By Funzani Mutsila
Every step feels like I’m trudging off to bed with a body so heavy and sickened with a deadly cold of sorts. This is how navigating aliveness while depressed feels. Depression is an impediment to progress; a mentally excruciating barrier combined with bodily exhaustion that creates a perpetual wave of dread and hopelessness.
In between this never-ending feeling of despair, momentary strikes of happiness finds its way. This ephemeral joy is contingent upon a belief that this burdening prism will one day end. But this joy does not last long, and soon I am reminded of the questionable state of my mental health. Frustrating enough, I cannot clearly define the cause of this feeling; it’s elusive but feels very final.
I can trace the advent of my depression to the lived poverty I grew up under in South Africa, the violence of losing my self-understanding to images of sanctified, virtuous whiteness that the white supremacist media forcefully fed us, and the daily experiences of being raised by apartheid trauma-ridden parents.
The exposure to Liberationist text has helped me better contextualize the experiences of my lifetime, and the height of my depression coincides during the Fees Must Fall student protests of 2015.
I recall battling myself out of bed, after a long night of debrief meetings with comrades. This day, we had ambitions of shutting down the University of Johannesburg. We were at the height of the youth-led social movement that sought to eradicate the racist and classist nature of higher education in South Africa. Many of us only met with the idea of student protest through historical texts we read by and about those who became before us.
Through my reading, I was already engulfed by the idea of Black liberation. And the public broadcast of Rhodes Must Fall (one of the biggest student protests post the end of apartheid in 1994) was an occasion that created a different ambiance in the country. Finally, a language to express my passion for liberation and love for Black people was being depicted before my eyes.
I felt a sense of newness to the way young people were viewing the world.
The movement, initiated by the students at the University of Cape Town, called for the removal of the Cecil John Rhodes statue which stood at the entrance of the campus in a manner both triggering and melancholy. Cecil John Rhodes, a colonialist and imperialist, had his legacy imposed upon us throughout South Africa by way of statues and monuments in his honor.
Naturally as the movement moved to Johannesburg in the form of Fees Must Fall, I threw all of my weight behind the movement. We deliberated; we held long meetings and protested for days. We got arrested, and were met with a violent state police and University’s private security. This meant less sleep, barely bathing, and hardly eating.
Being a student organizer awoken the potent and painful realisations of how far away Black people remain from the index of humanness.
This was made clear by the fact that many of those who were financially excluded from the universities were Black people; the lived experiences of the Black youth juxtaposed with those of the white youth clearly highlighted the pervasiveness of oppression and racial difference, and the curriculum we had been fed had little to no consideration of the existence of African people.
It did not take me long to exercise my anger righteously. Many of us were angry and that anger would temporarily camouflage a profound sense of loss of our identity and humanness in the so called “post” colonial regime.
Mental illnesses reduced us to silhouettes of ourselves, we found ourselves crawling in and out of quilts in the nights and mornings with great pessimism, while retaining the strength to fight regardless. We found hope in that, at the very least, we are raising our voices, speaking our truths, and fighting a system which saw our people suffer centuries long.
The pessimism however would trigger the depression; the depression would find expression in our stubbornness to not allow the status quo to persist but also in our toxic interactions with one another and over indulgence of intoxicating substances.
Our mental health would suffer greatly as the movement died down. We no longer had anything to find refuge in; to have our claws fixed into and claim as our contribution to the Decolonial project, although in retrospect I can acknowledge the contribution the movements had to the journey of complete liberation.
It’s past the protests now and my mental illness has transformed, reshaped and reconfigured in many ways. It has become especially agonizing to have to find myself outside the collective, carrying with the experience and information extracted in those moments of defiance. I’ve begun trying to make sense of my existence in isolation.
Childhood memories of normalizing Black people living in chronic poverty and feeling a heightened hopelessness, overwhelms my senses. I still weep from my own pain and the pain of those I live with and those who lived before me. I filled the walls of my back room at my parent’s house with pictures of this pain, so I wallow and hide in the abyss of this kind of death. A death of a self I so believed for all years of my life.
To find help, I sought to reconnect with the “source,” in my soliloquies, I question “surely my people had a higher being they believed in, before the mess that is colonialism?” This thought sends me to anger again and I sharply reprimand myself “If they ever did that power would have offered protection but it failed.” At the recollection of my emotions, I find myself meditating.
The meditation is not only borne through my exhausting anger but in that I have to find a way to get out of this depressed state caused by external factors beyond my power. I have earned myself the title of a “Black radical activist” which meant dusting myself off and rethinking how to move forward.
The honest truth, it is still elusive at this point what the fundamental cause of my depression is. I know I am profoundly troubled by the state of our society, that we are losing many young people to suicide due to depression.
That the moment of defiance I so proudly partook in has caused me an equally great pain, loss, and confusion. I question my very existence and my consciousness in all facets of my being has amplified to levels which feel out of my control.
I also know I am amongst the generation of young people who have to carry the burdens of trans-generational trauma and accumulated generational poverty. I am amongst the generation of young people who have to “figure it out” and “move on,” who have to see their siblings through university and create a better environment for others.
The young generation that needs to have a special understanding of the parenting styles of our trauma ridden parents and hopes one day it finds the answers and solutions to the centuries of oppression.
Suggested Reading
“‘Fees Must Fall’: Anatomy of the Student Protests in South Africa” – Christine Hauser, New York Times (Sept. 22nd, 2016)
Funzani Mutsila is a South African decolonial activist, analyst, post-graduate student at Wits University in Johannesburg and has written for publications such as Culture review and Vernac news.
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