My first book, ``It’s a black white thing,’’ details the integration struggles at South Africa’s University of the Free State, once reserved for whites. In 2008, the university in South Africa’s heartland found itself at the center of an international uproar over a racist video white students made to announce their opposition to allowing fellow black students to live at their dormitory.
When I visited the university after “It’s a black white thing” was published, a professor paid me the compliment of saying he recognized himself in my book. Others told me that they hoped the book could help spark the hard conversations they believe South Africans need to have about race, identity and change. Those are conversations I know Americans also are working to have -- since returning to the United States after 19 years as a foreign correspondent in South Africa and elsewhere, I have written about issues such as concern about racism at the University of Colorado’s dental school and how a small town in eastern Colorado coped with the arrival of scores of Somali refugees.
At Free State on my book tour, in addition to compliments and hope that my book would encourage introspection, I heard complaints that the strategies South African university leaders had adopted to foster cooperation and respect across racial and ethnic lines were nothing but words.
Following the scandal over the racist video, Jonathan Jansen, a black educator, took over as rector, or president of the University of the Free State.
In addition to his administrative duties, Jansen took time to teach a class on understanding the violence and divisions of South Africa’s past. He told me students brought their parents’ fears to the class. White students had heard during dinner-table conversations complaints that affirmative action for black South Africans would end opportunities for white South Africans. They’d read sensational newspaper stories of black farm workers seizing land from white farmers. They’d been steeped in a relentless chorus by Afrikaner media and lobbying groups decrying crime and corruption in clear, if coded, racial tones.
Black parents who had endured physical and psychological violence at the hands of whites cautioned their children to be wary. Manto Rantsho, a 19-year-old black accounting student from the small Free State town of Welkom, told me her parents fear she’ll one day be rebuffed or hurt by her new white friends. She said she understands their perspective, honed by decades of apartheid.
Jansen saw among students in his class that “any talk about the past gets them so uptight. The mere fact that we’re talking history (in class) is enough to drive some kids over the edge.”
Students would tell their president-professor that they wanted to put the past behind them. Jansen countered that that has been tried, and it failed.
“Even though we tried to get out of the past, it keeps coming up. So let’s learn emotional, psychological skills to cope.”
One text that Jansen asks students to read is a letter that Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a jail in Birmingham, Alabama.
It was 1963 and King had been detained for taking part in a civil-rights march. In his cell, King responded to an open letter in which fellow clergymen had advised him to abandon his campaign of non-violent resistance. King expresses disappointment that some white church leaders misconstrue his methods, but adds, “I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom.”
Jansen calls that letter “a beautiful testament of Martin Luther King’s understanding of the white clergy, for example, as brothers as opposed to enemies, and yet having to speak to those issues of togetherness in a very direct way.”
As he took over Free State, Jansen delivered an inaugural address that was published in several national South African newspapers. In that speech, he offered forgiveness to the anti-integration students, who had been expelled because of their video and the social media storm surrounding it. He said it was useless to make scapegoats of young men for a problem all South Africans needed to confront. Jansen’s speech also outlined an approach to fostering unity in a country that remained, and still remains, deeply divided because of apartheid. The residual effects of apartheid will not disappear without work and time. As part of that work, Jansen said in his address that he would be sending Free State students to study abroad to build the skills they would need to be leaders on a multiracial campus and in a multiracial world. Jansen’s experiment became known as the F1 Program. Jansen sent his youngest students, whom we would call freshman, abroad.
Jansen had seen his students’ vulnerability. He wanted them to learn to see it as a valuable tool. He recognized, from his own experience, that traveling far from home can help us be vulnerable and open enough to hear someone else’s perspective.
The emotional and psychological skills Jansen wants to foster come down to talking and listening with respect -- for others as well as for yourself.
Mere words? A word is powerful. The right one from a teacher can heal and encourage constructive action; the wrong one can wound and destroy.