A widening of scale: The traditional Fort Hare fades away

The onset of university apartheid, the arrival of J.M. de Wet, and the granting of autonomy stamped out any lingering remnants of the traditional Fort Hare. Barney Pityana makes frequent mention of this ‘traditional’ or ‘historic’ Fort Hare. This institution, from the 1930s, produced a spirit of fraternity and resistance among its students that reached a crescendo with the protests against the introduction of university apartheid. By 1973, the Fort Hare that Pityana speaks of – that of the Mbekis, Mdlaloses and Govenders – was a relic of the past. Indeed, as the protest surrounding the introduction of university apartheid died down, the third-rate system of black higher education was expanding, and Fort Hare, thrust into this environment, no longer occupied the unique place in the South African landscape that it had in earlier years. The centre of gravity had shifted, and though political activity at Fort Hare lived on, the situation at the university more closely reflected that of the rest of the country.

Events at Fort Hare in the late 1960s and early 1970s take on greater meaning when viewed in the context of this fading Fort Hare tradition. Protest at the university before and immediately after the takeover was aimed at preserving Fort Hare's distinctive culture of resistance. It failed. Yet student political activity at Fort Hare did not stop after 1960. In the new situation, opposition to government policy continued, but as part of a wider movement. As the NP consolidated its vision of black university education and seemingly stifled the student resistance that it viewed in large part as a product of the old Fort Hare, a new stream of activism emerged.

Indeed, the expropriation of Fort Hare failed to produce the docile and isolated group of students desired by the government. Although the segregated black university colleges sought to curb political activism, they spawned the experiences and created the conditions for black consciousness to develop. With black students growing increasingly disillusioned with the whitedominated NUSAS, the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) was founded at a conference at Turfloop in July 1969.

During early 1959 I travelled overnight from Durban by the Southampton bound Edinburgh Castle, one of the ships that were operated by the Union- Castle Line. I disembarked at its next port of call, East London, in the Eastern Cape. My final destination was Fort Hare, where I would commence studies towards a Bachelor of Science degree. From East London I boarded a train and alighted at a small railway siding called Blaney. From there I took another train bound for Port Elizabeth and got off at Alice railway station. A few kilometres from that railway station was Fort Hare – ‘the most historically significant institution for higher education in sub-equatorial Africa’. This was the beginning of a roller-coaster period of three years in my life.

Although I had become politically conscious at the tender age of six, when, with my father, I followed the 1948 surge to power of the National Party (NP) of Dr Malan and the demise of the United Party of General Smuts, and the following year, the tragedy of the anti-Indian riots in Durban and, in 1952, the Defiance Campaign, I had spent the four years, 1955–1958, in the relatively cloistered environment of a Roman Catholic boarding High School at Inkamana in Northern Natal run by German nuns and monks of the Benedictine Order, largely shielded from the debilitating effects of Bantu education and the tumultuous events of the mid-fifties. Fort Hare was an eye opener. The year 1959 was a hectic year in the history of South Africa, in general, and Fort Hare, in particular. Political activity in the country was at fever pitch. The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) had exploded onto the political scene after Robert Sobukwe and others had broken off from the African National Congress (ANC). The racist regime headed by the National Party had entrenched itself in power with a battery of oppressive measures that found themselves on the statute book masquerading under the guise of laws. The subjugation of, especially the indigenous people of the country was becoming more severe, particularly after the introduction of the devastating Bantu Education in the mid-fifties. Many educators, including my father and my uncle Michael, the musicologist, both of whom, together with their sister Renee, were ex-Fort Harians, had resigned from teaching in protest against Bantu education.

God will look after us

In the winter of 1933, Edward Roux, a member of the Communist Party of South Africa, arrived in Alice on a donkey, with his new wife, Winifred. The two pitched a tent on Sandile's Kop, a hill overlooking the Fort Hare campus, and at a series of outdoor meetings, shared the teachings of communism with students. They discussed organised religion, handing out literature that attacked Christianity. The couple recalled the students relating ‘their life in college and how they were disciplined and treated as schoolboys’. In turn, the Rouxs ‘told them of the movement and of Indlela Yenkululeko’ (The Road to Freedom), a recently launched monthly magazine. Wycliffe Tsotsi says that the magazine made the students aware of the extent of political strife in the country and Roux writes that it enjoyed a ‘fair circulation’ among the students at Fort Hare.

