Graduating via struggle can make a better person

The young man in the wheelchair looked as if he’d been run over by a truck. Disheveled and distraught, he rolled into my office determined to avoid eye contact. 

His mother had sent him, pleading that despite his poor academic marks he be given a last chance to get his degree.

I closed my office door and gave him “the talk”, and the less you know about the content of that speech the better. Other colleagues assisted.

Yes, we are headed for junk bond status as the economy tanks; yes, our school system remains stuck in an unacknowledged crisis that continues to destroy the life chances of 80% of our children; and yes, parliament has become a televised display of impunity and incivility, and then we wonder why young people mimic such disgraceful behaviour.

But there is nothing like a university graduation to remind you that there is another South Africa, where thousands of graduates who overcame seemingly insurmountable odds obtain a first degree in front of, and for their families.

There are graduates who survived on the university’s No Student Hungry bursary.

There are blind and deaf students who collected degrees.

There are students who dropped out to work and then came back when they had some money to carry them through.

There are graduates who would not have made it without the meagre amounts left from a grandmother’s monthly pension.

Posing with students for “selfies” (onsies I’m told is the Afrikaans translation) outside the graduation hall, they whisper these stories of survival.

Then there is Tanya Calitz who comes from a humble Afrikaans home in the south of Johannesburg but whose entire young life has been dedicated to living for and with those who struggle.

She is one of the few South Africans who I can truly say is “non-racial” in the depths of her being.

She loves and cares without boundaries, and unconsciously so.

There are few photographs in which Tanya is not living and serving among people who do not look like her or pray like her or speak her language.

This young white South African spends her time in townships and in other parts of Africa to live and to learn from others.

This week she obtained her degree summa cum laude and became the first law graduate from these parts to clerk for the deputy chief justice in the Constitutional Court.

Zandile Twala could not make dinner with my family on Tuesday evening.

She was busy doing her hair for graduation.

Zandile was the pupil from Menzi High School who got a full set of distinctions in Grade 12 but who was stranded without funding.

I called her and asked that she rush to the airport where a ticket was waiting to bring her to Bloemfontein for studies. I visited her mother in a shack on one of those hilly areas of Umlazi, and a translator helped me hear the dreams and gratitude of Zandile’s mother.

Well, on Wednesday Zandile will receive her BAcc degree and prepare for the CA (chartered accountant) qualification which will immediately change the lives of her mother and daughter forever.

Sometimes I think getting a degree under tough conditions makes you a better person, a more determined worker, a more grateful human being.

Maybe struggling is not such a bad thing after all.

Professor Jonathan Jansen is vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State