Mashupye H Maserumule
August 14, 2024 marks 40 years since Hendrick Matikweni Nkuna, one of the keystones of student activism, was killed in 1984.
Many do not know this, including some at his alma mater, Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), which came into existence 20 years ago after the merger of Technikon Northern Gauteng, Technikon North-West, and Technikon Pretoria on 1 January 2004. Some may wonder how Nkuna can be an alumnus of an institution established twenty years after his passing.
The answer to this question is straightforward. The depth of TUT’s 20-year history is rooted in its historical antecedents, dating back to the establishment of Technikon Mabopane East in 1976. Nkuna, a student at this institution in the 1980s, emerged as a leading figure in student politics. His influence and activism are integral to TUT’s history, making him its alumnus posthumously. TUT's history without Nkuna would be incomplete.
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Technikon Mabopane East became Technikon Northern Transvaal (TNT) in 1984 and later Technikon Northern Gauteng (TNG) in 1997. Technikon North-West (1997-2004) originated as Ga-Rankuwa Technical Training Centre in 1976, and from 1994 to 1997, it was called Setlogelo Technikon. When these institutions were established in 1976, the liberation struggle was at its height. Technikon Pretoria was established in 1979 to cater to the white student population. TUT is the by-product of these varieties. Technikon Mabopane East notably became a hub of student activism, where Nkuna, like the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle's portrayal, resonated like thunder in the skies. Alongside his generation, he led the fight against academic and financial exclusions faced by students and advocated for democratically elected student representative councils.
The police shot him and tried to hide their heinous deeds by fabricating stories about the cause of his death. This was meant to mislead the father, who desperately wanted to know his son's killer. Regrettably, many books on the history of student activism in this country fail to highlight figures like Nkuna, who, at the heart of their struggle, aimed to revolutionise education itself. His statue stands tall on TUT’s Soshanguve South campus. In Tembisa, his hometown, streets bear his name. Yet, these tributes are insufficient to immortalise his legacy in the annals of student activism. While Hector Pieterson is widely remembered, not everyone recognises Nkuna, although they both met their fate for the exact cause in different years -1976 and 1984, respectively. And that was the demand for equitable access to education as a function of social justice.
Sam Nzima’s picture of Mbuyisa Makhubu carrying the body of Pieterson after he was shot by the police in Soweto, with his 17-year-old sister, Antoinette, running alongside, stands out in the iconography of the liberation struggles symbolising students’ valiance. I wonder whether, had Nzima not shot this picture, Pieterson too would have been consigned to the footnotes of history, like Nkuna has been. This broaches the question of historicity regarding student activism, which the former vice-chancellor of Rhodes University, Saleem Badat, has always been concerned about the gap in the history of black student politics. In his book Black Student Politics, Higher Education and Apartheid (1999), he writes: “Student politics in South Africa has been analysed little.” This must change lest we become complicit in our dehistoricisation. Some books that analyse recent student activism, dubbed #feesmustfall, lack the depth of historicity and contextual nuances. This makes Nkuna’s story and his generation compelling, which must be written as part of historicising the epoch of their activism. This is because, although their activism drew essential lessons from the Tsietsi Mashinini generation of 1976, their pursuit was that of education as the practice of freedom.
Much about this was evident in the 1984 Newsletter for Youth Unity, the Voice of Alexandra Youth Congress (AYCO), where this generation said: “Education is vitally important to the survival of a society. The values and ideas of that society are passed on through education. To transform society, therefore, one has to transform the education system”. Coupled with this was the Congress of South African Students (COSAS), the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), and the Azanian Students Organisation’s (AZASO) launch of the Education Charter campaign in 1984. The Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire explains that education as the practice of freedom is “the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world”.
A quest to realise this became the continuum that bound the struggles of different student generations together, with that of the Nkuna’s 1980s notably managed to bring the communities behind its cause and called upon students to unite behind the transformation of education for it to have a liberatory effect. Monde Tabata, the COSAS activist from the Eastern Cape, observed that student activism of this generation “became important and may have been a turning point” for the liberation struggle. However, the narratives on student activism are much about the 1970s and the #feesmustfall generations, although the 1980s student generation sharply asked about the type of education blacks must have. If the 1976 generation had ignited it, the 1980 generation had upped the ante in its call for education to serve the aspirations of all, especially black students, and the #feesmustfall took this to the pinnacle of historical consciousness. However, history does not adequately account for the 1980s Nkuna generation. This is despite that, as Badat put it in his book, black students “were not just victims of apartheid but were also thinkers, conscious actors, and historical agents.”
Institutions of higher learning, such as TUT, which have been consigned to the footnote of history, must correct the skewed narratives about their histories by looking beyond hubris to answer the historical question about how they fared in moving away from the segregated higher education system, which the Nkuna generation fought ferociously against. In other words, with many of the racist laws repealed, does the integrated higher education system now exist, where these merged universities do not continue to show racial profiles in the demographics of their student population and staff composition? Attendant to this is whether education has become the practice of freedom with a liberatory effect, especially in a technology-driven economy where youth unemployment continues unabated, with the graduates not spared from this. In other words, are students being equipped to deal with this reality and discover how to transform the world, including developing their technical and cognitive competencies and shaping their character formation for responsible citizenry, thus asserting their future readiness in the changing world of work? These questions must be considered critically as part of honouring Nkuna and his generation’s legacy.
Pretoria News