The view in the rear-mirror does not give much guidance.
Guy Berger,
July 2005.
Revised version[1] of paper presented to Critical Tradition Colloquium Grahamstown, 19 – 21 August 2004.
Abstract:
This is a highly personal account of how the author’s politics and activism evolved in relation to Rhodes, and the complexities entailed in regard to strategic emphases. The trajectory commences with the 1970s critique that a university like Rhodes was an institution that served the then ruling class. Most students and academics more or less supported this project at the time, leaving activists little obvious option than to adopt an “off-campus” focus. The 1980s saw a change to a more campus-centred model, based on an analysis of Rhodes as a viable site of progressive struggle. Twenty years on, and a decade of democracy and “transformation” rhetoric, the terrain of struggle has become more complex, and indeed the very notion of “struggle” thrown into question. The author, who experienced the first two strategic “models” as a student, now contemplates – as an academic manager over the past ten years - the challenge of a third model of activism which negotiates both on- and off-campus orientations. The either/or models of the past offer little guidance, and instead there is a need for creative (and even contradictory) synergies during this phase. The characterisation in this paper is something of a caricature, but its purpose is to highlight diverse emphases about the meaning of campus-based activism.
1. Introduction: a telling anecdote
In the old days, Rhodes was characterised by many of us on “the left” as a reactionary institution par excellence. Confirming this in a very brutal way was an incident in 1977. In October that year, the administration was “hit” (well, mildly inconvenienced) by a stay-away of black workers called in protest against the bannings of black consciousness organisations and the murder of Steve Biko. The direct impact of the strike had been to force white Rhodes students to make their own beds for a day.
In the subsequent trial, one elderly black woman working in the Rhodes’ residences said she had been threatened not to come to work on the strike day. Giving state evidence against the four black accused were two leftwing white students, and the head of the Rhodes black workers union. A guilty verdict was returned by the presiding magistrate, and isiXhosa lecturer Sydney Zotwana received a year’s imprisonment, as did two others in the dock. The fourth accused was under-aged and was sentenced instead to … a flogging. He later studied at Rhodes, dropped out, joined MK, the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) in exile, returned after 1990, re-registered, was expelled for possessing weaponry in his residence, then joined the South African National Defence Force.
Despite the trauma and ostracism that went with having turned “impimpi”, the unionist become state-witness – Alistair Maxegwana, at the time a waiter in Milner dining hall – was subjected to additional punishment. Despite not having been convicted, he was summarily fired by Vice-Chancellor Derek Henderson (overriding a plea for leniency by Ian MacDonald). By contrast, the students, Jack Lewis and Lauren Vlotman, were allowed to complete their exams. A year later, Rhodes allowed Zotwana to return to his lectureship. Maxegwana remained unemployed.
These are some little examples of the 1970s race, class and political biases of the university in regard to dissidents, and also of the ambivalent character of white left commitment when the chips were down.
It was against the backdrop of this conservative context some years later that I knew I had brought disrepute on these hallowed halls of learning. Why? For having “gotten myself” arrested, tortured and imprisoned. In the displeased eyes of the establishment, I was to blame for tarnishing the image of safe Rhodes as a campus whose implicit image was as a place “where your kids are safe from commies”. In this perspective, I had been convicted for running ANC cells, abusing my status as a lecturer to brainwash innocent students.
In fact, at that very time, I was even “worse”. I found the ANC too tame in relation to socialism, and I was suspicious about African nationalism. But the political seminars I ran with students were a far cry from organising secret ANC cells, and while being a sympathiser of ANC cadres engaged in struggle, I was not in fact a member of the organisation. Indeed, it was only in 1985 that the organisation at its Morogoro conference formally opened its membership to whites within the country. Nonetheless, my Port Elizabeth magistrate was clearly impressed by testimony by an infamous spy (“our man in Moscow” said the Sunday Times). Craig Williamson, ably supported by one Prof Stoffel van der Merwe from Rand Afrikaanse Universiteit (later a cabinet minister under President FW De Klerk), convinced the court which accordingly made me an honorary ANC member, and dispatched me to prison for a couple of years.
Sentenced along with me back then was student Devan Pillay. Some five students were held as potential state witnesses in our case, but fortunately none were confronted with the dilemma of testifying or going to prison for refusing, since my lawyers (Denis Kuny, Raymond Tucker, Kathy Satchwell) made the necessary admissions to the court. The ripples of our repression at the time included the arrest and torture of recent graduate Zubeida Jaffer, harassment of another graduate Nalini Naidoo, and imprisonment of 1970s student Ian Mgijima. We were, of course, a tiny minority on campus. The bulk of students and staff were not part of the Henderson decision on Maxegwana. They were too busy drinking or doing academics. They did not know, and nor did they want to know.
