For a man about to step into the torrid glare of the top job at Stellenbosch University, Russel Botman exudes a surprising degree of genial serenity. But then this is also the man of whom the Christian magazine Lig said: ”Russel ry in die Here se kruiwa [Russel rides in the Lord’s wheelbarrow].”
”God decides where I go next,” he says, explaining the magazine’s metaphor, and he starts chuckling mid-sentence, ”even if I don’t want to go there.” It clearly matters to him that, as he stresses, he was nominated for the vice-chancellorship and only then submitted the necessary documentation to the selection committee.
”That’s how you know the way you’re going is the real way — when others tell you to apply. And He [God] will tell you, and others, more than you can yourself about where next to go.” This is high-level assistance indeed, and Botman will need all the support he can get when he takes over the position Chris Brink vacates next month.
Brink’s surprise announcement in July that he had accepted the vice-chancellorship of Newcastle University in England fuelled immediate speculation that the fiery language debate at Stellenbosch had finally taken too great a personal toll. Speaking to the Mail & Guardian at the time, Brink conceded that the searingly emotive debate did contribute to his decision to leave, but insisted that there was no single reason for his departure.
It is a measure of how central the language debate remains at Stellenbosch that Botman himself raised it within minutes of starting his interview with the M&G. He said he is due to report to the council on Friday on how to re-open the process of revising the university’s language policy, which had been halted during the search for Brink’s successor.
The storm started in 2002, when Stellenbosch resolved to teach certain programmes in English as well as Afrikaans. This looked like a politically and pragmatically wise move, aimed especially at drawing more non-Afrikaans-speaking African students to this traditional stronghold of conservative white Afrikanerdom.
But for precisely that constituency, the policy looked like it would deal a mortal blow to Afrikaans. It was all the more difficult to swallow because it came from a university that, in the minds of Afrikaner conservatives, has a near-sacred mission to preserve Afrikaner identity, which has been increasingly embattled since 1994.
For the more worldly at the university, however, insisting that all staff and students be proficient in Afrikaans would have been the beginning of the end for Stellenbosch: the student intake would shrink drastically, and the university would find it impossible to attract enough top-quality academics. In June, the senate voted against insistence on Afrikaans as the only teaching language.
Ominously, the entire issue will now be reopened. Botman said: ”The very basics will be debated again … and I don’t know how the issue will play itself out. One thing that worries me is that people have not been talking to each other, they’ve been talking past each other, often in newspapers.”
Botman is no stranger to reconciliation. He is an ordained minister in the Uniting Reformed Church, and he stresses the word ”uniting” as he speaks. He also observes that this church arose from the union of the once separate Dutch Reformed churches for coloureds and Africans respectively — ”and we’re still hoping for unity with the white Dutch Reformed Church”.
Another key factor in his background that should equip him to navigate the minefield of race and politics in the language debate is his time at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). As a student there he was active in the SRC, and his CV notes his leadership role during the 1976 Soweto uprising. It was also at UWC that he completed his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees, all in theology.
He became dean of UWC’s religion and theology faculty in 1999, before joining Stellenbosch in 2002 as professor of theology. For the past four years he has been deputy vice-chancellor.
Acutely aware of being Stellenbosch’s first black vice-chancellor, he talks of being ”dissatisfied with an institutional culture” that is ”not welcoming to blacks. I intend to tackle the existing dominant Âculture to make it more inclusive,” he says.
This is likely to be only one of many uphill struggles: currently 72% of students are white and only 14% coloured, 12% African and 0,02% Indian. The academic staff profile is even more lopsided — 86% white, 8% coloured, 2,6% African and 1,4% Indian.
Says Botman: ”We have to address black despair regarding higher education — it’s not an obvious choice for significant numbers, partly for financial reasons and partly because black pupils often don’t take school subjects that get them into university.” One of his first moves will be to establish a ”first-year academy” next year to identify those who are ”academically vulnerable because of their disadvantaged backgrounds”.
But for now the language debate looms. Whether in hope or in faith, he observes: ”There must be a rational way to resolve it, as with any other issue about university policy.” And then, laughing: ”Academics are supposed to be rational — that’s why they’re there.” He must be hoping that God is holding his wheelbarrow very steady indeed.