By Kate Philip (NUSAS president 1983/84) and Brendan Barry (NUSAS president 1985/86)
The formation of the United Democratic Front in 1983 had a profound impact on NUSAS and students on its university campuses at the time. From the late 1970's, the Freedom Charter had become a key mobilising document for NUSAS, providing compelling vision of a non-racial, democratic South Africa for white students. But it was with the formation of the UDF that it became possible for NUSAS to turn the non-racialism of the Freedom Charter from a matter of principle, to a matter of practice for large numbers of students. The UDF forged an alliance that united and strengthened the struggles of its political, community, youth, trade union, women and student affiliates and rapidly generated an unprecedented and nation-wide mobilization against apartheid.
Mobilising against Apartheid
When NUSAS joined with hundreds of other organizations throughout the country to form the UDF, it faced the key challenge of ensuring that it retained the support of the majority of students on the white campuses for this decision, in the face of state-funded and organized right wing and liberal opposition.
While most mass organisations build their membership by organising directly around the interests of their members, the historical challenge for NUSAS was to organise white students to take a stand that appeared contrary to their interests: to recognise that the white minority privileges they enjoyed as a result of apartheid were unjust and unjustifiable, and to ally themselves with the forces for democracy in South Africa.
For NUSAS, winning this ideological battle on the campuses was a pre-requisite for survival. As a federation of SRCs, NUSAS had to maintain student support for its policies and campaigns on every affiliated campus, or risk losing SRC elections, or facing campus-wide referendums to disaffiliate from NUSAS.
Year after year, and despite concerted State opposition, NUSAS managed to win support from the majority of white students for the anti-apartheid cause. But it could never take its constituency for granted: it had to win the battle of ideas: in mass meetings, campaigns, concerts and lecture halls, through pamphlets, posters, publications and campus radio stations, NUSAS sought to expose white students to South Africa's bitter realities, to overcome the comfortable separations and silences that apartheid worked so hard to create, and to find ways in which to support the wider struggle for a non-racial, democratic South Africa.
The complicated set of reforms with which PW Botha aimed to 're-engineer' apartheid created the basis for the widest ever mobilization against apartheid, under the banner of the UDF; and NUSAS was able to rally broad support from white students for the UDF, and to participate actively in the campaigns and protests that erupted against first the tri-cameral elections, then the black local authority elections, and the township uprisings that started in the Vaal and spread across the country in protest at the imposition of those local authorities.
For NUSAS, the decision to be part of UDF enabled us to link white students with these struggles in ways that were meaningful and material; that allowed these students to be participants in South Africa's democratic movement, side by side with the many constituencies within UDF, and in support of their struggles.
Opening the Doors of Learning and Culture
Student and youth struggles were a critical feature of the UDF period. NUSAS, COSAS and AZASO (subsequently SANSCO) had formed a non-racial student alliance from early in the 1980's, and formed the student wing of the UDF.
The 1980 school boycotts, led by COSAS, were an early skirmish in what was to be an intensifying struggle in the schools, with demands that included an end to Bantu education, the right to elect Student Representative Councils, and an end to corporal punishment and sexual harassment in the schools.
In 1984, a new dimension was brought to student struggles, in the Transvaal stayaway, in which trade unions organized a mass strike in support of student demands: identifying themselves as parents of students, and making the link between student demands for representative structures in the schools, and trade union struggles for recognition in the factories. The Transvaal was brought to a standstill. It was the first of many such stayaways to come, as increasingly organized workers asserted their power on the factory floor in relation to wider political issues.
The realities of conditions under Bantu education, and the huge discrepancies in state spending on white and black education highlighted all the more starkly for white students that their own education had been one of privilege: based not just on who had textbooks and who went without, but in terms also of the role of ideology in the very different content of the educations received.
The infamous quote from Verwoerd emphasized the goals of Bantu education and bears reminding: "What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics which it cannot use in practice? There is no place for him above the level of certain forms of labour...We should not give the native an academic education....we should so conduct school that the native will know that he must be a labourer in this country."
COSAS turned Verwoerd's dream into PW Botha's nightmare. Throughout the country, COSAS generated a leadership cadre characterized by its political maturity and insight and above all its courage. Together with other township youth formations, it provided a militant backbone to the entire democratic movement, not only through its own struggles but through its former students as they reached tertiary education institutions, joined trade unions, community organizations and MK. The struggles of COSAS students inspired NUSAS and its campaigns for many years and its banning in 1985 precipitated major protests on NUSAS campuses.
Challenging the Role of Universities
While much NUSAS activity was focused on solidarity with COSAS in opposing Bantu education, the struggles in the schools also cast into sharp relief the roles our own education was designed to have us play in our society, and the question of what we should be doing to challenge that education, and to find different ways to use our skills than those planned for us.
As a NUSAS publication of the time explained:
"Our universities are designed to prepare us for specific roles in the apartheid system. We are taught various skills in such a way that they will be useful to the privileged minority in South Africa, yet be inaccessible to the vast majority. A changed South Africa will need professionals whose skills are oriented towards serving the interests of the community as a whole."
NUSAS highlighted that a democratic South Africa needed architects and town-planners who understood the housing crisis in South Africa; doctors trained in preventive health care rather than plastic surgery; and teachers who can teach the history of resistance to colonialism and apartheid, not how Jan Van Riebeeck brought civilization to the Cape.
In practice, NUSAS worked with representative student structures in faculty councils, and with progressive academics, to challenge the content of education in the universities across every discipline; and challenged students to use their skills in support of the transformation of society.
