At the height of the Fees Must Fall protests that rocked South African campuses in 2015, Professor Adam Habib, Vice-Chancellor of Wits University, was offered a chair to sit on during a mass meeting with students.
He declined, and sat down on the floor instead to listen to their grievances. It was a gesture of solidarity that quite literally put him on the same level as the protestors, but at the same time it was a reminder that he too once stood with his fist raised on the other side of the great divide.
As a young “troublemaker”, growing up in Pietermaritzburg, he was an active participant in high school boycotts, campus politics, and the trade union movement. During the State of Emergency years, on the cusp of South Africa’s transition to democracy, he was detained for his political activities, adding a touch of irony to his later decision, as Vice-Chancellor, to bring riot police onto the seething campus.
But as Professor Habib tells Ruda in this revealing interview, he had been “predicting an explosion” in the tertiary education system for years, so the intensity of the Fees Must Fall protests didn’t take him by surprise.
But what it did do was put him through “an existential crisis”, as he battled to align his strong support for the legitimate demands of students, with his duty to keep Wits from collapsing under the onslaught of the protests.
Now writing a book on Fees Must Fall, Professor Habib tells Ruda about his rabble-rousing early years, his political reawakening far away from home, and his realisation that the struggle for liberty continues to rage, even in a free society.
Transcript
R: Hello, welcome to another session of the Change Exchange – where we talk about life, and we talk about changes and decisions and how we make them and, sometimes, how they make us. And my guest for this session, Professor Adam Habib, the vice-chancellor of Wits. Welcome.
A: Thank you very much.
R: Thank you for finding time in a busy schedule – really busy schedule.
A: Thank you
R: You started out doing BSc and then changed in the middle. That is already a big decision at, what, 18, 19?
A: Yah, about 18. Partly because I didn’t know what I wanted to do, like many students. So I landed up as a young, middle-class kid, went to the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg, which was a really pretty campus. And went there, it was a small campus, very homely, did BSc, hated the BSc, spent half of my time outside the classroom rather than in it.
R: (laughs)
A: And realized very soon that that was the wrong choice. I was lucky that my father believed in second chances. And so…
R: Political science and history then.
A: Yah, and then he gave me a kind of option and I then decided to go to political science and history, as a kind of BA. And initially I thought I was going to law, so a kind of BA political science and history was en route to a law degree. But I, en route, decided actually I didn’t want to do law. That I wanted to go into an honours degree, you know? Masters degree, PhD. And all was by chance rather than by design.
R: So you didn’t set out to be an academic?
A: No, I didn’t. I started…I first thought I’d do medicine and science. Decided I didn’t like it. Then went to, decided I wanted to do law, and started a BA towards that degree. Was terrified at the prospect of having to do Afrikaans and Latin, actually. Those were the two…
R: Equally foreign languages in KwaZulu-Natal.
A: They kind of freaked me out. But en route I began to enjoy political science. I was politically active, I was involved in the trade union movement, political parties, and fairly politicised in my university as …
R: At Maritzburg already, or at Wits later?
A: No, no, no, at Maritzburg already I had become fairly politicised. In my second year I started teaching at a place called Second Trust. And the Second Trust was an NGO that really was an educational structure that provided, provided support at multiple levels. I was employed in a programme that was meant to assist teachers in providing them with resources so that they could teach in classes, particularly teachers in schools at African townships. But while I was there I got involved in working with the trade union movement, because Second Trust also worked with trade unions. And we basically had a whole series of literacy campaigns for teaching people how to read and write and I would spend a fair degree of time in those kinds of classes.
R: How did that change your view of South Africa and South African society?
