Wits 90 Years Book

Wits:

90 years of Making History

Sue Krige

Italo Calvino’s words about cities and their history may equally well apply to a university.

“The city ... does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps … every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

Cities are invisible stories and stories are invisible cities.”

Cover photo: Taken in 1939, this aerial view demonstrates Wits’ physical relationship with the city – against the backdrop of the emerging skyscrapers in the CBD, the cooling towers of the power station in Newtown and the ubiquitous mine dumps

Wits:

90 years of Making History Sue Krige

CONTENTS Message from the Vice-Chancellor 1 Introduction 3 ORIGINS 7 Showing its Mettle 9 Fit for a Prince 11 BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 13 Agriculture, Assassination and Empire 15 “In a Huge Cloud of Feathery Sparks” 17 A Memory of Mining 19 “A Wild and Solitary Place” 21 Pipe Dreams and “Faraway Spots in Africa” 23 TEACHING & LEARNING 25 An “Anti-Women Complex” 27 The Invisible Bard 29 Teaching Scientific Thinking 31

Editor: Sarah Beswick Creative Director: Kasthuri Naidoo Graphic Design and Layout: Stephan van Wyk First publication 2012 © Sue Krige

RESEARCH 33 “Exploiting What is Unique” 35 Home is Where the Hearth is 37 STUDENT LIFE 39 Satire and Subversion 41 “This Tendency to Vulgarity” 43 Secrets and Spies 45 “An Education Beyond Academic” 47 Passing the Buck 49 SPORT 51 In the Long Run 53 Earning that ‘Clever Boys’ Tag 55

THE ARTS 57 Black Power 59 A Conversation of Epic Proportions 61 A Material World 63 Provocative and Delightful 65 COMMUNITY 67 A Labour of Love 69 Soul Medicine 71 POLITICS 73 The ‘Red Revolt’ 75 A Certain Amount of Military Knowledge 77 A Touch of Hope 79 The Power of Silence 81 Conclusion 83 Reference List 85 Acknowledgements 93 About the Author 94

Message from the Vice-Chancellor This intriguing book is an invitation into some of the more curious corners of Wits’ history.

Often working off images gleaned from the University’s archives, the book chronicles moments and personalities that have had a part in defining Wits over ninety years. In some cases, the vignettes chronicle elements of the University’s character that we can be proud of, in that they were moments when Wits was signalling its commitment to progressive social change. In other cases, however, the book reflects that struggles for equity needed to happen as much inside the University as they did outside. In this way, the book has succeeded – in a few brief pages – in providing a nuanced picture of an energetic and vibrant institution always passionately engaged with the issues of the time.

During my tenure at Wits as Vice-Chancellor, my most poignant memory is that of the Alumni

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General Assembly of 2005, which was held in order to make a formal apology to black students who had experienced discrimination and alienation in the University environment in the preceding years. While from the late 1940s Wits affirmed its commitment to be an ‘open’ university, from 1957 the apartheid state made this almost impossible. However, those black students who were given special permission to attend often felt marginalised and discriminated against in more subtle ways within the University itself. As a country, we have a complicated heritage defined by injustice and brutality, and that broader social reality was reflected in the life of Wits.

The General Assembly was an extremely emotional time for the graduates, academic staff and students who attended it, and was a turning point in Wits’ history, as we acknowledged the inequalities and discriminatory practices of our

past. Since the mid-1980s, the demography of the student body has changed considerably, with the result that Wits is now the most culturally and racially diverse university in the country.

Like other universities in South Africa, Wits has had to come to terms with the challenges faced by disadvantaged students for whom attending university is a major achievement in itself. Wits has risen to this challenge in a myriad of creative ways which have also transformed the very nature of teaching, research and learning itself.

Our future as a university, and as a country, will be built on the fundamentally creative dynamics that arise from our diversity, our ambitions for a more just and fulfilling society, and our ability to reconcile differences in a tolerant cosmopolitan environment.

As I think is well illustrated by the book, Wits has always maintained itself as a university that puts pressure on the status quo in society. The

challenges we face in transforming this country presently play themselves out in every boardroom, workplace and sports field. We have risen to these challenges over the years through championing robust and constructive debate, and by enabling our students to think in lateral and innovative ways about core issues affecting society.

Both South Africa and the wider global community have benefited from our graduates, who think and challenge beyond the norm, and are flexible and comfortable with change.

Our contemporary world is characterised by unpredictability and provides us with challenges at all levels of existence – physical, biological, economic and social. The extraordinary people who spend a part of their lives at Wits – students and staff – contribute in no small way to our ability to confront the challenges of our times.

This book is a wry tribute to those who have been here before us, and invites us, who are here now, to reflect on the ways we are continuing the distinctive legacy of this extraordinary institution.

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Introduction: WAYS OF SEEING

This book is a series of snapshots of Wits’ history over the past 90 years. The stories have been driven mainly by images in the University’s own archive and so our focus has been on capturing beguiling, and often quirky, moments on Wits’ timeline, rather than writing a comprehensive history of the University. Our aim is to highlight how Wits has been shaped by its social and political contexts throughout the past nine decades, and how the University, in turn, has influenced the world around it.

Each story has been carefully researched and draws on primary sources and personal interviews in addition to the relevant literature. Experts in each area have been consulted. Bruce Murray’s two-volume history of Wits and Mervyn Shear’s Wits, a University in the Apartheid Era deserve special mention. Murray’s books make up a comprehensive and detailed history of the University until 1959.

They are also beautifully written, with an eye for anecdotes and gossip that is essential for a book like this. Shear’s text is limited to Wits’ political history from 1959 to the early 1990s. It is part reflective memoir and part history, which gives it an engagingly personal perspective.

It is a pity that nothing comprehensive has been written about Wits after 1992.

Here the shift in the demography of its student body, in particular, has forced deep and painful, but ultimately constructive, introspection. It has been much

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Cover of Wits Student August 1985, describing clashes between the government funded Students’ Moderate Alliance, the Black Students’ Society and the police

more difficult to represent the past two decades of Wits’ history and its dramatis personae, as this would have required extensive primary research, beyond the scope of this project.

The conclusion of this book makes some observations about this period, however.

When writing a history of an institution, historians have to navigate between being either too apologetic or triumphalist.

Such a history has to be framed by the deeply oppressive and racist policies and practices of segregation and apartheid, and their attendant social ‘norms’. It cannot be otherwise.

Wits, like UCT and other English speaking universities, was a product of its time, but also ‘out of joint’ with its time.

From today’s perspective, the University leadership, in terms of its Council and Vice-Chancellor, may seem conservative, accommodating or timid. As Murray points out, in the 1930s, Council in particular was more reactionary in its academic and social segregationist policies than those of the state. The agonising that took place in terms of crafting the post Second World War policy of ‘academic integration and social segregation’ is hard to understand. Vice-Chancellor Bozzoli’s fraught struggle with the problem of opening the swimming pool to black students as late as 1969 sums up this

apparent absurdity. As the new VC, in accordance with an SRC request, he announced the pool was now open to all students.

He was quickly told by the Minister of Education, F.W. de Klerk that, in terms of government policy, mixed bathing was a social rather than an academic pursuit, and was not therefore part of the racial exemptions granted to the University. After a number of heated exchanges with De Klerk, Bozzoli was instructed to discontinue the practice of mixed bathing, which he reluctantly did. Behind the University’s complex and awkward manoeuvring lay the ever present threat, used more and more frequently, that the state would withdraw its financial subsidies if its policies were contravened.

In spite of this, during the 1970s, Bozzoli led the University in opposing an increasingly intrusive state, participating in public protests on campus and in the public sphere. He consistently provided staff and students with support in their own struggles against apartheid.

But it is a mistake to think of a university as its leadership alone.

A university is also its staff and students, many of whom resisted these policies in a myriad of ways, in academic and other pursuits on campus and beyond. Phillip Tobias is an example of someone who used his research to write powerfully on race and to critique

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Night vigil at the Great Hall, early 1970s

Introduction: WAYS OF SEEING

apartheid, as well as providing hands-on involvement in protest action, both in and outside the University.

The small number of black students admitted to Wits over time belies their impact. They participated actively in university structures and forums; a survey of SRC manifestos in the 1940s and 50s illustrates this point. However, Wits was not an ‘open’ university until the 1990s. Indeed, what the term ‘open’ may mean now is a matter for some soul-searching debate.

In considering Wits in its political context over time, and particularly in terms of social norms, the issue of discrimination against women has often not been foregrounded. Female staff suffered discrimination regarding salaries, retirement age, and the punitive requirement that a woman had to resign if she got married. Inequalities around pensions, medical aid and access to benefits were resolved only in the early 1990s. Women students did not suffer overt discrimination, but, like women staff, had to deal with prejudices regarding issues like the suitability of certain professions, such as medicine or engineering, for women. A glance through the covers of Wits Wits, the RAG student newspaper,

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during the 1950s and 1960s reveals a disconcertingly sexist view of women.

As Karl Marx wrote in 1856 (and we can forgive him his use of “men”, in the spirit of this book):

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

Each of the stories in this book illustrates this truth in one way or another.

There are a number of themes that thread through the stories in this book. One is mining, and, related to that, Wits’ distinctive urban character. The cover photo, taken in 1939, powerfully illustrates Wits’ physical relationship with the city – the emerging skyscrapers in the CBD, the cooling towers of the power station in Newtown and the ubiquitous mine dumps acting as backdrop. Wits began as a School of Mines, but, from 1917, its offerings included broader arts and science courses, in anticipation of the granting of university status. In October 1922, the inauguration of Wits University took place.

This happened in the face of powerful opposition from influential politicians in the Cape, including Cecil Rhodes, who opposed the idea of a university on the Rand. They believed that Johannesburg’s environment could never provide a suitable context for higher learning.

It was Wits’ first Principal, Jan Hofmeyr, who said of Johannesburg in 1926:

“We have this twentieth century city of Johannesburg with the ethic of the mining camp still sometimes revealing itself – all too painfully.”

But he said this with affection rather than disapproval.

