Daily Interesting News

What comes to mind when you think of the French Foreign Legion? Most likely men struggling through the desert in heavy blue coats and white peaked caps. Men who joined up after a lifetime of crime, fighting valiantly, then leaving the Legion to become tough, faceless mercenaries trading on their background, or else dying in the mud of Dien Bien Phu as the last choppers leave for La Belle France.

The reality is different. In its first version, the Legion was seen as a rough mercenary force that guaranteed immunity from criminal prosecution, as well as a new life and French citizenship. In its second incarnation, the Legion became a sort of substitute family. Now in its third, the official image of the Legion is of an elite fighting force, to be compared with the British SAS or the US Navy Seals. Today, legionnaires are much more than a band of mere ‘expendables’.

The modern Legion still has a few things in common with its previous incarnations. There remains an emphasis on marching (to enter, you have to complete several hikes in full kit, ranging from 50 to 120km) and the men who join are still keen to fight. The wages, though, are now quite good, especially if you see duty in a combat zone. Even the most basic pay of a recruit is €1,205 a month, which, considering there are no bills or food costs, is nothing like the five centimes a day it was in the 19th century. Then, a legionnaire could afford wine or tobacco, not both, and certainly no other luxuries.

Young men still queue to join up in great numbers. Several thousand apply per year, and some 80 per cent are rejected – the Legion doesn’t accept anyone wanted by the police or with a serious criminal record, though misdemeanours and petty crimes are still acceptable. The modern Legion is around 8,000-strong and needs only 1,000 new recruits each year to replenish the ranks. The average recruitment age is 23. In recent times, 42 per cent of recruits come from eastern and central Europe, 14 per cent from western Europe and the US, and around 10 per cent from France. Around 10 per cent come from Latin America and 10 per cent from Asia. These young, rootless men swear their allegiance not to France, but to the Legion itself. It is their only loyalty.

The Legion is composed of several branches: engineers, paras, armoured cavalry, infantry, and pioneers. The paras are based in Calvi on the island of Corsica (they are still not trusted to be on mainland France after a coup attempt in 1961). Other arms have been garrisoned in French Guiana and the United Arab Emirates. The Legion saw service most recently in Mali, where they helped restore the government against insurgent Al-Qaeda forces.

Recruits must present themselves at one of several centres in France. If this pre-selection goes well, it’s on to Aubagne, a small town about 20km inland from Marseilles on the Mediterranean. There follows one to two weeks of selection where numerous mental and physical tests are taken. The minimum age is 17.5, the maximum 39.5. There are no educational requirements.

Once they make it through selection, recruits sign a five-year contract and are then shipped to ‘the farm’ in the Pyrenees for six weeks of hellish training which further weeds out the unsuitable. Though probably not as tough as SAS selection in the UK, it certainly involves more cleaning, marching, singing and discipline – much more. It is accepted that hard discipline is the only way to weld men from such disparate origins into a single fighting unit. The Legion allows officers to strike the men in a routine manner. The method is age-old and simple: break the man, remove his old allegiances, then give him a new family.

In this new family, recruits are also allowed to choose a new name – the name by which they will be known ever after. And so, by the end, they have become someone new, with a new country and a new identity. Indeed, this is the most obvious pull the Legion has for men: a new life. This life, however, is wrapped up in a world that honours death.

The initial five years can be renewed at the end of service. In either case, legionnaires have the option to take French citizenship after three years – an attraction for those who would pay dearly for a European passport. A longstanding tradition of the Legion is that any legionnaire wounded in action automatically gets his citizenship, whether or not he completes his service, becoming ‘Français par le sang versé’ (French through spilt blood).

The reasons modern recruits give for joining can seem prosaic. Gareth Carins, a former quantity surveyor, turned down the British Army in favour of the Legion. ‘The truth was, I liked the army,’ he writes in Diary of a Legionnaire (2007). ‘I liked hill-walking, I liked travelling, and I was looking for an adventure.’ He reports that people regard his justification with ‘a look of disbelief and even disappointment’ – and rightly so, since the mystique of the Legion can’t be so easily captured. The one thing Carins doesn’t mention is death, but death is close to the heart of the Legion’s attraction.

In this, it differs from the standing armies of other modern countries. Joining the British or US army involves swords and salutes on the parade ground, but the Legion’s inaugural ceremony in Aubagne leaves no doubt that this organisation cleverly manipulates the death wish of many. At the Legion’s tomblike headquarters there is a shrine: a wooden prosthetic hand that once belonged to Legion Captain Jean Danjou, who died in Mexico in 1863 defending a road for a long-forgotten cause. Around the roped off hand-shrine hang placards inscribed minutely with the names of the dead – all 40,000 of them, dating back to the Legion’s inception in 1831. The message is clear. Sacrifice is essential but you will not be forgotten.

Death-loving nihilism is not the sole motivation, of course. Camaraderie, adventure, danger, the desire to prove oneself all play their part too, as with any army. And, perhaps more than most regular armies, love affairs gone wrong propel many into the arms of the Legion. When the British author Douglas Boyd interviewed a jungle warfare instructor in Guiana about his reason for joining the Legion, he was told: ‘Histoire de nana, le plus souvent.’ (‘Girlfriend trouble, mainly.’) Romantic by nature, they seek a romantic solution by sacrificing themselves to the masculine fantasy of the Legion.

The cap legionnaires wear, called the kepi, is bleached as white as the bones of a Saharan camel. It stands for Algeria, the Legion’s first home. With the French invasion of Algeria in 1830, there was a need for a force to pacify the country. There had been mercenary forces in the French Army before, but they had been organised along a national basis. One exception was the Hohenlohe regiment, largely staffed by Germans but including men of all nationalities. This force, raised in 1815 after the defeat of Napoleon when France was in disarray, was disbanded in 1831, its foreign troops incorporated into the newly formed French Foreign Legion that same year. So a certain amount of German DNA entered the Legion, and there remains a sneaking regard for German military prowess. Indeed, after both the First and the Second world wars, Germans formed the majority of the Legion’s strength.

