Читать книгу It's a Black-White Thing - Donna Bryson - Страница 7

A stone obelisk rises from a stubby hill on the outskirts of Bloemfontein: the Women’s Monument. At the foot of the stone tower, a bronze sculpture of a woman sits cradling a dying child in her lap. She is watched over by another woman whose flowing hood and gown recall angels’ wings. An inscription on the monument reads that it is dedicated to the 26 370 women and children who died in the British concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 to 1902.

The Afrikaners in the two Boer republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, lost their independence in a war that dragged on, with Afrikaner guerrillas resisting a larger foe. The British rounded up the women and children – and their black farmworkers – into camps that have endured as symbols of the cruelty of this war.

Historian Thomas Pakenham writes of the scorched-earth campaign that the large British Army resorted to out of frustration at being unable to swiftly crush the small, mobile, resourceful Boer commando units. It started on a small scale, with orders to burn a few farms, but the Boers were determined to hold on to their independence. Pakenham refers to this dogged determination in his exhaustive history of the war:5 ‘Husbands and sons in the hills fighting. Homes in the valley blazing. And the women sitting there watching, with the same patience, the same absolute confidence in ultimate victory, as the guerrillas.’

Pakenham explains how some British officers were both disturbed and impressed by the Boers’ resistance: ‘They had never seen anything before quite like this “big, primitive” kind of pa­triotism. But most British officers were all for farm burning. They thought that Sister Boer was as stubborn and stupid, to put it no worse, as Brother Boer himself.’6

The farm burnings, essentially attacks on the civilian population to keep them from helping the enemy, were stepped up in late 1900. But Britain saw itself as too civilised to allow the refugees it had created to wander the veld homeless and starving, so a plan was devised to corral them into camps. Perhaps because it was wartime, perhaps because no one had paused to consider the immense scale of the task they were embarking on, or perhaps because the British harboured contempt for the women and children of their enemy, the camps were woefully inadequate.

British welfare campaigner Emily Hobhouse, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman and niece of anti-war politician Lord Hobhouse, went to South Africa to visit the camps for herself in 1900. Her report, delivered to members of the British Parliament, and her lobbying caused a storm in Britain – and beyond. Hobhouse is remembered in South Africa for speaking out about the camps and returning after the war to start education and economic-development projects for Afrikaner women – the wives and daughters of the enemy. After her death in 1926, her ashes were brought to Bloemfontein to be installed in a niche in the Women’s Monument – a memorial to those who had died in the camps. Her remains rest there, an Englishwoman remembered among Afrikaners with loving respect.

The reality of that grave speaks to a feat of imagination, of invention, on both sides. Hobhouse, after whom a UFS women’s hostel is named, was able to put herself in the place of the suffering women and children she found a world away from her own privileged English home. And Afrikaners were able to see her as a sister and a mother, not as a speaker of an enemy tongue, an aloof colonialist offering charity.

Among the largest of the Boer War camps was the one at Bloemfontein, which fell to Britain in 1900, two years before the Boer generals would finally surrender.

Defeated and still heartsore, Afrikaners unveiled the Women’s Monument in 1913. And, bitterly determined to rise again, Boer War veterans were among the first students of the faculty founded in 1904 that would eventually become the University of the Free State.

That institution had its roots in a seminary known as Grey College, which had opened in Bloemfontein in 1856. It was named after George Grey, a governor of Britain’s Cape Colony, who had secured a grant from Britain to start a Dutch Reformed school for what was then the Republic of the Orange Free State. Grey’s school was perhaps a reconciliatory gesture on the part of the British authorities towards the men and women who, since the 1830s, had trekked out of the Cape to form their own republic.

Grey College offered a limited number of courses and students had to travel to Cape Town, in the opposite direction of their ancestors’ trek, to take examinations and classes for higher degrees. They could study in English in Cape Town or travel to the Netherlands to study in Dutch. In 1904, when six students registered for bachelor studies in Bloemfontein, government funds were made available for the first university building. Thus Grey University College was born. The first students were all white men; women enrolled a few years later.

The first graduation was in 1905. More buildings were added, and its name was changed in 1935 to University College of the Orange Free State. The university’s nickname among students, which lives on today, is ‘Kovsies’ – derived from the Afrikaans name Kollege van die Oranje-Vrystaat. The institution became the University of the Orange Free State in 1950 and the University of the Free State in 2001.

