African Studies Institute - Seminar Papers

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Author: search.filters.author.Murray, Bruce

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    World War II and Wits student politics
    (1993-10-11) Murray, Bruce
    Both nationally and on the Wits campus, the war years constituted a major divide in the realm of student politics. On the national level, the war promoted three developments. Firstly, for the duration of the war, there was virtually a complete breakdown in relations between the English-medium and predominantly Afrikaans-medium university institutions, bringing to a halt the traditional intervarsity competitions. The breakdown was effected at the instigation of the highly politicised Afrikaanse Nasionale Studentebond (ANS), the national organisation formed by the Afrikaner SRCs in the 1930s. Secondly, the war turned into a graveyard for the ANS, which identified itself with the paramilitary, pro-Nazi Ossewabrandwag (OB). The history of the ANS has yet to be written, but it is evident that the organisation fragmented badly in 1942 in the face of the drive of the parliamentary National Party to assert its ascendancy over political Afrikanerdom. After 1942 teacher training colleges, rather than university institutions, provided the ANS with its chief support base. In 1948, following the formation of the Nationalist Government, the ANS was replaced by the Afrikaanse Studentebond (ASB). Thirdly, the outcome of the war was crucial in determining the character of the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), effectively the national organisation of English-speaking students. During the war NUSAS sought to keep itself intact by averting polarising issues, notably the admission to its ranks of Fort Hare Native College. The outcome of the war, perceived as a defeat for the forces of Fascism and racism, ultimately ensured the admission of Fort Hare, and NUSAS finally emerged as a 'progressive' organisation. On the Wits campus, student organisation and political culture underwent some profound changes as a consequence of the war, and the issues it raised. For the first time students at Wits acquired a real sense of being part of the politics of the country; an organised left appeared on campus in the form of the Federation of Progressive Students (FOPS)…
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    Wits at War
    (1990-08) Murray, Bruce
    The Second World War began as a European war on Sunday 3 September 1939 and ended six years later in the Far East with the Japanese surrender to the United States. In the history of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, as in the history of much else, the war was a watershed. The University became much more 'open' in its admissions policy, with blacks securing access to the medical school; war—oriented research, notably in radar, gave a new importance to the University as a centre of research; the war contributed significantly to a heightened political awareness among students and the beginnings of student activism at Wits; and the enrolment of thousands of ex-servicemen at the end of the war helped to make the University a distinctly more adult institution. The war also effected major transformations in the wider society, which in turn were to have a significant impact on the University's development. World War II, and South Africa's participation in it on the Allied side, greatly affected the economic, social, and political life of the country.
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    Raikes, student politics, and the coming of apartheid
    (1994-02-28) Murray, Bruce
    In May 1948, in perhaps the greatest upset in South African electoral history, Dr D.F. Malan's National Party and its allies defeated Smuts' United Party in the first general election since the war. For only the second time in the history of the Union had the governing party been defeated at the polls; for the first time since Union was a purely Afrikaner government formed. The Nationalist campaign had been waged on a platform of apartheid, involving the fuller separation of the races, and once in office the Nationalists proceeded to enact a series of measures designed to promote both greater segregation and greater repression. These included the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, and in 1950 the Population Registration Act, the Group Areas Act, and the Suppression of Communism Act. In the field of education, their first major measure was the Bantu Education Act of 1953, which set up an entirely separate schooling system for Africans under the control of Dr Verwoerd’s Department of Native Affairs. They dealt next with tertiary education in the Extension of University Education Act of 1959, which established university colleges for 'Non-European' students and prohibited the ‘white’ universities from registering black students, except with ministerial permission. With hindsight, Nationalist legislation in the 1950s appeared to unfold with a logical inevitability in accordance with a comprehensively worked out long-term strategy for the construction of an apartheid state. Recent research, however, has emphasized the elements of fluidity in Nationalist policy-making, and higher education was evidently an area in which the Nationalists initially lacked a fixed design to direct them. Nationalist policy on the universities ran into a series of culs de sac before the route that led to the Extension of University Education Act was clearly mapped out. What was certain from the outset was that the Nationalists strongly objected to the two 'open universities', and the 'social intermingling' they allowed. For the 1948 elections, the Nationalist manifesto included universities in their projected apartheid policy for the country, albeit in rather vague terms. The recommendation of the Sauer Commission, the party's special commission into the 'colour question', was that where necessary provision should be made for higher education for Africans in their own areas. Once in office the Nationalists proceeded to harass the 'open universities', with the Prime Minister leading the way.
