TEXT OF TERM OF REFERENCE 3) PART 4 OF CHRISTMAS, 1987 SUBMISSION TO THEN-PRESIDENT OF SOUTH AFRICA P.W. BOTHA:

...congresses and seminars, and to meet occasionally at social events, they live in different worlds.

The white English-speaking students are unable to find an identity outside the student framework, while the black students feel a strong identification with the aspirations of the black people as a whole and feel in a forum such as a NUSAS congress that they represent not only black students but all black people.

Legality and multiracialism do not yoke together easily in South Africa. A NUSAS commission examined laws that infringed the rights of the individual, an issue white students felt had great importance. However, for the first time there was a new response from the black students. "What," asked one delegate, "is the use of a black man talking about the erosion of freedom in South Africa? We have no freedom and one or two laws more or less no difference to our situation."*

The NUSAS Congress of 1967 had been the turning point. The conditions under which the black delegates were (separately) accommodated at Rhodes University were appalling** and NUSAS was unable to do anything about it.

The black student community now stands united in the belief that in their unity lies the strength to overcome so many problems they face, first as students and then as members of the oppressed community. Briefly these sentiments are expressed in the following:

(i) Black students owe their first allegiance to the black community with whom they share the burdens and injustices of apartheid. Student unity, where this involves consolidating ranks encompassing people of variable aspirations, is not to be encouraged. It has been shown in the past that black-white student cooperation often leads to a divergence of expectations with the resultant frustrations.

(ii) The student population is already divided and black students feel it is more effective to go it alone instead of standing piously on ineffective platforms, issuing impotent fulminations against "the System."

*- THERE IS ANOTHER LONGER THAN USUAL FOOTNOTE I WILL OPEN AS SOON AS I CAN.

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