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It may be surprising and quaint today, but my experience at Wilgenhof was liberating

14 Oct 2024

My own and Professor Pierre de Vos’s recollections of Wilgenhof differ. Neither of us holds the exclusive entitlement to pronounce on the current dilemma. More important is to heed the current residents who say they had no part, ever, in repugnant past practices.

To anyone not familiar with the Wilgenhof men’s residence at the University of Stellenbosch, the recent media furore must have left a deep impression: racism, dark practices, torture, Nazism, the Ku Klux Klan and worse.

With this Professor Pierre de Vos has now associated court challenges by current and former Wilgenhof residents with Stellenbosch University’s decision to close Wilgenhof, at least for a year.

Read more: Court cases against UCT and Maties are emblematic of the ‘Mpofu-fication’ of SA universities

Professor De Vos adds the challenge to UCT’s decision to proscribe academic association with those connected to the Israeli Defence Force’s genocidal conduct in Gaza. These court challenges he links by citing them as evidence of “Mpofu-fication”: “lawfare” by deep-pocketed litigants who challenge actions with strong political, social or ethical dimensions.

For him, many Wilgenhof sympathisers refuse to consider, let alone accept, that the culture and traditions of the residence exclude and may discriminate indirectly on race grounds.

To me, this seems overheated and misdirected. Worse, it is an unwarranted slur to tar those who may not share the trauma he experienced at Wilgenhof, nor his view that the residence should be closed.

So let me start with a declaration of interest; then a disavowal; and, last, a recognition of some realities.

I too was a resident in Wilgenhof. It was in the early 1970s. My experience of Wilgenhof was different to his. More of that later; but first the disavowal.

I express no view on the merits of the challenges to Stellenbosch’s or UCT’s decisions. It should not be a surprise that I have a deep and abiding trust in our courts to uphold the Constitution, also here, without fear, favour or prejudice.

Next, some realities.

In my time, Wilgenhof was for white male students only. It was a creature of racial discrimination. Those who lived there, like me, cannot deny that reality – nor the privileges we garnered from it; not merely the immediate undue benefits, but the enduring privileges that advantage us to this day.

The same is true for all who lived and benefited from residence and campus life at historically white universities. And, beyond that, for all white South Africans.

A white South African problem

This gives a deeper, richer, more complex and painful hue than Professor De Vos’s tarbrush seeks to apply: Wilgenhof’s problem is part of a broader white South Africa problem.

Professor De Vos embraces the conclusions of the University’s Panel that investigated the contents of two rooms unveiled earlier this year at Wilgenhof. The Panel appeared to grant that Wilgenhof’s culture did encourage critical thinking – yet thought this subject to overriding group thinking and group psychology.

The Panel saw the issue as clear: if you respected the strict hierarchy (based on seniority) among fellow Wilgenhof residents, remained loyal to the group, and did nothing to threaten the group, you were welcomed into the brotherhood – but not otherwise.

These findings accord with Professor De Vos’s own experience at Wilgenhof.

My experience was not the same. In our first-year group, some of us made our objections to initiation and discipline known. So too our political views. Our efforts did not prevail.

Thus, our public statement condemning the June 1972 police attack on UCT students at St George’s Cathedral earned us some notoriety at Stellenbosch – but within Wilgenhof, there was no whisper of ostracism.

In fact, lively discussion and argument ensued. In Wilgenhof, as also on campus, speakers of different persuasions were invited. A brave “langhaar Engelsman” from UCT, Geoff Budlender, came to speak to a huge and mostly hostile “boere” audience about the anti-apartheid opposition he led at UCT.

Liberating

It may be surprising and quaint to many today, but my experience at Stellenbosch, and more even at Wilgenhof, was liberating.

It awakened my own slow and much-too-belated recognition of the racial iniquity from which we benefited.

During all this, despite deep differences, we got to know each other and lived together. And we made deep, cherished and lasting friendships. In this, I am not alone.

My friends and judicial colleagues, Edwin Cameron and Jeremy Pickering, will tell similar stories. And so too does Professor John Dugard, half a generation earlier, the progenitor and hero of South Africa’s case against Israel’s Gaza horrors – and another grateful “survivor” of Wilgenhof.

I do not denigrate or minimise Professor De Vos and others’ adverse experiences. Wilgenhof was not a paradise. Injustices occurred during initiation and the “Nagligte” disciplinary processes. These, the present residents claim, have long ceased. And nobody, past or present, contends that those practices can be defended or should be continued.

My own and Professor De Vos’s recollections of Wilgenhof differ. Neither of us holds the exclusive entitlement to pronounce on the current dilemma. Or to condemn others’ experiences. More important is to heed the current residents who say they had no part, ever, in repugnant past practices.

In adopting our Constitution, South Africans creatively promised a mutual surrendering of our past, fixed identities in favour of new insights and ways of being and relating.

That promise was viewed by many as a “miracle”. But as a perceptive American observer empathetically noted, “we call birth a miracle not because we know how it’s going to turn out, but because of the limitless possibility that it contains ... [m]iracles cannot be repeated, but what can be repeated is the hard, sometimes ugly, always unglamorous work of compromise and negotiation, and the working through of the inevitable consequences of those compromises”.

Wilgenhof was historically grounded in racial discrimination, as were all students at Stellenbosch; and all white institutions in South Africa. Wilgenhof is thus part of a general “white South Africa” problem.

What has happened is that, in the wake of the media furore, the Panel accepted wholesale that the two Nagligte rooms represent and embody Wilgenhof and its entire history; that the current inhabitants must be judged as if they accepted and continued that history; and that Wilgenhof thus represents and embodies all that is repugnant in Stellenbosch’s history of white male racism.

As some “non-Wilgenhof” sympathisers have said, there is an inviting logic to closing or “cancelling” Wilgenhof on those grounds. It is that the rest of Stellenbosch University – and, for that matter, the rest of “white South Africa” – should be closed or cancelled too.

Some would consider that a wholesale “cancelling” will not be so bad at all; but the least our democracy requires is that we recognise the right of those directly and indirectly affected by the possibility of “cancelling” to have their say without being unfairly tarred.

There are real interests at stake. Young lives are affected, real reputations have been damaged. The comparison between the Wilgenhof challenge and UCT’s Gaza litigation is odious.

This not only mistrusts the courts, who will do their duty; it is to perpetuate the process of apartheid “othering” – by turning the tables on those who did the “othering” in the past. DM

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A white South African problem

Liberating