To get South Africans to talk about difficult things, and to talk about our very divided past, I want to start by saying that we are not going to get our country right if we don’t get our schools right.
If we don’t get children coming out of school who know about democracy, about being decent, respectful, caring and compassionate, we are not going to get it right. If you don’t get the schools right, everything else topples.
Last week a first-year student came into my office here at the University of the Free State. Because the young woman was alone I said: “Why don’t you just sit across from the desk where I sit?” She came in and with a huge smile she just sat opposite me.
So I said to her in Afrikaans: “My child, how can I help you?” She said nothing, she just smiled, just a huge smile. I thought, there’s something wrong and I decided to do something professors seldom do, which is to shut up.
And then she said to me in Afrikaans: “Professor, I just came this morning to see who you are. And I also just came this morning to see where you sit.” And with that, she jumped up, ran around the table and said: “And I came here to give you a drukkie [hug].”
And I said to myself, what an amazing kid, [who] can take all the risk associated with coming into the office of this overweight black guy, smile without a care in the world and want to express respect, affection and care.
There are very few schools in South Africa that prepare people like that young student. There are very few homes in South Africa, dare I say, that prepare children like that one student. There are very few churches, mosques and synagogues that I know of in my country that prepare young people with such decency.
The reason South Africans have great difficulty talking about our past is simple: it’s very painful. South Africans don’t want to go back there. The problem is, if we don’t talk about the past, we cannot get through the past. Every day I am reminded of the past by the ways in which we talk to one other, by the ways in which we refer to the man and the woman alongside us.
I never thought in my wildest dreams that a leader in a major party would start to talk about minorities: “There are too many minorities in the economic cluster.” I thought that was language we struggled against during apartheid.
I also never thought my country would deny a visa to the Dalai Lama. And had you ever thought that our country would condone what happens in Burma? Would you ever have thought that our country would not have made some public statement of disgust at what happens in Zimbabwe?
And so our children watch television, read newspapers, listen to politicians and the message they get about being democratic, decent, respectful and about standing up when others are wronged, they don’t hear. That’s the part of our curriculum that scares me.
What do we do when, in many parts of our country, we have lost all sense of what it means to be deeply democratic in our commitments?
I’ve come to the University of the Free State from another university. The first morning I went to work in Umlazi in Durban I saw, as I took the turn into the university gate, a dead body. The school children from Umlazi Comtech next door walked over the body, the taxis drove around the body, my colleagues coming into the university gave one look and drove on the other side of the body. There lay the body.
Then I get inside the campus and I see photographs of the vice-chancellor sjamboking — I’m not talking metaphorically here — sjamboking a member of senate for daring to ask a question.
And that was the day I realised South Africa is a lot more traumatised than we think. Our country is in trouble. So how does one begin to go against this incredible culture of indecency, of disrespect, of undemocratic living?
I am scared at the damage we do to our young people because of our political timidity. We are scared to speak out, some of us because we want contracts and tenders, others because we as a country haven’t learned how to be democratic. Being democratic means speaking up for what is right, speaking up for those who cannot speak and insisting that there is no difference between criticism and commitment.
How then does one teach children, teach university students, teach our own children at home to be democratic in a dangerous world, in a dangerous country?
Number one, we have to broaden the notion of what it means to be a citizen. When you teach children to be proud South Africans, what you’re also doing is limiting their understanding to national borders. But when you teach children that they need to be able to understand their roles as citizens of the world, that changes their understanding of what it means to be democratic and what it means to be decent.
Unless you can feel the pain of a mother in Baghdad, as she sees the bombs raining down on her home and loses a child, in the same way as you feel the pain of a South African, then you’re not truly decent. And unless you can also feel the pain of the American soldier who’s just lost his life for defending something that’s indefensible, unless you can feel the pain of that person’s family, you don’t really know what it means to be decent.
Number two: you’ve got to make young people and older people recognise their mutual vulnerability in the face of danger. This past Sunday I saw the American journalist Christiane Amanpour interview a Palestinian family who lost everything — two daughters, their home — in an Israeli air raid.
Amanpour goes to the father, who had taught his children from a young age not to answer hate with hate, not to answer anger with spite. And she goes to the teenage daughter and asks: “Don’t you sometimes just want to hate because of what happened to your sisters?” I’ll never forget her answer as long as I live. She said: “Hate who?”
That young woman and her family recognise that their future is co-dependent on the enemy, on the people on the other side, that they’re both mutually vulnerable in that dangerous part of the world. One of the problems we have as South Africans, black and white, is that we tend to think that we can resolve our own problems separately from our brothers and sisters.
The third thing we need to recognise as we try to demonstrate what it means to prepare democratic citizens is the skill of counter-cultural leadership — that is, leadership that goes against the grain of everything expected of you.
Countercultural leadership for me is the leadership of a man who spent 27 years in prison and walks out of that prison and captures and captivates the people who put him there with his grace, with his demeanour, with his generosity. I cannot tell you how often I have been in fairly right-wing meetings, where I’ve seen Nelson Mandela speak and seen people sitting there with tears in their eyes listening to a person who exercises not hate but love, countercultural leadership.
Countercultural leadership is a woman called Anita Maritz, who wakes up one morning and says: “I think I need to change my school because my white children are being disadvantaged. They are not learning how to be democratic in a dangerous world.” The school in Alberton in the south of Johannesburg was named after a fellow called Strijdom — they used to call him the Lion of the North in those days. And she decides that the school will be called Diversity High.
But what she realised was that, for these kids to get a fair shake at democracy, she also had to change the membership of the school governing body and the people who came through the gates as students and she had to get the best black teachers to teach in her school in a desperately poor white working-class area.
Anita would tell, with a tear in her eye, how she was no longer greeted in the market place, how people no longer invited her children to parties, how she was isolated by her countercultural leadership. But the tear was only in one eye: in the other eye she sparkled because she recognised how many more friends she had drawn into her home and her life as a result of her kind of leadership.
By leadership as exemplar I don’t mean leadership that doesn’t stumble, leadership that does not make mistakes. It’s precisely because of our vulnerability and our fallibility as leaders that we can lead. The challenge remains this: the children are not going to respond democratically if we don’t behave democratically as parents, as teachers, as principals, as vice-chancellors, as citizens. Our children, our students are watching us.
Jonathan Jansen is vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State. This is an edited version of his address this week in Bloemfontein, launching the series Education Conversations, co-hosted by the Shikaya and the Field Education, the Development Bank of Southern Africa and the Mail & Guardian. On August 31 Dr Mamphela Ramphele and Western Cape education MEC Donald Grant will speak at the second of the series at the University of Cape Town, followed by Gauteng education MEC Barbara Creecy on September 29 at the University of Johannesburg