Under Protest: The Rise of Student Resistance at the University of Fort Hare by Daniel Massey (review)

Between about 1940 and 1955, the University of Fort Hare at Alice, a tiny town on the border of the tribal territory which eventually became the Ciskei bantustan, generated numerous graduates who eventually became hugely significant political figures, ranging from revolutionaries to servants of apartheid. Massey’s book is in part an attempt to examine how this came about.

One could say there is no mystery in this. The anticolonial upheaval of the 1950s and 1960s was naturally led—or co-opted—by a tiny African intelligentsia, generally university educated. Fort Hare was the only widely accessible university for Africans in southern Africa. Furthermore, while Africans could attend some white institutions, only at Fort Hare could a large number of African students set up a substantial political organization. Meanwhile the institution’s white management combined a patronizing attitude that bred resentment among students with a degree of liberal tolerance that permitted a little expression of that resentment. Hence—at least before the catastrophe of 1959—it was an excellent environment for political education.

Massey chronicles the institution’s development from a junior, largely religious-oriented college offering some university training accredited by the University of South Africa, to a (de facto) African satellite of Rhodes University in Grahamstown, and thence to the first of the “bush colleges” of the apartheid era. Leftist politics influenced students from the 1930s, when Eddie Roux visited the campus as a sort of Marxist missionary, donkey and all. Many ex-Forteans helped found the ANC Youth League in 1944, and a branch was formed at the university (banned from operating on campus) in 1948. (A Trotskyite parallel, the Society of Young Africans, was set up by the Unity Movement soon after to compete with it.)

Massey thus chronicles the divide between what eventually became the Pan Africanist Congress and the ANC. Student politics played itself out in theatrical criticism of the white academics and administrators (who felt themselves, as liberals, beyond reproach, and therefore responded with disciplinary action and waspish condemnation of rude, unseemly students). This conflict, in retrospect, appears almost pitiful, with both sides blissfully unaware of the fate they and their institution would face. Massey also outlines how, despite the handicaps of living under white rule and the paternalism of what he calls the “missionaries” (the religious academics who dominated Fort Hare until the mid-1950s), Fort Hare represented, for its students, a partial escape from the tightening chains of colonialism and apartheid.

Massey’s principal concern, however, is to recreate the atmosphere of the era. He provides the reader with a plethora of material from different interviewees from varying political backgrounds, reminiscing about the way things were in 1940s and 1950s Fort Hare. These sections are lavishly illustrated with photographs of both individuals and groups, as well as of university buildings as they were back then. This succeeds, but Massey’s attempts to analyze the implications of these events fail to provide a clear picture of the broader significance of seemingly trivial, local occurrences.

Meanwhile, the university’s attempts to stave off the seizure of control by the National Department of Bantu Education were pitiful. (There is a sad picture of a tiny march of Fort Hare academics through the streets of Alice.) Fort Hare students found that the National Union of South African Students had no more power than academia, or anybody else. Fort Hare could only make a few ineffectual protests before bowing to the inevitable—after which the liberal white staff members were purged, while the more radical black staff members resigned. The fragile charade of an island of black radicalism, overseen by white liberalism, amid an ocean of white conservatism, disintegrated.

This only takes us halfway into the book; much of the rest deals with Fort Hare between the...