S.A. Students Rebel Over Govt Veto On Lecturer

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31763, 21 August 1968, Page 13

S.A. Students Rebel Over Govt Veto On Lecturer

<N Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

JOHANNESBURG, August 20.

The Prime Minister, Mr John Vorster, today promised to meet dissident students in 10 days to hear their complaints about too much Government interference in South African universities.

The promise comes as the student revolt over a Government veto on the appointment of an African, a social anthropologist, Mr Archie Mafeje, to a lecturing post at Cape Town University enters its seventh day.

Cape Town students began a sit-in protest at their university’s administrative block last week and students from three other universities have added their voices to the protest

A group of Witwatersrand students last night drove 30 miles to Mr Vorster 1 s Pretoria residence to present him with a petition—and returned with their heads shaved by rival

demonstrators. The head-shaving incident happened in the grounds of the Prime Minister’s residence. A student leader, Mr Neville Curtis, said Mr Vorster had refused to accept a document protesting against

Government interference in university autonomy, particularly in Mr Mafeje’s case.

Then students from the Afri-kaans-speaking Pretoria University pounced, took the protesting group to their hostel and shaved their beads. Unrepentent, the Witwatersrand students announced a meeting today to

decide their next steps in support of their Cape Town colleagues. The Witwatersrand students ran into trouble earlier yesterday when they were pelted with eggs by counterdemonstrators outside the university building after Mr Vorster bad refused to allow a mass march through Johannesburg. Two other South African universities have joined the

protest, which is basically an attack against the country’s apartheid polities, and the National Union of Students of England, Wales and Northern Ireland have cabled their support.

The 38,000-strong union’s president, Mr Jeff Martin, wired “support for your courageous stand for academic freedom in South Africa.”

In English-speaking uni-

versities at Durban and Pietermaritzburg, defiant student voices—backed as at Witwatersrand and Cape Town by a strong leavening of professors and senior university men—have declared that they will not be intimidated in their fight against educational authoritarianism. The Afrikaans-speaking universities have come out against total university autonomy.