In the late afternoon of Wednesday, 21 September 1966, I took part in a small political demonstration on the campus of the University of Cape Town (UCT). It was broken up violently by university authorities, and I still have a copy of a two-page “Witness Statement” that I wrote immediately after the event, outlining the bare facts of what happened. The final paragraph is a threat to sue the university for defamation, common assault, and malicious damage to property. I never followed through with that, but my witness statement, together with those of other protesters was later submitted as evidence to the Principal and Vice-Chancellor, Dr Jacobus “JP” Duminy. There are several other documents related to the incident in the UCT Administrative Archives that I have drawn on in writing this article, and there is also remarkable TV footage of the event that can be freely viewed through a link provided in the penultimate endnote.
Background
Looking back on the demonstration more than half a century later, what seems most interesting to me is the extent to which it encapsulates campus politics – and indeed national politics – at the time, enabling us “to see a world in a grain of sand”, in William Blake’s memorable phrase [1]. It also provides an opportunity to reflect on the subsequent lives of the intrepid demonstrators.
At the time, we were just a motley collection of 13 young students, but interesting experiences lay ahead of us. I was an elected member of the Students’ Representative Council. A few months after the demonstration, in January 1967, I was appointed Junior Lecturer in Psychology at UCT. When my post came up for renewal in 1968, I was informed by a new Head of Department that my reappointment would not be confirmed, for reasons that he told me in strict confidence were political and had come down directly from the Dean of the Faculty of Science, acting on behalf of the Principal. This seemed plausible enough at the time, because the university had written to the student newspaper Varsity on 15 June 1966 complaining about several articles, and stating that “much of the material in the column written by Andrew Colman is abusive of the Principal, designed to undermine the authority of the Principal, and probably unlawful” (allegedly contravening the Riotous Assembles Act of 1956). After a few difficult months without pay, during which I argued my case strenuously, the university eventually confirmed my appointment, but by then I had accepted a lectureship at Rhodes University in Grahamstown.
The truth about the attempt to sack me eventually emerged after an article appeared in Varsity on 16 April 1969 describing how my reappointment had been blocked for political reasons. The Dean of the Faculty of Science objected strenuously, claiming that he had never asked my Head of Department to get rid of me. After checking with me, Varsity stood by its story, and the new Principal and Vice-Chancellor, Sir Richard Luyt, decided to conduct an investigation into the matter. The finding of the investigation was that my Head of Department had tried to remove me entirely on his own initiative, and this led to his academic career rather than mine collapsing a short while later, after more of his activities came to light. I moved to Rhodes University in January 1969 and was lucky enough to secure a lectureship at the University of Leicester in the UK in October 1970, where I am still working as a Professor of Psychology.
One of the most active and enthusiastic participants in the demonstration was Kenneth Hughes. Ken was a radical student activist [2] , [3] who gave some intentionally provocative talks on campus, including a contribution to a debate entitled “Is God dead?”, hosted jointly by the Students’ Christian Association and the YMCA in 1967, that caused an almighty backlash. After Varsity reported what he had said under the headline “Christian View of Sex All Wrong – Hughes”, Chris Pritchard, who had been Varsity editor at the time, was charged and convicted of blasphemy – a complete disaster if ever there was one. After graduating, Ken went on to acquire not one but two PhD degrees, the first from UCT and the second from the University of Warwick in the UK, before being appointed Lecturer in Mathematics at UCT, where he worked until his retirement as an academic, political thinker, and all-round polymath.
The demonstration was about the official opening of the new Snape Civil Engineering building, behind the Jameson Hall (now called the Sarah Baartman Hall) on the upper campus. Our protest was against a decision by the university to invite an apartheid government minister, Jan Haak, to open the building. The Snape building was named after Alfred Ernest Snape, a British-born Professor of Civil Engineering from 1910, initially at the South African College, the forerunner of UCT, until his death in 1946 [4] . Jan Haak was a rising cabinet minister [5] who was to retire as Minister of Economic Affairs in 1970 after being embroiled in a corruption scandal in which he was found to have granted fishing quotas to friends and members of parliament [6] .
