It’s not that Khotseng and other university officials did not understand there was a challenge to be overcome. Ramahlele would not have been hired as a res head had they not. And Khotseng had been a frequent visitor to black, white and integrated residences. He’d spoken to students about what to expect and what was expected of them. Students regularly came to his office with questions. He had taken to spending weekends on campus, mentoring and advising students. But, in the end, Khotseng came to believe he should have done more, and done it more systematically.
‘In a way, I realised we let change take place very fast, without facilitating it,’ he says. ‘We encouraged black students to come to campus. But the effort that we put in to convince white students to accept black students as their equals was very little. Many of the Afrikaans students who came to the university were from farms,’ he says, explaining that these students’ exposure to black South Africans had been hitherto limited to the farm labourers on their families’ estates. When they got to the university, they had to accept black students as their equals. ‘We did very little to assist them to change. We should have done a lot more homework. We should really have worked on them,’ he says.
Khotseng had fastidiously prepared for his role at UFS. His first experience of the university was in the 1980s. The former high-school teacher had risen to become an administrator in the education department of the government of Qwaqwa, the impoverished homeland that the apartheid government had set up for the Free State’s Sotho-speakers.
In a tactic that amounted to a subtle undermining of a system meant to smother black people’s aspirations, Khotseng sought help from researchers at what was then the University of the Orange Free State. He wanted advice on planning budgets and curricula. His aim, he said, was to improve education for blacks. And white people helped him.
‘In order to see the success of apartheid, I guess, they were bound, in a way, to support us in separate development,’ he says.
Not that his welcome was warm. As he visited the library and offices of the university, he found himself challenged by white students and staff who seemed incapable of addressing him in a normal tone of voice. ‘There used to be a lot of anti-black people,’ he says. ‘I was never really accepted.’
This was just a few years after the rector of the university had severely reprimanded, according to the university’s official history, the captain of the student chess team for taking part in a chess tournament at another university where non-white (in this case, Chinese) players had been welcomed.3
‘I was one of the first black people to come to campus as a researcher and visit the library,’ Khotseng says. ‘People used to shout at me. They would be howling at me: “What do you want? What are you doing here?” And I would say, “I’m here doing research.”’
In the early 1990s, Sotho-speakers began to champion the idea of a ‘university for ourselves’, as Khotseng puts it, drawing out the last word for emphasis. He was among those who advocated a partnership with UFS. He explained how he had learnt to work with Afrikaners while doing research there in the 1980s. Many Sotho-speakers also spoke Afrikaans, and the Qwaqwa administration was already working closely with Orange Free State bureaucrats, many of whom had trained at what would become UFS. ‘I worked with them and understood them and how they worked,’ Khotseng says, referring to Afrikaners.
Khotseng also portrays this proposal to UFS as a tactic in the fight against the system that had established universities based on the race of their students. ‘People wanted to defeat apartheid,’ he says. His colleagues ‘wanted to indicate to the government that there should be but one university. They realised it would not be possible to have more than one university in the Free State.’
But Qwaqwa’s overtures to what it saw as the natural partner for a university for its people were rebuffed. Officials were directed to work instead with the University of the North, an institution established for black people. However, the University of the North was some 700 kilometres from Qwaqwa (in what is now Polokwane) and in a region where blacks were as likely to speak Tsonga or Venda as Sotho. It was poorly funded compared with UFS, as Khotseng knew, as that is where he had completed his master’s. As the UFS history relates in matter-of-fact prose, with the entrenchment of apartheid in the 1950s, ‘the white government provided white, Afrikaans universities with generous financial support’.4
In the early 1990s, a University of the North campus was established in Qwaqwa. Khotseng taught philosophy and education there, and became dean of its education department. In 2003 that Qwaqwa campus became part of UFS.
In the 1990s, ambitions were being realised in South Africa. In December 1989, a prisoner met a president – Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk. On 2 February 1990, De Klerk unbanned Mandela’s ANC, and in Paarl nine days later Mandela walked from prison to be greeted by cheering crowds. In 1993, negotiators representing Mandela and De Klerk, and others completed a draft Constitution that opened the way to all-race elections on 27 April 1994.
Bloemfontein, once the capital of an independent Afrikaner republic, now has a Nelson Mandela Drive, winding from a shabby neighbourhood of mechanics’ garages and used-furniture shops, past the city hall, and on to a new part of the town, which sports a mall and the gleaming regional offices of large South African corporations. The main gate of UFS is on Nelson Mandela Drive.
As the date neared for South Africa’s first free elections, university officials let it be known they wanted a black educator to help put them on the map of a new South Africa.
‘I applied with interest,’ Khotseng says. ‘Here was an opportunity for me to assist the university and assist the Afrikaner to change, and to help us achieve what we wanted – which was to improve education for blacks in the Free State.’
He got the job, but Khotseng wanted to be sure that those who hired him saw him as a member of the team, not an outsider who was simply being tolerated. The language issue was revealing. Sitting at his dining-room table, Khotseng pulls a copy of letter from a file that he sent to the rector in February 1993, in Afrikaans, asking where his new post fell within the university structure. He insisted on a job title and a clear job description that he felt reflected the position he had assumed. The rector responded to the effect that Khotseng was his adviser on special projects – raising funds for scholarships for black students, planning multicultural training to help black and white students and staff learn about one another, and recruiting black students and staff.
That clarified the role, but Khotseng wanted to find out exactly where he fitted into the organisation. ‘I challenged them. So the principal had to go to the council. In the end, they said that they would establish my post as deputy vice-rector for student affairs,’ Khotseng says of the title he was eventually given. It was a breakthrough for a black academic at any formerly white university in South Africa.
He also asked that his daughter Nthabiseng be enrolled at the university, another step he had to take up with university officials. His daughter’s presence made it all the more important that an atmosphere welcoming to black students be created, Khotseng says. More black students would have to be recruited, a task he took on, along with identifying staff members who would be willing to help the new students settle in. And he urged the rector to take steps to train and nurture black academics who could rise in staff positions at the university.
Khotseng came to change a university, but he says he quickly realised he would have to change himself first. He had been a high-school teacher, a university professor and an education bureaucrat in a segregated system. He knew he was no expert in transformation. So Khotseng began to read, exploring studies on the psychology of race and on race in the workplace. He took a six-month management course at Harvard.
He encouraged colleagues to conduct at least