The Afrikaners craved and established an independent university, though it would take decades to create a curriculum in Afrikaans and offer instruction in Afrikaans, as opposed to English or Dutch.

The university’s official history quotes the revered Afrikaner nationalist F. W. Reitz (after whom the student hall of residence made infamous by the so-called Reitz video is named – see Chapter 3): in 1894 Reitz had argued that Afrikaners needed a university of their own ‘in the interest of our independence, and in order to preserve nationality’.7 The suffering and defeat in war only served to deepen these desires. A lawyer who had served both Afrikaner republics before they fell to Britain, Reitz was president of the Free State and wartime foreign secretary of the neighbouring Transvaal.

In many respects, the university owes its origins more to the message symbolised by that stone tower in the hills than any aspirations to being an ivory tower: it was an ideological and nation-building, or rebuilding, project in which a particular community invested its hopes for the future. The Afrikaners were setting out to reinvent themselves as victors.

About a decade after the peace treaty that had ended the Boer War, some of the most prominent Boer generals raised a rebellion against the Union government’s decision to support Britain in World War I. Brother fought against brother, and once-­revered Boer generals were sentenced to jail, the university history recalls, adding that the internecine split extended to the campus. Some students sided with the South African government led by Prime Minister Louis Botha and J. C. Smuts, both Afrikaner heroes of the Boer War; some followed another war hero, Christiaan de Wet, into insurrection.8 Scores of rebels and loyalist fighters were killed in the short-lived uprising. De Wet, after whom a UFS hostel is named, was later convicted of high treason, but his fine was paid by supporters and he served only six months of his six-year prison sentence.9 Although the university history is not explicit on the subject, many students who had joined the rebels no doubt eventually returned to their studies. I wonder how many drew, from the leniency shown De Wet and his largely undiminished reputation, the lesson that Afrikaner nationalism would and should rise again.

Initiation 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 reacted with fear and violence, cracking down on black nationalism, political activism and violence. It was a time when anti-apartheid 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, transform and lead, I consider that Seme’s view of the world and his place in it must have been shaped by the opportunity to study outside South Africa. Seme was just the kind of educated black man Afrikaners saw as a threat to their dominance and to the logic of apartheid.

A key element of apartheid was engineering an education system that would ensure there were few black people like Seme. In the 1950s, the government took over and revised the curricula – dumbing them down – of independent, often missionary-­run schools that apartheid’s planners accused of fanning the ambitions of black South Africans by overeducating them. George Bizos, the liberal, Greek-born lawyer who would later defend Mandela in apartheid courts, saw the tragedy this meant for ordinary South Africans. In Odyssey to Freedom, Bizos writes of teachers and parents trying to supplement the inferior education the white government had designed for black children. Their weekend and afternoon classes, called cultural clubs, were declared illegal. Despite lawyers’ efforts, the schools were closed down, and their teachers fined or threatened with jail.

In one case, Bizos was dismayed to find that a young man whom the organisers of a cultural club had thought was a student was in fact a spy sent by the police to gather evidence against a teacher. The teacher had asked Bizos: ‘Did police have the right to teach a boy to lie about who he was, where he came from and why he attended the club?’ Bizos told him that, in apartheid South Africa, there was nothing that said the police didn’t have the right.26

Over the generations the result, not surprisingly, was a growing contempt among black South Africans for the education they were being offered. When apartheid ended, the majority of South Africa’s citizens were left not only impoverished and angry, but without the skills or expertise to meet the challenges of the 21st century. The leaders, black and white, of institutions like UFS are left to cope with that legacy.

In Bloemfontein, university archivists have found minutes of a 1923 governing-council meeting in which the application of an aspiring black student was recorded. The application was denied.27 Mixed-race and black postgraduate students were first admitted in 1977. The postgraduates were followed by mixed-race undergraduates in 1985 and black undergraduates in 1988. It was not until 1990 that black students were allowed to live on campus.

Black students began to arrive at UFS in large numbers in the 1990s, only after the legal framework of apartheid had been dismantled. Their presence meant language was again an issue.

On a campus that had stubbornly turned its face away while history was being made during the 1980s, the arrival of black students in the 1990s must have felt abrupt and challenging. Change was being ushered in, in the form of fellow South Africans who, it seems, only yesterday could never have aspired to be more than labourers on the white-owned farms.