The slow and brutal colonisation of Algeria during the 19th century earned the Legion its reputation for toughness and expertise in the desert. It was here that the routine use of daily 40km marches made the Legion the fastest-moving infantry strike force then in existence. The Legion were military innovators and had the quickest system of infantry movement prior to motorised transport. Two men would share a mule that carried their kit. One would walk fast at its side while the other rode. After a few kilometres, they would change places. With this system, the legionnaires could travel 70 or 80 km a day with full kit, just as fast as Bedouin raiders with their camels.

When France moved into Tunisia in 1881, and into Morocco in 1911, the Legion followed with its desert experience. The Saharan period is formative for the Legion. The romance of the desert was cross-fertilised with that of the runaway convict-turned-mercenary, creating an occidental counterpart to fellow desert nomads, the Tuareg. It is this romance that attracted not just former criminals but many well-born men to their ranks, including King Peter I of Serbia, Prince Aage of Denmark, Crown Prince Bao of Vietnam, Louis Prince Napoléon VI and Louis II Prince of Monaco. Writers and artists who have been drawn to the Legion’s ranks include the novelist Arthur Koestler, the First World War poet Alan Seeger, the composer Cole Porter and the film director William Wellman.

But the romance of the desert was not what Erwin Carlé discovered when he enlisted in 1905. Born in 1876 in Germany, Carlé had worked in the US as a cowboy and a journalist before joining up. His memoir In the Foreign Legion (1910), published under the pseudonym Erwin Rosen, portrays the traditional Legion in its toughest era, and was one source for the classic novel Beau Geste (1924) by P C Wren. For Rosen, however, the Legion ceased to be interesting and fun once he ran out of money for ‘extras’ such as wine and good food.

Rosen describes how a new recruit’s bed would be placed between two older recruits who’d teach him the ropes. If he bought them a few bottles of wine, he learned even faster. All his kit had to be folded into a ‘pacquet’ ready to be packed in a rucksack. There were no wardrobes for the legionnaire, and no privacy since he lived in a dormitory with 20 other men. Yet Rosen reports that there was barely a raised voice and no curses when the recruits were taught how to handle their weapons. Likewise, when marching, no legionnaire was told off for being sloppy or wearing his kit strangely, as long as he marched 40 km in eight hours, with five minutes’ rest every hour. While the recruits eased off their 50-kg packs to rest, the old-timers simply lay flat with their packs underneath. It saved time not undoing the straps, time that could be spent resting.

The Legion Rosen describes is one of endless toil. When not marching or training, they were required to clean and do ‘corvée’ duty: basically any dirty job required by the colonial administration in Algeria. At one time, Rosen had to clean the sewers of the local prison, and was rewarded with the jeers of the Arab population: only a legionnaire was considered low enough for this filthy job. Rosen also notes that most of the roads in North Africa were built by the Legion, a handy hard-working force that was then among the cheapest in the world.

Why did they put up with this? Many didn’t and talk of deserting was common, but without money it was difficult to escape. It became rather easier to desert after 1962, when the Legion shifted its headquarters from Sidi Bel Abbès in Algeria to Aubagne; Carins tells of a modern-day American who left during training and headed over the Pyrenees into Spain. If caught, he would have been sentenced to military prison, but he made it home. The kind of official manhunt that would have been sanctioned by desertion 100 years ago is far more lacklustre today. The fact is, the modern Legion has enough keen recruits not to care too much if some run away.

In the past, strong discipline merged into punishment. If a man fainted on a march, he’d be tied to a pole sticking out of the side of a wagon. His arms would be supported, but if his legs couldn’t perform a walking action, he would be dragged along, burning a hole in his boots and feet. This harsh treatment was not seen as unjust since any man who couldn’t keep up would be killed by the Arab forces that often tailed the expedition.

After the Mexican civil war of 1857-60, and as an interlude from pacifying the North African colonies, the Legion was sent to help install Maximilian, the brother of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph, in Mexico. There were other troops also on loan to the insurgent regime including British Royal Marines, Austrian footsoldiers and even 447 Egyptians. But it was the French who stayed longest, until 1867, and did most of the fighting. Oddly enough, one of the few remaining influences of the Legion’s time in Mexico is the widespread acceptance of the French word for marriage to describe wedding musicians: the mariachi band.

The story of the Battle of Camarón on 30 April 1863, when Captain Danjou lost his life, has become the stuff of legionnaire legend. Surrounded by 3,000 Mexicans, Danjou and 64 of his men were given the chance to surrender. Danjou, however, knew that if he held up the Mexicans, a vital convoy of supplies would have time to get through to his men. So there would be no surrender. Down to their last cartridge, the final six legionnaires standing made a bayonet charge. Somehow, three of the six survived (with hideous wounds) and were protected by a merciful Mexican officer impressed by their bravery. Even then these three gave in only when their terms were met: that they kept their empty rifles and could give an honour guard to escort the remains of Captain Danjou. But not all his remains. In a macabre, comic twist, his wooden hand was somehow overlooked. After prolonged negotiation, it was later bought back by the Legion from a Mexican farmer who had found it but was reluctant to part with it. This is the wooden hand enshrined in Aubagne, where each new legionnaire is inducted, and where they say a final goodbye upon completing their service. The day of Danjou’s death is still celebrated every 30 April as Camarón Day.

The First World War, in which one in three French men of military age died, saw the Legion employed on many fronts fighting the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. Germans who were in the Legion were kept in Algeria for fear they might desert. The rest fought. The Legion, along with the Moroccan Division, were the most decorated French unit in the 1914-18 conflict. They fought on every front, including Gallipoli, but, when the war ended, their numbers were so depleted there was talk they ought to be disbanded despite their gallantry.

