24/08/2016
SRC INAUGURATION WELCOME ADDRESS: 19 August 2016
Prof Emmanuel Mfanafuthi Mgqwashu
Head of Department: Education, Rhodes University
Hall Warden: Allan Webb
Warden: Salisbury House
Program Director, VC, DVCs, Registrar, the leadership of our unions, the current
SRC, the incoming SRC, leadership of various student formations, our valued
student body, and all those viewing this occasion through live screening, good
evening.
Welcoming you to this New SRC Inauguration is a privilege and honour, and a
response to an invitation I humbly accepted. Humbly because I do not see myself
qualified to speak on the subject the orgainising committee requested me to speak
on: the subject of leadership. After searching my heart, I felt my welcome needs
simply to be a story about learning, un-learning, and re-learning. A story about
humility, sobriety, and courage. A story about learning to follow, to receive
correction, in order to grow in wisdom. A story about becoming a leader, learning
to lead, and leading.
As a 13 year old, I watched with admiration my elder brother delivering speech
after speech to hundreds of people in community halls, open fields, in the street
corners. He wasn’t concerned about how old he was, or who was in the audience.
He simply spoke his heart. I watched him grow into becoming the hope for our small
community. Just when my eyes were beginning to open to what he stood for and
believed in, I watched him getting shot at point blank right beside me, and falling
like an improperly built brick wall. Just as I went on my one knee to pick him up,
concerned that he might be trampled, I could hear the sound of bullets flying just
above my head. At that point, I had two choices: either attempt to pick up a body
with the weight twice my own, or pretend to be dead. Before I could make up my
mind, the crowd decided for me: I had to look like I was dead, flat on my face, on
top of the tarred road, trampled like an old dirty blanket, the same way my mom
washed our linen. Yes! My mom! A domestic worker! My hero! Alone, managed to
raise four children, fed them, clothed them, and sent them to school, and yes, to
higher education as well. Why alone? You ask. Well, let’s just say in the world
where men are the law to themselves, sons grow up with the desire to emulate
their fathers. But I chose to emulate my mother instead. She’s my leader! My
teacher! The teacher who taught me leadership through her life.
She taught me: a position does not make you a leader. One is not a leader because
they have a position. True leadership begins with learning to lead oneself, learning
to set own boundaries, learning to honour your own words, making-principled
decisions, being content about oneself, and loving people. She warned me: do not
love the position and not the people. Do not love to lead and hate the people. Many
love to lead, she would say, but they don’t love the people. They don’t even care
to understand how the people they lead feel, why they feel that way, and what
views they have to change the way they feel. Once people know you truly love
them, and truly care, leading becomes a collective project: you and them do the
leading, with a common, shared goal in mind.
That’s what I experienced exactly 20 years ago as a student leader at the then
University of Durban-Westville. It started with us as the student leadership truly
loving the student body, regardless of what they believed in, who they were, which
club or society they belonged to. After winning them with our love and care, they
were fully persuaded that we were for them, with them, and truly interested in
their affairs. Once they were persuaded, University leadership knew we truly
represented the entire student body. It then became easier for the student
leadership and University leadership to work as ONE TEAM. We had mutual
respect, honor, and understanding, listening to each other, and learning from each
other. We even came up with fundraising strategies to support the university
leadership for needy fellow students, and even accompanied some members of the
university senior leadership in some fundraising ventures. We also involved clubs
and societies in these fundraising ventures. We all had one goal: to ensure that no
student was sent back home because of financial challenges.
As the male student leadership, we never took advantage of female students who
were emotionally vulnerable, and often confused a need for a father-figure in their
lives with being in-love. We even confronted the male students head-on who called
first year female students “fresh meat”. Working with other arms of the university,
all such attitudes were alienated to a point where they were a mis-fit in the culture
of our residences and the University. We kept the focus on receiving quality higher
education, graduating, and going back to supporting our families and building our
nation.
Twenty years later, some of my peers are serving as mayors, ministers, even
premiers. My true heart for you, this generation, and the student leadership, is that
you do much better than us. Refuse to be angry because it clouds the bigger picture,
it compromises your judgement. Love one another with a true heart. Serve from
your heart. Nothing will be withheld from you. This is my humble welcome to you!