Wits has always thrived on the energy and innovation in the industrial heartland of South Africa. Wits is a university on a hill and in a city, and the city’s fortunes are inextricably linked with those of the University.

Since the 1980s, as the increasing numbers of residences testify, Wits’ urban identity has been richly enhanced by the many students and staff from other provinces, the rest of Africa and the world, who have made Wits their university of choice.

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ORIGINS School of Mines engineers working on a boiler

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Opening of Central Block, 1925

In 1912, 23 third-year students at the South African School of Mines in Johannesburg went on strike, protesting against assessment based on inspection of their lecture notes. The School’s rules laid down that attendance at lectures was essential, and the inspection was a way of enforcing attendance.

SHOWING ITS METTLE:

GOLD, TIN AND THE MAKINGS of A UNIVERSITY ON THE RAND

The Tin Temple, Plein Square

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Disciplining students at the School of Mines was a constant problem, both on campus and in the residences. Newcomers were regaled with “great and scandalous tales” about the behaviour of their predecessors.

Senate members were especially sensitive about behaviour that might reinforce perceptions that rambunctious Johannesburg was no place for an institution of learning, where students would be confronted with ‘distractions and temptations’.

Nine years earlier, the Governor-General of the Transvaal, Lord Milner, had prioritised getting the deep level gold mines going after the South African War. He commissioned an investigation into the possibility of Johannesburg as a centre not only for the technical training of much needed white

engineers and artisans, but also for higher learning.

The Tin Temple

Political forces delayed the establishment of such a university, but in 1910 the Transvaal Government transferred the Transvaal University College from Johannesburg to Pretoria and established the School of Mines in Johannesburg. Its headquarters was the former TUC building on Plein Square, to which was added in 1916 the famous ‘Tin Temple’ to its west. A wood and iron structure that served as municipal offices before the completion of the new Town Hall, it provided teaching space for the arts and science courses launched in 1917. The School was now a university college in all but name, and provided the foundation for a fully-fledged university, which we now know as the University of the Witwatersrand.

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Opening of Central Block, 1925

FIT FOR A PRINCE:

THE OPENING OF CENTRAL BLOCK, 1925 The Fake Prince

One of the most famous rag stunts in Wits’ history took place on Tuesday 23 June 1925, when Edward, Prince of Wales and the Duke of Windsor opened the Central Block. About 5,000 people had flocked to Milner Park where they were subjected to a massive hoax.

Traffic Constable Coetzee, who possessed a remarkable likeness to the Prince, was successfully passed off as the Prince. It was not until the Prince arrived that the hoax was uncovered.

The President and Vice President of the SRC masterminded the hoax.

They obtained the support of the Principal and the Registrar who declared they would allow the hoax, provided the Prince himself approved. The hoaxers went to Pretoria to interview the Prince’s aide-de-camp, who was most unsympathetic. He replied that it would be “an offence to his royal position” and that “the Prince would object most strongly to your suggestion”.

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Undeterred, on the Tuesday, a rag cavalcade escorted Coetzee, departing to the University from the Rand Club, where the Prince was staying. On arrival, the royal salute was sounded, the crowd cheered, and with “great ceremony” the Registrar greeted the bogus prince. He inspected the guard of honour and made “a dignified climb” to his seat of honour. While one of the songs of the occasion was being sung, a fleet of cars pulled up, and the real Prince stepped out to be greeted by another royal salute. Coetzee quickly disappeared and the Prince proceeded to open the building.

The Central Block building was in fact unfinished, a façade behind which stood a two-storey wood and iron structure, with a basement. Because of financial constraints, it was completed only in May 1940. In June the Governor-General officially opened the Great Hall, without incident.

A feature of the Great Hall was its acoustic design, but the Professor of Music was unhappy with it. He claimed the acoustics were unsuitable for an orchestra when it had to play on stage, and not in the well, saying the players felt “acoustically naked on stage”. The reason for this “was the shortness of the period reverberation for which the Hall had been designed, in opposition to my ideas”. With the construction of the Great Hall and the completion of Central Block, the original building programme for Milner Park had been carried out.

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Entrance to the William Cullen Library

BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPEs 13

The Tower of Light at dusk, 2012

AGRICULTURE, ASSASsINATION AND EMPIRE: WEST CAMPUS On 23 September 1936, hundreds of people queued up on the Witwatersrand Agricultural Showgrounds to see the new phenomenon of television in action. The Rand Daily Mail described the event:

“Thousands of green streaks of lighting chased each other across a screen, the continuous buzz of a revolving wheel, a blaze of light from behind black curtains and, in a few seconds, all these consolidated into the picture of a laughing little girl.”

This was one of the many attractions of the 1936 Empire exhibition, which marked the 50th anniversary of Johannesburg and celebrated the country’s ties with the British Empire.

Empire Exhibition: An ornamental fountain, linked to an ice rink, with the Tower of Light under construction in the background

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The Exhibition also offered a waterfall fed by an artificial lake, and a large ice-skating rink. There were galleries with “pictures, photographs … and sculpture, which will survey

the collective achievements of the Empire and the Union”, and exhibitions representing countries in the Commonwealth. In the tradition of such exhibitions worldwide, a brochure advertised “many picturesque pageants of African history, and probably a Rodeo and other performances”.

The Tower of Light is the most impressive of the remaining structures. Designed by the first Professor of Architecture, Geoffrey Pearce, it was the focal point of the Agricultural Showgrounds, home of the Rand Show for many years.

It was here in 1960 that the attempted assassination of Dr H.F. Verwoerd took place, as he was watching a cattle show. Ironically, when he was shot, Verwoerd was declaiming apartheid South Africa’s capacity to survive outside the Commonwealth.

In the next 20 years, student numbers at the University increased, and Wits acquired the showgrounds for its expansion, rather than build a satellite campus. Two-thirds of the existing buildings were either altered or used until new buildings were constructed. For example, the Exhibition’s gabled state pavilion, after a number of alterations and extensions, now houses the School of Accountancy.

In 2010, to make way for the multi-million rand Science Block, the Charles Skeen Sports Stadium, adapted from a livestock showring, was demolished. The podium and a portion of the stands were preserved as heritage buildings.

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“IN A HUGE CLOUD OF FEATHERY SPARKS”: FIRE IN CENTRAL BLOCK, DECEMBER 1931

In the early hours of Thursday 24 December, a motorist passing along Jan Smuts Avenue noticed a fire already raging through the University’s Central Block. The Rand Daily Mail reported that “the din was deafening, and as the flames continued their fierce attack the stairway crashed down in a huge cloud of feathery sparks”. In 1931 the central portion of the building was nothing like the building we have today. It was a temporary iron and wood structure, extremely vulnerable to fire. It took 60 firemen three hours to bring the blaze under control. The fire revealed the folly of the University’s failure to use fire-resistant material, as the structure was regarded as only temporary. Its priceless collections, located in the Library on the top floor of the central portion, were not only destroyed, but were also uninsured.

mining magnate, used his profits to set up this collection. His ideal had been to establish a collection illustrating every phase and aspect of South African life and culture. In an ironic twist of fate, he had transferred his collection to Wits from a special building on his farm which he felt was vulnerable to fire. Another loss was the Philip Papers, which consisted of the letters from the missionary and activist, John Philip, during the late 18th century.

These had formed the basis of the pioneering work of the Head of History, W.M.M. Macmillan. He too had placed the papers in the Library for safekeeping.

The collections included the extraordinary Gubbins collection of Africana. Gubbins, a Cambridge University graduate and minor

A new library, now known as the William Cullen Library, was constructed in 1932.

The remains of the burnt out wood and iron structure

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The massive crown of a eucalyptus (blue gum) tree, measuring more than 38 metres from side to side, supported by a trunk of 7.5 metres in circumference, shades part of the Gavin Reilly Green on West Campus.

Its presence enhances the ongoing beautification of the campus while also harking back to the city’s mining history.

A MEMORY OF MINING:

The tree was planted in the 1930s, next to the main road used in the 19th century by the early traders on the route between Rustenburg and Joburg when the city was still a gold rush town. From very early on, blue gums were imported from Australia as they were extremely fast-growing, meeting the ever-growing demand for wood to bolster stopes in the mines. Most of them were harvested from plantations, vestiges of which can be seen near the city’s mine dumps. Few reached the size of the University’s Champion Tree.

THE CHAMPION TREE

The Department of Agriculture initiated the Champion Trees Project to identify trees worthy of special protection throughout South Africa, under the National Forests Act of 1998. Such trees are considered to be exceptional according to criteria such as size, age, aesthetic, cultural, historic or tourism value. Once declared, the trees are protected under the Act, and a licence is needed before these trees can be cut or disturbed.

The English oak in Sophiatown

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The giant eucalyptus tree shading the lawns of the Gavin Reilly Green on West Campus

The first Champion Tree to be declared was a hundred-year-old English oak tree in Sophiatown, which was one of the few landmarks that survived the forced removals of 1955. Wits’ special tree is numbered among 60 trees, including the thousand-year-old Wonderboom Wild Fig Tree in Pretoria, a three hundred-year-old lane of camphor trees planted at Vergelegen Estate in the Cape and the largest indigenous tree in the country, the Big Tree or Baobab in Limpopo.

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“A WILD AND SOLITARY PLACE”: SAVERNAKE, RESIDENCE OF THE VICE-CHANCELLOR The mansion of Savernake has hosted Wits University Vice-Chancellors since 1948. It is one of the few remaining houses scattered along the Parktown Ridge that used to belong to the Randlords who made their money from the goldfields.

“Those remote house owners … could sit on their broad, raised stoeps, hearing from [the] distance the noise of the stamp batteries on the Rand ‘like faraway drums’.”

Clive Chipkin,

quoting John Buchan’s 1928 novel The Runagate’s Club

From the early 1890s, the Randlords, escaping from the dust and dirt of the burgeoning city, established themselves on the Ridge, regarded then as ‘a wild and solitary place’.

Above open, sloping country, the great houses of Northwards, North Lodge, Villa Arcadia and Hohenheim sprang up. Built in 1904, Savernake was a relative latecomer. Many of the owners were working class immigrants; now they were a self-made aristocracy. They built extravagant homes, imagining these represented the style of aristocratic houses in Europe.

