Protest should not be about disrespecting others

Last week we attempted to make sense of where South Africa is today by retracing the leitmotifs that have defined the character of our society through the ages.

We thus managed to grasp ours as the age of disorder. The political nature of our characterisation may have misled an unreflective mind hurriedly to conjure up images of bias against what UDM leader Bantu Holomisa cheekily calls "the Polokwane lynch mob".

Yet the mob is merely a rotten kernel of a more putrid social milieu. The rottenness of our society and the depth of its disorder was demonstrated dramatically at the end of Professor Njabulo Ndebele's presentation of the 10th Helen Joseph Memorial Lecture at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) last Wednesday.

Ndebele is an esteemed African scholar with a calm and cogitative demeanour that provides a window into the complexity of his mind. His long public silences are broken occasionally by bursts of scintillating wisdom.

Last Wednesday the professor grappled with a question that can be handled only by a mind like his: the evolution of the meaning of blackness - from colonialism to where we are today.

Such reflections are rare today. We live in a country where reason has given way to Twitter characters and their nourishment of shallowness.

When Ndebele finished delivering his lecture, and as the master of ceremonies was about to close the function, a young black student could be heard shouting from the back of the hall.

Against the dignified protests of a learned audience, the radical student proceeded to scream, insultingly, at Ndebele.

We are not suggesting that Ndebele deserves deification.

The sight of a black girl wagging her little finger at a grandfather like Ndebele suggests the presence of a mad social demon that warrants urgent exorcising.

That kind of behaviour amplifies precisely the point we made earlier, that South Africa's disorder is much deeper than the grotesque blatancy of Holomisa's "Polokwane lynch mob".

How has it come about that young black children no longer respect the elderly?

Have we reached a point where black youths have become so confused that they can no longer distinguish protest from naked disrespect?

None must suggest that the disorder in which we are currently drowning is a product of apartheid. Those who grew up under apartheid will remember how, at the height of dehumanisation, black children respected not only their parents but their neighbours as well.

Something under democracy has deformed black children's sense of humanity.

The girl who shouted at Ndebele should be interpreted as a manifestation of a broken social system. We must view her as an outcome of a deformed social framework that produces little monsters with a deficient humanity.

If we approach the problem from that standpoint, we will not ask questions about the personality of that girl; we will look for answers exactly where we must search - in homes, churches, schools and other social institutions that are responsible for moulding the character of our young people.

That girl at UJ must not be isolated and dealt with like a lost sheep. Her peers at various South African universities exude the very same pathology that drove her to wag her little finger at a grey-haired professor.

Youth protests in our time are generally expressed in a language that betrays a worrying regression in the civilisation of the human mind. Insulting older people is done with extravagant relish.

There is a marked difference between the generation of Steve Biko and our students today. Biko was murdered by the apartheid regime not for insulting but for deploying the force of argument to demonstrate the completeness of black people's humanity.

From #RhodesMustFall to #FeesMustFall, you will be lucky to find a piece of written work by our radical students that approximates Biko's erudition and intellectual refinement.

Clearly Biko appreciated the axiom: Knowledge is power.

We are not here calling for an infantile, peacock-like intellectual showmanship. We are trying to remind our radical students of Paulo Freire's instructive equation: "Action without Reflection = Activism". It would seem that some among the young black activists of our day, perhaps not unlike some among their parents, need to be rescued from the fog of exuberant radicalism.

Those among us who still regard order as the most reliable instrument of human progress cannot but wonder what it will take to bring South Africa back on track.

How do we remove rot from the centre and the wider social fabric? In other words, how do we re-humanise black people? It would seem that, before we try to teach our children to revere accomplished professors like Ndebele, we might need to begin by making them aware that respecting an older person has been the hallmark of black people's conception of humankind.