This was a crucial moment: the Legion needed to reinvent itself or die (echoing its mantra ‘march or die’), and a certain Colonel Paul-Frédéric Rollet came to their rescue. Short, slight, well-bearded, and with a penchant for wearing rope-soled espadrilles not boots while marching, Rollet understood that, instead of offering a sanctuary for runaway convicts, legionnaires needed a new myth of belonging and self-sacrifice. The Legion has won many battles since its formation but is known, really, for its marvellous defeats: at Camarón in 1863 and at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954 (where another one-armed officer, Colonel Charles Piroth, showed extreme bravery before killing himself with a grenade).

Rollet was a military genius who understood the inner symbolism of such things as heroic defeats, odd uniforms and lost limbs: Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, one of Britain’s most decorated officers; José Millán-Astray, founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion; and Admiral Horatio Nelson himself were all missing hands or arms.  Suggestively, Paul Rollet went into battle with just a rolled umbrella. He believed that a commander showed lack of faith in his men if he needed to be armed, and besides, it distracted from his real task of inspiring his soldiers to fight. That Rollet seized on the heroic defeat at Camarón is no accident: men brought up to accept death and mutilation as the price for never being forgotten by their uber-family (the Legion) are stronger than those bribed with the comforting notions of victory and glory. Rollet knew that an army doesn’t march on its feet, or even its stomach. It marches on the stories it tells itself. So he made sure that the Legion was full of traditions and stories and rituals. He also turned a few marching songs into full-blown anthems. However tough, legionnaires must learn to sing with gusto the songs of former warriors. Other armies don’t really do this, nor do the officers bring the men breakfast once a year (on Camarón Day, of course). This action alone mimics a family in its concern. Every Legion memoir (and they are legion), however much it complains of bullying or incompetence, mentions with heartfelt gratitude the songs and traditions imbibed alongside the forced marches.

Having fought through the First World War, Rollet had seen the mechanised future of warfare, and realised that men respond badly when treated like machines. He’d watched the French Army mutiny in 1917 and had even used his legionnaires to put down such an insurrection. This was a French Army that had been treated as cannon fodder for the great machine of death that was the Western Front. Rollet would go the other way. On the Legion’s 100th anniversary in 1931, and the first Camarón Day, he ordered that the infantry be led by bearded pioneers carrying immense axes. It was a quirky refusal to put guns on show but he knew that discipline and morale were more important than mere firepower. Not that they didn’t have that, too. Rollet expanded the Legion into infantry, cavalry and engineers. Too many French boys had died in the First World War, so from now on foreigners would defend France’s colonies. He had them posted in Fez and Marrakech in Morocco, in Sidi Bel Abbès in Algeria, as well as in Tunisia, Syria and Indochina. Between the wars, the Legion was at its greatest numbers, counting some 33,000 men.

Astutely, Rollet maintained the early German connection by making official the slow, 88-steps-a-minute march of the old Hohenlohe regiment. He maintained the desert connection with the official headwear, the white kepi, with its back flap as protection against the sun. But perhaps Rollet’s greatest legacy was to put in place the elements necessary for the Legion to later transform from yet another mercenary colonial force to an elite fighting unit.

But in Rollet’s day, that elite quality was still a few years away. The interwar, uber-family Legion is perhaps best known for the games they created. Russians who joined taught bored fellow legionnaires to play Cuckoo. Two men with loaded revolvers enter a cellar or darkened room. One calls ‘Cuckoo!’, then dives for cover. The other shoots. Then he calls cuckoo and the other fires. The game ends with either death, severe injury, or both revolvers empty. Another lark was Buffalo, in which each participant drinks a bottle of vermouth and then charges head-down at his opponent with hands tied behind his back, with things settled literally by cracking heads. If both are still standing afterwards, another bottle is drunk, and another head-on collision arranged. Usually two bottles, occasionally three, were consumed per man before a cracked skull or severe concussion decided the duel.

In the Second World War, the Legion fought against the invading Germans. After France fell, the Legion split: some remained loyal to Vichy, others sided with Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill. These two sides of the Legion actually faced each other briefly in Syria, before the Vichy forces capitulated and joined the Free French.

One legionnaire who served in Syria and later North Africa was Susan Travers, the only woman ever to be officially recognised as a full Legion member. The bilingual daughter of a British Navy officer who grew up in France, Travers was 32 when she unofficially joined. First a nurse and then an ambulance driver, she became the mistress of several Legion officers, ending up with the commander General Marie-Pierre Koenig. Travers demonstrated real courage under fire on numerous occasions. She was the only woman allowed in the defensive ‘box’ perimeter at Bir Hakeim, a battle that ended with the Legion making a heroic stand, and breaking out under cover of darkness to escape capture. It was Travers who drove the two commanding officers – both of whom had been her lovers – and the car suffered only 11 bullet holes and ruined shock absorbers. They let her drive not because it was her job, but because she was the coolest behind the wheel.

After the Second World War, many of the Legion’s former enemies, especially German soldiers, joined up. That some had served in the SS is a rumour many legionnaires like to promote but one that’s hard to believe. Members of the SS had their blood group tattooed on their arm, and even those with the tattoo removed would have found post-war recruiters far from sympathetic. But there were plenty of ex-Wehrmacht soldiers to swell the forces of the Legion in its next two conflicts: Indochina and Algeria.

Indochina between 1946-54 should not be mentioned lightly when the Legion is concerned. Often called the Michelin war (after the giant tyre company that stood to lose its immense rubber plantations if the Communists won), the Legion did its mercenary best, despite being given a hopeless task and incompetent leadership under General Henri Navarre, the architect of the Dien Bien Phu fiasco.

At Dien Bien Phu, where the Camarón story was read out before the final assaults by the overwhelmingly superior numbers of Vietnamese, the Legion showed that they could still die – but for what? France was already committed to pulling out of Vietnam, and was simply using military action to gain better terms. In the late 1950s and early ’60s in Algeria, the protracted and bloody civil war mimicked the previous bloody conflicts with Arabs. This time it was decolonisation on the cards.

