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Would the presidential penis have mattered if it was in a book?
October 2012
Presidential Address
South African Institute of Race Relations
Jonathan D Jansen
University of the Free State
27 September 2012
Introduction
An eminent historian recently made the interesting argument
that as a visual and aural society, South Africans rely on
the stimulation of sensual images in the public sphere to
inform our behaviours. In a literate society, on the other
hand, that is, one in which reading mattered, there would
probably be much less fuss about controversies like The
Spear if the medium was a book and not a public display in a
gallery. In retrospect, what was it in fact that made the
dogs-on-illegal immigrants (2001) or the Reitz incident
(2008) or the Marikana massacre (2012) such massive events
of public emotion, introspection and protest? It was the
camera, the visual and aural record of an atrocity that
could be played over and over and over again until the
public outcry was so intense that commissions of inquiry
would be promised and human rights bodies called to action.
If there was, for example, a visual record of screaming
security guards being cut-up and burnt alive in that car on
the Marikana site before the police shootings, our sense of
emotion and empathy towards the miners might well have gone
the other way. If The Spear was depicted in graphically
descriptive words in a book, there would probably not have
been the kind of upheaval at the time.
But that is a separate issue, for what the historian draws
our attention to with his observation of our visual and
aural society is the relationship between a book literate,
or educated culture, and the public behaviour of citizens,
for:
“In properly functioning
societies which read extensively, the instantly visual and
the immediately aural would not triumph so easily over
reasoned objections that come from extensive engagement with
the written word and the formulation of measured positions.”
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We are of course a society that
has long despised books, as the historic burning of banned
books deemed undesirable for citizen consumption attests;
this history is powerfully told in Archie Dick’s (2012) new
book, ‘The Hidden History of South Africa’s Book and
Reading Cultures’ (University of Toronto Press). Today
we regularly burn libraries in protest action and close down
places of learning.
And so the question I wish to address this morning is what
does the state of education tell us about the state of the
country? What are the most important shifts in education
that we need to be alert to as we contemplate the future?
Seven dangerous shifts in the public education crisis
I take it as my task in this
annual Lecture not to tell you what everybody else has
already said or what is easily observed, but to probe more
deeply into the meaning of what is happening in school and
society, and what this might portend for the future. Going
beneath the skin, or the surface features of the drama that
is education, will not only help to explain the stable
crisis in education, but will also hint at the kinds of
social actions that could break the political stalemate in
public schools and universities.
1. A shift in the valuing of public education---Olifantshoek
In the Olifantshoek case in the Northern Cape the
community closed down schools for more than three months.
What kind of society closes down its schools for months on
end because of demands for a tarred road and for the
ejection of a single person, the mayor? Think about this for
a minute. I am not contesting, for the moment, the
legitimacy of the community’s demands for better services or
more competent officials. I am asking a broader question:
why would a community sacrifice the one route out of poverty
for rural youth in a socially and economically oppressed
community like Olifantshoek and other areas of the Northern
Cape? There can be only one conclusion: that the value of
education has lost all meaning for these rural communities.
In this scenario, children are useful pawns in local
struggles for things other than education; and those who
still see some value in the education of the youth are too
scared or intimidated to go against the barbarians in their
midst.
This shift is important because
it has never happened before in the post-1994 period. In the
1980s there was that brief episode in which some activists
called for “liberation now, education later” but that
sentiment did not have broad support, and it certainly was
understandable in the context of the violence and oppression
under the apartheid state. But how do you explain “tarred
road now, education later” or “mayor fired or education
later?”
My interview with one of the
activists was disturbing in part because his own child was
being kept home, and in part because he was prepared for
this withholding of education to continue “until 2020 if
necessary.” Now I understand the hyperbole of South African
politics, but the notion that children could be kept out of
school for months for causes that have nothing to do with
education is something worth pondering.
