We need Free Education now - or we are all screwed

The Issue of Free Education has swept like a blaze - both literally and figuratively - across our nation's campuses. Citing the high cost of education in South Africa, students have taken to the streets with placards to demand that universities be open and free - but these protests often spark riotous outburst, shocking violence, and massive damage to our tertiary institutes. Here, Guest Writer Johan Van Eksteen puts forward a powerful and unconventional argument in favour of delivering every single one of the protesters demands. We think you'll agree.

The past few months on South African campuses have been tumultuous indeed. From Wits and UKZN to Rhodes and UCT, students have flocked en masse to the streets and lecture halls, demanding one simple thing: Free Education.

And yet, many of you (my Dear Readers) are vehemently opposed to this! You flock to social media and huddle in your racist echo chambers muttering trite things about the economy and having meaningless discussions about things as trivial as “long-term sustainability”, “limited funding” and “where the hell is this massive amount of money going to come from?”

However, my dear friends, I believe that there is a very powerful case to be made for universal, free and open tertiary education. It’s not even a case of “can we even do it without destroying our economy”; it’s a case of we must do it ASAP.

Not to address the historical inequalities of our country or deliver on the vague promises of ’94, ’07, ’09 and ’13. Not to restore dignity and parity and to give the poorest an opportunity to improve their lives. And no, not even to create an educated, progressive society that will one day contribute heavily in graduation tax and higher personal taxes (à la Denmark et Germany et Sweden et al) to others who want to benefit from the same free education they did.

No. We need to give them free education because, if we don’t, we are all fucked.

Ask yourself, which is more important: not having to pay an extra 15% tax in your business and personal declarations, or bringing enlightenment and critical thinking to someone who has such a puerile, myopic understanding of the economy, budgetary limitations, and finances?

How can you look at campuses - at the burning Jammie buses, the torched buses at Wits, the charred husks of cars at UKZN – and not see that these people need to read a fucking book as quickly as possible? How can you stand there and watch works of art being piled up and incinerated at UCT, read reports of staff, admin and VCs being harassed and held hostage, and browse photos of law libraries, coffee shops, theatres, and IT buildings being burned to the ground, and not realise that we need to get some fucking knowledge into their brains as soon as is humanly feasible?

How do you – Dear Reader – sit there in your mansions of privilege and greed watching Youtube videos showing protestors expelling parents and stakeholders from meetings because of their race - and NOT recognise the need for free, great education for these screaming buffoons?

Time and time again, illegal, illogical or infeasible demands are made by protestors, asking for free food and accommodation, asking that we abandon Western scientific disciplines, or demanding university staff be forced to donate their salaries or that landlords be forced to rent out their properties at a controlled amount, and you want to remain totally blind to the desperate need this country has for education?

How can you sit there on social media, scrolling past the contempt for and silencing of student media on campuses, the pages and pages of cult-like misinformation, propaganda, fear-mongering and hateful paranoia, not once think “I should be there, on the frontline, fighting to get these kids into the best classroom in the world!”?

Of course, it’s so, so easy for you to retort, “But where will the money come from?” This just shows you all the propaganda you’ve been swallowing.

This protest is being led by some of the finest financial and economic minds of our time. There are hundreds of MA and PhD students in those masses, making informed, rational suggestions. Since day one, there has been a clear and reasonable plan to show where all the billions of rand a year will come from – you just haven’t read it because you’re a racist.

Firstly, we’ll increase taxes by 15%. You know, above the tax increments already outlined in the National Budget '17/'18. It’s not like businesses will respond to this by putting up their prices of basic goods and services, thus negating the increases.

We’ll double the National Budget spending on education, up all the way to 100%. The national budget only pays for stupid things anyway, like the military. It’s not as if our national coffers are put towards Public healthcare, grants and welfare, or social services.

Besides this, we’ve all seen the damning financial documents from Rhodes. Not only will providing free internet, free food, free transport, free accommodation, a team of hundreds of admin staff and lecturers, and access to international academic platforms and libraries cost absolutely nothing, but all universities have literally trillions of Rands just lying around.

In any case, you have to ask yourself this frightening thought: what happens if we don’t give them the education they want so badly?

With just a shitty Matric and no other meaningful qualifications (coupled with irrationality and anger) they could easily become a policeman, or a Member of Parliament, or hell, the next President of South Africa. If you think they’re dangerous and destructive now, just imagine them with powers of law, or control over the financial reserves, or responsibility for the running of the country!!!

Next time you’re about to criticise this student movement, just take a moment to look across that crowd and ask yourself: “Do I want one of these people to be the next Hlaudi, the next Motshekga, the next Bheki Cele, or – god forbid – another Jacob Zuma?!”.

We need free education now, or we are all screwed.

