Vieser en Vieser oor Fischer: A participant's notes on a controversy over an honorary degree

Hermann Giliomee

In September this year the University of Stellenbosch (US) decided to award an honorary degree to Abram Fischer, former leader of the South African Communist Party (SACP), who died 1976 shortly after serving ten years of a sentence of life imprisonment for attempting to overthrow the state.

The US awarded several honorary degrees to National Party leaders in the apartheid era. The university staff did not oppose this. The main reason was the ideological solidarity in the Afrikaner community until late in the era of Afrikaner nationalist rule. Partly to redress an imbalance, since the 1994 election the US has awarded honorary degrees to several leading representatives of the ANC-led government and to people seen as closely aligned to the African National Congress (ANC) in the struggle years.

These included Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Desmond Tutu, Beyers Naudé, Trevor Manuel and Jakes Gerwel. There were no protests by US staff against the awarding of these degrees.

However, many have felt that a degree for Abram Fischer is a bridge too far, one political honorary degree too many.

The degree is problematic for several reasons. First, it is a posthumous degree, which universities very rarely award. Second, Fischer had no ties with the University of Stellenbosch. Third, neither the government nor any English-language university has honored Fischer in any significant way. Even his own alma mater, the University of the Free State, is yet to honour him.

None of these objections is insuperable, yet together they should at least make one rather uncomfortable when the US suddenly deviates from the practice of not awarding posthumous degrees and decides to award one to Fischer.

But the real objection is that Fischer does not seem to meet the requirements of the US statute for honorary degrees. How can the US, whose statute decrees that its honorary degrees must reflect its "strewes" (strivings), award a degree to Fischer, whose obituary in the African Communist referred to his "unswerving loyalty to the ideas of Marxist-Leninism and communism"? Either the US strewes mean something - the endorsement of certain values and of appropriate strategies to realise them - or they are so wyd soos die Here se genade ("as wide-ranging as the grace of God") en hence mean so little that the word should be expunged.

It is in this sense that the Fischer debate goes to the heart of the US corporate identity. Either the US still has links with the "strewes" of the past - the pre-1994 ideas and values (shorn, of course, of any racism and racial privilege) and the pre-1994 commitment to make the language of Afrikaans central in the pursuit of excellence and of service to the community, or Stellenbosch has opted to become just like any other university and is willing to sacrifice Afrikaans for the sake of progressive transformation.

In October and November 2004 there was a vigorous debate in the Afrikaans press between supporters and opponents of a degree for Fischer. A group of alumni tabled a motion at the US Convocation held on 11 November in which it asked Council to review the award of a degree to Fischer, arguing that he did not meet the requirements for an honorary degree. Tertius Delport, chairperson of the Students' Representative Council in 1962 and a cabinet minister in the De Klerk government, headed this group.

I was among those who seconded the motion. Convocation accepted a compromise motion. It affirmed that the correct procedures had been followed and that Fischer should be awarded an honorary degree, but that the university acknowledged that unhappiness existed among its alumni. The meeting defeated an amendment which asked that Fischer be honoured because of his fight against injustice. The upshot of it all is that the decision to award an honorary degree to Fischer stands. The ceremony will take place in December.

Fischer as revolutionary
In his 1966 trial for treason even Fischer's defence team conceded that the SACP, of which Fischer was the leader, had planned and instigated a violent revolution to overthrow white supremacy.

The only point in dispute is: What would have happened if the revolution succeeded?

The defence team denied that the SACP planned to introduce a despotic government in the place of the system of white supremacy; the state contested that. (Governments that came to power with a significant communist component in the two decades after the end of the Second World showed very little respect for human rights.)

Alan Paton, the leading liberal of the time, was not sanguine about the prospects for peace under a revolutionary government. He had warm affection for Fischer and agreed to his request to testify for the defence in the Rivonia Trial, but he had no doubt that communists with their hands on the levers of power would spell great danger, particularly with the Cold War at its height.

He disagreed with a fellow liberal who told him that he would be the first to be killed if Bram Fischer's party in alliance with the ANC seized power, but, in his own words, "was ready to believe that if (my) friend Bram came to power an emissary would be sent to me with a one-way ticket, and with a message to 'get out of here as fast as possible'".

