He can’t see far among the bodies pressed around him. There are white hands among those raised in the stomping, chanting, so he couldn’t be so noticeably there, the absorption in purpose is blindly fervent, he knows from political rallies. In the mass you have no direction of your own, he is carried along in a surge towards the main gates of the campus. Outside between the street and the gates, another gathering — a few pausing in curiosity before turning away, others, some black men and women literally throwing their yelling weight about. All cling to gates too wide, tall and strong to shake: they’ve joined the students’ action.
He tries to make a way to other parts of the campus but progress is against powerful currents as urge drives each limb of the great body to join that. He reaches only the science block from where he had set out.
Did any of his academic colleagues to whom he’d been advised to kick arse attempt to be along with the uprising against tuition fees most of their students couldn’t pay (so the cell phones worn like ear ornament, who pays for the serial calls). The faculty coffee room may say, factually, the university couldn’t exist without tuition fees to supplement the government’s inadequate grant; ‘funding free education is that government’s affair’. No dereliction of the university’s responsibility towards students?
Did he have a place down there (he’s back up at his window again). Claim it — claim on him—because of his part, his decision to get mixed up in providing scientific know-how and ingredients to make bombs, his Jabu, his children gestated in a black womb. There are bonfires signalling here, there, like the Guy Fawkes ones of his childhood commemorating a revolutionary arson he and his siblings had never heard of. One of the bundles of whatever was being fed smoking to the flames was very near the archeological museum where tooled stones are the reminder that young men rioting are the descendants of peoples who had skills before invaders brought others; he had a sudden fear not for himself but for what is an extension of self, the work, research that was in progress in the science faculty. What if they burst into the laboratories where climate change is being studied for solutions that would save their own existence on this planet.
Who the hell does he think he is.
What’s the difference between trashing a university that can provide knowledge only for money, and the street gangs who hijack and rob — ah, but there’s the difference, the hijack brings means to buy, own the advertised products the hijacker doesn’t have; there’s no gain in ransacking a university.
What if they come. Would he say comrades, it may be justice to let you into the laboratories to break the privilege others have to qualify for such work, tuition at a price your parents and grandparents, great-great-grandparents have earned down the mines, building the roads, digging the earth for the crops of masters.
This opposition within, clashing contradictions, it didn’t exist when you were closed away with yourself solitary in detention, and even in the bush tents where between action that seemed the answer then, immediate, which accounted to and for every contesting manifestation of living. There were discussions on what’s supposed could be called moral choices taken — made do with? — in the ‘situation’ of the old regime — everyone would be freed for good (in all senses of the two words) of all evasions once that regime was finish and klaar.
Who the hell do you think you are.
The answer is go back down into the body of the throng. But this time someone pressed against him in the strange intimacy of a peristaltic crush, twisted face round. — Eish! You Professor Reed from Science! — He’s not a professor yet, Senior Lecturer with a thesis to complete, but with this greeting he has a rank in the protest, if far back, in the combined push from the playing fields and the surrounded faculty buildings again to the main gates. There’s a backlash in the great body followed by a surge forward as common breath taken: the police are at the gates now the gates have given way, their dogs are barking against hysterical shouts in the theatrical effect of tear gas. Fight your way (as if that were possible) to the front and then, as a white man, the old authority that was the ultimate one, tell the police to lay off the assault? The students are throwing whatever they can pick up at the police, who are mostly black. Through tears and retching coughs they yell insults in many languages as batons strike them. As far as can be made out the leaders of the Student Council who were in the front line have been overcome and arrested, there are police vans swirling sirens in the street, and the other students are being dragged pell-mell random into vans.
Dispersal begins raggedly. Some small groups re-form with attempts at addressing the break-up, the campus is haggard with destruction.
His keys there in his pocket; he gets — escapes? — to the academic staff car park; few cars, no damage done to them — most of the academics have made off as soon as the protest grew. His book-bag and papers are on a table somewhere in his room and the door’s left unlocked — irresponsible. There’s one of the academics about to open his car. — You’re all right? You get caught up in that chaos?—
— Not caught up. I was there.—
Professor of Classics — yes it’s Anthony Demster — takes this as a philosophically sophisticated way of dealing with the disturbance.
— What went on at the university — the police — I tried and tried to call you after we heard at the office but you didn’t pick up!—
To put it to her; they were so familiar with each other’s reactions to the predictable or the unpredictable in their not far-off life on the wrong side of the law.
As customary, she’s doing something; she’ll continue routinely with some part of her unconscious (what is it — pushing the heads of keys into the clips of a leather holder) while her voice is intense with concern. The Classics Professor: did you get caught up in it. But she knows better than that. As if she knew he would leave his little academic enclave and go down there, among the crowd, who this time happened to be students, some of them his. As she would.
— Wasn’t there anyone among the leaders who could direct, I mean the way it was going. So they could be heard…—
She’s asking; she who sleep-deprived and in imminence of other torture had resisted giving the names of comrades the interrogators wanted of her.
A way now. Meeting in the Great Hall with the vice chancellor principal of faculty and the Students Council in discussion of the matter of tuition fees? — That’s the government’s affair.—
What would the result have been? Agreement that the Convocation would meet to consider an inquiry into the implications etc. of social responsibility implied by free tuition at university level? Who can pay and who can’t. A means test?
— I couldn’t even get together a so-called delegation to tell the minister the university’s little problem, attempting to teach students who come out of school half-literate. What choice is there for them. Out from the lecture halls and our baby-care seminars, to the campus!—
He tells her like a confession only just realised — to himself, that when the swell of bodies landed him back near the science block he ejected himself and went back up to his room, met nobody in the corridors — keeping themselves scarce in their rooms, quit the campus or holed up in the faculty coffee room. But what did he have to feel himself more honest about as he stood again at his window, looking down at what was officially referred to collectively inoffensively as ‘The Student Body’ and now really was that, a mythological entity of many limbs. So down again, leaving the room open.