David Cooper
I support the UCT student victory in the downfall of the Rhodes statue and also the Senate’s vote of 181/1 in favour of its removal. This imposing statue signified UCT’s deep historical involvement in colonial capitalism. However, much remains to be done to transform the academic structures and ideological symbolism, which in 2015 still run through the material and cultural power networks or “veins” embedded deeply within UCT’s social body. Transformation is urgently needed at UCT and our other universities – as many black (and some white) students aggressively and coherently argued at the March 25 mass meeting in Jameson Hall.
The short pre-1918 history I recount here is meant to convey how important, but also how complex, real transformation of the material and symbolic internal structures of UCT will be.
I focus the story on how a federal solution of all the white “university colleges” was proposed after the 1910 Union to deal with what then was called the (white) “university question”. However, when World War I broke out in 1914, UCT (then South African College, SAC) managed to get the Union parliament to pass a bill giving it full university status, and giving it the mining capitalist money of Alfred Beit and Julius Werner, which had been earlier intended to be split among a group of the university colleges.
What was this “university question”? In essence at the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, the university system consisted of the University of the Cape of Good Hope (UCGH), which since 1873 had been created to serve (like London University then) as a non-teaching university via a British Royal Charter. The UCGH “quality-controlled” and awarded all degrees of its constituent white university colleges. These “teaching colleges” by 1910 had grown to eight, comprising the university colleges of Transvaal (Pretoria), Natal (Pietermaritzburg), Grey (Bloemfontein), Rhodes (Grahamstown), School of Mines (Johannesburg, later in 1922 Wits University), Huguenot (for women, at Wellington), SAC (UCT after 1918) and Victoria College (Stellenbosch University after 1918). The latter two comprised well over 50 percent of total university students.
How to go forward with all these colleges? Since 1904, SAC had been arguing that it should become a full university to avoid the problem it faced, which was that UCGH staff, and not its own academic teaching staff, set and marked the course exams. This, along with the argument of the “large and high quality” nature of the SAC institution, continued to be pushed by its Senate/Council whenever any government commission deliberated over the university question. Yet Victoria College (Stellenbosch) favoured a federal solution under one national university centre but with strong academic autonomy for itself; while most of the other colleges supported some sort of federalism but with more Union government finances for them than to the two Cape institutions!
What of the money? Here SAC’s push for independence was to be strengthened by association with three mining capitalists, Rhodes, Beit and Werner. In 1888, Cecil Rhodes and his friend Alfred Beit had amalgamated the Kimberley diamond mines, enabling Werner, Beit and Co. to acquire a controlling interest in De Beers Mines. And in 1891 Rhodes had called for the establishment on his Groote Schuur Estate of a new university of the Cape Colony (to link with his Cape-to-Cairo dream). Rhodes planned to donate vast finances for construction of this university; but after the debacle of the Jameson Raid, he left in his will of 1902 the envisaged funds for the Rhodes Scholarships to Oxford instead. Meanwhile, Beit had on his death in 1906 bequeathed £200 000 for the establishment of a university in Johannesburg, to be used within 10 years, ie 1916. Nothing happened until 1909 when General Smuts, during a visit to London, met Alfred Beit’s brother Otto and Julius Werner. On top of the £200 000 originally meant for a Johannesburg university, the Beit estate added another £100 000 and Werner another £200 000 – half a million in all – for the creation of “a national university at Groote Schuur for the new Union of South Africa”.
Following a set of other commissions on the university question, which all failed, the Union government in July 1914 established the Laurence Commission. This commission proposed a two-university federal solution: a northern grouping of the white university colleges of Transvaal, Free State and Natal with a central “seat” in Pretoria; and a southern centre in new buildings at Groote Schuur and comprising the examining University (ex-UCGH) with SAC and Victoria as constituent colleges and Huguenot as an affiliated satellite. £350 000 of the Beit-Werner half a million was to go to the Groote Schuur campus, £25 000 to Victoria and the rest to the other colleges; Rhodes university college could join either the north or south; and the Johannesburg School of Mines should affiliate to both the north and the south to provide engineering degrees across the country.