Supporters of the Fischer degree tried to dismiss the claim that Fischer supported Stalinism and violent class war as a repetition of the scare tactics of the Nationalist Party (NP) government, which regularly used the "red peril" to rally white voters. Some cited long passages from Fischer's statements during his trial in which he tried to prove that his goal was basically benign and peaceful. Yet no one mentioned that Fischer never allowed himself to be cross-examined. His speeches were all made from the dock, to which courts never attach undue weight.

Those favouring the degree say that the honour is appropriate because the the South African Communist Party, which Fischer led in the 1950s and 1960s, is prepared today to live under a free market system, albeit reluctantly. They also argue that since fellow travellers of Fischer today support human rights and respect for the law, Fischer would have done the same had he lived until 1994. Others say that it would do no harm to honour Fischer because communism died 15 years ago.

These pro-degree arguments violate the most basic rules of historical understanding - always study the past for its own sake, always judge people within their own historical context and never project today's political values on to the past.

Prof A Gagiano, in a letter to the Sunday Times (28 November), suggested that history changes as the present changes and called for a reinterpretation of Fischer's contribution. Yes, each generation tries to understand history anew, but the ground rule is that the past is judged on its own terms and not on the basis of contemporary values and morals. And one does not rewrite history in order to celebrate the winners of today, otherwise we end up with the Orwellian aphorism: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

As the highly-regarded British historian Herbert Butterfield wrote in The Whig Interpretation of History, "When we organize our general history by reference to the present we are producing what is really a giant optical illusion."

Fischer must, in fact, be judged on the score of the SACP programme published in early 1963. Despite the notoriously slippery nature, or doublespeak, of communist rhetoric - it is fairly self-evident that that organisation (and therefore ipso facto Fischer) was not fighting either for non-racialism or for democracy as we understand those terms today. This is quite apart from its economic programme calling for the nationalisation of land, the mines, etc.

Among its proposals were, in line with Lenin's prescriptions, that the

revolutionary people of South Africa cannot merely take over existing State and government institutions designed to maintain colonialism, but must destroy them and create new people's institutions in their place.

While the state would "guarantee the fullest liberty of speech and thought" this was counterbalanced against the requirement that

racialistic and counter-revolutionary propaganda must be forbidden. People must be free to discuss and debate all schools of democratic and progressive opinion" (my italics).

A racialised version of the dictatorship of the proleteriat would also have been introduced:

In order to extend the gains of the revolution, particularly in the conditions of South Africa, the utmost vigilance must be exercised against those who would seek to organise counter-revolutionary plots, intrigues and sabotage, against all attempts to restore White colonialism and destroy democracy ... a vigorous and vigilant dictatorship must be maintained by the people against the former dominating and exploiting classes. Towards this end, the Party will propose the disbandment of the police and military forces maintained by white colonialism. A new people's militia and people's liberation army, composed of and led by trusted representatives of the people, must be created. (See The African Communist, Vol 2 No 2, Jan-Mar 1963)

So, let us say whites were swayed by Fischer's statement from the dock, and the scales of racial prejudice fell from their eyes. What was the alternative programme he (and his party) was offering? It was one where, aside from the extensive expropriation of white-owned farmland and businesses, there would be extensive racial discrimination against white South Africans in educational opportunities and employment, as the SACP/ANC set about a rapid programme of Africanisation. It would be a "vigorous and vigilant dictatorship" where the white minority, and their political representatives, would in all likelihood be suppressed as counter-revolutionary elements by a state machinery now in the hands of the ANC/SACP.1 If this was the only choice white South Africans had - between apartheid and a special blend of Africanism and communism - the fact that most whites chose apartheid in the 1960s and only a very small proportion chose communism should hardly surprise anyone.

That Fischer chose the violent route to realise his aims should not in itself rule him out for an honorary degree. But what worried me in some of the justifications was the glib assumption that violence was the only option available in the early 1960s and that apartheid could not be reformed by peaceful means. To accept this is to accept the dangerous assumption that our freedom and democracy are solely due to the struggle of the ANC/SACP. Such a history denies whites any meaningful role, now and forever.

Stephen Clingman, Fischer's biographer, entered the debate to say that universities should honour the person, not his ideology. A member of the University Council argued that the same rule should apply to Fischer as to an inventor with reactionary political principles: the invention could be lauded, but the principles could be forgotten.

