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Jaap Durand: a moment to reflect on the chequered history of the University of the Western Cape

An elderly man in formal wear, standing next to a portrait of himself.
The late Professor Jaap Durand was a Afrikaans theologian who broke with Afrikaaner ideology and demonstrated his solidarity with anti-apartheid activists. University of the Western Cape

Professor Jaap Durand, who passed away on January 24, was appointed the first ever vice-rector of the University of the Western Cape in 1980.

These were turbulent times in South Africa. The momentum against apartheid was growing as workers launched strike action and students took to the streets in protest. The state, for its part, intensified its efforts to crush all opposition.

One of the striking images being used on social media following his death shows him walking steadfastly alongside his protesting black comrades, including other leading academics in the anti-apartheid struggle. The suited white man is seen walking towards police firing from the Casspirs (military ambush vehicles) even as black students, heads down, are seen scampering in the opposite direction. A black academic theologian and university leader who knew him well commented:

That picture tells you what kind of man Jaap was.

Durand was exceptional for his time. He was a white academic in a senior position during the height of apartheid. I attended the University of the Western Cape during this period. I never met Durand. But my own experience provides the backdrop to understanding how different he was to his white contemporaries.

The white men who taught me science at the University of the Western Cape were with few exceptions outright racists; most of them were also very poor academic teachers. I did not enjoy my undergraduate years in the lecture rooms nor outside them in the constant disruptions on campus.

But there were moments of hope, such as exemplified in the life and leadership of this Free Stater and professor of systematic theology, Jaap Durand.

The lives of most white academics on black campuses during the apartheid years were mainly dull and uninteresting. They either settled into their wage-earning jobs and kept their heads down or mumbled quietly about their supposed discontents with the nationalist regime.

Then there was Durand.

He stood out like a sore thumb among his gowned comrades as they undertook those interminable marches to the university gates to face the trigger-happy security police. Here was the University of the Western Cape’s own Beyers Naude – also a Afrikaans theologian who broke with Afrikaaner ideology – demonstrating in a quiet way his solidarity with the anti-apartheid activists. That symbolism was powerful and it meant a lot to students in those days when racial separation seemed absolute and anti-white sentiment was palpable.

But the media responses to the passing of Durand reminded me that the singular and victorious narrative about the University of the Western Cape’s glorious struggle against apartheid needs an urgent injection of nuance and complexity.

A patchy picture

Like all South African universities, The University of the Western Cape was established as a tribal college by the apartheid government. It was set up in 1960 as a place of higher learning for Coloured students. Coloured was a term used by the apartheid government to describe people who were of both European and African ancestry.

Long before the age of resistance at the university there were long periods of political acquiescence, as a new book Blowing Against the Wind, by the University of the Western Cape sports historian, Winston Kloppers, demonstrates.

Richard van der Ross, the first Black rector, was a Coloured nationalist who flirted for much of his life with ethnic politics, drawing the ire of students of my generation. In his closing years, Van der Ross was warmly embraced by the university establishment without any reference to that troubled past.

Despite the heroic narratives of the institution, it is in many ways still Coloured to the bone. The academic senate is majority Coloured. The administration staff is overwhelmingly Coloured. The university has never had a non-Coloured rector.

The institution is happy to have African leaders in the largely ceremonial and powerless position of Chancellor but not in the running of the university itself. That does not sound like “the home of the left”, a lazy appellation attributed to the progressive and open-minded Dean and then Rector, Professor Jakes Gerwel.

This does not mean that there were and are not powerful centres on campus that have sought a deeper transformation of the university at various points in its history.

What Professor Emeritus Shirley Walters did for adult education or public health Professor David Sanders for public health or professor of physics Ramesh Bharuthram for the biological sciences or historian Professor Premesh Lalu for humanities research are truly spectacular.

Nevertheless, for the most part, the institutional curriculum remains largely untransformed except on the margins of disciplinary knowledge, as we demonstrate for the University of the Western Cape and nine other South African universities in our forthcoming book, The decolonisation of knowledge (Jansen and Walters 2022, Cambridge University Press).

What Jakes Gerwel did during his remarkable tenure between 1987 and 1994 as Rector of the university was to spell out an aspirational vision for the institution yet one that distinguished it from the more conservative Stellenbosch University and the professed liberal University of Cape Town.

But it was never the home of the left.

Nor should it be the home of a particular political perspective on knowledge and society. That would make a university little more than a political operation rather than an institution open to all knowledges, ideologies, and the contestations that come with such diversity in research and teaching.

Yet in the course of its institutional self-representation, the academic and general public is asked to believe that the university represents in its history the highest form of struggle against racist policies and encapsulates in its practice a model of transformation. This is untampered language.

Like all institutions, the university has a chequered history of white racism and Coloured nationalism that still haunts the campus. It had long periods of serious dysfunctionality in battles still not resolved between its council and senior management. There is an ethnic protectionist streak that still runs through some of its staffing appointments. And the extreme violence of its protesting students continues to plague the university as witnessed in late 2021.

A deep transformation of the content, culture and composition of the University of the Western Cape is not going to happen anytime soon.

The struggle continues

None of these reflections are meant to deny the massive progress at my alma mater. The point simply is that the greatness of an institution lies in acknowledging both the light and the shade in its ongoing journey as a great South African university.

As Jaap Durand might have said then and it certainly rings true now: the struggle continues.

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