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South African Student Protest, 1968:
Remembering the Mafeje Sit-in
by Martin Plaut
The student rebellions of 1968 across Europe and the United States received
wide coverage in their fortieth anniversary year. The student protest that
took place in South Africa has had almost no publicity, although it con-
stituted a significant turning point in the country’s long march away from
apartheid.
1
It transformed the outlook and – in many cases – the lives of
those who participated in the protest, of whom I am one.
The political landscape of South Africa was barren in those days. The
South African Communist Party had been banned in 1950 and had dis-
banded itself, before reforming in 1953. The liberation movements had
been attacked after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 when sixty-nine
unarmed protesters were shot down by police and a further 180 wounded.
Their leaders had been driven into exile, their members deep underground.
Fig. 1. Some of the original participants in the University of Cape Town sit-in, on the steps of
Jameson Hall at the reunion, August 2008. The author is at the back. Photo: Gill Black.
History Workshop Journal Issue 69 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbp035
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The National Party ruled over a country in which opposition was restricted
to the floor of the white-only parliament.
Discussion of socialism or communism was effectively forbidden, with
most books on the subject proscribed. As white students at the University of
Cape Town (UCT) we knew little of the stirrings of anti-colonialism in the
rest of the continent. Africa was portrayed by the media as a dark and
deeply troubled ‘terra incognita’.
By 1968 the organized left in South Africa was almost non-existent. The
African Resistance Movement (ARM), a white organization which
attempted to launch a bombing campaign in 1964, had been wound up a
year later, with the hanging of John Harris for setting off a bomb in
Johannesburg station when twenty-three were hurt.
2
On the UCT campus
there were two small left-wing organizations, the Modern World Society and
Radsoc (Radical Society).
3
These had some influence on the Student
Representative Council (SRC) there.
The spark that ignited student anger was struck in May 1968 when Archie
Mafeje was appointed to a senior lectureship in the UCT department of
social anthropology. He was eminently suitable, having graduated from
the university with a brilliant MA in the subject three years earlier. At the
time of his appointment he was studying for a doctorate at Cambridge.
4
But
the appointment flouted the spirit of government legislation dating back to
1959, which had declared the university a ‘white only’ institution: Mr Mafeje
was black. Black, Indian and Coloured students could only attend if suitable
courses were not available at black institutions such as Fort Hare in the
Eastern Cape, the heartland of the African National Congress. Fort Hare
educated a generation of African politicians (from across southern Africa)
and indeed Archie Mafeje had spent a year there in the mid 1950s before
coming to study at UCT, but it was not able to offer the range of courses
available at white universities.
At the same time the legislative restriction did not extend to lecturers, and
the ‘white’ universities continued to employ a small number of black people
in courses teaching African languages. So in 1968, taking advantage of this
loophole, UCT appointed Mr Mafeje. The government was not at all
pleased and within days the Minister of Education, Jan de Klerk, wrote
to the university objecting to the appointment of a ‘Bantu’ and demanding
that the vacancy be filled by a suitable white person. He argued that it was
‘tantamount to flouting the accepted traditional outlook of South Africa’.
5
The authorities also went on the ideological offensive. UCT had a large
number of Jewish students and the government reminded the Jewish com-
munity that a year earlier it had lifted tight exchange controls to allow Jews
to send funds to Israel during the 1967 war. Is this – the government
demanded to know – any way to repay us?
6
Within a month the UCT Council had caved in, following threats that
their funding would be cut and laws brought in to close the loophole. In
effect the university withdrew the offer of appointment to Mr Mafeje in
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order to protect the theoretical right to offer him a job! Such was the logic of
the time.
A section of the students at UCT were determined that this would not
stand. The issue was discussed at the congress of the National Union of
South African Students and the idea emerged of a sit-in – along the lines of
the occupations then taking place in the rest of the world. The European
protests were widely reported in South Africa, and we followed them with
interest. As far as I know no-one at the UCT sit-in had been involved in any
of these activities, although some went on to participate in other sit-ins at a
later stage.
