hard place
Marianne Merten
The University of Stellenbosch is fighting a battle on two fronts: not only is it trying to convince black students that it is no longer a Broederbond bastion, but it is also struggling to honour its commitment to remain a centre of the Afrikaans language.
After taking office in 1993, rector Professor Andreas van Wyk said 40% to 50% of the institution’s students would be black by 2000. This has not happened. The proportion of black students has increased from 4,5% in 1990 to a quarter last year. About a third of the 19 000 “Matie” students are English-speakers, while 8% speak an African mother-tongue.
University officials say the key reason is the declining numbers of black Afrikaans speakers in a shrinking pool of matriculants. And critics say the university has not been sufficiently aggressive recruiting black students, particularly from townships in the Free State and North West where most black students are fluent in Afrikaans.
“The university doesn’t do enough to recruit African students. There’s not really an urgency, a drive to do it,” says retired University of Stellenbosch economics professor Sampie Terreblanche.
The university has two full-time recruiters who continue to target traditional student pools, like the Northern Cape, Western Cape and Cape South Coast, with more attention now being given to disadvantaged schools.
Student representatives have complained that the recruitment initiatives have lacked the support of students and the wider university community.
“For me as an Afrikaner, I want to see Afrikaans maintained and Stellenbosch is the place,” says Terreblanche. “But Stellenbosch must give more access to Africans.”
Van Wyk is adamant Stellenbosch is “language-friendly” and the use of Afrikaans as teaching language should not be interpreted as a barrier.
Although Afrikaans is the language of instruction, students can write exams in English and classes may be taught in English at the discretion of the lecturer. Most postgraduate work is done in English.
But the institution is obliged by law to keep Afrikaans as its primary teaching language, a duty entrenched in the 1992 University of Stellenbosch Act.
University officials are painfully aware of “misconceptions” about the institution as a conservative, white Afrikaner haven.
A survey a couple of years ago showed parents across the colour lines picked Stellenbosch as their first choice for their children’s education, but were reluctant to send them there because of these perceptions.
Until recently, many students from the coloured community would keep quiet about studying there.
Most of the obvious apartheid-era references on the pretty campus have gone. There used to be a Hendrick Frensch Verwoerd building in honour of the student and lecturer in the Twenties and Thirties, who met his wife Betsie – who recently passed away in the Afrikaner homeland of Orania – there.
Also gone is one of the DF Malan buildings. The Balthazaar Johannes Vorster building is today known as the Arts Building.
What is more difficult to erase is that all prime ministers between 1919 and 1978 – from Jan Smuts through Malan and Verwoerd to Vorster – graduated from the university. Even PW Botha, a University of the Free State drop-out, became chancellor at Stellenbosch in the mid- Eighties.
Political analyst Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, associated with the Afrikaner intellectuals of the Group of 63 who have recently called for the special protection of minority languages, believes Afrikaans could be an anchor language at a university if there is provision for English, especially at the postgraduate level. Slabbert is, however, opposed to promoting Afrikaner ethnic politics or institutions. Needless to say the increasingly public clash between the Group of 63 and other prominent Afrikaners who believe the language should fight for itself is reverberating around the campus.
“Some people would say we have been conservative,” Van Wyk says. At present about 9% of all academic staff are black, and 34% are women. Top management remains white – with the exception of a recently appointed vice-rector, Julian Smith, formerly of the University of the Western Cape – and male.
Over the past three years 70% of appointments have been from “non- traditional” pools: women and blacks. Last year two of the eight vacant professorships were filled by black academics, one by a white woman and five by white males. Of the 19 lecturing posts, five were filled by blacks, seven by white women and seven by white males.
In stark contrast to such struggles are the oak-lined streets and historic buildings that give the campus a cozy, small-town feel where students on bicycles share broad roads with bakkies and luxury 4x4s. For some the beauty at the feet of the Jonkershoek mountains, and the rambling vineyards nearby, is deceptive and reinforces the university’s attachment to the past.
“We accept the challenge that we are a national institution,” says Van Wyk. “At the same time people are inclined to think Stellenbosch hides behind a vine curtain.”