Barney Mthombothi calls them cretins masquerading as students. They are worse than that. They are young criminal minds drunk on entitlement.
It is unfathomable to think that a whole history can be put to fire – not by knife-wielding thugs with no whiff of an education but by “cretins masquerading as students”.
The arsonists of the University of Fort Hare must hang their collective empty head in shame.
Campus politics did not begin with these spoilt brats who rend damage estimated at R500-million with their boxes of matches.
In the 1950s, a man who had no respect for Africans, Dr HF Verwoerd was appointed minister of native affairs. He quickly introduced the Bantu Education Bill through which he assumed control of the schooling of the natives.
In his racist prism, it was pointless to take the native through formal education: “What is the use of teaching a Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? Education must train and teach people in accordance with their opportunities in life.”
According to Verwoerd and his ilk, it was unthinkable for the likes of late Dr Thamsanqa Wilkie Khambule and Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng to emerge from the African womb and be so adept at the science of mathematics.
In 1959, Verwoerd ensured there was provision for non-white universities, kicking blacks out of the so-called white universities. There were protests at Fort Hare and the newly established Turfloop and solidarity campuses in such places as Durban, Bellville and Wits. Not a single match was struck! For a while, Fort Hare was the only black university in the country.
What lessons, if any, has the Fort Hare student of 2025 drawn from those who trod the
Alice campus before him in the 1950s? Rhetorical question. Nothing. Zilch.
To cork a snook at Verwoerdian thought, history was made at Fort Hare, where African leaders were forged – from Sir Seretse Khama, Nelson Mandela to Robert Mugabe, to name but three.
It is impossible though to restrict the story of Fort Hare to only this trio of African leaders because this university had always been a conveyor of black leadership. By way of its alumni, Fort Hare is a gallery of stars.
In his 20s, the late Govan Mbeki returned to his village from Fort Hare and was offered a position by the elders, which he turned down. “I already had a degree,” he told Mark Gevisser, the biographer of his son, Thabo.
“I was not going to take a job of a headman! They wouldn’t have the money to pay me …”
One shudders to think what these young arsonists are going to take back to their villages because trying to force out Professor Sakhela Buhlungu in a ball of fire is definitely not the way degrees are earned.
What are they going to take back home?
Lessons on how to set fire to history?
When the elder Mbeki entered university, it was on the back of a scholarship awarded to only 33 students that year. This is history of which the NSFAS beneficiaries have no appreciation.
They think they are entitled to an education, something Mbeki and his contemporaries viewed as a privilege, which they took with both hands, gratefully.
In the days of Govan Mbeki, young people were expected to go to Fort Hare and return home to put their education to good use, for the benefit of their respective communities.
Thabo Mbeki himself was a student at Fort Hare.
Black history was moulded at Fort Hare. The Pan-Africanists never miss the opportunity to remind their audiences that Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe taught at Wits.
But black university professors were already made in Alice where the likes of DDT Jabavu gave class. Professor ZK Matthews, Dr Naledi Pandor’s grandfather, was at some point acting principal of Fort Hare, thank you Dr Verwoerd!
Pandor in fact tells the story, chuckling, of how someone was telling her about how “our elders were not educated”. She was quick to point out to her interlocutor to speak for themselves: “My grandfather was a university professor!”
The militancy of Chris Hani is legendary. He is the “hot-head” who forced the ANC in exile to convene the Morogoro conference. A former Fort Hare student from 1959 to 1961, one wonders what Hani would have made of the “militancy” of his successors who think fire, not reason, is the way of persuasion.
It is sad that there have been at least two student deaths – that the SRC blames the university management, but you just do not set fire to historic buildings because your gripes about faulty smoke detectors were not
heeded.
Fort Hare (read black academic history) deserves better.
Cretins!
• Makatile is Sunday World weekend editor
