Once a ‘bush college’ which defied apartheid, the University of the Western Cape has entered a new ‘struggle’ era. In the first of a series of articles focusing on universities, Philippa Garson reports on UWC’s attempts to meet the needs of its students
A DISTURBING photograph of campus unheaval at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) last year depicts a coloured student hunched over her desk, screaming in fear as protesting African students storm the classroom.
The photograph captures in crude light some of the political tensions coursing the university and the wider Western Cape region — tensions which a “struggle era” generation, united in non-racialism during the time of apartheid, has yet to come to grips with.
UWC, once an inferior “bush college” set aside for coloureds, opened its doors to disadvantaged students countrywide in defiance of apartheid in the late 1980s, leading to rapidly ballooning student numbers, from 7 000 to 15 000 in seven years, and an African student majority.
Most at the university agree on the need for a new policy that replaces the romanticism of defiance, that grapples with the real educational needs of the majority of its students and attracts back into its fold coloured students who are enrolling elsewhere.
But such a new policy is being articulated with varying degrees of fervour and some see a backlash “colouredism” or “regionalism” emerging in the university’s new power bloc, with moves to restore it as a regional asset for those living near it, the coloured majority.
It is not hard to find the voices articulating opposing visions for the university’s future and the racial tension on campus. The story doing the rounds among coloured students is: “If your surname’s Tshabalala you’ll get a bursary; if it’s Van Wyk you won’t.” True or not, there is a perception among coloured students that African students “get away with anything”. As one young coloured student said: “I feel they’re taking over, they get more preference. We already have to pay through our necks and then they come here for free.”
African students believe they bear the brunt of racist lecturers and administrative staff, and resent the fact that 75% of the university’s permanent staff is coloured. “We don’t feel part of this community,” said one student. “There’s no mixing. But if we’re honest, we can’t expect miracles overnight.”
Echoes Edith Vries, special adviser to rector Cecil Abrahams: “We were naive in putting people together in a place and hoping non- racialism would evolve. It hasn’t. We wanted our student population to reflect national demographics and give access to those people denied it … but it’s time to do a rethink.
“Among coloured people there has been a sense that the Western Cape belonged to them. They are a bit shell-shocked at having to share it,” says Vries, critical at the same time of the ANC for doing much to “ensure the comfort zones of whites, without doing the same for coloureds or Africans”.
The university is debt-ridden, under-staffed, under-resourced, and unable to deal with the droves of students who cannot pay and who, with their disruptions during admissions, brought the police on campus, causing the university to close for several days last month.
That said, UWC has come a long way from its obscure beginnings as an isolated apartheid-based institution and has flourished into one of our leading universities, having pioneered some of the country’s most forward-looking tertiary initiatives. Several of its faculties, including dentistry, maths, history, English, the life sciences, nursing and education, compare with the best in the country.
It has developed niche areas in development-oriented research and teaching, like the School of Government, School of Pharmacy, Education Policy Unit and Public Health Programme, and took the initiative in creating a museum of apartheid memorabilia, the “Mayibuye Centre”. UWC has extensive links with overseas universities and takes fifth position out of the top seven universities producing national human science research, overtaking Rhodes and Stellenbosch.
Built far away from the cities of Cape Town and Bellville on land earmarked for development as the “coloured heartland” in 1960, UWC is now a sprawling mix of buildings old and new. Though meant for coloureds, it was staffed mainly by white Afrikaners. “Those were the days when council was handpicked by government, when students were forced to wear ties,” says Lionel Slammert, chairman of the Academic Staff Association and tipped to be the rector’s new advisor.
It was Richard van der Ross, now an MP for the Democratic Party, who ushered in the first changes that led to the wresting of control of the university from nationalist Afrikaner academics. In 1985 a decision was taken whereby departmental heads (who were not necessarily professors) were — and still are — elected by academic and non-academic staff, and not appointed. Now about 60% of departments have non-professorial heads.
