Statues and Storms: Leading through change

By Max Price

Statues and Storms offers a gripping insider’s account of Max Price’s tenure as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town during a transformative period in South African higher education. 

With a focus on leadership, the book also explores enduring themes in academia, including academic and artistic freedom, the limits of protest rights, institutional racism, culture and inclusiveness, and the funding of higher education.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Aug 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9780624087779

Max Price

Dr Max Price was Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Town from 2008-2018. Previously, he was an independent consultant in the fields of public health, health policy, medical education and human resources for health planning. He lives in Johannesburg. 

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MAX PRICE

Statues and Storms

Leading through change

Tafelberg

To Deborah

Note on Governance Structures at UCT

The Council is the highest governing body of the university. It comprises 30 members, 60% of whom are external to the university, appointed by national, provincial and local governments, alumni, donors and other constituencies. The vice-chancellor (VC) and deputy vice-chancellors (DVCs), some deans and representatives of the Senate and of other staff, and student representatives make up the internal members. The Council appoints the VC and other senior executives. The Council delegates to the Senate all academic decisions, for example those concerning curricula, research, teaching and learning, admissions and examinations policies, and new programmes. Council is responsible for the transformation, budgets, setting fees, infrastructure and capital investment, human resource policy, risk and assurance, and investment of reserves. Council has five routine meetings a year.

The Senate comprises all the full professors, the VC and DVCs, some student representatives, and some representatives of non-professorial academic staff and non-academic staff elected by those constituencies. The VC chairs the Senate. The VC is directly accountable to Council but also to Senate, which normally must approve his or her appointment and reappointment.

Exco, the Executive Committee of Council, has six members and acts for Council between Council meetings.

The university executive, sometimes referred to in this book as ‘my executive’, is the executive management team of UCT, comprising the VC, the four DVCs and the registrar.

Introduction

I had the privilege of being the vice-chancellor (VC) of the University of Cape Town (UCT) for two terms, from 2008 to 2018. During the latter part of my term, from 2015 to 2017, the universities across South Africa experienced the most sustained, widespread, disruptive and at times violent protests, unprecedented even going back to the decades of apartheid rule. These protests were triggered by one at UCT that targeted the statue of the 19th-century mining magnate and empire-builder, Cecil John Rhodes.

This book is in part a memoir about leading a university in such turbulent times. It is also an insider’s view, inevitably partial, of the history of the protests, an attempt to explain what happened and why the decolonising protests erupted at liberal universities two decades after the transition to democracy in South Africa. It is, thirdly, about leadership and the tough decisions leaders have to make, especially in times of rapid transformation. And, finally, it is a contribution to debates about some principles and values that are core to universities, such as academic freedom, which are increasingly being challenged through the protests in South Africa and at universities in many other countries.

In the course of writing this book I have considered a number of possible titles but the contending candidates each captured only one of the four themes. Here they are, by way of an overview of the book.

‘The man in the arena’

I have often been asked whether I would have taken the job of VC if I had known in advance that it would include a period of tumultuous protest and enormous stress. My answer is, unequivocally, yes. It was a huge privilege to be the head of and lead UCT, widely agreed to be the top university on the continent, with all the opportunities that go with such a position. UCT attracts the top researchers across many fields, and the engagement with them and their innovative work was always the highlight of my job through weekly visits to departments and research units. UCT’s standing gives it a disproportionate influence in South Africa, on the African continent and globally – an influence and potential for impact that are also carried by the VC as the head of the institution. The position offered the opportunity for personal growth through global exposure and networking with the leaders of the world’s top universities, with politicians and scientists, with multilateral institutions and global philanthropists.

Moreover, for the first seven of the ten years of my term, steering the ship was not just plain sailing in the sense of an absence of serious storms, but UCT was riding the crest of the waves of its achievements in many domains – growth in research, innovation, teaching reputation, successful fundraising and growing alumni support, rapidly expanding postgraduate numbers, destination of choice for academic staff and international students, rising rankings, increased engagement with local communities, and even success in sports.

The job of VC is also enormously rewarding, and never more so than when presiding over graduation ceremonies. They are the culmination of our academic work. Sometimes, I would meet three generations of family members – all of whom took enormous pride in having studied at and graduated from UCT. But even more moving was the regular experience of being introduced by a first-generation graduate to her parents from a rural village, who had only a few years of schooling. This was often their first time in Cape Town. They could not contain their emotions about the graduation – their son or daughter now a doctor, accountant, lawyer or engineer. This was the visible evidence that UCT was playing a role in transforming the lives of an individual, a family and a community within the scope of a single generation.