A: Oh, it fundamentally changed me. I mean I came in…I got recruited, to be honest I got politicised in school, I was in standard 7, so grade 9. And just walked into high school, my first day at high school and there was a school boycott in 1980 that lasted seven months, eight months. And I thought it was kinda cool, so I went out. And got politicised as a result of that. I began to start reading about Steve Biko and Nelson Mandela, but eventually I landed up being recruited by a guy called inaudible who had been in Robben Island. But he belonged to something called the Unity Movement. The Unity Movement was largely based in Western Cape and the Eastern Cape. Largely made up of teachers. But a very kind of principled organisation and that’s how I got involved. Landed up into university was involved in, if you like, the Tricapital Parliament Campaign against it. Landed up in university and then got involved in Second Trust. And Second Trust kind of introduced me to mass movement politics – the big trade union movement, the issue of class politics, the issue of shop floor politics. But it all happened in about ’85, ’86, which was the declaration of the State of Emergency. And very soon after that the place that I used to work at, Second Trust, got raided regularly. And as we did these programmes in the union movement and then acute groups, we got raided fairly regularly. And then in the State of Emergency 1986, detained for two weeks I think it was, under the State of Emergency regulation. And that was my kind of year in university. And so I got very politicised very very quickly.
R: I think we all forget how different the country was.
A: Oh, it was fundamentally different. This is why, when I kind of engage students and they say to me “we’re engaging in Apartheid discourse”, I say “really, do you have any idea what Apartheid discourse was? Do you have activities …
R: Meant?
A: Were meant?” When people say that they were abused by security on the campus I think we must take that seriously. But do you really have any idea when you describe that as equivalent? Do you know what it was to be in solitary confinement in prison? You know? So those kinds of things…I got fairly politicised in my… I did very well, ironically, when I took my second degree. So I did my BA in political science and history and interestingly I thought I was kind of gonna learn a lot about how to understand South Africa. I did very little of that. But what it did do, was I got very interested in political science and history. And finished my first degree.
R: (Interested) on an almost philosophical level?
A: Yeah at an almost philosophical level. Then I got finished at what quite I think the first, and second one was I missed it by one percent or something. I did very well. And then I came to Wits for my honours. And that was kinda ironic because at the university my wife Fatima and I began to date. Not surprisingly, the family didn’t like me, they thought I was kind of young, radical, get their daughter. And so, effectively, we decided to run away. Firstly she said, I had said I was gonna stay here, her parents thought when she’d applied for Wits that it was a good idea, because she’d get away from me. I didn’t tell my aunts – my mom and dad very well…so I was the youngest so I’d been raised by my aunts – I didn’t tell anybody that I was going to Wits. And she went to settle down and so a week later I said, hi, I’m off to Wits. And applied quietly. And so I went to Wits. I’ve always laughed and said Wits was like a kind of refugee of love, you know? We had kind of escaped.
R: But then suddenly you were completely on your own. Because …
A: That’s right…
R: … You said somewhere that your aunts were very protective.
A: They were very protective. My mom had died when I was 10, so they kind of brought me up. I was the son of the eldest brother. And you know it’s kind of all my aunts were spinsters so their entire lives were driven by the nephews of the brothers. And they were very protective.
R: So what was the experience like, to get to Wits and now you’re on your own?
A: And now you…I was on my own. It was interesting. So the first thing I did is a buddy and I decide we’re going to rent a, you know, pool in and actually have a flat together. And we decided to have it in Fordsburg. And he was not Muslim, and I was Muslim. And so I managed through, I don’t know, a whole series of family networks, got a flat. And of course we didn’t even think about this. And he came to stay with us. And for some reason they didn’t allow non-Muslims to stay in the flat. So he got kicked out. I think it lasted like three days or something like that. And they booted us out of the flat. Now…
R: So that brought the whole thing home to you?
A: Absolutely. You suddenly realize that actually these divisions on a racial, they’re also ethnic, they’re religious, they’re multiplicit even. Eventually I kind of, with another friend, he then managed to get an apartment with somebody else and my friend and I decided to rent a place in Nansfield, on the edge of Soweto and Eldorado Park. It was really a farm, and I’m sure it was controlled by someone associated with the black consciousness movement in the church. And there was a big caravan there. And somebody told me never ever look in the caravan and we never did but I, kind of funny, there was all sorts of contraband literature and other things stuck in the caravan. But we lived on this farm. And it just shows you, now you think it’s dangerous – South Africa was relatively dangerous in ’85, but it was in a different kind of way. We lived in this farm, two blokes, huge place, none of it was developed.
R: And sketch a picture of Wits in ’86?
A: So Wits was very politicised. Walked into this place and I was shocked at the politics. It was far more politicised than …
R: Shocked in what way? That it played such a big role?