2. Analysis: determinants in the making of an activist.
Looking back, my story is illustrative for what it says about the period and the pace of the university within the politics of repression and resistance. My political position had evolved out of a combination of factors related to my experiences at Rhodes during the mid- and late-1970s.
First was the intellectual one. Arriving at campus with a mindset that was faintly liberal, I encountered huge ferment about race and class. I battled through Howard Wolpe and Claude Meillesoux and learnt about internal colonialism and modes of production. I was part of a Das Kapital reading group. Any fool living in Grahamstown could see that the problem of poverty went much deeper than race, and one could scarcely miss the limits of white official liberal politics in addressing this critical issue. At the same time, Marxism was not just attractive for its politics – its intellectual power also made mincemeat of most other frameworks. Difficult to master, and hard to hold when it was always in contestation, Marxism served as a meta-methodology to cut through both the fog of apartheid propaganda and the mist of liberal pluralism. It helped you get to the crux that really counted (or so you thought, being less aware of gender and environmental questions in those days). When Althusserianism came on the scene, contradiction and overdetermination became my intellectual guidelines. On the other hand, with its functionalist concept of Ideological State Apparatuses, this orientation tended to point away from any notion of campuses as sites of struggle. Alternative localities were needed if one was going to counter the power of the ruling class. Thus theoretically informed, we were not especially enamoured by the prospects of activism within an Ideological State Apparatus.
Second, at the same time as pockets of new left thinking caught on around South Africa, struggle in the country was picking up. Black consciousness had sewn seeds of township resistance, especially amongst school-going youth. This constituency seemed like the one really going places. When the Soweto generation returned from military training and initiated symbolic victories like the Sasolburg and Secunda spectacular bombings, one could not but cheer the action. If the ANC was reviving through these developments, then it clearly merited some looking at – despite reservations about its old-fashioned, bourgeois-nationalist and pro-Moscow ways. The action was unfolding off-campus.
A third strand that added to the political climate of the late 70s and which influenced me personally was the white student movement. Led by Fink Haysom, its response to black consciousness had been to call for “Africanisation” – for white students to see themselves as part of the continent, to see a future here, and not look to emigrating. This struck a chord, and kindled an identity. Alienated from most fellow whites, this alternative “home” was welcomed by student activists. Campuses like UCT and Wits seemed like the apex of liberated zones with a critical mass of committed white lefties, but there was still a handful of students at Rhodes who rose to the ideology and its call to action. Interestingly, here – as we realised - was evidence of another strand of Althusserian truth at work, i.e. the successful interpolation of students to identify with an ideological position that was relatively autonomous of their direct class (and cultural) interests.
As a result of these three forces coming together, a political course was opened up for me personally, and indeed for a number of other Rhodes students (and staff) in that period. Pulled by the magnetism of these forces, we were also pushed into resistance by the literally repulsive dominant culture. At the same time, in the interstices of the Ideological State Apparatus, we appreciated the few academics (Jacky Cock, Terence Beard, Nancy Charton, Les Switzer) and the handful of courses that gave us the space to nurture our intellectual and political identity. The big question, however, was where should one most effectively express one’s activism?
3. “Off-campus” versus “on-campus” as the most strategic site of struggle.
Near the end of the 1970s, it became clear that conservatism on the campuses could be rolled back, somewhat, by an alliance with like-minded forces on other campuses, primarily through the white-student body, the National Union of South African Students (Nusas). Of decisive significance was support from, and links, with off-campus forces like the scholar organisations, incipient trade unions, and, in 1980, the Free Mandela campaign. But the focus was decidedly on-campus.
However, it took several years for this insight about the potential for struggle on campus to penetrate completely – and indeed for its material and contextual underpinnings to evolve. In the mid-1970s, the organised forces of racism and reaction on campus, along with the convenient apathy of the general student body, were so strong that many of us for several years thought it was a waste of time to bother with trying to change Rhodes.
Year after year at Rhodes, the “left” tried – and failed (thanks inter alia to the efforts of Izak Smuts and Rob Midgeley) – to get the SRC to affiliate to Nusas. By the end of 1976 and in the wake of the massacres at Soweto, several amongst us considered military combat as the only serious option to end apartheid (and thereby bring about, externally, the necessary real change at Rhodes). But other kinds of struggle and crisis called out for attention, and despite coming close to it, I personally did not sign up as a soldier in the armed struggle.