But, most importantly, I would take the job again because I prefer to be the ‘man in the arena’, not a bystander when history is being made. President Theodore Roosevelt once said in an address that has become known as the ‘Man in the Arena’ speech:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause.¹

Throughout my career, I have chosen to be in the arena. The challenging three years of the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) and Fees Must Fall (FMF) movements, from 2015 to 2017, will, I believe, be regarded by history as watershed years for UCT and for higher education in the post-apartheid period. They were enormously stressful personally and for my family, some periods even traumatic, but I feel fortunate and fulfilled to have had a lead role in steering the university, and the higher education sector more broadly, during this transformative period. This is a book about what it’s like to be a vice-chancellor of a major university, an actor rather than a bystander, a memoir about leadership through periods of upheaval and crisis.

‘On both sides of the barricades’

This contending title for the book refers to my personal history as an activist for most of my life, including having been a student protester and then, still as an activist, becoming the face of the establishment confronting student and worker protests. The first chapter describes this personal history, and subsequent chapters reflect on how I felt being on the other side – in a way, how I grappled with being cast as the opponent of the movements for change. That history forms part of the explanation for the policies I supported, e.g. on fees, on insourcing, on admissions, on managing protests, on transformation. It also informs the personal struggle one has when making decisions when one’s youthful and current ideological commitments clash with the exigencies of one’s position of authority and accountability.

‘Making tough decisions: The responsibility of leadership’

This is also a book about making difficult decisions in leadership positions, when the buck stops with you, when there are often no right decisions, only better and worse ones, and whether they turn out to be for better or worse depends on future developments that may be impossible to anticipate or, if anticipated, may only be given high or low odds of occurring.

Some decisions are difficult because they are contingent on future developments that are unknown and unknowable. Most histories and analytical works reflect on a series of events in the past with the knowledge of how they turned out, and therefore the ability to make judgements about the decisions based on the actual outcomes. I have attempted to put the reader in my position at the time each decision was being made, in the context of the uncertainties and risks of future external developments, and of how other actors would respond to that decision. I ask readers to set aside their knowledge of how events actually materialised, and try to imagine making the decision with me in the moment, moving forward with imperfect information and making predictions that would perhaps be wrong.

Some decisions are difficult because they have an impact on multiple stakeholders with conflicting interests. A vice-chancellor arguably must take account of more divergent stakeholders than most other organisation leaders – including students, Council, Senate, alumni, donors and foundations, local communities, government officials – and is consequently pulled from all sides. I describe decisions we took about what to say publicly about negative events and how to portray transparently the challenges we faced, negotiations with students, decisions about removing the names of donors and former leaders from buildings, trading off the costs and benefits of closing the university during disruptive protests, or compromising with a few in order to allow many others to benefit – all influenced by the complexity of the multi-stakeholder environment of the university.

Most decisions involve an executive team’s input – and some are difficult because, as a consequence of the team’s diversity, the members of the team have contradictory opinions and it falls to the VC to decide among them, taking account of how those whose views did not hold sway will respond and be supportive in the future. Some decisions are complex because there are so many variables to consider, and the interactions between them are difficult to predict. Often, decisions have a time frame that allows consultation and deliberation, and one can take time to explore multiple options, do feasibility studies and conduct due diligence. But, especially in crisis periods, decisions are rendered much more difficult because they need to be taken within hours or even minutes, without adequate investigation and deliberation.

But for me, the most challenging decisions are those that are particularly complex ethically, because they require a choice or trade-off between competing principles, between competing ethical frameworks, or deliberation on a principle that would steer a decision in one direction but would have such negative practical consequences that one is persuaded to compromise. I faced many of these, and they are one reason I always felt stimulated in my job. Among many others, the three most difficult for me were: the decision to disinvite Flemming Rose, who had been invited to deliver the annual academic freedom lecture; the suite of decisions related to the removal and covering up of some artworks; and the question of amnesties for criminal behaviour – each has a chapter unpacking the dilemmas.

