Desmond Tutu, Archbishop of Cape Town
For some years I was a delegate of Oxford University Press, and a member of its finance committee: that is to say, I was a non-executive director of the university’s publishing arm. The Press maintained, and maintains, a large branch in South Africa. During the years of apartheid, many of the OUP staff, and some of the delegates, thought the branch should be closed down, even though it was doing a valuable service in providing textbooks for black schools. Sir Roger Elliott, the chief executive, asked me to help him reach a decision whether the branch should continue to operate. We decided to seek advice from leading black South Africans.
Archbishop Tutu was in London at the time, and we paid him a visit. He was firmly in favour of closure. ‘I am Mr Sanctions’, he said. ‘I believe that the way to end apartheid is not by the armed struggle, but by economic means. I don’t care how much good you may be doing, but there can be no exceptions to the boycott.’ This was clear advice. However, we telephoned Oliver Tambo, then in Scandinavia, to get a second opinion. He set the matter in the context of an academic, rather than an economic boycott, and said that we should give priority to the educational needs of the majority community. In the light of this conflicting advice, we kept the branch open, but subjected it to the scrutiny of a local committee headed by Wieland Gevers, who later became Cabinet Secretary to the Mandela government.
Tutu came to Oxford in 1990 to receive an honorary Doctor of Divinity, and I met him again in 1994 after the end of apartheid. I reminded him of our conversation about sanctions: ‘I’m afraid we did not take your advice’, I said. ‘Quite right!’, he replied. ‘It was remarkably bad advice.’ In fact, he said, it would have been a remarkable piece of bad timing if OUP, having operated throughout the years of the National Party government, had pulled out on the eve of a new South Africa.
I much admired the way in which Tutu, having been at the forefront of the fight against apartheid, stepped out of the limelight as soon as Mandela was freed. I have met him several times since then, and he always radiates energy and cheerfulness. He is totally lacking in pomp. And he has never set great store by decorum, whether he was publicly chastising Mandela for his delay in marrying Graça Machel, or dancing toyi-toyi in the London Guildhall with a long train of female admirers.
Mamphela Ramphele, vice chancellor
In the 1980s, Balliol offered every year a visiting fellowship at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The fellowship was named after an alumnus of the college, the liberal politician Jan Hofmeyr, whom many had hoped would be the successor of Jan Smuts. At that time, the Association of University Teachers had a policy of boycotting South African academic institutions, which for a while I respected. But then I met Francis Wilson of the University of Cape Town (UCT), a South African of impeccable anti-apartheid credentials, who spent a sabbatical year in Oxford. He convinced me that the academic boycott did most damage to people in the universities who were seeking to overturn apartheid, and none at all to the authorities who upheld it.
In 1984, therefore, I accepted the Hofmeyr fellowship and travelled to South Africa with my family. Our first port of call was to the Hogsback, the rural home of Francis and his wife Lindy. It was in the midst of a forest planted by Francis’ missionary grandfather, and landscaped by his mother, the anthropologist Monica Wilson. The Wilsons, there and in their house in Cape Town, introduced us to some figures in the United Democratic Front (UDF), then the main centre of resistance to government policies. Our first encounter was with the Dutch Reformed pastor Allan Boesak, one of the leaders of the UDF. Sadly, he later turned out to be a broken reed. Much better fortune followed our introduction to Mamphela Ramphele.
Mamphela had been a student activist in the Black Consciousness Movement, and had been a partner of Steve Biko, the leader of the movement, who died at the hands of the South African police. When we met, she and Francis Wilson had just jointly produced, for the Carnegie Foundation, a report on the economic consequences of apartheid. Paternalistic nationalists had argued that, though black people had no political rights in South Africa, they were better off – in terms of education, health and living standards – than the inhabitants of independent sub-Saharan states. Francis and Mamphela showed, to the contrary, that in respect of such things as infant mortality and expectation of life, South Africa’s black population came near the bottom of the league table. At a dinner in our early days in Cape Town, Francis placed me next to Mamphela. She lectured me for two hours on the evils of British imperialism. It was the beginning of a long friendship.
