How was the discipline of geography caught up with apartheid in South Africa? Applied research and urban and regional planning was central to some of the most visible and hated structures of apartheid – such as the development of the ‘Bantustans’ – and the discipline more broadly at best ignored, and at worse diverted attention from, the violence wrought by apartheid on the landscape of the country. Yet through research, teaching, activism and community work scholars worked to dismantle apartheid through geography. This excerpt from Decolonising Geography: Disciplinary histories and the end of the British empire in Africa, 1948-1998 Wiley-Blackwell RGS-IBG Series) explores some of the anti-apartheid activism of geography staff and students on and off campus, through interviews with those involved.
By Ruth Craggs and Hannah Neate
Geographers working in South African universities in the 1980s were part of a segregated system in which institutions were designated for each of the so-called ‘racial groups’: Black African (also divided further by language group), Coloured, Indian, and White. The University of the Western Cape (UWC) – designated as a ‘Coloured’ institution – was shut for much of 1973 on account of student protests, and in the 1980s protests were also a regular occurrence. Geography lecturer Michael Dyssel described the atmosphere on campus:
Robert Sobukwe road [then Modderdam Road, where the university entrance was] was obviously a war zone, we would have a mass meeting here and feelings, emotions, boils over, some of the students would have been jailed again… many a time students would run to the gate, … picking up a stone and attacking the guys that would have postures on the high buildings opposite the university, who would be armed with rifles, albeit …with rubber bullets, and a whole contingent in their armoured vehicles on the other side…
These events significantly disrupted university life and study, often leading to the suspension of studies for months on end. Priscilla Cunnan at the University of Durban Westville (UDW) – designated for ‘Indian’ students – remembers ‘in my first year the university was closed from July to October, and, then we wrote our final year exams in November, and that was it, and miraculously I passed!’
Ngaka Mosiane had a similar experience studying at the University of Bophutswana (set aside for Tswana speakers in the Bantustan of the same name): ‘in the first couple of days after classes started for my very first semester the university was closed and we were told to go home because there was an attempted coup.’ Mosiane notes that these closures could also have further consequences, especially for poorer students and those forced to live away from campus: ‘I lived off-campus, with all the attendant challenges of lacking transport to go ‘home’ at night, thus taking risks by walking alone; not knowing what will happen the next day [with the strike situation].’ Studying in such conditions was hugely trying. Flip Schoeman’s nearly complete doctoral work was destroyed by fire after a protest on campus at the University of the North burned the Soil Science department to the ground. He never completed his studies and left academia. However, these experiences could also be important for understanding South Africa, as Cunnan argued: ‘that was the benefit in a strange way of being at that university. My friends who went to the white university [the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, which was not the centre of sustained action] never had that experience, because they never had any protest marches, or boycotts.’
Calvyn Gilfellan, a student and later lecturer at the University of the Western Cape, was heavily involved with anti-apartheid activism, described by his colleague Michael Dyssel as ‘an activist literally with hands and feet and everything on the ground, without any reservations around his beliefs.’ Gilfellan used geographical skills acquired in his role as a technician in the department in his activism. These included photo-development and aerial photo analysis. Gilfellan elaborated:
If there was a consumer boycott for instance, and there needed to be areas identified on a map of Paarl where people who would undermine that boycott would normally go, those were the kinds of things that they would expect, not even ask, but expect you to do. Or more underground would be where are the installations… one of our student colleagues was supposed to blow up a bridge where the security police would take you when they arrested you.
And whilst generally aerial photographs of sensitive areas like military installations were restricted, blurred, or removed from circulation, the Geography Department of the University of the Western Cape had a full unredacted set. Gilfellan’s geography training therefore included lots of ‘things that I could use in academia but also in the struggle’.
Another strand of Gilfellan’s activism was his work, alongside his colleague Mike Dyssel in community education. The two worked together in community projects, especially providing school-level education during the widespread disruption to teaching in the mid-1980s as students boycotted schools in response to the increasing hostilities and violence of the apartheid regime in the townships. Gilfellan and Dyssel worked in the evenings and weekends providing education for young people in the sprawling settlement of Bellville which neighboured the campus. The University of the Western Cape had by the mid-1980s become a base for radical scholars and community work was also seen as an important part of the university’s updated mission statement (1982), which refuted the ‘political and ideological grounds on which it was established’ – apartheid – and aimed to serve ‘Third World communities’, including those bordering the campus.
Working with school children could be both a pragmatic solution to the challenges they faced in gaining an education under apartheid, and part of a broader mission to bring pride and dignity to the community as one element of the wider struggle. The Black Consciousness Movement leader Steve Biko saw community education as crucial in promoting self-reliance and black consciousness. Dyssel reflected on what they thought they were doing in their community work and with their undergraduate students: ‘decolonisation wasn’t really a buzz word at that stage… even if it wasn’t a programme, even if it was haphazard, that bit and piece can maybe plant a seed and conscientize three or four students, and then we have achieved our goal’. Gilfellan made explicit his political and intellectual influences when reflecting: ‘it was this whole notion of Paolo Freire’s [1970] Pedagogy of the oppressed where the idea of the organic intellectual you could live it out here’. Drawing on Marxist thought, Freire argued that knowledge could be co-created between teacher and student and that education was key to revolutionary liberation from colonialism.