A: Yah that it was so political. It was so substantive. I remember the first debates that I went to between academics at Wits who were like superstars in those days, people in the trade union movement were walking through Wits all the time. Black students were a minority. I mean a serious minority. We forget this. Now black students in Wits are about 78%. Then it must have been 10%. Less than that even, 8, 10 percent. And I was kind of a minority in multiple ways. I was a minority as, because of my racial background, in a largely white institution. I was a minority because of my ideological orientation. I came in as a kind of far left Marxist critical of the ANC, but the mainstream politics on the campus was NUSAS and black students…
R: ANC-aligned?
A: ANC-aligned. And that was it. And I launched in that year, I was in my honours year, and in my first class, my second class, I bumped into a fellow Marxist in the sociology class of Eddy Repster actually. And we had a big argument with Eddy Repster who was quite closely aligned with Cosatu at that stage, which was aligned with to the ANC. And we launched a socialist party called the Socialist Student Action and we had battled to get it registered because SRC wouldn’t register it because it wasn’t ANC-aligned. Eventually we managed to get it registered.
R: So once again you realized that things are much more complicated. It’s not just all of us against the government. It’s…
A: It was multiplicity of these divides. So that’s what, when I came down, my introduction to Wits actually.
R: And when you went to New York? How did you experience that? You were there for three years?
A: Yes. So New York was very interesting. So what had happened was firstly I was at Wits. Finished Wits. And I qualify as an honours student and then I go to the politics department, which is a very liberal department. I always laugh about this. And I said to them you know I’m thinking about doing a masters and I’m thinking about, is there an assistantship for a research assistant. The guy said to me I don’t think you need to be here. I think you should go to the University of Durban-Westville. Because the University of Durban-Westville was an Indian university. I’d never been to the University of Durban-Westville. This guy was a kind of liberal scholar and kind of showed me the contradictions of liberalism.
R: Yes.
A: … In those days as well.
R: Yes, he still put you in that box.
A: That’s … He still put me in that box. And so I didn’t really, this thing, but actually a position opened up and it was a kind of junior lecturer where you worked, lectured part time. And so I applied and they said come. But I decided I was not gonna study at Wits, UDW, so I was gonna study at UKZN, I went back to Pietermaritzburg. So I would work, travel every day from Pietermaritzburg to Durban, go and teach, but I’d do my master’s degree at UKZN. And that’s what I did. And so I got very quickly there, landed up in ’89, taught for a while,, six months, and then I got a full-time junior lectureship. But I was…it was about the time in 1990, things were changing, UDW had just got a new vice-chancellor, Jeran Reddy, first black vice-chancellor, there’s lots of activity in the union movement, it was very active at UDW and I became a member of the union movement. And I became eventually, general secretary of the union movement.
R: That’s exciting times.
A: It was exciting times. And at one of those in 1992 they Iraq war happened (13: 53). And as the Iraq war happened, there was lots of protest and I was involved in organizing protests against the Iraq war. And at one point in the debate at the university we had invited the consular general, the American consular general, to come and debate and I was asked to respond. So he defended the Iraq war and I of course stood up and attacked him for imperialism, the fact that you wanna be the policeman of the world, da da da da da. And we had quite a roaring debate.
R: A robust argument.
A: Robust argument. In the public forum. But a couple of months later he write to me and said we’ve got the Fulbright would you like to apply? And I was kind of taken aback by this. I applied, went there, didn’t think I had a chance in hell. I had a very robust interview where I spoke about the imperial nature of the American government and how it needed to be challenged, and thought there’s no way they’re gonna give me this. And then they gave me a Fulbright scholarship for a masters, but I already had a masters, but for one year. And then the vice-chancellor from UDW said well, had written to something called the Educational Opportunities Counsel, which was doing scholarships for black students in the US and they offered me a three year PhD. And so I took out the EOC and declined the Fulbright. And then actually went on to spend some time in the US. And I went to, I thought I’d go to New School or Berkeley, but really somebody in an office in the US decided, they decided to send me to the graduate school at the University of New York. I subsequently found out this was because the capacitator (sic) was a graduate of the City University of New York and had simply chosen it out of loyalty and networks. But it turned out to be New York City, and so I was right in the middle of New York City for three years and spent a course period of time at the graduate school. Loved it.