Johan is a guest columnist at Muse and Abuse. Widely renowned for his non-nonsense approach to controversial topics, Johan shines a blinding light of truth on subjects like the hideous scourge of immigration, why white people should vote ANC, why Blackface isn't the real racist problem in SA, and how Black Privilege is an ugly truth that no one wants to admit. He also thinks gay marriage should have been outlawed years ago.

Maties inspires new TV show

UPDATE 13/02/16 7:00am: Muse and Abuse would like to apologise for this insensitive image and then retract that apology and go back to our original stance before apologizing again and retracting our retraction. Sorry.

Pic source of Stellies: Stellenbosch by Carton on Flikr under a Creative Commons 2.0 licence.

“You fucking racist” – the state of debate

Logging onto the internet after last weekend, I was greeted by a message from a fellow internaut. Curious, I clicked the message.

“You racist, this just shows the arrogance of white people. You shud be ashamed you idiot.”

Now, most people would feel insulted by such a message. But not me. By being called a racist, it meant that I had won.

Just one of the many reactions I got.

A bit of context perhaps: blackface fever has gripped South Africa and the internet circles I roam. There are lengthy debates, twitter furores, and at my Alma mater there are long web discussions about this subject.

Of course, me being me, I had to pitch up in this subject. But a part of me suspected something horrible about all the discussion, all the endless pages and pages of outrage and confusion and accusations. And so, I tried to tackle this the only way I saw fit.

Satire.

I stumbled across this art form in high school after a friend of mine pinning a hurtful “satirical” newspaper page on the hostel bulletin board. Slightly miffed that it wasn’t funny, I was determined to show everyone that you can make fun of teachers and hostel masters without outright insulting them. And so, the Dorm Six Voice (or the D6V) was born. Two years later, I started (read: was forced to start) a blog by our Digital Journalism lecturer. I wrote one satirical blogpost about the potholes in Grahamstown actually being Rhodes pools under construction and the reaction was enough to hook me into this subtle and incredible genre of writing.

But in all my years of serious writing (if you can call a few serious blogs like this and this, and working for the campus newspaper for years on end “serious writing”) I have noticed that online debate is mired in what I call TL;DR syndrome.

We all love so much to have our voices heard. That’s the beauty of the internet: that no matter what you believe, there is a free and endless platform for you to exercise your freedom of speech. But reading is a different matter. Anything longer than 300-words that isn’t broken up by hilarious GIF images, anything that doesn’t subscribe to a beloved listicle format, or even anything that doesn’t express our exact feelings to the letter, well… that we love slightly less.

But modern culture has instilled an incomparable rapidity (vapidity?) in our dealings with content. Any long, worthwhile discussion of a topic can inspire comments and “debate” that is fervently and fixedly a two-sided game of binaries that won’t shift. We comment, but we don’t think. We say what we feel, but do we really get the message?

When I posted my piece on blackface, Why Blackface is okay - the Plague of Reverse Racism, I did it to highlight this problem. I wrote it in a way that aspires to Poe’s Law complete with a (fake) guest writer’s name and a serious click-bait headline that was designed solely to grab attention and anger those who saw it. The content, however, is so obviously satirical (the post itself appears just after one about the Top Ten Sexiest Dictators of all time) that anyone would be immediately reassured of my sentiments towards blackface.

But that was not to be.

You see, the moment I was called a racist, or told that “omg blackface is wrong u need to change your mind” (and some even going so far as to say that they can’t believe this could be a legitimate opinion) my point was proven.

When discussing anything – be it blackface, abortion, women’s rights, (insert controversial hot topic here) - we must try as hard as possible to shove away our emotional knee-jerk tendencies. Even if we are disgusted by what we read or see, disgust alone is not enough to say whether or not it should be permissible. Gay Marriage, women’s rights, miscegenation (i.e. mixed marriages) – these have all been thought at some point in history (even today) to be disgusting or an affront to moral value.

Any subject should be balanced on critical reflection and relative merits, ethically and open-mindedly. Immediately taking one side and blowing down anyone who speaks a different tune is tantamount to hegemonising opinion. What if some people legitimately don’t understand why blackface is wrong? What about blurred lines, where it isn’t so much blackface but someone wanting to respect and honour one of their favourite characters in fiction?

This is why balanced, reasoned debate is important.

However, the issue with modern debate goes beyond this, because many of the comments I received showed that my post had not even been read before they blurted out how much of an idiot I am. The fact that some of these comments were deleted after it became clear that it was all jest just proves my point.

In today’s world, where whatever clarity or information you seek is just one internet tab away, we should be able to seek out the full story before condemning or deriding. This inability to see beyond our own preconceptions is indicative of why “discussions” like that of Gamergate can be such ugly battlefields. The problem with online readership is beautifully summed up by this social experiment done by the NPR and aimed at highlighting this exact problem.

We need to read. We need to inform ourselves before we swing the stick of judgement. To succumb to internet culture and immediately lash out in outrage and righteous vengeance because someone had the gall to not have our opinion is not the answer.

