Wits: A Racist University

The Campus Reformation That Split a University and Foreshadowed a Divided South Africa

Thirty years later, it is difficult to recover the electricity of the moment.

South Africa had just become a democracy. Nelson Mandela was President. The country was still speaking the language of reconciliation with an almost religious conviction. Institutions that had existed for decades within the architecture of white rule were suddenly being asked a deceptively simple question: what does democracy mean inside the institution itself?

At the University of the Witwatersrand, that question acquired a human face.

Malegapuru William Makgoba arrived at Wits in October 1994 from the Royal Postgraduate Medical School in London. He was an accomplished medical scientist, internationally experienced, Oxford-trained and conspicuously ambitious. He was recruited as Deputy Vice-Chancellor and was widely regarded as a serious potential successor to Vice-Chancellor Robert Charlton. Contemporary reporting described him as effectively having been hand-picked for the upper reaches of the institution. (Times Higher Education (THE))

He was also black.

That fact cannot decide whether Makgoba was right or wrong in any particular dispute. But to pretend that it was incidental to what happened at Wits in 1995 would be to remove the historical oxygen from the story.

Wits was entering democracy as a formally liberal university carrying the accumulated social structure of the society from which it had emerged. Its professorial and senior administrative ranks remained overwhelmingly white. Its traditions, systems of recognition, intellectual reference points and informal networks had been constructed over generations when black South Africans had occupied radically unequal positions in the country.

Makgoba did not arrive intending merely to occupy an office in that inherited university.

He intended to change it.

And therein began one of the great institutional battles of democratic South Africa.

The Man Who Would Not Whisper

There had been black intellectuals at Wits before Makgoba. Many had negotiated the institution with extraordinary sophistication. Some survived exclusion by concentrating on scholarship. Some learned the boundaries of what could be said, when it could be said and to whom.

Makgoba belonged to a different historical moment.

Apartheid had formally fallen. Why, therefore, should a black Deputy Vice-Chancellor behave as though the old restraints remained?

He spoke about the Africanisation of the university. He challenged what he called its dominant Eurocentrism. He described parts of the university leadership in language that was extraordinary for a serving executive, including the phrases “small inbred elite” and “junta.” (Times Higher Education (THE))

These were not observations whispered at a dinner table.

They were public interventions.

That distinction is essential when reconsidering the affair thirty years later.

Makgoba was simultaneously an institutional executive and a public intellectual. In the middle of an extremely delicate leadership transition, a man believed capable of becoming the next Vice-Chancellor was publicly criticising the culture and leadership of the very institution he might shortly have to govern.

There was courage in this.

There was also enormous strategic risk.

An academic can provoke. A columnist can attack. An activist can expose hypocrisy. But a Deputy Vice-Chancellor hoping to become Vice-Chancellor occupies another world. He requires coalitions, Council confidence, Senate confidence, relationships with deans, credibility among administrators and the ability to govern people who may intensely disagree with him.

Makgoba behaved as though political transformation had already transformed institutional power.

It had not.

Enter the Thirteen

Against him emerged thirteen senior Wits academics and administrators — eight of them deans, twelve of them white — with historian Charles van Onselen emerging as the most visible force behind their investigation.

They assembled an extraordinary dossier.

Published accounts differ somewhat over descriptions of its length during its development, but the completed dossier was widely reported as running to approximately 297 pages. Its allegations concerned Makgoba's administration, public conduct and aspects of his curriculum vitae. (Times Higher Education (THE))

The affair is sometimes retrospectively flattened into the proposition that thirteen white academics accused a black scientist of possessing fraudulent qualifications.

That is too crude.

Nobody seriously established that Makgoba had invented Oxford, fabricated his medical degree or manufactured an imaginary scientific career. His substantive academic record was formidable.

The attacks concentrated instead on claims around the edges of that record — precisely those elements through which an accomplished person converts accomplishment into exceptional distinction.

Had he really belonged to particular prestigious scientific societies?

Had he received the research grants in the manner represented?

Was a paediatrics certificate correctly described?

Was his publication record presented accurately?

Was he in fact the first black medical graduate to receive a distinction in medicine at the University of Natal?

These questions may appear almost microscopic thirty years later. At the time, they became explosives.

Van Onselen investigated claims including Makgoba's reported membership of the British Transplant Society and American Association of Immunology, grants, a certificate in paediatrics and the claim concerning the first black medical graduate distinction. (Times Higher Education (THE))

The most revealing episode was almost absurdly small.

Van Onselen wrote to the University of Natal asking about the history of black students receiving distinctions. He described the request as part of an “esoteric enquiry” into social history.

It was actually being used to investigate Makgoba.

