Lule for president

In 1938, an unassuming, intelligent Fort Hare student, Yusuf Lule, aspired to become elected to the SRC. His supporters coined the phrase ‘Lule for president’. The slogan proved to be prophetic, as Lule went on to serve as the president of Uganda for 69 days in 1979. Other ex-Fort Hare students had even more success than Lule. Nelson Mandela, elected to the Fort Hare SRC in 1940, became South Africa's first black president, and Robert Sobukwe, the SRC president in 1949, became the president of the PAC. Robert Mugabe, of Zimbabwe, was a Fort Hare student in the early 1950s.

Up to the late 1950s, Fort Hare produced a large share of east and southern Africa's black university graduates and many of its early nationalists. In the 1960s and beyond, political leaders continued to emerge from the ranks of the university's student body. Clearly then, the University of Fort Hare played a significant role in African history. Why? What was it about the Fort Hare that made it ‘the most historically significant institution for higher education in sub-equatorial Africa’? Asked this question, Joe Matthews answered: ‘What if this is all one big historical accident?’ His response, though rhetorical in nature, raises legitimate questions. For Fort Hare was not created to be a centre of revolutionary thought. Most people attended Fort Hare because it was their only educational option, even before the 1960 takeover.

Yet though the course of Fort Hare's development did not proceed as intended by its missionary founders and apartheid trustees, it is too simplistic to attribute Fort Hare's central role to ‘one big historical accident’. Fort Hare clearly influenced South African history, but South African history also affected Fort Hare. That the university turned into a hotbed of nationalism, producing political leaders throughout Southern Africa, was not merely a coincidence.

If Matthews had said that the history of Fort Hare was one long string of unanticipated consequences, he would have been more accurate. Fort Hare was not created to breed revolutionaries, and its role in the production of leaders throughout southern Africa is primarily owing to the circumstances of South African history.