While the students listened eagerly to Roux, the authorities felt his teachings ran contrary to those of the college. Alexander Kerr, the school's first principal, was ‘squarely against the college becoming a political agency … [He] wanted the Fort Hare authorities to control, channel and domesticate African aspirations.’ Tsotsi says: ‘The authorities were not interested in us involving ourselves in politics. Any sign of activity by the students which was independent of the authority was crashed down.’ Sipo Makalima (1936–1940) describes early Fort Hare as a ‘very conservative place’, and says that despite what may have been the best of intentions on the part of the missionaries who ran Fort Hare in its early years, it was not an ‘open university’. He adds:

In May 2002, Minister of Education Kader Asmal announced a restructuring of South Africa's higher education system. The sweeping changes – which involved streamlining a bloated university system created by the architects of apartheid to promote separate development – were designed to redress past inequality, promote growth in student numbers and establish institutions better able to meet job market demands. Asmal's plan followed years of extensive debate over the future of Fort Hare and other historically disadvantaged universities. With apartheid dead, was it time to dismantle the institutions the government had concocted to entrench its power?

The future of the University of Fort Hare appeared bleak. Rumours circulated that nearby Rhodes University would swallow it up. Yet in the end, while Asmal called for many of the historically disadvantaged universities to merge with other institutions, he left Fort Hare alone. ‘The University of Fort Hare, which has come to symbolise our history of struggle, will be retained,’ said Asmal in an Education Ministry release. Fort Hare's own website attributed the university's continued existence to the vital role it had played in educating leaders of the fight for majority rule in South Africa.

In 1997, while a junior at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, I spent a semester at the University of Fort Hare, in the Eastern Cape town of Alice, and quickly became aware of this history for myself. A university driver fetched me from the airport in nearby East London, and we made the one and a half hour drive inland. After dodging goats and cows on the narrow road between King William's Town and Alice, and trying unsuccessfully to acclimate myself to driving on the ‘wrong side’ of the road, we neared the university. A hill with a stone tower perched on top appeared on our right. The tower, I’d find out, was a memorial to James Stewart, a former principal of Lovedale and one of the missionaries who influenced the founding of Fort Hare.

Welcoming the regime

Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri remembers waking up on the morning of 23 October 1959 to find

Having lost the battle to keep their school free from government interference, the energies of Fort Hare students would shift towards expressing their dissatisfaction with the new, apartheid-appointed regime that ran the university. And, on the occasion of a campus visit by the newly appointed government rector, Johannes Jurgens Ross, the new registrar, H.G. du Preez, and the head of UNISA, Professor S. Pauw, the students offered a preview of what was to come. When the three came to address the students, they were greeted with banners bearing the slogans, ‘We don't want fascists here’, ‘Leave Fort Hare alone – away with indoctrination’ and ‘Ross verwag mofilkheid’ (Ross expect trouble).

The attacks on the new administrators did not stop with words. Professor Pauw's car was vandalised and students pelted Du Preez with eggs and tomatoes. Herby Govinden, a young lecturer at the time, says: ‘We gave them a pretty rough time. So they got a taste of what they were coming into.’ G.S. Tootla says: ‘Oh God! … Du Preez got a hiding from us. He was messed up from head to toe.’ Williams cites Professor O.F. Raum's account of events, saying that certain staff members who staunchly opposed the bills took delight in the protest, ‘milling around with the students … enjoying themselves immensely’.

The1960s brought unprecedented conflict at Fort Hare. In an era when opposition to apartheid was generally muted throughout the country after the Sharpeville massacre, protest against the authorities at Fort Hare served to politicise what would otherwise have been a silenced student body.