In 1913, Bernard Price, who made his fortune supplying the mines with electricity, bought the house. He became a benefactor of Wits,

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supporting the sciences in particular. In his will he bequeathed the house to the University, on condition that it would always be occupied by the Vice-Chancellor.

During the mid-1960s, the Transvaal Provincial Administration demolished the majority of the Parktown mansions to make way for the new General Hospital and the Johannesburg College of Education. The hospital’s location was deliberately chosen to obliterate the physical remnants of the country’s connection to Britain.

Savernake is a beautiful landmark in the wide sweep of university buildings and campuses stretching from Braamfontein to Parktown. It is a place where the Vice-Chancellor can welcome diverse students, staff and guests – or retreat to replenish the energy needed to lead a university where researchers explore the sometimes wild and solitary frontiers of knowledge.

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Martienssen was profoundly influenced by the French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, Le Corbusier, doyen of the Modernist movement. Martienssen made two pilgrimages to Paris to see him. A famous photograph of Martienssen in Paris shows him with a briar pipe, packed with Balkan Sobranie tobacco, firmly clenched between his teeth and wrapped up in the Harris Tweed coat so beloved of Paris intellectuals.

PIPE DREAMS AND “FARAWAY SPOTS IN AFRICA”: REX MARTIENSSEN AND MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE

As editor of the South African Architectural Record, he sent copies of these to Le Corbusier, including information on houses he had designed, and showing how Le Corbusier’s ideas had been realised on the Highveld.

In September 1936 Le Corbusier wrote to Martienssen:

The Hillman Engineering Block, built during the Second World War, is very different in appearance from the classical form of Central Block, the South West Engineering Block, and the Biology Block.

With its elegant, simple, clean-cut lines, and geometric, rectangular shapes, it is a fine example of the international Modernist architecture movement which followed the First World War. The South African centre of this Modernist sensibility was the Wits Architecture Faculty. The University had become a major exchange centre for new ideas, not only in architecture but in other areas such as psychology, palaeontology, history, mathematics and geophysics.

The most eloquent proponent of the Modernist movement was Rex Martienssen, architect and lecturer. Although he did not design the Hillman building, he provided the inspiration and context for its conception.

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“I was very touched to read through your copies of the South African Architectural Record. In the first place to find something so alive in that faraway spot in Africa, beyond the equatorial forests. But especially because there exists there youthful conviction, feeling for architecture and the great desire to attain a philosophy in these things.”

Martienssen’s early death in 1941, while undergoing training in the South African Airforce, meant that he was unable to implement many of his ideas, but he left a rich legacy behind him.

The Hillman Block, 2012

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TEACHing & LEARNing

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A Quantity Surveying student with the visiting Duchess of Devonshire, 1931

Margaret Ballinger in the mid-1960s

AN “ANTI-WOMEN COMPLEX”: THE CASE OF MRS MARGARET BALLINGER Margaret Hodgson, History and Economics lecturer at Wits, was one of a group of independent professional women who emerged after the First World War, coming into their own during the 1930s.

Interestingly, she was an enthusiastic supporter of women pilots, organising funding for a training aircraft a couple of years before the outbreak of the Second World War. She was a founder of the League of Women Voters, a proto-feminist group dedicated to promoting equality for women in the workplace, society and politics.

In 1935, after living with him for a number of years, she married William Ballinger, a left-wing British trade unionist who organised both black and white workers. Soon after this, she lost her job as married women were not allowed to work at the University. She had served Wits from 1920, and had established herself as a fine teacher and researcher, working closely with the pioneering historian W.W.M. Macmillan, whose racially inclusive work ran counter to traditional histories of the country. From 1923 she challenged the University’s unequal treatment of women in terms of salaries, retirement age,

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and most important in her case, compulsory retirement upon marriage. Once again she took on the University, this time with the support of the League of Women Voters, but the Principal, Humphrey Raikes, and the Council of the University remained intransigent, suffering from what one of its critics called an “anti-women complex”.

There were other reasons for her dismissal. Council was offended by her apparent lack of morals, and disapproved of the ‘Negrophil’ perspective she shared with Macmillan and her husband, regarding the latter’s left-wing activities with deep suspicion.

Ballinger went on to pursue a long career in politics, including representing African people in an all-white parliament, one of only three women members. During the 1960s, both UCT and Rhodes universities presented her with honorary doctorates, but Wits never did.

THE INVISIBLE BARD: BENEDICT VILAKAZI

Benedict Vilakazi as a young graduate

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In the history of Wits, Benedict Vilakazi is celebrated as the first black academic in South Africa to be admitted to a university. He arrived in 1935 with a BA from Unisa, and rapidly completed his honours and masters degrees by 1938, and his doctorate in 1946. But he is cited more often for embodying the way the University colluded with the policy of segregation during the 1930s. Vilakazi was already an acclaimed Zulu novelist and poet when he took up the lowly position of language assistant to Prof. C.M. Doke, the Head of Department of Bantu Studies, who had strongly urged his appointment on the grounds that “for the proper teaching of Bantu languages at the University, an African Native Assistant is needed”. There was considerable opposition to his appointment in Senate and Council, followed by a storm of public criticism, forcing Principal (Vice-Chancellor) Raikes to issue a statement that Vilakazi’s appointment was subject to certain conditions. He was a language assistant, not a lecturer and he would have little interaction with or authority over students.

However, it is important to foreground Vilakazi less as a victim and more as a complex and gifted individual. A pioneering giant in Zulu literature, he drew inspiration from his rural home in Natal.

He created a new genre of poetry combining traditional Zulu praise-poetry with the blank verse form. Vilakazi’s plays, books and poems, along with academic articles, were widely published from the early 1930s. But he found life in Johannesburg and academia alienating, and was disconcerted by sophisticated urban black culture. He longed for home, but he never returned. Vilakazi died prematurely, aged 41.

Vilakazi’s poem “Wo, Ngitshele Mntanomlungu” (“Tell Me, White Man’s Son”) recalls his arrival at Wits and pausing at the sound of pigeons roosting above the columns of Central Block:

“Wo, Ngitshele Mntanomlungu” (“Tell Me, White Man’s Son”) Such massive and majestic columns, Drawing my gaze, where, high above me, Doves are perched whose noisy cooing Is like the bellowing of bulls.

Thus, as I gaze in wonder, I realise beyond all doubt That I am lost! Yet well I know I came To serve my own beloved people – Aware of them always, I hear them cry “Take up your burden and be our voice!”

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TEACHING SCIENTIFIC THINKING: EDUCATORS ARTHUR BLEKSLEY AND KANTILAL NAIK

Professor Arthur Bleksley’s foreword to the 1969 physical science textbook Calculations in Physical Science, written for matric and first-year students by his former student, Kantilal Naik, showed the appreciation of one committed educator for the work of another. The book was used extensively by learners across the racially segregated education departments, in spite of the fact that Naik was a science teacher at an Indian High School.

Professor Arthur Bleksley

A photograph of a student meeting at the amphitheatre at Wits in August 1959, shows Naik listening attentively to the SRC president’s call to ‘step down into the wider arena of political conflict’. Encouraged by Bleksley, he was in his first year of study for a BSc in Applied Mathematics and Chemistry. When his father died in 1960, Bleksley arranged for a bursary to pay his fees.

Bleksley was a largely self-taught but internationally recognised polymath whose research interests and publications included astrophysics, mathematics, nuclear energy, cosmology, quantum mechanics, solar energy and even parapsychology. But what singled him out from his fellow academics was his commitment to making science accessible, firstly to students – his textbooks on mechanics were legendary – and then to ordinary people. Known by the public as ‘Mr Science’, for many years he wrote popular scientific articles in the press and gave scientific talks on radio. The Wits Planetarium – he was its first director – is a monument to this endeavour.

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The paths of Bleksley and Naik crossed again in 1971, when Naik, now a lecturer at Wits, was identified as associating with anti-apartheid activists. He was detained and tortured at John Vorster Square for six months. Bleksley intervened in a typically low-key way by writing a testimonial for Naik which he submitted to the police. Naik recalls, “The police brought the testimonial to my cell to show me. I had tears of appreciation in my eyes.

The testimonial undoubtedly helped me during my detention”.

Naik retired in 2003, having provided an enduring foundation for thousands of students by making Computational Maths accessible and himself available to them.

He still has an office in Senate house.

Student gathering at the Wits Amphitheatre, 1959. Naik is second from the right, top row

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Wits computer laboratory in the early 1970s

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RESEARCH

“EXPLOITING WHAT IS UNIQUE”:

FRIEDEL SELLSCHOP, NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND THE ELUSIVE NEUTRINO

Sellschop with nuclear reactor in the Nuclear Physics Research Unit

In 1961, Wits acquired a relatively cheap, small nuclear reactor from a laboratory linked to Cambridge University, which was the alma mater of Prof. Friedel Sellschop, a 28-year-old genius with a doctorate in nuclear physics. The reactor was housed in the Nuclear Physics Research Unit founded during 1955 and 1956, which Sellschop had built from scratch in the veld north of Wits. The reactor was key to the success of an international team, including Sellschop, devoted to the detection of neutrinos found in nature. Neutrinos (meaning “little neutral ones” in Italian) are tiny subatomic particles produced by the stars, making up a considerable amount of matter in the universe. They can be detected only in very sophisticated experiments.

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From the 1930s, scientists had theorised about their existence but it was only in 1956 that US nuclear physicist, Fred Reines, detected them in a nuclear reactor, calling them “the most tiny quantity of reality ever imagined by a human being”. In February 1965, Sellschop and Reines set up equipment three kilometres down the East Rand Proprietary Mine (ERPM) in Boksburg, where they observed a naturally occurring neutrino for the first time. Sellschop had taken to heart the advice of his mentor, Sir Basil Schonland, pioneer in the development of radar during the Second World War, to “seek opportunities for your research that exploit what is unique to your local environment”.