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    In defence of the 'open university': Wits University, student politics, and university apartheid
    (1995-05-15) Murray, Bruce
    In 1959 the Nationalist Government, after a decade in power, finally passed through Parliament legislation to impose apartheid on South Africa's university system. In protesting against the Government's proposals for university apartheid and an end to black access to the ‘open universities’, Wits and the University of Cape Town (UCT) demonstrated a high degree of solidarity, both in developing a united front on their respective campuses and coordinating action as between themselves. Two corporate protests, the first in the University's history, were organized by Wits against university apartheid; a march from Braamfontein to the City Hall in May 1957, and a general assembly in April 1959 to record the University's 'solemn protest' against the new legislation. Wits continued thereafter to mount 'solemn protests' against the application of university apartheid. In April 1969, to mark the tenth anniversary of the Extension of University Education Act, the University staged a week of demonstrations, culminating in another general assembly. The events of Academic Freedom Week at Wits', Convocation Commentary proudly declared, ‘showed that protest need not disrupt university life. That is the essential difference between student protest here and at some of the bigger institutions in Britain and the United States’.
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    The D'Oliveira Affair 1968/9: Thirty years after
    (1999-05-10) Murray, Bruce
    The 'D'Oliviera Affair' of 1968/9 was a decisive event in precipitating South Africa's isolation from international test match cricket. In the view of many at the time—and since—Basil D'Oliviera, the South African born Coloured cricketer who played for England, warranted inclusion in the MCC team to tour South Africa in 1968/9 when it was first selected on 27 August 1968. The fact that he was not included caused an uproar in Britain; the allegation made was that the selectors had not chosen the team purely on merit, but had instead capitulated to South Africa's apartheid government, which would have refused to admit an MCC team with D'Oliviera in it. When on 16 September Tom Cartwright, a medium-paced bowler, dropped out of the team through injury, D'Oliviera, regarded essentially a batsman who also bowled, was immediately selected in his place. As represented by the Vorster Government, this amounted to a capitulation by the MCC to political pressure from the anti-apartheid movement, and it refused to accept a team which it alleged was no longer that of the MCC. 'Whereas we are and always have been prepared to play host to the MCC', Vorster announced at the National Party congress in Bloemfontein on 17 September, 'we are not prepared to receive a team thrust on us by people whose interests are not the game but to gain political objectives which they do not even attempt to hide.' The tour was consequently cancelled, and a huge impetus given to the movement to exclude South Africa from test match cricket. As the Rand Daily Mail predicted, '[Mr Vorster's] decision to bar not only Basil D'Oliviera but the MCC team as a whole means, without a shadow of a doubt, South Africa's exclusion from the world of Test cricket'. Within three years that exclusion was complete. Throughout the 1960s the movement to ban South Africa from international sport had been building up momentum, spurred by the efforts of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC). Formed in October 1962, and moving into exile in 1966 when Dennis Brutus left South Africa for London on a one-way ticket, SANROC's primary focus was on the Olympic arena, where it sought to secure either non-racialism in South African sport, or failing that, the expulsion of South Africa from the Olympics and international sport more generally. In 1964, and again in 1968, South Africa was excluded from the Olympic Games. In cricket, however, South Africa's position still seemed reasonably secure.
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    Milner, Beit and Smuts
    (1976-10) Murray, Bruce
    The movement to establish a university on the Witwatersrand was initiated immediately after the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. It was a movement inspired by the new British regime. Both Lord Milner, the Governor of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony and High Commissioner for Southern Africa, and Joseph Chamberlain, the British Colonial Secretary, looked towards the establishment of a teaching university on the Rand. As Joseph Chamberlain put it in his celebrated speech at the Wanderers Club on 17 January 1903s: “If I were to point at this time to what, in my opinion, is the most urgent need of this community, I should say it was the immediate provision of a High School, efficient in every respect; and of a Scientific University specialised according to the needs of the great industries of the community. I can hardly doubt that an appeal to local patriotism to those who have made their fortune here will not be without its effect, and that before long Johannesburg will possess a University; which in its own lines will be superior to anything that now exists in the world”. British imperialist strategy, mining capital and the requirements of the gold mining industry of the Witwatersrand, a determination to open up the professions to locally trained persons, the assertiveness of the English-language groups in the Afrikaner North, and Johannesburg civic pride, provided the main thrusts behind the movement for the foundation of a university in Johannesburg. The counterthrusts, which served to delay the arrival of a full-fledged university on the Rand, stemmed from the vested interests of Cape Town, the rivalry of Pretoria, Afrikaner resistance to British cultural hegemony in South Africa, an immense amount of prejudice to the notion of ‘sinful’, ‘speculative’ and ‘turbulent’ Johannesburg as providing the seat for a university, and the machinations of Jan Christiaan Smuts. Strictly speaking, the story of Wits as a single institution, although with bewildering changes in name and status during its first two decades of formative struggle and development, dates from the Transvaal Technical Institute, founded in 1903. Its antecedents were nonetheless to be found in the Cape, and in the establishment at Kimberley of a school of mines.