‘Staying calm in the hot seat: Courage and resilience in leadership’

Among the personal qualities that I believe are required of leadership in times of crisis are courage and calmness in the face of the storm, and resilience over the longer term. And by leadership, I do not just refer to the individual who occupies the hot seat but to the executive as a whole. I hope this account of UCT’s history will highlight that. Courage is required to take unpopular decisions; especially to take decisions that your friends and allies think are wrong. Courage is needed to take decisions that compromise your principles but are in the greater good, and which you know you will struggle with all your life. At UCT, courage was required and demonstrated by many in the executive and at the levels of deans and heads of departments when taking tough decisions in the interests of the institution that hurt individuals, including some who were friends and loyal supporters.

Leading when there is substantial indecision, no right answer and widespread opposition demands courage – as in the early decision to remove the Rhodes statue when the majority view, from the ANC government to liberals, alumni and most staff, said this would be airbrushing history. I believe courage, rather than cowardice, was evident in the executive’s persistence with a strategy of avoiding or minimising an armed response to violent protests in order to avoid escalation and to persist with a commitment to solving problems through talking rather than through force.

I am also indebted to a handful of colleagues who had the courage to put their bodies on the line, even in danger – as they did when responding in person to calls from protesting crowds to meet, or attending a mass meeting with just one or two colleagues, or accompanying me in volatile close engagements with protesters. Some were kept hostage, many experienced insults and attempts to humiliate them, many experienced provocation – and in all cases, they prevailed with calmness, courage and dignity.

Resilience is necessary because part of the conflict strategy of adversaries is to wear each other down and provoke mistakes, outbursts and rash actions. Engagement and negotiation approaches often take longer to resolve, and face frequent setbacks, testing one’s determination. They require finding compromises between contesting parties. As a result no one is satisfied, allies are alienated, and the protagonists draw attacks from all sides. Resilience is about genuine listening and trying to understand the other party’s perspective and what they are experiencing. It is about patience. It is about keeping perspective and not taking personally attacks that are actually a result of the office one occupies or the authority one represents. And, if one can, resilience is about developing a thick skin. (I think I was lucky to be born with that.) Resilience is also about recognising not only that you can only play the cards you’ve been dealt, but that ‘life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well’.²

Individual resilience is nourished and fortified by supportive family and close colleagues. More than anything, I am indebted to my wife, Deborah Posel, as well as our daughter and son, both of whom were students at UCT during my term as VC. Their solidarity kept me going. And I was incredibly lucky to have colleagues in the executive who viewed the team like a lifeboat in a stormy sea – each member retaining a critical and independent mind in the debate about which direction the shore was in but, once a decision was reached, ensuring that we rowed together in the same direction.

‘It was never just about the statue’

A prime candidate for the book’s title was ‘It was never just about the statue’, reflecting the fact that this book is, first and foremost, a history of a watershed period in higher education in South Africa, with ripple effects around the world. The protest against the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the centre of the UCT campus was a seminal event in 2015. It marked a tipping point in the pace and substance of transformation at the historically white universities in South Africa. But while the Rhodes statue was the perfect symbol of the legacy of colonialism that still pervaded the universities, it was always only a symbol, and removing it would change little. The protests opened up the much wider debates about institutional culture, decoloniality, curriculum and pedagogy, racial identity and transformation, as I will show.

The UCT protests also fuelled nascent movements on campuses in many parts of the world, which have now begun to confront the legacy of colonialism and slavery on their campuses. Rhodes Must Fall complemented global debates on identity politics and movements like Black Lives Matter. UCT was a trailblazer in this regard and, as such, the history and debates at UCT are of interest globally.

* * *

Thus this book is intended as much more than a personal memoir. The issues I have attempted to address have purchase well beyond UCT and higher education in South Africa. They are issues confronting universities and their leadership teams across Europe and the Americas. I would like to think the mistakes and lessons will have relevance for leaders of institutions everywhere in periods of rapid transformation, and in situations of crisis and mass protest.

Finally, I hope my reflections on how my own thinking has been challenged on issues of whiteness, transformation, rights of artistic expression, academic freedom, institutional culture, managing violent protest, negotiation strategies, clemencies and amnesties, restorative justice and principle-based decision-making will stimulate further debate.