Sellschop had a broad range of research interests, brought together in exploring the deepest secrets of the universe, both without and within. He was mentor to astronomer Prof. David Block, who discovered cold cosmic dust, garnering essential funding for Block’s project. Sellschop was also mentor to the many students who benefited from his insatiable curiosity and ability to recognise research potential in a wide range of areas. He was key in providing the basis for Wits’ position as a global participant in scientific research, including in the observation of the Higgs Boson or ‘God Particle’ in July 2012.

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Cave of Hearths’ exit

HOME IS WHERE THE HEARTH IS: THE MAKAPAN’S VALLEY CAVES In the fossil-rich caves of Makapan’s Valley there is well preserved evidence of continuous hominid and human settlement for three million years. The valley lies about 18 km north of Mokopane in Limpopo Province. Layers of rock and sediment reveal when and how their inhabitants inscribed their lives on the lush landscape.

Also inscribed on the landscape are the names of famous archaeologists and palaeontologists associated with the University – Raymond Dart, C. van Riet Lowe, James Kitching, Brian Maguire, Reville Mason, Robert Broom and Philip Tobias. In the late 1930s, Dart and Van Riet Lowe hypothesised that ashy dark bands in the infill of a cave – known later as the Cave of Hearths – indicated the first known controlled use of fire. Although this has since been disproved, it sparked an ongoing debate encapsulating both the exciting and tentative nature of conclusions about the meaning of such discoveries.

The continuous settlement of the valley and use of its caves provide a unique opportunity to link ‘pre-historic’, pre-colonial and post-colonial periods. Many of the caves in the valley afforded refuge for waves of people fleeing from regional conflicts between

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the 17th and 19th centuries. In 1854, the Kekana Ndebele, under the leadership of Chief Mokopane (Makapan), took refuge in the Cave of Gwasa. Many surrendered or died during a retaliatory month-long siege by the Voortrekkers. During the 1980s Prof. Isabel Hofmeyr, a leading researcher in African Literature, studied the oral testimonies of the descendants of Kekana and the Dutch. She suggested an alternative account of the siege, challenging the apartheid narrative portraying the Voortrekkers as heroes confronting an uncivilised and brutal enemy.

Wits archaeologist, Amanda Esterhuysen, excavated the cave and worked closely with Wits historians to tap into a rich tapestry of sources: oral traditions, missionary reports, cultural artefacts, documents and ethnographies. Bones and other material remains, belonging mainly to women, children and the aged, are mute testimony to the terror and tragedy of the siege.

Contemporary heritage legislation requires that the excavation of the cave cannot take place without the consent of the living descendants, the Kekana. They agreed to this as long as the remains were returned to them for reburial. The bones are due to be reburied on Heritage Day 2012.

Pouch from the siege discovered in Gwasa Cave

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STUDENT LIFE First women students, 1917

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Residence initiate, 1922

Back page of Wits Student, 21 March 1973, Sharpeville Day Issue

Satire and Subversion: WITS STUDENT, 1973

In 1972, architecture student, Franco Frescura, began drawing a weekly satirical cartoon page called the John Burger Saga which was published in the student newspaper Wits Student. In 1973 he was arrested and charged with drawing a series of cartoons which purportedly accused Prime Minister, John Vorster (Fogstar) of making love to his wife with a police baton; cast the leader of the loyal opposition, Sir de Villiers Graaff, as a spider with a broad yellow streak as part of his political make-up, or as heavily pregnant; and described Parliament as “a pack of Neo-Nazis”.

Frescura was found guilty, fined and given a suspended prison sentence.

In a separate disciplinary action, the University charged Frescura with bringing it into contempt. Frescura was rusticated for the remainder of the year. When he was readmitted, he was effectively banned from publishing either words or drawings on the University’s campus for as long as he was registered as a student.

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Frescura has since been recognised as an artist as well as a gifted cartoonist, exceptional in

“the vividness and strength of his drawing style and sense of design. Without the clean, sure and bold character of his drawings, lettering and design, less attention would probably have been paid to his cartoons.”

His contemporaries still assume that Frescura was the author of a well-known cover of Wits Student in 1972, which featured a child looking into a lavatory asking the question, “Excuse me, are you the Prime Minister?” The real author, according to Frescura, “was a fellow student and co-activist who has since preferred to remain anonymous”.

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From 1929, Rag Day (Remember and Give) was the climax of six weeks of activity aimed at raising funds for charity, which also involved the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol. It followed a set sequence of events. Firstly, a month before Rag Day, students took to the streets selling the Rag magazine, Wits Wits, a compendium of jokes and cartoons. A Rag Queen presided over a street procession of floats in the morning and the Rag Ball in the evening.

28 MAY 1934 Dear Mr Raikes, Is any action being taken with the SRC regarding some of the unpleasant features of the last Rag and Wits Wits? I do not wish to raise any questions in Senate if action is being taken to secure a cessation of this tendency to vulgarity which has been showing recently ...

Zorbo: Rag Mascot, 1960s and 70s

Wits Wits magazine, 1956

“THIS TENDENCY TO VULGARITY”: WITS RAG 43

Drum majorettes, 1956

Wits Wits publication has been growing steadily worse and more daring in its suggestive jokes … The costumes (or lack of such) of some of the women students were disgusting – and positively a menace in our city, with so many natives witnessing the procession.

Doke’s complaints were repeated regularly over the years from many different quarters. In 1931, for example, the police intervened during the procession to curb the students’ rather boisterous behaviour. After 1950 the SRC inspected the floats after “unfortunate incidents” in previous years.

The Rag Committee claimed the right to refuse individuals who appeared in costumes “beyond the bounds of decency” from taking part in the procession. From the 1960s, municipalities on the East and West Rand regularly banned the sale of Wits Wits within municipal boundaries.

In 1966, in a spectacular Rag publicity stunt, students unsuccessfully attempted to kidnap international singer Marlene Dietrich.

Yours sincerely, C.M. Doke Rag Float, 1929

In the end, however, Rag did achieve its more noble objective of remembering and giving and charities such as the Johannesburg General Hospital, the Alexandra Health Clinic and the Johannesburg Child Guidance Clinic benefited from its fundraising.

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SECRETS AND SPIES:

STATE INFILTRATION OF STUDENT ORGANISATIONS UNDER APARTHEID

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The person in question, known as the “blonde spy”, was a former BA student who admitted to her undercover activities after lengthy questioning by student leaders.

When the story got out, newspaper cartoonists had a field day. Much of the information she passed on was trivial, partly because some of her targets yielded very little, apparently distracted by her beauty.

Campus Independent, student newspaper, 1976, funded by the state

The “blonde spy” affair injected a new element of anxiety into student politics.

Ever since the Nationalists had taken power in 1948, the police had monitored student protest action, making students wary about participating in public protests, fearing police identification would lead to the loss of their passports.

“Do you think undercover agents are people who walk around in trenchcoats and dark glasses hiding behind a newspaper and listening to every word you say … if you do you’re wrong. The person sitting next to you could be an agent or the one you bumped into in the corridor, or the one in the lift or …”

Wits Student, 1986 Superspy, Craig Williamson, masquerading as a student activist

At the beginning of the 1959 academic year, Prof. Philip Tobias addressed a special meeting of the student body. With the Great Hall crammed to overflowing, two motions were carried. One reiterated the student body’s opposition to the Extension of the University Education Bill; another condemned “the nefarious activities of a former student of this University” in supplying information to the police.

During the 1970s and 80s student spies – often lured by payment of their fees – and undercover security police infiltrated the SRC, including the notorious spy, Craig Williamson. The state had also secretly begun to fund pro-government student newspapers and organisations, a practice which continued into the 1980s.

An atmosphere of mistrust pervaded student politics. For student activists, the consequences of the activities of this network of informers were dire. As resistance to apartheid escalated during the 1980s, increasing numbers of students and staff were incarcerated for weeks and months without trial.

Dave Marais’ cartoon in the Cape Times referring to the ‘blonde spy’ affair

The extent of this infiltration and the friendships betrayed emerged only after 1994.

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“AN EDUCATION BEYOND ACADEMIC”:

The Black Students’ Society and the Conundrum of Racial Exclusivity

Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Mervyn Shear, tries to dissuade students from taking on the police

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In a relaxed manner, at a Convocation panel discussion around reflections on Wits’ role in anti-apartheid struggles, advocate Dali Mpofu, who was president of the Black Students’ Society (BSS) at Wits from 1985 to 1986, “recalled with obvious pleasure how he had replaced the Wits flag with an ANC banner”. For him, the relative autonomy of the University during the State of Emergency “provided a useful platform to keep the struggle alive”.

When the BSS was formed in 1977, white students in the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) found the creation of an exclusively black society difficult to understand, given their commitment to non-racialism. There were accusations of reverse racism. The BSS’ policy was non-participation in all aspects of university life. Various editions of Wits Student during the 1980s reveal ongoing bafflement about the policy. As a small minority on campus – black students had to get a ministerial permit to attend white universities – their backgrounds, experiences, perceptions and responses were entirely different from white students. This meant that their needs could be met only by a separate society. In 1986 the BSS argued that “we live in an apartheid society so the University cannot be separated from it”. But they also

stressed that racial exclusivity was a tactic rather than a principle, relevant only while apartheid was in place. The BSS did work informally with student structures.

Black students, many of them coming from the townships, also brought with them a new and unfamiliar style of militant protest, symbolised by the toyi-toyi. These protests took place at the height of police invasions of campus – 52 raids occurred between 1986 and 1988. The government-funded Students Moderate Alliance deliberately provoked increasingly violent clashes with the BSS, and overtly welcomed police onto campus. This tested university interpretations about freedom of speech and appropriate protest action to the limit.

Mervyn Shear, then Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Student Affairs vividly describes mediating between angry groups of students or between students and the police. The BSS was one of many organisations restricted in 1988.

Challenge, BSS newspaper

In late 1990, NUSAS and BSS leaders were called to a late-night meeting at Wits addressed by Nelson Mandela. He instructed them to disband their existing structures and form a non-racial, national student body. The BSS at Wits called a referendum in which 75% of its members voted in support.

Thereafter followed a period of extremely tough and painful negotiations.

