How did the South African university develop?

Howard Phillips

The university in South Africa has a long pedigree which incorporates a wide range of influences and developments in many countries and cultures. Let’s investigate these different influences.

The South African university’s origins goes back in the first instance to British and Continental universities of the 19^th century and via them, in turn, to the origins of the Western university in the studia generalia (Latin: “schools of general study”) of 12^th century Europe. At a time of intellectual and commercial revival in the region, these grew up in response to a rising demand for more than the devotional training then given in Christian church schools, which was the only form of organised advanced education then available.

At first the structure of these studia was very casual, with teachers and students coming and going as they chose. A good teacher would often take students with him (all the teachers were male) if he moved from one studium generale to another. However, if a particular studium generale gained a reputation for the quality of its teaching, it began to attract students from near and far. By the end of the 12^th century the best-known of these renowned institutions were those in Bologna, Paris and Oxford, where teaching was offered in subjects like Law, Medicine and Theology and where licences to teach these subjects (known as degrees) were awarded to those who passed an oral examination.

Teachers and students having close ties to one particular studium generale often formed a loose corporation there to safeguard their own interests in the town; like other corporations and guilds at this time, this was labelled a universitas (Latin: “a collectivity”), but to this was added the description, magistrorum et scholarium (“of masters and students”). Because of their growing prominence within the studia generalia, these universitates magistrorum et scholarium gradually became synonymous with the former and by the late 14^th century the abbreviated label universitas was beginning to be used by itself to describe such institutions of higher learning. From this comes our term “university”.¹

Another marker of their growing status at this time was their formal recognition as semi-autonomous bodies by the state and the church, both of which were willing to grant them formal charters so as to put them on a solid legal footing. This meant that they were free to govern themselves, provided they taught neither atheism nor heresy. However, this semi-independence came at a price: they had to finance themselves, which they did mainly from students’ fees. This growing formalisation of their structure and the increasing appreciation of the value that the training they provided could offer to society prompted the foundation of more such institutions during the 14^th and 15^th centuries, many of them based on the model of Paris. By 1500, 79 universities of this sort existed in Europe, each having its own corps of all-male professors and a body of male-only students aged anywhere between 15 and 25.² Their education consisted of attending professorial lectures, studying prescribed texts and participating in academic debates and exercises.

At this stage these emerging universities still had much in common with the far older higher learning institutions of China, India, Persia and Muslim Africa in terms of the limits imposed on them with regard to what they might teach and how they might do so. However, from the 16^th Century onwards some European universities began to stand out from the rest as they sought to loosen the intellectual stranglehold of the Christian church, expand the scope of what they taught and increasingly pursue intellectual inquiry by the application of reason rather than religious doctrine. Leading this development were German universities, and in the 19^th Century these steadily came to epitomise the modern scientific university in which unfettered teaching went hand in hand with unfettered research, together forming the basis of the concept of academic freedom. In the German phrase of the time, Lernfreiheit (a student’s freedom to choose courses) and Lehrfreiheit (a professor’s freedom to develop a subject and conduct research) were two sides of the same coin.

Unlike universities elsewhere in Europe and North America, British universities were slow to follow this lead and so, consequently, were the universities set up in the British Empire. Accordingly, in the first phase (1873-1918) of the five stages of university development in South Africa, the sub-continent’s first university, the University of the Cape of Good Hope (established in 1873), concerned itself solely with teaching and examining, laying down what should be taught, how this should be examined and what its rules should be for awarding its degrees. The actual teaching was left to the post-matric classes run by a number of colleges affiliated to it, chief among which were the South African College in Cape Town, St Andrew’s College in Grahamstown, Grey College in Bloemfontein and Victoria College in Stellenbosch. In the residential universities which developed out of these affiliated university colleges after 1918 teaching was also the primary activity at first; research began to be added to this only from the 1930s. However, as decisive in shaping their character was that dominating feature of modern South African life, ethnicity.

Whereas the University of the Cape of Good Hope had tried (not always successfully) to position itself above the ethnic rivalries between white English-speakers and white Afrikaans-speakers and even above the black-white divide, in the second phase of university development in South Africa (1918-1951) each of its former affiliated university colleges consolidated its character around a distinct ethnic identity, thereby accurately reflecting the strength of ethnic feeling in the diverse society around it. Thus, by the time that each attained independent university status during this phase, it was well on the way to having a particular ethnic ethos. Accordingly, the Universities of Cape Town, Witwatersrand, Natal and Rhodes³ were predominantly white and English-speaking in the composition of their staff and students and used English as the medium of instruction, while the Universities of Stellenbosch, Pretoria, the Orange Free State and Potchefstroom⁴ were exclusively white and Afrikaans-speaking in their staff and students and used Afrikaans as their medium of instruction.

In exactly this mould too was a later creation, the tellingly named Rand Afrikaans University which was opened in 1967. The one institution solely for black South Africans, the South African Native College at Fort Hare (established in 1916 and re-named the University College of Fort Hare in 1946) did not gain independent university status in this period and remained an affiliate of an established university, initially of the University of the Cape of Good Hope’s successor, the University of South Africa, and then, from 1951 to 1959, of the new Rhodes University. Its student body was largely African, its staff racially diverse and its medium of instruction English.

The University of South Africa was the only institution which purported to maintain a supra-ethnic character in this second phase of university development between 1918 and 1951, first as a parent to the university colleges mentioned above and then from 1946 as a pioneering distance-learning university which offered teaching by correspondence in either English or Afrikaans to its very diverse body of students scattered around the country. In only one later institution, the all-white University of Port Elizabeth (established in 1964) was a partial attempt made to follow the University of South Africa’s dual-medium teaching model, but only because of specific local circumstances pertaining in Port Elizabeth. The norm remained ethnically-based institutions.

Thus, when in 1959 the South African government, as part of its policy of grand apartheid, embarked on a third phase of university development (1959-1982), it directed this at creating separate universities for each ethnic cluster within the population whom it labelled “Non-European” and at completely closing the so-called “European” universities to them. To oversee this first batch of apartheid-created institutions, the University of South Africa was requested to resume its earlier parenting role and to set the curricula and examinations for them. As was the case with the university colleges of the previous phase, in 1970-1971 these university colleges went on to attain qualified autonomy as the University of Fort Hare, the University of the North, the University of Zululand, the University of the Western Cape and the University of Durban-Westville.⁵

However, when a second batch of poorly-resourced apartheid university institutions was set up between 1977 and 1982, mainly in nominally independent homelands, political considerations made it impolitic for the University of South Africa to take up a parenting role again and so the Universities of the Transkei (1977), Bophuthatswana (1980), Venda (1982) and Qwaqwa (1982) were founded as independent universities from their inception. To meet two other training needs of Africans which the apartheid planners recognised at this time, in 1978 the Medical University of South Africa was established north of Pretoria and in 1982 Vista University was set up with branches in the African townships of eight South African cities in a bid to channel the aspirations of the Soweto generation of pupils away from protests. The outcome of this flurry of university creation was that by the mid 1980s South Africa had 21 universities with a total student population of 221 761, as well as 15 technikons offering technical degrees.⁶ Each had a distinctive ethnic character, which was largely the result of a long history of ethnic-based politics in a country in which higher education institutions were almost entirely state-founded and state-funded.

Given their predominantly ethnic character, it is no surprise that South Africa’s universities were tailor-made sites for ethnic mobilisation and political activity.⁷ For instance, Afrikaner nationalism, Anglo-liberalism, African nationalism and Black Consciousness all drew richly on the support and resources of particular campuses, while from the 1970s broad opposition to apartheid swelled at all black universities and some English-speaking ones, feeding into the wider popular challenge to the political status quo. Nor did the easing of statutory racial restrictions on admissions of blacks to white universities in the 1980s ease this tide, though what it did do was to begin a significant dilution of the longstanding ethnic uniformity on traditionally white campuses around the country in what might be identified as a fourth phase in the history of universities in South Africa (1982-2000). This development was accelerated by the official scrapping of apartheid restrictions on admission to universities, one of the many changes which accompanied the end of white minority rule in 1990-1994 and the inauguration of a fully democratic political system in 1994.

It was not until 2000, however, that the new democratic government began to spell out in detail its ideas to reform the South African higher education system in what became a fifth phase (2000-) in the history of such institutions in South Africa. Reacting against the divided, inefficient and inequitable system it had inherited, with its array of very well-resourced and very poorly resourced institutions, the state aimed to redraw this academic landscape entirely so as to strengthen the weak and consolidate the strong among them. To this end it sought to create a single higher education system embracing all such institutions and compelled a number of universities either to merge with each other or to amalgamate with existing technicons⁸ to create so-called “comprehensive” universities.⁹ To bring the other technikons into this single system, they were consolidated and their status upgraded to universities of technology, six of which now exist.¹⁰

From studia generalia in medieval Europe to varsities and universities of technology at the tip of Africa a thousand years later, the idea of a university has travelled far, both geographically and conceptually. Though what a 21^st century South African university does and how it undertakes this task would be quite alien to the teachers and students of 12^th century Bologna, Paris and Oxford,, what has remained the same is the broad purpose of the institution, to provide the advanced specialised professional training required by the society around it. In that respect the sentiment expressed in the motto of the University of Bologna should remain the goal of all universities, that they should be a “fostering mother of studies”.

---

1. Seabury, P. (ed). 1975. Universities in the Western world. New York: Free Press & Collier Macmillan.

2. Rudy, W. 1984. The universities of Europe 1100 – 1914: A history. London: Associated University Press.

3. The University of Cape Town was established in 1918 out of the South African College, the University of the Witwatersrand in 1922 out of the original South African School of Mines and Technology, the University of Natal in 1949 out of Natal University College and Rhodes University in 1951 out of Rhodes University College.

4. The University of Stellenbosch was established in 1918 out of Victoria College, the University of Pretoria in 1930 out of the Transvaal University College, the University of the Orange Free State in 1950 out of the University College of the Orange Free State and Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education in 1951 out of Potchefstroom University College for Christian Higher Education.

5. In keeping with the ethnic demarcations of apartheid, the University of Fort Hare was intended for the Xhosa ethnic group, the University of the North for the Sotho, Tsonga, Tswana and Venda groups, the University of Zululand for the Zulu and Swazi groups, the University of the Western Cape for ‘Coloureds’ and the University of Durban-Westville for Indians.

6. Subotzky, G. 2003. ‘South Africa’ in D Teferra & PG Altbach (eds), African higher education – An international reference handbook. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

7. Badat, S. 1999. Black student politics, higher education and apartheid: From SASO to SANSCO, 1968-1990. Pretoria: RGN.

8. For example, the University of Natal merged with the University of Durban-Westville to create the University of Kwazulu-Natal, the University of Potchefstroom with the University of North-West to create North-West University, and the University of the North with the Medical University of South Africa to create the University of Limpopo.

9. For example, the Walter Sisulu University embraces the old University of the Transkei, the Border Technikon and the Eastern Cape Technikon, the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University incorporates the old University of Port Elizabeth, the Port Elizabeth Technikon and the local branch of Vista University, and the University of Johannesburg is the product of the merger of the old Rand Afrikaans University, the Technikon Witwatersrand and two branches of Vista University.

10. These are the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, the Central University of Technology in Bloemfontein and Welkom, the Durban University of Technology, the Mangosuthu Technikon, the Tshwane University of Technology and the Vaal University of Technology in Vanderbijlpark.