Natal subsequently asked that the resulting information be removed from the dossier because of the circumstances under which it had been obtained. (Times Higher Education (THE))

That little phrase — esoteric enquiry — captures the moral murkiness into which Wits was descending.

When Verification Becomes Investigation

There is nothing improper about checking a senior executive's credentials.

Universities have an obligation to verify appointments. Vice-Chancellors and Deputy Vice-Chancellors exercise enormous authority. A false qualification or material misrepresentation cannot be excused because its author belongs to a historically oppressed group.

But the question in the Makgoba affair was no longer simply whether Wits should verify a CV.

The question became: what happens when colleagues privately assemble themselves into an investigative formation around one individual?

Van Onselen had himself participated in the process that brought Makgoba to Wits. Yet by late 1995 he was helping lead a forensic excavation of the man's record.

The thirteen believed they were protecting the standards of the university.

Makgoba and many of his supporters saw something quite different: an old establishment deciding that an assertive black executive had crossed an invisible line.

Both perceptions acquired evidence with which to sustain themselves.

For the thirteen, Makgoba's public attacks on Wits demonstrated poor executive judgment and possibly unfitness for higher office.

For Makgoba's supporters, the sheer intensity of the investigation demonstrated the unequal standard being applied to the first powerful black challenger of the inherited order.

And here the affair became larger than the facts in the dossier.

Makgoba Opens the Files

Makgoba did not retreat.

He counter-investigated.

Using access associated with his senior university position, he obtained information from personnel records relating to members of the group investigating him. He then raised counter-allegations involving matters such as tax arrangements, nepotism, qualifications, promotions and remuneration.

His critics regarded this as an abuse of executive access and a serious violation of confidentiality.

Eventually he apologised for accessing the files. Contemporary reporting records him acknowledging that some of his own CV formulations might also have been capable of misunderstanding. (The Independent)

This is the point where later narratives frequently become morally convenient.

One narrative begins the story here:

Makgoba raided confidential files.

But that begins the story halfway through.

Before Makgoba opened the personnel files, the thirteen had already turned themselves into investigators of Makgoba, contacting outside institutions and, in at least one documented instance, obscuring the real purpose of an inquiry.

The two actions were not institutionally identical. Personnel records enjoy special confidentiality and a Deputy Vice-Chancellor has fiduciary responsibilities that ordinary academics do not.

But morally they belonged to the same accelerating logic:

You investigate me. I investigate you.

Once that threshold had been crossed, Wits ceased functioning merely as a university.

It became a battlefield.

Van Onselen and Makgoba: Two Men Built for Collision

Perhaps the catastrophe required these particular personalities.

Charles van Onselen was no timid bureaucrat. Contemporary profiles describe an intellectually formidable historian, combative in seminar rooms and utterly prepared to offend. The Mail & Guardian portrayed him as an “academic street-fighter.” In defending his pursuit of Makgoba, Van Onselen himself framed the matter in stark terms: if he believed someone unfit for senior office might soon run Wits, was he supposed simply to remain silent? (Mail & Guardian)

Makgoba was equally unlikely to retreat from a fight.

Thus Wits acquired two protagonists who each considered silence morally suspect.

One believed academic standards and institutional integrity were under threat.

The other believed transformation itself was being resisted through the language of standards.

Once those propositions hardened, ordinary compromise became almost impossible.

Every administrative act acquired racial meaning.

Every racial argument acquired administrative consequences.

South Africa had entered the room.

The Country Divides Inside a University

The significance of the Makgoba affair is not that everybody chose sides strictly according to race.

They did not.

The significance is that the dispute became intelligible to South Africans through race.

Academic research into the period identifies three major interpretations of the crisis: racial conflict, a succession struggle over the Vice-Chancellorship, and a struggle between competing conceptions of institutional transformation. (WIReDSpace)

All three were probably operating simultaneously.

That is why the affair became so combustible.

If it had merely been a disputed CV, Human Resources could have resolved it.

If it had merely been a succession struggle, Council could have managed it.

If it had merely been a debate about Africanisation, academics could have argued about it.

But once race + succession + transformation + personal credibility + institutional power fused into a single controversy, every possible resolution threatened to symbolise something much larger.

To many black staff and students, Makgoba ceased being simply one difficult Deputy Vice-Chancellor.

He became a test.

Could a black executive enter one of the great historically white universities and redefine its culture from inside?

Or was he welcome only on condition that he inherited the institution rather than transformed it?

To many white academics, another test was operating.

Did transformation mean that ordinary standards of evidence, credentials and executive accountability could no longer be applied to a powerful black official without the investigator being accused of racism?

These anxieties faced one another across the campus.

Neither could see itself in the other's mirror.

The Reformation Analogy

This is where the analogy with the Reformation becomes useful — provided it is used carefully.

