Between Mandela and His LLB Degree Was Racism and Apartheid

READERS' FORUM Wits, UCT and other English language ©GCIS medium liberal universities about their opposition to apartheid, in particular when apartheid obstructed academic freedom, is farcical and deceitful. The cases of these two African leaders in politics and scholarship, Mandela at Wits and Mafeje at UCT, respectively, are profound examples of the English liberal hypocrisy in apartheid South Africa. I frequently find myself returning to the miscarriage of justice at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission with regard to the universities. The TRC provided South Africa with a chance to interrogate South African universities about the roles these institutions played in supporting and keeping apartheid alive. Many sectors of society appeared and made their submission to the TRC, but not the education sector. The TRC should have called on universities to come before the commission and account. Wits should have been called to account at the TRC for its treatment of the law student, Mandela, and other black (African, Coloured and Indian) Between Mandela and his students. In addition, it should have been LLB Degree was Racism and asked to explain its alliance with the apartheid government, in particular the Department of Justice and its Minister Apartheid at Wits University PC Pelser, against Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe after his release from Robben By Neo Lekgotla laga Ramoupi Island prison in May 1969. GR Bozzoli, who at the time was Vice-Chancellor and Principal of Wits (1968 to 1977), ruce Murray’s “No easy walk government and its Department of and was the father to Belinda Bozzoli, to LLB for Madiba” (Sunday Prisons prevented Mandela from the current Democratic Alliance (DA) BTimes 26.07.15) does not point continuing his law studies by blocking Shadow Minister of Higher Education very clearly to the actual difficulties the political prisoner’s correspondence and Training in the South African faced by Madiba and other black with Wits and other universities inside Parliament, wrote a letter to the people studying law at the University and outside South Africa. Justice Minister Pelser, just days before of Witwatersrand during this period. The same pretext was mentioned Sobukwe was released, dated 5 May Rather it succinctly makes the point by another liberal university, the 1969. In the letter the vice-chancellor that it took N Rolihlahla Mandela 46 University of Cape Town, six years of Wits reassures the apartheid justice years to pass his Bachelors of Laws earlier, in 1968, in the case of Archie minister that since “this University (LLB) degree at Wits. Mafeje. By supporting apartheid was his previous employer; I feel that Murray writes “In 1974, he legislation as it related to Mafeje’s we might be thought to have some (Mandela) contemplated completing proposed appointment in 1968 as moral responsibility to assist him his Wits LLB, eliciting a cautious and a senior lecturer in the Department in his rehabilitation on his release legalistic response from the university of Social Anthropology, and not from prison.” I support Sifiso Ndlovu rather than a sympathetic one.” One challenging the Minister of Education, in his opinion that this was not wonders why Murray does not explain Jan de Klerk, father of former President, rehabilitation but simply a case of why Wits’s reply to political prisoner F. W. de Klerk, UCT entrenched Wits University officially assuming the Mandela on Robben Island at the time and strengthened apartheid in the duties of the apartheid regime (see, was not sympathetic. Rather, the liberal university system and in education “Robert Sobukwe: How Wits and excuse Murray cites is that the apartheid overall. So the self-proclaimed status of the Department of Justice shaped his 76 THE THINKER READERS' FORUM life,” http://www.sadet.co.za/robert_ assistant of the Department of Law in It would be interesting to audit how sobukwe.pdf). 1940 to keep the faculty integral when many blacks graduated with their Likewise, UCT should have its head, Robin McKerron, was about LLB during Hahlo’s tenure at Wits, appeared at the hearings of the TRC to leave. considering that Murray says Hahlo’s to account for the role the university This man looked down upon black advice to Mandela was that he was played in alliance with the apartheid students and women as inferior. Partly, wasting his time studying law as “law Minister of Education, de Klerk, against his ill-treatment of Mandela and women was a social science and women and Mafeje’s academic career and the other could be driven by the fact that he had Africans were not disciplined enough black students and lecturers at UCT; twice been rejected from serving in the to master its intricacies.” This