Malaika wa Azania has a problem with the ongoing threats against students who have chosen to write their exams, by those still protesting.
Johannesburg - In response to many incidents on campus - including police brutality that escalated a few days before exams were to begin - the institution decided to amend exam rules and to beef up security.
One of the terrifying rules is that students must be at the exam venue 30 minutes before sitting for their exam in order to be searched by private security agents hired by the institution. Students cannot bring anything but stationery and proof of ID - not even a bottle of water. This is now provided by the university. The suspicion is that harmful substances may be brought into the exam venue.
The university has reason to worry. A few weeks ago, protesting students hurled petrol bombs into a building occupied by other students. On reading the account on Facebook of one of the students inside the building at the time, chills went down my spine.
I could not help but imagine what would have happened if the occupants had not smelt the petrol. While I have been unwaveringly critical of the violent tactics used by students in the #FeesMustFall protests, it had not dawned on me until that moment that the movement has morphed into something potentially dangerous and even life-threatening for students themselves.
While it would be dishonest to claim that students have been completely innocent in this catastrophe, they too have been on the receiving end of violence perpetrated by the state and institutions of higher learning.
Just a few days before exams started, police brutalised protesting and non-protesting students on campus. Students were shot at and some arrested. Even those whose only crime was to walk to the shops to buy midnight snacks, or walk on campus, were shot.
One night I went to see what was happening on campus after being informed of a meeting and, within minutes of arriving, stun grenades and rubber bullets were flying all over the place. Perhaps out of fear I stood there, unable to move, frozen. Seconds after my boyfriend grabbed me and forced me to run to safety, I saw my brother and friend Tiego rolling on the floor. He was one of many who were injured in the stampedes that night.
For this and many reasons, I understand fully why protesting students have refused to write exams.
Not only are the levels of trauma in the institution very high, but for students who were shot over the weeks the thought of being searched by the same police officer before writing an exam would be traumatic and devastating.
The university was therefore correct to give students the option of writing exams now or in January.
Most students have elected to write exams now but some have left for home to recover from one of the worst crises of higher education in South Africa.
Both decisions by different groups of students are legitimate.
It is my opinion that the ongoing threats against students who have chosen to write their exams now, by those still protesting, are problematic.
Our decision to continue with the academic project is not indicative of a sell-out position, but of practical considerations made in the context of a black struggle that is complex and multi-faceted.
To dismiss students who have chosen to support the continuation of the academic project as counter-revolutionary is to be detached from the realities of the black condition that is painfully real.
For many students, particularly those from poor working-class families, obtaining a degree is the only way out of a cycle of generational poverty. Many of them will not recover from losing the entire year.
The likelihood that the government is going to shift its position on the funding model it has proposed for free education for the poor and assistance for the missing middle, as well as the scrapping of historical debt for the poor, is slim.
The government was forced into making this compromise and while we know from reports commissioned by the state over the years that free education is possible, we also need to develop and evolve our tactics of engagement.
Weeks of protest have not resolved the impasse. Our job now is to make a tactical retreat and assess our victories without taking our eyes off the fundamental goal: free education for all at the point of entry. In the heat of the ongoing violence and frustrations, we as students have failed dismally to claim victories that would have been a moral boost for our cause.
We became so insistent that free education must happen now that we failed to recognise when we had won important victories and where we had made blunders that eventually became our undoing.
As things stand, the #FeesMustFall movement has not only lost public sympathy due to unhelpful tactics that we used, but it has also lost legitimacy among students.
At the heart of the loss of this legitimacy is the failure to appreciate the complexity of black existence, to insist that students continuing with the academic project are sell-outs, which led to the alienation of many.
The bullying tactics that were also used helped the cause in no way. To vandalise computer laboratories in retaliation to students using them to study, as was done at Rhodes, and to refuse to engage with criticism on tactics, helped greatly to completely undermine the movement.
Bearing in mind the history of our police service and its trigger-happy tendencies, it is very difficult to write an exam knowing they are outside watching you. But the truth is, it would be equally difficult to write an exam knowing that somewhere out there, a group of students are in possession of petrol bombs that they would not hesitate to hurl through the windows.
And perhaps this is where the tragedy lies: that our beloved #FeesMustFall movement has degenerated to a point where we now fear it in the same way as we fear police violence.
If we hope to return the movement to its former glory, where it had moral high ground and support from almost all students, we need to have an important conversation - one that will embrace dissenting views and, above all, one that will not substitute honesty with political correctness.
* Wa Azania is a student at Rhodes University and author of Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
The Sunday Independent