In 1992 the South African Students’ Congress (SASCO) was formed, and in the same year, education student, Linda Vilakazi, became the first black woman president of the SRC.

In 1992 Linda Vilakazi became the first black woman president of the SRC

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PASSING THE BUCK:

Phineas at rugby intervarsity, 1951

TROPHIES AND RESIDENCE LIFE

A forlorn, armless figure in a tartan sash and kilt stands in a corner of the Wits University Archive. Known as Phineas, he was the University’s mascot for many years. On his head, he used to sport a “towering black busby”, which he lost, along with one of his arms, when he was kidnapped by UCT students shortly after inter-varsity athletics in 1923. A 1930 photograph shows him being carried by cheering Wits students, recaptured after a sevenyear sojourn at UCT. He lost his other arm sometime during one of the annual raids between Wits and Tuks students.

In 1971, when inter-varsity matches between Wits and Tuks ceased because of Tuks’ refusal to allow black students to sit on the stands, Phineas became the prize in inter-residence competitions and the object of continuing raids. In 1987, he reappeared at a privately sponsored rugby inter-varsity, under heavy guard.

Phineas retired twenty years later when the Kudos Kudu replaced him as Wits’ new mascot.

Although Wits is not a primarily residential university, the original plans made provision for separate residences for men and women. While the women were subject to curfews and strict rules,

men were free to do as they pleased, including kidnapping mascots and serenading female students at all hours of the night. Principal Hofmeyr’s puritanical mother took guarding women’s virtue so seriously that she even took to patrolling the grounds at night.

Over the decades, the number of new residences increased, and the older ones were extended, spilling into buildings in Braamfontein and Parktown. Until the late 1980s, black students were housed in separate residences. With the influx of large numbers of black students from far afield in the 1990s, the issue of accommodation (and exclusions) drove student protests.

Wits’ newer residences accommodate both men and women, a practice which would probably make Mrs Hofmeyr turn in her grave.

Phineas the mascot

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Wits Rugby team, 1928

SPORT

IN THE LONG RUN:

Fordyce and Plaatjes, who trained together at Wits, became athletes during the apartheid era, while Ramaala straddled the old and the new. All had to negotiate a perilous political and educational context. Fordyce is famous for wearing a black armband during his first Comrades victory run in 1981, protesting the incorporation of the race into the government’s Republic Day celebrations.

MARK PLAATJES, BRUCE FORDYCE AND HENDRICK RAMAALA

“I listen to my body and try to do what it tells me to do.

I can feel when I am too tired to train or when I am ready for a race. A coach cannot feel that for me.”

- Hendrick Ramaala In an unusually minimalist approach to training, marathon runners Mark Plaatjes and Hendrick Ramaala have never employed coaches, claiming their knowledge of their bodies beats using a trainer. In his early years, Plaatjes had an unrelenting ‘coach’ in the form of his brother, who followed him on a bike or in a car, threatening him with a brick if he didn’t run faster. Ramaala’s training partners comprised an informal group that met at the Wits athletics track.

Like ‘Comrades King’ Bruce Fordyce, they took up running by chance. A friend dared Plaatjes to run the 3,000-metre event at a high school athletics competition, which he won. Ramaala tried out for the Wits soccer team and failed, so he took up running instead.

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Plaatjes managed to gain a place in Wits Medical School, beyond the allocated racial quota required by the state. At the same time, defying anti-apartheid sports activists’ cries to boycott white-sanctioned events, including national championships, he competed in the South African Marathon Championships, winning twice. He was called a sell-out, and received death threats. In 1988, concerned about his daughter’s future under apartheid, he received political asylum in the US.

Hendrick Ramaala training in the Charles Skeen Stadium on West Campus

In 1993, as Plaatjes was about to receive US citizenship, he was invited to join South African athletes in training for the Atlanta Olympics. He had to decline. In that same year, he went on to win the World Championships in Stuttgart as a US citizen. Ramaala, who overcame the deficiencies of his secondary education to obtain his law degree, also qualified for Atlanta. He has since qualified for another four Olympics.

Plaatjes winning the Nashua Marathon for the second time, 1985

Bruce Fordyce, wearing a black armband, on his way to his first Comrades win

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Wits striker Howard Koseff avoids Orlando Pirates goal keeper George Lodge during a Castle League match

EARNING THAT ‘CLEVER BOYS’ TAG: WITS SOCCER

Wits Soccer Team, 1922

In 1975, the sports editor of Wits Student bemoaned the departure of Wits’ amateur soccer players “for the money offered … by the big-time leagues”. For many years, Wits faced the problem of top student players representing outside teams.

Even though Wits was losing some of its best players, it still managed promotion to the First Division in 1975, and clinched the Mainstay Cup in 1978, with a win over Kaiser Chiefs. Under the heading ‘Earning that Clever Boys tag’, Wits Student noted the irony in the fact that supporters had begun to chant the new name, ‘the Clever Boys’ when Wits was frequently fielding teams without any students. But it went on to boast that the team taking on its perennial rivals, Kaiser Chiefs, sported four students, including all-round sportsman and Springbok, sweeper Jimmy Cook.

Soccer League, Wits had become the first racially mixed team to play in black townships. But it was not an easy transition. The team faced extremely partisan crowds in packed stadiums. On more than one occasion police had to escort the players off the field to avoid the fury of fans when their teams lost.

By the early 1980s, matches drew huge crowds in venues such as Ellis Park, which accommodated 70,000 fans of all races. This bucked government sports policy, summed up by Minister Piet Koornhof in all its absurdity:

“[A] South African representative white team, a … representative Coloured team, a representative Indian team and a representative Zulu, Xhosa or any other Bantu (sic) national team can compete in [national tournaments].”

Corporate sponsorship became a feature of the game from the early 1990s. The Clever Boys are now sponsored by Bidvest, and have a loyal student following.

Wits soccer has come a long way from the struggling club founded in 1921, in spite of Wits’ official policy of favouring rugby. However, the original team did not do the reputation of soccer any favours. In 1925, an outraged ‘ex-supporter’ lambasted them for ‘bad play, rough play, and a rotten spirit’ in a letter to the student newspaper Umpa.

In 1978, as part of the new multiracial National Professional

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Herman Wald’s sculpture of diamond diggers in Ernest Oppenheimer Park, Kimberley

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Wald’s ‘Man and His Soul’ sculpture, West Campus

Artist Cyril Coetzee at work on his mural ‘T’Kama-Adamastor’, William Cullen Library

The ARTs

‘Statue to the Unknown Miner’, entrance to West Campus building

Prototype figures for the Oppenheimer Fountain, Kimberley

BLACK POWER: ‘STATUE TO THE UNKNOWN MINER’ 59

This bronze statue honours the many thousands of migrant black mineworkers who worked on the gold mines of the Reef. The atlas-like figure appears to hold up the rock surrounding the stopes deep beneath the surface, and, in so doing, the whole edifice of mining. We are familiar with the busts of the early prospectors and Randlords, the founders of the mining companies which continue to dominate not only South Africa, but many areas of the world.

The Chamber of Mines Engineering building itself appears to have been built in the style of a monument to the origins and ongoing relationship of the mining industry and the University. But the recognition of the nameless workers has been a long-time coming. So it is appropriate that it stands at the entrance to the building on West Campus.

However, the statue was actually created in 1961, long before the contribution of black mineworkers was acknowledged in any way. Conceived by sculptor Herman Wald, who also has other works on display at Wits, the statue was part of a design for a miners’ memorial in Kimberley, commemorating past and present diggers. The figure was originally made as a prototype for a group of miners holding up a sieve, which became known as the Kimberley Oppenheimer Fountain, but was rejected because it was too large. Thus the figure at Wits creates a virtual many-faceted conversation between the centre of gold mining and the centre of diamond mining.

Indeed, the Kimberley School of Mines was forerunner to the School of Mines on the Rand which later became Wits.

Installing the statue required an extraordinary feat of engineering. In this way it seems to represent the intersection between art and engineering, a symbolic statement that one cannot exist without the other.

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Reading room of the Cullen Library with the first two murals

A CONVERSATION OF EPIC PROPORTIONS: THE CULLEN MURALS

‘T’Kama-Adamastor’, the third mural

Cyril Coetzee on the mural: “One of the challenging things about the work was its scale: 28 square metres. Another was that it had to complete a trilogy of works begun 60 years earlier …

An early 1930s photograph of the main the main reading room of the Cullen Library shows two empty wall panels around the atrium.

These were soon filled by two large murals. The first, ‘The Colonists’, inspired by the theme of the arrival of the British 1820 settlers, was part of the 1925 British Empire Exhibition and was donated anonymously to the university. In 1934, the university commissioned the artist John Henry Amshewitz to execute the second mural, ‘Vasco da Gama: Departure for the Cape’. The third panel on the northern side was filled only 60 years later when the South African artist Cyril Coetzee was commissioned in 1995 to paint a third mural. ‘T’KamaAdamastor’ was hung in position on the northern wall panel in 1999.

As a group, the huge murals represent an ongoing conversation about the nature of white colonialism over 500 years. Coetzee’s fantastical, ironic and playful mural draws on the myth of Adamastor, a brooding and menacing monster in the shape of a cloud who prophesies shipwreck, catastrophe and death for all those bold enough to sail around the Cape. A particular inspiration was André Brink’s novella Cape of Storms: The First Life of Adamastor which reshapes the myth to represent an indigenous perspective on colonialism.

Both the Amshewitz and the Gill are heroic versions of episodes in the colonisation of Africa seen from a European perspective. The archives of the Cullen library are filled with images that record the colonial encounter in similarly Eurocentric terms. Many of these images are stereotypical representations of indigenous people as primitive and brutal.

In nearly four centuries of art … .one finds the same distorted portrayal of “discovery”, as if Africa had not existed before Europeans appeared on the scene. From the outset I wanted to reflect on and subvert such images in my own painting.”

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“It’s the stars of the collection on display, the really great or interesting pieces … but also, it’s ‘seeing stars’, like being hit on the head. We are very starry-eyed about getting here.”

