linguistic atlas of South African history.
South Africans are masters of the alchemy of borrowing and adapting. Today the Free State needs those transformative skills more than ever.
1. Songs of change
It started with singing that night in 1996. Billyboy Ramahlele feared it would end in a campus race war.
Ramahlele was new on the job – the first black man to head a hall of residence at what was then called the University of the Orange Free State. As head of the Kiepersol residence, he was a university-appointed father figure for the black students who had just begun to arrive in large numbers.
Those who lived on the campus (and for some, it was because they could not afford to live elsewhere) were housed in halls of residence, informally referred to as ‘reses’. These were more than just places to live: the reses have historically had great influence over the social, political and intellectual life of the entire student body at the university.
At this university, students apply to res committees for acceptance, often seeking places at the halls where their parents, or even their grandparents, lived and were moulded. The reses have age-old traditions – songs, mottos, secret rites and origin stories – almost a religious ritualism that is not out of place in the pious Free State. And in the past there were initiation rites meant to break down newcomers to the res in preparation for rebuilding them according to the values and expectations of their new community.
Residences have proudly borne names honouring figures like H. F. Verwoerd, the prime minister assassinated in 1966, who, during his eight years in power, oversaw the establishment of a South African republic, long an Afrikaner dream. Many black South Africans revile him as the prime architect of apartheid. Another res was named after Christiaan de Wet, the general who led Boer guerrilla fighters against the British in the 1899–1902 Anglo-Boer War. Historian Thomas Pakenham says that De Wet’s force ‘was not a majestic fighting machine, like a British column. It was a fighting animal, all muscle and bone’.1
Resourcefulness, independence, resilience – Afrikaners prize these qualities, which they believe helped them maintain their community against threats from powerful opponents in the past. And they can take a perverse pride in others’ depiction of them as narrow-minded isolationists. Afrikaner parents, Ramahlele says, would send their sons and daughters to the college at Bloemfontein from the province’s small towns and isolated farms, telling them to apply to this res or that res because it inculcated the values that they wanted their children to acquire.
‘Historically,’ he says, ‘residences were an extension of other institutions that were shaping an Afrikaner identity. There was government, there was the church, there was the education system – and universities were part of that: they were extensions for shaping what an Afrikaner is. The reason white students didn’t want black students living with them was, according to them, because they did not want their culture to be erased.’
Ramahlele was an ANC activist who, since the 1980s, had been pressing the university to open its doors to black students despite the prevailing apartheid laws. By the time he was appointed to the university staff in 1995 and took up his residence duties in 1996, apartheid was finally defunct, leaving some Afrikaners all the more fiercely determined to hang on to some semblance of power, like the outposts provided by the student halls of residence.
Ramahlele lived through and was a key player in a history that I, a foreign reporter who arrived in South Africa during apartheid’s waning days, had missed. He shared his history generously and vividly with me, helping me in my understanding of where South Africa has come from, and in my imagining of where it may be headed.
South Africa had seen its first all-race election in 1994, and Nelson Mandela had stood, tall and sombre, on the steps of Pretoria’s red sandstone Union Buildings, long a symbol of white racist rule, to take the oath of office as the country’s first black president.
‘Our daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity’s belief in justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul and sustain our hopes for a glorious life for all,’ Mandela told the nation in his 10 May 1994 inaugural address.2
At that point I was a young American reporter working on my first assignment in South Africa for the Associated Press. I had arrived in 1993, just on the eve of democracy, and would leave in 1996 to work in India, Egypt and the UK before returning for a second stint in South Africa from 2008 to 2012. In 1994 I had watched Mandela’s inauguration on television with a family in Soweto, one of the townships to which Johannesburg’s black maids, gardeners and other workers were removed during apartheid. The family had welcomed me into their home to report on what it meant for black South Africans to see Mandela become president.
I watched them raise their fists in the air as the first strains of the national anthem were played, sounding tinny from the speakers of a small TV set. They saw that Mandela, a tiny figure on the screen, had his hand over his heart. One by one, members of his audience in Soweto lowered their fists, opened their hands and placed them over their hearts. Mandela, South Africa’s master alchemist, was transforming a gesture of defiance into one of hope that a new nation was being forged which would command the loyalty of and be welcoming to all who lived there.
For black students at UFS in the mid-1990s, however, that welcome was cold. Many struggled financially and academically. Protesting students, who were demanding that the university write off their debts and offer more classroom support, toyi-toyied on the campus. Most white students had probably only been dimly aware of toyi-toying when the TV news brought anti-apartheid demonstrations into their living rooms.
Black and white students also clashed over seemingly petty issues, like whether to watch soccer or rugby on the res television. South African sports fans are largely divided along race lines, with black fans following soccer, and white fans choosing rugby. They may feel it’s natural for sport to be racialised, failing to realise the divide is rooted in history and stereotype, and is not something organic to the playing field.
Initiation rituals also rankled. In some reses, first-year students were expected to sit on the floor during house meetings, leaving the chairs to senior students. Initiation rites also included subjecting new students to all-night harangues, or forcing them to run errands for senior students.
Ramahlele was in his 30s when he arrived on campus in January 1996. He met black students who were his age, or older. Some had put in extra years of studying to prepare themselves for university after having undergone the inferior education to which apartheid subjected black people. Others had completed the traditional initiation rites of their ethnic groups, and expected to be treated as men. There were students who were husbands and fathers. Some had taken longer to finish high school because they had been involved in the struggle, and had spent time in jail because of their political activism. Former ANC guerrillas were among the students. And yet, Ramahlele says, here were young white students speaking to them as if they were labourers on their fathers’ farms.
‘In African culture, you respect your elders. And here’s a young Afrikaner boy telling you to sit on the floor,’ Ramahlele says. Some of those white students had been conscripted into the apartheid government’s army. Says Ramahlele:
You had black people, males in particular, who were fresh from the struggle, fresh from prison, fresh from detention, fresh from military training. And they’re thrown into the same residential area with whiteys. You also had Afrikaans boys who came from military conscription, who had been trained that a black man was an enemy. Trained also in other aspects of racism against black people. And here, for the first time, they meet at the University of the Free State.
Ramahlele