At the time of the demonstration, the atmosphere on the campus was distinctly charged. Balthazar Johannes Vorster had been Prime Minister for just 10 days, following the assassination in the House of Assembly on 6 September 1966 of his predecessor, Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd. The inspiring words of US Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s address, delivered at UCT on the annual “Day of Affirmation” [of academic freedom] a few months earlier on 6 June – two years to the day before his assassination in Los Angeles – were still hanging in the air. Jan Haak was a senior representative of a government that had imposed racial segregation on the university through the grotesquely misnamed Extension of University Education Act of 1959 [7] , had curtailed academic freedom in other ways and, more generally, had maintained and supported the racist, anti-democratic, and repressive apartheid regime in the country. We felt that it was simply wrong in principle to invite him as a guest of honour to open the Snape building, and a small number of us friends and acquaintances therefore agreed to hold a placard demonstration at the opening ceremony.
Other demonstrators
Before describing how the demonstration played out, it will be helpful to introduce the other participants and outline their subsequent lives. Keith Gottschalk was the principal organizer of the protest, inasmuch as it could be said to have been organized at all. He was to become a prominent anti-apartheid activist and Head of the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Western Cape (2004–2006). He had asked us all to wear academic gowns – yes, indeed, South African students sometimes wore gowns when demonstrating back then! – but I turned up in a duffel coat, because I did not own a gown. The placards that we used in the demonstration were fashioned in the students’ union offices by a fine art student, Lys Jacobs, who also participated in the demonstration. Lys later married an actuary named Gershon Lipschitz (later changed to Lipshen), had three children, and settled in Manchester, UK, where she worked for many years in calligraphy and manuscript illumination. Elizabeth (Lisa) James was studying for a BA degree, majoring in English. After graduating in 1966, she moved to the UK, married a physics teacher names James van Loon in 1968, and became a secondary school art teacher. They settled in Canada and lived there for many years, before retiring in Sydney, Australia, closer to family members. Brenda Morris, a psychology student and my girlfriend at the time, left for the UK in 1969 and became a clinical psychologist in the National Health Service, and she also developed a second career as an award-winning sculptor. In 1977 she married the prominent left-leaning Labour Party Member of Parliament, Roger Godsiff, became known as Julia Godsiff, and had a son and a daughter. In November 2019, Roger Godsiff was barred from standing for the Labour Party in the December general election because of his vociferous opposition to LGBT-inclusive education in schools [8] . He stood as an independent candidate but failed to win re-election, after almost 30 years as a Labour MP.
Apart from Ken Hughes, Keith Gottschalk, and myself, four other demonstrators went on to academic and academic-related careers. Jonathan Sacks obtained a PhD in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1975, then worked as a postdoctoral researcher under Karen Uhlenbeck at the University of Illinois. In 1981 he co-authored an influential paper with Uhlenbeck, proving what came to be called the Sacks–Uhlenbeck existence theorem, that in 2019 contributed significantly towards her becoming the first woman ever to win the Abel Prize, an equivalent of the Nobel Prize for mathematics. Jonathan then held a junior professorship at MIT for a short while before quitting academia in 1982. He spent the next 25 years working in the greater Boston area, mostly in computer-aided design, scientific visualization, and neuroscience research, including stints at computer vision and in neurology research groups associated with Harvard University. He taught mathematics part-time in New Mexico for a few years before settling in Oakland, California. Robert Schrire completed his graduate studies in economics at the University of California and Columbia University in the US and returned to South Africa, eventually to become a Professor and Head of the Department of Political Studies at UCT (1982–1985). Stan Kahn became a sociologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in the 1970s and 1980s, then Executive Director of the Funda Centre in Soweto in the 1980s and 1990s, and later worked with health-related NGOs and foreign donors in the public sector. Peredur Williams left South Africa and became a distinguished astronomer at the University of Edinburgh and the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Jennifer Hyman was the only member of the group of protesters who went into journalism, and her career was not without incident. She married Clive Emdon, who had studied Comparative African Government and Law at UCT, was arrested for possessing banned literature, and went on to become Editor of the daily Black edition of the Rand Daily Mail and Vice President of the South African Society of Journalists. Jennifer spent the next decades working for newspapers in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. In 1979, while working as a reporter on the Sunday Express in Johannesburg, she was charged, together with her editor, with contempt of court and criminal defamation of the security police for an article, published on 21 May 1978, in which she had alleged that many juvenile political detainees had been arrested and sentenced after 30-minute sham trials without the knowledge of their families or legal representatives [9] . The prosecution was triggered by her steadfast refusal to name her sources – activists and lawyers whom the authorities were keen to apprehend. She and her editor were represented in court by the brilliant civil rights advocate, Sydney Kentridge, and both were acquitted. She emigrated to the USA in 1983 and became a reporter on the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, New York. In 1992 she was listed as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for journalism (investigative reporting), for stories she wrote about secret links between the CIA and Rochester Institute of Technology [10] . She was not an actual Pulitzer Prize winner, as stated in an article on the UCT 1968 sit-in website [11] , but being listed as a finalist was a massive achievement, nevertheless. In 2004, she became Director of Communications for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a national interfaith peace fellowship [12] .
