It's a Black-White Thing. Donna Bryson

key element of apartheid was engineering an education system that would ensure there were few black people like Seme. In the 1950s, the government took over and revised the curricula – dumbing them down – of independent, often missionary-­run schools that apartheid’s planners accused of fanning the ambitions of black South Africans by overeducating them. George Bizos, the liberal, Greek-born lawyer who would later defend Mandela in apartheid courts, saw the tragedy this meant for ordinary South Africans. In Odyssey to Freedom, Bizos writes of teachers and parents trying to supplement the inferior education the white government had designed for black children. Their weekend and afternoon classes, called cultural clubs, were declared illegal. Despite lawyers’ efforts, the schools were closed down, and their teachers fined or threatened with jail.

      In one case, Bizos was dismayed to find that a young man whom the organisers of a cultural club had thought was a student was in fact a spy sent by the police to gather evidence against a teacher. The teacher had asked Bizos: ‘Did police have the right to teach a boy to lie about who he was, where he came from and why he attended the club?’ Bizos told him that, in apartheid South Africa, there was nothing that said the police didn’t have the right.26

      Over the generations the result, not surprisingly, was a growing contempt among black South Africans for the education they were being offered. When apartheid ended, the majority of South Africa’s citizens were left not only impoverished and angry, but without the skills or expertise to meet the challenges of the 21st century. The leaders, black and white, of institutions like UFS are left to cope with that legacy.

      In Bloemfontein, university archivists have found minutes of a 1923 governing-council meeting in which the application of an aspiring black student was recorded. The application was denied.27 Mixed-race and black postgraduate students were first admitted in 1977. The postgraduates were followed by mixed-race undergraduates in 1985 and black undergraduates in 1988. It was not until 1990 that black students were allowed to live on campus.

      Black students began to arrive at UFS in large numbers in the 1990s, only after the legal framework of apartheid had been dismantled. Their presence meant language was again an issue.

      On a campus that had stubbornly turned its face away while history was being made during the 1980s, the arrival of black students in the 1990s must have felt abrupt and challenging. Change was being ushered in, in the form of fellow South Africans who, it seems, only yesterday could never have aspired to be more than labourers on the white-owned farms.