In these now routinely violent
community protests, education is no longer accorded the same
value as in the previous century. It is not seen as the
route out of poverty. My informant mentioned unemployed
youth who finished school as another reason for this lack of
faith in education as solving any of the pressing social and
economic problems of the area.
I have a sense that this
negation of the value of education is spreading in the
poorest communities of the country, and the reasons are
many: the inability to keep enrolled students in school for
reasons that include poor quality education; an
unpredictable timetable; unreliable teaching; the shortage
of basic resources (textbooks and basic science materials
etc.); the lack of responsiveness from local, provincial and
national education authorities; and the visible lack of
connection between education and economic well-being in
local communities.
This should serve as a solemn
warning: when poor communities no longer believe in
education as offering private value or having public merits,
then expect more hostage-taking of children, more libraries
burnt, and more teachers opting out of education even though
their bodies—for reasons of money alone—remain in the
classroom.
2. The mobilisation of sentiment rather than
thought---Goodman Gallery
In a society that responds to images rather than words, it
is easy to mobilise mass sentiment rather than appeal to the
logic of ideas. What drew the masses towards the Goodman
gallery was the powerful image of a protruding penis in a
hyper-conservative society where sight overwhelms thought.
So disturbing was the image that it had to be physically
destroyed, as if the vandalism of the two men was sufficient
to suppress the ideas behind the painting. That is what
happens not only in a socially illiterate society.
There was little attention given to the attempts to
infiltrate logic and debate into the public sphere. The
nuance and complexity of the painting, the meaning of the
overall exhibition, and the importance of art as criticism
was something entertained by the reading elites. When a
prominent journalist registered the emotional history of the
black penis into the reactive debates, even the reading
elites backed off in deference to the argument for human
dignity.
It mattered little, this debate among reading elites, for in
the middle of the day hundreds of unemployed and disgruntled
people could be mobilised on sentiment alone for what was
clearly nothing more than a second round (the first being
the rape and corruption trials) in a politics of victimhood
centred on the president. The fact that there was no
political reaction to the equally provocative graphics that
followed—the Zapiro depiction of the president as a penis
and Ayanda Mabulu’s painting of another presidential
penis—is evidence enough of a cynical politics that tapped
into the sentiments of the poor for optimal effect.
3. The realisation that material prosperity can be
achieved without education---Marikana
It is still too early to establish the deeper meanings of
Marikana—the sloppy social science of over-eager analysts
and activists is an irritation¬—but one thing that became
clear is that the miners understand that great material
benefits can accrue without having to pursue the hard, long
road of education and training. A demand of R12,500 after
tax is more than what a beginning teacher with a degree and
teacher’s diploma will take home after deductions. Needless
to say, the boldness of the Marikana demands has spread like
wildfire across sectors; in fact some of my union colleagues
came to demand an increase in salary with the gentle warning
“we don’t want another Marikana.”
I wish to be clear that this is
not a judgment on the obvious need for better wages in the
mining sector and for improved living conditions for those
who labour in this dangerous segment of the economy. My
point is a broader one: the sheer scale of the salary
demands and the deadly determination to achieve the same
suggests another route to financial well-being other than
education and training.
Of course this demand for
massive financial reward makes sense when the union bosses
themselves drive expensive cars and lead luxurious
lifestyles. Yet it is important to note that the miners or
truck drivers or other workers are not against the
ostentatious display of wealth; it is that they want the
same material things without having to build towards such
attainment via education and training.
Of course the desperate route
to power and privilege that bypasses education and training
is amply on display in the political arena. The ready
assassination of competing councillors from the poorest
areas, such as the recent KZN South Coast killings, affirms
the observation of Joel Netshitenze that “with the flick of
a pen a man can go from long-term unemployment to a job,
house and car”—once again, without the labour of education
and training. The institutionalisation of corruption in some
provinces and the profitable linkage of party deployees to
jobs simply confirm in the minds of ordinary citizens that
there are other more immediate routes to escaping poverty.
