GILLIAN GODSELL AND BOBBY GODSELL: Campuses remake needs language other than fire
Lessons from the mines 30 years ago show we need to listen, stop demonising and find common ground, write Gillian Godsell and Bobby Godsell
The xenophobic venom directed at South African students in 2016 would be alarming even if the students were foreigners. These students are not strangers in our midst, they are our children. All of them. The rock throwers, the studious, the angry, the alienated, the scared. They are not only the neighbourhood kids, they are also the generation upon whom the sins of the fathers have been visited: the children of our democracy, the embodiment of our deepest hopes and fears. We cannot disown any of them. They come from our history. The same history that produced solutions for other conflicts that have shaken us to the core. The peace accord of the early 1990s stretched across a country wracked by violence, destruction and death from Johannesburg to Tugela Ferry and involved all levels of civil society. It was preceded and made possible by the bridging of seemingly irreconcilable differences of belief, behaviour as well as power-distribution in the mining industry. The 1980s were a decad...
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