PART I

At the Barricades: From One Side to the Other

1

Two Paths Cross

In 2005, the year I turned 50, I was in my tenth year as dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). Deans may only hold office for a maximum of two five-year terms. I looked back on my term with satisfaction and pride in the faculty’s achievements, in which I felt I had played a decisive role. I had enjoyed being in a position of authority through which I could have a significant impact on the faculty’s future direction. I also enjoyed being part of the broader university Senior Executive Team, intimately involved with university-wide decisions. Through the position of dean, I had been able to interact with and influence policy-makers in national and provincial governments, health science education at other universities, and even internationally. Given this experience of power and influence and of operating at a strategic level at a relatively young age, I did not think I would be fulfilled returning to a career in a research unit or a teaching department. I applied for a deputy vice-chancellor position that became vacant at Wits but was unsuccessful and decided instead that if I could not get a more senior position at Wits, I would leave on completion of my term and do consulting in health policy while looking for other leadership positions.

But in mid-2007, with just a week to the closing date, someone at the University of Cape Town (UCT) sent me the advert for the vice-chancellor’s post there and suggested that I apply. I decided I wanted to give it a go, thinking I had nothing to lose. Although I felt I had no chance, I also felt that I would always have regrets if I did not try. The UCT vice-chancellorship is arguably the top academic leadership post in the country – head of a great, well-established university with a long history and an international reputation, a high-profile position, and a platform to exert influence on the national higher education landscape and engage with peers from the top universities globally. Of course it would mean relocating from Johannesburg to Cape Town, so it would only be possible if my wife, Deborah Posel, agreed. She was a professor of sociology at Wits and director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), which she had founded. WISER was flourishing. But Deborah encouraged me to apply because, as she told me, first, there was no chance I would get the job, and second, she did not want me to be resentful for the rest of my life that I had sacrificed a unique career opportunity because of her. Her confidence that there was no risk of my being appointed was well founded. I was white and male. In 2007 the pressure from all quarters – government, students, university councils and the commitments of the universities themselves to employment equity – all but demanded that only black people should be appointed. In fact, a couple of years after my appointment, I was one of only two white vice-chancellors (VCs) among the 23 VCs of public universities. Moreover, we already knew of black and female candidates who would be likely to apply. (In the end there were 27 applicants and 14 were people of colour.)

Not having any UCT pedigree might also have counted against me. Four of the previous five VCs had been graduates or staff of UCT – known entities, rooted in ‘the UCT culture’. I had no such association. Indeed, in the first year after my appointment, when I met with alumni groups, they expressed less surprise that a white male had been appointed than that UCT had appointed ‘a Wits man’. This was somehow a slight on the quality of UCT graduates; a goal scored for Wits in the long-standing rivalry between the universities.

Also, I did not have a PhD. While that was not a particular obstacle to becoming a dean of a faculty of Heath Sciences, since medically qualified academics in the 1970s did not routinely proceed to a PhD, for VC appointments in the 2000s, and particularly at a strong research university, the absence of a PhD would usually be a deal-breaker.

Finally, I must confess, several friends with whom I discussed my decision to apply thought, unfairly as it turned out, that being Jewish would count against me. In spite of Jews having been disproportionately prominent in South African academia, no Jewish person had been appointed to the position of vice-chancellor at any South African university, ever. Even at UCT. I say ‘even’, because if there was one university that one might have expected to have appointed a Jewish VC in the past, it was UCT. After all, the reference to UCT students as ‘Ikeys’ originated as a pejorative antisemitic jibe by Stellenbosch University students in the 1920s at rugby ‘Intervarsities’ alluding to the large number of Jewish students at UCT. There were many Jewish deans and distinguished professors over the decades at UCT, but no VC. All this was reassuring to Deborah that the risk of my being appointed was negligible.

So I applied. I was one of three candidates shortlisted. Prior to the interview I had to meet and present a vision to various sectors of the UCT community, including unions, student leaders and a packed Senate. The recommendation of the selection committee then requires an endorsement by at least two-thirds of the Senate. Encouragingly, the support was above 80%. When the chair of the selection committee called to inform me I had been selected, he said that I was the white dark horse in the race. Deborah was not the only one taken by surprise.

I moved to Cape Town to take up the post in July 2008. Our daughter, Jess, was accepted to study medicine at UCT to start in 2009 while our son, Ilan, would only complete high school at the end of 2009. So we decided that Deborah would move down to Cape Town at the end of 2009 since the family would then all be there, giving her two years to manage a handover at WISER. I am deeply indebted to her for giving up WISER to accompany me to UCT. It turned out that she would be giving up much more than we could have imagined – essentially her recognition and visibility at UCT as an independent successful academic with her own career. After leaving Wits, she applied for and was made a professor at UCT, and founded another institute not dissimilar to WISER – the Institute for the Humanities in Africa (HUMA). She raised grants to cover all the Institute’s costs, including her own salary, to prevent any accusations that my position had in any way benefitted her or that she was taking a post away from someone else. In spite of this, she found her position so much more complicated than she had expected. As time wore on, and particularly once the troubles started in 2015, few people were able to relate to her other than as the VC’s wife. In the early years, she would often wonder whether she was being befriended as a way of gaining access to me. Later on, during the protest period, some colleagues would avoid meeting or engaging with her as they did not want to be seen to be too close to university management. She paid a heavy price for the selection committee’s decision.

