The Rainbow nation and the use and abuse of history: June 16 1976

"South Africa’s racial problems are a result of what happens when forgiveness is granted before the crime is acknowledged"

The concept of the ‘Rainbow nation’ is at odds with the commemoration of 40 years since the epoch of the June 16 1976 Soweto uprising, in which a milestone of nothing has been achieved. I use the term nothing, not as a manifestation of defeat, but rather of the continued perpetuation of oppression that sought to be dismantled 40 years ago. In consequence, at the heart of the student protests across South Africa (40 years later) is the immediate question of the right to learn. 

In choosing to adopt tactics that have forced institutions to shut down and preventing learning from happening in its usual ways, protesting students have come under fire for interfering in the lives of those who choose not to participate in campaigns that are said to affect ‘a minority’. As students, we have been chastised by our vice-chancellors and Minister of Higher Education Blade Nzimande for infringing on the rights of other members of their university communities to engage in “the academic project” and, in the usual sensational style of the mainstream media, the actions of students have been characterized as “violent”.

In dealing with the above mentioned, the use and abuse of history has been brought to the fore. In all honesty, South Africa’s racial problems are a result of what happens when forgiveness is granted before the crime is acknowledged. 40 years since 16th June, 1976, the use of history allows the youth, under the current status quo, to go back to the white community and say ‘A large number of young people were shot and killed for no other reason than for the fact that they did not want to live in a society where they were second-class citizens’.
If this remains true, which I posit, then many whites cannot maintain the argument that they did not take part or condone repression of blacks and that they are being made scapegoats if they continue to benefit from a system that still places their relevance above others.
To borrow a few words from Fanon: a “[person] is human only to that extent in which [they] try to impose [their] existence on another [person] in order to be recognized by [them]. As long as [they are] not effectively recognized by the other, that other will remain the theme of [their] actions”. For a while, then, our right to protest allows us to disrupt the usual ways in which the right to learn is given effect to, asking how it might be that this right can be put into effect for us all regardless of our ability to pay for it.

The 2015 #FeesMustFall nationwide protest was a cry to relieve students from the exorbitant tuition fees of institutions of higher learning and a call to end the privatization and capitalization of education. Its potency stemmed from the rationale that we have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some people an advantage over others, but rather has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. While the issue of fees increases might be resolved in the immediate term, the discussion about free higher education forces us to reopen a national debate that the student movement lost in the mid-1990s when transformation became reduced to a series of technocratic interventions, and the representation of different constituencies (or “stakeholders”) in institutional processes and structures increasingly began to dominate the discussions about and approaches to transformation. As this happened, our struggles for changing the very nature of structures of governance such as councils, curricula, forms of learning and teaching, and a decommodified system overall, slowly disappeared.


Taking on the baton from 1976, the years 2015/2016 have marred us with points of reflection around transformation of Institutions of higher learning and have shoved us into a space of moving beyond rhetoric into a space of taking up action. As students problematize the state of transformation today, arguing that current technocratic agendas do not serve the interests of a majority of students or society more generally, it is perhaps time for us to revisit some of the decisions that were settled on in the past. And there is no better premise to begin this discourse other than acknowledging that, As Biko puts it, “[the] white society collectively owes the blacks so huge a debt that no one member should automatically expect to escape from the blanket condemnation that needs must come from the black world”.


By Thabo Shingange