At least some people choose to live in Grahamstown because of its remoteness, and some because of its small-town nature.
At least some people choose to live in Grahamstown because of its remoteness, and some because of its small-town nature.
Others, I’m sure, long for the connectedness and energy of city life. All must be aware that at one stage Grahamstown was a major centre.
Rhodes University benefits from the fact that it is around 900km from every big urban centre, allowing students and staff fewer distractions from academic activity and that it has a student body manageable in size.
Having attended Wits as a student, I can speak from experience about the alienating experience of being one of many rattling around a huge campus.
Does the Eastern Cape, however, benefit from having three universities in close proximity?
It is at first glance puzzling that Nelson Mandela Municipal University and Fort Hare were not merged with Rhodes in the period that saw the other universities and technikons forcibly joined together – though a relief for each of the Eastern Cape academic institutions, I’m sure.
Rhodes University’s splendid isolation is not a matter of historical chance.
NMMU, which used to be the University of Port Elizabeth, owes its existence, by one account, to a conservative city council in that city objecting to the presence of a PE branch of Rhodes.
The council invited the Nationalist government to establish a university in PE in 1964 to replace the Port Elizabeth Division of Rhodes University established a few years earlier.
According to Rhodes official history, Fort Hare used to be affiliated to Rhodes until the Nationalist Party government, despite the objections of the university, disaffiliated it.
This kind of fragmentation is mirrored elsewhere. Both East London and Port Elizabeth have ports, yet enormous sums were sunk into the construction of the Coega deepwater port in the hopes of setting up an aluminium smelter.
Port Elizabeth is only 130km away from Grahamstown, and 173km away from East London – yet there is no rail link. To travel by train from Johannesburg, you have to board and alight at Alicedale.
Added to the lack of physical links are the psychological ones. Sometimes I think Grahamstown is more connected to the rest of the country than to the Eastern Cape.
Certainly, the former homeland areas seem to be beyond the pale, in the original sense of that phrase, where “the pale” was a fence separating the English settlers from the oppressed populace in Ireland.
This separation has its roots in our colonial past, as historian Jeff Peires has so vividly described in a chapter on the political economy history of the region in the book, Fate of the Eastern Cape.
“The historical legacy which the present EC inherits from its former local ruling class is one of failure and fragmentation, vacuity and absence."
"Transformation in the EC is a mammoth task. It is not enough for the present provincial government simply to transform what was. The putative economic foundations of the EC were never properly laid because the EC was politically fragmented and it lacked a government of its own.”
The province has been bedevilled by continuities of economic fragmentation, dispossession and exploitation.
Communal land ownership and the role of traditional leaders, entrenched by the homeland system, have not, I think, been sorted out.
The ANC has preferred compromise to confrontation, and its rural development policies could be seen as a palliative and pandering to a system that is in conflict with modern and increasingly urban realities.
Underlining the pull of urbanisation, a worldwide phenomenon, the Eastern Cape is losing population to other provinces as people migrate to cities for better economic opportunities.
It is not that economic activity is absent.
The Eastern Cape still has major motor manufacturers, for instance.
Given the province’s natural beauty, and its resources and long manufacturing history, the area could be much more vibrant and many more employment opportunities created.
It is, I think, a problem of no shared vision.
Labour, government and business have to agree that job creation is a priority, and compromises will have to be made. One of those compromises is described in a recent Sunday Times article on the successful Aspen Pharmacare drug factory in PE.
Apart from overturning expectations of what can be done in the Eastern Cape, the story relates how the company persuaded workers of the need for higher productivity, even though this would lead to retrenchment of workers in the short term.
The Eastern Cape motor industry also shows what can be done.
The motor industry in the province during the apartheid years was strike-ridden and supported by tariff protection.
It now has the capacity to export in competition with factories in the developed world. If the motor industry can overcome what seemed to be interminable labour problems, and the poor education the province is notorious for, we should learn how it was done and replicate it.