Which begs the question I was often asked: How did I get the job? Why me? The answer to this question, I believe, is that I was the right person at that moment for UCT. I would not have been the right person eight years earlier when the previous VC, Njabulo Ndebele, was appointed nor when the VC before him, Mamphela Ramphele, was appointed in 1996. And they would not have been the right people to lead UCT in 2008. To explain this view and also provide the context for the role I played as VC, I need to go back to the two strands that intersected at the point of my selection – my personal history and the history of UCT.

* * *

One side of the barricades: 1970s and 1980s activism

I completed matric in 1972 and was drafted into the army for twelve months. At that time, there were no particular security threats or wars that involved the military. All South Africa’s borders were still with countries that were controlled by the colonial powers and the townships were quiet. So, most conscripts spent their year of service in camps in the hinterland of South Africa. But I had been conscripted to the Signals Corps, which was the one section whose members were being sent to the northern borders of (then) South West Africa and Rhodesia as radio listening posts to intercept the communications of the liberation movements operating in Zambia and Tanzania.

To my great surprise, I discovered after I had completed basic military training in 1973 that I did not have security clearance to be sent ‘to the border’ – I and two others out of a camp of some 300. I was pleased not to be sent, because while there was no armed conflict or military action at that time, I recognised the role of the South African Defence Force in fighting the ‘liberation’ movements that had gone into exile to overthrow apartheid. And, as a signals interceptor, I would have been playing a more direct part in undermining the resistance movements.

Nevertheless, I was surprised that I was considered a security risk. I did not think of myself as radical or an activist. I had been brought up in a liberal, Progressive Party-voting household. My parents expressed clear and strong views on the injustice of apartheid, informed in part by their both having been born in Europe and escaped pogroms and the Holocaust, coming to South Africa in the mid-1930s shortly before the outbreak of World War II. The refuge they had found in Johannesburg was not to be taken for granted, and they always feared that antisemitism was universal and that Jews could again be turned out of South Africa particularly if they ‘rocked the boat’ by being too outspoken against the Nationalist government.

My brothers and I, however, felt we belonged in South Africa, and felt both entitled to have our voices heard and duty-bound to make them heard. Were we not raised on the fundamental truth that ‘all men are born equal’? The evening dinner table was the site of heated argument, raised voices and arrogant youthful certainty that one was either on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressor. One couldn’t be neutral. My parents, on the other hand, insisted that this was not really our business. Besides, ‘we could lose everything … again.’

I had been vocal in school debates and public speaking, invoking a liberal critique of apartheid, but not involved in any activist organisations during my school years. But on enquiring from the camp commandant why I had been denied security clearance, I learned that it was because of an incident that had happened when I was a member of the executive of the Johannesburg Junior City Council (JCC) – one of my school’s two representatives from 1971 to 1972. In October 1971, Ahmed Timol died after ‘falling’ from the tenth floor of John Vorster Square, the headquarters of the security police in Johannesburg. The JCC mayor was William Kentridge, son of two senior civil rights advocates, Sidney and Felicity Kentridge, and, perhaps because of that influence, he mobilised the JCC executive to run a petition protesting against Timol’s death in detention. Presumably this came to the attention of security police because it was so unusual for white school pupils to take up a political protest. The petition had generated much division and controversy among the member schools, with strong opposition from the Afrikaans schools.

