realities. ‘At that stage, every Afrikaner male had done military service,’ he says, referring to university managers who would have come of age before national service was abolished in 1992. ‘So, you had an ideological and a political conflict. The whole system of Afrikaner leadership was trained to see a black man with a different eye. And now you had black students who were resisting being seen in that way.’
Ramahlele says black students were too much of a minority to be elected to places on the committees that set the rules in the halls of residence. They felt vulnerable as the minority, he says, especially when the confrontations got physical.
The reses on one side of the campus became predominantly black. That area, Ramahlele says, was dubbed the ‘Bantustan’, an ironic reference to the nominally segregated black homelands established during apartheid. The white part of campus, Ramahlele says, was known as the Volkstaat.
Ramahlele’s res, Kiepersol, was integrated when he arrived but the white students left, and the black students who remained were particularly politicised. Some may have been drawn by the presence of Ramahlele, whose anti-apartheid activism was well known.
Ramahlele sees himself as a ‘Christian activist’. He has a degree in theology. ‘For me,’ he says, ‘Christianity does not necessarily mean pacifism. There are certain things that, if you want to destroy them, you don’t have to be violent, but you have to be physical. Christ did that.’
One can imagine that Ramahlele, a vigorous man with close-cropped hair, is as comfortable in the pulpit at the Bloemfontein church where he preaches as he is behind his UFS desk, where he is still a manager today. Ramahlele believes universities should teach universal, not narrow, group values and that university halls of residence should be places where people can learn to live with one another. But he recognises that, even now, this is a point of contention in universities across the world.
Many of the black students at Kiepersol were leading figures in student organisations affiliated with the ANC and other, more radical black groups. Ramahlele’s charges recruited more black students, offering them protection from the assaults and other abuse they faced in the predominantly white reses. Kiepersol was a senior residence, meaning that everyone who lived there had already spent at least a year at the university. For black students, that first year was very likely to be a tough one.
Ramahlele says that Kiepersol had disaffected black students who challenged the system:
I inherited a res which was very angry at the system, very angry at the white people. I inherited students who were once abused within the system. And, as a result, Kiepersol became almost a political institution, for protecting the rights of blacks on campus. And I had to head that. But I’m also a manager in a white system. I had to say, ‘There’s anger, understandably so. But the expression of this anger needs to be channelled in a responsible way.’
‘Blackness was being affirmed and respected under my leadership,’ Ramahlele says, proud that Kiepersol residents were among the first blacks to gain places in student-union leadership positions.
But the future looked uncertain that night of the singing. Ramahlele was at home in the apartment attached to his res, where he lived with his wife. He heard the sound of protest songs dating from the anti-apartheid struggle getting louder outside. ‘I was worried because I had never heard so many students singing at that time of night,’ he says, recalling that it was around 8 o’clock in the evening. He went outside the res to find students armed with bats. He approached them to find out what was going on and they told him they were very angry. Some black students had been assaulted and abused in a residence called D. F. Malherbe. The Kiepersol students were going to rescue them.
Ramahlele tried to dissuade them, telling them the white students outnumbered them and that they were likely to be better armed. Nevertheless, they set out anyway, about 140 of them, some with guns, toward the Volkstaat res. Ramahlele called the director of student housing, and told him he thought a war was going to break out. Then he followed his Kiepersol men.
The white students, meanwhile, had heard trouble was coming. ‘The white students were also being mobilised and organised. They had their bats, and I saw they also had guns,’ Ramahlele remembers.
The white students had called in reinforcements who lived off campus, and they began arriving in their cars. Few black students could afford cars.
The black students toyi-toyied; the white students sang ‘Die Stem’. The national anthem of the apartheid government had, with the dawn of democracy, been combined with a hymn of the anti-apartheid movement, ‘Nkosi Sikelel’iAfrika’, in what was meant to be the uniting theme of a new South Africa. The Xhosa, Zulu and Sotho lyrics of ‘Nkosi Sikelel’iAfrika’ call for divine help in banishing wars and strife. ‘Die Stem’ proudly extolls the beauties of the country.
There was no such harmony on campus that night in 1996. Ramahlele, however, was able to persuade the black students to retreat when they saw the growing force of white students. As the black students ran back to Kiepersol, they smashed the windows of parked cars, which to them symbolised white privilege and arrogance. The white students followed them. Hundreds, if not thousands, surrounded the black students, who had now reached the safety of their res. The white students threw stones, breaking every window in the building. The police arrived, as did higher-ranking campus officials. White officials pleaded with the students outside; Ramahlele kept talking to the students inside, and kept in touch with his colleagues by phone. Around midnight, the white students were persuaded to return to their reses.
Among the senior officials who rushed to the campus to help Ramahlele was Benito Khotseng. In 1993 Khotseng had become one of the university’s first black senior managers. Years later he would offer me further insight into this piece of history and was, like Ramahlele, willing to relive the turmoil of the past. The two also display a remarkable resilience that I see as the real story, a theme that comes up again and again in the stories of South Africans.
Early on, Khotseng’s job had entailed recruiting students. He also took on the role of finding scholarships for black students, and creating special classes to ensure that students who had had the inferior education afforded them during apartheid could keep up academically at a formerly white university. And although not a formal part of his job description, Khotseng’s duties, out of necessity, came to include trying to keep racial confrontations from flaring into violence.
Another confrontation in 1997 nearly spun out of control at Karee, a residence that had suddenly seen its proportion of blacks rise from zero to 30 per cent. White students at Karee surreptitiously added a laxative to the sandwiches served to the students at afternoon tea. The white students made sure black students got the tainted food, saying they resented the newcomers helping themselves to what they saw as unfair portions. The laxative had a powerful effect: several badly dehydrated students had to be hospitalised.
The next day, retaliation came for the laxative stunt. Two firebombs were thrown at guards at the university’s front gates. Dozens of black students descended on a central hall where exams were being administered. The white students fled, leaving their black counterparts toyi-toying outside the hall. More white students began heading to the hall from residences then notorious for their militant racism – Reitz, J. B. M. Hertzog, Verwoerd.
While a white senior member of university management, Vice-Rector Teuns Verschoor, pleaded with the white students to return to their residences, Khotseng did the same with the black ones. Eventually, the two sides were separated. ‘Later on, I asked Teuns, “What do you think happened?”,’ Khotseng recalls, sitting in the dining room of his home on the edge of campus. His face is unlined, but thick-lensed bifocals hint at his years. Verschoor and Khotseng came to the conclusion that, for all the meticulous planning to bring more black students to the university, including installing Ramahlele
