Teaching Politics in Exile: A Memoir from Swaziland 1973–1985

Abstract

In this paper, I reflect on the half of my 22-year exile from South Africa teaching Political Science in Swaziland, initially on a campus which formed one leg of an unusual experiment in tertiary education, the tri-national University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland (UBLS). The paper makes two main points. First is that the three national campuses which made up UBLS were in academic terms in the 1970s and 1980s equal if not superior to the better known and better resourced campuses over the border in South Africa. Thus it is suggested was a product of the rich international and high-quality mix of the faculty, the diverse and politicized make-up of the student bodies and the innovative and progressive nature of the curriculum. Second is that the three campuses became in the course of the intensifying regional struggle against the apartheid regime significant sites of struggle involving both faculty and students, many of whom paid a heavy price for their involvement. It cost me my job in terms of a deportation; others paid a heavier price.

Notes

1 A somewhat relevant text would be the story of the ANC's Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Morogoro, Tanzania in the late 1970s. This was, however, a primary and secondary school and did not develop a tertiary level (Morrow, Maaba, and Pulumani 2004).

2 The NUSAS was after the banning of the ANC and Pan Africanist Congress in 1960 the most active and outspoken of the above-ground anti-apartheid groupings. Its base was the English-language universities along with a significant foothold at some black institutions, notably Fort Hare and the black medical school of Natal University, then known incredibly as the University of Natal Non-European. In 1964, I was elected to the national executive of NUSAS and in 1995 to be as its full-time Vice-President for 1966. After the banning in May 1966 of NUSAS President, Ian Robertson, I acted as President. I also served as the host to the visit, deeply unpopular in state circles, of US Senator Robert Kennedy. In 1967, I was elected President for 1968.

3 At the time, a banning meant, inter alia, being confined to a single magisterial are for five years and reporting regularly to the police. Nothing one said could be quoted, nothing written published, no educational institution could be entered nor attended as a student and one could not at any one time associate with more than one other person. If that person was your partner and similarly restricted, one required ministerial permission to share a bed. It was a form of detention and imprisonment without trial.

4 In 1995, President Mandela recognized Stern's contribution to the new South Africa with the award of the Founder's Medal. In his address, Mandela said of Stern that ‘he demonstrated in the worst days of apartheid, that even those who were free to enjoy the privileges of the system could ally themselves with the oppressed’.

5 In 1981, the Swaziland Government signed a then secret agreement with the South African Government giving the security forces of the latter a near free reign to operate inside Swaziland. Certainly from that time, there was higher level of collaboration between the intelligence agencies of the two countries, one which intensified after the death of King Sobhuza II in August 1982.

6 The only other multi-national universities in the world then were (i) the University of East Africa linking tertiary colleges in Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya; (ii) the University of the South Pacific with campuses on 12 island states in the Oceana region, including Fiji, Samoa, Nauru and the Solomon Islands and (iii) the University of the West Indies. The UAE operated from 1963 to 1970 and founded on the rocks of nationalism (see Southall 1974). The BWI, founded in 1948 with a link to the University College of London, became an independent institution in 1962 and still prevails and thrives today with three physical campuses in Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados as well as three satellite campuses and a distance education facility linking 18 English-speaking territories in the Caribbean.

7 The college was established by the Roman Catholic Hierarchy of Southern Africa in Basutoland in 1945. In 1950, it was ceded to the Congregation of Oblates of Mary Immaculate and prepared students for the external degrees of the UNISA. One of its earliest graduates was Thomas Nkobi, one-time ANC Treasurer-General and a member of the first democratic parliament post-1994.

8 Tiro was President of the SRC at the University of the North in 1972. At the graduation ceremony of that year he launched a fierce attack on the Bantu Education system for which he was expelled from the university. At the end of 1973 he fled to Botswana and sought shelter at a remote Catholic mission, but on 1 February 1974 he was killed by a parcel bomb sent from South Africa, almost certainly by Republican Intelligence, the then external arm of the Bureau of State Security.

9 The IUEF was an important conduit of Scandinavian funding into South and southern Africa. In the 1970s, it was funding both NUSAS and SASO by way of a bank account I operated in Swaziland. The money was handed in cash to couriers from South Africa who made occasional visits to Swaziland. One of those was Craig Williamson who was then active in student politics/NUSAS in South Africa. In the latter 1970s, Williamson fled South Africa and was employed at the IUEF head office in Geneva, as assistant to the veteran head, Lars-Gunnar Eriksson, a close associate of Swedish premier, Olaf Palme. Late in 1979, Williamson was exposed by the Guardian newspaper in London as a long-time security police agent. The IUEF dissolved in the wake of the revelation.