The UDW saga

IN 1961, a university exclusively for Indian South Africans opened on Salisbury Island. Eleven years later, it was recreated on a new campus at Westville as the University of Durban-Westville (UDW).

- SALEEM BADAT and GOOLAM VAHED

By 2004 it was no more, merged with the historically-white Natal University to form the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

University of Durban-Westville, 1961-2003: Undoing Apartheid, Building a Non-Racial Culture, published by UKZN Press, narrates the struggles of Indians for university education. It charts UDW’s origins and development, and reflects on its arts, humanities and social sciences disciplines.

The 22 authors contributing to the 536-page book are scholars who were all associated with the university. The book is dedicated to the memory of Professor Vishnu Padayachee, an outstanding scholar long associated with UDW.

Before the creation of the University College for Indians, Indians obtained a university education either through Fort Hare or the distance correspondence University of South Africa or on a segregated basis at the “white” universities’ like Cape Town, Wits, Natal or Rhodes.

The new college was the apartheid state’s separate ethnic university for Indians. Significantly, it signalled begrudging acceptance of Indians as permanent South African residents and put an end to ideas of repatriating them to India or other places that would accept them.

Initially, there was widespread opposition to the establishment of a segregated and exclusively Indian university across the political spectrum and calls for a boycott.

Pragmatism among political moderates, material conditions, and the enticement of economic and social advancement meant that student enrolments steadily increased. At the same time, apartheid oppression provided fuel for student activism and protests, and ensured that UDW, like other universities, became a site of ideological and political struggle.