If Sebastian Flyte had been in South Africa. Credit: Evans/Three Lions/Getty Images
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On a clear day, from my school playing fields, I could see the university that I would one day attend. It was the University of Cape Town, a Doric crow’s nest, perched high on the side of the Table Mountain chain.
My young life was a travellator up that mountain. I come from precisely that generation for whom attending university was a no-brainer for those in the brains game. And I come from a place in which where you would go to university wasn’t something you ever had to think about. There were only two full universities within a 400-mile radius — and one of those taught in Afrikaans.
The tyranny of choice, the terror of UCAS, the holy mysteries of “clearing”, all passed me by. As did the English “university experience”. When your university is a twenty-minute drive from your family home, you live in that family home. The upside of this model is that you can enter adulthood without much debt. The downside is that university becomes a kind of superannuated school experience: all the same friendship cliques re-establishing themselves. It can easily become a flatpack, wipe-clean lifestyle, notably low in personality formation, windswept romance and regrettable fumbling. Home by half past three. Dinner on the table at half seven. A time of bland stasis, at exactly the moment when everything from Brideshead Revisited to The Young Ones has promised you a rite of passage, adulthood and “freedom”.
These days, having lived in the country for over a decade, I can bluff Englishness easily: I’m odourless, flavourless, practically indistinguishable. But when it comes to that military service for the middle classes, The University Experience — that particular confection of shoe-vomiting on cobbled stones, of WKD-saturated student unions, of “blowing your grant on pills and Beefa then subsisting on baked beans for two months”, all the clichés — I know it only through careful study of BBC3 sitcoms and mid-period Adrian Mole.
Back then, this rankled — so much that one year into a degree, I dropped out, hopped a plane to England and spent 15 months emptying drip trays in a series of bad pubs and worse hotels, in search of a life less ordinary. Up above the bars, in scabby live-in rooms, I scanned various kinds of .gov.uk bumpf, searching for a way to join the English University Experience, until I managed to piece together that it would cost £12,000 per year excluding accommodation, no loans available. I binned the dream, and eventually returned home, thereby performing the uncommon feat of dropping-back-in.
This was still the Mbeki era, when the nation’s farcical political successes of the 90s hadn’t quite dimmed, and a sense of collective purpose still spanned from black to white. In South Africa, the key problem of student politics was “student apathy” — the student paper would run endless pointless pieces on it. A few years later, the storm clouds of Rhodes Must Fall would herald a prickly new world, but at that moment, university was positively prelapsarian. Identity politics was already inside the seminar rooms, but not yet beyond them. Cancellation was unheard of. One winter, a charity I was involved with staged a Big Brother-style live-in contest in a fake squatter camp on the main plaza. Coceka, the girl who won, did so with the slogan: “Keep the black in the shack”.
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SubscribeThe Rite of Passage turned into Fees Must Fall. Noble in itself as these things usually are, if not examined too closely. This swiftly moved into a Rite of Burning and Destruction including books and artworks, to the extent that many alumni withdrew funding.
Very recently there was a devastating fire on the Table Mountain range around UCT and what was amazing was that of the few buildings affected, one library was not on the edges, but in the heart of the campus. Many priceless and irreplaceable books (not digitised), were destroyed. Questions have been asked against a backdrop of the Western woke pushback (often burning and looting) against all things colonial.
Lesley are you seriously suggesting that “questions have been asked” about the library burning as in, it was foul play?! I certainly haven’t heard any capetonians seriously asking that question so it sounds scurrilous to me.
“…of the few buildings affected, one library was not on the edges, but in the heart of the campus.”
In less close-minded circles than yours, that’s what’s known as proposing a hypothesis based on suggestive fact. What you’ve heard from your friends is neither here nor there. The question is whether you can tell us more about how it happened than he does. Incredulity is not an argument.
I drive past the university most days, seeing how the fire has burnt the mountain right down across multiple areas and vegetation zones, including all kinds of areas of the upper campus (where the library is) down to the highway and even below it, so the idea that the library is somehow in a protected zone and it was unlikely to have burnt without foul play is what I was expressing incredulity about. I hope that clarifies things. I may be wrong but it certainly isn’t a suggestion I’ve heard anyone making in seriousness.
At the time of the fire there was considerable speculation in the local and international printed, broadcast and digital media that the fire may have been deliberately initiated.
Lesser reported was the earlier bonfire in c.2016 of all the fine art works from Smuts and Fuller Halls. ‘Progressive’ students piled these original artworks in a heap on the Smuts Hall car park, smashed them with rocks then poured petrol on them and set them alight.
UCT. In my day, late 60s, early seventies, it was known as Moscow on the Hill.
Not really sure why the photo is from the B&W days of an all white UCT under apartheid, which isn’t what he’s talking about at all. I went the other way – Oxford, London, then to UCT in the late 90s. Very grateful for the move and still here… And my early experiences were similar to some of what the author relates.
Ha, I guess usefulness is strongly context dependent. My wife and her family are all Spanish speakers so it is a subject that has turned out to probably be of more use to me on a quotidian level than any other.
Just a niggling, pedantic architectural correction: those columns in the portico of the UCT are clearly Ionic, not Doric.