It's a Black-White Thing. Donna Bryson
traditions devised by students, which would have a profound influence on the personality of the university for many years to come, began to emerge around the same time. A blurry 1912 photo shows four men in costumes that make them resemble extras from a movie whose art director has an uncertain grasp of Roman history. According to the caption, they are the Torture Committee, charged with ‘welcoming’ new students to the university.10
The caption describes the futures of the young men pictured: they would become doctors and professors. One was C. R. Swart, who would become a South African president. They were influential men from respected families, who would go on to hold their own respected positions in the Afrikaner community. The university history goes on to describe the initiation ceremonies presided over by secretive societies led by these and other young men and women. The societies were based at the student halls of residence, which would develop into social and political centres of the campus, and play a crucial, and sometimes divisive, role in later attempts to integrate the university.
What did these ceremonies entail? Newcomers were spanked, denied sleep, forced to run gauntlets in which they were slapped with wet towels. They polished the shoes of older students, and collected their laundry and post. They were made distinguishable so that any older student knew who to harass – the young men in jackets turned inside out with their trouser legs rolled up, the young women in dresses worn back to front, or their hair conspicuously braided.
Since the 1920s, university officials have repeatedly tried to ban, or at least limit, the initiation abuse – even through semantic efforts (the name ‘Torture Committee’ was compulsorily changed to ‘Welcoming Committee’ in 1937). But, despite these efforts, students were determined to persist, confident they were contributing in their own way to the goals of their university and their community. The university history quotes a letter that students wrote to the local newspaper soon after the university’s founding:
We wish, through initiation, simply to show the newcomer that … he knows nothing and is nothing. His ego must be broken down slightly so that his future moral and intellectual development can take place from a healthy base. Our initiation is directed at the psychological, not the physical, side of the student. Indeed, to be able to build securely, we want first of all to break down those aspects that are wrong.11
An earnest, if unsophisticated, rendering of the belief – and one that is certainly not unique among Afrikaners – that suffering builds men and societies, that defeat strengthens. Just a few generations after those university students outlined their strategy, young South African men would encounter something similar when they were drafted into the apartheid government’s army, to fight in the townships that were home to fellow South Africans who were black, or to fight the Border War against countries where black politicians had taken over from white colonialists. One former conscript, who went AWOL, told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: ‘The aim of basic training … was not to equip you with battle skills but … to break you down so that you would blindly follow orders.’12
Alchemy does not come without a cost.
A reader dipping into the university history finds the same questions raised again and again, seemingly never to be settled: issues of language, of how much responsibility a student should be given and what manner of leader should be shaped. The students were both subjects of and participants in a continual discussion over identity.
After the Anglo-Boer War, Afrikaners may have chafed at what they saw as English meddling in their relations with black South Africans, and the English may have believed themselves to be more liberal. But in the new Union of South Africa, created after the war, white English victors and white Afrikaner losers alike subjugated black South Africans. The fierce debates then were not over race, but over language.
In 1904, at the founding of what would become the university, the Afrikaner students were taught in English because of the dearth of professors trained to teach them in Afrikaans. Nevertheless, from the start, Afrikaners campaigned for a university they could call their own – one where the medium of instruction would be Afrikaans. The Anglo-Boer War was still fresh in Afrikaners’ minds, as were memories of the British officers who viewed Afrikaners as primitive and stubbornly resistant, and who had brought the war to Afrikaner women and children with their scorched-earth campaign. Having their children taught in the language of this victor was anathema.
In 1918 the National University of South Africa granted its affiliates permission to teach in Afrikaans. In the same year, D. F. Malherbe, a professor at Grey University College and later rector, became the nation’s first professor of Afrikaans.13
But most courses were still taught in English in Bloemfontein. Afrikaner politicians, journalists and clergy campaigned for Afrikaans at the university, though some Afrikaners opposed abolishing English because they wanted to see South Africa’s white communities united.
In the 1930s, Grey University College and other Afrikaans institutions broke away from the National Union of South African Students, which was seen as liberal and English, and allied itself with a new student union that had an unabashedly Afrikaner nationalist agenda, the Afrikaanse Nasionale Studentebond.
It was a time when not only students, but also the larger community of white South Africans were split politically. On the one side there were English- and Afrikaans-speaking South Africans who wanted to remain loyal to the British Crown and who supported Anglo-Boer War general Jan Smuts and his United Party. On the other side were the nationalists who wanted an independent Afrikaner republic. The latter group consisted mostly of Afrikaans-speakers and they supported D. F. Malan’s National Party (NP). Malan became prime minister in 1948 after the NP won the elections. With his coming to power, laws segregating the races and subjugating black South Africans were passed that would eventually develop into apartheid.
On the university campus in 1948, Afrikaner nationalists at last saw their dream realised. English was phased out as a medium of instruction, and the university became a purely Afrikaans institution.
The university history includes excerpts from the work of celebrated Afrikaans historian Karel Schoeman, described as a ‘critical outsider’ during his years at the university in the 1950s. His words presaged later debates about how to foster excellence at the university:
With the elevation of ‘Afrikaansness’ to the one and only criterion, a situation began to develop at the university in the 40s which would affect the whole country in the next decade, namely that appointments were made not because the person concerned was the most suitable, but because he was Afrikaans-speaking – it applied almost without exception to Afrikaans men – and had the ‘right’ political and religious affiliations. This paved the way for the growth of a considerable phalanx of mediocre, third-rate and generally fatuous officials who, under the guise of ‘Afrikaansness’ ended up in positions which they never should have held, with a concomitant lowering of standards.14
Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd came to Bloemfontein in 1963 to receive an honorary degree. Historian and journalist Allister Sparks, in his political history of South Africa, The Mind of South Africa, describes Verwoerd as apartheid’s Lenin – ‘the man who added to [apartheid] conceptually and then sought to put it into practice in its total-separation form’.15 Verwoerd’s name can sound like a curse on the lips of black South Africans.
By the 1970s the Afrikaanse Studentebond had become the main student cultural organisation in the university, and it was becoming more politically assertive and more outspoken about its allegiance to the National Party and apartheid. Roelf Meyer, then a law student at the university, was elected president of the Afrikaanse Studentebond in 1970. Meyer would go on to serve as a National Party Cabinet minister, and, later, as the party’s chief negotiator in the talks that led to the end of apartheid.
In the post-apartheid years, as the National Party became increasingly irrelevant, Meyer joined the ANC, which, like the National Party, has its roots in Bloemfontein. Some may see Meyer as an opportunist, even a traitor, for showing that talent for adapting – without which South Africa’s transformation to multiracial democracy would have been impossible.
For many South Africans, the 1980s was the decade in which it became clear apartheid was impossible. The government