- Curator Julia Charlton explains the thinking behind the opening exhibition of the Wits Art Museum, ‘Seeing Stars’.

The angel Gabriel, from the ‘Altar of God’

A MATERIAL WORLD:

WITS ART MUSEUM AND THE SCULPTURES OF JACKSON HLUNGWANI

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The south-east corner of East Campus has recently been transformed by the addition of the Wits Art Museum (WAM).

A singular aspect is the transparent outer wall, which literally provides a window onto the University’s impressive African art collection.

Lit up at night, it provides a welcoming beacon to those entering Braamfontein, symbolising the transformation of the area into a residential and retail hub. Scattered public works of art mark these changes. WAM, like the latecomer to a party, has made a spectacular entrance.

There are many stories associated with the pieces, including their journeys to the museum. Visible from the street is Limpopo artist Jackson Hlungwani’s wooden sculpture installation, ‘Altar of God’. Hlungwani, a self-styled charismatic leader, combined Christian and African theology in his distinctive work. ‘Altar of God’ was one of two stone altars, the other being the ‘Altar of Christ’.

After his introduction to the world of high art in 1985 via a pioneering exhibition on African arts, called ‘Tributaries’, Hlungwani sold the Altars to the Johannesburg Art Gallery and the Wits Art Gallery. He intervened actively in the various installations of the sculptures, adding more figures and large rocks from his holy place, Mbhokhota, located in the remnants of a settlement dating back to the 17th century.

Hlungwani’s base remained his rural Limpopo home, where he now trained apprentices to create more figures. However, while these sculptures sold well to tourists, high art collectors wanting unique pieces snubbed him.

‘The Altar’ in its place in WAM is symbolic of the tensions of navigating interlinking worlds, a situation familiar to those who live in the city, but regard home as elsewhere.

‘The Altar of God’

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PROVOCATIVE AND DELIGHTFUL:

Largely an apolitical musical, the people associated with it were not. Drum journalist and musician, Todd Matshikiza, wrote the music and some of the lyrics, and Arthur Goldreich, later one of the Rivonia trialists, designed the set.

Lead actors Nathan Mdledle, Miriam Makeba and Joseph Mogotsi on stage at Wits © BAHA, Photograph by: Ian Berry

By the mid-1970s, there was an established tradition of protest theatre, but the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, drawing on Brecht and new social history, developed a radically different form.

Based at a converted convent building, the Nunnery, at Wits, this collective of university-based white intellectuals, including artist William Kentridge and director Malcolm Purkey, tackled apartheid head on. Purkey summed up their approach:

‘KING KONG’ AND THE JUNCTION AVENUE THEATRE COMPANY

As the departure of their aircraft was announced, a group of passengers spontaneously began to sing ‘Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika’. This poignant moment signalled the end of the South African leg of the tour of the joyous ‘King Kong: an African Jazz Opera’ Based on the troubled life of boxer Ezekiel Dhlamini, ‘King Kong’ was first performed in Wits’ Great Hall on 2 February 1959. It starred the best jazz musicians of the time, including Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba and Kippie Moketsi. It was staged at the Great Hall because this was one of the few places where multiracial audiences were allowed.

“Cast member Comet Mdledle recalled, I had never seen such a crowd at the Wits Great Hall. Over the years I had attended shows in that Hall but on that night the masses came out in full force.”

“We wanted a theatre that was light and political, provocative and delightful, gentle and confrontational … a theatre that helped to conscientise and contribute to mass mobilisation.”

Their first production, ‘The Fantastical History of a Useless Man’, used vaudeville techniques to deconstruct ‘official’ South African history. It pondered the role of whites in resistance after June 1976, concluding that this was “to be the least obstruction”.

The Nunnery is now a teaching space, and the Wits Theatre Complex hosts drama that continues to provoke and delight.

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COMMUNITY Student volunteers in Fordsburg bringing aid to victims of the 1918 epidemic

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History Workshop Open Day poster, 1984, with sketches by an emerging young artist, William Kentridge

Poster for the launching of FOSATU in Durban in 1980

A LABOUR OF LOVE: WITS AND LABOUR STRUGGLES

An associated research initiative, the Wits History Workshop, set up in 1982, devoted itself to promoting research and writing of ‘popular’ history, accessible to workers and activists. History was seen as a fundamental tool in educating all those involved in the struggle. One of the most famous early publications was Luli Callinicos’ Gold and Workers,

1886-1924.

Wits academics were directly involved in the turmoil of the rise of black trade unions and the formation of the first umbrella labour federation, FOSATU, in 1980. These were dangerous times for any organisations challenging the apartheid state, and these academics were under constant security surveillance.

Apart from this direct involvement, Wits academics also ran a FOSATU Labour Studies course between 1980 and 1985. This brought into sharp relief intense debates about the role of academia in a repressive state. The Wits Council’s decision to terminate the contract with FOSATU on the grounds that it breached academic freedom was one aspect of this debate. Outraged academics continued to offer the courses off campus, until the formation of COSATU in 1985.

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Annual ‘Open Days’ took place, which consisted of kinds of festivals featuring plays, photographic and other exhibitions, slide shows and music. Hundreds of worker organisation members were bussed in from the townships, and ‘occupied’ Wits for a day.

There were also more serious conferences, where debates centred on the extent to which ‘popular’ histories diluted academic history and whether ivory tower academics could write for workers.

Today the tradition of support for the labour movement at Wits continues in, for example, the Sociology of Work Project (SWOP), now the Society, Work and Development Institute.

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Original Health Centre building, 1937

SOUL MEDICINE:

Nurses administering polio vaccine against the background of army vehicles 1986

ALEXANDRA HEALTH CENTRE

“I feel Soul City ... has greater impact. You feel it and it sort of shakes you inside.”

- female audience member from Gauteng

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In 1939 Wits took over a foundering mission clinic, requiring all medical students to serve a 17-day rotation there. After the Second World War, the Clinic’s future was again in question. Four leftwing doctors, led by Wits graduate, Mervyn Susser, revived the clinic in 1952, envisioning its place in an emerging network of health centres aiming to provide comprehensive community health care.

In 1994, millions of viewers were introduced to the hugely successful soap opera, Soul City. Set in the fictional township of Soul City, it used Alexandra Township and its Health Clinic as a filming location and inspiration. Two years earlier, Wits doctors at the Clinic, Garth Japhet and Shereen Usdin, conceived of this edutainment vehicle to address the basic social and health problems, particularly HIV and AIDS, which they saw at the Clinic. CEO Lebo Ramafoko believes Soul City’s success “is not merely its authentic portrayal of township life but also its intimacy with viewers”.

But increasingly repressive political pressures constrained this work. As the apartheid regime clamped down on independent medical initiatives, and on black resistance, Susser’s close relationship with the ANC in Alexandra led to his being fired and immigrating to the UK.

The series represents a 21st century media version of the practice of social medicine, which addressed the socio-economic causes of disease and violence, rather than simply treating the results. For this model to work, a close ‘authentic’ relationship and empathy with patients and the community they came from was essential.

Another important moment in the Clinic’s history was in 1991 when IFP hostel dwellers, unchecked by the police, rampaged through the township. Treating casualties of all factions equally, doctors and nurses alike shared these trials by fire, using adversity to forge innovative community-based alternatives to healthcare delivery.

During the political violence of the 1980s, the Clinic, perceived as providing succour to ANC members, became the target of three attacks orchestrated by the security police.

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Wits students clash with police on Jan Smuts Avenue, 1970

POLITICS

Government troops from the Drill Hall in the centre of Johannesburg heading for Brixton Ridge

THE ‘RED REVOLT’:

SMUTS, WITS AND THE 1922 STRIKE

On 10 March 1922, General J.C. Smuts proclaimed Martial Law and came to Johannesburg to direct operations personally against white striking mineworkers. What had started out as a large-scale strike had escalated quickly into a full-scale revolt, indeed a war, which became known as the ‘Red Revolt’. With the strikers entrenched in Fordsburg and along the Brixton Ridge to the west of Milner Park, Smuts used the Wits Biology Block, which was nearing completion, to survey and plan an attack on Cottesloe School and the Ridge. A contemporary map noted that on March 12, “Brixton Ridge was captured, aeroplanes and guns co-operating with infantry, and the first severe blow dealt against revolutionaries in Johannesburg”. 2,200 Strikers were taken prisoner and four were executed.

The fighting along the Rand lasted four days and 153 people were killed before the strikers were finally subdued. The University’s sympathies in this conflict were never in question. The strikers were seen as “Bolsheviks”. Staff and students alike, many of them veterans of the Great War and intensely loyal to Smuts, rallied

to the defence of law and order. Wits’ close ties with the mining industry were also probably a factor drawing the battle lines in the University.

Those who did not enlist in the army volunteered as special constables to patrol the streets in the suburbs. A commerce student and an assistant lecturer in law made “the supreme sacrifice” in responding to “the call of duty in connection with the revolutionary outbreak”.

The strike was responsible for the postponement of the inauguration of the University, initially planned for 1 March 1922. The inauguration ceremony and the University’s first graduation were finally held on the morning of 4 October at the Town Hall. Here Smuts was awarded the University’s first honorary degree.

Smuts receiving his honorary Doctorate

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A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF MILITARY KNOWLEDGE: WITS AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR Memorandum from H.R. Raikes, Principal, 15 October 1942

University Training Corps on Great Hall steps, 1942

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“Owing to the stocking shortage, I feel it desirable that women students … should be permitted to wear slacks or dungarees at lectures. Women students will be expected to see that any apparel of this nature … is of a quiet and businesslike ‘tailored’ cut.”

In May 1940 a University Training Corps (UTC) was set up as an Active Citizen Force, Wits Command. The UTC comprised artillery and engineering sub-units from Engineering and Science, while medical students had their own training unit. Arts and Commerce students were given the short end of the stick, being allocated to infantry sub-units. Later an air squadron was formed, including a Women’s Volunteer Air Force Section. The UTC provided a certain amount of military knowledge before students presented themselves for full-time service.

