This university has, in the foyer of the Great Hall in which we are gathered, a plaque which avows:
At a general assembly of the university held on the 16th April, 1959 the following dedication was affirmed:
We are gathered here today to affirm in the name of the University of the Witwatersrand that it is our duty
To uphold the principle that a university is a place where men and women without regard to race or colour are welcome to join in the acquisition and advancement of knowledge.
And to continue faithfully to defend this ideal against all who have sought by legislative enactment to curtail the autonomy of the University.
Now therefore we dedicate ourselves to the maintenance of this ideal and to the restoration of the autonomy of our university.
That plaque was put in place twenty-one years ago, but its dedication has not been fulfilled. It has not been fulfilled despite the efforts of a series of just and enlightened chancellors and principals, a student body that with each successive intake has included young men and women who have worked through the Students’ Representative Council to that end, and thousands of graduates, some of whom have become prominent citizens, who should not have lost sight of it in the influential positions they hold in South African society. I cannot tell you to cherish what we have; I can only turn around the proposition and ask you to try to create something worth cherishing.
To attempt this it seems to me you will first have to come to a clear and honest understanding of your position. I use the word ‘position’ in the singular, although there are some black graduates at Wits (about ten percent of the student body represents the hard-won progress made since the plaque was set up) and although the situations of black and white are totally different, because both black and white do inherit in common a state of underdevelopment of a specific kind. We have the most highly-industrialized state in Africa, we have gold, diamonds, uranium, coal, etc., a technology and achievements in science and medicine second to none on this continent and in many countries beyond, but we are also in the state of underdevelopment defined by the Cuban novelist Edmundo Desnoes and described of his own country as an inability to relate things, to accumulate experience meaningfully. What happened to South Africa after the Second World War is the most obvious example. But experience is an accretion of day-to-day life rather than the sum of large events. It is the failure to relate that experience to historical change, on the one hand, and to a fixed and unalterable sense of the rights of human existence, on the other, that is symptomatic of this kind of underdevelopment.
Now, what do I mean by historical change, vis-a-vis your life?
I mean quite simply and unequivocally that you have been brought up on the white side or the black side of whatever so-called community you have been born to; you have gone to a segregated school during your most malleable years; you have unthinkingly, as we all have, climbed on buses and entered cinemas and numerous other public places reserved for people of your skin-color — able as they are to go anywhere, whites, certainly, even the most aware, cannot be conscious twenty-four hours a day of the bizarre and unnatural character of what is commonplace in their lives, and even blacks, chafed into greater awareness by the restrictions that debar them everywhere, and perhaps even more by the patronising concessions that now allow them into the public library in this town but not in that, seat them beside a white on South African Airways but not on trains and buses, must often take these circumstances for granted. Yet from these daily acceptances comes the sense of self, of one’s place in the world, of a recognized identity; and in your case, a very peculiar one, as consciously conditioned as if you were to have been born into one of those science fiction worlds where people are cloned to function as drones, soldiers, or breeders. This historical identity that my generation has handed on to you is a thing of the past; an immature image of self, a contradiction of your humanity; useless to you; an encumbrance to be consciously shed.
What do I mean by a fixed and unalterable sense of the rights of human existence? Don’t these change from country to country and ideology to ideology? And don’t all countries and ideologies claim sole guardianship of them?
But I am talking of something comparable only to the middle ear in the human head, an aural organ but also the seat of balance, by which we find our way upright; I don’t know where the seat of a fixed and unalterable sense of the rights of human existence lies, and how many millennia of successive descents into and emergings from barbarism have gone to establish it through how many media, instinctive, mythical, religious, philosophical — but I am convinced this sense does exist between the fire and ice, the dreadful polar caps of human behavior. It is not a mystery, it’s a balance. We know what we are; we know what we might be. At the axis of the propositions is the sense of the rights of human existence, and that sense is never quite lost, as evidenced in the elaborate justification for its distortion, propped up by Hansard volumes, Commission reports, by rhetoric, bombast, and propaganda of all kinds and from all sides. The sense of the rights of human existence is there inside you, like your unseen middle ear — a collective conscience painfully arrived at, characteristic of your humankind, if you prefer. And it is to this sense — the true sense, your own sanity — that your daily accumulation of experience needs to be measured and related, and not to the shifty accommodations of a dying experiment called separate development and about to be renamed a ‘constellation of states’.
If you are going to graduate only by means of your degree, you may count yourself well-educated but I do not think you will be fully equipped to live your life in South Africa now. A few years ago I was on a television programme in the United States, and the black South African actor Winston Ntshona, also taking part, was asked by the interviewer: ‘What advice would you give Nadine Gordimer as a white South African?’
Ntshona thought for a moment and said, ‘I’d tell her, live like a man.’
The interviewer got his laugh even if he hadn’t managed to draw blood as he’d no doubt hoped. But I didn’t laugh and Ntshona didn’t laugh. We understood each other; I knew what he meant, and so do you. Without any apologies to my sisters in this gathering, I am conscious of how far I have failed to ‘live like a man’. To attempt to be fully human in South Africa it is necessary to examine your actions and their consequences, to view your private experience in relation not only to the section of society, the enclave in which it has been accumulating, but in relation to the complexity of the society as a whole in which you live; to see your existence not only in relation to nuclear family, friends, economic, professional, and social group, but to the human matrix in which these, and you, are embedded. That is where you are — not, as apartheid has made it seem, safe in your commune on an old mining property, in chambers where you receive your clients, the consulting rooms and wards where you examine your patients, the speech clinics and social welfare offices where you help people overcome their personal problems, the disco where only the lights change, the country club or suburban garden where everything seems to stay the same.
As you leave this university, you need to look back and think about what your presence here for a number of years has signified. Everyone will tell you you have been privileged. This is a platitude taken over unquestioningly from other societies where class, a flexible concept, or exceptional ability, arguably a determinant of congenital and/or environmental origin, is the criterion. The implication is that you are privileged because higher education will put up your worth in the market-place and/or qualify you to serve the community at a high level of skill; and the intellectual stimulation you have received will bloom as your capacity for living fully. But in South Africa the concept of ‘privilege’ has acquired stronger negative than positive associations. The privilege of a good education is not one that can be earned by exceptional ability, hard work, or even parents’ will to pay for it. You have first to be born white; and if you are, you have to remain aware that this ‘privilege’ from which so many others are spawned is also a mark of Cain; while some are embracing you in congratulation, others are cursing you. If you are white, that is your sober heritage. That is the truth of your situation on this day.