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    "Academic non-segregation and social segregation": Wits as an "open" university, 1939-1959
    (1988-05) Murray, Bruce
    In 1959 the Extension of University Education Act provided that the 'white' universities in South Africa could no longer admit black students, except in special circumstances and only with ministerial position. Prior to then two of the four English-speaking universities, the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and the University of Cape Town, operated as 'open' universities, supposedly in the sense that their criteria of admission were purely academic, and were applied without regard to considerations of race, colour, or creed. The position in 1959 was that there were 297 black students at Wits, as against 4813 whites, and 633 black students at UCT, including 461 'Coloureds', as against 4471 whites. Neither Natal nor Rhodes were 'open' in the sense that Wits and UCT were. From 1936 onwards the Durban branch of the Natal University College did provide separate part-time classes for blacks, and in 1951 a medical school for blacks was established in Durban under the University of Natal, but otherwise blacks were excluded from the regular classes at the university. As Edgar Brookes confessed in his History of the University of Natal, published in 1966, 'it is not possible to avoid regretting the failure of the University ever to concede real unhindered equality to non—European students'. Rhodes University, for its part, made no provision for admitting black students. While Wits and Cape Town clearly differed from the other too teaching universities in South Africa, they were never completely 'open' universities, and they certainly never granted "unhindered equality" to their black students. The official policy of the University of the Witwatersrand was one of "academic non-segregation and social segregation". In terms of that policy, black students were to be offered the maximum practicable access to the academic facilities available in the University and they were to be treated in academic matters with racial impartiality, but beyond the academic sphere social contact with white students was to be severely curtailed. Outside of the classroom, blacks were excluded from the main residences, the sports fields, and social activities organised by whites. In other words, the University's policy towards black students was that they ware there for academic purposes only, and were not thereafter to participate in the general social and sporting life of the University. In 1952 the Students' Representative Council at Wits challenged the University's policy of "social segregation", but was unable to change it. The University Council, sensitive to the fact that the 'open' universities represented a target for the Nationalist Government which had come to power in 1948, was more anxious to intensify rather than relax the policy of social segregation, and there was little support in Senate foe an abandonment of that policy. In the main, the liberals in the Senate were satisfied with the University's 'middle way' of "academic non-segregation and social segregation"; it allowed blacks access to the University's academic facilities without gratuitously challenging the prejudices of the wider white society. The historic role of liberals in the Senate, notably Professor R.F.A. Hoernle prior to his death in 1943, was to seek to open the University to black admissions; the liberal heirs of Hoernle never challenged the policy of social segregation at the University. Their efforts were directed rather towards obliging the errant departments, particularly Dentistry, to conform to the University's general policy of 'open' admissions. Black students, for their part, also refrained from launching any systematic campaign against the University's policy of social segregation. They sensed that for them to mount such a campaign would only prove counter-productive. Their concern throughout was to ensure access to the University's academic facilities. The focus of this paper is on the University of the Witwatersrand's admission policies between the outbreak of World War II in 1939 and the passage of the Extension of University Education Act in 1959. In 1934 already the University Counci1 had accepted the principle of normally admitting black students to lecture courses at Wits, but prior to 1939 only a very limited number of blacks had enrolled, largely because blacks continued to be excluded from a clinical training in both medicine and dentistry. The war itself served to accelerate the whole process by which Wits, and more especially the medical school, was opened up to blacks. By the war's end there were some 150 black students at Wits, including 82 in the medical school, out of a student population of three thousand.