TRANSFORMATIVE LEADERSHIP, ACTIVISM AND SCHOLARSHIP REMAIN RELEVANT IN THE CONVERSATIONS ON THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF OUR COUNTRY AND ITS UNIVERSITIES. Keynote Address delivered by David Makhura on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the military occupation of Turfloop Campus. 12 June 2026. University of Limpopo.

Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Limpopo, Prof Jerry Mabelebele;

President of the SRC and entire student leadership and former Presidents here present;

President of the Alumni and Convocation Association;

Minister Thembi Simelane and MEC Jerry Maseko;

Chairperson and Deputy Chairperson of the Council;

Esteemed Veterans of the liberation struggle and retired academics;

Former student leaders and activists of various generations;

Members of the academic community;

Members of the student community;

Ladies and Gentlemen:

We gather today in response to three seemingly contradictory impulses of human history that mutually reinforce one another: the past, present and the future.

It is Karl Marx who argued, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that the “tradition of all the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living”. The actions and omissions, the heroism and mistakes of past generations weigh heavily on the current and future generations.

In one of his poems titled PastPresentFuture is Now, South Africa’s National Poet Laureate, Professor Keorapetse Kgositsile, posits that the past, the present and the future are in permanent negotiation. He repudiates the ridiculous idea that for our country to move forward, we must forget about our past.

No serious nation, culture or civilisation can move forward without drawing lessons on successes and mistakes from its history. It is like being advised to undertake a journey to an unknown place without a GPS or a compass.

Many ancient kingdoms, empires and civilizations that rose and fell, thrived and failed, have major lessons for us as we strive to build a better future.

The simple and ever-so-poignant truth is that we must anchor ourselves in history and honour memory if we are to move to the future with clarity and confidence.

Forty years ago, on 12 June 1986, this campus experienced one of the most defining moments in its history: a full-scale occupation by the apartheid army.

We assemble here not merely to commemorate the tragic and disruptive impact of that fateful day. We also meet to celebrate the resilience, brilliance and bravery of the students and to draw lessons and make linkages between the past, present and future of our university and country at large.

I arrived on campus in 1989, during the last year of the battle to remove the apartheid army from the university, coming from a school where the army’s intimidatory visits were only occasional.

The experience of registering at the gate near the old Sovenga Post Office under the watchful eye of the army was a clear message from day one about who was in charge of the campus at that time.

Ernest Khosa was the President of the SRC, which provided a counterweight and some kind of dual power to the management and the army.

In 1990, I succeeded Ernest Khosa as the SRC President to lead the generation that ushered in major university transformation initiatives and spearheaded the appointment of the newly-released Nelson Mandela as Chancellor of the University of the North (as Turfloop was called then).

History credits our generation with the introduction of democratic governance and transformation of the higher education policy landscape during the transition and early years of democracy, including the setting up of the national student financing scheme.

The film premiere of Studying Under the Barrel of a Gun, a movie adapted from President Ernest Khosa’s book, is a very significant and proud moment in the history of the student movement and the University of Limpopo.

Khosa was at the centre of the generation that mounted massive resistance and national mobilisation and won the battle to remove the army from campuses in August 1989.

I commend President Ernest Khosa for telling the story of Turfloop so eloquently, continuing the long tradition of Nkondo and Tiro who articulated the issues of this university very well in the Turfloop Testimony.

Khosa’s book and the movie we will watch today remind us that history is more complex. It is not just a collection of dates and events but a creation of narrative in context and interpretation of competing visions about the future, drawing lessons from the past.

History is about giving meaning and interpretation to the flow, contours and interconnection between seemingly unrelated events, discerning a common thread and trends from which a narrative is created.

We pay tribute to all the generations of students who studied, organised, debated, resisted and continue to dream and fight for freedom under extraordinary conditions.

Theirs was not just a struggle against something terrible—Bantu education, apartheid colonialism and imperialism.

It was principally a struggle to create something much better—democracy, freedom, development, and the fundamental socioeconomic transformation that will leave no section of society behind.

Standing here in Onkgopotse Tiro Hall, stripped of the sentimentalism and youthful passions of yesteryear when we held many mass meetings in the same venue, one cannot escape the burden of history that weighs heavily on our shoulders.

This hall bears the name of one of the greatest products of our university.

Onkgopotse Abram Tiro understood that education without freedom is incomplete and that knowledge without courage is powerless.

