Grand Apartheid

For most of my years excavating at Taung, it was part of a 'country' known as Bophuthatswana. It was one of six such separate homelands under the South African government's system of 'grand apartheid.' There was nothing grand about it at all. The idea was to divide up the country so that the black Africans could have their own 'countries' while the white's could have theirs.

Bophuthatswana was particularly interesting, as it was divided into six geographically separate packages of land. One could look at satellite images of South Africa and pick out the pieces of Bophuthatswana – the most desolate land to be sure. At the time I was working at Taung, Bophuthatswana had a crook ... I mean, president ... named Lucas Mangope. His picture was displayed at all the Bophuthatswana establishments, as if he were a real leader with real authority and a grasp of reality. "Mr. Jeff," a Taung worker once told me, "Mangope has done nothing for me. You are my president." Being president of a pseudo-nation was not my calling, but I appreciated the sentiment.

Life in Bophuthatswana was not easy for those trapped there. Residents could not get South African passports, as they were not recognized as citizens. And no outside nation would officially recognize a Bophuthatswana passport, so its citizens were pretty much stuck. Some went to work in the gold mines of "neighboring" South Africa, and sent money home. But in 1977, when Bophuthatswana gained "independence," the Northern Lime Company shut down their operations at the Buxton Limeworks, and most there were left without a job in a desolate land with little infrastructure.

So when I first arrived to hire people from the village to work on the excavation, I was welcomed with open arms. And as the first employer to treat them with dignity, I became a bit of a local hero, hence my presidential status to some. But my greater heroics, if one can call them that, in the fight against apartheid came back in Johannesburg. So I will digress for a few paragraphs here.

The University of the Witwatersrand, where I taught, was a leading South African university in terms of not only academics, but in recruiting and admitting non-white students. The South African Minister of Education did not like that, and proposed some draconian measures on who the universities should admit. This was not taken lightly by the university, and was met with protests, both formal and informal.

The funniest attempt to skewer the new education policies was our faculty silent protest. My colleagues and I were to stand on the steps of the university's 'Great Hall,' in our full academic regalia, replete with robes, doctoral hoods, and hats, and remain silent for fifteen minutes. But have you ever tried to keep a professor quiet? I did my best, but most people were just chatting away about anything from government policies to theoretical physics. When it was over, I heard somebody remark in jest: "I bet that brought the government to their knees."

One other protest, however, stands out in my memory. In order to more effectively protest the restrictions proposed by the Minister of Education, a bigger event was planned for the lawn in the center of campus. A stage was erected, and chairs were arranged so that students and faculty could listen to speeches decrying the Minister's move. This was to be followed by a march around the university, which the authorities had declared illegal.

On the day of the event, the speeches were as resolute as they were resounding. The final speech came from my boss in the Department of Anatomy, Professor Phillip Tobias. He had always been renowned as a great orator, and a vocal critic of apartheid, but he surpassed himself at that protest. To this day it remains the most effective speech I've ever heard, and the one moment for which I was most proud of him.

But toward the end of the speech, with Tobias saying slowly but resolutely that "we are ANGRY," helicopters of the apartheid police started flying overhead, in anticipation of the illegal march. It made it difficult to hear the final evocative words, and angered the united assembly of students and faculty. But the sound of the helicopters only magnified the thunderous applause at the end of the speech.

It took some time to organize the assembly for the march, so my students and I, standing on the steps of the Great Hall, were staring up at the helicopters and down at the lawn where we had listened to the speeches. One of my incensed students suggested that we send a message to the helicopters by lying down and spelling something out. We quickly figured out how many people we would need to write out our message with bodies lying on the ground, and started recruiting students. This being a fairly strict South African police regime we proposing to taunt, only a few were willing to participate, and not enough. So as I gazed to the lawn, I came up with another plan, and shouted to my students "The chairs! We can spell it out with the chairs."

We ran down and got to work, being careful to keep our backs to the helicopters, lest we be filmed and identified. I was particularly vulnerable to being identified, being both a foreigner and wearing my academic robe. But my adrenalin kicked in and off I went. As a kid in the USA in the 1960s I had been intrigued by the civil rights and Vietnam war protests, but was too young to participate, let alone understand. Now was finally my moment, and I went for it full force. Here is the message we sent to the police in the helicopters above:

After writing our quaint message, we still had time to join the illegal march around the university, and ran to join the crowd. Along one side of the university, as we progressed, the road was lined with the South African police. About two dozen police aimed their rifles at the marchers. The students quickly scattered in the face of the threat, as well they should have. But something got into me, probably the adrenalin again. Maybe I was brave, maybe I was stupid, maybe I thought that my academic robe was bullet-proof vest. Certainly I was incensed, so I stood my ground, crossed my arms, and glared back at those police and their rifles.

Now you must know that the police had rubber bullets in their guns, and I knew that. But those can hurt or put an eye out (as our mothers would have warned us.) Yet to this day I can feel the determination for academic freedom and fair opportunities for education that I felt then. I did not get shot, but the story does not end here.

The students regrouped en masse, in front of the police brigade, and began singing politically motivated songs. It was a stand off that lasted roughly half an hour while a university administrator who had been hit by a rubber bullet on another occasion, negotiated with the police. It was agreed that we could sing one more song, and the natural choice was Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika. It means "God Bless Africa," and was a rallying call for the apartheid resistance movement; it is now South Africa's national anthem. I had learned it's !Xhosa language lyrics at Taung, and was eager to sing along. But it was not to be.

As soon as we started singing, the police broke their agreement and lobbed tear gas canisters at us. I wasn't sure whether to be excited or distressed. Maybe the police on the ground got word of our little message to the helicopters on the campus lawn?

Whatever the case may have been, what caught my attention was that suddenly everybody started lighting up cigarettes. Very few had been smoking up to this point, so it seemed like an odd time to me. But it turns out that, right or not, there is a belief that smoking cigarettes helps you open up your lung passage ways when you've inhaled tear gas. So somebody gave me a cigarette, and I once again joined the behavior of the crowd. It didn't hurt, that's for sure.

The lessons I learned that day were these: never be afraid to stand up for your convictions, and always take a pack of cigarettes to a protest that might involve tear gas. As time went by, however, I learned a greater lesson. Yes, one must stand by one's convictions, but one must always be open to reexamining them. Such was the case with that notorious Minister of Education who tried to impose apartheid restrictions on our university. He later became president of South Africa, and, with an apparent change of heart, went on to set the stage for the end of apartheid. He freed apartheid resistance leader Nelson Mandela from prison, and eventually shared the Nobel Peace prize with Mandela. His name was F.W. de Klerk.