Revolt and Protest: Student Politics and Activism in Sub-Saharan Africa, by Leo Zeilig. London: IB Tauris, 2007; pp. 336. £47.50 (hb). ISBN 9781845114763.
In most African countries, students inhabit a contradictory class position. A good example would be the students at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) who feature prominently in this study. Until the end of the 1990s, students received a grant which was perfectly adequate to cover living expenses, accommodation and remittances back home. In 1995, the grant was five times higher than the annual salary of a teacher with a high school diploma. In 1998, students at UZ took part in a heroic struggle to defend the principle of a grant, against government plans to replace it with a loan. Despite their defeat, a loan is little hardship in a society characterised by hyper-inflation. Since 1998, a greater concern has in fact been the need to maintain the grant at a living rate, against a backdrop of cuts to the public sector. The physical fabric of the university has been allowed to rot in the same period. A library which was a national treasure has been subject to widespread petty theft. Students, who were far above the average (in terms of wealth, prospects and cultural capital) remain privileged, but the extent of their privilege is significantly eroded.
The relative decline of student privilege has not stopped student activists and former student activists from playing a prominent role in social protests. Indeed, where the economic decline has been most marked – as in the DRC or Zimbabwe – students and ex-students have been most likely to be found at the head of opposition movements. Zimbabwe forms a useful case study, not merely for the part played in the Movement for Democratic Change by former student militants including Tendai Biti and Arthur Mutambara, but also for the serious attempt made by students (well documented in Zeilig's book) to link their campaigns to those of workers and the urban poor, especially during Zimbabwe's biennio rosso of 1996–1998.
Our moment is not that of 1968. The world is not full of protesting students, claiming to speak on behalf of the nation, or still less on behalf of the oppressed generally. Yet, where regimes have decayed, and protest coalitions have formed to challenge them, a prominent part is played, invariably, by students and former students.
Zeilig's second case study is the mobilisation principally at the University of Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal that lasted from 1999 to 2004. Campaigns included a national student strike (February–April 1999), protests against the printing of fake education cards in the run up to the contested Presidential elections of 2000, a strike calling for an increase in the student grant (February 2000), protests against increases in university entrance fees (January–February 2001), and further mobilisations in February 2001, following the killing of a student demonstrator Balla Gaye. In the aftermath of the killing, the students' main economic demands were conceded.
Zeilig quotes one student, Jean-Claude Kongo, as a spokesman for this generation of protesters:
If you think how few members of society actually gain access to university in Senegal … students are privileged; they are in a better position to help and ultimately control the nation. But every student I know has the problem of money although students are here for themselves and for society in general. Materially they certainly aren't a privileged class, that's not possible. I know a student with a scholarship who can't live at the university but has to live in the suburbs. The price of transport, accommodation, everything, I know two students who committed suicide because life was impossible for them.
This is a valuable study; certainly, the events Zeilig documents in Zimbabwe (being so out of kilter with the clichés about that country, which are endlessly reported in the global press) deserved to be much more widely known.