This text refers to question.
“For heaven’s sake,” 1 my father said, seeing me off at the airport, “don’t get drunk, don’t get pregnant — and don’t get involved in politics.” He was right to be concerned. Rhodes University in the late 1970s, with its Sir Herbert Baker-designed campus and lush green lawns, looked prosperous and sedate. But the Sunday newspapers had been full of the escapades of its notorious drinking clubs and loose morals; the Eastern Cape was, after the riots of 1976, a place of turmoil and desperate poverty; and the campus was thought by most conservative parents to be a hotbed of political activity.
The Nationalist policy of forced removals meant thousands of black people had been moved from the cities into the nearby black “homelands” of Transkei and Ciskei, and dumped there with only a standpipe and a couple of huts for company; two out of three children died of malnutrition before the age of three. I arrived in 1977, the year after the Soweto riots, to study journalism. Months later, Steve Biko was murdered in custody. The campus tipped over into turmoil. There were demonstrations and hunger strikes.
For most of us, Rhodes was a revelation. We had been brought up to respect authority. Here, we could forge a whole new identity, personally and politically. Out of that class of 1979 came two women whose identities merge with the painful birth of the new South Africa: two journalism students whose journey was to take them through defiance, imprisonment and torture during the apartheid years.
One of the quietest girls in the class, Marion Sparg, joined the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), and was eventually convicted of bombing two police stations. An Asian journalist, Zubeida Jaffer, was imprisoned and tortured, yet ultimately chose not to prosecute her torturers.
Today you can trace the footprints of my classmates across the opposition press in South Africa and the liberal press in the UK — The Guardian, the Observer and the Financial Times. Even the Spectator (that’s me). Because journalism was not a course offered at “black” universities, we had a scattering of black students. It was the first time many of us would ever have met anyone who was black and not a servant. I went to hear Pik Botha, the foreign minister, a Hitlerian figure with a narrow moustache, an imposing bulk and a posse of security men. His reception was suitably stormy, even mocking — students flapping their arms and saying, “Pik-pik-pik-P-I-I-I-K!’, like chattering hens.
But students who asked questions had to identify themselves first. There were spies in every class. We never worked out who they were, although some of us suspected the friendly Afrikaans guy with the shark’s tooth necklace.
“For heaven’s sake,” 1 my father said, seeing me off at the airport, “don’t get drunk, don’t get pregnant — and don’t get involved in politics.” He was right to be concerned. Rhodes University in the late 1970s, with its Sir Herbert Baker-designed campus and lush green lawns, looked prosperous and sedate. But the Sunday newspapers had been full of the escapades of its notorious drinking clubs and loose morals; the Eastern Cape was, after the riots of 1976, a place of turmoil and desperate poverty; and the campus was thought by most conservative parents to be a hotbed of political activity.
The Nationalist policy of forced removals meant thousands of black people had been moved from the cities into the nearby black “homelands” of Transkei and Ciskei, and dumped there with only a standpipe and a couple of huts for company; two out of three children died of malnutrition before the age of three. I arrived in 1977, the year after the Soweto riots, to study journalism. Months later, Steve Biko was murdered in custody. The campus tipped over into turmoil. There were demonstrations and hunger strikes.
For most of us, Rhodes was a revelation. We had been brought up to respect authority. Here, we could forge a whole new identity, personally and politically. Out of that class of 1979 came two women whose identities merge with the painful birth of the new South Africa: two journalism students whose journey was to take them through defiance, imprisonment and torture during the apartheid years.
One of the quietest girls in the class, Marion Sparg, joined the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), and was eventually convicted of bombing two police stations. An Asian journalist, Zubeida Jaffer, was imprisoned and tortured, yet ultimately chose not to prosecute her torturers.
Today you can trace the footprints of my classmates across the opposition press in South Africa and the liberal press in the UK — The Guardian, the Observer and the Financial Times. Even the Spectator (that’s me). Because journalism was not a course offered at “black” universities, we had a scattering of black students. It was the first time many of us would ever have met anyone who was black and not a servant. I went to hear Pik Botha, the foreign minister, a Hitlerian figure with a narrow moustache, an imposing bulk and a posse of security men. His reception was suitably stormy, even mocking — students flapping their arms and saying, “Pik-pik-pik-P-I-I-I-K!’, like chattering hens.
But students who asked questions had to identify themselves first. There were spies in every class. We never worked out who they were, although some of us suspected the friendly Afrikaans guy with the shark’s tooth necklace.
Janice Warman. South Africa’s Rebel Whites. In: The Guardian Weekly, 20/11/2009 (adapted).
The overall view the author outlines of late ‘70s South Africa is