France was split about Algeria, though the majority favoured pulling out. Four former generals of the French Army thought otherwise, and staged a coup against De Gaulle in 1961. The elite 1st parachute regiment of the Legion were sent to capture Paris. De Gaulle went on radio and television appealing to the nation to side with him against the revolt – and succeeded. The 1st paras were disbanded, though, strangely enough, not really in disgrace since a legionnaire swears allegiance to the Legion and not to France. In following their superior’s orders to effectively mutiny against the government, they were not acting dishonourably but according to their code. And when the troops made their final march before disbanding, they sang the Édith Piaf classic ‘Non, Je, ne regrette rien.’

The coup attempt brought to the surface the troubled relationship between France and its Foreign Legion. The French admire it and yet don’t quite trust it. Another reinvention was required. This time, the solution was truly bold: to turn the Legion into an elite force, a strike force, the kind that could easily put down a coup, or stage one in another country. The undisgraced 2nd Para became the ‘Young Lions’ of this newly created force.

Elite fighting forces are a serious attraction to young men. And the Legion, unlike many special forces, gets to fight a lot. Death and elitism are a heady cocktail. Since the late 1960s, the Legion has fought with distinction in Chad in 1969-71, in Zaire in 1978, and been a peacekeeping force in Lebanon in the early 1980s. During the First Gulf War in 1990-91, they served to protect one arm of the coalition forces and received very light casualties. In 1992, they were back in old Indochina in Cambodia, and also in Somalia. In 1993, they were in Bosnia, and Rwanda in 1994. In this century, they have served again in the Ivory Coast in 2003, and Chad in 2008. In 2013-14, they helped to rid Mali of the politicised Islamic extremists that took control of Timbuktu – a return to their romantic desert roots.

Ex-legionnaires are rather touchy on the subject of their motivation. They naturally distrust anyone who hasn’t had their experiences. To outsiders, it looks a little strange. All that discipline and marching – and then ending up dead. That they are men who love fighting is only half the story. Even the desire to prove oneself as manly and tough cannot account for the continued fascination for this army of foreign mercenaries who celebrate not victory but an honourable death. One has to go further, and look at the Samurai tradition of Japan, where an almost erotic interest in death runs alongside a more workaday nihilism. According to the 18th-century Samurai manual the Hagakure: ‘A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this you will awaken from your dreams.’

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — On the January day three years ago that Kgomotso Tjie found out he’d made it into an elite South African university, he logged onto his Facebook page and typed a message with shaking hands. The moment he’d worked toward all his life had arrived.

“I thank God for granting me the desires of my heart,” he wrote.

For Tjie, the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg was the promised land, evidence that being poor and black was no longer a barrier to success in South Africa. Born in a rural township some 400 miles northeast of Johannesburg, he’d started believing that hard work and smarts really might be enough.

It had been a lonely odyssey to get there. At his all-black high school, more girls get pregnant each year than students make it to university, and guidance from teachers on how to apply to university had been minimal. Stumbling through a stash of application forms alone at a local library, Tjie had been stumped by even the most basic bureaucratic questions. He’d never encountered officious phrases like next of kin. Back home, his mother, who sold vegetables by the roadside to help make ends meet, couldn’t offer much practical advice.

Just a quarter of Tjie’s year group at the state-funded M.L. Nkuna High School got the grades required to get into university that year, reflecting the enrolment rate of black students across public schools in the country. Tjie was one of the lucky ones who got the grades and could scrape together the money for fees to actually enrol. But once he got to Wits — as the university is known to students and teachers alike — he found himself plagued as much by self-doubt as financial constraints.

“I never fool myself into thinking because I’m here — because I left most of my peers in townships and villages — I’m a ‘better black.’ The struggle doesn’t end just because I made it to Wits,” he said quietly one afternoon at the end of last year, as we sat in a terraced amphitheater overlooking the campus’s Olympic-size pool.

It’s a reality that gets to the heart of a political battle defining this generation of South Africans. Those who came of age in a country unshackled from the white-minority rule known as apartheid have found themselves confronting a painful question. What does it mean to be black in a country that still confers advantages on white people in every walk of life, even now, more than two decades after the end of minority rule?

The first rumblings of a movement that was to sweep across campuses began back in March 2015, when a black student threw a bucket of shit over a statue of Cecil John Rhodes, a proudly racist British imperialist and mining magnate, which looked down over the main square at the University of Cape Town. That act of defiance had an elegant symmetry to it: Rhodes used to force his black miners to have the contents of their bowels examined to prevent them from stealing diamonds. Students called for the removal of the statue, launching a campaign known as “Rhodes Must Fall.” Critics saw it as an attempt to “erase history,” an irony not lost on those fighting to get rid of a statue celebrating a bigot who saw Africa as little more than a plundering ground for white advancement.

Such protests had quietly simmered for years in universities largely attended by black working-class students, but this was the first time since apartheid ended in 1994 that formerly whites-only colleges were involved — and the media began paying serious attention. The Rhodes Must Fall fight for racial justice soon echoed across the globe from Princeton to Oxford to Edinburgh, as students began calling out universities for their roles in harboring vestiges of white supremacy.

In South Africa, talk moved from the psychological ways in which nonwhite students remain disenfranchised to the practical. Rhodes Must Fall morphed into “Fees Must Fall” as black students demanded “free and decolonized” education, alongside calls for better conditions for poorly paid black workers employed by universities. Protest movements led by young black students flared across formerly white campuses, triggering a martial crackdown by the state. Week after week, heart-stopping clips emerged of police and private security swarming onto university grounds and engaging students in tense face-offs.

The wreckage of the year included university buildings set alight, more than 800 protesters arrested, and hundreds showing signs of post-traumatic stress. Two students lost their lives. The government increased bursary funding for those hardest hit, but little was actually resolved. With fees now raised in “Ivy League” universities like Wits, the threat of more protests, and perhaps ultimately more deaths, looms over this academic year.