Guy Struben came from an extremely wealthy family, including the brothers Fred and Harry Struben, who were the first to discover gold on the Witwatersrand in 1884 [13] . After completing a degree in English, he emigrated to the UK and then, according to his best friend at the time, did very little, apart from smoking cannabis and occasionally teaching English as a Foreign Language. In 1978 he married one of his students, a Mexican woman called Anna Moreno Cervantes, then in 1989 an English woman, Elissa Dereford, and in 2016 he died of metastatic cancer.
Susan Jessop was a second-year medical student and the younger sister of Jill Jessop, a prominent anti-apartheid activist and secretary of the Liberal Party in the Cape Province who had been arrested in 1964 under the dreaded 90-day detention law (the General Law Amendment Act of 1963). After qualifying as a dermatologist, Sue joined the state health service at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. As a clinical member of the UCT staff, she also published a number of research papers, contributed to curriculum development and teaching, and worked on the promotion of clinical education in under-resourced primary care clinics.
Clash with the authorities
These thirteen radical student protesters assembled outside the Snape building shortly before 4:00 p.m. on 21 September 1966, as the ceremony inside, attended by about 300 people, was getting under way. We found a Canadian (CBC) television crew waiting for us there. They had been in South Africa since the Robert F. Kennedy address and had been tipped off about the planned demonstration by Jennifer Hyman. Also present was Gordon Winter, a British-born journalist whom I knew quite well, because he had been sniffing around radical student groups for some time and at one stage even had an exploitative sexual relationship with one of the female demonstrators. He was in his mid-30s, had been an arms smuggler, had associated with notorious London criminals including the Kray twins, and in 1955 had been sentenced to 21 months in prison in the UK for aggravated burglary. What we did not know at the time was that in 1963 he had been recruited by South African Intelligence and was working as a spy for the Bureau of State Security (BOSS). In 1981 he published a book entitled Inside BOSS: South Africa’s Secret Police [14] in which he gave frank details of his criminal past and bragged about his odious spying activities in South Africa.
Also waiting outside the Snape building was Mr D. C. Robertson, a senior lecturer in civil engineering and a member of the University Senate. He was a Commandant in the UCT Regiment of the South African Army, a unit that had been mobilized during the State of Emergency following the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 of 69 unarmed black people protesting peacefully against the pass laws. He was a supporter of the Nationalist government, and two years later he was to be the only member of Senate who opposed the appointment of a black lecturer, Archie Mafeje, in an incident that eventually triggered the famous UCT sit-in of 14–22 August 1968, after the university withdrew its offer of employment to Mafeje in response to government pressure [15] . Robertson accosted us aggressively, with the words: “Take your posters and get.” We asked him on what authority he was ordering us to leave, and he replied that he had spent a lot of time organizing the event. He pointed at Ken Hughes, who was carrying the placards, and asked him what his name was. I reminded everyone that we were not obliged to give our names, and Ken refused to say who he was. Robertson then asked whether any of us were willing to give our names. The only reply came from Gordon Winter, who said: “Yes; my name is Gordon Winter. I’m a reporter for Post.”
At that point, the Principal’s liaison officer, Danie Fourie, appeared at the scene. He was a patriotic Afrikaner and was well known to us as an aggressive bully, a police reservist, and an informer for the Special Branch (security police). Apoplectic with rage (this would have been even more frightening than it was but for the fact that it was his default emotional state), he shouted: “We know what organization you belong to.” When Stan Kahn challenged him to name it, he spat out: “The ping-pong club.” He then began abusing the demonstrators verbally. He told Guy Struben: “You won’t reach my age; pimps die young.” He repeated the slander, adding “You can quote me on that.” He ostentatiously photographed each of the demonstrators’ faces and repeated several times that we would all be sent down. Fourie and Robertson, helped by the university’s head janitor, a Mr Hayden, then proceeded to rip the placards from our hands and tear them to pieces. Robertson, whose general demeanour was more formal and less thuggish than Fourie’s, seemed to balk at attacking female demonstrators physically, but Fourie had no such qualms and went for both sexes with equal gusto. Brenda Morris sustained two cracked ribs in the scuffle.