The Protestant Reformation did not create every tension that subsequently divided Europe. It revealed, concentrated and institutionalised tensions already developing beneath the old order.

After Luther, arguments about doctrine were no longer merely theological disagreements. They carried questions of political sovereignty, institutional authority, property, identity and civilisation.

The Makgoba affair functioned in miniature in a similar way.

It did not create South Africa's racial division.

It revealed that the great 1994 political settlement had not resolved a deeper argument:

Who defines legitimate authority in the new South Africa?

The old institutional elite could say:

Institutions survive through standards, procedures, accumulated expertise and autonomy. Transformation cannot mean destroying these.

The emerging black institutional class could answer:

Those standards, procedures and traditions were themselves formed within historical exclusion. You cannot simply declare the inherited institution neutral on 27 April 1994.

That disagreement has never disappeared.

It subsequently resurfaced in disputes over affirmative action, university admissions, language, statues, curricula, appointments, decolonisation, land, corporate leadership, the judiciary, the civil service and professional bodies.

The vocabulary changed.

The argument remained.

Wits in 1995 was one of the first great theatres in which post-apartheid South Africa discovered that political liberation had not produced agreement about institutional legitimacy.

The Black Defeat

By December 1995 Makgoba had been suspended after releasing information from confidential personnel files. Education Minister Sibusiso Bengu intervened publicly as the confrontation spiralled. (Times Higher Education (THE))

For black constituencies at Wits, this was no abstract jurisprudential drama.

The university's most prominent black executive — perhaps its future Vice-Chancellor — had been removed from office.

Whatever the procedural justification, the symbolism was devastating.

This is where archival history and lived history can diverge.

Documents record meetings, resolutions, inquiries and settlements.

People remember atmosphere.

A settlement can be legally balanced and still be socially experienced as defeat.

The Wits Transformation Front, Black Staff Forum, SASCO, student representatives and others demanded broader scrutiny not simply of Makgoba but of the investigation itself and of the institution's transformation. (Times Higher Education (THE))

The argument was no longer: Is every line on Makgoba's CV accurate?

It had become:

Who is actually on trial here — Makgoba or Wits?

Dennis Davis and the Settlement

Then came one of the most revealing phases.

Lawyers Dennis Davis and Cecil Wulfsohn entered a mediation described contemporaneously as exceptionally difficult because the parties were so far apart.

The eventual March 1996 settlement was neither Makgoba's vindication nor the thirteen's victory.

The proposed tribunal into Makgoba was abandoned.

There were apologies and acknowledgements.

Makgoba relinquished the Deputy Vice-Chancellorship and accepted a research professorship in the Faculty of Health Sciences.

Nine of the thirteen accepted the agreement.

Four refused.

They were Charles van Onselen, Keith Beavon, Ron Carter and Ian Steadman. Contemporary reporting said they were unhappy that the agreement was vague in places, scrapped the tribunal and — remarkably — did not formally exclude Makgoba from subsequently becoming Vice-Chancellor. (Mail & Guardian)

This is enormously important.

The settlement does not permit the easy conclusion that Makgoba had been proven innocent of everything.

Nor does it permit the easy conclusion that the thirteen had demonstrated him to be a fraudulent academic.

It resembles something more complicated: damage containment in a case in which everyone possessed vulnerabilities and nobody could guarantee what an adjudicated conclusion would do to the university.

A Malcolm Wallis inquiry meanwhile cleared the thirteen of misconduct allegations levelled against them by Makgoba; the Black Staff Forum and Makgoba rejected that outcome. (Times Higher Education (THE))

The historical picture therefore refuses purity.

That is precisely why it remains interesting.

Makgoba's Great Tactical Error

Thirty years later, one can defend Makgoba's insistence on transformation while still asking whether he handled power wisely.

The question becomes especially sharp if he really was within reach of the Vice-Chancellorship.

An executive politician of institutions might have behaved differently.

He might have absorbed insult.

Documented hostility.

Cultivated Council.

Accumulated allies.

Demonstrated faultless administration.

Stopped writing inflammatory public commentary.

Refused every invitation to personalised combat.

And waited.

A year of restraint might have delivered the very office from which much deeper transformation could have been exercised.

Silence in that context would not necessarily have meant surrender.

It could have been strategy.

Makgoba instead fought almost every battle at once.

There is something admirable in that refusal to bend.

There is also something tragically imprudent.

He possessed enormous academic capital but behaved at times as though academic distinction automatically translated into institutional power.

It does not.

Institutions have their own physics.

The Thirteen's Great Tactical Error

But the Gang of 13 committed the mirror-image mistake.

If their concern was genuinely the protection of Wits from an unsuitable future Vice-Chancellor, they chose a method almost guaranteed to convert an administrative problem into a racial constitutional crisis.

