elections. With his coming to power, laws segregating the races and subjugating black South Africans were passed that would eventually develop into apartheid.
On the university campus in 1948, Afrikaner nationalists at last saw their dream realised. English was phased out as a medium of instruction, and the university became a purely Afrikaans institution.
The university history includes excerpts from the work of celebrated Afrikaans historian Karel Schoeman, described as a ‘critical outsider’ during his years at the university in the 1950s. His words presaged later debates about how to foster excellence at the university:
With the elevation of ‘Afrikaansness’ to the one and only criterion, a situation began to develop at the university in the 40s which would affect the whole country in the next decade, namely that appointments were made not because the person concerned was the most suitable, but because he was Afrikaans-speaking – it applied almost without exception to Afrikaans men – and had the ‘right’ political and religious affiliations. This paved the way for the growth of a considerable phalanx of mediocre, third-rate and generally fatuous officials who, under the guise of ‘Afrikaansness’ ended up in positions which they never should have held, with a concomitant lowering of standards.14
Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd came to Bloemfontein in 1963 to receive an honorary degree. Historian and journalist Allister Sparks, in his political history of South Africa, The Mind of South Africa, describes Verwoerd as apartheid’s Lenin – ‘the man who added to [apartheid] conceptually and then sought to put it into practice in its total-separation form’.15 Verwoerd’s name can sound like a curse on the lips of black South Africans.
By the 1970s the Afrikaanse Studentebond had become the main student cultural organisation in the university, and it was becoming more politically assertive and more outspoken about its allegiance to the National Party and apartheid. Roelf Meyer, then a law student at the university, was elected president of the Afrikaanse Studentebond in 1970. Meyer would go on to serve as a National Party Cabinet minister, and, later, as the party’s chief negotiator in the talks that led to the end of apartheid.
In the post-apartheid years, as the National Party became increasingly irrelevant, Meyer joined the ANC, which, like the National Party, has its roots in Bloemfontein. Some may see Meyer as an opportunist, even a traitor, for showing that talent for adapting – without which South Africa’s transformation to multiracial democracy would have been impossible.
For many South Africans, the 1980s was the decade in which it became clear apartheid was impossible. The government reacted with fear and violence, cracking down on black nationalism, political activism and violence. It was a time when anti-apartheid activists at home and abroad were finding innovative ways to keep up the pressure, and not just politically. The 1980s also saw a major victory in the campaign to isolate South African sportsmen and women because of their country’s racist policies: the thwarting of a planned tour of New Zealand by the Springboks.
Sparks describes the violence on the ground:
By February 1985, for the first time the police found themselves confronted with organised street fighters. In the Crossroads, the ‘comrades’ made huge shields of corrugated iron which they carried into the street to protect the stone- and petrol-bomb throwers from police shotguns. In Alexandra they dug ‘tank traps’ – trenches three feet deep – across the rutted roadways to stop the Hippos.16
Protests exploded into confrontation, to be followed by dusty mass funerals. Sparks says the 1980s saw the most sustained insurrection hitherto carried out by black South Africans, with the country in ‘a virtual state of civil war’.17 Sparks estimates that the 1984–1987 uprisings led to 3 000 deaths and 30 000 detentions.18
In his memoirs, Chester A. Crocker, the US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during that turbulent decade, writes that the 1980s showed that ‘the ramshackle system could no longer be defended at an acceptable price. Nor could power be seized at an acceptable price. South Africans on all sides had looked down into the abyss of civil violence – and recoiled in sober shock.’19
Yet the reaction in the university to what was happening in South African society was a passive form of denial. The university history explains that the students were isolated in a predominantly white institution, where ‘the reality of the “struggle” outside apparently did not penetrate the thoughts of Kovsies’.20
Ignoring that reality was a choice that many white South Africans made. They were surrounded by the turmoil of change, and constantly confronted by ideological and political challenges to how they had defined themselves for generations. Perhaps they hoped that if they decided the challenges were beneath notice, they would indeed prove unimportant. And if a reckoning should one day come, they could at least plead ignorance.
If the students ensconced in the university had decided to ignore the struggle, its momentum had nonetheless reached the Free State despite them. Celebrated liberal Afrikaans writer Antjie Krog writes in her memoirs about a committee that arrived at her door one day in 1987 in Kroonstad to beg her to read her poetry at a rally in Maokeng, Kroonstad’s township, lobbying support for Mandela’s release from prison. At the time, it was illegal to quote Mandela in South Africa.
She delivered her poem in Afrikaans, and the township crowd turned her refrain into a chant: ‘Die vuis sê Mandela! Mandela sê Maokeng!’ (The fist says Mandela! Mandela says Maokeng!).21
Van Aardt Smit was just 23 in 1982 when he started teaching at what was then the University of the Orange Free State. I tracked him down to find out more about what it was like at the university in those days. Smit had studied at the university, had completed his military service and had hitch-hiked across Europe before becoming a lecturer. Now a UFS business-science professor specialising in entrepreneurship, he remembers the shock of discovery on his tour of Europe.
‘You would pick up a newspaper and you would see how the rest of the world felt about South Africa,’ he says. ‘You would see things you would never see in your own press. It was not nice to see we were probably the most hated country in the world.’
Yet, when he returned to Bloemfontein, he slipped back into a state of unknowing. ‘It was almost a little bubble,’ he says. ‘You didn’t realise what was happening.’
He and his friends, he says, held anti-government views that were considered radical for the time, but they did not act on their convictions within the bubble that was Bloemfontein’s university.
‘We talked a lot. But we didn’t do a lot,’ he says. ‘I don’t think we realised to what extent it was ignorance and to what extent it was brainwashing. I think we realised we had a police state. [But] I don’t think people sometimes realise how effective the government was in brainwashing the white population.’
Imagine that, only a generation later, in November of 2001, UFS conferred an honorary degree on Mandela. It is a measure of both Mandela’s commitment to reconciliation and how far South Africa had travelled that Mandela accepted an honour that the same university had earlier bestowed on Verwoerd.
Mandela gave his acceptance speech in Afrikaans and English: ‘Much remains to be done on the road of transformation – and this is true for all sectors of higher education – but the concerted change-seeking efforts of the historically Afrikaans universities should be proudly recognised and acknowledged,’ he said. ‘What the University of the Free State has done to promote diversity, a multicultural environment and respect and appreciation for all of the traditions and backgrounds of the people of the province and country, has not escaped us. To many, your university represents a model in this regard.’22
In 2006, the name of the university’s Verwoerd