R: How did that change your view of the world? Because now you were in the heart of the monster?
A: It changed my world in fundamental ways. It showed me a couple of things. One is our struggle is not the only struggle. It created a much more cosmopolitan orientation – I began to understand that you can only be truly African if you’re part of a common humanity. That we are one of multiple struggles. My first class in New York, and this is what’s great about New York -–sitting in New York, there’s like 30 people in the class for a master’s, well it was a PhD programme but this course was taken by both masters and PhD students, and it must have had 17-20 people from outside the United States.
R: Yoh.
A: I had a guerrilla from El Salvador, somebody who was the head of Amnesty International in Panama, there were a couple of students from Turkey. You know, some guy from the curds. There was like…you just interacted and I learnt more from engaging other students, and grumbling and fighting and arguing with them, than I did from anybody else. The EOC was a very luxurious scholarship, they paid for me, I didn’t need to work, which meant I could study, I finished the programme flat-out in three years – thesis and all.
R: Did you ever consider not coming back?
A: You know it never actually entered my mind.
R: This was 95-ish
A: Yah it was 94-ish, and 94-ish … 94 I was utterly astounded that I was not in South Africa, and the election’s taking place. I was just like, I remember the first thing that they actually do is, I wrote when you land up in higher…you see you’re in an orientation week. They have this thing. And I said to them (inaudible) if something had to happened to me in the United Stated I want to be buried in South Africa. I want my body transported back home. So it never actually even occurred to me. It wasn’t even part of the equation. My son, my eldest son, my conceived in New York. And he wasn’t born in New York but he was conceived in New York. And I had still, we, Fatima and I, we had cover, medical cover, I still had a year and a half in New York. And I said no I’m going back home. I’m going back a year earlier home, my son would, the first breath my son takes would be African. So kinda romanticised illusion, remember this is 95. The changes happened. So we got on a plane. One year ahead of the schedule of the scholarship, flew back into South Africa. And came and did our … I wrote my thesis here and then went back to defend as opposed to this. So it was a fascinating…
R: Yes
A: Fascinating period. It changed my life. It gave me a cosmopolitan world view. It allowed me to understand our struggles play themselves out in multiple ways.
R: And that your truth is not the only one.
A: And my truth is not the only one. So there was a, it transformed me in quite funda … in little ways. Fatima worked while I studied. Got me to understand, you know, don’t assume that men will always earn the most actually. She earned and I was supportive.
R: Or women would always do the cleaning.
A: Or women would always do the cleaning. You know, it was all of these things that we learned. But it fundamentally changed us.
R: And then, coming back there were other things, but then you were at UJ.
A: So what had happened is I came back in 96 and walked back into UDW. And continued to work in UDW. And UDW was still going through its political traumas. And effectively there was a group of students, an alliance of union, and an SRC that had overthrown the management one day. And we, effectively then the police came in and took over the place.
R: How did you experience that? In the new South Africa?
A: It was very different, but it was also…you know I said to the, I remember sitting in the sinner chambers in UDW and saying to the students, whatever your criticism of the manager, and I kind of share some of that, do you really believe that the state is gonna allow you to take over? Are you really …? But eventually the (inaudible) move in. It divided the university community and it. It’s an experience that informs much of what I do at Wits today.
R: Sho.
A: But I had come there and then, thereafter, I actually there was a new management that came in subsequently, the union movement was really, the UDW community was really shattered. And I did, joined, effectively, I assisted management with restructuring the academic programme. With Jonathan Jansen, was still there, he had joined and he was the deputy vice-chancellor. I was simply an assistant from the academic staff. And we worked for two years at that.
R: Yis, how exciting.
A: And got that going. And then as usual the management was kind of self-focused and internally focused in ways that had…there was all kinds of divisions. And eventually there was, I was, I remember applying for the deanship, and got the job, actually recommended, but the vice-chancellor wouldn’t appoint me because we had an altercation. Even though I was chosen by the selection panel. And I was also, in a moment of counselling I decided to leave. And I went to the University of Natal. I just crossed the hill actually. And at the … I launched something called the Centre for Civil Society. And launched the Centre for Civil Society, and at the same time I was offered, I was simultaneously offered a job at the HSRC but I decided to take a part-time job at the HSRC, so the centre allowed me to do a small 20% of my time with the HSRC. And I became a professor in the School of Development Studies. I was the founding director of the Centre for Civil Society, and effectively I worked a little at the HSRC and did those three things kind of simultaneously. And the Centre was enormously successful. We did a huge study on social movements, we did a huge study on philanthropy in developed South Africa. I published a book, I edited a book with John Daniels. And the first stuff, the State of the Nation, I edited volumes with John Daniels. And another colleague. And all of this got done and the Centre was very successful.