Thirteen senior academics.

Twelve white.

Eight deans.

A nearly 300-page dossier.

Private investigations into the black Deputy Vice-Chancellor's history.

Questions about whether he really was the first black person to achieve this or that distinction.

One investigator disguising the purpose of at least one inquiry as “esoteric” social history.

How could such an operation possibly remain merely technical in South Africa in 1995?

Even if every factual question they raised had been legitimate, the political optics were catastrophic.

They gave Makgoba something more powerful than an answer to every allegation.

They gave him a historical narrative.

And Van Onselen Did Not Truly Win

Makgoba suffered the immediate positional defeat.

He moved from Deputy Vice-Chancellor and prospective contender for the highest office to a research professorship.

For those who supported him on campus, that looked and felt like defeat.

But Van Onselen did not emerge carrying Wits intact behind him.

The university remained deeply wounded.

The succession process became tortured. Leadership positions opened. The institution continued wrestling with transformation. The eventual Vice-Chancellor selection itself became another national controversy. Contemporary accounts described a university in prolonged crisis. (Mail & Guardian)

Van Onselen himself eventually left Wits for the University of Pretoria.

Makgoba eventually left too — and later proved that the Wits catastrophe had not ended his capacity to lead major institutions. He became Vice-Chancellor of the University of Natal and later founding Vice-Chancellor of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His subsequent public career included leadership of the Medical Research Council and service as South Africa's first Health Ombud. (National Planning Commission)

History therefore delivered an extraordinary epilogue.

The man whose suitability for senior university leadership had helped tear Wits apart went elsewhere and became a Vice-Chancellor.

The man who had pursued him in defence of Wits eventually left Wits himself.

The battlefield survived neither general.

Thirty Years Later

The easiest retrospective position would be to choose a saint and a villain.

History offers no such comfort.

Makgoba was not simply a helpless victim. He exercised agency, sometimes recklessly. He publicly attacked colleagues and institutional culture while occupying senior executive office. He accessed confidential personnel information. Some formulations in his CV were sufficiently questionable to generate legitimate inquiry.

But the thirteen cannot be transformed retrospectively into disinterested auditors performing an ordinary compliance exercise.

They organised themselves into an extraordinary investigative bloc against one executive in a racially charged institution at the precise moment that power was beginning to move. Their methods themselves became controversial. The racial composition and institutional power of the group inevitably gave their actions meaning beyond whatever intentions individual members possessed.

The affair therefore cannot be reduced to:

racism versus standards.

Nor to:

transformation versus reaction.

It was a collision between an inherited institutional order and a new political age, mediated through flawed human beings.

And perhaps that is why it mattered so much.

The Story South Africa Never Finished

The great unfinished argument of democratic South Africa is not simply whether transformation should occur.

Almost everybody eventually learned to speak the language of transformation.

The unresolved question is:

What is transformation allowed to transform?

May it change demographics but not institutional culture?

May it change institutional culture but not standards?

Who defines those standards?

When does inherited expertise become entrenched privilege?

When does transformation become an excuse for mediocrity?

When does insisting on procedure defend an institution?

When does procedure become the fortress through which accumulated power protects itself?

When does calling out racism identify a real structure?

When does the accusation itself silence legitimate scrutiny?

These questions were roaring through Senate House at Wits thirty years ago.

They are still with us.

This is why the Makgoba affair should be remembered as more than an embarrassing university quarrel about a curriculum vitae.

It was one of the earliest moments when democratic South Africa saw, in concentrated form, the enormous distance between political transfer of power and institutional transformation.

In 1994 the country had changed its sovereign order.

In 1995 Wits discovered that changing the meaning of an institution would be much harder.

The thirteen thought they were investigating a man.

Makgoba thought he was confronting a system.

Black staff and students increasingly believed they were watching the old order defend itself.

Many white academics believed they were watching the new order demand immunity from ordinary standards.

Each side therefore ceased hearing the literal argument being made by the other.

That was the rupture.

Like the Reformation, the importance of the event lay less in the original dispute than in the identities that crystallised around it.

Afterwards it became increasingly possible to inhabit two incompatible South African stories.

In one, transformation was the unfinished work of liberation against institutions still carrying the architecture of white power.

In the other, the defence of institutional standards was becoming increasingly necessary against political demands that threatened autonomous institutions.

Those two South Africas have been arguing with one another ever since.

The Makgoba affair did not create them.

It revealed them.

And thirty years later, perhaps that is why this apparently ancient quarrel at Wits still feels strangely contemporary.

I deliberately made the ending “It revealed them” rather than “it wrecked South Africa in two.” The latter is powerful as your underlying thesis, but historically the stronger argument is that the affair exposed and crystallised a post-1994 schism that was already forming.