‘You guys have helped me to learn Afrikaans. We must take this a step further: you must learn Sotho. I must teach you Sotho.’
His colleagues, he says, were excited at the opportunity. He put together a Sotho phrase book for managers, and the Afrikaners who used it almost immediately saw the benefits in terms of better relations with the black cleaners and other support staff they had once taken for granted.
‘I had first of all to change my attitudes towards other people in order to be able to change them,’ he says. ‘I realised I had to get interested in their way of life, and show them things that could get them interested in my way of life.’
Language, then, did not have to be a point of departure. Black and white South Africans share this: they hold their native tongues dear, and that can be an opening to learning to respect one another’s languages in a nation that today has 11 official tongues. ‘I didn’t have any problem speaking Afrikaans,’ he says. ‘But I insisted they also should speak Sotho.’
Khotseng sought allies, many of them the white women who felt undervalued in tradition-bound, patriarchal Afrikaner society. He championed the promotion of white women to senior positions. Here was a black man able to see the world from the point of view of white women:
When I came here, women – even though they were white – were in a way discriminated against, left out, in terms of management. I started bringing up the issue of women in management. White women saw me as someone who brought them in. That made it quite easy for me to work with white women on campus. They saw that I was very positive as far as they were concerned, that I felt they needed to be treated as equals and that they needed to be given opportunities.
As he speaks, Khotseng places his hands together under his chin, fingertips lightly touching, as if he were holding a delicate piece of pottery. Khotseng says his experience at UFS taught him that change has to be handled as if it were something fragile. He believes that the unrest in the campus in the mid-1990s resulted from a failure to communicate and monitor. The bridges he had built to women in the university helped his mission because he was able to speak to the women who headed the female residences. He learnt that they had worked to welcome the black students – something the heads of the male residences had not done. The female residences had not experienced the kind of turmoil that the male residences had, he says.
Then, Khotseng explains, university officials, shocked and uncertain, made another mistake: they did not continue to demand that students integrate their reses.
‘We should have pushed for it during that period,’ he says. ‘We should have worked hard to try to encourage it more and more. And we didn’t.’
Khotseng shows an adeptness for adaptation I have come to see as quintessentially South African. His own story, with the rebuffs he first experienced in Bloemfontein and the violence he was unable to prevent later, could have been a blueprint for bitterness. But I hear strength in the calm with which he tells his story to me. His is a journey that tempers and teaches.
2. Nation building
A stone obelisk rises from a stubby hill on the outskirts of Bloemfontein: the Women’s Monument. At the foot of the stone tower, a bronze sculpture of a woman sits cradling a dying child in her lap. She is watched over by another woman whose flowing hood and gown recall angels’ wings. An inscription on the monument reads that it is dedicated to the 26 370 women and children who died in the British concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 to 1902.
The Afrikaners in the two Boer republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, lost their independence in a war that dragged on, with Afrikaner guerrillas resisting a larger foe. The British rounded up the women and children – and their black farmworkers – into camps that have endured as symbols of the cruelty of this war.
Historian Thomas Pakenham writes of the scorched-earth campaign that the large British Army resorted to out of frustration at being unable to swiftly crush the small, mobile, resourceful Boer commando units. It started on a small scale, with orders to burn a few farms, but the Boers were determined to hold on to their independence. Pakenham refers to this dogged determination in his exhaustive history of the war:5 ‘Husbands and sons in the hills fighting. Homes in the valley blazing. And the women sitting there watching, with the same patience, the same absolute confidence in ultimate victory, as the guerrillas.’
Pakenham explains how some British officers were both disturbed and impressed by the Boers’ resistance: ‘They had never seen anything before quite like this “big, primitive” kind of patriotism. But most British officers were all for farm burning. They thought that Sister Boer was as stubborn and stupid, to put it no worse, as Brother Boer himself.’6
The farm burnings, essentially attacks on the civilian population to keep them from helping the enemy, were stepped up in late 1900. But Britain saw itself as too civilised to allow the refugees it had created to wander the veld homeless and starving, so a plan was devised to corral them into camps. Perhaps because it was wartime, perhaps because no one had paused to consider the immense scale of the task they were embarking on, or perhaps because the British harboured contempt for the women and children of their enemy, the camps were woefully inadequate.
British welfare campaigner Emily Hobhouse, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman and niece of anti-war politician Lord Hobhouse, went to South Africa to visit the camps for herself in 1900. Her report, delivered to members of the British Parliament, and her lobbying caused a storm in Britain – and beyond. Hobhouse is remembered in South Africa for speaking out about the camps and returning after the war to start education and economic-development projects for Afrikaner women – the wives and daughters of the enemy. After her death in 1926, her ashes were brought to Bloemfontein to be installed in a niche in the Women’s Monument – a memorial to those who had died in the camps. Her remains rest there, an Englishwoman remembered among Afrikaners with loving respect.
The reality of that grave speaks to a feat of imagination, of invention, on both sides. Hobhouse, after whom a UFS women’s hostel is named, was able to put herself in the place of the suffering women and children she found a world away from her own privileged English home. And Afrikaners were able to see her as a sister and a mother, not as a speaker of an enemy tongue, an aloof colonialist offering charity.
Among the largest of the Boer War camps was the one at Bloemfontein, which fell to Britain in 1900, two years before the Boer generals would finally surrender.
Defeated and still heartsore, Afrikaners unveiled the Women’s Monument in 1913. And, bitterly determined to rise again, Boer War veterans were among the first students of the faculty founded in 1904 that would eventually become the University of the Free State.
That institution had its roots in a seminary known as Grey College, which had opened in Bloemfontein in 1856. It was named after George Grey, a governor of Britain’s Cape Colony, who had secured a grant from Britain to start a Dutch Reformed school for what was then the Republic of the Orange Free State. Grey’s school was perhaps a reconciliatory gesture on the part of the British authorities towards the men and women who, since the 1830s, had trekked out of the Cape to form their own republic.
Grey College offered a limited number of courses and students had to travel to Cape Town, in the opposite direction of their ancestors’ trek, to take examinations and classes for higher degrees. They could study in English in Cape Town or travel to the Netherlands to study in Dutch. In 1904, when six students registered for bachelor studies in Bloemfontein, government funds were made available for the first university building. Thus Grey University College was born. The first students were all white men; women enrolled a few years later.
The first graduation was in 1905. More buildings were added, and its name was changed
