A week in the new life of a relocated scholar.
Day One
I await one of my heroes in one of Jo’burg’s ubiquitous shopping malls. No, it’s not a rugby player, not a film star, not a politician, not even an academic, but a man I met when I was 15 years old.
In 1962 Olof van Schalkwijk graduated from the University of Pretoria with a degree in psychology, geography and a teacher’s diploma and elected to teach at Capricorn High in Pietersburg. He ended up teaching biology, Afrikaans and geography — the year he arrived, 1963, this diarist was to be found in the geography class. Slight of build and quietly spoken, Chalky, as he was very quickly known, thoughtfully answers my many questions about how he (and my other heroes) experienced “my school”.
He talks about the school’s legendary headmaster, John Harman, and his other colleagues and goes on to say that teaching in that place at that time was “not a job but a way of life”. He should certainly know all about this because after a postgraduate year in Bloomington, Indiana, Chalky took up a career as a resource consultant. For 30-odd years he has been thinking about workplace satisfaction!
As we take our leave, I ask him what to call him now. Clearly, the once obligatory “sir” is out of the question. Should it be Olof, the name that reveals his mother’s ancestry? “Call me Chalky,” he says, “all my friends do.”
Day Two
Our dear Thelma is buried in the Jewish section of Johannesburg’s West Park Cemetery. We’ve come to visit her for the first time since her tragic passing in June 1993 when she was 35 years old. The inscription — with her married name, Gabey — on the marble stone is fading and the man who tends the place tells us that rainwater is seeping into her grave. We hold hands weeping, but laugh when we remember how she once painted her bathtub red and the bathroom walls black! In the bleak early 1990s, our Thelma was truly avant-garde.
After placing a ritual gift of stones on the marble plate, we walk back, passing forests of gravestones. In two centuries, South African Jews have made an enormous contribution to intellectual and cultural life of this country. In the late 1960s when I was an undergraduate at the University of the Witwatersrand, they were at the very centre of political and intellectual energy — as they had been, I imagine, for several decades. This was the case at the University of Cape Town, too. Even at the traditionally Afrikaans universities — Stellenbosch and Pretoria, in particular — Jewish academics, students and intellectuals were prominent in the life of the university.
Given this presence, what does it say about our past and our present that the first Jewish person to be appointed as a vice-chancellor in South Africa was Max Price, who took up that post at UCT in July 2008 — 120 years after higher education classes were first offered in that city.
Day Three
In an age when few of the young want to enter academia, it is a treat to write a letter of support for a young man who has chosen differently. With a bright Cape Town dawn breaking I attest, on my faithful netbook, to Matthias Kranke’s proficiency in English, his intellectual ability and suggest why he has a bright professional future ahead of him as an academic.
Sadly, Matt is not South African but German, and he is taking his PhD at the Free University in Berlin. He was the brightest star in a large cosmopolitan class I taught at Sydney’s Macquarie University in 2008. If successful, the reference will take him to Columbia for a semester as a doctoral fellow. Later, hurrying along St George’s Mall towards an ATM, I happen upon a second-hand bookseller. I pause at the trestle tables to look at the titles. They’re interesting, these — many books on South African history, politics, philosophy, economics.
I look to see if I recognise the collector, but no name appears in any of the covers. Then, my heart pumping, I buy John PR Maud’s City Government: The Johannesburg Experiment, published by Clarendon Press in 1938, for R35.
There is much to say about the book and more to say about the author, so a few lines on both will have to suffice. In 1935 John Maud, fellow of University College, Oxford, was invited both to teach at Wits and to write a book about the city of Johannesburg. In an old-world way, this 412-page tome explains “the art of city government” in Johannesburg through the lens of the now sadly forgotten idea of “public service”.
There is no Soweto on the maps Maud offers. This is Johannesburg under the late-imperial gaze; Johannesburg before it was ravaged by the ideology of apartheid, before it was damaged by the recent fad, the “new public management”, which, by relying on the market, has entirely corroded the idea that bureaucrats are supposed to “serve” the public.
With this book done, Maud might well have thought that his business with South Africa was done, too. It wasn’t to be. In 1959 in the build-up to Hendrik Verwoerd’s declaration of the republic, Sir John, as he was then, was appointed British high commissioner to South Africa. He carried out his diplomatic responsibilities with the same thoroughness, professionalism and, indeed, imperial guile he brought to the book in my hands.
This experience was written up in a riveting diary kept by his wife, Jean. Twenty years ago I was given a copy of these privately published diaries, which make Jean Redcliffe-Maud, as she called herself, appear far more interesting than her husband. Then three years ago, and totally unexpectedly, I was offered the South African section of Lady Maud’s archive. In vain, I pleaded with a local university to pay the costs of freighting the papers to the country. So, instead of being here, where they belong, they’re in Oxford awaiting the attention of a bright-eyed doctoral student.
Day Four
Aristotle’s idea that “educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all” could be the motto of my undergraduate years and each visit to Wits brings back nostalgic waves of that discovery. On a distant corner of that campus, in what used to be the National Institute for Personal Research, I find myself in the “Wits Professional Hub”.
Yunus Ballim, Wits’s deputy vice-chancellor, opens an international workshop on the development of young professionals in the humanities. He confesses that Wits is “playing the [global] ranking game” and that, in this game, the humanities are not big players. But he goes on to say that the humanities are at the core of any university, a point reiterated by Loyiso Nongxa, Wits’s vice-chancellor and an old friend.
Why does the ever-elusive promise of science (and its imagined link to economic prosperity) continue to pull universities away from deep debates on what makes us human? Especially at a time in which the mindless violence of the superpower continues unabated; a time in which wealth is redistributed daily from the poor to the rich; a time in which the discourse on rights has been turned to favour the interests of the powerful.
The day’s deliberations yield some promises from the foreign guests and local academic leaders, but I leave wondering how much of their energy and resources will be taken up reconstructing (or should that read, raiding?) the universities in newly liberated Egypt and Tunisia?
Peter Vale is professor of humanities, University of Johannesburg, and Nelson Mandela chair of politics emeritus, Rhodes University. His Black Arts diary entry appears monthly in Getting Ahead (next edition April 29)