A colourless lot

At a debate in the House of Assembly on the bill that would transfer control of Fort Hare to the government, a minister said one of the real reasons officials wanted to assume control of the university was the danger it posed to the policy of apartheid. Saying that it was essential to put ‘a stop to the continued existence of Fort Hare in its present form’, Minister G.P. van den Berg called the college ‘a colourless lot of people, a university without a character of its own’. In reality, it was not the absence of character, but the presence of a colourful cross-section of the multi-racial South African population that angered the government. For Fort Hare showed that the races of South Africa could live, work and play together. To Isaac Mabindisa, a student at Fort Hare in the late 1950s, the college's multi-racial nature was its biggest asset:

At the last official college function before the takeover by the government in 1960, Gertrude Darroll, an English lecturer, said that Fort Hare was not a university, but a ‘diversity’. Terence Beard calls pre-1960 Fort Hare a ‘microcosm of a non-racial society in the heart of apartheid South Africa’.5 With the National Party elected to power on its apartheid platform, to have a place where Indians, coloureds, and blacks mixed freely and happily powerfully showed, as Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri suggests, ‘what was possible’.6 Yet this possibility was precisely what the Nationalists wanted to break down. In 1955, word reached Fort Hare that the government intended to assume control of African university education.