A Wabash immersion experience in South Africa brought students face to face with the emotional turmoil that lingers 21 years after apartheid.
by Agata Szczeszak-Brewer
The first time I cried in front of my students was because of a shoe.
I have long considered emotional vulnerability part and parcel of teaching literature, especially texts rooted in trauma, genocide, and oppression. Teaching South African literature and taking students to Johannesburg, Soweto, and Cape Town made me realize that despite months of preparation, reading, and study, professors and their students have to accept and expect profound emotions that accompany intellectual growth and cultural awareness.
You never know when those emotions may emerge.
In November 2015 we traveled to South Africa to discuss the atrocities in that country’s past and the complexities of its present with the people who experienced them. We had read Sol Plaatje, Bessie Head, Zoë Wicomb, and J.M. Coetzee; we had discussed Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko; we had watched clips from the “Rhodes Must Fall” protests organized by students who wanted to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes, a colonizer of southern Africa, from the university campus; we pondered similarities between the most recent racial tensions in the U.S. and South African post-apartheid narratives.
But it wasn’t until we were immersed in the South African townships and on the University of Cape Town campus that we gained a more nuanced understanding of the difficult reconciliation process in post-apartheid South Africa. It was there we came to understand, face to face, the emotional turmoil that this process unearthed.
In Soweto—an overcrowded township designed by apartheid officials to house black people removed from their homes—we visited a church pockmarked with bullet holes after the police shot at unarmed people seeking shelter there. But it was our meeting with Antoinette Sithole that revealed the ugliness and inhumanity of the apartheid regime. Antoinette is the sister of Hector Pieterson, a 13-year-old schoolboy who became the first of hundreds who died when the schoolchildren’s peaceful protest against inequality in education turned deadly after the police opened fire.
In Sam Nzima’s iconic photo from the 1976 Soweto Uprising, you can see Antoinette running beside a man who holds Hector’s limp body in his arms. Before talking to Antoinette, we had studied key events of South African history, and we read stories, novels, and poems based on these events. We even looked at that photo, seeing—but perhaps not fully comprehending—the horror of police brutality. Here is Antoinette, a uniformed schoolgirl, running alongside a man who carries the body of her little brother. Her face is distorted with pain. The pleats in her skirt are still intact, but her right hand is raised, fingers outstretched—in despair? In search of protection? From whom?
The other hand seems to be holding Hector’s foot, the one that still has a sneaker on. In class, as I talked to my students about the photo, I began to wonder: Where is Hector’s left shoe? Did he lose it when he was marching with other students, unarmed, to protest the injustice of the Bantu Education Act, or did it fall off after a police officer fired live ammunition at him?
But our time was up. My students rose from their seats and left our Center Hall classroom for their cafeteria jobs, their workouts, their math homework.
Fast-forward to our visit to Soweto.
We’re standing on the pavement in front of the Hector Pieterson Museum while Antoinette recalls the day her brother and countless others were shot. There is no escape into the comfort of dorm rooms, lunchrooms, and offices. Here is a woman who has been telling the story of the Soweto Uprising for decades. Her voice is steady and calm, but her eyes betray the heartache as she recalls hearing the shots and seeing commotion in the crowd nearby. That’s when she noticed a man lifting something in the air. It was her brother’s body. She knew it was Hector because she recognized Hector’s shoe.
A few days after meeting Antoinette, we spoke with student activists under a sprawling tree in the courtyard of the Azania House at the University of Cape Town. My students readily admit now that this gathering was the most uncomfortable moment during the trip. For some, it was the most uncomfortable moment during their four years at Wabash. On our campus, we are used to being flattered by speakers. They say they are grateful for our hospitality; they praise the academic rigor and student engagement at Wabash; they thank us for our thoughtful questions. But the Rhodes Must Fall activists didn’t meet us to flatter. They agreed to talk to us because they wanted to wake us up from our comfort, shake us up and say: “Don’t you see how privileged you are?” “What are you doing to help others?”
When my students asked about the Cecil Rhodes statue, whose shadow was at that time painted on the pavement after the statue had been removed, the activists connected their struggle to decolonize universities with the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. What was supposed to be a 30-minute conversation turned into a 3-hour intensive debate about institutionalized racism and inclusion of women and the LGBT community in anti-racist organizing in both countries.
Finally, one of the activists asked: “Why do people in the U.S. still fly the Confederate flag? What are you doing about it?” Many of us realized that to be silent in the face of injustice is to be complicit. It was one of many difficult truths we learned in South Africa.
We met with others: with Noor Ebrahim, a Muslim District Six resident evicted during the apartheid regime’s attempt to make his neighborhood all-white; with a former political prisoner on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years of prison time; with Desmond Tutu, whose small early-morning service at St. George’s Cathedral was conducted in three languages (English, Xhosa, and Afrikaans) and turned into a jovial celebration of all who attended, together with hugs and personal introductions. We had a family-style Thanksgiving feast at Biesmiellah, a Malay-cuisine restaurant run by a Muslim family, who gave us a warm welcome and prepared mouthwatering potato wadas, samosas, curry, saffron basmati rice, koeksisters, and mango juice. We went to two theater productions and spent our evenings talking about violence, racial segregation, the enduring economic inequality in South Africa, and the connections between South African and U.S. activism.
Yet it was the image of Hector Pieterson’s shoe that made me lose my composure on the flight home. And as I closed my eyes, it wasn’t Hector’s face I saw. How could it be? In Nzima’s photo you can’t see Hector’s face, only two terrified people trying to bring the boy’s limp body to safety. When I closed my eyes, I saw the face of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who, like Hector, was killed by the police—only almost 40 years later and on another continent.
sidebars:
“What was so powerful about the students we met was their desire for change through revolution. Instead of waiting for something to happen or using process as a means of change, these students decided to take action. They physically removed something that represented oppression and marginalization.”
Chris Biehl ’16, recalling conversations with activists at the University of Cape Town whose protests prompted removal of a statue of 19th century colonizer Cecil Rhodes.
“So Immediate and Powerful”
“Antoinette Sithole established the Hector Pieterson Museum in 1994 in memory of her brother, who was 13 years old when he was killed by police in 1976.
“We knew some of the details of the killing beforehand, but hearing it from her was a completely different experience. It became more real. You can intellectualize it when you’re reading it on the page of a history textbook. But you’re hearing it from her, and she’s starting to cry a little as she tells it—even after all these times telling the story—and you begin crying a little as you hear it, it’s just so immediate and powerful. For her, that pain just doesn’t go away.”
Ben Cramer ’18
Associate Professor of English Agata Szczeszak-Brewer is chair of the English department. Her South African Literature class traveled to that country in Fall 2015.