“But what if one discovers evil in what one has lost?”
(Robert Jay Lifton in the preface to The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich)
“Was apartheid the product of some horrific shortcomings in Afrikaner culture?… How do we live with the fact that all the words used to humiliate, all the orders given to kill, belonged to the language of my heart?”
(Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull)
It is the only university in South Africa where Nelson Mandela was forced off campus. Mr Mandela had hardly been on a University of Pretoria stage for 10 minutes when an elderly white-haired man, one Hendrik Claassens, walked slowly towards and on to the same stage of this open-air amphitheatre.
The head of campus security claims he thought it was a professor who wanted to address the rowdy right-wing students in the crowd of more than 6 000 young people; for this reason, he did not intervene.
By this time an estimated one-quarter of the students had created havoc: they shouted racist interjections at the person introducing Mandela; they burned an ANC flag shouting “brand vlag brand, brand vlag brand [burn flag burn, burn flag burn]”; and when asked by the master of ceremonies to stand and to sing the liberation anthem, Nkosi Sikelel’iAfrika, they turned their backs towards the stage and sang the apartheid anthem, Die Stem van Suid-Afrika. To the side of the raucous right-wingers a disheartened group of mainly black students stood in competition, singing the liberation anthem.
Meanwhile, Mandela’s bodyguards, at first uncertain of what to do with the old white man, then realise the potential for trouble and stand in his way to prevent him reaching the ANC’s president. The raucous students use this as a cue to rush on to the stage and fists fly between the bodyguards and students representing Mandela and the right-wing students now on the stage.
Mr Mandela appears briefly, smiling bravely, and is then whisked off campus, not having been able to deliver his prepared speech recognising the cultural and language commitments of Afrikaners even as he made the case for a more inclusive democracy.
Right-wing student bodies on campus and political organisations off campus used the incident to declare what dangers lay ahead if South Africa continued on its path towards majority rule. The University of Pretoria appeared upset, apologised to Mandela and the ANC and promised action against the culprits. Four months later the university declared that no action would be taken against the students involved. Since then, each time an ANC leader would attempt to come on to campus, there would be fierce resistance from the right-wing white students.
In the meantime it was found that the old man, Hendrik Claassens, had 33 years earlier interrupted a meeting of a Pretoria Study Group where Chief Albert Luthuli — ANC president — would address the group. He then also jumped on to the stage, declaring that “A kaffir is not allowed to address white people”, and punched the Nobel Laureate in the face.
These acts were led by students whose childhoods were formed during the last years of apartheid and who came into the new South Africa with the racial knowledge but without the racial power of the past. Since then the University of Pretoria would continue to be one of the major sites for confrontation of knowledge of the past, of the present and of the future. For almost a century this large institution had trained the white Afrikaner community, advanced the Afrikaans language and promoted the racial knowledge of the apartheid state.
Ordinary Afrikaners had expectations that some of this would continue, that Afrikaans would remain the dominant if not the only medium of instruction. Their children expected to take up residence in the same tradition-soaked koshuise (university residences) as their parents and grandparents. And the Afrikaans community expected that the proud symbols of a racial past — the university choir, the ox wagon at the centre of the university emblem, the institutional flag — would continue to enjoy prominence in the identification of the institution.
What the presence of Mandela on the campus of the University of Pretoria did was to threaten the secure knowledge with which these children had grown up and of which they learned so reliably in those closed circles of influence through parents, teachers, coaches, peers and dominees. The secure knowledge of the state and its institutions, like the University of Pretoria, painted Mandela as the enemy, his organisation (the African National Congress) as terrorist and his world view as communist.
It was something Nelson Mandela understood perfectly and which sentiment was reflected in his accommodating but assertive speech which he prepared but could not deliver on the day:
“I am pleased to have this opportunity to speak at the University of Pretoria. I am aware that this feeling may not be shared by all members of this university and there are undoubtedly many who will not welcome my presence. I think this hostility and fear is not directed at me personally but at what I represent as a leader of the ANC — an organisation that many have been told threatens everything that you value.” [emphasis added]
Mandela then continues by appealing to their own sense of history as Afrikaners.
“Whites are living on a volcano. They are deluded if they think they can continue to live as they have on the backs of black South Africans. Surely you, the Afrikaner, who fought for your freedom from British imperialism would lose all respect for the African people and the blacks in general if we just meekly accepted the denial of our rights?”
It was a masterful speech that was in large part conciliatory, with parts written in Afrikaans, and at the same time assertive about what the liberation movement stood for as a body that sought to remedy injustice on a racially inclusive platform.
Of course these elevated political ideals did not matter to the students at the time. If Mandela came on to this campus, black students would surely follow and everything would be lost. When white students therefore ejected from their campus the president of the ANC, the man who shortly thereafter would become the first president of a democratic South Africa, they were rejecting the threat of the new knowledge and the new clientele he represented. In a very direct way, the transmission line for secure knowledge was being challenged and, for many, this was the first time.
This is an edited extract from Knowledge in the Blood: Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past (Stanford and UCT) by Jonathan Jansen