It's a Black-White Thing. Donna Bryson
activists at home and abroad were finding innovative ways to keep up the pressure, and not just politically. The 1980s also saw a major victory in the campaign to isolate South African sportsmen and women because of their country’s racist policies: the thwarting of a planned tour of New Zealand by the Springboks.
Sparks describes the violence on the ground:
By February 1985, for the first time the police found themselves confronted with organised street fighters. In the Crossroads, the ‘comrades’ made huge shields of corrugated iron which they carried into the street to protect the stone- and petrol-bomb throwers from police shotguns. In Alexandra they dug ‘tank traps’ – trenches three feet deep – across the rutted roadways to stop the Hippos.16
Protests exploded into confrontation, to be followed by dusty mass funerals. Sparks says the 1980s saw the most sustained insurrection hitherto carried out by black South Africans, with the country in ‘a virtual state of civil war’.17 Sparks estimates that the 1984–1987 uprisings led to 3 000 deaths and 30 000 detentions.18
In his memoirs, Chester A. Crocker, the US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during that turbulent decade, writes that the 1980s showed that ‘the ramshackle system could no longer be defended at an acceptable price. Nor could power be seized at an acceptable price. South Africans on all sides had looked down into the abyss of civil violence – and recoiled in sober shock.’19
Yet the reaction in the university to what was happening in South African society was a passive form of denial. The university history explains that the students were isolated in a predominantly white institution, where ‘the reality of the “struggle” outside apparently did not penetrate the thoughts of Kovsies’.20
Ignoring that reality was a choice that many white South Africans made. They were surrounded by the turmoil of change, and constantly confronted by ideological and political challenges to how they had defined themselves for generations. Perhaps they hoped that if they decided the challenges were beneath notice, they would indeed prove unimportant. And if a reckoning should one day come, they could at least plead ignorance.
If the students ensconced in the university had decided to ignore the struggle, its momentum had nonetheless reached the Free State despite them. Celebrated liberal Afrikaans writer Antjie Krog writes in her memoirs about a committee that arrived at her door one day in 1987 in Kroonstad to beg her to read her poetry at a rally in Maokeng, Kroonstad’s township, lobbying support for Mandela’s release from prison. At the time, it was illegal to quote Mandela in South Africa.
She delivered her poem in Afrikaans, and the township crowd turned her refrain into a chant: ‘Die vuis sê Mandela! Mandela sê Maokeng!’ (The fist says Mandela! Mandela says Maokeng!).21
Van Aardt Smit was just 23 in 1982 when he started teaching at what was then the University of the Orange Free State. I tracked him down to find out more about what it was like at the university in those days. Smit had studied at the university, had completed his military service and had hitch-hiked across Europe before becoming a lecturer. Now a UFS business-science professor specialising in entrepreneurship, he remembers the shock of discovery on his tour of Europe.
‘You would pick up a newspaper and you would see how the rest of the world felt about South Africa,’ he says. ‘You would see things you would never see in your own press. It was not nice to see we were probably the most hated country in the world.’
Yet, when he returned to Bloemfontein, he slipped back into a state of unknowing. ‘It was almost a little bubble,’ he says. ‘You didn’t realise what was happening.’
He and his friends, he says, held anti-government views that were considered radical for the time, but they did not act on their convictions within the bubble that was Bloemfontein’s university.
‘We talked a lot. But we didn’t do a lot,’ he says. ‘I don’t think we realised to what extent it was ignorance and to what extent it was brainwashing. I think we realised we had a police state. [But] I don’t think people sometimes realise how effective the government was in brainwashing the white population.’
Imagine that, only a generation later, in November of 2001, UFS conferred an honorary degree on Mandela. It is a measure of both Mandela’s commitment to reconciliation and how far South Africa had travelled that Mandela accepted an honour that the same university had earlier bestowed on Verwoerd.
Mandela gave his acceptance speech in Afrikaans and English: ‘Much remains to be done on the road of transformation – and this is true for all sectors of higher education – but the concerted change-seeking efforts of the historically Afrikaans universities should be proudly recognised and acknowledged,’ he said. ‘What the University of the Free State has done to promote diversity, a multicultural environment and respect and appreciation for all of the traditions and backgrounds of the people of the province and country, has not escaped us. To many, your university represents a model in this regard.’22
In 2006, the name of the university’s Verwoerd residence was changed to Armentum, Latin for a herd of elephants, the house mascot. In a statement, the then rector Frederick Fourie said the change was ‘part of the transformation effort at UFS to make the campus a more inclusive place, where all South Africans can feel at home’.23
Verwoerd’s National Party, which would fade away soon after apartheid ended, had its beginnings in Bloemfontein, where the Anglo-Boer War general J. B. M. Hertzog (and later prime minister of the Union) formally established the Free State National Party in 1914.
Mandela’s ANC, by a coincidence of history and geography, was also born from a meeting that took place in Bloemfontein, in 1912. A year later, the British Parliament would approve the Natives Land Act, barring the black majority from owning land in all but 7.5% of South Africa. The 1912 meeting in Bloemfontein ‘was perhaps the first step taken by the peoples of our region, who had been subjugated by three European powers – Britain, Germany and Portugal – towards creating the institutions needed to defeat colonialism and racial oppression to reclaim the freedom the African people had lost on the battlefield,’ the ANC recalls in a historical essay marking the centenary of its founding.24
Like the Afrikaners who had regrouped at Bloemfontein to start a university, the black Africans were determined to turn the bitterness of defeat at the hands of colonialism into inspiration for resurrection. Waaihoek, a Bloemfontein district to which black South Africans were restricted during apartheid, is not far from the Women’s Monument. Still standing is the church that was the site of the January 1912 founding meeting of the South African Native National Congress, which would become the ANC.
Nearby is the house once owned by Thomas Mapikela, a local founding member of the ANC. In 1909, Mapikela had been part of a multiracial delegation that travelled to London on a failed mission to persuade Parliament not to allow the Afrikaners defeated in the Anglo-Boer war to institutionalise racism. The ANC history recounts that Mapikela was joined in Bloemfontein in 1912 by black African luminaries of the time: Sol Plaatje, a writer and newspaper editor, Alfred Mangena, one of South Africa’s first black barristers, and Charlotte Maxeke, an American-educated teacher.
‘In their number,’ the account of that founding meeting continues, ‘there were also royal personages, whose forebears had led the armies that resisted the occupation and seizure of the lands of our continent during the 18th and 19th centuries: Solomon kaDinizulu, Montsioa of the Barolong, Lewanika of the Lozi of Zambia, Letsie II of Lesotho, Labotsibeni from Swaziland, Dalindyebo of the baThembu, Sekhukhuni of the baPedi and Khama from Botswana.’25
They had all been summoned by Pixley ka Isaka Seme, a black lawyer who brought a determined intelligence and a love of learning to the struggle against colonialism and apartheid. Seme would lead the ANC in the 1930s. He had left South Africa at the age of 17 to attend Mount Hermon School and Columbia University, New York, and then Oxford.
Seme had spent almost half his life studying abroad when he returned to South Africa in 1911 at the age of 30. When I think of the later university leaders at UFS whose own stories were influenced by journeys abroad, and who would come to see educational travel as a way of preparing students of all races to learn,