Gilfellan’s activism got him arrested and detained on more than one occasion, where his reputation as a geographer was well known by other inmates who would draw on his expertise to pass the time, asking ‘about the mountains, you know you look out at the mountains and they ask you, you know, is it sedimentary rocks; “chief, the cloud that is coming is it cumulonimbus or nimbostratus?!”. While in prison in July 1988, Gilfellan received a message from his Geography II class, signed by all 44 students and smuggled into his cell:
We just want to let you know that we are thinking a lot about you and hope that you are doing well… We hope to surprise you with the Statistics test results so you can see that the time and work that has gone into it has not been in vain. We hope to see you again soon because we miss that friendly smile on campus. Love and Blessings.
The university and department also released separate statements demanding his release, and Gilfellan described the latter as ‘very heart-warming given the political tension in the department’.
When Gilfellan returned to work after some months in prison, some of his white colleagues didn’t mention his detention at all, though some surprised him. Fellow geographer Tielman Roos ‘was probably the most sympathetic one, though he was the most conservative one … but he was also very religious.’ Gilfellan found out later that Roos had applied for permission to visit him in prison, though he was released before the visit could take place. In a clear indication of the complexity of apartheid politics as played out within geography departments across the country, Roos took early retirement shortly after this incident, in 1989, because he was identified as a member of the Broederbond [a secret society dedicated to Afrikaner advancement and closely associated with the Apartheid regime] and he felt threatened on campus.
The University of the Western Cape wasn’t the only department where geography staff were actively involved in the wider struggle, often working through community organisations and on urban issues such as housing, planning, segregation of group areas and access to infrastructure. For example Alan Mabin at the University of Witwatersrand co-founded Planact, which, in collaboration with community-based organisations lobbied local government for services and infrastructure for poor and informal settlements from the mid 1980s onwards. Keyan Tomaselli, who, alongside Mabin, had made student protest films shown on campuses in the early 1970s, was by the late 1980s collaborating with the Westville Residents Support group in Durban, alongside fellow academic Ruth Tomaselli. Brij Maharaj was Secretary of the Merebank Community Centre, also in Durban. At the University of Natal, several geographers were variously engaging with the progressive trade unions, black civic society organisations, the anti-apartheid coalition the United Democratic Front (UDF), and the African National Congress (ANC).
When Michael Sutcliffe returned to the University of Natal Durban as lecturer in 1982, following his PhD in the US, he recalled that ‘no sooner had I got back in my office, than a comrade came into my office then and said “Hi, I know you can analyse things with computers, data”’ and requested his support for anti-apartheid projects. Doing this analysis brought Sutcliffe into contact with the UDF and ANC, and he went on to be heavily involved in the movement, running a community research unit, establishing NGOs within and beyond the university which provided a screen for uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK, the armed wing of the ANC), as well as working to improve living standards, and contributing to studies aiming to support South Africa’s democratic transition:
There were probably a hundred studies we ran on workers, of living conditions of people, and I would analyse them, write the stuff up, we would always have publicity stuff, but we would have organising behind it…. if the police were putting a road-block in, tear gassing people, we would go in behind the scenes, do a survey of people, what do you think of these things etc, and we’d then tell the newspapers, and they would publish it and they could say, such and such survey of so and so grand academic shows 99.9% of people don’t want to be teargassed! Not quite as simple as that but you know what I mean.
In collaboration with others, Sutcliffe founded the Built Environment Support Group, which, similar to Planact in Johannesburg, worked to fight forced removals, and recorded violence through community and trade union surveys. By the late 1980s the political situation in South Africa was incredibly tense, and often violent. Some of those – often young people – involved in monitoring state violence as part of Sutcliffe’s activist research were killed. Many more were imprisoned. At the University of Witwatersrand, the anthropologist David Webster well known to colleagues in geography and planning, was killed by state assassins in May 1989. This was the context in which those opposing apartheid were working. Reflecting on the period, Dianne Scott, who had studied at the University of Natal, Durban articulated the need to understand:
The power and vicious hold the apartheid government had on the universities, academics and of course the society at large. The barriers this pernicious system created were huge and activist academics … had a monumental task in trying to change or reconfigure the system, risking their freedom and their lives.
Patricia Daley and Amber Murrey have recently argued for what they call ‘defiant scholarship’: ‘active scholarly practice that seeks to work against and outside colonial grammars and prevailing registers’ in order to address coloniality in and beyond the university. The geographers discussed above, using their geographical skills as part of anti-apartheid campaigning, community education and direct action against the apartheid regime, might provide a template for that kind of work. But the interviews also highlight that defiance can also be dangerous, for individuals’ careers, and sometimes even their lives (something Christine Noe and Stefan Ouma have also pointed out). This needs to be acknowledged. Learning from the past can illuminate the sorts of academic work that might contribute to transformation in the present, as well as the barriers to that kind of work.
For more information about the authors and Decolonising Geography: Disciplinary histories and the end of the British empire in Africa, 1948-1998 see the publisher’s site here
Ruth Craggs is Reader in Political and Historical Geography at King’s College London.
Hannah Neate was Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University when this research was conducted.
Featured photograph: Caption: Protests at the University of Durban-Westville Campus, May 1972. Source: Van Niekerk Collection, No: 1152/518. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Special Collections, Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre.
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