Many paid the ultimate and supreme sacrifice for freedom with their lives.

The current generation of the leadership of the university and students have inherited an institution with a very rich history.

You need to know the history of the University of Limpopo in full.

Few institutions in South Africa have embodied and embraced the twin tasks of pursuing struggle for both liberation and education as consistently as the University of Limpopo has done in the past six-and-a-half decades of its existence.

Very few universities have produced the quantity and quality of graduates, across all spheres and sectors of society, across generations, who have made it their business to carry forward the torch of freedom and transformation.

Since its inception, successive generations of student leadership at this university have stayed steadfastly loyal to the idea that a university cannot be separated from the history of the liberation struggle and development agenda of the nation and communities.

From Professor Muxe Nkondo and his generation in the 1960s, to Onkgopotse Tiro in the 1970s, to Ernest Khosa and the Young Lions of the 1980s, successive generations turned this university into a school of leadership and a laboratory of progressive and radical thought.

While other institutions produced graduates, Turfloop produced leaders.

While others transmitted knowledge, Turfloop generated ideas that challenged injustice and inspired transformation.

The significance of Turfloop extends beyond South Africa. It belongs within the wider story of Africa’s intellectual re-awakening and renewal.

Throughout the continent, universities served as incubators of liberation movements, nation-building projects and developmental ideas.

Turfloop occupies an honoured place in that tradition.

We honour the University of Fort Hare, which helped shape the generation of African nationalist leaders between the 1930s and late 1950s: Professor ZK Matthews, President Robert Mugabe, Professor Robert Sobukwe, Govan Mbeki and Nelson Mandela.

However, my contention is that from the 1960s onwards, the centre of gravity shifted to the north of South Africa.

Turfloop emerged as the principal centre that produced the largest quantity and quality of anti-apartheid activists and leaders for liberation movements in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

This university was also the centre of ideological ferment and revival of the people’s mass organisations.

The Black Consciousness Movement was conceived and anchored here in the 1970s.

The Congress Movement and the Mass Democratic Movement (those aligned to the Freedom Charter) were revived here in the 1980s.

More than any other university in our motherland, the University of Limpopo has produced presidents, ministers, premiers, judges, vice chancellors, pastors, educators, senior civil servants, business leaders and professionals who built the foundations of our constitutional democracy and continue to shape the democratic era.

The military occupation of 1986 was intended to silence dissent and suppress resistance to the evil system of apartheid and colonial dispossession.

Yet the paradox of history is that repression produced resilience.

The occupation became a symbol of resistance. It exposed the moral bankruptcy of apartheid and strengthened the resolve of students and communities across the country.

The remarkable achievement of the generation of the 1980s was that they shifted the tempo of the struggle from resistance to people’s power.

They understood that liberation required more than protest. Transformation required more than rejection of Bantu education.

Liberation and genuine freedom require radical and transformative ideas, organisation, institutions, strategy and vision.

By “radical and transformative” we are not referring to the noise, populism and drama of today’s performative politics—what Shakespeare refers to as “sound and fury signifying nothing”.

Nor are we talking about radical rhetoric that lacks substance.

To be radical and transformative is to go deep to the root of the problem and seek solutions that fundamentally alter the status quo and empower the voices, sectors and communities that are structurally and systematically excluded from freedom and development.

Professor Muxe Nkondo articulates radical and transformative activism, leadership and scholarship as the praxis of placing “lived experiences of the masses and developmental aspirations of communities” at the centre of democratic institutions and democratic politics.

In Development as Freedom, Economics Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen argues that:

“Development consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency. Freedom is the ultimate goal of social and economic arrangements and the most efficient means of realizing general welfare… economic growth without investment in human development is unsustainable and unethical.”

President Julius Nyerere, in Freedom and Development, saw:

“Freedom and development as completely linked as chicken and egg… Freedom depends on development and development depends on freedom.”

Today’s generation of students, academics and workers on campus, and progressive activists in communities, have to perfect their skills on how we solve the problems of democracy, freedom and development.

We live in a democratic South Africa.

Yet democracy alone does not solve all problems.

Inequality remains stubbornly high.

Poverty continues to undermine human dignity.

Unemployment deprives many young people of hope.

Corruption and personal greed have weakened public trust and undermined the ideals of liberation.

We need to institutionalise the ideals of freedom and development and insulate democratic institutions from personality cults and capture by elites.

We all have a duty to learn from history so that we can tackle the problems of the present and shape the future, with the full benefit of those who came before us.

