Thank you, Professor Witthuhn
Let me start by welcoming the most important people here today, the students who are graduating and their loved ones. Rector and Vice Chancellor Professor Francis Petersen, the Deans of the Faculties of The Humanities, Natural and Agricultural Sciences, and Theology and Religion, whose students are graduating today, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. As they say in government, all protocol observed.
It is such a wonderful feeling to share this special day with you. Congratulations to everyone who is graduating here today. For most of you, today represents the reward for three or four years of hard work, where you often had to forego the pleasure of being young in order to concentrate on your studies.
And you have achieved this at a time when our country is going through all kinds of turmoil, not least still recovering from a pandemic that crippled our economy and defined a new reality for many of us. We will never be able to forget the lockdowns, wearing masks in public and keeping social distances. We will never forget not being allowed to visit family and friends. But we have survived.
I want to share a few lessons from my life based on just two of my experiences: growing up in Hanover Park on the Cape Flats and working at the anti-apartheid community newspaper, Grassroots, in the early 1980s.
I spend most of my formative years living all over the Cape Flats. This is basically the euphemistic term for the poor areas where most black people live in Cape Town. I travelled with my mother and two older sisters from house to house until we eventually were offered a municipal house in Hanover Park, which was then and still is one of the most depressing townships you can find anywhere. The poverty levels are extremely high and, when I drive through the area nowadays, I see hundreds if not thousands of able-bodied young men standing on street corners at all hours of the day, unable to find work and without any hope of furthering their studies. Many of these young men have completed matric but just gave up hope after that, with some turning to a life of crime because they have run out of options.
It was tough growing up in Hanover Park, where I had to sleep in our toilet because that was the only place available for me to sleep. I could run quite fast as a young man and, I suppose, part of it had to do with the fact that I often had to run away from gangsters who could be found in every block of flats in the area and would strip you of every possession if they caught you.
The school I went to was in a prefab building and the year before I matriculated, we went to buy the newspapers to see who passed. Our school’s name was not in the newspaper. When we went to school later, the principal told us that the reason our school’s name was not in the newspaper was because no one had passed. We were determined to make sure that we would not fall to the same fate, so we called in former students, who were now at university, to tutor us, and we divided our fellow learners into groups of six to eight and each of the supposedly brighter children took charge of a group. We studied together and tutored them at the same time. In the end, we had a decent pass rate, with quite a few of us qualifying to study at university.
We did this despite our teachers and not because of them, and we realised that we had to give life to the old Congress of South African Students (COSAS) slogan of the time: Each one, teach one. We had to become students and teachers at the same time.
I learned so much about leadership during that period and still apply many of those lesson today. I also learned a lot about leadership and management when I worked for Grassroots community newspaper in the mid-1980s. I had worked for a mainstream newspaper which was part of the Argus Group, South Africa’s biggest newspaper company at the time, and I left to join the community newspaper for less than a quarter of my salary. But I did this because I was committed to the struggle against apartheid and felt that I could make a bigger contribution working at Grassroots.
The Grassroots experience was amazing and that is where I learned most of my management skills. I still use many of those skills today.
Grassroots was owned by community organisations such as residents’ associations, youth groups, churches, trade unions, sport clubs and women’s organisations. We had to check everything we did with representatives of these organisations. For instance, the paper came out every five weeks and the first week we would have a newsgathering meeting where up to 50 representatives would meet to go through our diary. We would sit in a circle and everyone would get an opportunity to speak and tell us what was happening in their organisations or communities. We would then decide which stories would work best for our next publication. The representatives would then go and write up the stories with the help of their media committees. The following week, everyone would meet and those with stories would read them out aloud and we would comment. Our meetings often lasted five hours. After three weeks of newsgathering, we would hand over to the production committee, which consisted of me and another trained journalist, working with youngsters from various youth groups from throughout the Western Cape.
I am telling you about this because I believe the best education can be obtained by simply listening to the people around you. I never dismiss anyone because they are perceived to be lower than me from a societal perspective, because I believe you can learn from anyone.
I learned from the gangsters in Hanover Park and I suppose that is one of the reasons I never became a gangster myself. I learned from the aunties and uncles in our communities, who worked hard every day to give their children better lives. I learned from the people I worked with at Grassroots and in other struggle organisations such as the United Democratic Front and the Cape Youth Congress.
Among the most important lessons I learned in life were that:
1. You must always treat others with respect, because you cannot expect people to respect you if you do not give them respect;
2. You can learn from everyone, because many people might not have riches, but they have wisdom;
3. You must always be guided mainly by values and morals and not by political, business, religious or other affiliation, because otherwise your decisions might not always consider the bigger picture, which is always wanting the best for the most vulnerable in society. Always try to do the right thing based on values such as respect, fairness, nonracialism, non-sexism and a belief in a more equitable society;
4. You must never forget where you come from and always appreciate the people who sacrificed and helped you to become successful in whatever it is that you plan to do with your lives. We must always try to find ways of giving back and helping others to also achieve their dreams.
5. But the most important lesson I have learned in life is that learning never stops. It only stops when you pass away. I count myself among the lucky ones who have an inquisitive mind and who is always hungry for new knowledge.
In conclusion, I want to welcome all of you who have stopped studying to begin working, to a new reality where you will soon realise that while the lessons you learned in university will always be valuable, the lessons you will learn in life are priceless. Congratulations on your achievements and I wish you all the best for the future.
Thank you
(Speech delivered to the University of the Free State afternoon graduation ceremony on Friday, 9 December 2022)