While our placards were being destroyed, Stan Kahn and Brenda Morris slipped away and hastily prepared new versions in the students’ union offices. They returned with the new placards hidden under their gowns shortly before the opening ceremony ended and the Principal, the government minister, Jan Haak and his wife, the President of the Students’ Representative Council, Ian Hume [16] , and assorted dignitaries and guests began to emerge from the Snape building. At that moment we hoisted the new placards above our heads. The placards proclaimed: “WE DEPLORE VIOLENCE”. The ones that had been destroyed had contained messages such as: “STUDENTS REJECT CAMPUS APARTHEID”.
The whole demonstration, including the verbal abuse and physical assaults, was recorded by the Canadian TV crew and photographed by the journalist Gordon Winter. At one stage, Danie Fourie tried unsuccessfully to confiscate Winter’s camera. After the demonstration, the TV crew recorded interviews with a few of the demonstrators and also Ian Hume, in his capacity as President of the Students’ Representative Council, of which I was also an elected member at the time. Gordon Winter played a leading role in the filming, buzzing around and steering the TV crew towards people to interview, including Ken Hughes, Stan Kahn, and me. Some of the footage was later included in a 30-minute CBC TV documentary entitled God’s Country that has survived, and the section depicting the Snape building protest is freely available to be viewed [17] .
Aftermath
The UCT Administrative Archives include a file on the Snape building demonstration, revealing that the university took the incident far more seriously than we had realized at the time. The Principal had six meetings and numerous phone calls with the President of the Students’ Union to discuss it. He wrote to the South African Ambassador in Ottawa enquiring about the Canadian television programme and any press coverage resulting from it, and the Ambassador responded by sending back a transcript of the interviews from the programme. Thanking him, the Principal wrote: “The transcripts confirmed my suspicions that the whole discourteous and inappropriate incident was deliberately contrived by the small group of students who took part in it. It was a most deplorable and senseless gesture which seemed to have been planned so as to gain the maximum publicity – to the detriment of the University!”
The university’s chief concern appears to have been bad publicity and reputational damage. The documents contained in the file include my witness statement and those of other demonstrators and guests who attended the event. Other documents reveal that the Principal’s Liaison Officer, Danie Fourie, made increasingly strenuous efforts to get the demonstrators, especially me and Keith Gottschalk, severely disciplined, and these documents also suggest why his efforts failed. In particular, Ian Hume was at the same time pressing the Principal to hold a full-scale enquiry into the incident and to get Fourie to apologise formally for his conduct.
On 22 September 1966 the Cape Times morning newspaper carried a report of the demonstration, quoting Fourie’s threat to have the students expelled. The Reverend Thomas Frederick Kime, the well-known anti-apartheid Rector of a non-white community in Paarl, about 40 miles from Cape Town, must have written a letter supporting the protesters. It is missing from the Administrative Archives, but the Principal’s patronizing reply is preserved: “I appreciate the interest which you take in the affairs of the University, but I cannot help feeling that in this particular instance you seemingly lost sight of the possibility that there might have been another side to the story.” A Senior Lecturer in Architecture called Senior Bolland read the report and wrote a letter to the Principal on the same day: “May I plead for your tolerance of the students? ... That such protest was made is, surely, not unexpected. That it was embarrassing and undignified in the eyes of such officers as Mr Fourie is also not unexpected.” Expressing the opposite view, a student called John Sunde and eight other students in Smuts Hall of Residence signed a joint letter to the Principal stating: “We feel that strongest possible measures should be taken against these people [demonstrators].” Ian Hume wrote to the Principal listing “salient points of objection to Mr Fourie’s actions”, including “the infringement of the right to demonstrate”, “physical assault”, and “the use of abusive language”.