That the most charismatic among our national leaders have
themselves accessed enormous wealth and privilege without
personal investments in education and training must be
enormously attractive to millions of young people failed by
the school system before and since 1994.
4. The belief that central control is better than local
authority in education--- Rivonia Primary and others
Another important shift in the education landscape has been
the growing shift towards centralization of authority. Where
once the clarion call of struggle was for communities to
take charge of education at the local level, there is now a
creeping tendency to reinvest that authority in the centre.
To be fair, the impulse for
centralization is perhaps a natural response to education
crises in the provinces over which the national government
has little legal control. But the centralization of power
invariably carries the potential for abuse, and this is
clearly evident in recent cases.
When the Gauteng Department of
Education forced Rivonia Primary to take an extra child, it
effectively overrode the authority of the school governing
body to determine admissions policy. A school that raises
private resources to enable quality education for manageable
numbers of learners from diverse racial and class
backgrounds, found itself being subjected to legal action
and its principal under threat of dismissal over one (middle
class black) child. The issues of diversity and inclusion
are not at stake here—this can and should be achieved
through other means; what is at stake is the erosion of the
authority of a school to decide over admissions. The central
authority knows best.
In the Free State, the Minister
of Higher Education and Training lost in the courts his
attempt to impose administrative authority on the Central
University of Technology (CUT). I am not making the case for
CUT or its leadership; my point is a different one. The
impulse to control universities from the centre is the
broader threat facing all universities—including the ones
with strong financial, managerial and governance
systems—under the guise of ensuring accountability. We see
this in the push to establish a university in the Northern
Cape despite advice from the Council on Higher Education
that this was a bad idea, for reasons of numbers alone. We
see it in the push from the centre to impose the Auditor
General’s authority on autonomous institutions with their
own established systems of accountability—from external and
internal audits, to annual financial reporting, to
government. We see it in the first-ever attempt by a central
government to establish humanities centres in public
universities and to instruct universities on the vexed issue
of differentiation or differentiated missions for higher
education institutions. We see it in the daily interference
by central government officials to submit the names of
students for NSFAS allocations and to plead for individual
students to be admitted or readmitted to public institutions
despite the fact that admissions policies remain fundamental
to the authority and autonomy of universities. Students in
trouble, especially those with political connections, now
recognize that they can go straight to the national
department of education and training to plead for admission
to a university.
The case of the textbooks in
Limpopo province present the most visible case of a national
department invoking legislation to take over the authority
of the province over matters of delivery on the assumption
that a central authority will do better than a corrupt local
authority. At least three competing inquiries were launched
from the centre, including the president’s office, and the
results were clear: the national government was as
incompetent to deliver textbooks on time as their local
counterparts for a simple reason—“national” had neither the
insight nor the capacity to deliver textbooks in a situation
hundreds of miles removed from the air-conditioned offices
of the central government.
5. The withdrawal of governmental authority in the face
of community-level gangsterism around schools---Eastern Cape
and others
The most serious shift in education in recent times has been
the loss of authority by political authorities over
citizens. The fact that the Minister of Basic Education was
driven away from the Eastern Cape in her attempts to
intervene in the crisis at the beginning of the year that
kept thousands of children out of school, is cause for
concern. The fact that even a presidential visit later could
not persuade the comrades to allow the poorest children to
return to learning, should also ring alarm bells.
Since then, the reported fear of the Minister to initially
visit the Northern Cape schools in Kuruman and Olifantshoek
because of the violent response of communities ought to
concern all of us. It fell on the shoulders of the Minister
of Police, no less, to try and get children back into
school, and he too was denied. It was a non-elected
official, the Public Protector no less, who in the past few
days was able to persuade one of those communities to open
their schools to learning.
My point is this: gangsters operating as concerned citizens
are holding children hostage in the quest, we are told (I
think there is a good case worth investigating by examining
local political infighting over the control of resources,
that might offer a better explanation for the hostage-taking
in the two Northern Cape areas), for service delivery, and
our elected officials at the highest levels have lost their
moral and political authority to restore order in those
schools.
