This article was published in City Press on 23 April 2023.
Transformation is not for the faint-hearted or lily-livered. The sight of the Stellenbosch University vice-chancellor on the day after participating in the Cape Epic race to raise funds to bridge the gap for financially struggling students was testimony to this.
Tired from cycling more than 60km at the time of the on-boarding of students whose challenges included accommodation emergencies and debt, Willem de Villiers was his usual jovial, unassuming and understated self. But the signs of fatigue were clear.
He was tired not just from cycling, but also from weathering the storms of leading the transformation of a 100-year-old institution that had been established for whites in colonial South Africa. A new storm that started as a breeze and ended up as a whirlwind was in progress.
‘AFRIKAANS HATER’ LABEL
De Villiers’ leadership paradigm acquired a global perspective when he headed a medical institution in the US for many years, before returning to the country of his birth to serve as dean of medicine at the University of Cape Town. De Villiers, a son of Stellenbosch who resides next door to the house in which he grew up, who is a polymath of sorts and whose father was a Stellenbosch University law dean during apartheid, says he came back to play a meaningful part in healing the divisions of the past. His leadership, which has yielded demonstrable transformation that includes visual redress, has been an odyssey of storms.
The storms this gastric endocrinologist who pivoted to management has weathered include the #RhodesMustFall and Open Stellenbosch protests challenging the impact of Afrikaans as a language barrier, the 2016 #FeesMustFall turmoil, the 2017 response to load shedding, which involved an unbudgeted R80 million for alternative energy, the 2018 rape and murder of a female student, the Day Zero water scare in the Western Cape, the 2019 gender-based violence incidents at the University of Cape Town that led to a national protest wave, the 2020/21 Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown that leapfrogged education to online platforms in a context of unequal digital access, last year’s urination incident that resulted in the Khampepe report, and this year’s accommodation and fees challenges, plus the language backlash. In De Villiers’ words:
Throughout this period, significant background noise/turmoil regarding the language issue at Stellenbosch University, namely a new language policy [multilingual and increased inclusivity] in 2016 and increasing use of English [as opposed to Afrikaans] as a medium of instruction/knowledge transfer further cemented by the 2021 language policy.
An Afrikaner who is proud of his mother tongue, De Villiers has been portrayed by detractors as an Afrikaans hater. When that did not gain traction, the narrative shifted to other fronts. His academic record could not be challenged as that has exceeded antecedent achievements on virtually all dimensions.
Under his leadership, the university is slowly emerging from the shadow of its past collusion in designing, propping up, benefiting from and implementing apartheid in its institutional practices. Building on the legacies of his predecessors, Chris Brink and Russel Botman, De Villiers led the adoption of the restitution statement in 2018. The statement acknowledges the institution’s complicity in past racist wrongs, apologises for such and pledges to make amends.
A copy of the statement greets visitors and institutional citizens as they enter the main administration building. The adjacent building, initially named after Raymond William Wilcocks, one of the intellectual architects of apartheid, is now called the Krotoa building.
Krotoa was a Khoi woman who served as a bridge between the Khoi and Dutch settlers. Having married into the settler community and later become a widow, she lost favour with settlers when she resisted the betrayal of her people. The entrance to the law faculty building, where apartheid high priest Hendrik Verwoerd spent time brewing his human stratification racist ideas, is adorned by the constitutional preamble, which talks about laying the foundation for establishing a society that is based on social justice and other ideals.
The contrast is akin to night and day.
De Villiers walks the talk on social justice. He co-chairs, with Basetsana Khumalo, the Council of Social Justice Champions that is championing the Marshall Plan-like Musa Plan for Social Justice. He cycles and engages in other activities to raise funds for and awareness about student financial asymmetries and remedial initiatives such as Bridge the Gap and Action for Inclusion.
DEALING WITH THE PAST
De Villiers has led the Social Justice Walk, which takes place annually on June 16, the anniversary of the Soweto uprising, since its inception. The walk brings together diverse stakeholders to reflect on our divisive past and its legacy as they go through vestiges of forced removals and slavery, and forge bonds for building a shared future anchored in shared humanity.
The stopover points, where De Villiers and his team provide an earnest narrative on what happened and how that continues to define the present, include Luckhoff High School in Stellenbosch. The school was taken from the Verkplas coloured community that was forcibly removed from central Stellenbosch in the 1970s under the Group Areas Act. Also included is a farm where a slave harness tree still stands, together with the shackles that were used to prevent slaves from escaping.
The Social Justice Walk and related talks culminate in Pniel, a community descended from freed slaves on the road between Stellenbosch and Franschoek. Contrary to fears about telling the truth about the past, these exercises always have the impact of building bridges across social groups while inspiring hope. Some are regulars who return each year.
TRANSFORMATION ANXIETIES
In addition to visual redress, the colour and gender of those in institutional positions of authority on campus is changing. While the chief operating officer is a white man, the four deputy-vice chancellors comprise a white woman, a black woman, an Indian man and a coloured man. The composition of deans of faculties is also steadily and significantly changing colour and gender.
Word in the winelands points to transformation anxieties as the real concern that is being channelled through proxies such as the language backlash. The Khampepe commission report, by retired Constitutional Court Justice Sisi Khampepe, established to investigate the urination incident, may also have exacerbated transformation fears. If this is true, it is understandable.
In a country where one group was not only groomed to believe that it was entitled to certain privileges purely because of its colour, but also taught to fear and deride other groups, change should understandably trigger insecurities. In his book titled Verwoerd: My Journey Through Family Betrayals, Wilhelm Verwoerd, grandson of the late prime minister, who is a transformation and reconciliation agent at Stellenbosch University, alludes to the stigmatisation and inferiorisation of blackness and exaltation of whiteness in his generation’s upbringing.
Previously, I alluded to the fact that I had protested when my millennial son’s Grade 4 history textbook stated that when white people moved into the interior, they were confronted by many dangers such as wild animals, snakes and natives. Neuroscience tells us that, until disrupted, such narratives and consequent paradigms endure to define people’s hopes, fears and actions.
WILL HE PREVAIL?
All of this raises the need to deal with resetting mindsets and relationships. Healing discussions to surface hopes and fears, with a view to achieving common ground beyond strategy consultations, need consideration. Despite the storms, De Villiers remains resolute in his commitment to co-creating a Stellenbosch University for all – one that can sustainably take its place as a globally competitive institution while having a positive social impact on society.
Where others succumb to people-pleasing, De Villiers has remained steadfast in his vision of an inclusive South Africa and putting Stellenbosch University in pole position as a co-creator of such a new society. He passionately talks about a “gown-and-town relationship” between the academy and society.
To lead amid storms requires huge reserves of emotional, social, spiritual and intellectual intelligence – plus agility. It is said that a leader needs ubuntu and a “strong liver” to command the following needed to help him/her transcend such storms.
Having transcended the perils of leading transformation, will De Villiers prevail in current and future storms? What will the outcome mean for the transformation progress and sustainability of Stellenbosch University? Only time will tell.
Madonsela is the director of the Centre for Social Justice at Stellenbosch University and founder of the Thuma Foundation