These arguments simply do not hold water. For Fischer, the national democratic revolution was his lifeblood for which he sacrificed his freedom and career. It is to demean the courage and dignity with which he fought for his cause to minimise those elements dearest to him.

Yet I can imagine myself supporting a Fischer degree in some specific circumstances. A historically Afrikaans university could decide to award two posthumous honorary degrees to commemorate the moral complexities of the struggle that was waged between 1950 and 1990. The awards would honour both Bram Fischer and NP van Wyk Louw (a foremost Afrikaner poet and essayist who was also a staunch Afrikaner nationalist) on the following grounds: both embraced an obnoxious ideology, and both were prepared to condone violent state coercion in support of their ideology. However, both were committed to a noble principle: the dismantling of apartheid (to say "non-racialism" would contradict the earlier point) in Fischer's case, and "survival in justice" in Louw's case (the conviction that it was unacceptable to pursue survival at the expense of justice).

The main problem with the arguments of the Fischer supporters was that they tried to airbrush his political convictions out of the picture. A political argument that does not attach the highest priority to the unvarnished truth is in trouble.

A university is in serious trouble if a political debate on a honorary degree is circumscribed by the demand by one side that unpalatable truths should not be spoken. Somehow the strange idea developed in the pro-Fischer ranks that to call Fischer a communist was an insult and that it entailed holding him personally responsible for the deaths of millions in Europe and the Soviet Union.

That Fischer was a Stalinist is generally accepted in the academic literature. It means simply that he was strongly influenced by the form of communism that developed in the Soviet Union and that he did not question or challenge the ideas and actions of the Soviet government. In 1967 the Soviet government awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize, the Soviet equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize. The idea that the anti-Fischer group holds him personally responsible for the deaths ordered by Stalin is risible. (One does kind of wonder how someone who spoke so passionately against 90-day detention without trial, and the encroaching police state in South Africa, could see so little wrong with Soviet Russia, show trials, the gulag etc.)

There is also another troubling issue: Has the university's Council and management chosen to use Fischer simply to improve the image of Stellenbosch as a Politically Correct university? The extremes to which some of the faculty are prepared to travel on the PC route is demonstrated by an article by Lizette Rabe, professor of journalism at US. She wrote:

Communism has never been declared a crime against humanity. Apartheid has. Any question of which is the bigger evil?

The matter of Soviet communism's 66 million deaths is but a small hurdle for apartheid to cross to reach the top of the league of evil regimes.

She seems unaware that it was the communist bloc, led by the Soviet Union, that persuaded the General Assembly of the United Nations in the early 1970s to condemn apartheid and Zionism as crimes against humanity (The United States's muscle compelled the UN to rescind the Zionism part.) No major Western country signed the UN convention on crimes against humanity which ensued from the proposal.

Hence the supporters of the Fischer degree could not entertain the possibility that the opposition to the degree could be resting on some sound principles - that it is bad policy to award posthumous degrees, that the university should not politicise its honorary degrees, and that the university should refrain from taking sides in the party political battles waged over the present and past.

There was a concerted attempt to depict the opposition as somehow emanating from a deep resentment of the new order, perhaps even from nostalgia for the Cold War. Jeremy Cronin wrote that the debate "has smoked out those individuals who remain stuck in a Cold War position". Die Burger's "Dawie" column, usually written by the editor or deputy editor, maintained that the opponents of the degree "glorify their heroes, prettify apartheid, refuse to see or hear women and students, and want to reserve certain holy places for their exclusive use."

Anthony Holiday insists that Stellenbosch "must cleanse itself by honoring him [Fischer]". He labelled those who question the degree as anti-democratic, verkrampte reactionaries.

Holiday's idea that a university in a democratic South Africa can still be described as unclean is frightening. One wonders whether it portends a new Jacobinism intolerant of any institution that does not honour the prescribed heroes. Rabe, in fact, proposes affirmative degree-giving to "communists" (her quotation marks) to compensate for those given to apartheid prime ministers.