The file also contains a long “Report from the Principal’s Liaison Officer to Principal on Student Misbehaviour on 21.9.66”. Its author, Danie Fourie, wrote: “I found a group of dishevelled-looking individuals, unkempt in appearance and variously dressed – some in undergraduate gowns, one girl [in fact it was Brenda Morris] in undergraduate gown with a cockney-type rainproof cap askew, one whom I recognised as Mr. Colman.” Fourie saw “placards ‘Oppose Neo-Nazi Bills’ etc., painted in red and others with similar slogans in black, including ‘Students Reject Campus Apartheid’ ”. He mentioned Keith Gottschalk and me as particularly blameworthy students. At the top of the report, in the Principal’s distinctive handwriting, are the words: “Counsel was, I think, asked”, and below it, in a different handwriting, initialled illegibly, “Yes”. At the bottom of the report, in the Principal’s handwriting, are further comments, referring back to Ian Hume’s list of “salient points”, including: “The P.L.O.’s report makes no mention of tearing up posters”.
On 26 September 1966, Fourie wrote to the Principal in a tone of desperation: “It is beyond doubt in my mind that the aim of the group was not a genuine desire to protest against anything, BUT THEIR SOLE AIM WAS TO GRATIFY THE BASE DESIRES OF A FOREIGN T.V. GROUP TO FIND SCURRULOUS PROPAGANDA SLOSH AND THAT THEY DID SO MINDFUL OF THE HARM THAT IT WILL DO TO THE UNIVERSITY” [caps in original]. He added: “Even when they were made fully aware of the despicable nature of the results of their action and the contraventions of which they were making themselves guilty, they were still prepared and determined to go on to achieve their disgraceful aims.” Fourie reported that a certain Sergeant Swart had informed him who had invited the Canadian TV company to the protest. If this is the Sergeant Swart who was a Special Branch (security police) officer in Cape Town – Jennifer Hyman, among others had dealings with him around that time – then the implication is that the Principal knew this, because Fourie did not need to explain who he was; and that in turn suggests that the Principal may have knowingly condoned a link between the university and the Special Branch, which we suspected at the time.
On 12 October, Ian Hume issued a statement noting that he had heard from the Principal by telephone that no apology would be forthcoming from members of the University staff who tried to break up the demonstration. Hume commented: “We feel it necessary to instigate a full-scale enquiry into the incident so that the facts can be made known.” A few days later, on17 October, he wrote to the Principal: “I would like to express my concern at the need for an expeditious convening of the enquiry.” At the bottom of this letter are notes in the Principal’s handwriting, dated 18 October, indicating that he had replied by telephone: “As far as I was concerned the only point at issue had to do with the students’ claim that they had a right to be on any part of university property – at any time they wanted – and that this was a legal point on which I would have to seek legal opinion.” At that point, the issue appears to have fizzled out. Perhaps the Principal had already sought legal advice and was advised that students did indeed have that right –that would explain his earlier note about having sought counsel’s opinion – or perhaps he simply did not want the details of the incident exposed to public scrutiny.
Conclusion
The Snape building demonstration was one of many protests on the UCT campus during the 1960s. It did not play a prominent part in the struggle against apartheid or even in the local struggle for academic freedom at UCT, and we did not expect it to. Our demonstration was not even intended to try to stop Jan Haak from opening the Snape building. We felt, nevertheless, that the opening event should not be allowed to pass without any expression of dissent. We had a tacit understanding of the moral principle that there are some battles that are worth fighting even if they cannot be won.
This demonstration is an interesting case study precisely because of its short-term inconsequentiality – a typical feature of campus politics in South Africa in the darkest days of apartheid, when there seemed no end in sight. Nevertheless, like other political demonstrations at that time, it certainly helped to radicalize the demonstrators who participated in it, especially the less experienced ones, and through them, no doubt, some of their friends and relatives, and the effect might have continued to diffuse through them to others. This brings to mind a powerful metaphor in Robert F. Kennedy’s Day of Affirmation address a few months earlier, that every small act of resistance “sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance” [18] . In the years that followed, a multitude of small pressures did gradually build up against the apartheid regime until it began to crumble in the 1980s. It was rapidly dismantled after Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, and the country had its first ever properly democratic election on 27 April 1994.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the following people who helped me in various ways: Beverley Angus, Jill Boswell, Jonty Driver, Prunella Fiddian-Green, Julia Godsiff, Keith Gottschalk, Madi Gray, Ken Hughes, Jen Hyman, Sue Jessop, Stan Kahn, Lys Lipshen, Howard Phillips, Jonathan Sacks, Caroline Salinger, Robert Schrire, Clive Stannard, Lisa van Loon, Anna Vorndran, Peredur Williams.
