UCT’s golden age for Jews – a mixed picture for liberalism

Emeritus Professor Howard Phillips sees 1948 to 1968 as the golden age of the University of Cape Town’s (UCT’s) medical school, as well as the best years for Jews on campus, both in terms of staff and students.

Phillips, speaking about his recently published book, UCT under Apartheid: From Onset to Sit-in 1948 – 1968 is a graduate of UCT and London University. He also taught in the department of historical studies and department of public health at UCT from 1974 to 2014.

The most obvious but by no means the only example of our community’s influence, he says, was the very marked growth in numbers of Jewish staff and students at the medical school during those years. Jews in fact constituted a “significant minority” amongst the white students.

“Because the profession of medicine had been such a major instrument of social mobility for Jews – for the first generation of South African-born Jews, that was the way to go – many were in the medical profession and were willing to do part-time teaching,” says Phillips.

The best-known Jewish figure at the school at the time was the late Professor Frank Forman who was one of those who laid the foundations of the “efflorescence” of the medical school during those years, Phillips says. “He was certainly a man whose teaching style and bedside manner [learned from his Scottish teachers] were the stuff of legend. In terms of inculcating that into students, his impact is widespread indeed.

“Forman was reputed to be able to speak to people in a way which wasn’t top-down, and this made an immense impression on his students.”

An illustration of what Phillips terms the “congenial environment” which UCT had become for its Jewish students and staff, was when it gave a leave of absence to 77 Jewish students who wished to volunteer during the Six-Day War. “One member of senate thought this infringed on South Africa’s declared policy of neutrality in Arab-Israeli matters, but refrained from raising this ‘in the light of the strong Jewish representation in the senate’.”

While UCT has the image of being a liberal institution during apartheid, Phillips shows that this was not always uniformly the case, but rather dependent on particular principals and departments.

“One needs to look at UCT in a comparative context and, in contrast to many other South African universities, UCT and Wits [the University of the Witwatersrand] were certainly far more so than Rhodes or the University of Natal – and we’re not even talking about the Afrikaans-medium universities.

“So relative to other South African universities, UCT certainly was liberal.” But, he says, one has to draw a difference between UCT’s public profile and what often happened in-house, describing the situation as “a mixed picture”.

“Its public profile was that it stood up very courageously against the imposition of apartheid; students and staff marched through the streets of Cape Town against the introduction of university apartheid. All of that is in keeping with UCT’s public image as a defender of academic freedom.

“But within the university, there are many practices which are anything but in accord with that public profile and that is because it was also part and parcel of white South African society and it often reflected those outlooks. When it had to deal with government institutions like Groote Schuur Hospital, it had to bend to its requirements, so medical students had to fit in with the racial segregation at the hospital and UCT didn’t take a significant stand against that.”

On an individual level, one comes across even more marked racist attitudes, he says. In the book, Phillips documents the experience of black students who felt “very seriously discriminated against”, a phenomenon that surprised Phillips most in his research of the period.

He cites the example of black fine arts students who, when it came to life drawing, were told that they had to go into a separate room as they were prohibited from drawing a white model – a coloured woman would pose for them.

This information was gleaned from the late intellectual and activist Adam Small in an interview during which Phillips asked him if his parents had been outraged at this. “My mother was outraged, because the idea that I should see a naked woman was absolutely unacceptable to her, whether she was white or black,” Small replied.

One needs to recognise the nature of the society at the time, Phillips comments, and not necessarily try and separate UCT from the context of the society of which it was part.

When architectural students were required to come up with a plan for a state or institutional building, separate toilets and separate entrances for different races were incorporated “without anybody commenting on it”, according to Phillips, who labels the phenomenon “unconscious racism”.

It underlines the importance of oral testimony in providing the full picture, as personal experiences wouldn’t be documented in the formal archives.

Similarly in the faculty of medicine, black students weren’t permitted to be present when white patients were presented, and had to leave the lecture theatre. Forman got around this by only presenting black patients to the class.

Phillips describes the 1968 sit-in at UCT as a “watershed” in that this was the first time that students had protested against the university. Until then, the two constituencies had been united in their protests against apartheid.

Dubbed “The Mafeje Affair”, the sit-in was the result of UCT bowing to government pressure to withdraw the appointment of black academic Archie Mafeje to its staff. Instrumental in driving the sit-in was “the highly articulate zealot”, Raphie Kaplinsky, the chair of the Radical Students Society, who went into exile in Britain after his passport was withdrawn in the wake of the sit-in.

Phillips also wrote The University of Cape Town 1918 – 1948: The Formative Years; Cemeteries and Synagogues: The Foundation of Organized Jewry in SA; and The Centenary of the Great Synagogue, Cape Town, 1905-2005.