Foreword

Summary

The late Professor Mervyn Shear’s book, Wits: A University in the Apartheid Era, was first published in 1996. This was also the year in which the legal superstructure of the apartheid system was brought to an end and a new non-racial constitution for a democratic South Africa was adopted with great hopes for a more just future. I am honoured to write this preface to the republication of Professor Shear’s book, which was lovingly prepared through careful and rigorous research in the best traditions of truth-telling scholarship. I do so with a deep sense of responsibility to the Wits community, past and present.

The book begins with Shear’s tribute to ‘all those courageous students as well as those throughout South Africa who opposed apartheid tyranny in the face of harassment, intimidation and incarceration without trial’. It is appropriate that I begin this preface with a tribute to the author himself. Mervyn Shear became a courageous, clear minded and principled opponent of apartheid tyranny, as well as an advocate of a negotiated transition to a constitutional democracy. As Deputy Vice-Chancellor with the portfolio of student affairs, he gave unstinting support to staff and students protesting against apartheid, and was indefatigable in his commitment to defending their rights and well-being in the face of assaults, banning orders and detention without trial. He is remembered with a great deal of affection and respect by the student leadership of the turbulent 1980s, the period of his service as a senior and distinguished administrator at one of South Africa’s leading academic institutions.

Although a reading of the book reveals much about Shear’s character and opinions, its historical method is essentially documentary in the sense that it provides a record of facts from the beginnings of the university in 1919, although focusing on the apartheid era. It provides an invaluable resource to the present Wits community, and for the wider South African public, for reflection and deliberation on many of the questions that continue to engage us. Was the relationship between the university and the apartheid state one of resistance or accommodation, or both?