UNIVERSITY of FORT HARE, Alice, Eastern Cape.
Per fess: 1. Azure, a sun rising or. 2. Sable, an open book proper, overriding the line of division, inscribed with the words In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen.
The principal charge is a rising sun, very like those found in the arms of East London and the Border Technikon, and similar to the one in the crest of the Eastern Cape Province.
The open book in base is a typical symbol of learning often found in academic arms. A similar book, also inscribed with a motto, is found in the arms of Rhodes University.
The motto translates as “In Your [God’s] light we are able to see the light.”
The illustration of the arms is a coloured version of the arms as used by the University College of Fort Hare (shown at left). The university currently uses a simplified drawing (shown at right), but the arms are essentially unchanged.
The university’s name and location:
The university takes its name from a fort built in 1847 during the Seventh Frontier War and named after Colonel John Hare, Lieutenant-Governor of the Eastern Province (of the Cape Colony) in 1838, who during July and August of 1846 was in command of the army in the frontier region.
The ruins of the fort, which remained in use until 1883, can still be seen on the university campus.
The Fort Hare University calendar for 2000 sums up the place’s history in this way:
“Many forces have interacted in the Eastern Cape. Incoming Afrikaners and British met with Xhosa-speakers in the eighteenth century, and the long process of conflict, followed by the subordination and expropriation of the indigenous people, took place over more than one hundred years. An important British base at the time, named after a military officer, was Fort Hare, near which grew the small town of Alice.
“The process of colonisation and expropriation was paradoxical. Brutal military conquest, and integration of the population into the colonial economy, was accompanied by the spread of Christianity. The missionaries who carried the new ideas were themselves part of colonial expansion, but brought with them a creed which was taken by Africans and forged into a tool for grappling with the challenges of
the colonial world . . .”
The town of Alice, just over a kilometre from the fort, was traditionally part of the Victoria East district and the Division of Fort Beaufort, but in 1982 became part of the Republic of Ciskei. It was reincorporated into South Africa in 1994 and became part of the Eastern Cape Province.
Following the municipal elections of 2000, Alice was incorporated with Fort Beaufort, Hogsback, Middledrift and Seymour into the Nkonkobe Local Municipality.
South African Native College (1916-’51):
The original forerunner of the present-day university was the South African Native College. The college was opened in 1916 by the Prime Minister, General Louis Botha.
The first students followed matriculation courses, with degree courses of the University of South Africa being introduced later. The first graduation took place in 1924.
The university calendar continues:
“The College originated from the sometimes uneasy alliance between this new class of educated African Christians, supported by a number of traditional Southern African leaders, and early twentieth-century white liberals, many of them clergy.
“The religious tradition at the heart of Fort Hare’s origin, shared by black and white, stood at its best for ‘plain living and high thinking’, and for education that was undeniably Eurocentric. But it did not make the assumption, central to the Bantu Education implemented in South Africa from the 1950s, that black Africans require and deserve a different, inferior, education.”
University College of Fort Hare (1950s), affiliated to Rhodes University:
In 1951 the SANC was affiliated to the newly independent Rhodes University, of Grahamstown, and a year later changed its name to the University College of Fort Hare.
Continuing with the university calendar’s history:
“Fort Hare produced graduates, from South Africa and as far north as Kenya and Uganda, who knew they were as good as the best. Many went on to prominent careers in fields as diverse as politics, medicine, literature and art. Some politically active alumni like Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, Robert Sobukwe and Mangosuthu Buthelezi in South Africa, Robert Mugabe and Herbert Chitepo in Zimbabwe, and Eliud Mthu and Charles Njonjo in Kenya, are well known. But, to take a sample, there are also, from South Africa, the poet Dennis Brutus, the Drum journalist Can Themba, the sculptor and painter Ernest Mancoba and the Xhosa author and scholar Archibald Campbell Jordan. The first black Zimbabwean medical doctor, Ticofa Samuel Parirenyatwa, and the historian, novelist and politifian Stanlake Samkange, were among the many non-South Africans who spent formative years at Fort Hare.