In other words, post-apartheid rule papered over the gashes wrought by white minority rule with a so-called “rainbow nation” band-aid. But that is unraveling, and what happens this year will reveal yet further the depths of those wounds.

At 22 years old, Tjie is baby-faced and doe-eyed, with a voice that remains soft even when he’s talking about crushing experiences — which, three years into life at Wits, is often.

This was supposed to be a new world, one in which his parents need no longer lie awake in their corrugated iron–roofed home feeling that, no matter how hard they try, it will never be enough for their son. Tjie, at least, out of their four children, had made it out of the townships. But reality quickly began to chip away at this mirage.

Which is why he sometimes avoids his parents when they call him from home. He doesn’t know how to explain to them that daily he’s reminded of the fact he is temporarily inhabiting a space that was never meant for people like him — not just black, but poor too — and that, as a result, he constantly feels like he’s there on borrowed time.

There were the gut-wrenching moments that confront every black person. Like the October afternoon when the police had pelted him and other protesters with tear gas, and he’d rushed to shelter in another building. Two white students dashed in ahead of him. When he reached the entrance to safety, Tjie realized a man was blocking his way.

“Where’s your student card?” he recalled the man asking him.

He hadn’t asked the white students.

What shook him even more was when he recognized the man as a lecturer.

Later, reflecting on it, Tjie spoke with a resigned calm. “White people aren’t seen as part of this thing, as dangerous.”

When he first arrived at college, Tjie’s Facebook posts were peppered with references to being a “proud Witsie.” Outwardly, he knew it was a monumental achievement for someone who’d clawed their way through rural poverty and a broken public school system. But self-doubt was a constant internal soundtrack. He felt more at home joking around with the university cleaners — “They’re our parents,” he said of them — than with most of his fellow students.

He knew what it was like to wake up with stomach cramps from hunger, because he couldn’t afford a fridge and was often too tired to cook; his classmates were more likely to be fretting about morning rush-hour traffic. “Our situations,” he said of the latter, “are too different — you can’t compare two things that aren’t even the same.”

As he struggled through his first year, he found camaraderie in a group of black activists marching against the high price of university accommodation. Here were people who saw the world through the same eyes. If you’re born into a black household — as 80% of South Africans are — your average income is six times lower than that of a white household, meaning student fees of up to 108,000 rand ($7,922) disproportionately affect families like Tjie’s.

And, more than once, he’d thought of quitting university altogether — which some 50% of black students do in their first year. “When I first came to Wits, I almost dropped out and ran away home. You write the tests. You try by all means. But the struggle never ends.”

But his family back home was looking up to and depending on him. His elder sister, a graduate unable to find a job. His brother, who had not dared rack up the debt university would bring. His father, who’d come out of retirement to help scrape together money for his fees.

And he’d had high hopes himself. He’d grown up in Mpumalanga, in a farming community that also provided a steady stream of cheap labor to nearby luxury safari parks. As a kid he’d idolized his uncle who was a traffic cop. “He would drive, like, a better car. That’s what I saw each and every day, him living a better life.”

Education was his ticket to one day owning a car, to having money to help out his family. He’d staked everything on it. “I need to do better for my family because they’re all looking to me,” said Tjie.

Wits ripped him from the quiet rural life he’d always known and plunged him into the ever-hungry mouth of capitalism in Johannesburg. It was there he began to see clearly how the world worked, starting with the realization that his uncle, the cop who drove a battered car, wasn’t really such a big somebody. “When I came here I realized that no, that’s not life.”

He learned that a school uniform had been a blessing if all the clothes you had barely filled a tiny wardrobe. “Saturday, you’re happy you don’t even come to campus, and study in the room because they will see you wearing exactly the same thing.”

At Wits, he learned how to type properly for the first time.

And he learned that dreams were scaled firstly according to the colour of your skin, then the size of your bank account. “Growing up in Mpumalanga, the people you see who are successful are teachers, nurses. They drive when I walk every day — and you think that’s success. But when you come here you see white people,” he said, then sucked in air and held it for a long moment.

Somewhere along the way, everything became overwhelming; self-doubt morphed into self-sabotage. Adopting a phrase in Tswana, his language, as a mantra — ku rila a swi pfuni, which means, “crying doesn’t help” — he said he saw no point in asking his lecturers for help.

His grades began to slip, and with them the possibility of renewing a scholarship that depended on him getting at least 60% pass marks.

What needled him most, though, were the casual, everyday incidents he couldn’t quite pin down to his skin color, but neither could he shake off the feeling that’s what they were about. Like in class, after pairing up with white students. “After submitting a project or whatever, you don’t know each other any more. Tomorrow, hey—,” he mimed waving at someone, “they take out their phones to try and pretend they didn’t see you.”

For Tjie, who grew up in an all-black township, navigating race was an exhausting, constant undertow.

It came as a painful shock when the university insisted on preparing for exams in November even as protests raged around them. What he was fighting for, he realized, was abstract to most of his white peers. “My friend yesterday had two rubber bullets. One next to the eye, and one in the leg. How am I gonna concentrate?” he asked.

Then when he went to classes, feeling depressed, a white lecturer encouraged students to “take back Wits” from those who were protesting. “He said ‘take back.’ What does ‘take back’ mean? It means you owned it, right? It’s like we stole the thing away so they’re taking it back because it’s theirs.”

And it was the reason he stopped reading newspapers or online news. “You try by all means, but as a black protester, you’re still a hooligan. The media just keeps saying we’re hooligans.”

A few hours after we first spoke, Tjie sent me a message. He thanked me, politely, for talking to him. Since then, though, he’d been pacing around. “After the conversation we had, I had so much anger and I know it will not change the situation,” he wrote. He wouldn’t be able to talk with me again. Each minute of an interview with me meant twice that long dwelling on his painful reality later.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Hopes had been so high when the country became a non-racial democracy that those born after the end of apartheid in 1994 were given a nickname full of promise: the born-frees.