End notes
[1]. This is the first line of William Blake’s poem Auguries of Innocence, written in 1803, from his notebook later entitled The Pickering Manuscript. <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Pickering_Manuscript> ↵
[2]. We viewed Ken Hughes at the time as a radical, although in later years he commented disapprovingly on the radical activism of the 1960s: see Helen Swingler, “Struggle veterans recall Kennedy’s 1966 ‘Ripple of Hope’ speech” (University of Cape Town website). <https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2016-03-31-struggle-veterans-recall-kennedys-1966-ldquoripple-of-hoperdquo-speech> Ken Hughes is quoted as commenting, after watching footage of the Snape building demonstration: “There were certain things you avoided doing and some of them were also because you didn’t want to score an own goal. Some things were counterproductive and I’m very conscious [seeing the video clip] of this.” Ken also describes a later visit to the campus by the State President, for which he wrote and distributed a pamphlet – “a splendid piece of subtlety called The Visit”. It alluded to an arthouse film about an embittered woman seeking revenge and the townspeople who would benefit from her largesse after committing murder on her behalf. According to Ken, “the parallels were clear to those who understood” and “most importantly, it prevented us from having a confrontation with the law”. I doubt that many of the radical students had such scruples at the time. We considered confrontation to be necessary and even desirable, and we weren’t afraid of offending the sensibilities of our racist and reactionary opponents. As a young student, Ken seemed less concerned about offending people who held opposing views and thereby “scoring an own goal”, “causing a backlash”, or creating a “complete disaster”. ↵
[3]. Ken Hughes has described himself as having been “a mere Social Democrat” at the time: see Ken Hughes (2018). “Lessons of the great UCT sit-in” (UCT 1968 sit-in website). <https://uct1968sitin.wordpress.com/2018/07/01/lessons-of-the-great-uct-sit-in-ken-hughes/> ↵
In the same paragraph, he described me as having had “Trotskyist leanings”. In reality, although I and other members of the Modern World Society over which I presided were openly critical of liberal approaches, because we believed that it was futile to try to defeat the brutal apartheid leviathan by persuading people with entrenched reactionary views that it was wrong, we were not dogmatic. We were equally critical of Soviet state capitalism, as we called it, which we regarded as repressive and authoritarian, and we were interested in almost any radical and anti-Soviet ideas. These did indeed include Trotskyist ideas – we were in touch with some members of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) and the African People’s Democratic Union of South Africa (APDUSA) in the Cape area, and they fed us thought-provoking underground literature throughout the 1960s. In general, we supported almost any radical action that might save us from the abandonment of all hope. Ken Hughes’s self-description as “a mere Social Democrat” does not mesh with my recollection of him in the 1960s. To cite just one example, it was he, and not one of the other radical students of whom he later became so critical, who got hold of Karl Marx Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, edited by Bottomore and Rubel (Penguin, 1963) soon after it was published and circulated it among the others.
