A Theatre of Chaos as Students Lose Moral Compass

Zamikhaya Maseti

Last week, we witnessed the burning of the University of Fort Hare by protesting students. The most disturbing image was not the smouldering buildings, but the contemptuous attitude displayed towards the Vice Chancellor, Professor Sakhela Buhlungu.

The purpose of this reflection is neither to defend the Principal nor to condemn the arsonists, but to probe a deeper national crisis, how far we have drifted as a people, and how our children and grandchildren have come to misunderstand the role and soul of the university.

Universities are not theatres of chaos. They are sacred spaces for the cultivation of intellect, for the refinement of human reason, and for the continuous interrogation of the social order. The generation of students today must understand that some of us were there before them; we are the pathfinders of university transformation. We carried the intellectual fire of our time with discipline and moral purpose.

At the University of the Western Cape, where I pursued my studies, we were conscious that our struggles on campus were not isolated from the broader national liberation movement. Yet we maintained ideological independence; we were intellectuals in the making, not political mercenaries. We understood the dialectical relationship between knowledge and power, and we recognised that the university was both a site of privilege and a site of contestation.

We were deliberate and strategic in our methods. We defined our areas of convergence and divergence with the liberation movement. We anticipated that a time would come when contradictions would sharpen between the intellectual class and the post apartheid establishment.

But we also understood that these contradictions, by their very nature, would be non-antagonistic, a necessary tension within a developing democracy. That was our theoretical and ideological standpoint, and we were unapologetic about it. Our activism was grounded in analysis, not in fury.

In my days at UWC, I was privileged to share a room for a year with the then President of the South African National Students Congress, Comrade Mike Koyana, a shrewd and unforgiving Orthodox Marxist Leninist scholar. May his soul rest in peace.

In that small room, we debated the meaning of post apartheid transformation and crafted visions of what a liberated university ought to be, not an ivory tower of privilege, but a factory of conscience producing thinkers who would anchor the moral and intellectual rebirth of a nation emerging from colonial darkness.

What I saw at Fort Hare last week was a betrayal of that vision. It was not a revolution; it was a regression. It was not a protest; it was the collapse of moral and intellectual discipline. Burning down a library or humiliating a Vice Chancellor is not a mark of radicalism; it is evidence of intellectual bankruptcy and moral decay.

If the generation of 1976 fought for access, and the generation of the 1980s fought for transformation, then today’s generation must fight for restoration, the restoration of dignity, ethics, and intellectual excellence in our universities. Fort Hare, that illustrious cradle of African nationalism and Pan African thought, cannot be reduced to ashes by the very children it sought to liberate.

The new generation of the student movement must pause, look itself in the mirror, and ask a difficult question: what kind of political and ideological leadership are we offering to the student body, the supposed young intelligentsia of this country?

If the movement under their command produces an army of arsonists, then they must know that they are setting the country on fire. That path leads not to liberation but to ruin. This Jacobinism is unreflective, destructive, and unworthy of the intellectual traditions that once defined student activism in South Africa. It is nothing to be proud of.

Equally, the crisis at Fort Hare demands that the entire university community, students, academics, Chancellors, Vice Chancellors, blue collar workers, and security personnel, come together and dismantle the metaphorical ivory towers and walls that divide them. They must forge a common bond anchored in a shared vision, the genuine transformation of higher education.

The challenges confronting our universities today are not new. They are the same demons we fought against thirty-five years ago: financial and academic exclusion. The Fees Must Fall Movement only exposed the unfinished business of our generation, a struggle left incomplete. It was a reminder that transformation without justice is hollow.

The Department of Higher Education cannot escape its share of blame for the prevailing pandemonium. The financial stranglehold on students has reached a suffocating level. This crisis is not born of student recklessness, but of institutional failure at the very heart of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme.

What was conceived as a noble instrument of social justice has degenerated into a theatre of chaos, inefficiency, and despair. The pandemonium we have witnessed at NSFAS is a tragic symbol of administrative collapse, a betrayal of trust, and a profound indictment of the state’s capacity to manage the aspirations of the poor.

Instead of empowering the children of the domestic worker and the farm labourer, it has plunged them into cycles of debt, humiliation, and exclusion. This is not the promise we made to the nation at democracy’s dawn.

The crisis at Fort Hare is therefore a mirror reflecting a much broader national problem. It reveals the moral exhaustion of a society that has lost its sense of higher purpose. It calls upon all of us, government, academia, parents, and students, to restore our institutions as sanctuaries of ideas, not battlefields of rage.

Let this moment awaken the collective conscience of our higher education leadership. Let it be a call to the broader university community, to all Vice Chancellors across this land, not to retreat from the mission of restoring the intellectual legacy of our country. The rebirth of our universities is the rebirth of the nation itself, and it is a duty from which no scholar, no teacher, and no student must ever shrink.

* Zamikhaya Maseti is a Political Economy Analyst and holds a M.Phil in South African Politics and Political Economy from Nelson Mandela University.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.