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360º PERSPECTIVES | ISSUE 7 | 2020/2021
» In 1959, the apartheid Parliament passed the Extension of University Education Act, which ironically limited black people’s access to higher education to ethnically defined institutions. HE PLAN WAS TO GROW a class of black intelligentsia who would collaborate with and support the apartheid project. In 1960, the University College of the Western Cape, a constituent college of the University of South Africa, admitted the first group of 166 so-called coloured students. Its all-white Afrikaner faculty offered limited training for positions in schools and civil service institutions serving coloureds.
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The hostile academic staff, drab buildings and poor amenities were uninspiring, and the location surrounded by railway yards, sand and dense vegetation was disparaged as a ‘bush college’ by the students themselves. The student leaders who met in the cafeteria to discuss these problems were not as docile as the authorities had hoped. By the end of the decade, influenced by the South African Students Organisation (SASO), the students