[4]. “Snape, Alfred Ernest.” Artefacts. <http://www.artefacts.co.za/main/Buildings/archframes.php?archid=1590> ↵
[5]. “Jan Haak.” French Wikipédia. <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Haak> ↵
[6]. Robert J. Wood et al. (2014). “Afrikaans business under apartheid: The case of the Western Cape”. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 5(27), 1361–1371 (at p. 1366). <https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3287/cafb5b29fc026b8e22e4cb615c66b83e4318.pdf> ↵
[7]. Extension of University Education Act, 1959. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extension_of_University_Education_Act,_1959> ↵
[8]. “Ex-Labour MP to run as independent after being dropped over LGBT row”. The Guardian, 8 November 2019. <https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/nov/08/ex-labour-mp-to-run-as-independent-after-being-dropped-over-lgbt-row> ↵
[9]. Survey of Race Relations in South Africa: 1979. Johannesburg: Institute of Race Relations (at p. 168). <http://psimg.jstor.org/fsi/img/pdf/t0/10.5555/al.sff.document.boo19800300.042.000_final.pdf> ↵
[10]. The Pulitzer Prizes 1992. Finalist in Investigative Reporting. Finalist: Jennifer Hyman of Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, NY. <https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/jennifer-hyman> ↵
[11]. Michael Popham, “Being Varsity editor in 1968” (UCT 1968 sit-in website). <https://uct1968sitin.wordpress.com/2018/09/03/being-varsity-editor-in-1968-mike-popham/> ↵
[12]. “ ‘I knew I had to find another way...’: An interview with Jennifer Hyman by Richard Deats” FOR – Fellowship of Reconciliation Magazine, 24 November 2004. <http://web.archive.org/web/20080709080047/http://www.forusa.org/fellowship/mar-apr-04/hyman_interview.html> In this interesting interview, Jennifer describes her early experiences at King David School in Johannesburg and especially the radicalizing influence of her History teacher, Donovan Lowry, an early Liberal Party member, and her Afrikaans teacher, Marius Schoon, a member of the banned Congress of Democrats who later (in 1964) planted a bomb at the Hillbrow Police Station in Johannesburg, for which he served 12 years in prison. ↵
[13]. Early Pioneers: The Struben Brothers (Joburg website). ”<https://www.joburg.org.za/play_/Pages/Play%20in%20Joburg/Culture%20and%20Heritage/Links/Early-pioneers-The-Struben-Brothers.aspx> ↵
[14]. Gordon Winter (1981). Inside BOSS: South Africa’s Secret Police. London: Penguin. <https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inside-Boss-Africas-Secret-Police/dp/014005751X> A London literary agent told me that this book led to a string of libel writs that made it the most expensive book Penguin had ever published. ↵
[15]. Fred Hendricks, “The Mafeje affair: The University of Cape Town and apartheid.” African Studies, 67(3), 423–451. <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00020180802505061> This article also includes a brief account of the Snape building demonstration. ↵
[16]. Hume, I. (2018), From the Edge of Empire: A Memoir (Outskirts Press). <https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=q4HOtQEACAAJ&printsec=copyright&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false > Ian Hume was a slightly older student who had been a Captain in the Rhodesian Army before quitting to study for a degree at UCT. After graduating, he won a Beit scholarship to Oxford, where he obtained a PhD. He then had a long career working for the World Bank in Washington DC and eastern Europe, and he played an important role in Rhodesia’s transition to independence as Zimbabwe. He has describes his career in this excellent autobiography. ↵
[17]. A 30-minute TV documentary, God’s Country (1966), produced by Bill Harcourt for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Television Services, broadcast on 27 September 1966, presenter/interviewer: Stanley Burke. A five-minute excerpt, covering the Snape building demonstration is free to view. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL9GiEN1sX8> ↵
In the interviews immediately following the demonstration, Ken Hughes drew attention to the fact that several demonstrators had been verbally abused and threatened with expulsion, Lys Jacobs (I believe) quoted the “pimps die young” slander, and Stan Kahn said that many prescribed books were not on our library shelves because of issues of the Government Gazette [listing banned publications]. Responding to a question from the interviewer, Sue Jessop confirmed that a white corpse could not be dissected in a hospital by a non-white person and added that a non-white doctor could not attend or watch a post mortem on a white body. Ian Hume, not a demonstrator but President of the Students’ Representative Council, in which capacity he had attended the opening ceremony, said that the demonstrators had a right to protest, and the fact that the protest was broken up was completely reprehensible. I (Andrew Colman) commented that political protests were dangerous, exposing participants to the risk of banning orders, detention without trial, and other repressive measures. The interviewer remarked that the head of the National Union of South African Students [Ian Robertson] had been placed under a banning order for inviting Robert F. Kennedy to give the Day of Affirmation address, and I pointed out that he too had not transgressed any law. Finally, Ken Hughes expressed the view that things could only get worse for years and years to come in South Africa. The footage also includes interviews conducted the following day with students on the campus of the Afrikaans-medium and generally pro-government Stellenbosch University; these students claimed that the demonstrators were not students but professional demonstrators, hired and paid by opponents of the government.
[18]. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Day of Affirmation Address, University of Cape Town, 6 June 1966. <https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-family/robert-f-kennedy/robert-f-kennedy-speeches/day-of-affirmation-address-university-of-capetown-capetown-south-africa-june-6-1966> I have added a comma that is missing from the official version of the quoted passage but is essential to make its meaning clear. ↵