“Though Fort Hare operated in an environment of racial segregation even before apartheid, the college contained the seeds of a more tolerant South Africa. It was as racially inclusive as it could be at the time, with black, coloured and Indian students;[1] it had men and women students from the beginning; its mainly white staff included black academics like Z K Matthews and D D T Jabavu; students’ home languages ranged through Xhosa, Sotho, Zulu, Afrikaans and many others.”
University of Fort Hare (Bantu education; Republic of Ciskei):
Legislation enacted in 1959 ended the affiliation to Rhodes University and transferred the university college to the Department of Bantu Education.
The university calendar continues:
“The takeover of the college in 1959-60 by the National Party government put an end to these achievements. Fort Hare was transformed into an ethnic college for Xhosa-speakers. Outspoken staff were expelled and a new administration, conspicuously loyal to the government and intent on imposing its world-view, was installed. The campus grew over the next three decades, and student numbers rose, but Fort Hare was reduced to the level of the ‘Bush Colleges’ that the government proceeded to institute in many homelands.”
It became a university for the Xhosa peoples in 1969, serving Transkei as well as Ciskei. Continuing with the calendar history:
“In a parody of true academic maturity, Fort Hare became, in 1970, self-governing and ‘independent’. With the creation of Ciskei in 1980, Fort Hare became the university of a microstate recognised only by its fellow-Bantustans and by South Africa, a marked decline from its previous status as the greatest centre of black higher education in Southern and Eastern Africa.
“The values and traditions of Fort Hare were embattled after 1960. The apartheid state made a determined attack upon the institution and did immense damage. However, continuities did survive which are being built upon. While the tradition of non-racism, critical debate and of aspiration towards educational excellence faltered in the years of apartheid, it was never completely eliminated. It is now being nurtured and built upon.
“This tradition survived, firstly, amongst the students. Many rejected the attempt to turn Fort Hare into an ethnic college, and from various directions – political, religious and cultural – kept alive a spirit of opposition. In the 1960s various African
National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress-aligned organisations emerged and were quickly suppressed. Subsequently, Fort Hare became a stronghold of the Black Consciousness-oriented South African Students’ Organisation. Later still,
there were constant protests by students, brutally suppressed, against the Ciskei homeland regime.”
Following the “independence” of Transkei in 1976 and of Ciskei in 1982, political tensions between the two states rose, and Transkei took over the classes Fort Hare had been teaching in Umtata and created its own university, the University of Transkei.
Both these universities grew larger and larger (especially in non-academic staff) as their governments blackmailed the apartheid government of South Africa for more and more money for their budgets. Although academic standards were largely maintained, large student debts were accumulated.
Since the formal dissolution of the “independent” homeland states in 1994, the financial state of the two universities has grown worse, partly because of the reduction of their excessive subsidies, but partly also because of the political manoeuvring
of the excess staff, who refused to accept retrenchment, as well as a continued failure to collect student debts, combined with a willingness to accept students regardless of their ability or willingness to pay.
Both universities have been threatened with closure, but as of February 2002, the axe had not fallen on either campus.
Yet the fruit of the apartheid years was not all sour. Again from the university calendar:
“The tradition also survived in the affection and loyalty of people who knew, or knew of, the previous Fort Hare and, when the opportunity arose after 1990 when the apartheid-era administration was expelled, worked there. These included Sibusiso Bengu, the first black Vice Chancellor of the new dispensation and later Minister of Education; Makhenkesi Stofile, the current Eastern Cape Premier; and Sipho Pityana, Registrar in the early 1990s, now Director-General in the Department of Foreign Affairs. . . . It survives in the remarkable archival records at Fort Hare, made up of the papers of the ANC and other liberation movements in exile. The archives of the University itself record an extraordinary and sustained educational achievement, forming a corporate memory only now being made accessible to scholars.”
The university has its own website here.
Afrikaanse blasoen:
Die wapen mag in Afrikaans so geblasoeneer word:
Gesny: 1. In blou, die stygende son in goud. 2. In swart, ’n oop boek in sy natuurlike kleure wat oor die middellyn steek, met die inskrywing In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen.
[1] At least one white woman, Monica Wilson, was a student at Fort Hare, later lecturing at Fort Hare and becoming a professor at the University of Cape Town. She spent her last days at Hogsback, the mountain village favoured by many Fort Hare staff.
Back to Armoria academica index
Comments, queries: Mike Oettle