But then World War I unexpectedly broke out a month later in August 1914. Those “in the know” were aware that unless the £200 000 provided by Beit’s will in 1906 was used for a national university by 1916, the money would have to revert to his estate. So the SAC Senate/Council in 1915 made a deal with Victoria College of Stellenbosch. The latter supported SAC to take all £500 000 and seek a parliamentary bill for a University of Cape Town – if a similar bill created a Stellenbosch University, with donor money that had then been promised separately from wealthy Afrikaner sources.
With this deal in place late in 1915 in the midst of the war, the SAC (UCT) Council sent their representative and Cape Times editor Sir Maitland Park to London to meet the four Beit-Werner trustees. The trustees comprised Lady Werner (wife of deceased Sir Julius Werner); Sir Otto Beit (brother of deceased Alfred Beit; the current UCT Student Union building has the name “Otto Beit”); a close friend of Beit and Werner, Sir Starr Jameson (infamous for the Jameson Raid of 1895, currently “honoured” by the grand Jameson Hall of UCT); and Sir Lionel Phillips, mining capitalist friend-associate of the Werner-Beit London-based company. These trustees agreed that if the necessary Union parliament university bills could be drawn up in 1916, the closure date for Alfred’s bequest, then all £500 000 could be used to build a new University of Cape Town at Groote Schuur (SAC was then located around Hiddingh Hall in the city).
Thus in 1916 parliament passed three university bills creating UCT, University of Stellenbosch and University of South Africa (Unisa), which took the place of the University of the Cape of Good Hope as degree-awarding university for the other white university colleges, most of which only became full universities after 1945. These three universities were launched in 1918. A new UCT campus was constructed at Groote Schuur during 1918-28 and the “famous” Rhodes statue erected in 1934.
Naturally other white university colleges, especially those of the Witwatersrand, were not happy with this deal. According to UCT historian Howard Philips: “The UCT bill encountered some heated opposition from Witwatersrand MPs who felt that at least Alfred Beit’s £200 000 should be used for establishing a university in Johannesburg as originally intended… It was the feeling of every Johannesburg member (MP) at present that they had fallen among thieves,” declared the MP for Germiston. “The Cape Town College Council was the operating gang in the transaction and the government were accomplices after the fact,” said another northern MP.”
So hopefully even with the fall of the statue, UCT students will continue to discuss this material and cultural historical heritage of the lovely Groote Schuur campus when they gather in their student union Otto Beit Building, which is next to the Jameson Hall, or when they pass the Robert Leslie (first dean of commerce in 1921) Building or the over 100 other buildings and paintings and memorabilia of the pre-1994 era that span this campus.
Perhaps, too, the sociological links will be clearly made: that these black students often have had black great-grandfathers and great-uncles who worked on the mines, and great-grandmothers and great-aunts who stayed behind in the villages working the crops – all of whose hard labour and sometimes blood contributed significantly to the vast profits made by Beit and Werner, and out of which this UCT upper campus was so splendidly constructed after 1918.
It is useful to end with a story that is quite revealing about the racial heritage of UCT. In the very year of 1915 when the SAC Senate/Council was liaising with the Beit-Werner trustees in London, Latin Professor W Richie, the renowned historian of SAC, recounts another event of that year: “From time to time one or two coloured students have attended (SAC) and, in one case at least, taken a degree with credit, but, naturally, with a view to the general interests of the institution, there has never been any great encouragement extended to such students. A rather unusual case occurred this year (1915) when the son of a native chief applied for admission to the intermediate class after passing the matriculation examination, but after some very friendly negotiation the applicant saw that it was better on the whole to seek instruction elsewhere.”
“Very friendly negotiation” has been a hallmark of elite, research-intensive universities like UCT all over the world. This should be borne in mind during struggles over the next few years for major transformation at our universities.
l David Cooper, retired Emeritus Associate Professor, Sociology Department, UCT.
His Chapter 1 provides a short history of higher education in South Africa: in D Cooper and G Subotszky (2001), The Skewed Revolution: Trends in South African Higher Education 1988-1998 (Education Policy Unit, UWC).