The “Rhodes must fall” campaign at the University of Cape Town and the “Open Stellenbosch” movement at the University of Stellenbosch, together with the frequent threats of Dr. Blade Nzimande to intervene in the affairs of universities, raise serious questions whether university autonomy would not become a casualty of the maladministration and dangerous populist rhetoric that characterise the Zuma government.
The O’Brien affair
Disturbances of this kind are not a new phenomenon in South Africa. Thirty years ago, in September 1986, a very similar event played itself out on the UCT campus when student protests forced the abandonment of the lectures given by the visiting Irish academic Conor Cruise O’Brien. He was a leading public intellectual in the Irish republic and later came to be held in high regard in both Britain and the United States.
In the early 1980’s he was editor in chief of the London Sunday paper, The Observer, and a few years later published a widely acclaimed study The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism.
Early in 1986 Prof. David Welsh, Head of the Department of Political Studies at UCT, invited O’Brien to teach a comparative course on South Africa, Ireland and Israel. No one was better qualified than he to teach such a course and nearly a hundred students enrolled. There was nothing that suggested impending trouble. O’Brien condemned apartheid and supported economic sanctions.
But trouble lurked just behind the corner. In 1986 the leadership of the ANC-in-exile called for an academic boycott of South Africa. Just before his departure for South Africa O’Brien wrote in The Times of London that he rejected such a boycott. He indicated that he was on his way to give a course at UCT.
The first three weeks of O’Brien’s spell at UCT passed without incident, but the ANC’s London office and O’Brien’s enemies were hard at work orchestrating the disruption of his public engagements. They found willing puppets in South Africa. In the fourth week O’Brien’s public lectures and classes were disrupted. I was in the audience at the final chaotic meeting. Students harassed and taunted him and he responded by calling the academic boycott “Micky Mouse stuff.”
The following day I was in my office in the Department of Political Studies when a group of about fifty students came up the steps and knocked on my door. Its leader, a well-known activist called Comrade Ziko, demanded to know where O’Brien’s office was. Fearing that the group’s planned to throw O’Brien out of his office. I refused to give the information. “The Comrade Professor is reactionary”, Comrade Ziko told his followers contemptuously before leading the retreat.
To avert any further disruption and possible injuries Dr. Stuart Saunders, Vice-Chancellor, and O’Brien agreed to terminate the lecture series. A Commission of Inquiry, headed by Wits ex Vice Chancellor, Dr. D.J. Du Plessis, assisted by Arthur Chaskalson and Ismail Mahomed, rather spinelessly imputed part of the blame to O’Brien. Their report described him as “activist” and “a volatile personality” not easily able to “maintain academic detachment”. Astonishingly, it partly blamed O’Brien for the debacle. An outraged David Welsh described this appropriately as a classic case of blaming the victim.
The report clearly failed to go to the heart of the matter. The truth was that the university authorities were unwilling to take the strong disciplinary measures they would have employed had white students disrupted the O’ Brien’s lectures and public speeches.
The university failed to follow its own rules adopted after Mangosuthu Buthelezi was barred from giving a lecture two years earlier. This protected the right to dissent of protestors provided their actions did not infringe the rights of those who had extended an invitation to a speaker.
In the end no disciplinary action was taken against students over the O’Brien affair.
In 1998 Welsh wrote in a volume dedicated to O’Brien that there was little indication that the ANC was willing to respect the autonomy or neutrality of the universities. He predicted that this attitude would prevail even after liberation.
One could have some sympathy with the university authorities at that time. South Africa was in the grip of a battle for the control of the state. There were no generally agreed upon rules for public debates. The immediate reality was that South Africa could well tear itself apart. In an article I wrote at the time I quoted the words of Albert Camus in his letter to an Algerian militant during the Algerian Revolution: “It is as if two insane people, crazed with wrath, had decided to turn into a fatal embrace the forced marriage from which they cannot free themselves. Forced to live together and incapable of uniting, they decide at last to die together.”
China’s Cultural Revolution
O’Brien warned at the time of his visit to South Africa that the academic boycott and the intransigence of some of the students threatened the South African universities with the same forces that destroyed the Chinese universities during the Cultural Revolution at the instigation of Mao Zedong.
Between the late 1950s and the late 1970s the ruling Communist Party launched a concerted attack on academics and universities. Mao singled out as enemies of the people those academics who criticised the crudest distortions of the socialist revolution.
More than hundred thousand academics were jailed, dismissed or sent to rural labour camps. No one was allowed to express ideas on the public welfare that differed from that of the ruling party. Most universities were closed and those that remained open were nothing more than hollow shells.
