It’s time to honour South Africa’s forgotten Black student leaders

This year marks two decades since the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) in South Africa came into existence after the merger of Technikon Northern Gauteng, Technikon North-West, and Technikon Pretoria in January 2004. This merger was no small feat, especially in the early years, with the university now encompassing six campuses across three of South Africa’s nine provinces.

The 20th anniversary of what is now Africa's most prominent university of technology, teaching more than 60,000 students and recently ranked 12th nationally, is a significant milestone. Amid these deserved celebrations, however, we should also remember a more sombre event that has profoundly shaped my institution and South African higher education more widely.

I refer to Hendrick Matikweni Nkuna, one of the titans of 1980s student activism, killed 40 years ago last month. Without his story, my institution’s history is incomplete.

Nkuna was a student at Technikon Mabopane East – then the name of Technikon Northern Gauteng, a training college established for Blacks in 1976 – and a leading figure in student politics. Along with his generation, he fought against student academic and financial exclusions and for democratically elected student representative councils.

The police shot him on 14 August 1984 and tried to hide their heinous deeds by making up stories about the cause of his death. This was intended to set Nkuna's father, who desperately wanted to know who killed his son, on a wild goose chase. It is a pity that many books about the history of student activism in this country do not foreground people like Nkuna, who was central to the struggle to transform my country’s segregated higher education system.

His statue is found on TUT’s Soshanguve South campus. In Tembisa, where he came from, streets are named after him. This is not enough for him, however, to enter the annals of the history of student activism. Many would remember Hector Pieterson – the 12-year-old schoolboy killed in Soweto in 1976 – but not know about Nkuna, even though these are two youths who were shot by the security forces during student protests for equal access to education.

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 student heroism. 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 how the history of student activism is written. The former vice-chancellor of Rhodes University, Saleem Badat, has always been concerned about this gap in the history of Black student politics. As he wrote in his 1999 book Black Student Politics: Higher Education and Apartheid: “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 contextual nuances. This makes Nkuna’s story and his generation compelling, and it must be written as part of historicising TUT, especially since their aim was not just access to higher education but also the practice of freedom.

These themes were evident in 1984 when a “newsletter for youth unity” noted how “the values and ideas of that society are passed on through education” and “to transform society, therefore, one has to transform the education system”. Along with the Congress of South African Students, the National Union of South African Students and the Azanian Students Organisation, that year saw the launch of the Education Charter campaign.

Nkuna’s activism and death helped to bind the struggles of different student generations together. Monde Tabata, a student activist from the Eastern Cape, observed that the student activism of the early 1980s “became important and may have been a turning point” for the liberation struggle. However, the narratives on student activism are as 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 ignited it, the 1980 generation 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 how, 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 that have been consigned to the footnote of history, such as TUT, must use their anniversaries as an opportunity to correct the skewed narratives about their histories by examining how they really moved away from the segregated higher education system. More pointedly, we should also ask whether, with many of the racist apartheid-era laws repealed, an integrated higher education system now exists? Do merged universities continue to show racial profiles in the demographics of their student populations and staff compositions?

While TUT’s focus is supporting South Africa’s technology-driven economy, it remains important that our students are equipped to consider the issues that Nkuna and his fellow students fought to highlight. Technical and cognitive competencies are not enough on their own; our graduates need to become responsible and aware citizens ready to change the world of work and our society more generally. 

Mashupye Maserumule is executive dean at the Faculty of Humanities at Tshwane University of Technology, a six-campus university with sites in Gauteng, Limpopo and Mpumalanga.