7
At first there was an attempt to hold a joint mass meeting of the univer-
sity, organized by the university administration and the SRC. But a group of
students, led by Raphael ‘Raphie’ Kaplinsky of Radsoc, destroyed the
united front between the student leadership and the university authorities.
Kaplinsky spoke out strongly against any idea of co-operation with the
administration.
...the anger on campus over the weakness of the administration in
caving in to the government was expressed in an unplanned and
impromptu speech by Kaplinsky. Condemning the meeting as ‘a salve
to conscience and a ritual’, he slated the administration for doing the
government’s ‘dirty work’ for them. Giving them a week to change their
minds, he called for a second mass meeting, which if the demands of the
students had not been met would lead to a sit-in.
8
The university authorities failed to act and by August 1968 enough of a
head of steam had been generated to hold a second mass meeting in the
imposing surroundings of Jameson Hall. After rousing speeches from
student leaders, including Duncan Innes (President of the National Union
of Students) and Kaplinsky, most of the thousand strong audience marched
out, down the broad granite steps that are the focal point of social life on the
campus, and occupied the administration building.
Six hundred of us decided to participate in the occupation, determined
not to leave until UCT reversed its decision. For ten days we held out,
sleeping on the floors. Food was cooked communally – even by the men
who, at that time, were largely ignorant of the workings of a kitchen. Plenty
of wine and marijuana were consumed and virginities were lost, but on the
whole it was a carefully managed protest, with a signs asking for rubbish to
be removed and the areas being occupied to be kept clean. Messages of
support flowed in from students in Paris and London and there was favour-
able coverage in the international media.
9
Perhaps the most important thing was that we discovered intellectual
liberation. Alternative lectures were organized on the stairs. We got a news-
paper up and running. In one fell swoop we had thrown off our mental
shackles. At last we were not just some isolated racist outpost of empire,
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but part of an international student movement. And the times – they really
were a-changing!
Yet it was not to be. The university stubbornly refused our demand to
reappoint Mr Mafeje and gradually our spirits flagged. Students from the
Afrikaans university of Stellenbosch, fifty kilometres away, were sent to try
to beat us up. Shots were fired at the doors. The government threatened to
act if the university would not. As support ebbed away we finally packed up
and left. Some of our leaders were called in by the Prime Minister of the
time, the notorious John Vorster, who harangued them, warning that if
anything like this ever happened again he would send in his men to ‘sort
us out’.
10
A failure? Not really. It gave the lie to the government’s claim that all
whites supported its racist policies. In the intense debates that took place
new ideas came bubbling up. ‘What will I tell my children if I do nothing’,
one student asked to loud cheers, ‘especially if they are black!’ It is hard to
convey the shock that went through us all at these words. Laws prohibited
all sex between races; this was the luxury of pure heresy.
Forty years later those of us who could make it gathered for a reunion at
the University of Cape Town in August 2008. Organized by Duncan Innes,
it was an opportunity to recall the events. About sixty of us attended, nearly
a third from outside South Africa. It became clear during the discussions
that many had gone on to play active parts in the trade unions that emerged
in the 1970s and in the movements of the 1980s that finally led to the end of
apartheid.
11
The sit-in also had reverberations that went beyond the confines of UCT
or our own lives. One linkage was particularly important. Richard ‘Rick’
Turner, who had studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, had returned to South
Africa and was living on a farm near Stellenbosch at the time of the sit-in.
12
It is not clear whether he participated in the protests directly, but afterwards
he held informal discussions at his home. Lessons were drawn from the sit-in
that went on to influence his thinking.
Richard Turner moved to Durban and became a driving force in the
resurrection of the trade-union movement. This was assisted by the Wages
Commissions he inspired, established by white students to investigate and
act upon the poverty that resulted from the poor wages paid by South
African industry.
13
In 1972 he published one of the seminal books of the
period: The Eye of the Needle: an Essay on Participatory Democracy.