Former President Kgalema Motlanthe makes a provocative assertion that history has no sentimental value of its own:

“Unless current generations can draw lessons to solve the problems of the present and future.”

He also says:

“History is both a living dialogue among equals and a conversation between generations.”

I would like to summarise my message to this august and solemn occasion by outlining six lessons we can draw from the history of Turfloop in general and Studying Under the Barrel of a Gun.

First Lesson: Memory is Both a Pedagogy and a Path to the Future

One of the fatal mistakes of those who have fought for justice and radical change is to assume that yesterday’s oppressor would want the story of liberation to be told to future generations.

Naturally, the oppressors want the story of oppression and injustice to be forgotten as quickly as possible.

Milan Kundera calls on us to wage another struggle:

“The struggle of memory against forgetting.”

This is very critical for countries that went through periods of painful conflicts and oppression.

Nations that forget their history become vulnerable to distortion, manipulation and decline.

Memory teaches humility.

It teaches gratitude.

It teaches resilience.

Above all, it teaches responsibility.

It will take a struggle to ensure that the history of the fight against colonialism and apartheid tyranny is told to future generations and preserved in museums.

New monuments have to be erected, books have to be written and films produced to preserve and ensure that future generations know that freedom was not free.

Second Lesson: Education Can Never Be Neutral

The architects of apartheid understood the power of education.

The apartheid regime sought to use it as an instrument of domination.

Yet progressive students, academics and workers built enduring alliances that transformed schools, universities and colleges into sites of liberation struggle.

They never separated the act of learning from the activism of changing society.

They knew that education can be a weapon that can be used by the oppressor to disempower and indoctrinate the people, or it can be harnessed as a force for national liberation and self-empowerment.

Education either expands human freedom or constrains it.

Education can either inculcate progressive and emancipatory ideas and values, or it can cultivate and reinforce conservative and oppressive relations.

There is no neutral education system.

Third Lesson: Young People Are Makers of History Today

The idea that young people are the leaders of tomorrow is not always an accurate representation of the revolutionary and transformative potential of the energy and ingenuity of youth.

Across the world and throughout history, young people have taken actions that have changed the course of history and destiny of nations.

Often, this happened when older generations were either too comfortable or fearful of the status quo.

This is the context within which Fanon famously made his eternally relevant assertion:

“Each generation must discover, out of relative obscurity, its own mission, fulfill or betray it.”

The history of South Africa bears testimony to the transformative role of students and youth in key phases of the struggle.

The youth of the 1940s, the 1976 generation, the Young Lions of the 1980s, the transformation generation of the 1990s and 2000s, and the #FeesMustFall generation have all played different but important roles.

As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the June 16 Student Uprising, we must make a call to the youth to assume centre stage in seeking solutions to the current challenges we face as a young democratic nation.

Young people become the leaders of today the moment they decide to be catalysts and agents for transformative change—to deepen democracy, fast-track economic transformation and give real practical meaning to freedom and development in the daily experiences of the masses in rural communities and townships across the country.

Fourth Lesson: Democracy is a Beginning, Not an End. The Destination is Freedom and Development for All

One of the most dangerous ideas that must be confronted and combatted is the notion that the struggle ended in 1994 when our country achieved democracy.

We must insist that the struggle fundamentally continues: Aluta Continua.

The idea that people must simply wait on government to deliver while they sit and chill is not developmental and revolutionary.

Yes, we want a more interventionist state and an activist government that should do more to deliver basic services and infrastructure, and support communities and citizens to build their own livelihoods.

However, we also need an active citizenry that takes agency and builds self-reliance instead of becoming over-dependent on government.

We want citizens who take part in building a participatory democracy and accountable governance instead of waiting to elect leaders once every five years.

Democracy has enduring value only when it is a scaffolding to freedom and development—a better future for all where the inequities and injustices of the past have been redressed and opportunities are available to all to meet their needs and aspirations.

The crisis of many liberal democracies across the world is that the people’s living conditions and experiences do not find expression in the daily deliberations of political and economic elites who monopolise national resources and development opportunities for themselves.

This results in the alienation of people from democratic processes.

True democracy must always lead to freedom and development.

If democracy does not result in socioeconomic transformation and freedom, it can lead to people losing faith in democracy.

We already see evidence from global IPSOS surveys that more people, including in South Africa, are beginning to believe that dictatorship can help societies facing deep social and economic crises.

