Description

Drawing on an extensive array of sources--written, oral, and visual--this richly illustrated volume provides a rounded social, intellectual, educational, cultural, and political history of one of Africa's foremost universities during the first phase of apartheid.It puts a spotlight on its leaders, lecturers, and learners, but its wide focus takes in many other dimensions of this heterogeneous institution's history too--teaching and research, social, cultural, and sporting life, and its chequered relationship with the apartheid state, ranging from formal opposition, protest, and students' growing defiance that culminated in the sit-in of 1968, to ambivalence and willing collaboration. All of these are woven together into a many-sided whole to produce an elegant, accessible, and nuanced study of the operation of UCT as apartheid began to be imposed on South Africa. Howard Phillips gives us a pioneering and definitive history of the period, one which will occupy pride of place on the bookshelves of the academics and the thousands of alumni who helped shape this history and the many ordinary Capetonians touched by Varsity.