In this respect I have made the point often that when the
most powerful teachers union in our country can also hold-up
the education of the poorest children to fight for their
immediate demands around teachers, then there is yet further
evidence that the control and authority over especially
disadvantaged schools has shifted from school governing
bodies and government to forces outside the schools.
This should concern all of us not only in education but in
society more broadly as people begin to lose faith in—or
simply ignore—those they elected and, once again, the people
and schools most affected by this shift in authority are
those who can least afford the disruption of education.
It would, in the context of the arguments above, be a
serious oversight not to make the observation that
government officials seem to intervene only in those areas
where they can bully citizens into submission—such as in the
case of principal Carol Drysdale of Rivonia Primary—but
withdraw into a political shell when it comes to those who
have a say in their elected futures—such as in the case of
angry black citizens and a defiant teachers union.
6. The recourse to the courts to solve deep-seated
educational problems---Equal Education and the Eastern Cape
schools
It should concern us, this tendency to believe that we can
resolve complex problems of institutionalised dysfunction in
the administration and management of schools by going to the
courts. I understand of course the frustration of activists
and parents to establish functionality in the schools by
holding government to account for the delivery of basic
resources to all schools. But as we now know, government
ignores or fails to deliver on court-established deadlines,
with no consequences. We also know that changing the
long-established cultures of bureaucracies and of schools
are much more complex and not responsive to legal
injunction.
7. The illusion that well-intentioned policies and plans
merely require ‘implementation’---the NDC and the Thabo
Patshwa and Uitenhage Primary schools
This is an abiding illusion in public discourse—we have good
policies, we just need to implement them. The problem with
this formulation is the separation between policy ideals and
practical realities. A policy is, in fact, only as good as
its realisation in practice. Some go as far as to argue that
the practice is the policy. A good policy, therefore, is
something that works, and can work, in the messy reality of
South African schools.
It is for this reason that the
National Development Plan remains for me an important
concern. Nobody I know contests its elegance of composition
or its quality of data, or even its direction for change.
But the NDP means nothing if it does not find purchasing
power in social and educational institutions which, for the
majority of people, simply do not work. I have made the
point before that one way to rescue a brilliant
plan-on-paper is to outline its theories of actions, the
paths (if only illustrative) by which the goals for, say,
early childhood education, can be attained.
To return to my earlier points, once a community begins to
lose faith in the redemptive power of a good school
education, no technical or development plan can rescue such
a society without being lodged in a serious, engaging
discussion of not only educational change BUT social
transformation at the same time.
8. The growing acceptance in society that to protest
means to threaten, insult, destroy and even kill
Our children learn from their observations of adult
behaviour that acceptable forms of protest mean to attack
and destroy even those very resources that enable learning.
There is no single, clear, authoritative voice on the social
or educational landscape that not only condemns, but ensures
that the necessary protests in a democratic society cannot
allow for anarchy and what have now become gratuitous
attacks on ordinary citizens by those in power.
It would be a very insightful audit that accounts for the
number of school and university buildings, including
libraries, which have been destroyed in our democracy. This
has to stop, but do we have the moral and political
authority to create a different kind of society when those
in power behave in exactly the same way when it suits them??
Conclusion
The point of this Lecture has been to point to the kinds of
consequences that result from a society which is socially
and educationally illiterate, where emotions triumph over
logic, where reason is displaced by wrath, and where books
take second place to rocks (watch the truckers’ strike of
the day).
There are no short-cuts to changing society. The only way
out is a social revolution that once again places education
at the centre of the agenda for change but not in the form
of yet another round of rhetoric by the powerful, but
through a social movement among ordinary people that
urgently confronts the rot in the school system before it is
too late.
1 Charles van
Onselen (2012), Review of The Hidden History of South
Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures, by Archie Dick,
University of Toronto Press, delivered at book launch on 6
July 2012, University of Pretoria
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