Gerwel: from resentment to revolution at UWC

Two years ago, Steve Kretzmann interviewed Professor Jakes Gerwel for the University of the Western Cape’s internal magazine, 360 Degrees. 

During the interview, Gerwel, who was UWC’s vice-chancellor between 1985 and 1994, reflected on his life as a student activist during the turbulent 1960s.

When Professor Jakes Gerwel arrived at UWC in 1963, he was 17 years old and he deeply resented being there.

It was then a teacher training college, a creation of the apartheid government, and was designed specifically for coloured students, who were not allowed to attend “white” universities.

So he was not alone in his resentment.

The college was situated in an old primary school building in Bellville.

But although the students were there “under protest” and “the atmosphere was one of rejection of the place we were at”, it was nevertheless “quite a charged atmosphere”, Gerwel remembered.

“You can’t bring a thousand young people together without there being a dynamic.”

Although there was a lull in the anti-apartheid struggle at the time – Nelson Mandela had just been imprisoned and anti-apartheid organisations banned – there were political issues being fought on campus, even if they were minor in scope.

“The main political issue was that there were no institutional structures – sports clubs, societies, that sort of thing, and that was what we were protesting for.

“It seems minor now but it gave UWC its sense of opposition, of not accepting the system. Out of that more progressive protest politics grew.”

Not accepting its pariah status, the student body’s resistance to apartheid politics slowly expanded in scope, eventually pressurising the state to appoint UWC’s first black vice-chancellor, Richard van der Ross.

Van der Ross’s appointment in 1974 came exactly because students were vigorously taking issue with the fact that they did not have a black rector and followed a major clash over this issue in 1973, with students walking off campus.

It was at that time that Gerwel, after having completed his undergraduate studies and furthered his postgraduate studies in Brussels, returned to UWC as a member of staff.

He went on to become Van der Ross’ successor.

“When I was appointed vice-chancellor in 1985, they were turbulent days in the anti-apartheid uprising, there was real resistance. The educational terrain became a foremost site of struggle.

“My politics was of a more radical nature than Van der Ross’. I was from a younger generation, but I faced the same dilemma he had. To be a comrade of the students but keep teaching, learning and education going.”

But the concept of creating an intellectual home for the left “allowed for the argument that we needed to engage intellectually and not just on the streets, in a military fashion”.

“Almost daily” clashes between students and police led to then minister of education, FW de Klerk, calling Gerwel and top UWC management to a meeting with security force heads.

“We were lectured to, told the university was being allowed to become a ‘hotbed of radicals’ and De Klerk tried to promulgate regulation which would tie our government subsidy to how ‘well behaved’ we were.”

UWC and the University of Cape Town took him to court over this matter and won.

“I would joke with FW later, when I was serving in the new dispensation (as director-general in the presidency under Nelson Mandela), that he was the one guy I had won a court case against.”

Source: City Press

Professor Jakes Gerwel was a student, staff member and eventually the vice-chancellor of the University of the Western Cape. Picture: Felix Dlangamandla/Foto24