R: So why did you, how did it happen that you…
A: And then I was offered a directorship of the Democracy and Governments programme at the Human Science Research Council. By (inadible). And I’d left the school, the Centre was quite strong financially. We had raised about R40 million, lots of publications. So I went to the HSRC in Pretoria. And about the same time Fatima got a job. And she had actually got the job first, and then this offer came in, it kind of made sense. Because she got a job, I got…
R: In Pretoria?
A: In Johannesburg. And so we decided to come. And I then came and went to the Centre and again had a good four years at the HSRC. It was fairly successful. Mark Walkin was an incredible CEO. I learnt a lot underneath him – how to manage, how to be pragmatic. And learnt an enormous amount. And the Democracy and Governance programme was enormously successful, we turned it around, it was in financial trouble. Managed to raise enough money to get research going. Got a big programme going. But I had said I would only be there five years because I wanted, my life was at the university.
R: Ah.
A: And then the Dean of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg opened up. And I applied for it and didn’t get it, actually. But there was another candidate who got it, it was an internal candidate. But what was interesting is the vice-chancellor called me and said we couldn’t give you the Dean of Humanities because it was an internal candidate and, but we think you’d be good as the Dean of Research, you’d lead the research division. And I said well, you’ve got a Dean of Research. And he said no we’ll work on an arrangement. And I said no. I wouldn’t do that to somebody. And he then said well what would you do? I’d said, well, if it was a Deputy Vice-Chancellor, then I would consider. And he said okay I’ll come back to you. And I didn’t hear from them for five, six months, and then they said well we’ve got a Deputy Vice-chancellor we’re advertising and would you like to apply?
R: What is the major thing that stands out for you from your time at UJ?
A: So UJ was again an enormous experience. Fundamentally changed me in important ways. So UJ came in, it was the old RAU, so very strongly Afrikaans institution. Just been merged and it was in the throes of the merger.
R: So it was still about 60% white?
A: Yes.
R: Student, the student body?
A: It was changing very quickly by then. So it must have been … RAU had taken large numbers of black students towards the late 1990s, early 2000s. So it had changed quite a bit. But it was, I don’t know, 30, 35% white. Still 40% maybe white. And I walked in. And the team was made out of people from the old RAU, and a new team. So Ihron Rensburg had come from, what was it the council of the Technikon Witwatersrand. Marcus had been from the Tech there and he was the Chair of Council. Derek van der Merwe was from the old RAU. And Henk Kriek was the Dean of the Faculty of Commerce and Economic Sciences, he’d just been appointed as DC Finance. My colleague I knew from UDW, Anjef Park, was DC Academic, and I came in as DVC Research. Completely new.
R: So you had to build a team out of that?
A: Yes, completely out of that. And in a lot of ways we came in with different skill sets, but it really was a dream team. In part, because we were so different people. You know. Derek van der Merwe was the obeying, sophisticated individual, the quintessential academic. Iron Rensburg was, he didn’t have a track record in the universities, but was the manager per excellence who had been at the SABS and had, not sufficient grounding in the university but did the … what was his great strength is he recognised his weaknesses and he brought a team around him that worked. Henk Kriek, I think is still perhaps one of the best DVCs of Finance I’ve come across. He understood the academic programme but he understood money and he understood, he was eager to learn and all of that. I came with a skill set and kind of, by that time I had a bit of a reputation as a kind of radical academic in the public domain. And I think I brought a skill set to UJ that shook it up a little. In a lot of ways I put it into the public domain. I would like be, debates are happening and were recruiting skills and one of the things that you couldn’t do … one thing that when I came in they said we want you to drive our research. Ironically that was, the managers wanted that because of the stature of the place. The old RAU was scared that we would become a technikon. So they wanted to drive research. And we said we’re gonna drive research. And so I pulled some money together and argued with the management (inaudible) and I went hunting for academics. And the place I went hunting for was Wits University. And people said to me in the first couple of months, nobody will leave Wits. And I said, watch this. And as we started engaging in the public domain and as we offered more money and we did all of that, we started getting to shift people. And as that happened, we started marketing ourselves and engaging in the public discourse, and we were … at one point UJ was all over the map, you know it was just everywhere.
