Chapter 3 - Activists Under Pressure

Summary

The struggle against apartheid education widened into a battle against the implementation of apartheid in general and the draconian methods used by the authorities to suppress almost all forms of extra-parliamentary opposition. At first during the early 1970s, the great majority of student demonstrators at the English-language universities were white. As black student numbers increased during the 1980s, members of the black student movements predominated and frequently took the initiative in setting up the protests.

Harassment of student activists and demonstrators by Government supporters and the police was to become a feature of student protest. One of the first victims of this oppressive legislation was Mr Dennis Brutus, founder of the anti-apartheid South African Sports Association in 1958. In 1961 he had helped organise a national convention of coloured activists at Malmesbury in the Western Cape and this had led to his being banned. In 1962 he was elected to the SRC, but because of the banning, was unable to attend and participate in its meetings. The SRC appealed to Council to make representations to the Minister in this regard, but the Council was unsympathetic, arguing that Brutus was restricted in terms of a legal enactment.

The Government also resorted to a variety of sinister and covert methods to suppress student opposition to apartheid. One of these was the infiltration onto English-language campuses in the 1960s of student informers paid by the police to spy on their fellows. It was also discovered that plain clothes police and police photographers were attending student meetings. Although the police were the object of some considerable derision, the informers were taken very seriously. The attempts to intimidate students and to pay some to provide information, accurate or inaccurate, which may have led to the arrest and detention of some students, were strongly condemned by the administrations and staffs of the universities affected. Vice-Chancellor Bozzoli was particularly outspoken in his criticism of this kind of action.

On 15 December 1964 the University was informed that the appointment of Professor E R Roux, a long-serving member of the Department of Botany, would be terminated by the Minister of Justice on 1 February of the following year on the grounds that he was a listed Communist and was to be subjected to punitive restrictions.