The ‘Coloured Question’ and the University of Pretoria: Separate Development, Trusteeship and Self Reliance, 1933-2012 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Janeke Deodata Thumbran IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPY Professor Helena Pohlandt-McCormick December 2018 © Janeke Deodata Thumbran ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To my adviser Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, words cannot express how thankful I am to have had your support. Thank you for introducing me to a different way of thinking history and for the huge amount of time you invested into this project. Thank you for believing in me and for always having my back. To Ann Waltner, the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History, thank you so much for your support throughout the last (and extremely difficult) stretch of this dissertation and for always availing yourself to discuss my progress – whether in person or via Skype. To the members of my committee, Gary Minkley, Ron Aminzade, Ilze Wolff and Allen Isaacman, thank you so much for reading and engaging with my work so thoughtfully. To Gary in particular, thank you for unofficially assuming the role of co-adviser and helping me rethink and restructure this dissertation’s most important arguments. To my African History cohort at Minnesota: Paul Vig, Elliot James, Gabriale Payne, Jessica Farrell, Virgil Slade, Abraham Seda, Denise Malauene, Heather Wares and Ntombi Mpofu. Through countless seminars, reading groups, informal conversations and more particularly, through our Faultlines Conference, I have learned tremendously from you and have been inspired by your ideas and insights. My dear friends and colleagues at Minnesota, Kwame Adovor Tsikudo and Sravanthi Kollu, thank you so much for lending an ear and supporting me through the stress, anxiety and intensity of the writing process. To Ketaki Jawant and Heider Tun, thank you for your comradery as I juggled teaching, the job market and finishing the dissertation. i To my colleagues, mentors and friends at the Center for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) – Premesh Lalu, Leslie Witz, Ciraj Rassool, Noëleen Murray, Patricia Hayes, Heidi Grunebaum, George Agbo, Ross Truscott, Michelle Smith, Fernanda Pinto de Almeida, Lauren van der Rede, and Emma Minkley. Thank you for welcoming me at the several winter schools I attended, and for your generous engagement with my work during my short residency at the CHR 2016. Being part of this intellectual community has had such a tremendous impact on my work. To my colleagues at the University of Basel, Giorgio Miescher and Lorena Rizzo – who also formed part of the CHR’s broader intellectual network – thank you for supporting this project. To the staff of the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC), Karen Brown, Shereen Sabet and Laura Noppe, I am most grateful for your support and encouragement. Thank you for cultivating a vibrant space in which scholars from all over the world could engage with each other. I am also tremendously thankful for the funding that ICGC provided, which enabled me to conduct my preliminary dissertation research and to compile a first draft. I also received generous financial support from the National Research Foundation (NRF) in South Africa. Through two years of funding in the form of the NRF Freestanding Scholarship, I was able to conduct archival research and fieldwork and to refine this project. To the staff of the University of Pretoria archives, Alida Green and Ria van der Merwe. Thank you for helping me locate the documents and images that were crucial to writing this dissertation and more particularly, for always going the extra mile to make sure that I had what I needed. ii To colleagues at the University of Pretoria, whose insights into UP’s institutional history were crucial to the formulation of this project: thank you to Professor Antoinette Lombard from the Department of Social Work and Criminology, Dr. Carin Combrinck from the Department of Architecture, and Gernia van Niekerk, from the Office of Community Engagement and Professor Alan Mabin from the Capital Cities Project. I would also like to thank Professor Alois Mlambo at Department of Historical & Heritage Studies, who as one of my former professors at UP, not only fully supported my project, but provided me with an affiliation to the department as I conducted my research. A very special thank you to Professor Irma Eloff, former dean of the Faculty of Education, who hosted me on several occasions and provided access to much-needed resources. To my family, who believed in me long before I was able to believe in myself. Thank you. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements i List of Figures v List of Abbreviations vi Chapter 1 – Overview of the Project, 1908-2012 1 Chapter 2 – History of the University of Pretoria 40 Chapter 3 – Pretoria, Marabastad and Eersterust 68 Chapter 4 – Background to the Poor White Problem, the Native Question, 96 and the Coloured Question, 1903-1976 Chapter 5 – Sociology, Social Work and the ‘Coloured Question’ at the 136 University of Pretoria, 1933-1990 Chapter 6 – Architecture, Housing and Self-Reliance at the University 184 of Pretoria, 1943-2012 Chapter 7 – Conclusion 230 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. The deans of Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Sciences 60 from the University of Pretoria with the Minister of Bantu Education, standing around a model of Medunsa. Figure 2. Greater Marabastad, 1870-1975. J.F.C. Clarke, 94 A Glimpse into Marabastad, 12. Figure 3. The Nawab Miriammen Temple, built in Marabastad between 95 1928 and 1939 by the Tamil League of Pretoria. Photographed in 1970. J.F.C. Clarke, A Glimpse into Marabastad, 23. v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AB Afrikaner Broederbond ANC African National Congress HSRC Human Sciences Research Council GEAR Growth, Employment and Redistribution NP National Party PHP People’s Housing Process PNP Purified National Party RDP Reconstruction and Development Program SABRA South African Bureau of Racial Affairs SANAC South African Native Affairs Commission SAP South African Party TUC Transvaal University College UP University of Pretoria UP United Party UWC University of the Western Cape ZAR Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (South African Republic) vi Chapter 1 – Overview of the Project, 1933-2012 Introduction This dissertation is about a historically white university’s engagement with what is called the ‘coloured question’. It explores how the University of Pretoria (UP) grappled with the question of where ‘coloureds’ belonged politically, socially and economically in apartheid South Africa – specifically through the disciplines of sociology and social work. In doing so, this institution produced knowledge that would shape and inform this racial category – not only through writing, teaching and curriculum development – but also by appropriating the segregated township of Eersterust as a site of disciplinary intervention, from the time of this coloured community’s creation during apartheid in 1962, to the post-apartheid and neoliberal present. In the post-apartheid period, these forms of knowledge have re-emerged through the university’s recently established mandate of community engagement, which was accompanied by a disciplinary shift away from the social sciences, towards the material discipline of architecture. The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate the various ways in which the disciplinary reason of the university informed, shaped and converged with the instrumental reason of the apartheid state to produce forms of racialized subjection,1 using the University of Pretoria’s appropriation of Eersterust as a particular example. In addition, the purpose is to problematize and historicize the persistence of apartheid’s racial categories – like the ‘coloured’ category – and forms of knowledge production in 1 These terms are taken from Premesh Lalu and Noëleen Murray’s, Becoming UWC: Reflections, pathways and unmaking apartheid’s legacy, 18-19. Instrumental reason: “reason directed to the accomplishment of a certain end.” Disciplinary reason: “reason that produces a useful effect, controlling a population or administering life.” 1 post-apartheid universities. This project’s purpose not only ties in with widespread calls to decolonize the university made through recent student protests in South Africa, but asks how we might begin to envision a university ‘after’ apartheid, by calling attention to a form of subjection that lies at the heart of apartheid’s racial premises: that of the ‘coloured’ subject and its instrumentalization in the practices of university disciplines. Background and Research Questions/Arguments The term ‘coloured’ is widely used in southern Africa to refer to people of mixed-race and/or those who have been mixed over a number of generations. In South Africa, the term first emerged among the descendants of slaves in late 19th century Cape Town as a form of self-identification, but took hold in the official discourse of the colony and the colonial state as a racial category used to describe those who were neither ‘European’ (white) nor ‘native’ (black African).2 Although coloureds were often seen by English- speaking Cape liberals during colonialism as an appendage to white society – premised on notions of ‘civilization’3 – the rise of Afrikaner nationalism in the early 20th century was accompanied by the state’s inability to develop a coherent policy on the political and social status of those identified as coloured.4 With the victory of the Afrikaner National Party in the 1948 general election came the policy of apartheid, under which coloureds would be removed as an appendage to white society, and would be made into their own, separate ‘community’, premised on their ‘racial difference’ from whites.5 This 2 Mohamed Adhikari, “Introduction – Predicaments of marginality: cultural creativity and political adaptation in southern Africa’s coloured communities,” in Burdened by Race: Coloured identities in southern Africa, ed. Mohamed Adhikari (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2009), xi.