Even now it’s hard to conjure the full horrors of apartheid.

Segregation had long existed in colonial South Africa, but in 1948 the all-white National Party enacted a system designed to keep nonwhite throats under white boots. Apartheid, the law of the land, was the separation of races — divided into whites, blacks, Indians, and “coloreds” (members of South Africa’s unique mixed-race heritage). A person’s political, civil, and economic rights — or lack thereof — were dependent wholly on which classification they fell into.

Divide and rule was used to devastating effect. The infamous pencil test — whether someone’s hair was curly or “black” enough to hold a pencil — was so arbitrary and imprecise it meant members of the same family could be forced apart. Some colored people sought to “go white” to improve their own lot in life — at the cost of being unable to see or talk to family or friends who weren’t willing or able to make the leap.

Literally meaning “apart-hood” in Afrikaans, apartheid went even further than the deprivations of Jim Crow in the US. Not unlike the far-right groups ascending in the US today, there was a yearning for a “pure” white nation. Black South Africans were effectively stripped of citizenship and forcibly sent to “Bantustans” — black homelands — so the government could achieve a white majority in “true” South Africa, the almost 90% of land reserved for the white minority. Nonwhites had to carry passes at all times, which determined where they could move around.

Grand apartheid dictated that black people were penned into townships, allowed to enter white areas for labor and domestic work only on designated buses. Petty apartheid was the sign that greeted workers, on return to their townships, saying, “CAUTION: BEWARE OF NATIVES.”

A few years after instituting apartheid, the government gave up the pretense that separate facilities had to be equal, and passed a law to that effect. The result: Inferior black-only buses took black students to inferior black-only schools. Inferior black-only ambulances took black patients to inferior black-only hospitals, and when black people died after receiving inferior treatment, they were buried in inferior black-only cemeteries. Toilets, swimming pools, bars, restaurants, churches, bridges, cinemas, beaches, parks, benches, railway cars, drinking fountains — all were separate and unequal.

Throughout the 1980s, apartheid began crumbling in the face of black resistance and pressure from international allies of Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid movement. “Free Mandela” became an international rallying cry, and in 1990, after his release from prison, he gave a speech that resonates more than ever today. “Apartheid education is inferior and a crime against humanity,” he said, a reference to the then-government’s belief that black people needed only enough education to become domestic helps or manual laborers.

As a lifelong champion of education, the African National Congress (ANC) he led swept to power on a mandate of “jobs, jobs, jobs” and “quality education for all.” The ANC has governed ever since, but increasingly the legacy of moderates like Mandela is being questioned. Millions of impoverished black families have been lifted from poverty, but South Africa’s wealth is still overwhelmingly in the hands of white people, who account for less than 10% of the population. A black empowerment scheme by the ANC focused on shifting wealth from white people into the hands of black entrepreneurs, but in doing so created a class of politically connected oligarchs while failing to address the poverty of most black South Africans that’s a legacy of apartheid.

“Saying apartheid has fallen, we now have black students [at Wits] — that’s a very narrow way of trying to understand the problem,” said Crispen Chinguno, one of just 20% of black academics at Wits. “The political side, we’ve managed — the ANC is now in power — but the economic dimension is heavily in the hands of white monopoly capital. And those who have economic power are able to capture those with political power.”

The algebra of history may now means it’s black police shooting at black students, but it’s dredged up what psychologists call intergenerational trauma; the pain of apartheid is being psychologically relived by a generation who never endured it directly.

“I don’t want to equate this to apartheid because it’s not the same, but we’re dealing with the unfinished business of apartheid,” said Nomfundo Mogapi, director of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, who herself graduated from Wits at a time when it was legally segregated. “If you come from a society where you were made to feel subhuman and stripped of dignity, and those issues haven’t been dealt with, when you experience it in the present it takes you back to the past.”

On the surface, the aims of the Fallists are simple: free and decolonized education, and an end to exploitative outsourcing of support staff like technicians and cleaners, who are almost always black.

But wrapped in the students’ economic demands is a painful reckoning of what it means to be young, educated, and black in a country still stratified by race.

The chasm opens long before university: 47% of white matriculants will go to university; for colored students the number drops to 20%; black students trail with a 17% enrolment rate.

That means many students run a marathon just to reach the starting line at university. Seen this way, the university crisis isn’t just about financing — it’s about who even has a shot at getting there.

In October last year, I went to a cafe in an art gallery on the Wits campus to meet Kayleen Morgan, a confident, cherub-faced media studies student who is, in South African parlance, colored. She’s also part of the country’s rapidly growing middle class — the so-called Black Diamonds. Although her family could afford the fees, it was at Wits that she woke up to the political reality of being black.

“I started realizing that, next year, certain people I’m sitting in class with — next year I’m gonna walk on a podium, and I’m gonna graduate. And they’re not. Because of the inequality of our society,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “Someone who is 27 is still an undergrad because last year they had to fall out and raise money for a year. And the same thing is going to happen to them at the end of this year again.”

Morgan had attended almost every protest until a few days previously, when riot police closed in on a group of female friends and dragged them off by the hair; the sight of cops now made her break into a sweat.

At Morgan’s middle-class high school, where most of her classmates were also colored or black, race hadn’t been an issue. Instead it was at Wits, where nonwhite enrolment had climbed from from just two students in the late ’60s to 70% of 35,000-odd students today, she was forced to confront it.

“During Fees Must Fall I … realized there isn’t much of a difference between myself and a child that classifies as black in the country,” Morgan explained. “When you’re privileged it’s easier to identify with your white side because you have similar experiences.”

Until then, Morgan never presented any challenge to the white status quo — she spoke with a soft accent, she lived in the suburbs, she got good grades from a good school. All that, she’d felt, would counter what many white people perceived as blackness — which she had herself neither rejected nor fully embraced. “You’re always assimilating as a black child. In high school, you’re taught what to think, not how to think. If you dared challenge anything…” she shook her head so her halo of curls shivered.

