‘Laaitie’ is a South African colloquialism used to refer to someone younger than oneself or a young person. It may also infer someone being younger in experience or intellectual ability. It may be used positively, as a term of endearment, or as a way of dismissing someone as inferior to oneself. Mostly, laaities are not taken seriously in the world. This has not, however, stopped laaities all over the globe from changing the paths of history. Today, too, in struggles from Soweto to Paris to Argentina, it is ‘laaities with lus’ (Koenraad De Buys, 2006) who speak out and act against authoritarian and exploitative relations, situations and regimes. While the term ‘laaitie’ is often used to dismiss the fighting, critical and unrestrained spirit of young people as being outside of the domain of ‘the rational’, and ‘the responsible’ (not yet mature enough for proper consideration), it is reappropriated here in celebration of the laaitie as that spirit of unbridled freedom and rigour of critique and action in life.
Okay, university fees, right? Here's my idea: We make a student’s university tuition fee equal to like double whatever his or her school fees were. Awesome, huh? Check, it’s like if you went to a really good school where the fees were say 15k...then, uh, your ‘varsity fees would be 30k. Now our varsity fees are only about 7.5k, but if they were 30 grand, we could subsidise, um, 3 other kids who went to shitty township schools that only cost like 500 bucks a year and where they probably got a kak education and now they still have to work part-time and shit just to afford to be at university – I mean, Christ, that puts them at such a disadvantage right away, dudes. How the fuck are they meant to compete with middle-class mother fuckers like us who had all these opportunities...And the best part is that those fucken pricks who went to those ultra-expensive elitist asshole schools like St. Wanker’s College or wherever would have to pay like 200 grand for ‘varsity instead of just the same 7.5k as the poor kids do now. So they’d subsidise like 20 other dudes who really need it and their robber-baron fathers would just have to compensate by buying the little wankers BMWs instead of Porsches to date-rape chicks in. I mean, fuck it, they’d still be rich Ralph-Lauren wearing cunts, but they’d at least have to contribute to a slightly more egalitarian society...I went to a good school...I got no problem paying more for my tertiary education, man...it’s frikkin’ bullshit that some people have to pay like 10 times what their schooling cost and others only have to pay like a tenth...I reckon that’d work, man….fuck those date-raping elitist asshole preppy motherfuckin’ spawn of apartheid robber barons and gold-digging-trophy-whores...
* dissolve into helpless laughter*
Democracy took a beating in Foreman Road,
Richard Pithouse, November 22, 2005, The Mercury