It was after I moved to Rhodes House that Nancy and I began to see a lot of Mamphela, who stayed with us occasionally, once with her young son. In 1993, she was made chair of one of the South African Rhodes selection committees. Summing up at the end of one selection session she said that she willingly gave up a weekend at a busy time because the encounter with the candidates was such a hopeful and rejuvenating experience. ‘It is indeed ironic’, she said, ‘that Cecil Rhodes, who epitomizes imperialism in South Africa, offered a scholarship scheme that has become a highly significant vehicle for helping to create a new kind of society at the end of the twentieth century.’ In 1996 she became the first black person, and the first woman, to be appointed Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Town.
In the latter half of the 1990s, the endowments of the Rhodes Trust regularly generated an annual surplus after all the expenses of the scholarships had been met. Now that the political climate had changed, I had no difficulty in persuading the trustees that it was appropriate to use these funds to support good causes in South Africa. Since 1973, the national officers of the trust had operated a system of bursaries for black schoolchildren, which supported more than a hundred a year. By 1995, higher-level bursaries had been added, and there were in that year 79 students holding Rhodes bursaries in attendance at UCT.
Over the decade, the trust gave over £4 million to South African causes. The largest such benefaction was announced at Mamphela’s installation as vice chancellor. In the presence of President Mandela, she announced that the trust had earmarked 7 million rand for the construction of an All Africa House at the university. This was to provide a focal point for contact between the faculty of UCT, and faculty members from universities in other African countries. In 1999, I joined Mamphela for the official opening of the building. Once again she took the opportunity to offer a reinterpretation of the Rhodes legacy in the context of the new South Africa.
Since ceasing to work for the Rhodes Trust, I have seen little of Mamphela. Like many who were once supporters of the ANC, I have been saddened by the decline in the calibre of government since Nelson Mandela’s death. I was sorry when I learned that Mamphela had turned down the opportunity to lead the Democratic Alliance, the most promising party of the opposition. She would have been an inspiring leader, and would have symbolized the multiracial form that the party must take if it is to compete successfully with the ANC.
Nelson Mandela, President of South Africa
On our first visit to South Africa in 1984, Nancy and I carried in our suitcases a few recordings of a song, Free Nelson Mandela, that was banned in that country. We thought they would make useful hostess presents. In fact, we found that every house we visited already had a copy – and often several copies – smuggled in by previous visitors from the UK.
The first time we ever saw Mandela was not in South Africa but in Norway. In November 1993 I was invited to give a series of lectures in philosophy at the University of Oslo. It turned out that Mandela and F. W. de Klerk were jointly due to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Because my host and I were both fellows of the Norwegian Academy, we were entitled to be present at the ceremony at which the king awarded the prize. It was a great honour to be present when the prize was awarded to two such recipients who had each worked hard to bring peace within their troubled country.
I met Mandela several times later, but only on ceremonial occasions and for brief party conversations. But even the shortest time in his presence was enough to impress one with his immense affability and complete lack of bitterness. After I ceased to be secretary of the Rhodes Trust, the trustees set up, alongside the Rhodes Scholarships, a set of Mandela Rhodes Scholarships. This was due to an imaginative initiative of my successor as secretary, but above all it was an expression of Mandela’s magnanimity in allowing his name to be linked with that of Rhodes. It was hoped at the time that this would purge the name of Rhodes and shield it from the obloquy hurled at it by many black South Africans. Sadly, a decade or more later, that hope proved vain.
My most picturesque memory of Mandela dates from 1997. Oxford University wished to offer him an honorary degree. When his office was approached, we learned that a dozen other British universities wished to do the same. The new President of South Africa could hardly be asked to make an academic peregrination around the country, so it was arranged that there should be a ceremony in Buckingham Palace at which representatives of the various universities should make their laudations and present their scrolls to the honorand. I was a member of the Oxford delegation.
The event was a spectacular exhibition of imperialism in reverse. On the dais, beside the Duke of Edinburgh, stood Nelson Mandela, handsomely attired in a plain Armani business outfit. Surrounding him were little groups of academics wearing the quaint old-fashioned dresses of their separate tribes. On approaching the dais, each vice chancellor was accompanied by a bodyguard of bedels bearing traditional weapons of truncheons and maces. I wish I could have seen the expression on the face of Queen Victoria, wherever she may now be.