My own first act of public protest was in 1959. Rhodes faculty and students in academic regalia marched through Drostdy Arch and down the High Street protesting the Extension of University Education Act, which meant exactly the opposite. The act banned black students from registering at ‘white’ universities. That year I also wrote to the Minister of Justice, Mr CR Swart, and organised a group of Divinity students to join me as signatories registering our “vehement protest” at his treatment of ex-Chief Albert Luthuli. The Nobel Peace Laureate and President of the ANC had been banned for five years in 1954 and now a further five years had been slapped on him. My concern had a personal dimension because I had met Luthuli in our home in Cape Town when Dad was organising the Defence and Aid Fund.37 I was in awe of this bluff Zulu giant, who exuded warmth, strength and conviction. It seemed absurd that such an obviously good person should be treated thus. In his reply the minister decided to do Bible study with us, suggesting that seeing we “had already delivered judgement on the poor misguided sinner, the Minister of Justice, it would perhaps be wise of [us] to read and digest the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican …”38
There was also a foray into student politics, beginning with something of a necessary humiliation. Elections for the Students’ Representative Council (SRC) were beginning to reflect national politics and becoming increasingly bitter. A crisis split the SRC and forced the resignation of some of the incumbents and in the ensuing rough and tumble I joined the name-calling, labelling one of the candidates named Rudolph Gruber a “megalomaniac and a Nat” which, given the state of politics today, might seem fairly tame, but not so in 1959, when we still referred to fellow students publicly as ‘Mr’ or ‘Miss’. Whatever I felt about Mr Gruber, I had no proof whatever for what I had said. My conscience gnawed at me over the weekend and at a mass student meeting on the Monday, having already written to him personally, I offered a public apology to him and for being one of those who had contributed to the chaos. I then pleaded that we all reject the hate and malice that remarks like my own had stoked and rather focus on facts and principles instead. This seemed to have a positive effect on the rowdy meeting. In the election that followed some students put my name forward and I found myself on the SRC. Mr Gruber went on to become prominent in the South African Foundation, an organisation established to promote SA interests overseas. I do not know whether he was a Nat after all, but he wasn’t a megalomaniac and we kept up a friendly contact over many years. My shame at having so easily smeared another person in the heat of the moment led me to decide that whatever fights lay in the future, I would not descend to that sort of behaviour again. I have tried not to.
At some point, I also became an assistant editor of the student newspaper, Rhodeo. The editor was Hugh Lewin, son of an Anglican priest and a courageous and principled person who was later to serve seven years as a political prisoner and record his experiences in the powerful book Bandiet. Our claim to fame as Rhodeo’s editorial team was to print an issue carrying big blank spaces denoting the stories that government censorship had forbidden. Soon, in the humourless logic of our rulers, it became illegal to leave blank spaces in newspapers.
SRC membership also thrust an entirely different duty upon me, that of organising the traditional Casbah evening during Rag Week of 1959. Casbah was a fête, with various stalls, games and competitions to raise Rag funds. I decided that this year would be bigger and better than anything before and we moved the whole event out of the safety of a university hall onto the Rhodes Great Field. As evening came, the field was a fairyland of coloured lights with students and townsfolk milling happily around the stalls. Our centrepiece was a floodlit ring where a boxing display would climax the evening. My fellow tokkelok Ken Eddie and I sat in the commentator’s box in the grandstand, taking in the tranches of cash delivered to us from the stall-holders, and all was well until the Graham Hotel downtown closed and male students in the later stages of inebriation arrived on the field. For some reason the brightly lit boxing ring attracted them and it was soon filled with drunks – far too many of them – swinging wildly at each other. The structure itself began to teeter and sway drunkenly, the poles and floodlights above it describing ever-widening arcs through the night sky. When the end came it was impressive: the ring collapsed, drunks were flung in all directions, sparks hissed and crackled and a large portion of Grahamstown was plunged into inky blackness. We had tapped into the town’s power grid to light the Great Field and our impromptu boxing exhibition had blown it. On the field, darkness and chaos reigned and Casbah was no more. By the glow of Ken’s cigarette lighter we scraped all the takings into one bag. Ken grabbed some bottles of wine donated as prizes, and we slipped out of the box and down to his old black MG parked behind the grandstand. We got to it without being seen and before anybody could miss us we were back behind a locked door in Ken’s room in Livingstone House, wondering how we could wriggle out of this disaster. Running out of ideas, we got quietly tipsy – a first for both of us – and waited for the morning.
The following day an outraged Vice-Chancellor demanded that the entire Rag Committee appear before him, together with the SRC. Things were worse even than we thought. It turned out that not only had we ruined Casbah and subjected half of Grahamstown to a blackout, but unknown to us a student couple had been exploring their very close relationship under the boxing ring when it collapsed and had been fortunate to escape with their lives, if not their dignity. Vice-Chancellor Tom Alty tore into us and announced that he was cancelling Rag, and considering the facts, his parting words were memorable: “Next year, maybe you should get the theologs to organise Casbah, so it ends up half decent.” I made myself as small as I could while SRC chair John Benyon loyally failed to mention that Alty’s suggestion had already been tried and found spectacularly wanting. Professor Hewson, responsible for Methodist students, a thoroughly gracious person and a close friend of my father, was furious. “You could be sent down for this,” he hissed when I stood before him, “we have all been shamed.” My misery deepened as I waited for the axe to fall, but was saved by the liveliness of the student body. They poured into a protest meeting that sent a suitably servile resolution to Dr Alty, pleading for the restoration of Rag in return for a ban on any future Casbahs. Alty relented, the Rag procession went ahead, and I survived. Also, my policy of ensuring regular deliveries of cash takings to the commentary box meant that we could chalk up a record Casbah income in spite of the disaster. It had indeed been a very different – but final – Casbah.
On 21 August 1959, just as we were bracing ourselves to prepare for our final examinations, my world fell in. In the small hours of that morning a hand on my shoulder shook me gently awake. It was Prof Hewson telling me that my father had died. The person I most loved and admired was gone. In something of a daze I got myself ready for the drive to Port Elizabeth, and then onto a Vickers Viscount – my first flight on a commercial aircraft – to Cape Town. I found my mother and sister at the home of friends, Mom lying in a darkened room, silent and stricken. Dad was only 58 when he died and being ten years younger than he, a long life of loneliness lay ahead of her. At the funeral in Rosebank Methodist Church, my sister and I sat on each side of her, listening as good people spoke, but I recall little of what they said. I had slipped into the church an hour before the service. The coffin was already in place and I had spent a little time beside it, thinking and saying what I needed to, and regretting all the things left unsaid between us. My recollection of that moment is of a strange counterpoint of pain and certainty: pain that he and I would now never break through our mutual reserve into the closeness and comradeship of an adult father-son relationship, and the certainty that whatever now occupied that coffin, it was no longer my dad. “He’s not here,” I whispered to myself. “That’s no longer him in there.” In the desolation of it all, and without much mature faith to turn to, the gift of that moment was an existential one – another moment of ‘being persuaded’, a deep assurance of Resurrection life.
The return to my last couple of months at Rhodes wasn’t easy, though my fellow students were very kind. I wrote