Morgan’s friend Mamodibe Ramodibe, all long limbs, cropped hair, and intellectual fire, took a deep breath and pulled her leather jacket tighter as she tried to articulate why so many people seemed unable to grasp the sentiment behind “fuck white people” — a slogan that had caused outrage in some quarters after being repeatedly sprayed across campus buildings.

“Here’s the thing,” Ramodibe said slowly, “it’s not even implicating them [white people personally]. We’re just saying, look, this is the side effect of years of oppression. So we need to break that down, right?

“So white people then start feeling like we’re throwing jabs at them — and we’re not. It bothers me how as a black child in 2016 I still have to explain how there’s something called an inherited disadvantage.”

For a while, Morgan said, she’d tried to engage with her white friends about how it was impossible to separate herself from the wider fate of most black South Africans. She soon stopped bothering.

“For a white woman to tell me that…” she adopted an overbearing tone, “‘I’ve got two jobs — why don’t you guys just get a job and just work harder?’” Her voice rose a notch in frustration. “Because in the first place I cannot get a job. The fact that you have two jobs is an element of privilege.”

Even more exasperating were encounters with other black people who didn’t support the cause. Ramodibe raised her eyebrows at the thought. “There’s…” she started laughing, “There’s two types of black people in South Africa.”

She and Morgan finished the sentence in unison: “The type that supports Fees Must Fall, and the type that doesn’t.”

Then, serious again, Morgan continued, “I also think it’s because some of these people who are much older than we are, they’ve seen police brutality. They’ve accepted the system. So it makes them uncomfortable to see a youth that doesn’t want to stand for that.”

Inside the Great Hall at Wits, where the protesters gathered each day, Glenda Daniels was sitting in her office when two thuds made the windows vibrate. Daniels, a petite South African of Indian descent and senior lecturer at the university’s media studies department, walked out into the corridor, past the sign on her door that read, “UNIVERSITIES IN CRISIS: FUND THEM PROPERLY.”

As more bangs resounded, another colleague ran out his office, glasses askew and face drained of blood.

“Have you heard it? Stun grenades,” he said.

“Stun grenades!” Daniels knew what damage they could do. Thirty years ago, as an undergraduate at Wits, she was one of around 500 nonwhite students who led protests as Wits frequently locked horns with the government over its admissions policies. She later encountered the police again as a reporter during the violence-fueled period leading to the white-minority government’s fall.

She made her way downstairs. Staff were flitting through the hallways.

“Why are you scared? Are you South African or not?” another black member of staff teased, a reference to the protest culture their generation lived through.

“I am South African,” Daniels replied calmly. “I’m scared for my students getting hurt. The stun grenades…”

There was a brief pause.

“This is totally surreal. It just brings back a whole flood of traumatic memories. It feels like running through a surreal nightmare. Unbelievable that 21 years after apartheid fell we have to be dealing with this,” muttered Daniels.

There was the sound of running feet and someone coughing violently. And then the private security who’d been holding the crowd back at the main entrance swept past, holding up their riot shields. Plumes of tear gas filled the corridor.

An hour later, four lecturers from the media department huddled on a fifth-floor corridor, trapped inside the building as the police faced off with students outside.

“How do they expect us,” Daniels demanded, her voice rising in indignation, “to actually ask our students to come in [to lectures]?”

“How will they get through the tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons?” another lecturer, Mehita Iqani, said, raising her voice over the roar of a police helicopter outside.

Someone else puzzled over the ages of some of the student leaders — wasn’t one of them 38 years old? Was he even a student?

“Most of them are actually post-grads; they don’t seem to care about the undergrads,” Daniels said.

Nicky Falkof, a white professor who speaks quickly and with a trace of an English accent picked up from years teaching in London, shook her head. “I know a lot of them have got shiny … potential things to do afterwards,” she said.

University campuses have long been used as a springboard into the national arena, and complicated — and sometimes controversial — political ties thread through the movement. Fees Must Fall is supposedly a hierarchy-free movement, but in several meetings I attended students openly complained about the growing number of suspicious about-turns announced by leaders without consultation.

Many see the meddling hands of political parties behind these decisions. “Why do [the government] want to shut down [the protests]? Because the university has produced credible, middle-class, socially mobile people,” someone said.

Daniels interrupted: “Who’ll be less likely to vote the ANC in the future.”

“The radicals are running the show,” another lecturer said.

“So it’s a shitshow,” said another.

Traces of toxins lingered in the air when I returned to the Great Hall to sit in on Falkof’s classes the next day. Five of her 50-odd students made it to class, picking their way past shattered windows and rocks littering the entrance.

Lectures had been intense lately, Falkof explained, walking past empty classrooms. She told a story of one recent class, where a white student had raised her hand and spoken tearfully.

Since the protests, the student said, she’d become acutely aware of slights she’d never noticed her black colleagues having to endure before. In the bookstore where she worked part-time, for example, some white clients would ask her if books were in stock, even after they’d just been told otherwise by her black colleagues. “I feel guilty for being white, I feel like I need to be apologizing for all white people all the time,” the student told Falkof.

Another student, a black woman, then raised her hand. There were tears in her eyes too. “How you’re feeling now? That’s what I’ve felt my whole life.”

And now, the following week, two white women sat in the second row, three black students behind them. Falkof wore a denim jacket, and her curls loose. She sat on the empty front row of the lecture room, trying to coax the class to talk. There was no attempt to study; all anyone could focus on was the crisis playing out.

Someone brought up the police dogs that had been on campus. Falkof said beagles were often used for police work because they’re cute and so people just want to pet them. A smattering of ironic laughter rippled around.

The discussion turned to two images circulating on social media at the culmination of the previous day’s chaos: one was of black students leading away a dazed-looking Father Graham, a white campus priest, his robes drenched in blood; the other showed a wild-looking black man hurling rocks at the police.

