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Publication Details |
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Reference |
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Pithouse, Richard (2001) The Michael Makhabane Murder. Daily News : -.
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Summary |
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Reflections on the police murder of Michael Makhabane 2 days after the event
Student’s Murder an Outrageous Assault on Democracy
Michael Makhabane is dead. Poems have been written. Oaths of vengeance have been sworn. People who never met Michael have wept for him and this blow to the dream of building a decent society. Professors and cleaners have come together to invoke Jesus, Yeats and the Amadlozi and to cover the bloodstain on the side of the road with flowers. Students haven’t slept for days while they try to come to terms with a new barbarism. Messages of outrage and solidarity are pouring in from across the country and the world. But none of the anger and grief will change the fact that on 16 May 2000, in the 6th year of democracy and 24 years after June 16 1976, another student was killed in the struggle for the doors of learning and culture to be opened to all. Michael Makhabane is dead and South Africa has become a different place.
Eyewitnesses insist that the police gunned Michael down as he walked past a small group of demonstrators. But this crime would be just as outrageous if he had been leading the demonstration. After all, the right to hold and express dissenting opinions is the fragile heart of democracy. And of course the crime would have been equally outrageous if Michael had broken a couple of windows or pressured other students to join the boycott. Not even the most zealous law and order fanatic thinks that petty vandalism or pressurising others to join a strike deserves an instant death sentence.
These are difficult days for people committed to building a decent society. In Pretoria our government, in whom so much hope and blood has been invested, is infected with the malignant lie that politics has no alternative but to cower in the shadow of the Almighty Market. So we suffer economic policies that allow the rich to flourish while the poor are driven deeper into desperation. In Durban one in four pregnant women tests positive for HIV and very little meaningful action is taken against this holocaust. In Harare activists in the Movement for Democratic Change are murdered. In Cape Town Senegalese traders have their heads cracked open. And so it goes. In times like these its easy to surrender to cynicism and to stifle critical energies before they lead to Prozac or unemployment.
But if we lose our capacity for outrage we lose our humanity, harden into our enemies
and become embodied blasphemy against hope. Thankfully, decent people have been united in their insistence that this brutal assault on democracy must not be excused, obscured or forgiven. But those who speak for power are trying to legitimate this murder by demonising the protesting students and making the preposterous implication that their idealism and minor excesses are a greater threat to society than the use of murder to repress dissent.
We are being haunted by the ghost of Adrian Vlok and the phrases which apartheid used to demonise resistance have been dragged back into use. There is wild talk of ‘agitators’, ‘mobs’, ‘rampages’ and ‘immature hotheads’. A TV news bulletin changed the chronology of events and this newspaper affixed a dishonest caption to a photograph. Indeed, the coverage in The Daily News has been particularly shameful.
Newspapers like Business Day were able to join organisations like AZAPO, SASCO and NEHAWU in taking a principled stand against this assault on democracy. But in the 18 May 2000 editorial the Daily News, which is read by many of the people who’s hope has been privatised and auctioned off, demonised the demonstrating students without condemning the murderous repression of their protest.
Many developing societies have found innovative and creative ways to ensure that poverty is not a barrier to university access. And although we can’t spend much more than the current quarter of our national budget on education we haven’t fully explored options like a national student loan scheme. The state definitely should be exploring all options to ensure that, in higher education as elsewhere, class doesn’t become to democracy what race was to apartheid. But even if the student’s demands were hopelessly utopian or directed at the wrong authority the brutal crushing of that protest would still be an outrageous assault on democracy. After all, democracies advance precisely because they tolerate inconvenient and often fractious demands for social progress.
Africa’s greatest intellectual, Frantz Fanon, described how he arrived at university in France “imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world.” But he ran into a racism which refused to recognise him as a human being and dismissed him as an object. Michael Makhabane probably entered UDW with the same hopes as Fanon. But he was a victim of a class war that saw him as an object rather than a person. Fanon’s personhood was attacked with words and looks and so he was able to pull the shattered pieces of his personality together and to rebuild himself as a new and stronger person. Michael Makhabane’s personhood was attacked with a shotgun and so he’ll never have that chance. But we can and must use the energy generated by our outrage to pull together the shards of our university, of our right to express dissenting views and of our hopes for equitable access and rebuild them on firmer ground.
Richard Pithouse teaches Philosophy in the School of Governance at the University of Durban-Westville.
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