R: Ja
A: And that just changed the place. It attracted new students to the place, it attracted post-graduate students, lots of black students came, we had some interesting debates with, what I would call the white right. There was a time when there was a complaint about a letter, people would complain that it was losing its Afrikaans roots. And I write a thing in the Beeld, actually, an article, about you can only be … you can fulfil yourself as an Afrikaner if you fulfil yourself, as recognising you’re a South African. And that became – there was a big debate around this in the Beeld and you know I was in, debating the Afrikaans newspapers and the English newspapers.
R: Yeah
A: And I gotta give credit to Ihron and others, they gave me the space to do that. A lesser vice-chancellor would have been intimidated by it. He was comfortable with it.
R: So what was the experience of then moving to Wits?
A: So then Wits, then this happens, and we do really well, and within four years, five years, we had effectively doubled our research output.
R: Sho.
A: So we had, you know, we were really recognised now and we were number six in the country, and everybody was talking. And then my first five years came up and I decided I wanted to write a book. I’d been meaning to write this book in a while. On South Africa, not on the university. And so I got a six months sabbatical actually and I went to Oxford, at the Centre for African Studies and spent there a lot and write this. And that’s when the tragedy happened at Wits, you remember the mother who had died because she was waiting in the queue.
R: UJ?
A: At UJ, sorry. And I was still at Oxford. And then I came back, finished a book, and just as I came back, Wits was going up. And I thought well, why not? And so I applied. And Wits was going through its own trauma. It was already divided between the union and the management and the staff. Ironically under any other conditions I don’t think I would have got this. Because Wits would have looked internally. But I did apply and I did well and the three of us got shortlisted in the interview, and the interview went well, and the presentation went well. And by the time I had a bit of a reputation and I had the added kudos I was part of a team that had transformed UJ. And so was offered the term. There was one question that one member of the council asked me – will I continue engaging in the public domain as much? My answer was: Yes, but in a different way, I probably wouldn’t do as many interviews, but I would write issues because you know Njabulo Ndebel, you know he does. I, you want to be a leader, I said this, if you want to be a vice chancellor for research in terms of the university, your responsibility as vice chancellor is also to engage in public discourse. To inform in a thoughtful way. And so I became, that’s how I came to Wits. And Wits was an enormously fruitful experience. I …
R: How do you experience it, suddenly being on the other side, if I can put it like that? That you were suddenly the big bad authority, during Fees Must Fall?
A: Yeah, well that was really interesting. I’ve often laughed and said I went through an existential crisis.
R: Yes!
A: I’d been predicting an explosion at the universities for like five, six years, saying that this political (inaudible) is just not suitable. You can’t reduce subsidy, increase fees and then all of you talk about free education. You’re effectively doing the opposite. And this thing’s gonna blow. I just didn’t think I’d be on the opposite side when it blew. And so it was difficult. But my position in Fees Must Fall has been, I came out openly saying I support the demands of the students. I think that they have a legitimate demands.
R: And you did that from day one.
A: I did that from day one. I did say, however, that how you conduct the struggle is also gonna be a … if you try and burn down buildings I will come down like a ton of bricks. If you try to permanently shut us down, I will come down like a ton of bricks. But if you wanna march to the Union Buildings and you ask me to march with you, I’ll march with you. That didn’t take well because actually there was, what I call a faction of the student movement that was enamoured by spectacle.
R: That’s beautifully put.
