SOLIDARITY STATEMENT FOR OCTOBER 6 CAMPAIGN
"The last shall be first and the first last.' Decolonisation is the putting into practice of this sentence." (Frantz Fanon, 1961, The Wretched of the Earth)
The new student movement in South Africa has called for the decolonisation of this country's universities. Central to the call has been the understanding that our universities remain a product of a longstanding project of racial capitalism in South Africa, and that efforts to 'transform' since the end of formal apartheid have not done enough to change deep-seated inequalities at universities.
In fact, while some progressive gains have been made in the post-apartheid period, South African universities have slid into more conservative practices. One of the most serious instances of this conservativism has been the treatment of university workers. The mass outsourcing of university workers to private companies since 1999 is a blight on the record of post-apartheid universities. Workers who have always earned the smallest salaries on campuses - cleaning buildings, tending to campus gardens, providing security and catering services - lost what meager benefits and status they had on campuses when universities transferred their contracts to private companies. Overnight workers lost up to 40% of their salaries, many of their benefits (including being able to send their children to university for free), their job security, and much of their bargaining power.
For many years workers across universities have been struggling against outsourcing and the intolerable conditions of work on campuses. Oct6 marks a turning point in the politics of outsourcing on university campuses. Oct6 represents the coming together of campus-specific struggles into a national campaign for insourcing on campuses. It is a demand invigorated by the new student movement and the emerging significance of universities in national politics.
Oct6 is the beginning of a long campaign across South African universities, a campaign that puts forward key demands for a decolonised public African university. Oct6 is the inauguration of an effort to unite workers, students and academics on all campuses to create principled and progressive universities that stand for principled and progressive change in the society in which they work. The campaign begins with one of the most important issues on campuses: the mistreatment of workers.
Oct6 is clear: all university workers must be insourced.
In Fanon's terms, outsourced workers are the very last on campuses. Academics report having to give workers money privately because workers do not have enough money for food at the end of each month. This while senior management bargains for annual bonuses on top of their already swollen salaries. University management must understand that if they want to be taken seriously as agents of change in their institutions and in society they must work against their own privilege in service of equalising and democratising these important institutions. It is in this spirit that insourcing must be a key task in the decolonisation of South African universities: putting the first last and the last first.
The raw inequality of campus life is a sign of a deeply undemocratic system. Universities cannot imagine that they can serve as the cultivators of future democracy in South Africa if their own terms are saturated by such inequality. It provides a tacit education to all who learn at our universities that such inequality is an acceptable feature of our society. If we cannot sustain a practice of equality in our universities, how are we to expect other institutions to work against inequality in the most unequal country on earth?
From recent correspondence, it seems university managements might be listening. Yet they mostly defer insourcing to some future time when government funding to universities increases. Of course, government must be petitioned to improve funding to higher education to ensure that universities have the resources to provide affordable, quality education to students, and to guarantee its workers a living wage that allows them to secure better lives for themselves and their children. But Oct6 is clear: insourcing cannot wait until government improves funding to higher education.
It is the universities' responsibility to find a way to finance insourcing and living wages for its workers without increasing tuition fees, or reducing academic staff salaries, from within its existing resources. Management argues that they do not have the money to fund outsourcing. How then can university managements routinely find money to fund their priority projects: A-rated scientists who do not teach our students, performance bonuses for senior managers, glossy new buildings? The point is to ask what these projects and their funding say about the principles and priorities of universities, and how they orient universities as drivers, rather than mitigators, of inequality.
Towards a decolonised public African university:
Insourcing of all workers at universities
Free university education
An end to the criminalisation of student protest
Decolonisation of the curriculum
Massive public investment in universities.