In 1987 Jakes Gerwel, now President Nelson Mandela’s right hand man, led the university on a path of radical transformation. Students denied access elsewhere found a place at UWC and left-wing coloured intellectuals “took a political decision to return to ‘Bush'”, recalls Vries.
Some saw the attrition of Afrikaners as paving the way for “white liberals” in positions of seniority and believed Gerwel played an overtly political role to the detriment of the university. “He was more interested in national transformation; he wasn’t able to unite the university under his leadership,” says one source. “His grand visions were not always followed with policy.”
“At face value, it was the heroic thing to do,” says Slammert. “But this didn’t go hand-in-hand with a dramatic increase in staff, appropriate academic-development centres, curricula or support structures for students.”
Slammert believes the university “must be a regional response. In the Western Cape the coloured community is the majority. That cannot be denied in the same way it cannot be denied that Africans are a majority in other regions. There is a denial in political circles in the Western Cape that the superstructure should respond to the region, because of the whole ‘coloured issue’ that has not been resolved. But the recognition that the existence of the coloured people as a majority group in the Western Cape is being denied, is in fact anti-racial. It is recognising and affirming difference,” says Slammert.
Human Rights Commissioner and former UWC academic Rhoda Kadalie is bluntly critical of this new policy and believes it translates into a “conscious purging in the university of anyone who had links with Jakes”. In her view, good white academics, like vice-rector and historian Colin Bundy, are being marginalised by the rising “colouredism”.
Campus co-ordinator Saleem Mowser is equally critical: “We cannot change from being a national to regional university. I can’t help feeling it’s a way of keeping African students out of the university.”
But Abrahams, fresh on the South African scene from many years in Canada where he lectured in African literature and held senior administrative posts, is outspoken in his desire to get UWC’s sister universities to take on their fair share of disadvantaged students. Considering that his university has a debt of R27-million against the University of Cape Town’s reserves amounting to R600-million, and that it has the same amount of students (15 000) but only one-third of the number of lecturers, it’s not hard to see where he’s coming from. Whether this is evidence of a rising “colouredism” or mere pragmatism depends on who one speaks to. Some say he answers to a “coloured cabal” he’s placed around him and others that he is truly a “people’s leader”, astute, strategic and conciliatory.
Vries describes him as “the right leader at the right time: an internationalist with a progressive agenda who doesn’t carry the baggage and scar tissue of having been an activist in this area. There’s a freshness he brings.”
Comments Abrahams: “There is tension around the increasing number of African students from outside the Western Cape and we can’t close our eyes to it. We need to provide a greater comfort level to the communities around this university and to those who come from outside.”
From the calm order of Candadian universities, Abrahams has been propelled into student unrest, had his administration building overrun, his foyer area trashed and virtually been held hostage by students demanding cash payments for poor conditions in the residences. His capitulation to these demands last year, a decision overriden by the university council, led to accusations that he was naive and open to manipulation by students.
Any attempts to entrench “colouredism” will be met with resistance from a relatively powerful Sasco-dominated SRC. Fresh-faced SRC leader Jay Jay Thabane, says with unequivocal confidence: “This is no longer a regional asset, it is a national asset, a people’s university.” Thabane ackowledges “post apartheid tensions” which he attributes to “elements wanting to resist change”. While the election bringing Thabane and his team into office last year boasted a 36 percent poll, one of the highest of last year’s student elections, it is well known that coloured students have all but moved out of student politics (two of the 13-member SRC are coloured). “Students may feel supressed … but democracy must prevail,” says Thabane, conceding the presence of racial tensions on campus and, like all other players, calls for a commission of inquiry into race and gender issues.
Saliem Patel, chairman of the far-left Student League, blames the problems on the Government of National Unity: “The whole notion of provincialism is being entrenched by the interim Constitution. People are latching on to enclaves, finding places they can claim as their own.”