The year 1976 saw not only the bravery of nationwide school uprisings and their politicising impact of their suppression, but also the chokingly bitter fruits of George Matanzima’s bullyboy prelude to Transkei “independence”. In reaction to this Bantustan event, tens of thousands of people fled Herschel and Glen Grey for the barren wastes of Thornhill in the Ciskei. Egged on by Jeff Peires, a group of us students trekked up there to see if there was anything we could do to stem the tide of infant mortality publicised in the papers. We found devastation and starvation on a scale far worse even than the dire poverty of black Grahamstown. It was heart-rending evidence of what the Bantustan strategy really meant.
This experience initially underlined the artificiality, sterility and indeed decadence of trying to work with a reactionary, racial elite on the campus. With Thornhill in such trauma, there was simply no point in working politically in the belly of an unfeeling and elitist beast made up of an Ideological State Apparatus like Rhodes! Over the next two years and with donor support from wellwishers like the Beards, we engaged in small-scale community sewing projects in far-flung Thornhill (in between getting arrested for being there without state permission). That is, until a flash of realisation struck our do-gooder selves. We gained our insight through the welcoming words delivered on one occasion by Chief Malefane, through whose offices we had been working. He greeted us with the words: “We are very grateful to you Rhodes students coming here to help us, following in the footsteps of the honourable …” We anticipated that he would say “Lennox Sebe” in partially-understandable deference to the Bantustan puppet who had given the Transkei refugees sanctuary from Matanzima. Wrong. “… in the footsteps of the honourable PW Botha, who visited us here in his helicopter recently…”, he completed his sentence. It was the coldest of sobering showers.
Today, of course, Botha is bastioned in his Wilderness mansion, while the Thornhill poor are just as poor. But, the main point to make here is that the Chief’s words brought home to us the misguided nature of our kind of work in the rural areas. Tails between our legs, we had to re-examine and look elsewhere for a terrain in which to try and make a difference. What to do? After all, practical experience (and urban Marxism) told us that the working class, and not the rural poor, was the motor of the struggle, but there was no working class as such in Grahamstown.
There were different responses to this general question facing concerned students within the unfolding activist climate of the time. Students like Ryland Fisher dropped out and joined community struggles in Cape Town, working through Grassroots newspaper in his case. Some linked up with the ANC underground which was more and more building its networks for recruitment and infiltration of military personnel. But another opportunity began to emerge. Practical struggles on the other campuses began to also pose questions about the prudence of writing off the university as a space for struggle. (In a parallel move in theory, Stuart Hall began to analyse media less as a tool that expressed the pre-existing views of a ruling class, and more as a dynamic institution - relatively autonomous and internally contested - which created constituencies and articulated interests. The same approach could be transposed to the university.)
The result of all this was that the (miniscule) Left on campus began to focus back home. By this stage, we’d learnt that losing the Nusas battle did not mean losing the war. It meant, instead, building on the momentum of a referendum to further conscientise and mobilise the few dozen white students who had actively supported the pro-affiliation campaigns. Their energies could be productively channelled into a range of outlets – whether boycotting racist sports, staging the “quad squat” protest, expressing solidarity with black students on campus, avoiding whites-only cinemas and restaurants, championing course reform, doing Black Sash advice office work, or using student media to spread progressive ideas. And because there was not a neatly sequential transition from the Thornhill focus to the campus one, so the energies of politicised students could help contribute to Thornhill as well (up until the time we finally abandoned our work there).
This turn meant that from Marxism, we moved to Leninism. From abstracted leftwing analysis of modes of production, we were encountering somewhat more practical politics. In personalised terms, intellectual leadership shifted from Althusser to Auret (van Heerden – Nusas president). This thrust of Nusas-linked campus activism gave rise to a climate which in the 1980s saw the emergence of a strong End Conscription Campaign, many white students joining the ANC underground or the UDF, and eventually Nusas absorbed into the non-racial SA National Students Congress (Sansco) which later became Sasco. Following my and Devan Pillay’s sentencing, the unbelievable happened – a referendum in favour of re-affiliation, led by fellow former detainee Mike Kenyon, was won. It was a sign that activity directed at campus could pay off. The institution now seemed to be worth activist attention.
To sum up: at the end of the 1970s, although campus as a whole was still experienced by us as an alienating bastion of reaction, it was no longer seen as a monolithic and unmovable institution. Besides for tolerating (and making possible) a degree of dissidence, it also meant the viable possibilities of work to change the politics from within. The challenge at Rhodes was to enlarge the pool of white “lefties”, replicating on a wider scale the way that we had begun our own university lives unconscientised and unpoliticised and yet found ourselves transformed into activists for change.