In September 1963, South Africa's Minister of Justice, Mr Balthazar John Vorster, used the occasion of a speech made before a public audience in Potschefstoom to attack the National Union of South African Students. NUSAS, he told his audience, was ‘a damnable and detestable organisation … a cancer in the life of the nation’. He hinted, darkly, that it would have to be ‘cut out’. He urged all students to resign ‘in the interest and for the sake of our country’.

Vorster was not alone in his assault on NUSAS. At the same event, the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications suggested that parents should themselves take action and refuse to send their children to any university where NUSAS might be active. Eight months later, in a parliamentary debate on education funding, several MPs vented their own indignation. A representative for Pretoria was particularly vehement. He told his fellow parliamentarians that NUSAS was the breeding ground of ‘Communists … and all the other staunch leftists’. NUSAS, he said, ‘as we know it today, should be destroyed root and branch’.

The Minister for Education, Johannes de Klerk, took up his colleague’s words in a lengthy speech. He reminisced about his experiences with NUSAS in the past, and suggested that there had once been an attempt to set it on a different path. But now, he said, NUSAS had embarked upon ‘a changed course of action which I must say is frightening’:

This chapter will consider the efforts of the government to suppress NUSAS, and examine the perverse effects that these efforts had on white students in South Africa. I will argue that, although the government was able, at times, to push students out of the ‘political sphere’, more often than not it failed to do so in the middle years of the 1960s. Instead, its efforts at repression sometimes galvanised student activism, leading to the organisation of some of the most publicly visible demonstrations and protest actions of these years.