The years in South Africa were life-changing for Paddy O’Halloran, who teaches African history at Concord Academy. They gave him a different perspective on the world and linked him to people and history there forever.
In 2014 and 2015, O’Halloran pursued a master’s degree at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, now renamed Makhanda. That was a small, run-down town tucked in a valley, founded during colonial conquest. A third of it was originally English and separated from the other two-thirds, which were “townships,” or areas historically reserved for people of color. Many people in the town also lived in informal settlements of shacks that they built out of palettes, tarps, tin, and cardboard.
As he studied an ongoing social movement called the Unemployed People’s Movement (UPM) that started in that town five years prior, O’Halloran became aware of the reality in South Africa. At that time, the unemployment rate in Makhanda was over thirty percent, with poverty impacting people’s ability to find work even with available jobs. O’Halloran would often go to the UPM office. There, he saw how, even in the town’s distressing state, people formed communities and worked together to solve issues such as housing, jobs, and electricity and water service while navigating the town’s corruption and water supply challenges. Furthermore, the movement demanded that the poor in Makhanda and in South Africa be accorded dignity as people.
The second year O’Halloran was in Makhanda, university students in South Africa began to protest institutional racism and exclusions that they were experiencing. This included students at Rhodes University, named after imperialist Cecil Rhodes.
“I was there when it began,” O’Halloran recalled. There was a meeting in the rain, on March 17, 2015. That was the first meeting of the students at Rhodes University, where they demanded a change to the school’s name. O’Halloran was there with people in his research unit, people from UPM, and his roommates. “So I was part of it from the beginning, and it felt… right,” he said.
Since then, every day for nine months, that became the main setting of his life. The movement moved from the name-change to practical matters, such as advocating for an end to vacation housing fees for students who could not afford them and a curriculum change for South African history. It gradually merged into bigger national issues such as the abolition of tuition. The student activists negotiated with school administration, hosted internal meetings, organized public demonstrations… O’Halloran helped draft the movement’s statements along with another four or five people. It became intense. “There were police involved. There was an occupation of a university building. There was a day when I was at risk of expulsion… And that’s what everybody who was serious about it was facing,” he recalled.
Even though O’Halloran wasn’t South African, he cared about and felt a sense of belonging in the student movement. He believes, “When people are standing up for themselves, you should stand up with them.” A few were ruffled by a foreigner’s presence, but most welcomed anyone of a like mind, emphasizing solidarity over identity.
Later in 2018, O’Halloran moved to Johannesburg where he studied towards a PhD, rooted in questions about history, popular politics, and belonging that he had encountered in Makhanda. A new perspective, as well as a link to the people there, grew from the countless daily interactions throughout O’Halloran’s five years in South Africa and shaped him deeply and permanently. He calls to our attention a mindset through which one can appreciate new perspectives. “You don’t go admire or sympathize with or despair about poverty,” he says, “You go and acknowledge it and learn from people who live it.”