Debate and critique is, to my mind, part of Rhodes’ intellectual culture. Grahamstown and Rhodes University are fortunate to be able to attract important and controversial people, who both inspire and incense.
Debate and critique is, to my mind, part of Rhodes’ intellectual culture. Grahamstown and Rhodes University are fortunate to be able to attract important and controversial people, who both inspire and incense.
A few months ago, Rhodes students critically engaged with S’bu Zikode, leader of the homeless people’s movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo) for over two hours on the social issues of landlessness and housing.
Last week, Estela Bravo, a renowned documentary film maker with a formidable record of over 30 films, showed two of her award-winning films, After the Battle, chronicling the decisive Cuban involvement in the South Africa-Angola war, and Mandela and Fidel, about the extraordinary relationship between the two leaders.
The lecture theatre was overflowing with young people. In an atmosphere replete with congratulation, it took rare courage for a young man in the audience (who I later discovered was a first-year student of Journalism at Rhodes) to insert a voice of dissent into the accolade-laden room, by challenging the one-sided picture that Bravo’s films projected.
This student suggested that Bravo’s films were brilliant propaganda for Cuba. He questioned Bravo about human rights violations in Cuba, about the detention of dissidents in Cuban jails, and the unadulteratedly positive view of Cuba that her films gave to the world.
This student was silenced, surprisingly, by Bravo herself, and then by a section of the audience.
Bravo said that the people in the room had come to talk about her films and not anything else.
She then, incredibly, voiced her suspicion that the young dissenter had been ‘planted’ in the audience to provoke trouble. Her husband, Ernesto Bravo, then chastised the student by saying that his "behaviour" was not what one expected from a "university student".
As if young people are incapable of speaking up for themselves; as if the idealism and courage of youth can be curbed by notions of "appropriate behaviour"…
As I listened to the Bravos, a sense of outrage grew in me and I had to speak.
Raising my hand and awaiting my turn, I knew that the young man’s right to speak, whether anyone agreed with him or not, had to be defended.
In a university setting, which is the place that upholds freedom of speech, this young man was merely exercising his right.
He had a right to his view, just as surely as the Bravos had a right to theirs. And so that is what I said. I had been moved by the films, they were incredibly powerful and inspiring, but none of that should deprive one lonely voice of its power to speak his truth.
I pointed out how Bravo herself had emphasised the value of getting multiple voices into her films.
I talked about how all great leaders’ contributions (including Nelson Mandela’s) will be reassessed critically by history, and how disturbed I felt that "my young friend at the back" had been silenced; He was merely pointing out silences in Bravo’s text and in his own words, “giving a voice to the voiceless.”
My intervention launched a renewed wave of disapproval from Bravo: They had seen life, they had suffered, they had been present at the great protests in history, and had marched with Martin Luther King, Harry Belafonte and others. The implication was that their age and their experience made them immune to challenge.
They had been revolutionaries and perhaps consider themselves as revolutionaries still, but were they the only ones who could lay claim to this appellation?
And do not yesterday’s revolutionaries sometimes become today’s despots?
Do not today’s youth have a right to wage their own struggles against injustice, wherever they see it?
I was disappointed.
Had the Bravos forgotten what it was to be young, and passionate, and idealistic, and to say what you believe to be the truth?
Members of Bravo’s audience and readers of this piece must make up their own minds.
Esther Ramani works part-time at the Institute for the Study of English in Africa at Rhodes University.