14
Six
years later he was brutally assassinated, almost certainly by government
agents. His book was not only a trenchant attack on apartheid, it was
among the most important left-wing, non-Communist critiques of the
regime of the period. Highlighting the need for new forms of organization
it inspired the generation that went into the unions. Its spirit was inculcated
in the unions, with an emphasis on open debate and on the need for leaders
to be accountable to their members for their actions. Union militants took
these lessons on into the United Democratic Front, which they helped found
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in 1983 and the UDF, in turn, played a critical role in the overthrow of
apartheid. The influence of Turner’s thinking can still be found within the
South African left.
The other linkage was with the black consciousness movement, which
was beginning to take shape at this time. This has not previously
been revealed, but Kaplinsky argues that it took place just after the sit-in
ended.
...this is little known, (but) there was a direct link between key sit-in
activists and the Black Consciousness Movement. Directly after the sit-in,
and inspired by the sit-in, Steve Biko and others at Fort Hare asked the
UCT students to join them in their own planned protests. Details of what
took place are sketchy, but although thwarted by police blockades, this
act of solidarity was important to Biko. Later, in 1969, he and some of
the ‘sit-in graduates’ shared a platform. Together, they argued the case
that if change was to occur in SA, it would not come from paternalistic
white opposition politics (however well-meaning), but through the strug-
gle of the black population itself.
15
When we met in Cape Town last August, forty years on, we discovered
there was a twist to the tale. An investigation into the circumstances
surrounding Mr Mafeje’s treatment conducted by UCT had uncovered
evidence of why the university authorities acted the way they did all those
years ago. Although the full findings of enquiry have not been made public,
information from it has helped lift the veil on why the university held out so
strenuously to retain the right to appoint black lecturers, even if it meant not
appointing Mr Mafeje in the process. It turns out that, unbeknown to the
government, UCT had already managed to appoint a man classified as
Coloured to the academic staff. He was Johnny van der Westhuizen, and
since his name was Afrikaans he had slipped past the authorities, who
had assumed he was white. It appears that the university had rejected one
black appointee in order to safeguard the employment of an existing
member of staff; another example of the strange and terrible consequences
of apartheid.
Our reunion was tinged with sadness and some bitterness. The university
had never made its peace with Mr Mafeje. He had gone on to live the life of
a wandering scholar in exile in Tanzania, Egypt, Senegal and Namibia.
16
He
published widely and was a respected figure, but his family rightly felt he
had been shabbily treated by UCT. Yet attempts at reconciliation had been
made. After white rule ended in 1994 he was offered a research post. But as a
professor at the time he declined to accept it. When he finally applied for a
chair at the university, he was once more rejected as being unsuitable for the
position. The 2008 UCT enquiry established why this was, but its findings
have not been revealed to protect those who participated in the appointment
selection panel.
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Archie Mafeje died in March 2007, apparently a deeply embittered man.
UCT has now, belatedly, apologized for the way he was treated.
17
At a
ceremony attended by some of us who had taken part in the original protest,
his family formally accepted the apology and the university awarded Mafeje
a posthumous honorary doctorate. A scholarship is to be inaugurated in his
name and his works published. The room in which the University Council
meets, and which we occupied all those years ago, has been renamed in his
honour.
Martin Plaut studied Social Science at the University of Cape Town, and
took an Honours degree in Industrial Relations from the University of the
Witwatersrand in 1977. While a student he was active in the Wages
Commissions movement, which led to the resurgence of trade unions and
COSATU, the Congress of Trade Unions. After an MA at the University of
Warwick he worked for a year as Industrial Relations adviser to Mobil Oil,
before becoming an adviser on Africa and the Middle East for the British
Labour Party. He represented the Labour Party on the Anti-Apartheid
Executive. In 1984 he joined the BBC, working primarily on Africa, and
he is now Africa Editor for BBC World Service News. His publications
include: Power! Black Workers, their Unions and the Struggle for Freedom
in South Africa, (with Denis MacShane and David Ward), Spokesman Press,
1984; South Africa: Out of the Laager?, Fabian Society, 1991; War in the
Horn (with Patrick Gilkes), Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1999;
Unfinished Business: Ethiopia and Eritrea at War, (ed. with Dominique
Jacquin-Berdal), Red Sea Press, 2005; Ethiopia and Eritrea: Allergic to
Persuasion, (with Sally Healy), Royal Institute of International Affairs,
2007.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1 Most of the information for this article was obtained during discussions held at the
University of Cape Town in August 2008 at a reunion of those who, like the author,
participated in the original sit–in.
