Role of Black students in South Africa struggle

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Victor Steyw was a central leader of the Black student movement in South Africa during the 1980s. Today, he is a member of the Workers Organization for Socialist Action (WOSA), a South African revolutionary group. Michael Schreiber, co-editor of Socialist Action, interviewed Steyw in Capetown on June 2, 1992.

Socialist Action: In general, what were the goals and accomplishments of the student movement that you participated in during the 1980s?

Victor Steyw: The movement of the 1980s came in the wake of that of 1976. That was the threshold of student struggles in South Africa. In some respects, 1976 was almost comparable to the uprisings in in France in 1968 in so far as, for the first time, our political issues were transferred outside of the student arena and into the main arena of struggle involving working-class people.

This was in terms of supporting the demands of the students for better educational facilities and structure, and I think one of the most prevalent limitations would have been that students were a part of a more privileged constituency. Because of that, there was a criticism that they were just flirting with the labor movement. After graduation, they could settle into relatively comfortable jobs, become economically contented-and forget.

But that is not a political issue as far as I'm concerned. The point is what happens while they are involved in the struggle. And a whole generation of those students, like myself, are still in the radical liberation movement. It's been at some economic cost to ourselves; some like myself have ended up in prison for a short or long period of time. But then one looks at the overall goals and objectives, and realizes that no one said this struggle of ours would be easy.

SA: What were some of the organizational forms that came about during the early 1980s?

VS: The Black students of the 1980s made considerable organizational progress vis a vis the 1976 group of students, in as much as we were able for the first time to build a national infrastructure or network among different student populations in different parts of the country. That was critical. That kind of interface gave us a common destiny. And it raised problems that we were not previously aware of.

At the same time, of course, a whole host of students from the 1976 era had gone into self-imposed exile, and some had gone into forced exile. Many joined the guerrilla movement at the time.

But in terms of the problems, to be concrete: Here in the Western Cape, we had what we called the Committee of Eighty One. That was in so far as we had 81 high schools in the Western Cape-which has the highest concentration of high schools in the country. That's particularly because of historical government policy. "Coloureds" [mixed race people] are the majority in the Western Cape.

SA: So these high schools were both African and coloured?

VS: Mostly coloured. There were only two or three so-called African high schools. So that brings to the fore another very critical aspect of that period. For almost the first time, we saw contact being made between so-called Africans and so-called coloureds. We then suddenly realized that here we have a major language problem.

We students all spoke English. But virtually all so-called coloured students cannot speak an African language. Subsequently, a language project has been waged-specifically to address the acquisition of African languages by so-called coloured students. In white schools, they had an African language as an option. In our schools we never had that. Only the two official languagesEnglish and Afrikaans.

SA: You're saying that now you do have the option?

VS: No. We still don't. African students in general were compelled to learn English and Afrikaans because it gave them economic and social mobility. They were forced to. For example, I can only speak mainly the two languages—and a smattering of an African language. But that's not enough to make contact with the community.

SA: How does the student movement today compare with that of the 1980s?

VS: The student organizations have seemingly gone into a kind of inertia-a lapse. I sometimes like to think, being subjective, that the militant student layer that I come from can never be duplicated! But of course, the issues are somewhat different from what they were then. And students are seemingly tied much more to academic performance, given the kind of economic imperatives that are involved for them.

For people such as myself—although it wasn't entirely voluntary-I found myself in a situation where I sacrificed two years of my academic life because of involvement in political issues. That doesn't tend to happen to the same extent today.

And rightfully so, I think. Unless it's absolutely necessary, students should be able to study and to make progress. The emphasis has now'shifted in terms of the required technical skills and intellectual labor that will be needed to put the country on the right footing.

SA: In what way did the issues change in recent years?

VS: I would say that a lot of factors influenced the kind of inertia the student population had gone into. One was the