tenured academics and leaders would have taken 45 minutes to wade through these same waters. What is more striking is that he built his address on the same ancient foundations as Gorgias and Martin Luther King: repetition.
In a brief 688 words 15% was spent repeating the phrase ‘how do you teach values when —”. Seventeen instances (and variations thereof) plundered the same phrase. Part accusatory, part conciliatory, part harangue, he challenged these graduates to live a better life. A life, essentially, of the critical and compassionate citizen that would take South Africa forwards in these troubled times.
It was stirring stuff. And yet, because of the obviously performative rhetoric, a little dismissible. Were we witnessing Jansen performing or graduates absorbing? Was this just a show, a vaudeville flourish or a call to arms? I fear that those who witnessed the event would concede that it was the former.
My assessment is not based on any desire to denigrate Jansen. Personally I like the man and the guts with which he thinks and speaks, which is more than we can say about a lot of our other, more esteemed, leaders in the higher education field.
What was wrong with this address was that it was too little too late. Who cares when one is graduating? The damage or good rendered by the higher education system has already been done.
These graduates are on their way to careers, life or unemployment. They have no time for lectures on what qualities they should have picked up during their stay at Wits, or any university for that matter. They are formed: hardened citizens. It is those in the system that should be receiving this message.
So who is giving out Jansen’s message to our first years, or second? With few exceptions, not the lecturers who are battered, from both sides, by admin and the influx of underequipped students. Hardly the administrative staff who seem, by and large, to have learned customer care skills from the frosty library of bureaucratic apartheid. And decidedly not the support staff, if the University of the Free State initiation video is anything to go by. That only leaves their peers and, more especially, their student leaders.
Ah, our student leaders. Especially as they are currently congealed into the artery called the South African Union of Students. The vision was that SAUS was supposed to house disparate student interests to proclaim a united front acting on behalf of students.
Yet anyone who has ever had the opportunity of witnessing a SAUS gathering will testify to the ruinous condition of student leadership in this country.
Unbeknown to SAUS, the South African Students’ Congress is under the impression that it owns SAUS, which in turn owes its power to the ANC Youth League, which in turn is constantly berated — for not getting its Marxist rhetoric right — by SACP members. This is symptomatic rather than exceptional. If you thought that the coffin and the bum cleavage at the ANCYL conference were spontaneously idiotic, you would be missing this fertile breeding ground for loutish behaviour.
First there was the Mbeki/Zuma spat and now the Pikoli debacle. The SABC meltdown — all these are instances of the same kind of in-fighting for power. They are simply more sophisticated and therefore sadder versions of the same thing.
But where does this leave the 734 000 (minus the 200 or so so-called student leaders) students in the system?
Bereft of leadership, students are turned inwards towards self-interest and consumerism, a place where Jansen says ‘the black middle classes are encouraged by their political leaders to get ‘filthy rich’”. How can you blame them when there is nothing to inspire our students, when their elected leaders are tearing one another to pieces in an attempt to get a little further up the pecking order?
This seems to sum up the country at the moment.
Without a collective purpose we are drawn back into ourselves and when that localised sphere is polluted with petrol increases, Eskom, racism, ANC cannibalisation and food-price hikes, it makes for a general despondency.
As with the desire for power, racism is a bottom-feeder. It appears only when there are no aspirations — personal or collective — left.