But hey: TL:DR, OP is faggot, amirite?

Why Blackface is okay: the plague of reverse racism

A guest post by Johan Van Eksteen
Head of Race Studies and Representation at the International Institute of Social Sciences

We’ve seen it again and again: a controversy that crops up its ugly head every few months, and I think that, as a whole, we can all agree that it’s time to put this ‘Blackface’ nonsense into context and address the core issues at the heart of the centre in this topic’s middle.

Blackface. What is it? Harmless students having fun? Leon Schuster making us laugh our asses off? An insulting spit-in-the-face of black people drawing on a history of discrimination and marginalisation? Perhaps we’ll never know.

But what we can know, is that black people are also guilty.

Recently, in my travels across the harsh, bleak blogosphere, I came across a so-called ‘tradition’. A tradition that sickens me. A tradition that makes me want to take my size-13 veltschoen and throw them out the window the way the government it throwing this blerrie country out the window.

Every year, wherever you go in the country, there is a special Xhosa ritual where black people mock white people. They dress up in blankets and robes – perhaps trying to poke fun at our tendency to blanket our emotions and opinions in a swaddle of self-censorship and guilt – and paint their faces white.

It’s disgusting.

After thousands of years of oppression, misunderstanding and marginalisation, to the point where we whites as the people who were the kings of this land can’t even get a job unless it’s in a city or a village or a town or in our dad’s garage or even in an apprenticeship anywhere in the country through any of the numerous employment options afforded to us through privileged education, we have to face this 'whiteface' ridicule. What are parents teaching their children? That it’s funny or a part of their so-called “heritage” to paint their faces white and mock at least six years’ worth of white discrimination?

It gets worse.

Oh yes, these boys (sometimes as young as sixteen or even younger!) will do this for a whole month! And they’ll do it without having access to food or water – perhaps a sign that this hateful culture wants us, white people, to starve and die of dehydration, with no sustenance or help around us. And as one final kick-in-the-ribs to white people, they then circumcise the boys. Are they trying to make fun of our tiny, limp, quiescent penises? How dare they?!

I am sick and tired of this hypocrisy. A few university students dress up as a maid and the whole world goes bananas. You know, they didn’t even look like black maids, that’s the worst thing. I myself have three black maids – one for each house I own – and eight garden boys. People are jumping to baseless conclusions.

Let us also look at the media. Yes, it’s also guilty. Have you ever heard of a man called Dave Chappelle? No? Okay, what about the Wayan Brothers?

These sick “actors” go around dressing up as white people, and no one says anything. Not a word. Not even a single angry tweet or page-three report in the Mail & Guardian. Yes, I know lots of people will immediately go to the tired and over-flogged horse of “oh, but Leon Schuster” – but at least Schuster is funny. Look at how funny he is. Funny. Laugh. How many movies has he made? Dozens. They’re funny. But where do we draw the line?

This is where the debate gets even worse. There are companies out there who sell women white face powder. Is it okay for women to insult white women by creating such horrific and disgusting caricatures of Western, white and idealised notions of beauty by covering their faces in an insulting and symbolic ‘vok jou’ to white skin?

I don’t think so.

The truth, ladies and gentlemen, is that black people have been guilty of cultural appropriation for years. Does the media say anything? No, it’s all “Miley Cyrus” this, and “Die Antwoorde” that, and “yada yada Iggy Azalea”.

But every time Kanye West spends a million dollars, do people ask whether he isn’t taking advantage of white peoples’ culture of being rich? Every time a black person gets a degree or an education, how come no one accuses them of stealing our rich heritage of having easy access to higher-quality knowledge and self-improvement?

It gets worse. Yes, I know you’re all vomiting and retching emptily now in dismay, but I’ve almost finished revealing to you the festering, grotesque mess of this media and society conspiracy to its deepest, ugliest depths.

They appropriate our religion and our culture: the most important things to us. When we brought printing presses here, did we ask them politely to become Christians? Of course not! Did we ask them to take our names in place of their own names, choosing “Charles”, “George”, “Peter” and even “Nelson”, over… um… lots of X’s and Q’s? No. We didn’t.

What is missing in this debate are sane, rational thinkers: leaders of clarity and well-reasoned logic who can debunk these myths one at a time. Voice who will define this generation’s truth and perspicacity. Voices like Steve Hofmeyr.

Next time we inevitably see a Stellenbosch University student do this, let us remember: pots can’t call kettles black.

Or white.

Pics: Pic 1 of two boys: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/photogalleries/south_africa_faces/images/primary/Xhosa.jpg
Pic two of one kid: http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--C2S-D7Gl--/18erpzhk5qiamjpg.jpg
Dave Chappelle: http://www.candidtam.com/WP/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/good-ol-chapelle.png
Leon Schuster: youtube.com
White chicks: http://www.jackasscritics.com/images/movies/white_chicks_01.jpg