The University Principal, Raikes, discouraged students from joining up until they had graduated. They had to consult before they did so. A number of staff members, with appropriate military rank, commanded the sub-units of the UTC, but those of a more liberal left persuasion were involved in setting up the Army Education Service (AES), which became part of the Government’s Military Intelligence division. The AES developed ‘propaganda’ programmes to educate troops in South Africa, North Africa and Italy about the reasons for the war, the nature of fascism and the meaning of ‘citizenship’ in a post-war South Africa. Embedded in quite varied notions of citizenship was the possibility that ‘non-Europeans’ might be integrated (albeit gradually) into the white political economy.

Women in the Wits Voluntary Airforce Unit, 1942

During the war, there was a dramatic increase in black students, which provided a rare opportunity to change the University’s policy direction, making it more of an ‘open’ university. The opening of the Medical School (with some limitations) signalled this intention.

After the war, Wits made extensive provision for the education of ex-service men and women, doubling up on classes and courses. The excitement as they arrived was palpable – in the description of one contemporary, “the joint was jumping”.

However, much to students’ disappointment, Raikes tightened up the dress code for both men and women students after the war, and dungarees became a thing of the past.

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A TOUCH OF HOPE: ROBERT KENNEDY AT WITS, 1966

While Kennedy’s speech at UCT is the best-known, the one he delivered at Wits was the most political one of all. By now he had had time to a meet diverse groups of South Africans both black and white – he arrived at Wits fresh from a triumphant motorcade through Soweto – and so he felt greater freedom to speak.

Kennedy being mobbed while making his way into the Great Hall

Quoting his brother, he addressed young students as “you who … have the least ties to the present and the greatest ties to the future.

On a winter’s evening in June 1966, students milled around the Piazza in front of the Great Hall. A group of excited women at the front of the crowd gathered to welcome a good-looking young American, in a scene reminiscent of those which greeted pop stars of that time. As he strode up the stairs, he shook hands briefly with the fortunate ones, but his light touch was remembered for many years. Robert Kennedy, junior senator from New York and brother of slain American president, John Kennedy, took up his position on the stage and delivered his final speech of a brief tour of South Africa.

Kennedy speaking at the podium in the Great Hall

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Kennedy was the first American leader to visit South Africa after the National Party came to power. He was highly critical of apartheid and committed to racial equality and civil rights in the US. Invited by the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) to deliver the Annual Day of Affirmation Speech at UCT, he went on to speak at two other universities. The apartheid government found it difficult to handle his visit, because of its ambivalent dependence on the US. It refused to provide any security, and government ministers petulantly contented themselves with delivering insults, including that Kennedy was “a little snip”.

And those who seek change and progress in South Africa are very special … So many of these I have seen, so many who are in this hall, are standing with their brothers around the globe for liberty and equality and human dignity; not in the ease and comfort and approbation of society, but in the midst of controversy and difficulty and risk.”

Student leader Merton Shill gave this vote of thanks to the senator:

“It is not an honour for us to have you with us this evening sir, it is an inspiration, and it was not with pleasure that we have listened to you sir, but it was from compulsion. And it is not with nostalgia that we view your departure tomorrow, but it is with trepidation.”

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Affirmation Banner across Central Block, 16 April 1959

THE POWER OF SILENCE: ACADEMIC PROTEST MARCHES

The 1956 Separate Universities Bill prompted the University’s first concerted response to a political issue. It united students, staff and alumni in opposition to the government’s intended introduction of apartheid in the open universities.

A general meeting attended by about 1,400 students in September 1956 reaffirmed the student body’s belief in university autonomy and the principle of university admission based solely on academic qualifications. On Wednesday 22 May 1957, 2,000 academic staff, students and members of Convocation marched from the University to the City Hall behind a single banner: ‘Against Separate Universities Bill’.

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In April 1959 the protest against the government’s plans reached its climax with the second reading debate of the Extension of University Education Bill. On Thursday 16 April, Wits staged a “solemn day of protest”. Early that morning students erected a banner across the columns of the Central Block, affirming Wits’ commitment to the idea of a university open to “men and women without regard to race or colour”. This was followed by the first ever General Assembly of the University, held in the Great Hall, where the Principal, W.G. Sutton, read the Affirmation and Dedication. After a minute’s silence the assembly was dissolved and the University closed for the remainder of the day.

From the 1960s onwards, the intensification of general apartheid legislation meant that political marches became commonplace, sometimes in the face of brutal police intervention.

Margaret Rankine (BA 1963) remembers a lesser-known feature of the early marches – silence. She participated in the 1962 student march against the 30 Day Detention without Trial legislation.

“This was a totally silent march (as was the protest against the University Amendment Act). I do not believe anyone who has not experienced being part of such a protest can possibly imagine the incredible power of a silent protest. The City of Johannesburg stopped – all work, all traffic. In the silence a single telephone ringing or a typewriter was occasionally heard from an upstairs room as we walked past.”

1957 march protesting against the Separate Universities Bill

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CONCLUSION “I studied Law and Economics at Wits from 1997 to 2002, a period of great transformation for the University ... My generation’s time at Wits was not defined by great struggle. However, it was a period of constant battles to achieve an inclusive campus. Financial exclusion [and] cultural isolation were some of the challenges of that time. The University has made remarkable progress on these issues since then.”

Trudi Makhaya, MSc 2003, MBA 2006 (Oxford)

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The pages of the student newspaper Vuvuzela are an indication that the concerns of the Wits’ student body have ‘normalised’. Sport, social and cultural clubs and events dominate the paper, indicating the priorities and concerns of the current students.

stand, who are forced to forge creative alliances and find commonality in terms of defining and serving students’ needs. Student groups also ally themselves with worker organisations on campus, regarding basic working conditions as an important political concern.

Vuvuzela also devotes space to issues of access

Recently a senior academic challenged student councillors to reconsider the notion of what is political and what is not. He argued that all issues that affect students’ lives are political, and characterised negotiations and interactions with the University bodies at all levels as political. Since knowledge is power, it is the students’ responsibility to seek as much information as possible at the initial stages of policy development in order to equip themselves to provide meaningful input. An example is the policy around fees, where students tend to engage only at the end point of a process – usually in some form of mass protest – when fee increases are already a fait accompli.

and exclusion, represented in the financial precariousness of the lives of disadvantaged students, which often precludes academic success. Foreign students, many from Africa, face huge financial hurdles in simply obtaining a study permit from the Department of Home Affairs. Student accommodation remains that perennial issue for all students coming from other provinces and countries.

Student political activity – as demonstrated by the SRC elections – is often linked to the youth wings of political parties like the ANC. However, there are independent candidates who

Active student participation on the Wits’ committees at the highest level, and in the public domain, is preparation for engaging with political issues beyond the University, which too may be characterised as issues that affect all aspects of the lives of South Africans. Many Wits graduates have taken up this challenge, particularly in civil society groupings, and have made a difference in terms of basic living conditions, like access to water, housing and education. They are able to draw on all aspects of the university experience, academic and beyond.

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Reference List Introduction G.R. Bozzoli, A Vice Chancellor Remembers: The Memoirs of Professor G.R. Bozzoli, (Alphaprint, Randburg, 1997).

Jan Hofmeyr Collection: A1: Ea194. ‘Address at a university meeting to welcome the Duke of Devonshire’, 1926. Historical Papers Library, University of the Witwatersrand.

Showing its Mettle Murray, Wits: The Early Years, 58-9.

Fit for a Prince Murray, Wits: The Early Years, 370.

University Press, Johannesburg, 1982).

Bruce Murray, Wits: The ‘Open’ Years. A History of the

University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg 1939-1959 (Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, 1997).

M. Shear, Wits, a University in the Apartheid Era (Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, 1996).

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852, Cited in http://www.

“A Wild and Solitary place”

W. Martinson, The Tower of Light: an architectural description, 2008. (Parktown and Westcliff

Pipe Dreams and “Faraway spots in africa”

Heritage Trust Data Sheet, unpublished, 2008).

Thanks to Prof. Kathy Munro for her input.

“In a Huge Cloud of Feathery Sparks”

Bruce Murray, Wits: The Early Years: A History of

the University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg and its Precursors 1896-1939 (Witwatersrand

http://www.britishpathe.com/video/attemptedassassination-of-dr-verwoerd/query/attem pted+assassination+of+Dr+Verwoerd

Agriculture, Assassination and Empire http://www.artefacts.co.za/main/Buildings/ bldgframes.php?bldgid=8271 http://www.studygroup.org.uk/Archives/35/ THE%20EMPIRE%20EXHIBITION%20 SOUTH%20AFRICA.htm

Murray, Wits: The Early Years, 216-21.

A Memory of Mining http://www.joburg.org.za/index.php?option=com_ content&view=article&id=5679&catid =88&Itemid=340#ixzz1q3l9Vx3y

http://www.vintagemedia.co.za/this-day/23-september1936-the-south-african-publics-first-glimpse-of-tv

http://www.jhbcityparks.com/index.php?option=com_ content&view=article&id=718:celebratejoburgs-trees-&catid=1:latest&Itemid=56

http://joburgheritage.co.za/currentissues.html

Author’s own collection.

Chipkin, Johannesburg Style, 30-1, 41.

http://www.artefacts.co.za/main/Buildings/ archframes.php?archid=1053 Prof. K Munro, ‘The Hillman Building, A Living Treasure’ in http://www.gradnet-db.wits.ac.za/hillman.html Clive Chipkin, Johannesburg Style: Architecture and Society, 1880s-1960s, (David Philip Cape Town 1993), 155, 163, 179.

Chipkin, Johannesburg Transition:

Architecture and Society from 1950 (STE Publishers, Johannesburg 2008), 95.

Many thanks to Prof. Alan Mabin and Prof. Kathy Munro for their input.

guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/ apr/18/karl-marx-men-make-history

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Reference List Prof. Naik, personal collection.

An “anti-women complex” Bruce Murray, Wits: The Early Years, 329-34.

Prof. Naik, interview.

Prof. David Mason, interview.

Personal papers of Muriel Horrell, author’s own collection.

Home is where the Hearth Is A. Esterhuysen, ‘The Makapan Valley and the Excavation of the Cave of Gwasa’, (The Digging Stick Vol. 20, no. 3 December 2003).