This is a very dangerous idea.

Fifth Lesson: Knowledge Production and the Battle of Ideas Remain Strategic Sites of Struggle and Must Not Be Abandoned

One of the mistakes we committed after 1994 is that everybody moved into government or business, abandoning universities and colleges as sites of struggle.

Little attention was given to the need to maintain dynamic cross-fertilisation of ideas and the flow of transformative leaders and scholars between academia, government and business for purposes of the broader transformation agenda.

This mistake borders on revolutionary recklessness.

We can learn a great deal from countries such as the United States.

The Republicans and Democrats have a very dynamic relationship between those who are in government and those who are in universities.

From time to time, academics move into government to shape and implement the policy agenda and values they support and later return to universities with an improved understanding of what they need to teach.

Former government leaders and public policy practitioners also move into universities to reflect, research and write about their experiences and practices.

The same applies to those in business.

I dream of a future where more former student leaders and academics will return to this university and others to pursue postgraduate studies, research and teaching.

Nations that succeed in the twenty-first century are nations that invest in ideas, technology and human development.

Research, innovation and scholarship are not luxuries.

They are strategic national assets.

Sixth and Final Lesson: Leadership Matters. Without It, Nothing Moves

If history is to bequeath anything to the future, Turfloop must continue to be the school of both radical and transformative leadership and scholarship for generations to come.

Leadership is not a title.

It is about impact.

It is about taking responsibility to change your circumstances and the circumstances around you for the better and for the benefit of more people in society.

It requires moral courage, vision, sacrifice and the upholding of high standards of ethics and performance.

We cannot simply decry the erosion of ethical standards and leadership quality in public life.

This erosion represents one of the greatest threats to democratic progress.

We must take action to build a new generation of activists, leaders and scholars who are not only technically capable and morally grounded, but who are deeply committed to transforming society in pursuit of freedom and development.

As we reflect on these lessons, we must also ask difficult questions about the future.

Conclusion

Allow me to conclude by posing a set of questions that should be answered by all those of us who have an umbilical cord with this university.

What should the University of Limpopo become over the next fifty years?

What must we do to ensure that the University of Limpopo remains one of Africa’s leading centres and schools for a new generation of transformative African leaders and scholars?

Can it become a premier institution for leadership development?

Can the University of Limpopo produce solutions to the challenges confronting rural development, governance, public health, education, technology and climate adaptation?

I believe we can.

Yes, we will.

The future demands a new generation of leaders.

It demands leaders who can move comfortably between ideas and implementation, between theory and practice, between intellectual excellence and public service.

Professor Tshilidzi Marwala boldly made a profound call:

“The ones who do not read and learn, should not lead.”

Yes, I agree.

Leaders must read and continue to learn because the world is becoming more complex than at any other time in human history.

This includes learning from our own history and the history of other nations, cultures and civilisations so that we do not repeat their mistakes.

Universities must prepare students not merely for existing jobs but for challenges and opportunities that do not yet exist.

The legacy of Muxe Nkondo and his generation was radical and transformative leadership and scholarship.

The legacy of Onkgopotse Tiro and his generation was intellectual courage and activism that linked the struggles on campus to the wider centuries-old struggles against colonialism and apartheid.

The legacy of Ernest Khosa’s courageous generation of Young Lions was to respond, with fearlessness and ingenuity, to the apartheid regime’s crackdown on political activism in campuses and townships through the declaration of the 1986 State of Emergency.

The current generation of student leaders, academics and administrators also have a duty to posterity.

You should ensure that the next generation of students inherit institutions capable of advancing the struggle for freedom and national development in the new era.

It is your responsibility to ensure that future generations inherit:

A democracy that is stronger;
An economy that is transformed and more inclusive;
A society that is more cohesive and united in diversity;
A state that is more effective, ethical and developmental; and
A citizenry that is more active, better educated and activist in the affairs of their own country.

The enduring lesson of Studying Under the Barrel of a Gun is that every generation encounters obstacles that appear insurmountable.

Yet you possess the infinite capacity to overcome and solve the problems of your time.

You cannot bask in the glory of the achievements of the previous generation.

You must take charge of your destiny and make your own impact.

May the spirit of Turfloop continue to illuminate the path toward a South Africa that is freer, more prosperous, more just and more united.

Oh Turfloop, our Turfloop!

May your proudly radical and transformative traditions endure for generations to come.

I thank you.