2Illustrated History of South Africa, Readers Digest, 1988, p. 415.
3 Ken Hughes, ‘Lessons of the Great UCT Sit–in of 1968’, unpublished, says this about
these organizations:
...my generation – the intermediate generation after ARM [African Resistance
Movement] and before 68 – a generation which included Keith Gottschalk, Sheila
Barsel and Rick Turner – drew several lessons from the ARM fiasco – one was to
abhor violence, another was to scorn the false romance of underground action, and
most importantly, to practise tolerance and cooperation on the Left as best we could –
if only to avoid the terrible infighting which had undone the previous generation. Thus
Keith Gottschalk handed over the previously Liberal campus organization, the
Radical Students Society to Raphie Kaplinsky – who came out of a Marxist back-
ground (his brother Simon had fled the country after being rumbled printing
pamphlets for the Communist Party). On the other side the formerly Communist
Modern World Society, was inherited by Andrew Colman, who had Trotskyist
leanings, and by myself – a mere Social Democrat!
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See also Clement Erbmann, ‘ ‘‘Conservative Revolutionaries’’: Anti–Apartheid Activism
at the University of Cape Town 1963–1973’, South African History Online, http://www.
sahistory.org.za/pages/libraryresources/articles_papers/1963_1973_conservative_revolutionaries
.htm.
4 Citation for the Honorary Degree for Dr. Archie Mafeje at the University of Cape
Town, delivered by the University Orator, Professor Francis Wilson at the installation of
the University’s new vice-chancellor, Dr Max Price, 19 August 2008. www.uct.ac.za/usr/
vcinstallation/Mafeje_citation.pdf.
5 ‘Lessons of the Mafeje Affair’, University of Cape Town brochure, August 2008,
www.uct.ac.za/downloads/uct.ac.za/about/management/vcinstallation/Mafeje_brochure.pdf.
6 Recollection of Mike Khan, from Notes of the UCT Sit–in reunion, 17 August, 2008.
Unpublished.
7 Ken Hughes was involved in the 1970 sit-in at Warwick University in the UK and
another in the United States: ‘Lessons of the Great UCT Sit–in of 1968’.
8 Erbmann, ‘Conservative Revolutionaries’, p. 12.
9 Erbmann refers to the UCT student newspaper of the time and interviews with
Kaplinsky and others and says: ‘The event also received favourable attention both in the
local press and the international media, with footage reaching the television screens of approxi-
mately 400 million people across the world, as well as being the first event supported by the
Voice of America and Radio Moscow since World War Two’.
10 Recollection of Phillip van der Merwe, in Notes of the UCT Sit–in Reunion.
11 Notes of the UCT Sit–in Reunion.
12 Erbmann, ‘Conservative Revolutionaries’, p. 14.
13 Erbmann, ‘Conservative Revolutionaries’, p. 18.
14 Richard Turner, The Eye of the Needle, Johannesburg, 1972.
15 ‘Little Acorns and Big Okes: 40 years on from the UCT sit–in’ (Okes is
a South African term roughly translated as blokes), Raphie Kaplinsky, unpublished, http://
occupybremner.ning.com/forum.
16 Citation for the Honorary Degree, 19 Aug. 2008.
17 UCT Statement and Apology regarding Professor A. B. Mafeje, August 2008. http://
www.uct.ac.za/about/management/vc/installation/mafeje/.
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