Many students who were part of NUSAS tried to do precisely this on leaving the campuses, and continue to do so in the new South Africa, as part of building and sustaining the spirit of non-racialism in the era of transformation.
The challenge posed to students, of finding ways to use their skills in support of democratic struggles, was a factor contributing to the proliferation of what in the 1980s became known as 'service organisations'. These NGOs included legal support services which challenged human rights abuses; para-legal support to communities contesting forced removals; community health services, refugee support structures in Natal, responding to the displacement of people during the Inkatha violence against UDF and COSATU in the region; labour research services, urban planning NGOs working with civic structures; media support agencies, and many more: staffed by activists, graduates and professionals, black and white, who sought to apply their skills in ways that strengthened the democratic movement.
Solidarity and Support for Wider Struggles
While NUSAS challenged the racist education system, and mobilized white students against apartheid, students were also organized to provide support for the wide range of struggles that emerged under the UDF banner. Not only did UDF provide a common platform for the voice of grassroots structures, but also a vehicle through which apparently isolated struggles were able to build a cumulative and decisive impact.
When NUSAS activists weren't silk-screening posters for mass meetings on campus, they were doing so for youth organizations and unions; printing presses at NUSAS Head Office and on many campuses often cranked through the night, producing pamphlets that were not destined for campus consumption. Students campaigned for the release of political prisoners and pamphleteered buses and trains with 'Free Mandela' pamphlets; spoke at black schools to promote non-racialism side by side with COSAS; pamphleteered white schools in support of COSAS; organized support for consumer boycotts and worker struggles; picketed the tri-cameral parliament voting booths and marched in protest against the states of emergency, detentions and the treason trials of UDF leaders.
The advent of UDF also brought new forms of organization, and opportunities for new forms of involvement in struggle by white students. In the white community, organizations such as the End Conscription Campaign, the Black Sash and the Five Freedoms Forum were bringing new constituencies into the anti-apartheid fold, even where these were not directly affiliated to the UDF.
New forms of constituency-based organization in the UDF also provided white students with opportunities to struggle alongside workers, youth and community members in UDF's local and regional campaign structures: as part of the Million Signature Campaign, organising against tri-cameral and community council elections and Bantustan repression. Students also joined local youth structures, which often cut across the spatial racial divisions of the Group Areas Act, which were fraying at the edges in many urban centres; and campus women's movements were able to link up with community-based women's structures.
Troops in the Townships
In the context of the massive growth in popular organization that characterized the UDF period, as well as the formation of Cosatu and the growing use of strikes and stayaways, the apartheid government made it clear that it intended to retain control at all costs: with massive repression.
In this context, the widespread deployment of SADF troops in the townships had a profound impact on the campuses; an impact enhanced by students' experiences of participating side by side in campaigns with the organizations now being targeted by apartheid's army.
At the time, white male students faced compulsory conscription to the SADF after leaving school or after completing their university studies. Opposition to conscription had grown in response to the South African war of occupation in Namibia and southern Angola and the murderous raids by the SADF into frontline states. On the campuses, opposition increasingly turned to rejection as student conscripts and potential conscripts confronted the immediate reality of war against their fellow South Africans in townships throughout the country. More and more white students demanded the removal of troops from the townships, supported the End Conscription Campaign and joined the struggle against apartheid.
NUSAS in the States of Emergency
In 1985, NUSAS July festival was due to be opened by Matthew Goniwe, speaking about the remarkable levels of community organization in the small towns of the Eastern Cape. Instead, the conference opened with the news of his disappearance: and then, during the conference, that his body, together with the bodies of Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkhonto and Sicelo Mlauli had been found on a back road outside Port Elizabeth, assassinated by apartheid forces. Their funeral attracted hundreds of thousands of people to the small town of Cradock; but that evening, PW Botha declared his first State of Emergency. In film footage used by the SABC to justify the emergency, Beyers Naude (who was honourary president of NUSAS at the time) was shown during his speech at the funeral. But instead of the measured words of solidarity and struggle he'd given, the footage had been speeded up, so that he was seen waving his arms demonically at the crowds. The propaganda onslaught against the democratic movement had entered a new phase of intensity and deceit.
The successive states of emergency were vicious in their attempts to smash organization. The exuberant presence of mass organization in the early stages of UDF was forced into semi-clandestine forms of operation. Many activists were targeted and killed. Many ordinary people came under fire. Attending mass funerals of the victims of state violence became a form of solidarity in its own right. As community leadership was forced on the retreat, the state nurtured forms of vigilantism and internecine violence.
In this context, although the university campuses were not beyond the reach of repression, they were nevertheless a zone of relative protection. NUSAS did its utmost to use this space to maintain the profile of resistance and opposition, and to provide a platform for leaders from mass-based organizations in the UDF and Cosatu. Under student pressure, university administrations were forced to choose sides, and many chose to protect the rights of students to create such platforms and to protest as part of academic freedom, using their powers - but not always successfully - to keep the riot police, the Casspirs and Hippos at bay.
The ability of NUSAS to operate nationally was also severely curtailed, with its Congress banned from Cape Town in 1985, its 1986 July Festival banned, many student leaders detained, and others living on the run as they ducked and dived to evade the attentions of the security police.
In those dark hours, it was hard to comprehend that what lay at the end of the tunnel was light; that the intensity of repression was part of the death throes of the regime; that the balance of forces had in fact tipped; and that the release of political prisoners, the unbanning of the ANC and the SACP and the negotiated transition to democracy would follow.
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