Communist, Afrikaner, author of Dracula: Bram Fischer was many things to many people. Christened Brambleberry Foxglove Fischer, he rejected his bourgeois roots in the 1920s and briefly changed his name to Bram Tractor Fish-packer after a visit to the Soviet Union. On his return to South Africa, flush with the royalties from Dracula, he committed himself to a life at the bar, but last round had already been called and his life at the bar lasted just another 10 minutes. He subsequently dedicated himself to a life outside the bar but was asked by the local constabulary to move along.
Or something along those lines. That’s the trouble with dying in the dark, two decades before the shutters were opened in the 1990s: Fischer missed out on canonisation for want of a decent publicist. Like an inconvenient face in an old politburo photograph, Fischer’s likeness in our national portrait has disappeared under the clever fingers of ideological retouch artists.
That is, it had until this week when a postgraduate at the University of Stellenbosch suggested that he be awarded an honorary degree. Alumni dug their heels into the fertile, papsak strewn soil of that fair borough, and threatened to blockade the Stellenbosch Farmers’ Winery with a ring of S-class Mercs.
Which seems fairly uncharitable, given the university’s long history of offering recognition to outright basket cases. Observe the Maties rugby club, the biggest in the world, with an estimated 80 teams: surely any institution that happily sends alumni magazines and college ties to people who sat on the reserve bench for the Maties 78ths can include one yellowing political memory?
But perhaps that’s just the point: had Fischer punted the pigskin for a team with only mild disabilities, say the rickets-wracked 42nds, he would no doubt have stood a far better chance of academic promotion. Indeed, the front page of the university’s website this week suggested that Stellenbosch is actively breeding a new kind of achiever: ”Flute-playing swimmer excels for SA in Tunisia” read the headline, further evidence of an academic programme intent on splicing sport and culture.
The curious reader was entranced. Had her fingering and mouth position been crisp, to prevent massive consumption of seawater during her oceanic recital? Had wholesale pandemonium broken out among sonar operators in passing submarines? Disappointingly it turned out the alumnus, a flautist when not swimming, had merely become the first person in the world to swim around Africa’s most northerly point, which Dutch immigration officers insist is Rotterdam, but which is actually somewhere in Tunisia.
No doubt she will be awarded an honorary doctorate of music and oceanography next year; and why not when University County Cork (UCC) give James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan an honorary gong earlier this year, the same Pierce Brosnan who left school at 15?
But at least Brosnan is reportedly charming and sophisticated, which is more than can be said about many of the sportsmen now crowding graduation podiums around the world. Manchester United’s Roy Keane, another UCC laureate, knows many things: how to extract maximum pain per pound of force exerted on the human shin; how to look hard-done-by at all times; how to express his world view in just two syllables. But with all due respect to Dr Keane (DPhil Head-Butting), he probably thinks cum laude is an instruction from a porn director.
Still, at least acceptance speeches are short. In July this year the Italian football referee Pierluigi Collina was made a Doctor of Science by Hull University for his services to sport. You know, because of all the science. Winning everlasting adoration with his oratory (”Hull seems like a nice city”), he went on to marvel at the curious events going on around him.
”It’s not usual for anyone to receive an honorary degree from a university,” he said. Luckily for his self-esteem the Sultan of Brunei was not with him on the podium, awaiting his 133rd degree.
But in the end one can’t scoff at the players. They’re just pitching up for the free sherry. It is the universities — many of them little more than activity centres for wealthy orangutans — that devalue degrees. Central Ohio State University (Cosu) probably has at least one functionally literate lecturer on its books; but it all crystallises when visitors trail their fingers up the maple-veneer honours boards, past the names of pork-product tycoons and bipolar televangelists, to 1989.
Because that was the year Cosu awarded a Doctorate in Human Letters to Mike Tyson.