The political significance of the affair
In recent years a new rule has replaced the belief in constitutional protection: that there is less chance of the government acting to the detriment of an institution (or a corporation) if that institution pays obeisance to government and to the ANC as a liberation movement. Such institution must also pursue affirmative action as fast as possible. The government does not demand that its leaders and favourite sons and daughters be honoured, but it will certainly develop negative perceptions if such awards are not made. Hence honorary degrees become like premiums in a fire insurance policy.

What the Fischer controversy makes clear is this: once an institution announces that it intends to honour one of the regime's favourite sons or daughters a storm will ensue if the honour is withdrawn. We live in an age in which politics is turned into public theatre. For supporters of the Fischer degree it is outrageous that the credentials of a man they consider a symbol and a martyr can be questioned in public.

The supporters of the Fischer degree were made up of a strange alliance of the "white left" (who feel that whites have not repented enough for apartheid) and people who did well out of the old regime but now believe that a degree for Fischer, together with deference to government, is the price that has to be paid for the protection of Afrikaans and from further government intervention in university matters. What held the alliance together was the belief that the government would be furious if opposition to the degree led to the decision's being rescinded.

In the press debate the supporters of Fischer offered very few arguments. There were the same mindless, insulting attacks on individuals as there used to be in the 1960s when liberals were labelled communists. As in the 1960s those who spoke for the regime could utter only The Scream, "You are stupid, behind the times, ungrateful. You do not know the realities of Africa. You do not know that your only protection is the government. You are destroying white-black harmony."

Addressing the US Convocation meeting of 11 November, 2004 the rector, Professor Chris Brink, warned against alumni "who act as if they have a monopoly in deciding who are the icons of Stellenbosch". He said that this is damaging the image of Stellenbosch in the eyes of South Africa and the world. (Brink did not mention that there had been no resistance to US degrees for Mandela, Mbeki, Manuel, Beyers Naudé and Gerwel.)

No alumnus I know of has ever proposed that Convocation should have the right to monopolise decisions about honorary degrees. All the Delport group was doing was to put a motion at the Convocation requesting Council to re-examine the idea of a degree for Fischer. The very idea that anyone claimed a monopoly on these matters is preposterous.

Conclusion
The one good thing about the Fischer affair is the vigorous debate over the issue and the widespread public interest it has aroused in the Afrikaner community. The relationship between the Afrikaner elite and the ruling elite, the use of honorary degrees, and the character of the university have all come into sharp focus. My hope is that in future there will be a greater awareness of the need for universities to maintain a critical distance from government and the ruling elite, and neutrality towards the party political divisions of both the present and the past.

Our democracy has been seriously eroded over the past ten years. Criticism of the government is mute and one of the most worrying developments is the disappearance of the activist university of the1980s, which took tough stands on government policy failures. It would be a great tragedy if the obsequious award of honorary degrees by South African universities signalled a retreat from the position of 20 years ago characterised, at least on some campuses, by an independence of mind and a resistance to government bullying. Such a retreat would leave both universities and its honorary degrees without honor.

Notes:

1 I have drawn some of the ideas expressed here from correspondence with James Myburgh, but I am solely responsible for the way they are formulated here.



LitNet: 9 December 2004

boontoe / to the top

© Kopiereg in die ontwerp en inhoud van hierdie webruimte behoort aan LitNet, uitgesluit die kopiereg in bydraes wat berus by die outeurs wat sodanige bydraes verskaf. LitNet streef na die plasing van oorspronklike materiaal en na die oop en onbeperkte uitruil van idees en menings. Die menings van bydraers tot hierdie werftuiste is dus hul eie en weerspieël nie noodwendig die mening van die redaksie en bestuur van LitNet nie. LitNet kan ongelukkig ook nie waarborg dat hierdie diens ononderbroke of foutloos sal wees nie en gebruikers wat steun op inligting wat hier verskaf word, doen dit op hul eie risiko. Media24, M-Web, Ligitprops 3042 BK en die bestuur en redaksie van LitNet aanvaar derhalwe geen aanspreeklikheid vir enige regstreekse of onregstreekse verlies of skade wat uit sodanige bydraes of die verskaffing van hierdie diens spruit nie. LitNet is ’n onafhanklike joernaal op die Internet, en word as gesamentlike onderneming deur Ligitprops 3042 BK en Media24 bedryf.