Page 189 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

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aCta
it (i.e. community service). Die Matie refers to the invitation to an open dialogue at various
stages, i.e. 24/02/1986, 13 March 1985, 27 February 1986.
Some examples of student activism on other Afrikaans universities included the forma-
tion of the Studente vir ‘n Demokratiese Suid-Afrika at Pretoria and Afrikane teen Apartheid
at the Rands Afrikaanse University. The University of the Orange Free State also saw a small
nucleus of left wing activists acting on and off campus.
At the white (no more really white) liberal universities things were markedly different
since the 1970s. Regular demonstrations took place and were frequently broken up by the
police/riot police. At the so-called “bush colleges” or “ethnic” universities student resistance
regularly ended in demonstrations and/or class boycotts; the University of the North, the
University of Fort Hare, the University of Venda, the University of Durban-Westville, the
Medical University of South Africa or Medunsa (exclusively for black students) and the Uni-
versity of Western Cape (UWC) being examples. UWC in stark contrast to Stellenbosch and
other Afrikaans universities declared openly that it was “an intellectual home to the Left”.
The liberal (English) universities hovered between protestation against apartheid laws and
demonstrations.
Indeed, the tertiary world in South Africa was worlds apart and students from different
political backgrounds acted out these “Worlds of Difference”. South Africa since the es-
55
tablishment of the State Security Council in 1972, the 1976 Youth Rebellion and the transi-
tion to a tri-cameral parliament under an executive presidency in 1983 was moving closer to
what Frankel described as a praetorian state (perhaps by default?) or Orr the “garrison state”,
while others referred to a “bunker state”. Indeed white South Africa became a militarised so-
ciety and the white Afrikaans universities followed suit, with the exception of very marginal
dissidents.

impLications of past experiences and perceptions of the miLitary for
civiL-miLitary reLations and the career of the professionaL miLitary
person in south africa
The South African experience of tertiary education for officers as far as associated with a
single university and in the current absence of a military university for South Africa provides
some lessons for the future.
However close the interaction between the military and civilian students had become in
the two decades after 1970, the changing composition of the Military Academy student body
from 1990 to reflect the South African demography, would pose new questions to interaction
with a main campus were change occurred much slower.

concLusion
Politics, history has taught us, is the art to included rather than exclude. Politics and the
art of managing the sword given to the state imply to deploy the sword – if ever – not against
your own citizenry but in defence of the country and its citizenry. This in fact constitutes the

55 C. van der Lugt, Worlds of Difference In: I. Liebenberg and C. van der Lugt (eds.). Worlds of Difference:
The Political Attitudes of White Students in South Africa (Idasa, Mowbray, 1990).