‘Hippies, radicals and the Sounds of Silence’ Cultural Dialectics at two South African Universities 1966-1976 Helen Lunn Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in the School of Music University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, Howard Campus Supervisors: Professor C. Ballantine, Professor C.Burns and Professor J. Hyslop September 2010 DECLARATION Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy , in the Graduate Programme in Department of Music , University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. I declare that this dissertation is my own unaided work. All citations, references and borrowed ideas have been duly acknowledged. I confirm that an external editor was used and that my Supervisor was informed of the identity and details of my editor. It is being submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosoph in the Faculty of Humanities, Development and Social Science, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. None of the present work has been submitted previously for any degree or examination in any other University. Helen Lunn _____________________________ Student name 20 September 2010 ______________________________________ Date E. Muller & S.Ellis ______________________________________ Editor Acknowledgement I wish to acknowledge and thank the NRF for the financial support which made this research possible. Abstract This study explores the impact of the counter culture on students at two Anglophone universities in the 1960s and 70s. It focuses on the social and historical differences that predisposed English speaking youth to metropolitan based cultures. It explores this in the context of a lack of identity with the dominant culture of apartheid. The study examines the method of transmission, absorption, translation and incorporation of the counterculture and the New Left. The factors that highlighted the differences between South African students and their counterparts abroad are seen not only in their access to technology but also in the nature of their relationship to power both political and educational. The importance of understanding what bred different responses to similar stimuli assists in understanding the process in which the global became local. It is argued here that the attraction of the counterculture lay in the broader cultural scope it gave to expressions of difference and resistance as a response to the rigid and continuous expansion of punitive measures by the apartheid government. The persistence through the 1960s of a liberal framework is examined in the context of a response to these measures as well as a failure to move beyond the racial foregrounding of the political system. The influences of events in the USA, UK and France in 1968 are seen in the context of their importance in South Africa as a catalyst to practical and theoretical change. The significance of individuals as translators of the discourses of the New Left is paralleled in examinations of South African musicians whose lyrics and compositions carried both the ideas of the counter culture as well as expressed responses and issues shared by their audiences. The importance of the coalescing of both the New Left and the counterculture are evident in the early 1970s. Students adopted a Marxist framework within which to analyse South Africa, and the methods of the New Left in France in seeking alliances with workers. This practical approach was an example of the global becoming local and introduced those with access to privileged white education into a reexamination of the role of education in changing society. The counterculture expressed itself in the adoption of both cultural and educational methods of focusing on change as a response both to students relationship to power as well as to the emphasis of the 1960s on a broader more individually expressed ability to embrace change and new values. The study concludes that the framework of the New Left when employed in redefining South African history was central to a process of both economic and cultural change within the country. The absence of a strongly expressed identity suggests the widespread appeal of the central values of the counterculture which emphasized distance and disaffiliation from the dominant culture. The opportunity offered by this position is seen as a response to the political expressions of a racially defined student body against a less obvious but significant change in the definition and role of tertiary education and cultural institutions. Table of Contents CHAPTER I .........................................................................................................................1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 1-15 CHAPTER II ......................................................................................................................16 Methodology ...................................................................................................................................... 16-26 CHAPTER III ....................................................................................................................27 Teach Your Children Well ............................................................................................................... 27-55 CHAPTER IV ....................................................................................................................56 We Shall Overcome ........................................................................................................................... 56-82 CHAPTER V .....................................................................................................................83 The Personal is Political .................................................................................................................. 83-104 CHAPTER VI ..................................................................................................................105 We can change the world, rearrange the world .......................................................................... 105-124 CHAPTER VII .................................................................................................................125 You Say you want a Revolution ................................................................................................... 125-155 CHAPTER VIII ...............................................................................................................156 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 156-166 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................. 167-180 Appendix A .................................................................................................................................... 181-185 Introduction Chapter 1. ‘It’s all relative!’ The youth of the1960s created buttons and slogans pronouncing, „History is dead,‟ „Frigidaire‟s are the coffins of dreams,‟ „Turning on is the answer‟ and „Life is like a beanstalk.‟ The buttons captured the pervasive sense that life and history were mutable. The realisation that tiny amounts of manufactured LSD1 could shift entire personal worlds changed concepts of history and certainty forever. Science reached this point in the first two decades of the twentieth century when quantum physics upset Newtonian scientific theory2, but the social sciences did not reach this point until the 1960s. Once it was understood that history and life were a matter of perception, different discourses and constructs, every study within the academic world lost certainty and every statement became subject to its own intent form and structure. It was the world Foucault entered when he questioned the dividing line between sanity and insanity at the beginning of the 60s, and which led him to conclude that the realm we come out in is “neither the history of knowledge, nor history itself.” Indeed once we go beyond the division, beyond the rational Newtonian world of logic and structure what is “in question is the limits rather than the identity of a culture.”3 Rejection of ideology, history and bourgeois social structures, irreverence, sexual freedom, drugs and altered perspectives were all hallmarks of the counterculture. It is these and other aspects of the counterculture and its impact on middle class Anglophone students at South African universities that this thesis is concerned with. The counterculture offered spaces within which alternative and oppositional discourses could be explored and it is the counterpoint, ruptures and areas of coalescence between the cultural and political that this study describes. Locating the Study: The decision to explore this terrain within the context of two universities was based on the understanding that universities were the most fertile ground for the cultivation of counter cultural values and the New Left. The University of Natal (UN) was the home of some of the most radical structured opposition to apartheid in the early 1970s based on the writings of the New Left and the influence of events abroad. The University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) situated within the economic hub of South Africa, had one of the most diverse cohorts of Anglophone students within the country. These factors accounted for the student body referred