A: And so they effectively, for them it was too complex a struggle. They wanted the bad management and the state, and the progress of this thing. And the way this was playing out was just not that way. And they would make demands that were just impossible to sustain. I must say, with every one of the individuals, I wanted to…at an ordinary level I had a wonderful relationship with. They would come, they were charming, they would be good, Mcebo Dlamini who often taxed me on the television station would be saying Habib is a terrible man and then he’ll send me SMSes saying please don’t listen to me I love you like my father. You know, I would have all of these kinds of things! I’ve got all of those things with me. What is me, is people believe politics in South Africa means you saying one thing to the people in the public domain and you do something else (inaudible). I think it’s a very dangerous politics, I think it’s precisely what can …
R: It has no integrity.
A: That’s right. And that’s why land up with a Jacob Zuma. That was part of the problem with this. So it was hard. What also was difficult was that I was at the centre of it. So this was a national…
R: You became the poster boy.
A: I became the poster boy of it. Partly because, not only I was vice chancellor of Wits, I was the chair of Universities South Africa. And whether you like it or not Wits University captures the imagination of people in a way that others don’t. And so, that was there, but then I was part of the negotiations with Jacob Zuma, I was part of the negotiations with Blade Nzimande, I was part of the negotiations with the student movement. And basically I found myself having to navigate a struggle that wasn’t of my making. The cause was not of my making, but I’d been predicting it. But I was saying: How do you engage in the struggle to protect the university, but yet still allow a legitimate campaign to emerge and evolve in a way that leads to a progressive outcome? And that was the dilemma that I was confronted with in 2015. And it was that getting the balance right between engagement and security. The demand that the students were putting forward and recognising that compromises were required. And it was that entire thing. So you would see in 2015 I sat that entire night – people say I was forced to, actually I wasn’t. I had security right around me. I’m writing a book about this now. And actually I’m recollecting all of this. The security, the car was waiting for me when I said let’s go and I said no let’s see this through. When the council members, my chief council phoned me and said I wanna join you, I said I’m gonna sit here the night. If you come here you’re gonna have to sit the night. We’re gonna see this through. So that was there, the fact that I sat on the floor
R: Yes…
A: The students brought me chairs. I said no let’s sit on the floor, and let’s talk. These were voluntary acts. In 2016, even late 2015, after the zero percent, there was a second demand, which was insourcing and again I agreed with the demand. People were paid terribly. But I said it’s gonna come at a cost and there will be consequences, we will have to cut finances in academic programmes. And then we ended off 2015, I had to bring in police at the end of 2015. But it ended off quite quickly – 12 days the students did, achieved, in 10 days what vice-chancellors had been debating with the state for ten years. 2016 when we started, you could see there was a dissent, the movement had become factionalised. A group had decided that they want to permanently shut down the university, they had decided that they will not allow registration to take place. And the people who had been most affected were the poor. Because rich people had credit cards, they could register via online, poor people couldn’t. And then I decided to bring in private security. And I wrote a letter to the university community, saying here is why I’m doing it. And that would become the hallmark of my decision. If I did a decision, I’d write to the public domain and I’d put it: Here’s why I’m doing it, and saw it got published in Maverick and these things. And that put me right in the face of a massive conflict with at least the most extreme versions of the student movement. And then, towards the end of the year, we managed last year, 2016, right until the end, and then in September, we knew that there was something coming. They were supposed to have decided on the fees commission, but they asked for a two year, a year extension. The fees came, we were engaging the minister and the minister said he had to do consultation. I said to him I’m telling you this is not gonna work, announce in June/July, anyway they announced on the 16th of September. I was away. And immediately they announced, the students went on the protest. But this time it become violent. I came back, it took me a week to get back, partly because I couldn’t get flights back from New York, so I had to go through Mexico, from Mexico to Germany. Eventually I came back, it took me three, four days, and we decided to have a…the first thing we decided to do was to go on a poll.
R: Ja, yes.
A: To have a poll. You say you represent the student community, let me ask the students.