racist line then the former University of Natal and Defence Force on medical grounds. of thinking continued in the universities so on. The point I labour here is that Born in the United States in 1905, in South Africa when my generation of the English in South Africa continue at an early age Hahlo went with his black South Africans entered university to invent the idea that apartheid was parents to Germany, where he took in the late 1980s when registering for a created and implemented by the the Dr Jur at the University of Halle Philosophy or English course at UND Afrikaners and the English were never and commenced practice. He could where I went, white English liberal part of it. But Bantu Biko warned not stomach living under Hitler, and Professors – with or without a PhD – us about the liberal in I Write What I he emigrated to South Africa in 1934. would tell you, you cannot do this Like… we must re-read it. In two years he completed the LLB. At course – it is not for blacks!’ Today in The narrative of Murray at Wits, as the graduation ceremony on 20 March the twenty-first century at UCT during presented in this Sunday Times article, 1937, LLB degrees were conferred on the Rhodes Must Fall Movement in is inadequate to explain “No easy the sixteen candidates who had passed March 2015, black students echoed walk to LLB for Madiba” because it the Final Examination in the previous this experience. pits Mandela’s intellect, to a greater December, the highest number until In 1973 Wits conferred the LLD degree, as the problem – and to a lesser 1950; that provides the impression of honoris causa on Hahlo; probably extent Mandela’s political activism – the law faculty in its formative years. thanking him for keeping Mandela a for his failing his law courses and for Several of the sixteen were to achieve complete failure at LLB. On Robben taking all these decades just to earn an prominence, including PC Pelser, Island, Mandela probably heard from LLB degree. This kind of thinking is at who became Minister of Justice; and his most white, English and Jewish the heart of racist ideology and white Hahlo, the person most responsible for Johannesburg-based and Wits-trained superiority. raising the faculty to its 1990 stature. attorneys that his law faculty persecutor Apartheid and white superiority, In 1946 Wits promoted Hahlo to a had been honoured by Wits. Thus I maintain, stood between Mandela professorship. the following year, in 1974, prisoner and the attainment of his LLB degree Mandela, writes Murray, “wrote his Mandela took steps to complete his at Wits University. For a start, just look final-year LLB examinations on three Wits LLB; and it was for the first time at the format of this 1949 picture of occasions, from 1947-1949, but failed that he tried with Hahlo out of sight, Mandela’s almost all white classmates at each attempt. In 1952, and again in out of mind. But he did not succeed. with the racist Dean of Law, Professor 1974, while incarcerated on Robben Murray does not tell us why that was HR Hahlo. Mandela is standing at the Island, he took steps to complete his the case, except to say “they came to back next to another colleague who Wits LLB, but they came to naught.” naught.” Mandela was settled now in could be either coloured, Indian, if A livid fact that Murray omits in his his Island prison environment and its not African like Mandela; and all the narrative is that throughout Mandela’s sameness of routine; I bet he was ready whites are standing from first row all failure to complete his LLB degree, it to conquer that Wits LLB! the way up. Apartheid legislation was HR Hahlo at the helm, as the head Fortunately, Hahlo lived long prohibited Mandela from living in of the Wits Department of Law and enough to bear witness to the aura the city, Johannesburg, where Wits later as Dean of the Faculty of Law from and wisdom of Mandela, especially is located; he had to take public 1947 until 1968 when he emigrated Madiba’s raw sincerity when it came to transport, probably a train or bus, after – again – to Canada; certain that dealing with his oppressors and jailors his LLB classes in the evenings daily to Mandela, the African freedom fighter, because he lived to age of eighty-one commute to Orlando in Soweto where was locked, stocked and barrelled on years, with his mental capacity intact. he lived with his young family. During Robben Island – and there was just no Do Not Tell Me How To Remember the day he had to work to support his way the radical and militant Mandela My History. ■ family and himself. could become an LLB graduate, not The human aspect of racism and only of Wits, but of any university Dr Neo Lekgotla laga Ramoupi, apartheid that was the elephant in inside and outside South Africa.

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