By RIAAN DE VILLIERS
DAYSPRING, a memoir by the South African-born student activist, poet, novelist and educator C.J. (Jonty) Driver, was launched at Clarke’s Bookshop in Cape Town on 16 July 2024. Driver died in England in May 2023, and Dayspring has been published posthumously.
The launch took the form of a discussion between the literary scholar Prof David Attwell and Maeder Osler, founder of Toverview, who worked closely with Driver during his years in the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), and succeeded him as NUSAS president.
Edited by J.M. Coetzee, another lifelong friend and Jonty’s brother-in-law, who also wrote a foreword, Dayspring tells the story of Jonty’s increasingly eventful life in South Africa up to 1965, when he left for England to escape growing pressure from the apartheid state. His book Some Schools (2016) continues his life story up to 2000, concentrating on his career as an educator. Driver also wrote prolifically throughout his life, producing ten collections of poetry, five novels, and numerous works of non-fiction.
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Driver was born in Cape Town in 1939 as the son of an Anglican clergyman and educator, and had an eventful early life in various towns and schools. While studying at UCT, he became involved in the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), and rose to become its president in 1963-4.
In 1964, following the arrest of members of the African Resistance Movement (ARM), some of whom he knew and had preceded him as student leaders, he decided to resign as NUSAS president, leave the country, and take up a teaching job in England. The day before he was due to board a passenger liner in Cape Town, he was detained by the security police, held in solitary confinement, and interrogated. No charges were brought against him, and he was eventually released.
He then flew to England where he pursued a career as teacher and schoolmaster. The apartheid government revoked his South African citizenship, and after a period of being stateless, he obtained British citizenship, and married an Englishwoman, Ann, with whom he raised a family of three children. After studying at Oxford University, Driver pursued a career as educator, rising to prominence as headmaster of a prestigious English public school.
From 1991 onwards, Driver often visited South and southern Africa, among others as a board member of the Beit Trust, which funds development in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia. He also renewed his friendship with Maeder Osler, and visited him and Lesley on Hanglip Farm, together with Ann and – one one occasion – their three children, Dominic, Thackwray (Dax) and Tamlyn. In an afterword, they write that Hanglip Farm was ‘probably the closest thing to his global lodestone, and Maeder probably the closest of all his many friends’.
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In his foreword, Coetzee writes that Jonty was elected as NUSAS resident in 1963 and again in 1964 ‘at a time of crisis for liberal whites’. The apartheid government had shown itself ready to use lethal force against its opponents, even those who practiced non-violent resistance. Pressure was growing to go over to an armed struggle, and when Jonty was arrested, it was under suspicion of belonging to ARM, which was committed to acts of strategic sabotage. In Jonty’s eyes, however, the role of NUSAS was above all educative, namely to prepare young white people for life in a colour-blind democracy.
He continues: ‘Jonty called himself a revolutionary; he saw as clearly as anyone that Gandhian passive resistance was not going to work in the South Africa of the 1960s. For my part, I find it impossible to imagine him with a gun in his hand. In the largest of contexts, it may well have been best for him that he removed himself early, or was removed, from the South African scene, even though the mechanism of his removal – arrest, solitary confinement, harsh interrogation – left an indelible mark on the psyche of a young man who until then had led a fairly protected life.
‘As for whether it was good for South Africa to have lost to the larger world a spirit like Jonty’s – thoughtful, creative, courageous, straight as an arrow, nurtured on Christian principles of love of and duty toward fellow beings – that is another question entirely.’
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Responding to a series of thematic questions by Attwell, Osler recounted key aspects of Driver’s life and beliefs as a student activist. Points made include the following:
While Driver knew numerous members of ARM, he firmly rejected the use of violence as a political strategy. ARM’s strategy was to attack non-human targets only, mostly powerlines, rail, and other strategic infrastructure. ‘However, you can’t just flirt with this sort of thing … There were always discordant elements — somebody got hurt, somebody was injured, somebody got killed.’
Driver also felt that SA society had been traumatised by violence, and sensed that there was another level of violence underlying the activities of various political parties, including the ANC and SACP, which ‘went against every grain of his being’.
Contrary to the prevailing view, in the early to mid-sixties, there was a close relationship between NUSAS and black student bodies and organisations. Black students at the major English-language universities participated actively but critically in NUSAS, and some rose to leadership positions.
NUSAS had branches at all the black universities, and offered a range of valuable services. Among others, Thabo Mbeki and his associates at Fort Hare benefited hugely from NUSAS scholarships and other forms of assistance.
Despite this, once in exile, Mbeki and his cohorts became very hostile to NUSAS, and black leaders in NUSAS in particular. This involved some very prominent figures, including Thami Mhlambiso (a vice-president of NUSAS, later an ANC representative at the UN, and apparently favoured as a potential leader by Oliver Tambo, among others), Steve Biko and Barney Pityana. According to Osler, the consequences of this fateful polarisation were still being felt today.
‘For a time,’ Osler added, ‘there was a very close and creative relationship between BC and the largely liberal NUSAS leadership, which has been washed out of South African history.’
Later, NUSAS ‘threw in the towel’ and acquiesced to various takeovers dictated by forces in exile, eventually leading to its dissolution.
According to Attwell, Driver had made it very clear that whatever ideological decisions NUSAS would have to make, white students had to accept that they would not play leading roles in the liberation struggle or its aftermath, and had to accept black leadership instead. This made him very unpopular on some campuses.
A lively discussion followed, showing that, almost 60 years later, these issues are still very much alive in the South African political discourse and memory.
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Dayspring: A Memoir is jointly published by Karavan Press and uHlanga. It can be ordered online from Clarke’s Bookshop.
To access videos of the launch, click here.
FEATURED IMAGE: David Attwell and Maeder Osler during the launch. Image: Facebook video.
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Additional notes about NUSAS
Maeder Osler has provided the following explanatory notes about NUSAS and its role up to the end of the 1960s:
NUSAS was founded in 1924,in response to the formation of the International Federation of Students (ICE) in 1919. While formally non-racial, it was mostly made up of students from white English-language and Afrikaans-language universities.
The Afrikaans-language universities withdrew in the 1930s, and NUSAS only became non-racial in practice when Fort Hare and the Hewatt Training College were admitted in 1945, and the Non-European Medical School (NEUM) at the University of Natal a few years later.
Over many years, at least up to the late 1960s, there was significant participation by black students in NUSAS, as well as close collaboration between NUSAS and emergent black student organisations.
Many black students at affiliated universities (effectively the major English-language universities) participated in NUSAS, both actively and critically.
Students at Fort Hare supported NUSAS for many years, critically but positively, as did students at the Non-European Medical School (NEUM) at the University of Natal.
Besides the affiliated campuses, there were (greatly harassed) NUSAS branches at most of the so-called tribal colleges, as well as some Afrikaans-language universities.
Many students at black universities and colleges benefited from NUSAS support programmes, notably scholarship schemes.
There were also close relations between NUSAS and most of the emergent ANC, PAC and BC student organisations, which continued until the 1969 SASO breakaway led by Steve Biko.
NUSAS then entered a turbulent period in which it had to redefine its strategy and plot its survival amid growing polarisation and state repression. Cycles of decline and revival followed, some dictated by forces from abroad, during which NUSAS gradually abandoned its political independence and aligned itself with the liberation movement headed by the ANC.
This also led to its demise; in 1991, NUSAS merged with the ANC-aligned South African National Students Congress (SANSCO) to form the South African Students’ Congress (Sasco).
Since then, SA student politics have gone through many more stages of decline and renewal, among others the traumatic ‘Fees Must Fall’ movement of 2018. So the story continues …