By Chris Heymans
Independent political economy analyst Chris Heymans was editor of Die Matie in 1977-78, amid the turbulence student and youth politics in the shadow of the historic 1976 Soweto youth protests and subsequently across South Africa.
For decades, Die Matie has occupied a complex, sometimes paradoxical place within Stellenbosch University (SU), and arguably within South African student journalism more broadly. Across different eras it reflected the prevailing mood of the campus, yet it also provided space for students prepared to question that mood. It was neither consistently radical, nor consistently conservative. Its significance lay precisely in the fact that successive editors sought, each in their own way, to preserve a measure of editorial independence in an environment where political, institutional and cultural pressures were never far away.
I was privileged to play a small part in that story as Editor-in-Chief of Die Matie from September 1977 to September 1978. This is therefore not intended as a comprehensive history of either the newspaper or SU. It is a reflection on a particular moment when the newspaper found itself navigating a rapidly changing South Africa, and when events far beyond the oak-lined avenues of Stellenbosch forced new questions onto the campus agenda.
The fiftieth anniversary of the Soweto uprising provides an appropriate lens through which to revisit that period. The significance of June 1976 was not simply that it transformed South African politics, but it also changed the context within which universities – and student newspapers – had to operate. Soweto is therefore not the subject of this essay so much as the event that altered the conversation at Stellenbosch.
Until then, Die Matie, like much of campus life, had largely revolved around university affairs: student traditions, residences, sport, societies and the rhythms of an Afrikaans university that often appeared insulated from the growing turmoil elsewhere in the country. That was not unique to Stellenbosch. Universities frequently become absorbed in their own worlds. But after the uprising in June 1976, it became increasingly difficult to sustain the illusion that what happened beyond the campus gates could remain someone else’s concern.
The Soweto uprising, in which hundreds of young people lost their lives after protesting the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction, profoundly shook the legitimacy of the apartheid state. Initially, those events seemed geographically and emotionally distant from Stellenbosch. Yet the unrest that followed, the growing international isolation of South Africa, and the increasingly visible social and political fractures across the country inevitably found their way into campus conversations.
The editorial team that inherited Die Matie after 1976 was operating in a markedly different environment from its predecessors.
The tension was especially acute at Stellenbosch. The university formed part of an establishment in which political authority, the Dutch Reformed Church and the institution itself were closely intertwined. The sitting Prime Minister served as Chancellor; his brother was the Senior Minister of the student congregation; and Vice-Chancellor Dr Kosie Gericke was himself a respected leader within the same church tradition. Few universities illustrated more clearly the intimate relationship between the governing order and academic life.
Yet universities are rarely defined only by their formal structures. Beneath the surface, another conversation was starting to emerge. A growing number of students believed that Die Matie should not merely chronicle campus life, but engage, thoughtfully and responsibly, with the profound questions confronting South Africa. The newspaper became one of the few legitimate spaces where those debates could begin.
Looking back, it was not dramatic acts of defiance that mattered most, but the gradual widening of the conversation. During 1977 and 1978, Die Matie reported on Steve Biko’s death in police detention, the emergence of informal settlements such as Crossroads on the outskirts of Cape Town, and the social realities that increasingly challenged the notion that Stellenbosch could remain detached from the rest of the country.
Editorials questioned more. One particularly controversial editorial, “Die fut is uit”, criticised what we regarded as an increasingly hesitant Student Representative Council (SRC) that seemed unwilling to confront the political questions facing students. Debate forums such as the Stellenbosch Current Affairs Circle (SAAK) similarly created opportunities for difficult conversations that had previously been uncommon on campus.
The newspaper was not alone in this shift. Campus politics itself entered one of its most contested periods. Elections to the (SRC) increasingly reflected deeper divisions within Afrikaner society. A younger generation of students – including figures who would later become prominent in public life, such as Edwin Cameron, Ilse Treurnicht, Ruda Wahl (later Landman), Hilgard Bell and others – argued that Stellenbosch could no longer define itself primarily as an inward-looking Afrikaner institution. They pressed for greater engagement with questions of racial justice, academic openness and the future of South Africa.
Others defended existing traditions or favoured more cautious reform. The debates were often vigorous and occasionally bitter, but they signalled that the old consensus could no longer be taken for granted.
Nor did change come only through editorials or SRC meetings. Increasing contact with students from English-speaking universities, engagement with the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), and visits to black communities – including Soweto for some students – began to expose many of us to South African realities that lay beyond our own upbringing. These encounters did not produce instant political conversions. They did, however, make inherited assumptions more difficult to sustain. Relationships often changed people before politics did.
It would be misleading to portray Stellenbosch as a centre of resistance in those years. It was not. Equally, it would be inaccurate to suggest that nothing was changing. The years immediately following Soweto marked the beginning of a more searching conversation about the university’s place in a deeply divided society. Die Matie neither led that transformation nor stood apart from it. Rather, it became one of the places where the changing mood of a generation could be observed, debated and recorded.
Half a century later, that may be the newspaper’s most enduring contribution. Student newspapers rarely change history on their own. They do something just as valuable: they preserve the record of moments when inherited certainties begin to give way to new questions.
Looking back at the pages of Die Matie from those years, I am struck less by how many answers we found, and even more by our growing willingness to ask questions that earlier generations had often left unspoken.
The echoes of Soweto perhaps reached Stellenbosch later than many other campuses. But once they did, they could not easily be silenced. In that sense, the history of Die Matie in the late 1970s is not primarily a story about a student newspaper. It is a story about a university – and perhaps an entire generation – gradually learning that South Africa could no longer be understood from within the comforting boundaries of its own traditions.
