The Classics and South African Identities by Lambert Michael;

Author:Lambert, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

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The Classics and Black South African Identities

I performed in only a few dramas, but I had one memorable role: that of Creon, the king of Thebes, in Sophocles’ Antigone.

Nelson Mandela on Robben Island,

in Mandela 1994: 441

Homeland universities

As we noted in Chapter 1, the absurdly-named Extension of University Education Act (no. 45 of 1959) established university colleges for each ‘ethnic’ group in keeping with the ‘separate but equal’ tenet of apartheid ideology. As a course in Latin at tertiary level was still a requirement for the law degree and Hellenistic Greek was required for the training of ministers of religion, separate departments of Greek and Latin, which at times coalesced into Departments of Classics, had to be established at the ‘homeland’ universities.

As with most master plans which require social engineering, anomalies often occur and the first anomaly was that a university for blacks, which included Africans, ‘Coloureds’ and Indians, already existed in the Eastern Cape – the University of Fort Hare, established in 1916, which had emerged from the missionary institute of Lovedale, had attracted black students from all over Africa and was now ‘to serve the Xhosa group’ (Behr and MacMillan 1966: 216). The independent homeland of the Transkei lobbied for the establishment of a university in its capital, Umtata (now Mthata), and this university came into being in 1976, the year of the Soweto uprising.

It is with the ‘Cinderella of the Classics departments of South Africa’ (Wakerley 1985: 101-2) at the University of Transkei (Unitra) that I would like to begin this chapter, as this offers an especially interesting insight into the teaching of Classics by white academics, and identity construction mobilised around language, at ‘homeland’ universities during the apartheid era.

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