After my year of compulsory military service, I started Medical School at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) where my political consciousness, education and involvement expanded rapidly. Studying medicine had a radicalising effect on me, as I believe it does on most health science students, in spite of the fact that the class had almost no African students and only a handful of Indian and coloured students. But the experience was radicalising because it exposed students in their clinical years to conditions in the black townships and in remote rural ‘bantustans’, and to the impact of those living conditions on health as observed in the black hospitals where we trained. This was shocking in part because, like most whites growing up in Johannesburg in the 1960s and 1970s, I had never been into a black township or shack settlement. I also had no black friends or peers. Yet in the black hospitals, one met black doctors and nurses, and some black medical students (they were not allowed to practise or study in white hospitals). One was confronted by the enormous inequality between black and white hospitals – black hospitals being grossly overcrowded, understaffed, chaotic, unable to offer patients any privacy, and lacking the specialists, facilities and sophisticated equipment expected in a tertiary hospital. As part of the training, students also occasionally went into the townships to patients’ homes. So, unlike most other whites in my social circle, health science students had a much more direct sense of what was going on in the townships and of how apartheid manifested in people’s everyday lives.

I became involved with the Medical Students Council in my second year, and in the following year, in June 1976, I joined Wits students protesting on Jan Smuts Avenue at the main entrance to the Wits campus. The date was 17 June, and we were protesting against the killing of Soweto youth the day before, and expressing solidarity with them against the inferior Bantu education and forced use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. The poster picket morphed into a march heading into town to the police headquarters at John Vorster Square. It is estimated that 300 predominantly white Wits students marched through the city centre, where they were joined by many black workers. At a later point, on the Queen Elizabeth bridge crossing the railway lines, we were suddenly chased by students from Rand Afrikaans University joined by white railway workers from behind us, while police blocked our path forwards off the bridge. I and many others were beaten, arrested and taken to John Vorster Square for processing. We were released late that night. Given the trauma that the Soweto students were facing, the hundreds who were shot, killed, injured and maimed, and the subsequent detentions and torture, I have to say that we were protected by our skin colour and suffered only a few baton bruises. For me, and many other naive, budding activists, this was our initiation into political action – and the solidarity we experienced with black workers, the sense of virtual solidarity with Soweto students, and the feeling, as the year progressed and the riots spread across the country, that we were part of an unstoppable revolution that would eventually, someday, sweep away white minority rule was exhilarating and seductive.

I became increasingly involved with a circle of student leaders and activists. In August 1976 I stood in the Student Representative Council (SRC) elections and was then elected by the SRC as vice-president. The SRC had to be dissolved in early 1977 as it became dysfunctional, disrupted primarily by Bureau for State Security (BOSS) secret agents who had got themselves elected onto the SRC, some masquerading as leftists. The university Council appointed me to chair the interim governing structure that was put in place while the SRC constitution was fixed. As chair, I coordinated the planning of a range of activities that would commemorate the Soweto uprising at Wits, on its first anniversary. The campaign leading up to the anniversary included a series of pamphlets carrying the headline ‘Institutionalised violence’, presenting the Soweto uprising as a response to the state violence of forced removals, pass laws and schools designed to subjugate.

At about 4 am on 11 June 1977, security police arrived at our family home where I was living, and detained me. They took me to John Vorster Square, where I was ultimately detained for twelve days in solitary confinement. I did not know how many others had been detained, but I discovered on my release that there were five from Wits, another two from the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) detained in Cape Town, and some twenty black students from the Soweto Schools’ SRC, including its chairperson, Sechaba Daniel Montsitsi.

I was not told why I had been detained. Was it a preventive detention to stop us from organising the commemoration events? Or did they suspect more subversive activity? How would my interrogators know that I was not lying when I said I had no underground connections? Would they not simply escalate their interrogation techniques? This was a terrifying prospect. On day eleven I was taken from the cell block up to the tenth floor of John Vorster Square for interrogation for the first time. The agent questioning me warned darkly that this was the room from which Ahmed Timol had fallen and that I should not make a run for the window.

Otherwise, besides the unpleasantness of a small cold cell and smelly blanket and urine-soiled mat on the floor, the actual experience was manageable and, if anything, empowering. At night, detainees would raise their voices in song together – recognition that one was not alone but part of a movement, a show of solidarity, which was especially inspiring because it spanned the apartheid divides.

I was the last of the group of white students to be released, on day twelve. I gathered from my interrogation and subsequent discussion with the others that the pamphlets we produced had been widely distributed at the schools in Soweto and that the security police thought we were acting in concert with the Soweto SRC to help mobilise the commemorative protests and to incite violence. I wish I could claim more of a role – the truth is I can only speculate how the pamphlets and other publications got from Wits to Soweto.

The Soweto students were not released and more were detained in the months that followed. Many were tortured, almost to death. After being held for some fifteen months, they were put on trial for sedition and received jail sentences.

The detention of both the Wits and Soweto students on 10 June was certainly intended to abort the organisation