South Africa: This Writer Reminds Us That Wits Has Seen Protests Like This Before

analysis

HAROON WADEE takes us back to the early 1990s.

It was 1993, the year before the first democratic elections, and Wits University was on fire. Not literally, but it was inflamed with passionate activism and cries for transformation of the Senate and the ruling structures of the university. Lectures were disrupted, lecture halls were trashed. Protesters engaged in peaceful sit-ins at Senate House were pursued and hounded by policemen with police dogs, rubber bullets, teargas and batons. The cops seemed eager to get their last bits of bloody action before 1994, when a new dispensation might bring an end to such draconian policing.

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