A week of senate politics, apartheid diplomats, Nobel Laureates and good hair.
Day One
Haircuts — I’ve always been indifferent to them, which is just one of the reasons I loved the 1960s. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll were certainly fun but, hey, the best part of my student days was that long beautiful hair!
In the past few months, however, I’ve changed my mind about haircuts. This is because I’ve stumbled across the best barber in the world — well, in Africa, perhaps.
Erad Shenoda, the Egyptian-born, Groucho Marx-lookalike craftsman, operates out of a first-floor near hole-in-the-wall in a tiny shopping centre on Melville’s Main Road.
But this guy doesn’t give a mere haircut; he delivers an effective hair-removal cabaret of which Groucho would have approved. When cutting my hair, he attends to the task with 13 different instruments: three different-sized clippers, two razors, three pairs of scissors, four towels and face balm.
Day Two
On a stunning Free State Saturday morning, I wake to find myself staring at a mirror on the ceiling. Huh?
Staggering towards breakfast, I stumble across a relaxed-looking Rudi Buys, the dean of students at the University of the Free State (UFS), who explains that we’re standing in what was once Sol Kerzner country. Here, in what used to be the Thaba Nchu Sun, the senior management of UFS is holding a legotla or, as they might still call it here, a bosberaad.
In a horse and pony show, the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s John van den Berg and I are scheduled to introduce two sessions. The Free Staters are an animated group. I’ve not heard such excited talk about change on a South African campus since the balmy 1980s, when Jakes Gerwel called for the reinvention of the University of the Western Cape.
The importance of sustained intellectual debate in the UFS senate is on the agenda — an interesting opening. I ask the group what they think the person sitting next to them at a senate meeting might be thinking. Their bleak answers only confirm that senate meetings are a drag. As managerialism has taken hold in our universities, even the most progressive vice-chancellors have smothered senate debate under mountains of paper littered with empty words. If this is depressing, some developments in this direction are simply frightening.
The new vice-chancellor of Unisa, Professor Mandla Makhanya, reported to the senate on the Ides of March, spelling out a dark and grim message to that august body: the days of conversation are over; welcome to the diktat.
The government, he argued, wants “efficiency and effectiveness” and “accountability and quality” so management has “limited control” over managerialism. This means academics have no special place in society.
“Academics have a new role to play and failure to adapt to a technologically driven higher-education environment, the main aim of which is to educate increasing numbers of students with fewer resources, will spell redundancy. That much is a fact —” Well, things have certainly changed in the new South Africa.
In a debate on the infamous De Klerk (University) Funding Bills in the Rhodes senate, during the stormy and divisive Eighties, even conservative senators passionately pleaded the case for institutional autonomy and freedom of academics. The late Derek Henderson, then that institution’s vice-chancellor, relished the occasion in spite of his reputation as a competent manager and a strict law-and-order man.
Day Three
One of Cape Town’s best-kept secrets is the architecture on Queen Victoria Street. This Philistine’s favourites are two magnificent Art Deco buildings. But today I’m visiting a building with neoclassical looks that have gradually grown on me: the Centre for the Book.
The occasion is the launch of a trilogy of memoirs written by diplomats who served the old South Africa. My interest isn’t all academic: some is political and not a little voyeuristic.
To explain: like many of my generation, apartheid stood between me and a career in the foreign service. Surrounded by what might well have been my cohort had it not been for apartheid, I hear tell of the diplomatic life, the difficulties of dealing with “the securocrats” (as Stellenbosch University’s Willie Breytenbach famously called apartheid’s defence force) and much talk of “keeping the lines of communication open”.
The trilogy’s three editors — Pieter Wolvaardt, Tom Wheeler and Werner Scholtz — speak well and nervously joke about the proverbial elephant in the room, their old boss Pik Botha. They also point to an endorsement from Albie Sachs who is in the room. And one of them, emboldened by the freedom from diplomatic protocol, is using the f-word.
History, of course, shows that diplomats invariably perish with the Crown and, certainly, some of these folk have slowly left the “service” (as the diplomatic corps was reverently known) since 1994. So, there is a sense in which they have been lucky and unlucky. Not one was fired and none put to the sword, but their careers were truncated.
Question time is largely self-congratulatory until a young woman, who was raised in a diplomatic family, freezes the celebratory mood by asking: “How can you justify what you did under apartheid?” The editors reach for the kinds of answers that would best be left to a dense reading of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of “habitas”, a set of socially informed habits and behaviour that generates practices and perceptions.
Over drinks, I meet an old friend, Gunter Parkendorf, the professor emeritus of German at the University of Cape Town, in the flesh for the first time. I call him an “old friend” even though we met only a few years back over the phone during a two-hour-long conversation on successive failures to protect the humanities in South Africa.
Day Four
Stellenbosch in the late summer usually has misty mornings and today is no exception.
I make an early visit to the Africa Collection of the Gericke Library to pick up pages for a paper on which I’m working. The wonderful professional staff aside, the place exudes this country’s history in its busts of luminaries, wonderful books and a massive archive. Briefly, I fantasise about retiring to this room.
There is a buzz during the ritual Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (Stias) lunch, which is packed to the proverbial rafters. It is difficult to know where to sit: with the group working on land issues, or with someone working on “poverty and demography”, or with the couple working on “xenophobia in South Africa”, or with a group working on human evolution with South African-born Nobel Laureate Sydney Brenner. Luckily, I hesitate before deciding, and end up sitting with Afrikaans novelist Ingrid Winterbach.
In the afternoon I pore over documents and have a few intermittent exchanges with Jonathan Jansen. We joke a lot, but make good progress in writing a report in which we’re both involved.
At the invitation of the director of Stias, Hendrik Geyer, in a party of six, I have dinner with David Gross, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2004. Nowadays a laid-back Californian, Gross tells us about the protocols that are taught to Nobel winners during the week before the ceremony. One is never to walk backwards away from the Swedish king after receiving the medal. This is because Pearl Buck, who won the Literature Prize in 1938, did so and tripped over her long skirt!
Day Five
Jonathan Jansen says that on reaching home, he told his daughter about his day. “Lunch with Sydney Brenner, a Nobel winner in medicine; dinner with David Gross, a Nobel winner in physics … This is as good as it gets.” Without hesitation, the teenager replied: “No, dad, your day just gets better and better, because you came home to have hot chocolate with me!”
Peter Vale is professor of humanities at the University of Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela Chair of Politics Emeritus at Rhodes University and chair of the Academic Advisory Board of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies