South Africa

Because it was a moment of hope, 1968, arguably the 20th century’s most political year, stirs passion as few other calendar years. Events in Europe threatened the political stability of several countries while, in the United States an anti-war movement drove President from office.

In South Africa, 1968 was a hard, harsh year dominated by the grim-face of John Vorster. A biographer has described Vorster as a "cold, formal, even rude" man who was "unsmiling, inflexible, fearsome and intolerant" towards opponents and critics. The same string of adjectives could be used to describe South Africa in 1968. Political repression had all but defeated opposition to apartheid, high levels of control and censorship prevented the spread of literature that informed debates elsewhere. So, the reading of Mao, whose Little Red Book was so influential in Europe, was almost unknown here.

New protest tactics

What was the direct impact of the 1968 events abroad on South Africa? Their unfolding was certainly followed by the small and informed public, black and white, but in terms of the political process itself, they were largely peripheral but not entirely without effect. Student activists followed the events in France in May and June 1968 with awe. The idea of a student-worker alliance toppling a major western government seemed impossible when confronted by the intractability of local politics. For South Africa’s student left "Danny the Red" (Daniel Cohn-Bendit) and the German Rudi Dutschke provided new heroes and new protest tactics which students at UCT soon put to use.

Events in the US, however, probably, had more impact than those in Europe. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy struck a cord. Cold War politics notwithstanding, the US was regarded then as a potential ally in the struggle against apartheid and the identity of blacks with the civil rights campaign was intense.

King´s “dreams” smuggled into South Africa

When King railed against the denial of rights, he was seen as speaking too for black South Africans and their inequalities. Although banned, recordings of King’s "I have a dream ..." speech were smuggled into South Africa and circulated like Soviet samizdat texts. His assassination in April sparked a wave of emotion in the townships. But the apartheid government saw things differently. Few who heard it will ever forget how the SABC announced his death. Without a gesture towards the message of King’s life work, it announced that "Widespread rioting has broken out in the United States following the assassination of the Negro civil rights agitator, Martin Luther King". The words dripped with racism and barely concealed relish.

Two months later, the murder of Robert Kennedy unleashed a further wave of regret. Kennedy’s whirlwind visit to South Africa two years earlier had – as a commentator said - "blown clean air into a dank and closed room". Kennedy had attracted enthusiastic crowds everywhere, even in Stellenbosch. For the National Party the visit was a propaganda disaster but for the opposition it was a reminder that the world was on its side and a morale booster after the Rivonia trial.

Explosive events at UCT

But it was developments at UCT on 16 August 1968 that promised to bring home the explosive events elsewhere. On that day, some 1000 overwhelmingly white students condemned the UCT Council’s decision to withdraw an offer of a senior lectureship to Archie Mafeje, a South African then at Cambridge University. After the meeting, 300 students marched on the administration building but instead of the customary pause in the courtyard to petition the Principal, Richard Luyt, they took possession of the building and stayed 10 days. Led by Duncan Innes and Rafi Kaplinsky (dubbed "Red Rafi"), the move outraged the government but captured the media’s interest more effectively than any previous form of student protest. It failed to move the Council which had originally appointed the best applicant but then capitulated to government threats.

It split the campus with Dean of Arts, Maurice Pope, resigning his job in protest. But it was on the black campuses that the seminal event of 1968 occurred when the growing power of Black Consciousness led Steve Biko to take South Africa’s black campuses out of the white-dominated student federation NUSAS and to strike out on their own as the South African Students Organisation (SASO). The move reflected the Fanonist view that for a people to be free, they had to believe they deserved to be free. SASO challenged the mental self-enslavement of blacks and not only student politics, but the politics of South Africa were never to be the same.

The sanctions campaign against apartheid

The other significant event of 1968 was the government’s veto of the selection of Basil D’Oliviera to the MCC cricket team to tour South Africa. Denied by race of the chance to represent this country, D’Oliviera had moved to England and acquired citizenship. Vorster’s veto outraged British opinion and forced the reluctant English cricket authorities to cancel the tour. It was a decisive moment in the campaign to isolate South African sport, and an important stepping stone in the sanctions campaign against apartheid.

1968 was a low time in the struggle for a new South Africa. The period between the sabotage trials of the mid-1960s and the labour unrest has been described as "the lull". Hindsight is a wonderful science however and it is now possible to see how unrelated occurrences in South Africa during that year set in train developments which contributed to apartheid’s eventual demise.