Forty-two years after the historic student revolt, the burning of schools goes against the spirit of what 1976 was about, says former Morris Isaacson science teacher Fanyana Mazibuko.
He is quick to point to Vuwani, “and just recently three schools were burnt in Mpumalanga”.
Mazibuko says this with a heavy heart. He was responding to the question: How do we best honour the heroism of the Class of 1976 in 2018?
It pains him that adults seem to have abdicated their responsibility to pass on political education to the children. But then again, he says, the current generation behaves like it has solely discovered the struggle.
As modest as ever, despite his colourful achievements, Mazibuko says “not me as a teacher, but young kids, who were 18 at the time, and took part in 1976”.
These are in their 60s now and the current youth consider them “as irrelevant”.
He says the generation of Onkgopotse Tiro, who was given a teaching post at Morris Isaacson after his expulsion from Turfloop in the 1970s, and Tsietsi Mashinini cannot, in 2018, be considered surplus to requirements.
Mashinini was “in my class the year he left”.
“Before 1976, just after the introduction of the Bantu Education Act, progressive teachers like E’skia Mphahlele resigned in protest. We did not say in 1976 that the generation of Mphahlele was irrelevant,” the former teacher says.
Young people should desist from the notion that they started the Struggle, he adds.
He returns to the torching of schools and wonders out loud what this has to do with civic protests. We destroy our own amenities, he gripes: “And the next day we take our grannies to the same hospitals we destroyed yesterday and complain that there is no service delivery.”
He cites the protest action at Charlotte Maxeke Hospital as an example of how shabbily we treat our own amenities. We pay for this damage, he warns.
He agrees that infrastructure was destroyed in the 1970s but says the objectives were different then. “The thinking has to be different,” Mazibuko says.
He asks the question, rhetorically: Have you watched television footage of protest action?
Those who barricade the streets and burn tyres are not old people, he says. “Tempers of young people must be brought down.”
We don’t have the same idea that educational institutions need to be respected, Mazibuko says.
“Many people do not know why history needs to be compulsory. They just read in the papers that it must be taught.”
History is instructive in that it shapes societal conduct: “If people do not know that it is wrong to steal, society will collapse.”
At the height of apartheid, he says, black communities had platforms to meet and discuss civic concerns, from across the spectrum - education, health, family, etc.
The likes of Curtis Nkondo, Dr Nthato Motlana and others led meetings where concerns were raised and consensus sought.
Nkondo, says Mazibuko, taught them that liberation meant the ability to make mistakes and self-correct. Nowadays we make mistakes and he doesn’t see a lot of effort being made to correct those mistakes.
Communication, just as communities practised in 1976, remains key. “At Morris Isaacson we have an Alumni Association that is busy doing all sorts of things. The other day we had a Tsietsi Mashinini Memorial Lecture.”
These are give-and-take forums, he says, where the old impart their knowledge and skills to the young.
The know-it-all attitude of the young worries Mazibuko a lot: “Some of them encounter socialism for the first time in their lives and think that their mothers and fathers never knew these -isms. The old should be challenged. We need forums that do not only talk education all things, service delivery included. This is no longer a struggle for political power. It is a struggle for discipline. The struggle to discipline ourselves.”
It is this discipline that will allow us, young and old, to “sit down and examine what the hullabaloo of 1976 was all about”.
We need to come together, form groups with a common purpose, he says. He is sad that instead of doing this, there are “splinter groups mushrooming all over”.
Recovering from a debilitating back injury, the highly decorated pedagogue is slowly getting back to assisting science teachers across the country.
A modest man indeed, he insists that the story of 1976 be sourced from other voices too, not his alone. And to this end he offers contact details of past colleagues, like Conference Matseke, Patrick Mabena, Lucas Ngakane, Nick Mogatusi, Daniel Lefoka and Thami Ntenteni, among others.