‘When in a climactic moment, during the recent looting spree to find university pictures to put on the bonfire, the members of Rhodes Must Fall entered the university residences, they encountered a number of foreign white students, whom they harassed and harangued, and eventually tried to chase away, telling them, “you have no right to be here”.
‘By this act Rhodes Must Fall showed its true colours: for its bottom line is really xenophobic racist violence.‘
Appeasing the UCT Taliban Professor Kenneth Hughes 22 April 2016
‘Anyone who knew the liberal English-speaking campuses during the apartheid era knows that the vice chancellors and other university administrators of that period were greatly superior to those we have today – figures of real intellectual authority, people of real courage and backbone. They had far smaller budgets and very many fewer administrative staff than is the case today, but they stood up to the government, made their academics feel free and they looked after their campuses.
‘There were no fires at UCT in those days.‘
On the burning of UCT’s books: A postscript R W Johnson 4 May 2021
According to an EWN report, the Table Mountain fire consumed more than 70 000 irreplaceable items in the African Studies Collection in the Jagger Reading Room.
What the Woke don’t want you to remember – but what is part of our Constitutional Court record – is that this is precisely what the Fallists sought to achieve.
A Supreme Court of Appeal judgement sets out in detail how Fallist protestors brought tyres and petrol onto the UCT campus in the Shackville protest between 15 and 17 February 2016, with the clear intention of burning the university to the ground.
In one of the iconic images of the Fallist’s anarchic rampage throughout the country, one of the world’s most influential publications, The Economist, showed the rabble hurling stones at paintings that had been set alight. In their cerebral brilliance the Fallists torched paintings by Richard Baholo, the first black student at UCT to be awarded an MA in Fine Art, and two collages of images of Black Sash activist Molly Blackburn.
Two vehicles were torched.
One was the Jammie Shuttle bus and the other was used in UCT’s efforts to uplift the rural poor in the Karoo.
The office of vice chancellor Dr Max Price was fire-bombed.
They were not successful in their arson attempts at UCT but such Fallists – described as ‘fascist’ by Professor Jonathan Jansen who called his book about this period, As by Fire – The End of the South African University – were more successful at other universities.
At the University of Johannesburg, the Sanlam auditorium was reduced to a blackened shell and, in Durban, the Howard College library was set alight.
At the University of the Western Cape, the rampaging Fallist mob locked three security guards in a building and set it alight.
Evil does not become more distilled than that.
Fuelled by ethnic hatred, the Fallists saw the desecration of the memories of those who fell in battle as laudable, spray painting ‘Fuck Rhodes’ across the memorial at UCT which honoured the dead in two World Wars.
In November 2016 Judge Dennis Davis asked an obvious question: ‘What other than naked populism or opportunism explains how we have medical doctors who sanction‚ at least by implication‚ violence?’
In response, 31 woke virtue-signallers from the Staff for Social Justice in Education, most of them in the medical faculty, sent a letter to GroundUP calling for less security on the campus, not more – you can read their names here.
The Fallists, seeking the same objective, attempted to murder one of UCT’s security staff and assaulted others – see here and here – but if any members of the Staff for Social Justice in Education condemned this or visited the gravely-injured men in hospital as their Hippocratic Oath required of them, I am not aware of it.
But, as history has shown, the Revolution eats its own, and the denouement for the 31 doctors came in a searing cri du coeur in Cape Town’s Saint George’s Cathedral on 4 August 2018.
‘Professor Bongani Mayosi’s soul was “vandalised” by #FeesMustFall protestors, his sister said at the cardiologist’s funeral yesterday.
‘Ncumisa Mayosi told more than 2000 mourners in Cape Town that the depression that led to her brother’s suicide nine days ago began when he became dean of health sciences at the University of Cape Town (UCT).
‘“He was hardly two weeks in his new position and the protests broke out”, she said. “The vitriolic nature of the students and their do or die attitude vandalised his soul and unravelled him. Their personal insults and abuse cut him to the core, were offensive to his values and were the opposite of everything he was about.”’
#FeesMustFall to blame say Mayosi family Sunday Times 5 August 2018
This was reflected in UCT’s investigation into Mayosi’s death, and if the 31 above-mentioned academics challenged these findings, I am not aware of it.
If I was troubled by the attempt by one of the Fallist’s most vociferous supporters, Dr Lydia Cairncross, to downplay the role of the Fallists in the death of Professor Bongani Mayosi, I was also distressed by the assertion of Lorna Houston, elected President of the UCT’s Convocation in 2017, that racism and white privilege are ‘.. lodged in the plaster on the walls, somewhere between the bricks and the paint’.
When the SABC transferred me to its Cape Town news office in 1978, Sir Richard Luyt was vice chancellor, and between that year and 2017 when Lorna Houston was appointed, the vice chancellors were Stuart Saunders, Mamphela Ramphele, Njabulo Ndebele and Max Price. To suggest that any of them were supporters of or apologists for apartheid is absurd.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s I reported on the protests led by NUSAS which sought to have black students enrolled and black lecturers appointed at all our universities – and UCT played a singular role in those protests.
The striking difference between the NUSAS protests and the Fallist thuggery was that NUSAS members never tried to murder anybody, or set buildings alight, or loot shops or torch vehicles or threaten the media, or assault university officials or desecrate memorials to our war dead, neither were they motivated by ethnic hatred nor did they disrupt the studies of tens of thousands of their fellow students.
They paid a high price for opposing the apartheid system, however, being kept under constant surveillance by the security police, detained, banned, sentenced to house arrest for lengthy periods. They also had their passports confiscated.
Perhaps Lydia Cairncross, Lorna Houston, and the members of the Staff for Social Justice in Education who wrote to GroundUp in answer to the question posed by Judge Dennis Davis can explain the different approaches to social justice in education adopted by the members of NUSAS and the Fallists.
As Professor Kenneth Hughes so succinctly described it, the UCT Taliban were guilty of xenophobic racist violence.
We’ve seen the havoc fire has wreaked at UCT and can be thankful that the Fallists, cited in three tiers of our court system, did not achieve their malign objective on the night of 16 February 2016.
We now know what that would have looked like – if not worse.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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