The EFF is 6 year old, and is still finding its feet in broader South African politics. Its organisational culture is still developing and it has a bigger duty towards advancing the people’s revolution. In his address to the 3^rd National Students Assembly, the Commander-in-Chief posed the question, “Why must the EFFSC exist?” As a response, some fighters misconstrued this as an attack on the legitimacy on the student movement. It is the contention of this narration that CIC’s question is timely and contributes towards crafting dialogue in the movement about the methods that we continuously apply in the revolution. This question needs to be thoroughly engaged and debated. Not only as an academic exercise but to sharpen organizational culture.

The formation of the EFF Students’ Command saw the resurrection of student activism around campuses nationwide. The Students’ Command revived radical students’ culture and offered a space for students to engage in radical campaigns against the state of higher education; what made the Students’ Command most special at its inception was its unrelenting insistence in anchored intellectual and ideological work.

The Students’ Command fashioned itself as a Marxist, Leninist & Fanonian student movement. One recalls how the movement was charged with robust debates relating to our theoretical underpinning in 2015.   There were two dominant schools of thought at the helm of these debates: The Fanonian School, which was largely championed by the Wits branch, and inspired by the black radical tradition. This school of thought spoke to the conditions of historically white dominated institutions. The image “white dominated” instead of white institutions stems from the reality that all universities are essentially white; this is inclusive of those universities that have been designated for black bodies (e.g UniZulu, UniBo and University of the North).  The University of Pretoria EFFSC branch, which I am a member of, also had the habit of gravitating towards the Fanonian modes of articulation, considering that the institution is an Afrikaaner University. This branch construed race as being the main antagonism that required urgent attention. 

In 2015 Naledi Chirwa, Thuli Zulu, Amla Monageng and I, were some of the few to come up through the ranks and emerge as branch leaders of EFFSC UP. Most of us, specifically the named comrades, were inspired by a non-partisan aligned movement known as Black Thursday. Black students would convene at the student centre and discuss issues affecting us by way of music and poetry. Initiatives like Black Thursday shaped our ideological outlook and as a result, the EFF became the only organization that we could identify with.

Most of us joined the Students’ Command post the inception of Black Thursday because we sought a political home that would accommodate our nappy hair, ankhs and the so-called African prints that we wore.

Another dominant school of thought at the time was Marxism; comrades like Ntando Sindane (Unisa) were staunch proponents of this ideological framework. This school identifies Class as a central antagonist wherein prevailing class-inequalities in institutions of higher learning are the bedrock of any revolutionary student movement.  Each of these schools identifies their main antagonism based on their material conditions at their respective campuses. Consequently, each school is ideologically justified because each responds to the prevailing reality on the ground.

TUT, University of Limpopo and similar institutions that are severely under-resourced could be categorized as part of the Marxist school because their chosen approach to the struggle is usually underpinned by a strong Marxist outlook. In contrast, the case of TUT main campus poses an oxymoron worth studying because the campus is more resourced compared to its sister campuses (Rankuwa, Polokwane, Emalahleni and Mbombela). Moreover, its diverse racial demographics make it amenable to bouts of institutionalized racism. It is against this background that TUT main campus inherently breeds the intellectual atmosphere to combine these two schools (Marxist and Fanonian). It is the argument of this exposition that Tshwane University of Technology is an example of the healthy ideological contradictions that EFFSC sought to grapple with. 

Flowing from its first elective conference, these two schools were able to find one another and our Marxist Leninist and Fanonian organisation enveloped into a theoretically sound movement founded on these two complimentary ideas. There used to be many jokes with particularly Ntando Sindane, wherein some of us argued that Fanon is arguably Karl Marx’s greatest student and that there is no way we could not reconcile the two. EFFSC in those times cultivated a strong culture of debate which ideologically enriched the Mother body, the EFFSC stood as a promising beacon which would enhance the EFF through vibrant ideas and rigorous intellectual debate. 

EFFSC also promised to be a vanguard of the protest movement’s militant and radical character through the #FeesMustFall, #EndOutsourcing as well as #AfrikaansMustFall protests. EFFSC set itself out as a segment of the EFF that would always embody radicalism and militancy in advancing the protest movement. EFFSC also encouraged the culture of writing and communicating the EFF’s ideas through blogging and aesthetics, through our clothes and music. Fighter Mbe Mbhele and Wits EFFSC cultivated the long-lost politics of aesthetics in South Africa, using art as protest and means to assert blackness. These ideas had far-reaching consequences, the rise of the dashiki in the EFF as part of the broader project of black aesthetics and creating a space for black street culture in mainstream politics. .

