(Rehad
Desai)
Everything
Must Fall, directed by Rehad Desai appears on the Durban
International Film Festival. It will be showing again at Musgrave 3 at 16h30 on
July 23 and is currently showing on Showmax. (Review by Patrick Compton)
This is a documentary largely devoted to
the #FeesMustFall demonstrations at Wits University from 2015-18. The focus is
mainly on four student leaders and a clutch of academics who supported them,
while vice-chancellor Adam Habib gets some opportunities to provide his
perspective on the student crisis.
Desai, who made the award-winning Miners Shot Down, clearly supports the
student rebellion which was sparked by a proposed 10.5% increase in tuition
fees. This protest later spread to issues such as outsourcing university worker
employment to external agencies as well as “decolonising” education, an aim
which remains at a sloganeering level.
Desai does give opportunities for Habib to
explain his position. Not surprisingly, the intellectually left-leaning
vice-chancellor finds himself between a rock and a hard place – sympathising
with free tuition in principle but also finding it extremely difficult to make
it happen because of the government’s inability or perhaps intransigence in
terms of increasing funding. As he argues on a number of occasions, his main
priority is to keep the institution open and solvent and thus able to fulfill
its core duties of knowledge production – an imperative that the “fallists”
seem to ignore.
There’s plenty of footage of protesting
students, aggressive cops and the like, but it’s a worry that, apart from
Habib, centrist positions on the struggle are virtually ignored by the
filmmaker as is the violence, bullying and threats emanating from some of the
protesters whom Habib later went on to describe as the “Pol Pot brigade” owing
to their desire to shut down Wits permanently.
It’s worth pointing out, because Desai
palpably doesn’t, that the “fallism” years at universities and technikons
nationwide cost the fiscus approximately R800 million in damages. Finally, it
should be borne in mind that there is no such thing as “free” education. In the
end, someone has to pay for tuition, food and accommodation, and the buck stops
– of course – with the already overburdened taxpayer who Habib estimates would
have to stump up an added R143 billion per year, a clearly impossible task
given South Africa’s already ravaged economy.
Everything
Must Fall will be showing again at Musgrave 3 at
16h30 on July 23. The movie is also currently showing on Showmax. – Patrick Compton
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