MALAIKA MAHLATSI

In 2015, thousands of South African students in historically White universities took to the streets in protest against institutionalised racism. I was one of them. At the time, I was an undergraduate student at Rhodes University, a bastion of White privilege, an institution which, like many, was resistant to change. The university had been insisting on using the quantitative measure of the Black student population to shield the realities of the insidiousness of racism that was embedded in institutional culture. We, the class of 2015, had grown up in a post-apartheid dispensation with hopes that the democratic order would humanise us – that as Black people, we would finally close a chapter on an era where the colour of our skin was used to mark us out as subservient beings. I was born and raised in Soweto in the democratic era and knew too well what it meant to exist in what Frantz Fanon so aptly referred to as a zone of non-being.  For the thousands of Black students who protested on university campuses, our collective lived experience in democratic South Africa was defined by the remnants of our past – spatially, economically and otherwise. Those on the outside saw the #RhodesMustFall movement as a protest against the prominent display of the statute of British colonialist, Cecil John Rhodes, at the highest ranked university in Africa – the University of Cape Town. For us, the statue was a symbol of something bigger – the idea that Black people in South Africa had to co-exist in spaces that dehumanised them.

The Rhodes statue represented the disregard for the spiritual death that Black people had to negotiate in universities that, almost 30 years into democracy, remained resistant to the idea that our humanity matters.

The #RhodesMustFall movement was a fight for the lives of Black people in institutions of higher learning. It was a battle for the reclaiming of Black dignity in a South Africa where we continue to exist as an impoverished, disenfranchised, de-civilised and dehumanised people. I was committed to the movement because I understood the importance of decoloniality and would continue to dedicate myself to student activism during the #FeesMustFall movement that would bring South Africa to its knees a year later. During that period, universities would bring in law enforcement, including private security, to disperse our protests. I lived through this experience when police shot bullets at us during a gathering at Rhodes University. I tended to comrades and friends who had been wounded by these bullets, their only crime being to ask why, decades into democracy, the doors of learning continued to be shut on poor Black people who have been systematically proletarianised and had already lived through centuries of having every opportunity denied to them. I remember thinking that no country that claims to be democratic could send police to shoot at protesting students.

Almost a decade later, in October 2023, I enrolled for my PhD in Geography at the University of Bayreuth in the German state of Bavaria. Like many African students, I believed that Europe, even with its history of colonialism and pursuit of imperial interests, was at least a democratic region. I believed that disregard for the freedoms of people of the global majority happened exclusively in poor regions of the world – that on European soil, governments protect human rights. This was a reasonable belief given that many pro-democracy programmes in many parts of Africa and the Global South broadly are funded by European institutions. Within months of my relocation, this illusion would be shattered. In February 2024, I received a summons by mail from the German police informing me that I was being investigated for “rewarding and endorsing a terrorist event” in Germany. This was after I had written articles in various South African newspapers calling what was happening in Palestine by its proper name – a genocide.

Long before the International Court of Justice confirmed that there was prime facie evidence of genocide, and long before the world woke up to what the apartheid state of Israel was doing to Palestinians, I was insisting in my articles that the world was witnessing a genocide in real time. That the world needed to first see over 60 000 people dead and children dying of hunger in what has essentially become the world’s biggest concentration camp, to recognise that the actions of the apartheid state of Israel were always intended at exterminating Palestinian people, is a wound on our collective humanity. In the summons, I was requested to present myself to the Hannover Police in the state of Niedersachsen where I live, but was unable to do this as I was in South Africa at the time. I informed the police of this, by email, and provided a comprehensive response disputing the false allegations that were presented in the letter. I also reiterated my position – that Gaza was a crime scene, that the apartheid state of Israel was waging war, genocide, against Palestinians.

I did not receive a response, but just over a month later, I received another letter from the German police stating that their investigation was concluded. I was cleared of all accusations, in part because by then, the South African government had intervened, with the then Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Dr Naledi Pandor, stating to the media that the government would protect my right to free speech. The South African embassy in Berlin had also extended support to me, recognising the seriousness of the situation. Yet, even after the police had cleared me, the harassment did not end. The matter was referred to the Office of the Public Prosecutor in Gottingen, and for weeks, I remained in limbo, not knowing whether I would have to defend myself in a German court – a country where support for Zionism forms part of national identity. It would take several weeks before I received a letter from the Office of the Public Prosecutor confirming that the investigation had been closed.

Throughout that period of harassment by the German state, I did not receive any support from my university, which was fully aware of what was happening.

Until very recently, German universities have maintained an eerily audible silence about the genocide in Palestine. They have refused to condemn the actions of the apartheid state of Israel, standing neutral in a situation of genocidal injustice and thereby, taking the side of the perpetrator. So paralysing has been the German response to the genocide that when we, a small group of doctoral scholars at the University of Bayreuth, asked that we, at the very least, release a statement calling for the end of the blockade of humanitarian aid, we were met with strong resistance. Our German colleagues would not do even that bare minimum, and in a meeting we called to discuss how we could show practical solidarity with the Palestinian cause at a time when more than 20 000 children had been killed, only four people attended.

African students, many of them relying on German scholarships for their studies, did not participate in protests or activities in support of the Palestinian cause.They understood what was at stake, for they had witnessed what happens to those who dare to speak up.

They were forced to choose between either standing up for Palestinians or building a better life for their families. Many are from some of the poorest countries in the world, and a German education could rewrite the narrative of their lives and change the fate of their communities. They chose the latter. Though it pains me, I have great sympathy for them because I understand the impossible situation in which they were placed. As for me, I was, and I still am, prepared to be deported by the German government. I will, if it comes to it, complete my PhD elsewhere.

My education matters to me, but not more than my desire to live in a world where the children of Palestine can play on the streets without having bombs rain on them from F-16s.

I have never been accused of any crime in my entire life. But in Germany, I was accused of the most egregious crime – terrorism. This harrowing ordeal did not happen to me alone. Hundreds of students in Germany who protested in support of Palestine, some of them foreigners like myself, have been subjected to unimaginable harassment and brutality by the German state – often right on their university campuses. Images of police brutality against university students in Berlin finally broke the audible silence that the academic world had maintained on the treatment of pro-Palestinian student activists. This brutality is not restricted to Germany.

The world is watching what is happening in the United States regarding the detention and deportation of pro-Palestinian student activists. We all watched in horror what the Donald Trump administration did, and continues to do, to Mahmoud Khalil, a student at Columbia University in New York. Khalil is a permanent resident of the United States, legally married to an American woman. But following an Executive Order signed by Trump, which claims to prohibit “anti-semitism” on American campuses, student activists like him are being targeted and deported.

Western governments are increasingly becoming comfortable with the abuse of power, particularly towards students. There is an intentional and growing direct assault on academic freedom, and a systematic attack on pro-Palestinian activists. There is an undertone of racist ideas in this, a not-so-subtle assertion that some lives matter more than others. The same governments that harass and detain pro-Palestinian students and supporters have no problem with students supporting and defending the rights of people who are not Arab, Black or part of the global majority. And this is precisely the reason we should never tire in our support of the Palestinian cause – because this is not only about Palestinians, it is about all of us.

We, people of the global majority – Blacks, Arabs, Latinos, Asians, Islanders – we are all Palestinians.