The pictures set South African social media alight, with users alternately seeing them as evidence to denounce the police or the students.

After the cops began firing rubber bullets in response to students throwing rocks, Graham had opened the doors of the church compound to those fleeing. At some point as the violence dragged on, a police nyala, a heavily armoured van, attempted to charge through the church gate. Graham stood in front of it with outstretched arms. The nyala retreated, but only after police shot Graham in the face.

The black man was Wimpy Sello, a homeless 27-year-old who was a regular at the church’s soup kitchen. After seeing Graham shot, he began pelting the armored carrier with rocks.

“People just pick their truths,” said a black student with her hair braided into a neat crown.

Her friend beside her nodded. “That’s why when people say ‘Oh, the students are just hooligans,’ I don’t bother explaining myself anymore,” he said.

A white student put up her hand. What made her angry, she said, was her own relatives who dismissed the movement. She didn’t know how to confront them.

The protests, Falkof theorized, were “one of those moments where the neo-capitalist system starts to fall in on itself. Capitalism, in order to reproduce itself, needs a whole variety of different workers, right? But what it also needs at the same time is for us to keep buying and spending, which means it has to be aspirational and to want to improve and move up a class.”

She paused to see if anyone wanted to comment.

“And by making university so significant, and the only way that you can really progress, we also make them into these really valuable commodities to the extent that people are willing to take a rubber bullet. For this. That’s a hell of a lot of people that are left out of the system where there’s only one path — this — to status and success.”

Nobody had a response.

Looking for answers, I next approached the Black Academics Caucus at Wits. I initially got an unequivocal response: They did not want to speak to journalists because, they said, they didn’t want to be “the token black.” That stance softened once they realized I was black myself.

Wits has only one black South African female professor, and caucus members talk about the “juniorization” of the other black academics who make up roughly a quarter of the staff body: not only the uneven opportunities for promotion, but also what they see as near-constant undermining and micromanaging.

Many within the caucus saw in the students’ turmoil a reflection of how their own blackness still shaped their experiences for the worse. “As a black academic you’re in a precarious position,” said one caucus member, speaking on condition of anonymity and explaining, perhaps, why the organization initially trod carefully even as the situation spiraled.

Black lecturers pointed me to an incident that happened at the University of Cape Town. A black professor there brought in members of the Rhodes Must Fall movement to a sociology lecture, where they explained the history of protest songs and their political leanings.

He was immediately chastised for it. “The activists were nothing but walking archives of the struggle to both Africanise and decolonise knowledge in a supposedly South African university in 2015,” wrote Lwazi Lushaba in a fiery open letter after the faculty’s head of department accused him of using lectures to push a political agenda.

What hardened the battle lines, many believed, was the growing emphasis on “decolonization” — the idea that African universities can’t just be transplants or extensions of those in former colonial powers. Beyond simply replacing Western, white-washed histories and texts that erase thought systems from places such as Africa or Latin America, it also means universities owning up to their role in perpetuating anti-blackness even today, not least in their alienation of poor black students.

Universities like Wits “reject African cultures, African thoughts — the culture itself, the language, the way that students relate to lecturers,” said Chinguno, the academic who is also a black caucus member there. “It’s much easier for someone to come from Oxford or Cambridge than the black child who comes from the township or the rural area.”

More than once, walking around the manicured grounds with colonnaded buildings that wouldn’t look out of place in Oxford, Chinguno has had students approach him to tell him they’re grateful to have finally encountered a black academic — it gives them hope that they can pursue the same path.

“It’s not that we’re rejecting the world, but the African experience must be at the centre of informing us, not the Eurocentric. Decolonized education is a process that will take hundreds of years, but we need to start somewhere,” added Chinguno, who is half Zimbabwean and half Mozambican, and likes to point out that the fact he nevertheless speaks two South African languages is because of the colonial artificiality of African borders.

A week after we first met, Tjie sat in his cramped student accommodation in downtown Johannesburg. With time, he’d agreed to talk again.

He wearily admitted that Wits offers him opportunities he wouldn’t otherwise get. The university had, for example, sent him on a week-long induction course at PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the world’s top global accountancy firms. Afterwards, Tjie was offered a training contract.

In the wake of the year’s violence, he is glad he decided to decline. I asked him if he felt this was the right decision — these kinds of opportunities would be hard to come by, I said.

He shook his head and grimaced at the recollection of his visit there. “The environment — how do I explain it? Maybe it was the way I grew up and everything. I was like, uh oh, I wouldn’t survive here.”

Tjie understands not only that the world does not owe him a living, but also that he may never get another chance. But after a year of violence, protests and missed classes, he was adamant about his decision. “Sometimes you should just let go and lose if you have to.”

He’s not sure what he’ll do next. He’s not sure any other offers will come his way.

By December, all he could do was wait. He was stressed and didn’t sleep well when he took his end-of-year exams. The 24-hour library, where he normally spent the night during exams, closed early because of the protests.

He returned home unsure he’d passed. When the news came that fees would increase by 8% in 2017, he felt a strange sense of relief. There was no way he’d be able to afford the 8,000 extra rand anyway ($922), even if he did pass. A decision had been made for him.

On December 19, he received his grades. He’d got only 50% in one module. But good grades in other modules pulled him up. “Permitted to proceed,” the letter finished.

“I will have to find a way to make it through just one more year,” he said when I spoke to him on the phone, after he got the news.

As the new semester began this year, with police once again stationed on campus, he stopped attending the daily meetings where students strategized for how to take on the establishment and government. Once at the front of daily protests, he has no plans to join any this year.

“This is just a game to them, and if you try to expose them, they’re the law,” he said. “I just hope nothing happens this year since we are tired of being shot at for nothing.”

Meanwhile the police said they were ready to handle any further protests using the same tactics as last year. “We will be better positioned to deal with them,” the acting police chief told journalists in January.

Tjie went quiet for a moment as he thought about the future. He felt certain of only one thing: “Protesting won’t get us anywhere.”