Winds of change

In the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision in 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled that distinctions based on race or colour violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The decision provided the legal framework for the United States civil rights movement of the 1960s. That same year, the fall of Dien Bien Phu brought an end to French Indochina, and signalled the beginning of the end of French and British colonial empires. Around the developing world, the defeat of a colonial power by a small Asian nation augured the collapse of colonialism and was a source of great pride.

Increasingly, what racists in South Africa saw as the natural order was becoming out of step with the rest of Africa and the world. In October 1958, the United States government shifted its policy of abstaining from resolutions critical of apartheid, voting for a mild declaration expressing ‘regret and concern’ over South Africa's racial policy. Shortly afterwards, the All-African People's Conference in Accra, Ghana, pushed Africans in South Africa – particularly those who were Africanists – to identify more closely with movements for independence elsewhere on the continent.

‘Self-government has become the cry of the peoples throughout the length and breadth of the continent,’ noted the ANC report in December 1959. ‘That cry can no longer be resisted by the imperialists who are making a last desperate bid to withhold the legitimate rights of the African people.’ Nigeria, Cameroon and Congo were among those colonies on the cusp of independence, sparking a renewed sense of hopefulness that South Africa would overcome white domination. Africanists in South Africa pointed to the growing spirit of independence to claim their movement was in concert with the rest of the continent.

In Britain, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan took note of the burgeoning nationalist movements and, on a trip to Cape Town, declared before the South African parliament that ‘winds of change’ were blowing throughout the African continent.

A colourless lot

At a debate in the House of Assembly on the bill that would transfer control of Fort Hare to the government, a minister said one of the real reasons officials wanted to assume control of the university was the danger it posed to the policy of apartheid. Saying that it was essential to put ‘a stop to the continued existence of Fort Hare in its present form’, Minister G.P. van den Berg called the college ‘a colourless lot of people, a university without a character of its own’. In reality, it was not the absence of character, but the presence of a colourful cross-section of the multi-racial South African population that angered the government. For Fort Hare showed that the races of South Africa could live, work and play together. To Isaac Mabindisa, a student at Fort Hare in the late 1950s, the college's multi-racial nature was its biggest asset:

At the last official college function before the takeover by the government in 1960, Gertrude Darroll, an English lecturer, said that Fort Hare was not a university, but a ‘diversity’. Terence Beard calls pre-1960 Fort Hare a ‘microcosm of a non-racial society in the heart of apartheid South Africa’.5 With the National Party elected to power on its apartheid platform, to have a place where Indians, coloureds, and blacks mixed freely and happily powerfully showed, as Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri suggests, ‘what was possible’.6 Yet this possibility was precisely what the Nationalists wanted to break down. In 1955, word reached Fort Hare that the government intended to assume control of African university education.

My career as a Fort Hare student ended just nine months after it began. I was expelled from the university following the student strike in 1973, joining the ranks of Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, Thenjiwe Mtintso and others who were forced from the university as a result of their activism.

The University of Fort Hare I attended was, in some ways, far different from the university in which Mandela and Tambo studied. Following the 1960 government takeover, outspoken staff members were expelled and new academics, mostly Afrikaners who bought into the government's separate development policy, replaced them. The university's multi-racial character became a thing of the past.

Nevertheless, we continued the fight for democracy in South Africa that had come to define the generations of Fort Harians who came before us – maintaining our reputation as a thorn in the flesh of the apartheid government. As the late Ntombi Dwane remarked, giving title to this book, we were studying ‘under protest’.

The strike that resulted in my expulsion followed very closely after the events of 1972, when Tiro was expelled from the University of the North at Turfloop after giving a fiery graduation speech that attacked separate universities and the apartheid system in general. As Under Protest shows, students all across the country rose up, including those at Fort Hare.