There was once an EFFSC grouping named, “18-point-7” which was actually a room number at TUT Soshanguve campus wherein comrades would meet to strategize, drink, sing and other youth activities. “18-point-7” would gain its prominence especially during #FeesMustFall protests, and stood as the centre of campaigns against erasure of the revolutionary efforts of comrades from institutions like TUT, MUT, DUT and others. “18-point-7” would invite comrades from all campuses to experience life as a TUT student, their daily struggles, the blatant brutality they face from police and private security, most crucially, “18-point-7” also embraced TVET colleges in all their programs, aggressively undoing the tendency of forgetting TVETs in student struggles. This was a really beautiful time in the EFF.

Fast forward to 3 years later, robust debates in the Student’s Command have taken a drastic nosedive. These debates, if any, are now limited to Facebook insults, largely spewed by banal cishet male fighters, who find joy in insulting feminism while lacking the basic comprehension of the very meaning of feminism. During this period, the EFF Students’ Command had done a lot in trying to introduce Feminism and the gender question as a discourse. It had become an agenda that is frequently engaged, but the quality of the engagements, at present, remain sincerely worrying, coupled with the patriarchal attitudes/habits/actions/tendencies that continue to plague the Students’ Command. The current EFF Students’ Command neglects activism around gender and sexuality, doing very little work on sexuality.

In the last two elective conferences, some fighters fashioned their campaigns in a way that seeks to undermine and de-legitimize the EFF.  These campaigns were filled with messiah sloganeering (such as “Comrade X or Death”), arrogantly promising to “restore” the EFF or talk of how the EFF leadership has sold out. Admittedly, the organisation needs to be critical of itself through its members, however, there exists a fine line between constructive criticism and outright ill-discipline.

All of this unfettered ill-discipline is probably born of the fact that Fighters construe the EFFSC as a vehicle to the CCT of the EFF, and thus deployments to parliament, provincial legislature and municipal councils. Most worryingly, fighters seem to be using the EFFSC to settle political squabbles with senior leaders of the EFF. The reality is that fighters of Students’ Command have developed a culture of entitlement thus doing everything in their power to prevent a new layer of leadership from emerging. In the final analysis, all this decay could be due to the Students’ Command having taken shape as an elitist entity that sees itself as above the EFF.

Why then must the EFFSC exist?

One of the pitfalls of the Students’ Command has been the breeding of an elitist culture among students. This is evidenced in how a rift has been created between EFFSC and the mother-body, wherein students limit their involvement in the revolution to their campus branches, effectively neglecting community branches and the much needed activisms in that space.

The Students’ Command weakens branches of the mother body, robbing it of capable young students who choose to only participate in campus politics instead of EFF branches in the community. The Students’ Command therefore alienate students from community-based politics, reducing activists into campus dwarfs and separating campus struggles from broader working-class community struggles.

Having joined the Students’ Command in 2015, I hardly ever tried contacting my local branch at home even during recess because I was too preoccupied with the Students’ Command, forgetting that I exist, not only as a student but also as a member of the community. My ward in Mabopane, in Tshwane has been denied of my skills, knowledge, youthful energy and revolutionary vigour. This is a challenge for branches of the EFF nationwide, wherein campus dwarfs hold the unspoken sentiment that says; “We’re too good for community-based branch politics, ours is the university.”

The proposal to dissolve the EFFSC and merge its branches into the EFF is thus plausible, and may be worth debating at the upcoming National People’s Assembly of the EFF in NASREC.

For any nation that exists in this world has its history, language and cultures that epitomizes the communal development of that particular nation. I write today as an attempt to debunk the myth that English represents all of us, we were a colonized continent, politically, socially and cultural our colonizers conquered us.

