The day before spring lectures ended at the University of Cape Town, Black student protestors shut campus down. Barricading entrances and roads with boulders, ropes, chairs and even their bodies, students made sure that school would not continue until the administration addressed two crippling injustices: university tuition and the outsourcing of university staff.
The demand was simple — abolish university fees and outsourcing completely. This call spread throughout the nation, and soon a national university shutdown ensued with students peacefully protesting from coast to coast.
Stresses of paying tuition render acquiring an education, a basic human right, impossible. The proposed approximately 11 percent increase of school fees at UCT, would financially exclude mostly Black students from continuing their degree. Let it be clear, fee increases work to serve the corporation functionality of university systems — fluffing the pockets of rich white men while simultaneously starving the minds of poor Black children.
This is an intentional tool used to maintain a state of Black subjugation. What’s more, outsourcing of staff is a connected immorality that restricts staff workers from health benefits, sufficient pensions and living wage salaries. It exploits Black labor, restricting mothers and fathers from being able to send themselves or their children to university, let alone afford to live comfortably.
Comparatively, the social death experienced by Africans stolen into America, is one of daily surveillance and criminalization. American social imaginary is intentional in restricting our movement as well as our imaginations. Likewise, we must be intentional in not only challenging oppressive institutions but also in completely dismantling them.
Change is inherently disruptive and discomforting. But to exist as a Black body in a modernity constructed in your opposition is to be a disruption. As bodies intentionally violated and invaded, we must ask ourselves: what do I have to lose? And continue to intentionally use our bodies to disrupt for the sake of change.
What’s more, we must resist America’s suppression of our robust imaginations — a system held together by its dependence on us not trusting ourselves. The Black imagination has the power to create other worlds. We must craft worlds where we only look out for ourselves. Not in the European sense of individualism but in an acknowledgment of singular selves as multiplicities — those who came before us and those who will come after us.
Black bodies are born into an inheritance of ancestral knowing — whether it’s trauma, poverty or brilliance. We carry with us collective bodies born to resist and thus must honor them.
But to create these worlds, every space that denies us totality of self must be disrupted and ultimately dismantled.
