PIETERMARITZBURG, South Africa — Going to college in South Africa is not all that different from going to college in the United States.
Like many college campuses, the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg – a city of 300,000 – is a blend of tradition and modernity.
The cornerstone of the Old Main Building proclaims it was laid in 1910, the year of the union of South Africa, while two buildings down, Dell hard drives hum in one of the campus’s three main computer labs.
Here, over 8,000 students spend their weekdays on a campus nestled against the rolling foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains. The summer weather is hot, humid and sometimes broken up by dramatic thunder storms.
Students gripe about finding parking, cram for exams, and hang out in each others’ dorm rooms. On sunny days you can find them on the lawns or playing cricket on the soccer field, and almost every night the campus bar bumps hip-hop and house music, even when it isn’t crowded.
It might not be apparent at first, but this university is – as are almost all universities in South Africa – a key institution in the effort to reverse the oppression of apartheid.
Apartheid, a policy of racial segregation imposed by a white Afrikaner regime, was designed to keep blacks inferior to whites in almost every way. It left the country’s black majority poor and uneducated and was enforced by police violence and state-sponsored terrorism.
It was only after years of inner turmoil that at times bordered on civil war that the Afrikaner government rescinded apartheid policies and held open elections in 1994. Since then, the “New South Africa” has undergone reforms to try to balance wealth and power between the white minority and black majority, with mixed success.
Universities have played a vital part in the 10 years of transition.
Previously dominated by white students, the UKZN campus in Pietermaritzburg now has a student body that is 52 percent black and 25 percent white – though these statistics are still a far cry from reflecting the make-up of South Africa’s population, which is 75 percent black and 14 percent white.
Having a university education opens doors to students who, under apartheid, would have had their futures dictated to them.
Having an education is important in a country where half the population is below the poverty line and where estimates of unemployment range from 31 percent to 42 percent.
“Universities certainly make it more likely you will get employed,” said Liz Gunner, the acting director of the campus’ new Center for African Literary Studies, who estimated unemployment in the Pietermaritzburg area could be as high as 60 percent. “The university’s seen as a way up.”
And a way out. The end of apartheid created avenues for escape from suburban township life for millions of young blacks. Many of these townships consist of shacks that can house anywhere from 5 to 10 people in a single room, and sometimes they seem held together with nothing more than cardboard and faith.
Compared to life in the townships, where crime, AIDS and unemployment are rampant, the chance to pursue a college degree is alluring, to say the least.
But education does not come easy. For every disadvantaged student who makes it, countless others do not.
The biggest problem may be the grade school system. Many of the public schools open to poor, primarily black youths, even after 10 years of reform, are still shoddy by any standards. Classes are overcrowded, many of the teachers unmotivated, and they lack basic supplies such as books and even chalk.
“You’ve got a shell of a building, one who anyone from a civilized country would not even consider a school,” said Linelle Irvine, the coordinator of the Human Sciences Alternative Access Program, which seeks to aid disadvantaged students.
“So there are thousands of students out there who have hardly what could be called an education. They’ve had schooling, but not an education. These are students who, through no fault of their own, will not meet entrance requirements to a university.”
Those few students who are able to enroll know one thing above all –education is golden.
Sanele Nene, a third-year political science student in Pietermaritzburg, is one of those few.
A resident of the Newtown township near Durban – a port city on the Indian Ocean – Nene grew up in the schools Irvine described. And now he is one semester from graduation.
Nene calls himself “hard hearted,” and he does not display much emotion when he talks. But he has facts at his fingertips, and he can speak just as knowledgeably about the inner-workings of the South African government as he can about violence in the townships.
“I could kill you for your sandals if I wanted to,” he said of the crime in rural areas without batting an eyelid. “Actually, I could kill you for nothing. I would put a gun to your head and kill you. It’s not about respect anymore. It’s about people wanting to be feared.”
Nene should know: He grew up during the years of violence when the African National Congress – now the dominant political party in South Africa – and the Inkatha Freedom Party fought over the direction they felt post-apartheid South Africa should take. They turned townships into war zones, and many believe it was at the instigation of the waning Afrikaner apartheid government.
At the time, Nene lived with his aunt and uncle and seven other family members in a house in Newtown. He remembers having to spend three days and nights living near a river because the fighting had made his neighborhood unlivable.
During the day, he and the other kids would play in the water, but they were always alert to a warning whistle or shout.
“Sometimes we would wake up at 2 or 3 a.m. just to run because we knew we were being attacked,” he said.
He remembers enjoying school –when it wasn’t interrupted by violence. He always wanted to attend a university, but the quality of his local high school made that dream unlikely. There were no college guidance counselors, and many of the teachers were under-qualified and over-worked.
Some classrooms had no windows, doors or even ceilings.
“Sometimes when it was raining the teachers wouldn’t come, and when it was too hot, classes were canceled,” Nene remembers.
He scored too low on his high school exams to qualify for a shot at a university. And even if Nene had qualified, it was doubtful his family, who made less than 60,000 rand a year – about $10,000 – could pay for him to go to a university. Tuition at UKZN ranges from $2,000 to $2,500 a year, depending on the school.
“At first they used to say, ‘Hey, take your applications, and if you’re accepted, great, but how are you going to pay for it?’” he said of his family.
Undaunted, he started looking around at different universities, willing to go almost anywhere for an education.
He might never have gone anywhere had he not stumbled across Irvine and the Alternative Access Program in Pietermaritzburg.
The access program, pioneered and run by Irvine, seeks to bridge the gap between students who are well prepared to handle a university education and students like Nene.
Students who enter the access program – often on financial aid – take an extra year’s worth of classes to learn basic computer, reading and writing skills, and also a year of English instruction.
The program also seeks to build students’ self-confidence and encourages them to question each other and their teachers – something that Irvine calls an “enormous step” for black students coming from a rural community.
Irvine and other access program staff essentially face the monumental task of reversing decades of apartheid-era restrictions on black education.
“These students need more support than they can get in a one-year program,” Irvine acknowledged.
Nene heard about the program when he visited the Pietermaritzburg campus.
He was told to come the next week to take a test and have an interview, and he did. Two days later, he received a phone call saying he was accepted.
The best part: The admittance came with the necessary financial aid.
“At first no one could believe it when I received financial aid,” he remembers. “They only believed it when I was signing the forms.”
Now, four years and a lifetime later, Nene will be part of the first access program class to graduate from the university. He is considering taking another year to do post-graduate work before looking for a career in diplomacy, possibly with the African Union, to give something back to his continent.
For someone who professes to have a hard heart, he seems to have a soft spot for his fellow Africans. “I don’t like seeing people suffer,” he said.
As for the access program, it has grown over the past four years – this year they accepted 62 students and next year are aiming for 80 – and some of the five other campuses in the UKZN system are adopting similar programs.
But Irvine said the program’s growth has been restricted by funding, and the program has to turn away far more people than they accept.
“You start starry-eyed and thinking you’ll perform miracles, and the miracles have not been performed,” she said.
Nevertheless, Irvine said it’s been an experience she won’t soon forget. She still recalls with fondness the different students she has met and taught – from the goat-herder who wanted to get an education to the gas station attendant who decided she wanted more from life.
And she remembers one “breakthrough” moment she had with Nene when, in class, he challenged another student in a debate, something the access program staff had been trying to get its students to do all along.
“I thought: ‘Yes! He’s got it!’” Irvine exclaimed as she related the story, raising her fist triumphantly and grinning as if it had just happened yesterday.