The protest activity continued into 1973 in different forms in each institution. At the University of Fort Hare, a strike was sparked by the expulsion of one student at Beda Hostel, after which university authorities closed the whole hostel. The whole student body could not tolerate this type of response from the authorities, where the sanction was so disproportionate to the alleged offence. These protests were met with a new element – that of apartheid violence – added to the equation by the authorities. Rector J.M. de Wet was determined to crush the South African Students’ Organisation, and he worked in concert with the police to beat back the group's organising efforts.

When students gathered for meetings, the police would be there, armed with dogs. We were attacked, which only stiffened our resolve. I left campus after less than a year, never dreaming in my wildest imagination that I would one day return as leader of the most significant higher education institute in the history of southern Africa.

Lule for president

In 1938, an unassuming, intelligent Fort Hare student, Yusuf Lule, aspired to become elected to the SRC. His supporters coined the phrase ‘Lule for president’. The slogan proved to be prophetic, as Lule went on to serve as the president of Uganda for 69 days in 1979. Other ex-Fort Hare students had even more success than Lule. Nelson Mandela, elected to the Fort Hare SRC in 1940, became South Africa's first black president, and Robert Sobukwe, the SRC president in 1949, became the president of the PAC. Robert Mugabe, of Zimbabwe, was a Fort Hare student in the early 1950s.

Up to the late 1950s, Fort Hare produced a large share of east and southern Africa's black university graduates and many of its early nationalists. In the 1960s and beyond, political leaders continued to emerge from the ranks of the university's student body. Clearly then, the University of Fort Hare played a significant role in African history. Why? What was it about the Fort Hare that made it ‘the most historically significant institution for higher education in sub-equatorial Africa’? Asked this question, Joe Matthews answered: ‘What if this is all one big historical accident?’ His response, though rhetorical in nature, raises legitimate questions. For Fort Hare was not created to be a centre of revolutionary thought. Most people attended Fort Hare because it was their only educational option, even before the 1960 takeover.

Yet though the course of Fort Hare's development did not proceed as intended by its missionary founders and apartheid trustees, it is too simplistic to attribute Fort Hare's central role to ‘one big historical accident’. Fort Hare clearly influenced South African history, but South African history also affected Fort Hare. That the university turned into a hotbed of nationalism, producing political leaders throughout Southern Africa, was not merely a coincidence.

If Matthews had said that the history of Fort Hare was one long string of unanticipated consequences, he would have been more accurate. Fort Hare was not created to breed revolutionaries, and its role in the production of leaders throughout southern Africa is primarily owing to the circumstances of South African history.

Immediately after graduating from Fort Hare in 1945, Thelma Appavoo was offered a teaching post in Port Elizabeth. She did not accept the offer, explaining, ‘I’d already got engaged and those were the days, there wasn't so much women's lib, although I had my degree, my husband said, “no, no, no, don't you start go and teach now.” We’re getting married.’ Appavoo was married in 1946 and had two children. Her East London home was a frequent meeting place for Eastern Cape activists. She says, ‘we had a lot of people coming in and out, staying overnight. It wasn't unusual for someone to knock on the door at 12 at night, give them a meal, then before sunrise they’re gone.’ When we met, Appavoo was in East London in the house she had called home for more than 50 years.

After obtaining a B.Sc. degree in 1971, Jeff Baqwa abandoned study towards an honours degree in biochemistry in 1972 when he walked out of Fort Hare along with 41 others. He immediately began to work full-time for SASO as literacy director and community development projects coordinator. Baqwa also served on the SASO Executive Committee. In 1973, the National Party government served him with a banning order restricting him to the village of Mzimkulu in the Transkei. In 1974, following the assassination of Tiro, he was sent to Botswana to begin developing strategies for guerilla training. He was active in the establishment of the black consciousness guerilla camps in Tripoli, Libya and Beirut, Lebanon. Baqwa traveled throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Africa on in an attempt to spread the message of black consciousness and build solidarity for the black South African cause. He graduated from the University of Saarland Medical School in West Germany in 1988. He then did a diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene and earned an MA in community health at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. He returned to South Africa in 1991, where he did research into community health elements of the country's health system. In 1994, he was the first black South African to be made a professor in the faculty of health sciences at UCT.