Thanks to Amanda Esterhuysen for her input.

Murray, Wits: The Early Years, 312-13.

Poem quoted in Chipkin, Johannesburg Style, 78. http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/NAM/ newafrre/writers/vilakazi.shtml Teaching Scientific Thinking David Mason, ‘Arthur Bleksley: pioneer of science awareness in South Africa’, (South African Journal of Science 104, November/December 2008), 423. http://www.sthp.saha.org.za/memorial/ articles/reliving_detention.htm

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Secrets and Spies Murray, Wits: The ‘Open’ Years, 316-8.

Wits Student, Volume 38 (2) 1986.

“Exploiting What is Unique”

The Invisible Bard

www.wits.ac.za/alumni/news/ atwitsend/14879/ticketsupremo.html

Obituary: Jacques Pierre Friederich (Friedel) Sellschop 1930-2002, (adapted from article in Sunday Times 11 August 2002, by Chris Barron). http://www.src.wits.ac.za/groups/jpfs/jpfs-mem.html Jeremy Paschke, ‘Little Neutral One: Neutrino research has Minnesota roots’. http://technolog. it.umn.edu/technolog/mayjun99/neutrino.html ‘Wits plays key role in historic find’, http://www. wits.ac.za/newsroom/newsitems/201207/16724/ news_item_16724.html

Wits Review, July 2012.

Satire and Subversion http://www.francofrescura.co.za/ franco-full-biography.html http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/chapter2strongprotest-art-1972-1976-damnedfaint-praise-or-buried-clichestrong Bozzoli, A Vice Chancellor Remembers, 187-90.

“An Education beyond Academic” Shear, Wits a University, 100-2, 118 , 224-5, 238.

Wits Student, May 1987.

Wits Review, July 2012.

Linda Vilakazi-Tselane, interview.

Passing the Buck

“This Tendency to Vulgarity” Murray, Wits: The Early Years, 368-73.

Murray, Wits: The ‘Open’ Years, 329-34.

Murray, Wits: The Early Years, 375-6.

Shear, Wits, a University, 258. http://student.wits.ac.za/Residences/Mensres/History.htm

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Reference List Earning that ‘Clever Boys’ Tag In the Long Run

Wits Student, Vol 34, no 2, 1982.

Wits Sport, 1981-1993.

‘An Elite Athlete Training Without a Coach’, (New York Times, July 9, 2009) http://well. blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/an-eliteathlete-training-without-a-coach/ Jonathan Beverly, ‘Hendrick Ramaala Acts Like Just One of the Guys - But Don’t Let That Fool You’, (Running Times, November 2006) http:// runningtimes.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=9256 Jete Longman, ‘Mark Plaatjes’, (New York Times, February 20, 1994) http://www.nytimes. com/1994/02/20/magazine/mark-plaatjes. html?pagewanted=all&src=pm http://www.supersport.com/athletics/running/ news/120127/Ramaala_makes_history_in_Dubai

Wits Sport, 1981-1993.

The Wits Reporter, 13 February 1978.

Wits Student, Sports Special Edition, 1983.

Murray, Wits: The Early Years, 365-8.

Jonty Winch, Wits Sport: An Illustrated

History of Sport at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, (Windsor publishers, n.d), pages 240-49.

Arthur Goldstuck, interview.

Black Power http://www.hermanwald.com/blog/ Unknown_Miner_1.aspx http://www.wits.ac.za/newsroom/ newsitems/201203/15582/news_item_15582.html

A Conversation of Epic Proportions http://www.artefacts.co.za/main/Buildings/ archframes.php?archid=1609 http://www.wits.ac.za/alumni/alumnirecognition/3593/ briandorothyzylstra.html http://web.archive.org/web/20050314025632/ http://www.instituto-camoes.pt/arquivos/ artes/adamastormith.htm This link is an edited version of Cyril Coetzee’s account of the beginnings of his painting ‘T’kama-Adamastor’ which appears in a collection of essays, edited by Ivan Vladislavic, T’kama Adamastor: Inventions of Africa in a South African Painting, (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2000).

A Material World Anitra Nettleton, ‘Home Is Where the Art Is: Six South African Rural Artists’, (African Arts, Vol. 33, No. 4 Winter, 2000).

A. Nettleton, ‘Jackson Hlungwani’s Altars: an

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African Christian Theology in Wood and Stone’, (Material Religion Volume 5 Issue 1), 50-69.

Matthew Partridge, ‘The Wits Art Museum collection: From garage to gallery’, (Mail and Guardian, 18 May 2012). http://www.braamfontein.org.za/news/arts-showcaseat-greatly-anticipated-wits-art-museum Provocative and Delightful Harry Bloom, King Kong: an African jazz opera; lyrics by Pat Williams, (London, Collins, 1961). http://www.wits.ac.za/alumni/news/ atwitsend/14879/ticketsupremo.html http://soulsafari.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/ king-kong-the-first-all-african-jazz-opera-1959/ ‘The night the music took over the city’, (City Press, 31 January 2009) http://152.111.1.87/argief/berigte/ citypress/2009/01/31/CP/29/lm-KingKong.html Brent Meersman, The Real Review, http:// realreview.co.za/tag/malcolm-purkey/

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Reference List Malcolm Purkey, ‘Productive Misreadings: Brecht and the Junction Avenue Theatre Company’ in http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/ German/German-idx?type=div&did=German.

BrechtYearbook023.i0008&isize=text

A Labour of Love Luli Callinicos, Gold and Workers. 1886-1924.

A People’s History of South Africa. Volume One. (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1980).

M. Friedman, ‘The Future is in the Hands of the Workers’: A History of FOSATU (Mutloatse Heritage Trust, Johannesburg, 2011), 98-9.

Soul Medicine S. Marks, ‘South Africa’s Early Experiment in Social Medicine: Its Pioneers and Politics’, (American Journal of Public Health, March 1997, Vol. 87 No.3), 452-59.

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S. Krige, ‘An Ideal behind the Work: Muriel Horrell in a post-war world 1946-1949’, (Unpublished discussion paper, January 2012).

Mervyn W. Susser, ‘Alexandra Health Centre and Clinic 1952-1955: The best of intentions; misadventure, debacle and inadvertent emigration’, (Unpublished article, Adler Museum of Medicine).

Dr Tim Wilson Collection, Adler Museum of Medicine.

Transcripts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission http://www.justice.gov.za/ trc/decisions/2001/ac21230.htm Peter Hawthorne, ‘Emotional Intelligence’, (Time Magazine, 2 July 2001) http://www.time.com/ time/magazine/article/0,9171,145116,00.html L. Rocha-Silva & G. Hendricks, Soul City. In

Behind the mask: getting to grips with crime and violence in South Africa. A.B. Emmett & A.

Burchart (eds). (Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council), 93-112. http://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/ product.php?productid=1934&freedownload=1

http://www.soulcity.org.za/news/soul-cityseries-11-addresses-burning-issues Dr Sue Goldstein, interview.

Thanks to Adler Museum Curator, Rochelle Keene for her input.

The ‘Red Revolt’ Murray, Wits: The Early Years, 71-2.

Jeremy Krikler, White Rising: The 1922 Insurrection and Racial Killing in South Africa (New York: Manchester University Press, 2005).

A Certain Amount of Military Knowledge Murray, Wits: The ‘Open’ Years, 1-20.

A Touch of Hope This story draws extensively on the website for the documentary film, A Ripple of

Hope: RFK in the Land Of Apartheid

http://www.rfksafilm.org/html/speeches/africaking. php http://www.rfksafilm.org/html/speeches/shill.php The Power of Silence Murray, Wits: The ‘Open’ Years, 303-11, 319-20.

A fascinating 3-minute film clip of the preparations for the General Assembly of 1959, with the famous affirmation banner: http://www.britishpathe. com/video/university-of-the-witwatersrand Margaret Rankine:http://www.wits. ac.za/alumni/news/witsreview-online/ lettersandeditorial/14198/studentprotest.html

S. Krige, ‘An Absolute Royal Battle’: The War Journals of Muriel Horrell 1940-6’, (Unpublished seminar paper, University of Johannesburg, October 2011).

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the following people who gave generously of their time and expertise to make this book possible: Julia Charlton Ferna Clarkson Colleen Dawson Gillian Dawson Dr Amanda Esterhuysen Sue Goldstein Arthur Goldstuck Greg Homann Babalwa July Rochelle Keene David Kgopa Reshma Lakha-Singh Prof. Alan Mabin Peter Maher

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Trudi Makhaya Elizabeth Marima Prof. John Mason Prof. Rob Moore Prof. Kathy Munro Prof. Bruce Murray Prof. Kantilal Naik Prof. Anitra Nettleton Shirona Patel Michelle Pickover Fiona Rankin-Smith Zofia Sulej Linda Vilakazi-Tselane

About the Author

Sue Krige has a masters degree in History from Wits University, and has worked, written and published extensively on various fields of history, both for academic and other purposes. Apart from teaching at Wits during the 1990s, and again from 2008-2010, she has been an independent heritage consultant and director of a heritage tour company, both of which have strengthened her interest in Johannesburg’s history and contemporary development, and in the history of cities in general. Putting together this book was a wonderful opportunity to explore the history of Wits in this and other contexts. At present, she is enjoying working in an entirely different position as the Academic and Strategic Planning Manager for the Faculty of Commerce Law and Management at Wits.

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“The objection has been raised that already quite enough time is wasted on sports and frivolities in Universities …

No doubt for many the University is but a school where they learn various formulae and dicta – to them it means nothing more than the place where in return for a certain amount of labour, they are given a degree which enables them to earn a living ... For a few, the University has a wider significance – it offers unique facilities for discussion on all topics. It is to those few to whom this plea is addressed.”

Extract from the editorial of the student newspaper Umpa, 1929

“It is the students who will yet change Wits: by extension, other universities, colleges and technikons as well.”

Author Es’kia ‘‘Zeke” Mphahlele, Professor of African Literature at Wits during the 1980s, writing in 1996