university’s nickname among students, which lives on today, is ‘Kovsies’ – derived from the Afrikaans name Kollege van die Oranje-Vrystaat. The institution became the University of the Orange Free State in 1950 and the University of the Free State in 2001.
The Afrikaners craved and established an independent university, though it would take decades to create a curriculum in Afrikaans and offer instruction in Afrikaans, as opposed to English or Dutch.
The university’s official history quotes the revered Afrikaner nationalist F. W. Reitz (after whom the student hall of residence made infamous by the so-called Reitz video is named – see Chapter 3): in 1894 Reitz had argued that Afrikaners needed a university of their own ‘in the interest of our independence, and in order to preserve nationality’.7 The suffering and defeat in war only served to deepen these desires. A lawyer who had served both Afrikaner republics before they fell to Britain, Reitz was president of the Free State and wartime foreign secretary of the neighbouring Transvaal.
In many respects, the university owes its origins more to the message symbolised by that stone tower in the hills than any aspirations to being an ivory tower: it was an ideological and nation-building, or rebuilding, project in which a particular community invested its hopes for the future. The Afrikaners were setting out to reinvent themselves as victors.
About a decade after the peace treaty that had ended the Boer War, some of the most prominent Boer generals raised a rebellion against the Union government’s decision to support Britain in World War I. Brother fought against brother, and once-revered Boer generals were sentenced to jail, the university history recalls, adding that the internecine split extended to the campus. Some students sided with the South African government led by Prime Minister Louis Botha and J. C. Smuts, both Afrikaner heroes of the Boer War; some followed another war hero, Christiaan de Wet, into insurrection.8 Scores of rebels and loyalist fighters were killed in the short-lived uprising. De Wet, after whom a UFS hostel is named, was later convicted of high treason, but his fine was paid by supporters and he served only six months of his six-year prison sentence.9 Although the university history is not explicit on the subject, many students who had joined the rebels no doubt eventually returned to their studies. I wonder how many drew, from the leniency shown De Wet and his largely undiminished reputation, the lesson that Afrikaner nationalism would and should rise again.
Initiation traditions devised by students, which would have a profound influence on the personality of the university for many years to come, began to emerge around the same time. A blurry 1912 photo shows four men in costumes that make them resemble extras from a movie whose art director has an uncertain grasp of Roman history. According to the caption, they are the Torture Committee, charged with ‘welcoming’ new students to the university.10
The caption describes the futures of the young men pictured: they would become doctors and professors. One was C. R. Swart, who would become a South African president. They were influential men from respected families, who would go on to hold their own respected positions in the Afrikaner community. The university history goes on to describe the initiation ceremonies presided over by secretive societies led by these and other young men and women. The societies were based at the student halls of residence, which would develop into social and political centres of the campus, and play a crucial, and sometimes divisive, role in later attempts to integrate the university.
What did these ceremonies entail? Newcomers were spanked, denied sleep, forced to run gauntlets in which they were slapped with wet towels. They polished the shoes of older students, and collected their laundry and post. They were made distinguishable so that any older student knew who to harass – the young men in jackets turned inside out with their trouser legs rolled up, the young women in dresses worn back to front, or their hair conspicuously braided.
Since the 1920s, university officials have repeatedly tried to ban, or at least limit, the initiation abuse – even through semantic efforts (the name ‘Torture Committee’ was compulsorily changed to ‘Welcoming Committee’ in 1937). But, despite these efforts, students were determined to persist, confident they were contributing in their own way to the goals of their university and their community. The university history quotes a letter that students wrote to the local newspaper soon after the university’s founding:
We wish, through initiation, simply to show the newcomer that … he knows nothing and is nothing. His ego must be broken down slightly so that his future moral and intellectual development can take place from a healthy base. Our initiation is directed at the psychological, not the physical, side of the student. Indeed, to be able to build securely, we want first of all to break down those aspects that are wrong.11
An earnest, if unsophisticated, rendering of the belief – and one that is certainly not unique among Afrikaners – that suffering builds men and societies, that defeat strengthens. Just a few generations after those university students outlined their strategy, young South African men would encounter something similar when they were drafted into the apartheid government’s army, to fight in the townships that were home to fellow South Africans who were black, or to fight the Border War against countries where black politicians had taken over from white colonialists. One former conscript, who went AWOL, told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: ‘The aim of basic training … was not to equip you with battle skills but … to break you down so that you would blindly follow orders.’12
Alchemy does not come without a cost.
A reader dipping into the university history finds the same questions raised again and again, seemingly never to be settled: issues of language, of how much responsibility a student should be given and what manner of leader should be shaped. The students were both subjects of and participants in a continual discussion over identity.
After the Anglo-Boer War, Afrikaners may have chafed at what they saw as English meddling in their relations with black South Africans, and the English may have believed themselves to be more liberal. But in the new Union of South Africa, created after the war, white English victors and white Afrikaner losers alike subjugated black South Africans. The fierce debates then were not over race, but over language.
In 1904, at the founding of what would become the university, the Afrikaner students were taught in English because of the dearth of professors trained to teach them in Afrikaans. Nevertheless, from the start, Afrikaners campaigned for a university they could call their own – one where the medium of instruction would be Afrikaans. The Anglo-Boer War was still fresh in Afrikaners’ minds, as were memories of the British officers who viewed Afrikaners as primitive and stubbornly resistant, and who had brought the war to Afrikaner women and children with their scorched-earth campaign. Having their children taught in the language of this victor was anathema.
In 1918 the National University of South Africa granted its affiliates permission to teach in Afrikaans. In the same year, D. F. Malherbe, a professor at Grey University College and later rector, became the nation’s first professor of Afrikaans.13
But most courses were still taught in English in Bloemfontein. Afrikaner politicians, journalists and clergy campaigned for Afrikaans at the university, though some Afrikaners opposed abolishing English because they wanted to see South Africa’s white communities united.
In the 1930s, Grey University College and other Afrikaans institutions broke away from the National Union of South African Students, which was seen as liberal and English, and allied itself with a new student union that had an unabashedly Afrikaner nationalist agenda, the Afrikaanse Nasionale Studentebond.
It was a time when not only students, but also the larger community of white South Africans were split politically. On the one side there were English- and Afrikaans-speaking South Africans who wanted to remain loyal to the British Crown and who supported Anglo-Boer War general Jan Smuts and his United Party. On the other side were the nationalists who wanted an independent Afrikaner republic. The latter group consisted mostly
