Poverty porn painful reminder of how society is failing black students

A week ago, University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) student, Dumisani Ngobese’s emotional graduation photo trended on social media. The young man from a rural area outside Empangeni was photographed crying as he walked across the stage to receive his Bachelor of Arts degree.

Ngobese was raised by his maternal grandmother who was a street vendor and the sole breadwinner in a household with more than 10 children. It is for this reason that unlike his peers, he could not afford a suit for the special occasion. He wore a black golf T-shirt, black chino pants and white sneakers. The poignant image of a weeping Ngobese captured the hearts of millions of South Africans and it was not long after this that a Durban-based businessman offered Ngobese a job. Many other people made monetary pledges to him.

It is not possible to know Ngobese’s story and not be touched by the generosity that he has been shown by strangers. They have given the young man a fighting chance in a country where, for black people specifically, a degree is not a guarantee of finding a job. This fighting chance means that his family will likely be lifted out of poverty. The devastating impact of poverty is known by millions of people in our country.

Research demonstrates that for black people in particular, poverty is generational. Effectively, poor grandparents have passed poverty onto parents, who then pass it onto their children. These children give birth to children in poverty – repeating and reproducing the cycle of poverty. This kind of poverty affects every aspect of a person's life: physical, social, emotional and mental. It is a debilitating condition to which millions are condemned.

I am happy for Ngobese, in great part because I know personally what it means to be the first graduate in a poor family and to have a job that helps rewrite the narrative. But I am also deeply saddened by the fact that he had to perform his poverty in order to find employment. He is not the only one. Thousands of black people in our country, particularly graduates, are constantly having to engage in poverty porn before they can be given a fighting chance in the labour market.

I have seen many graduates standing at traffic lights holding up placards showing their qualifications – pleading for jobs. The same thing happens on professional networking sites like LinkedIn. Everywhere in our country, black graduates are either performing their poverty to get jobs or to get help settling their student debt. And it appears that the more painful their stories, the likelier they are to trend and be assisted as a result.

There is something fundamentally wrong with a country where graduates must resort to measures such as standing at traffic lights wearing their graduation gowns, or weeping uncontrollably on graduation stages, to be given a chance to make an honest living. Anyone who has ever been poor will tell you that poverty is deeply dehumanising. More than this, it is traumatic. Making black graduates perform this poverty adds onto this trauma. We should not normalise the production of a society that deems it legitimate to use the trauma of a disenfranchised people as a measure of their value.

A graduate should find employment because they hold a skill that is critical to the development of a country. They should be employed as a means of investing in the future of a country. The Ngobese story normalises the employment of black graduates out of pity. Pity is dehumanising and de-civilising. Graduates do not need pity, they need a functional society that affords them opportunities to work.