If you are a black graduate, you have to be aware that you have been made an exception of rather than given the right to the same education for black South Africans as for white. That is the truth of your situation on this day.
I cannot tell you — all of you, black and white — you have nothing to fear from the truth. There is plenty to fear in South Africa; but it is no pious platitude to say that the greatest danger lies in not seeing facts, not admitting them, walking out of here in your new-found, qualified adulthood to take up life the way it is. Because life the way it is in South Africa is over. Young blacks don’t need telling; indeed, they are the ones who are spelling out, thinking out, acting out the message. The old laws are still there, the old forms are still there, but the laws are hollow and the men and women are not. They are purposeful and mutually supportive, eager to prepare themselves for the future. It is for young white men and women that I want to put up a banner over the exits of the Great Hall, near the plaque: Don’t walk out of this university into the past. You will not be going into the old family business that grew from slavery to apartheid. Free yourself gladly of the mentality that went with that kind of enterprise.
Despite the questionable nature of privilege in our country, I think there has been a certain element of unquestionable privilege about your years at Wits, and I rejoice in it for all of you, black and white. This is a segregated university, it has only a token if growing presence of black students, and while race laws remain this cannot be otherwise; and I know that repeating the die-stamp of the immediate world outside the campus, student life tends to equate like-seeking-like with pigment seeking like pigment — so that there are clubs and groups who see their interests as defensively racially-defined. In present circumstances in South Africa this is not surprising. Under apartheid, the fact that you are African black or Indian black or Chinese or white is the most important characteristic you have. The full preposterousness of this morbid phenomenon will be booming our shame loud-mouthed through ages when all else about life the way it is among us has long been forgotten.
But in spite of all this, you have lived a less absurd and corrupting life for the hours you have spent on this campus every day than is lived outside it. I hope for your own sakes the difference has marked you deeply. I hope you will never disavow it; I hope you won’t cover it with some sleazy, fashionable life-style; I hope even more that you will not regard it as a campaign medal to be trotted out for the rest of your life in lieu of any further thought and action — that there won’t come from any of you that vapid death-rattle: Oh, when I was a student I used to get steamed up about things—
At this university you have had the chance to be stirred and informed, to wake up and muster the momentum of doubts, questionings, polemical argument in public in a way that is not possible outside these gates. For study purposes at least you have had access to works expressing ideas — the movement of modern thought, the expression of changing concepts of man in his sexual, political, religious, and social being — that are banned from libraries and bookshops outside. You have been able at least to take a breath in an atmosphere where, in some intellectual disciplines, a new concept of South African culture is being explored — as, for example, in Professor John Dugard’s Applied Legal Studies; in work being done in the fields of social science, psychology, and film; in T. J. Couzens’ establishment in our literature of the journalism and other writings by early black writers, and Professor Charles van Onselen’s social history of this extraordinary area in which we live — the Witwatersrand — as an analytic assertion of values of other than the gold price.
These are the inklings of a new idea of yourself to be realized in relation not to the inherited illusions strung around your neck but to the real entities of the life that has always been there, about you; the understanding that an exclusively white-based culture has been and is as foreign and sterile for white South Africans as for black, and that there is a huge new cultural energy ready to blow — our popular hero-figure doesn’t have to be Kojak, and our humour isn’t really Carol Burnett’s.
Here at this university you have had a chance to learn how you have been manipulated by the forces of a particular social order, and the more general social forces in conflict in the world. You have come to question, many of you, the politics, economics, and mores of home and class as well as colour, that you were born to, outside the university. You have had a chance to make contact as equals, however tenuously, across the colour taboos maintained by harsh penalty outside. If you have not made use of these opportunities to remake yourself, the loss is yours, the lack is yours. If you have made use of them, you have gained a foothold in independence of mind from which arbitrary doctrines will find it difficult to coax you down, and ministerial demagogues to cow you.
In 1971, when I gave the Academic Freedom Lecture at the University of Natal, I remarked that the places of public assembly in South Africa were by then open only to dog shows and pop groups. In 1980 this has not changed — except to get worse, since there were to be further restrictions after 1976 and these have just been renewed. Because you were a student at this university, last month you were able to be present at a public meeting that could not take place in a public square, and you heard the free and fearless expression of ideas about the state of your country, the future of your country, that would be most unlikely to be given a platform outside the environment of a university. And because you were there, openly expressing your solidarity on an issue openly stated, you know that it is not true that your signature on an appeal to free Nelson Mandela is an approval of urban terrorism. You know that your signature among more than fifty thousand others was consciously and responsibly an action to create a real alternative to the horrors of terrorism. Unlike hundreds of thousands of other South Africans who only get the chance to hear what the government wants them to hear, you will know that what the Minister of Police has implied of your action is not the truth. And that is important. A single meeting; a single issue; but with significance for your whole life to come, where you will again and again be faced with the need to examine your facts and hold your convictions on that evidence alone, against pervasive and persuasive interpretations that others will try to sell you, if not to brand you with.
Take all these advantages away with you from the university, along with your professional skill; use them, develop them along with it. Graduation from the peculiarly South African state of underdevelopment has not been accomplished as your degree has been granted, once and for all. People will taunt you fearfully — you yourself will not be without fear — how do you know, if you must abandon South Africa the way it is, the way it will be is going to be just and human? The answer is you don’t know; speaking for Africa, you can only say with Wole Soyinka, you have to crack the nut and take the future between your teeth; and with Albert Camus, himself born into a dying colonial situation and writing under Nazi occupation in Europe: ‘We have chosen to accept human justice with its terrible imperfections, careful only to correct it through a desperately maintained honesty.’