In history we know that the colonies epistemologies could not accept the native’s languages nor cultures, African scholars in literature who could write poetry, novels etc. were always excluded, if those writings were presented in languages such as isiZulu, Yoruba or Swahili. The main point was to entrench the colonial domination over African people that English was sufficient, and that it represented exceptionalism. The British colonizers took upon themselves that any intellectual production that should take place should in English so that everything else represents Europe. It did not reflect the social experiences of Afrikans but Europe, and was a demonstration that their knowledge is universal. Therefore, nothing that came outside the English language met their standards.

The entire academic structure from the history has been exclusively white, the languages being used in academia is white thus it is not easy in that situation to develop our languages. As Prof Ngugi Wa Thiong’s point out in his decolonization of the mind book “The choice of language and the use to which language put is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment” I won’t dwell much explaining the history of English language.

The colonization of the Afrikan people was the genesis of dominating them, economically, cultural and socially. The purpose was to culturally alienate people and redefine what colonizers thought of Afrikan people with their cultures, colonizers could not interpret the meaning of the disequilibrium between people and ancestors therefore it introduced Christianization of knowledge to declare our own cultural beliefs as uncivilized or barbaric. Europe presents itself as monotheistic that there is no any other knowledge that can exist except for their knowledge, the Afrikan disciplines were in existence but through epistemic colonial rule, they made sure that Afrikan teaching and languages become unattractive so that even Afrikan people can themselves can feel inferior when they express themselves in their languages.

That is why they had to name everything for Afrikan people, from rivers to mountains because Europe had dehumanized Afrikans.

To define the context South Africa is currently engaged in a robust debate about the English language being used mostly in model c schools, some of the parents lamented that the isolation that their children have to go through because they can only articulate themselves in English. Moreover, the other dissenting view is that English is a colonial language, therefore, it is unacceptable for our young children to speak English, the conundrum is that South Africa did not get independence in 1994 because independence would mean that we rename everything, we also focus on decolonization of knowledge as well as our languages being included in academia. The entire colonial setting remains even after 25 years of the so-called democracy, the education system that was exclusively white and natives were not allowed to enroll for has now been generalized for the benefit of everyone. Everyone in the country now learns all these disciplines, which are anti-black.

The argument is that English is a universal language, taking your child to a school that teaches them English is to prepare them for a globalized era. “To be a student is to be a technician, learning to apply theory produced elsewhere, we risk producing the high-cost caricatures yet another group of mimic men and women for a globalized era. The alternative is to rethink our aspirations not just to import theory from outside as another development project but to aim differently and theorize our own reality” Prof Mamhood.

The quagmire is that we were a colonized nation, domination by colonial settlers for 400 years; psychologically they manipulated us that we view whiteness as modernity, sophistication and we view ourselves as subjects to serve the system. The colonized was forced to learn the English Language to prove to the colonizers that they (we) can also mimic them, we have seen Afrikans sharpening English accent just to be viewed intelligent.

What is Language? Language is communal developed, it is constituted and developed by the people, they give meanings into things, and the language represents their cultures as well as their identities to the world. How can speaking SeSotho or IsiZulu viewed as backward? Because the dominant ideology of whiteness manifests itself that, those who are oppressed by it begin to speak in its defense. The spiritual connection as Afrikan people can only be accessed through our languages. Language immerses us into a cultural world, a child that speaks English because of the current colonial and Eurocentric education system does not belong to a cultural world but your child is a mimic, your child draws aspirations from whiteness that is why your child is getting an isolation.

Afrikaners did not opt for interdisciplinarity in 1948 when they took over power. They created their institutions to develop Afrikaans until today that Afrikaans became a close alternative to English. There are many Afrikaner speaking people who cannot read or write in English but they have businesses in the country, they teach children Afrikaner cultures because they have invested so much in their language.

Afrikans, we remain conquered, cultural, economically and socially. Ours is to focus on the decolonization project to develop our knowledge as opposed to employing defensive mechanisms when the Eurocentric education is at the question, one may ask why I wrote this article in English. Because I agree with Walter Rodney where he said “The ultimate task of the guerilla intellectual is not simple to reject white bourgeoisie thought, white institutions, and white learning mere rejection does nothing to wage a struggle against a power structure on its own terms. Rather, the guerrilla intellectual must actively wage a struggle for the terrain of academia, of knowledge production, of knowledge distribution, and finally, they must free the whole structure. To do this, the guerrilla intellectual’s first level of struggle must be within their own sphere of operations”