In the most extreme attack Mao called academics “the most despicable and lowest of all the stinking classes” – lower than landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, enemy agents, capitalist roaders. The Chinese universities took several decades to recover from this onslaught. The academics I spoke to when I visited China in 1989 still shuddered at the memory of this savage repression.[1]
The ANC’s “moral virtue”
In the 1980s and 1990s the ANC leadership displayed a deep belief in the ANC’s moral virtue. The key concepts in this vocabulary were ‘non-racial democracy’. But these were slippery terms, as Lawrence Schlemmer pointed out:
“The ANC has perfected a code in responding to the issue of race. It invariably starts off from the position of non-racism, and it then qualifies this with a commitment to closing racial gaps in order to achieve a legitimate basis for non-racialism, and from there it proposes a range of race-based affirmative action and empowerment policies to give effect to this.”
For brief moments in the late 1980s and the nineties it was possible to see the ANC as a social-democratic party in the making with a general concern for liberty. Yet appearances were deceptive. The most formative influence on most ANC leaders was the ‘democratic centralism’ of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European states and the one-party dominant African states, where the ruling elite enriched itself enormously, marginalized the opposition parties and ethnic minorities and dictated to universities. The aura of moral virtue was soon gone.
But something remained, the literature on democratization points out that the methods by which a democracy is brought about foreshadows the way in which the country will be governed.
The ANC’s big weapon in the 1980s and early 1990s was rolling mass action and threats to make the country ungovernable. It could be expected that once an ANC government power landed in serious trouble it would use the same methods. As the rugby coach Danie Craven always said to his teams: “The way in which you practice during the week is the way you will play your match on Saturday.”
South Africa’s “cultural revolution”
By 2005, well before Jacob Zuma had come to power, all the elements of a South African style “cultural revolution” were in place: the idea of African hegemony, the demand that the job market and educational institutions had to reflect the demography of the population as a whole, the insistence on expunging the colonial past, and the rewriting South African history to represent white rule as an unmitigated disaster, had become well established.
South Africa’s “cultural revolution” was delayed for several reasons. By 2005 Communists had not yet gained control of key positions in the cabinet and in state departments; the failure of the ANC’s development goals and its education policy had not yet become patent; corruption, as symbolised by Nkandla and Chancellor House, had not yet spun completely out of control; the state was not yet in serious fiscal trouble; and the ANC was not yet challenged on its left wing by the EFF.
There was also another important reason. The Democratic Alliance under Tony Leon was still a principled minority party with no dreams of soon gaining support from a significant section of the black population, not to speak of capturing some predominantly black cities like Port Elizabeth, Johannesburg and Pretoria. The DA was thus not afraid to contest and challenge ANC ideology. In a speech held in 2004 before the Johannesburg Press Club Leon slammed the ANC’s policy of transformation in pursuit of representivity and African hegemony.
Now the crisis that has hit the ANC has hit the country, and its universities in particular. Fearing a Chinese-style cultural revolution, the universities have caved in. The University of Cape Town meekly succumbed to the demand to remove the statute of Cecil John Rhodes. The Senate, a body that I once was proud to be a member of, agreed to this with one dissenting vote. It is the kind of result one would expect at the University of North Korea.
The Council of the University of Stellenbosch is launching an investigation into the conduct of a member, Piet le Roux, on the grounds that he vowed to resist what he called “transformania”. It agreed to the minister’s demand that the number of government representatives be increased from three to five. It dropped its commitment to protect Afrikaans.
The populist rage of the ANC has also affected the Democratic Alliance as the party’s quite excessive punishment of one of its leading members, Dianne Kohler-Barnard, shows.
“We are winning”, Rapport newspaper headlined the view as Dr. Kyle Thomas, a lecturer and member of the pressure group “Open Stellenbosch” expressed in an interview. In the interview Thomas accused the University Council of serious “corruption” without providing any evidence.
At Stellenbosch the new demand from Open Stellenbosch is for a 100% offer in English-medium classes in 2016. The university authorities are committed to an equal offer in Afrikaans and English in undergraduate teaching. To preserve its credibility it simply will have to find the resources to offer a proper parallel medium course. This is preferable to the so-called T-option (English and Afrikaans in the same class) which the late Dr Van Zyl Slabbert described as pedagogic nonsense.
Succumbing to the Zuma government’s blanket demand for transformation and its cynical toleration of violent disruption the universities have placed themselves in jeopardy. It is walking in lockstep with government in insisting that transformation, which is nothing more than the policy of the ruling party of the day, is now the highest law, which no one dares to challenge. They fear that failing to heed the demand would trigger violence that could escalate into a major collapse of order on the campus.
If he were still alive Conor Cruise O’Brien would not be surprised that his prediction has finally come true.
Hermann Giliomee taught history at Stellenbosch and politics at UCT.