R: Ja
A: And then the SRC goes opposed. They took us to court to try and prevent it. It was astonishing. I saw … there were more, the student movement had more lawyers than the university had, and I thought to myself: How the hell can you afford this? But we won that. And then we decided to open, and the students then decided it would be a protest. And then, but I had at the same time spoken to some previous leaders of the black student society, Sipho Maseko, and effectively Tiego Moseneke, and said would you serve as a back channel to the students? And on the first day we had action, some student protests and tear gas, and they gave me … they came back and said the students have come to us and said that if you close for this week, they’ll come back next week, but that you show solidarity with them. So we agreed – we closed for a week. I went to the senate and I said will you come with me and march with me? With the students, in support of the goal of free education? Would you march with me, will the council march with me? And we agreed. We agreed to have a university assembly – we’ve only had five in the history of this university, and we’ve always pronounced on important things, on AIDS in 2002, on Madiba’s passing in 2013, in 1992 around democratic South Africa, in 1959 on why the university should be open. And we decided to have one on this. And two, three hours before the general assembly I get called, mediators come to my house, they said, or at least the university house, they say to us that the students have pulled out, they said they won’t go back next week. And they’re gonna destruct this thing. Clearly there was a faction of the student movement that was taking instructions from the outside, who couldn’t have matters settled because there were other political agendas. And then we decided to open. I called the council and said we’d cancel the general assembly on the …
R: But your background as a troublemaker yourself as a young person and in the unions and so forth –- that actually trained you.
A: It gave me an understanding. Often I’d know, I could predict how they were gonna play this. In a sense. So we went, we effectively went to, we decided to open, got the police, planned it. You know, it looked bad – the first two days were hard, I sat at the window and gave the instructions, please don’t go ahead and kill, the last thing I need is some young child killed. But we brought it. The actual protest lasted three days. And within three days we had brought the campus back in order. It was a hard decision
R: Ja
A: But frankly, people say to me you know how could you do that? When 5000 students graduated in March this year, they wouldn’t have graduated without that decision. You make hard decisions, you make hard choices. And I said, I hated that decision, but when you take on the job, you fulfil the obligations of the job. You don’t abandon it because suddenly it becomes hard. Or because it doesn’t neatly daft in with your ideological conditions. And so I write a piece at the end of 2016, I write one at the end of 2015 and 2016, which is about my experience of the student protest and why I did the decisions I made. And currently I will take next year six months off after my first step and effectively want to will write a book. I got offered a second term at Wits. I wouldn’t have taken it had 82% of the senate not voted and said we want you to take it.
R: So what are your dreams for the next term?
A: So my big thing is, firstly I wanna write a book about Fees Must Fall, because I think it teaches us lessons.
R: Ja but that’s not, that’s not about your next term.
A: So that’s the first thing I want to do. The second I think, my big desire, is to ensure that Africa has its own research in terms of universities. You see, you can’t truly be free if your mind is not – that’s an old Steve Biko quote. But your mind can never be free unless you’re producing your own knowledge. And so, not in some (inaudible) way, but in a way that contributes equally to the knowledge that is produced by the rest of the human race. If Africa has only teaching universities, and no research universities, then we send our children for training for our masters and PhD, we’ll never be free, we’ll always be importing knowledge from everywhere else and technology from everywhere else. My desire is to ensure that South Africa and Africa has its own research in terms of universities. It must have the equivalent of its Oxfords, Cambridge, Harvards, Stanford, Zurich, University of Tokyo, Peking, etcetera. It must have its own. And that’s what – that’s my argument with Fees Must Fall. That: Don’t engage in the struggle in a manner that destroys this university. So, that for future generations we don’t have the research. That’s for me what, and that means shifting Wits into largely a post-graduate institution or at least 50/50, 45 maybe 50, making sure that we produce large levels of research. That to produce global research doesn’t mean you have to imitate Western institutions. Ironically, you want to conquer your local, and I learnt this from the Apartheid state actually. Ironically, the Apartheid state created universities that were cutting edge in deep-level mining engineering. Why? Because they took their problem, which is deep mines, and they took the world’s best knowledge and applied it to that and in the process innovated …
R: And built something new.
A: And built something new. And it seems to me that that’s what we’ve gotta do. But we have to do it in multiple fields, in health, in engineering solutions, in software engineering, in the forth-industrial revolution which is about robotics and artificial intelligence. All of those. Unless we are at the cutting edge, we will never be free. And that’s for me the big dream. For not only Wits, but five, six, seven, eight of our universities, that we operate at that level.
R: May it happen!
A: Thank you.
R: Absolutely. And thank you so much for your time.
A: It’s a pleasure.
R: I really, I want to, to say God bless you
A: Thank you very much, I really appreciate it.
R: Until a next time, and do come back to us, goodbye.
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