During early 1959 I travelled overnight from Durban by the Southampton bound Edinburgh Castle, one of the ships that were operated by the Union- Castle Line. I disembarked at its next port of call, East London, in the Eastern Cape. My final destination was Fort Hare, where I would commence studies towards a Bachelor of Science degree. From East London I boarded a train and alighted at a small railway siding called Blaney. From there I took another train bound for Port Elizabeth and got off at Alice railway station. A few kilometres from that railway station was Fort Hare – ‘the most historically significant institution for higher education in sub-equatorial Africa’. This was the beginning of a roller-coaster period of three years in my life.

Although I had become politically conscious at the tender age of six, when, with my father, I followed the 1948 surge to power of the National Party (NP) of Dr Malan and the demise of the United Party of General Smuts, and the following year, the tragedy of the anti-Indian riots in Durban and, in 1952, the Defiance Campaign, I had spent the four years, 1955–1958, in the relatively cloistered environment of a Roman Catholic boarding High School at Inkamana in Northern Natal run by German nuns and monks of the Benedictine Order, largely shielded from the debilitating effects of Bantu education and the tumultuous events of the mid-fifties. Fort Hare was an eye opener. The year 1959 was a hectic year in the history of South Africa, in general, and Fort Hare, in particular. Political activity in the country was at fever pitch. The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) had exploded onto the political scene after Robert Sobukwe and others had broken off from the African National Congress (ANC). The racist regime headed by the National Party had entrenched itself in power with a battery of oppressive measures that found themselves on the statute book masquerading under the guise of laws. The subjugation of, especially the indigenous people of the country was becoming more severe, particularly after the introduction of the devastating Bantu Education in the mid-fifties. Many educators, including my father and my uncle Michael, the musicologist, both of whom, together with their sister Renee, were ex-Fort Harians, had resigned from teaching in protest against Bantu education.