National Party, which would fade away soon after apartheid ended, had its beginnings in Bloemfontein, where the Anglo-Boer War general J. B. M. Hertzog (and later prime minister of the Union) formally established the Free State National Party in 1914.
Mandela’s ANC, by a coincidence of history and geography, was also born from a meeting that took place in Bloemfontein, in 1912. A year later, the British Parliament would approve the Natives Land Act, barring the black majority from owning land in all but 7.5% of South Africa. The 1912 meeting in Bloemfontein ‘was perhaps the first step taken by the peoples of our region, who had been subjugated by three European powers – Britain, Germany and Portugal – towards creating the institutions needed to defeat colonialism and racial oppression to reclaim the freedom the African people had lost on the battlefield,’ the ANC recalls in a historical essay marking the centenary of its founding.24
Like the Afrikaners who had regrouped at Bloemfontein to start a university, the black Africans were determined to turn the bitterness of defeat at the hands of colonialism into inspiration for resurrection. Waaihoek, a Bloemfontein district to which black South Africans were restricted during apartheid, is not far from the Women’s Monument. Still standing is the church that was the site of the January 1912 founding meeting of the South African Native National Congress, which would become the ANC.
Nearby is the house once owned by Thomas Mapikela, a local founding member of the ANC. In 1909, Mapikela had been part of a multiracial delegation that travelled to London on a failed mission to persuade Parliament not to allow the Afrikaners defeated in the Anglo-Boer war to institutionalise racism. The ANC history recounts that Mapikela was joined in Bloemfontein in 1912 by black African luminaries of the time: Sol Plaatje, a writer and newspaper editor, Alfred Mangena, one of South Africa’s first black barristers, and Charlotte Maxeke, an American-educated teacher.
‘In their number,’ the account of that founding meeting continues, ‘there were also royal personages, whose forebears had led the armies that resisted the occupation and seizure of the lands of our continent during the 18th and 19th centuries: Solomon kaDinizulu, Montsioa of the Barolong, Lewanika of the Lozi of Zambia, Letsie II of Lesotho, Labotsibeni from Swaziland, Dalindyebo of the baThembu, Sekhukhuni of the baPedi and Khama from Botswana.’25
They had all been summoned by Pixley ka Isaka Seme, a black lawyer who brought a determined intelligence and a love of learning to the struggle against colonialism and apartheid. Seme would lead the ANC in the 1930s. He had left South Africa at the age of 17 to attend Mount Hermon School and Columbia University, New York, and then Oxford.
Seme had spent almost half his life studying abroad when he returned to South Africa in 1911 at the age of 30. When I think of the later university leaders at UFS whose own stories were influenced by journeys abroad, and who would come to see educational travel as a way of preparing students of all races to learn, transform and lead, I consider that Seme’s view of the world and his place in it must have been shaped by the opportunity to study outside South Africa. Seme was just the kind of educated black man Afrikaners saw as a threat to their dominance and to the logic of apartheid.
A key element of apartheid was engineering an education system that would ensure there were few black people like Seme. In the 1950s, the government took over and revised the curricula – dumbing them down – of independent, often missionary-run schools that apartheid’s planners accused of fanning the ambitions of black South Africans by overeducating them. George Bizos, the liberal, Greek-born lawyer who would later defend Mandela in apartheid courts, saw the tragedy this meant for ordinary South Africans. In Odyssey to Freedom, Bizos writes of teachers and parents trying to supplement the inferior education the white government had designed for black children. Their weekend and afternoon classes, called cultural clubs, were declared illegal. Despite lawyers’ efforts, the schools were closed down, and their teachers fined or threatened with jail.
In one case, Bizos was dismayed to find that a young man whom the organisers of a cultural club had thought was a student was in fact a spy sent by the police to gather evidence against a teacher. The teacher had asked Bizos: ‘Did police have the right to teach a boy to lie about who he was, where he came from and why he attended the club?’ Bizos told him that, in apartheid South Africa, there was nothing that said the police didn’t have the right.26
Over the generations the result, not surprisingly, was a growing contempt among black South Africans for the education they were being offered. When apartheid ended, the majority of South Africa’s citizens were left not only impoverished and angry, but without the skills or expertise to meet the challenges of the 21st century. The leaders, black and white, of institutions like UFS are left to cope with that legacy.
In Bloemfontein, university archivists have found minutes of a 1923 governing-council meeting in which the application of an aspiring black student was recorded. The application was denied.27 Mixed-race and black postgraduate students were first admitted in 1977. The postgraduates were followed by mixed-race undergraduates in 1985 and black undergraduates in 1988. It was not until 1990 that black students were allowed to live on campus.
Black students began to arrive at UFS in large numbers in the 1990s, only after the legal framework of apartheid had been dismantled. Their presence meant language was again an issue.
On a campus that had stubbornly turned its face away while history was being made during the 1980s, the arrival of black students in the 1990s must have felt abrupt and challenging. Change was being ushered in, in the form of fellow South Africans who, it seems, only yesterday could never have aspired to be more than labourers on the white-owned farms.
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