Remembering the Common Hood
Soweto and Runnymede
Peter Linebaugh, Counterpunch

I flew from Detroit, with one stop, to the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg to participate in an international conference, "The Promise of Freedom and its Practice: Global Perspectives on South Africa's Decade of Democracy."

I arrived on the heels of students protesting the cut in university 'bursaries' forcing many to terminate their studies, especially the poorer students. When the university responded by calling in armed police, helicopters, and 'bouncers' from neighborhood gangs, some faculty remonstrated, "this seems very much like Bantu education in a different guise," they wrote the Vice Chancellor, alluding to the apartheid system of education that prevailed during the third quarter of the 20th century. The difference now is that the IMF-imposed cutbacks, unlike apartheid, are truly pan-African, whose effect is the destruction of the independent university in the mother continent as a whole. (The Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa has been ringing this alarm for years.)

During a break in the conference I strolled down the hill from Wits (as they call the university), across Mandela Bridge, over the railway tracks (O so many!) and mini-bus yards, down the African street with its hawkers, colors, and fragrances, in order to meet the comrades of the Anti-Privatization Forum, the Landless People's Movement, Jubilee South Africa, and the Indymedia Center who were gathering at the Worker's Library in an anti-war coalition. They were to be evicted at the end of the month from that venue by the Johannesburg city council.