After decades as a philosophy professor at Stellenbosch University, Anton van Niekerk reflects on his role as a critic of apartheid, the meaning of Afrikanerdom in post-apartheid South Africa, and the role of philosophy in South African society.
“Philosophy is inevitable. Philosophy occurs wherever we move around and start thinking about the lack of self-evidence of the self-evident.”
During his more than 40 years at Stellenbosch University, philosophy professor Anton van Niekerk says that the university has experienced several radical changes – not only in size and technological advancement, but in cultural ways that align with the democratisation of South Africa. PHOTO: Marthinus Botes
Professor Anton van Niekerk speaks these words with a sincere profundity. Whenever he talks about philosophy, his eyes light up and his arms talk with him. Philosophy, Van Niekerk says, is like the very air we breathe. Even when we do not realise we are doing it, we cannot do without it.
Van Niekerk is a professor of philosophy at Stellenbosch University (SU). He has been appointed at the university since 1981, and has been stationed in this very office – room 666 of the Arts and Social Sciences building – for almost all of it.
At the age of 71, he claims to have retired from SU last year; but it doesn’t seem like much of a retirement. He still teaches an honours course in the philosophy of hermeneutics and social sciences, remains involved with masters students in bioethics, and supervises four or five PhD students to boot.
“I’m fairly busy at the moment,” he laughs. “Those who know me know that I am addicted to my office.”
With his view of Ryneveld Street from the sixth floor of the building, he has seen the university change. It’s much larger, for starters, and technology has come a long way in the years he has spent here.
But the full extent of the changes felt by SU cannot be separated from those experienced by South Africa as a whole.
Stellenbosch University’s Arts and Social Sciences building houses the office of philosophy professor Anton van Niekerk, who has committed himself to maintaining an active presence in South African society by writing for newspapers such as Rapport and Beeld. Van Niekerk believes that public interaction and debate is one of the ways that philosophy can have a tangible impact on society. PHOTO: Marthinus Botes
“Maybe that is one of the main issues in which the university changed – is the fact that we are now a constitutional democracy, which we weren’t. That remains a complete miracle to me and to many others, if we think about how far we were from it at the time.”
Grappling with historical consciousness
It is difficult for Van Niekerk to pinpoint the exact moment that he began to question the ideas that formed the foundation of the apartheid government. In a 2015 essay, he wrote that his generation of Afrikaners, like many others, grew up with the idea that one should go through life with a Christian nationalist worldview – but by his matric year of high school, he had begun to develop a subversive form of social consciousness. The development of this social consciousness was in no small part thanks to Van Niekerk’s older brother.
“He had a quite significant influence on me, just, bringing to my attention the injustices, the wrongdoings that we were experiencing every day. And once one’s eyes are open for that, I found it impossible not to be concerned about those kinds of issues.”
“Those who know me know that I am addicted to my office,” says Stellenbosch University professor Anton van Niekerk. He has been situated in room 666 of the Arts and Social Sciences building since the 1980’s. PHOTO: Marthinus Botes
Initially, Van Niekerk is hesitant to say that his recognition of these injustices had a large impact on his academic work. He did not, like many academics within the field of social sciences, pursue his fields of research with the express intent of making a particular difference.
But after a few moments, he reaches over to the bookshelf behind him and pulls out a thin black and red book titled What comes after Apartheid?, a collection of essays published in 1988 that he co-edited with Philip Nel and JP Landman, who were colleagues of his at the time.
South Africa found itself in a seemingly unsalvageable position. Domestically, it was caught within a semi-civil war, and internationally, it had been shunned and smothered by sanctions, said Landman, reflecting on the time when the book was published, more than three decades ago. The book, he says, was the attempt of a group of young academics to show that there was a way out of apartheid, which could be achieved if both sides sat down and negotiated.
Reflecting on the book, Van Niekerk retracts his previous answer. “In that sense, I was most certainly influenced in those kinds of writings by the historical, social, and political context in which I find myself,” he said.
“My work in bioethics was, from the word ‘go’ strongly influenced by the social context […] like the death of Steve Biko. It was arguably the biggest bioethical issue for a long time.”
Stellenbosch University philosophy professor Anton van Niekerk reflects on the 2006 book Ethics & AIDS in Africa, which he co-edited. Van Niekerk still believes that the HIV/AIDS crisis is among the most serious bioethical crises to exist in the African continent. PHOTO: Marthinus Botes
In an academic paper he co-authored with Solomon Benatar in 2011, Van Niekerk draws the link between bioethics – the field of philosophy concerned with the moral ramifications of healthcare and the life sciences – to Steve Biko, the black consciousness leader who was killed by the apartheid government through inadequate and unnecessary medical procedures while detained.
Post-apartheid Afrikanerdom
“There’s been a great deal of rage, and disappointment, and resistance towards me,” says Van Niekerk.
In 2011, Van Niekerk met with a reactionary right-wing Afrikaner who wanted to discuss an article that he had written, titled Don’t condone Apartheid. The article denounced the tendency of some conservative Afrikaners to downplay the role of Afrikaners in the apartheid regime. Van Niekerk began to explain the article to the man (who had not even read the object of his outrage). The man became aggressive, and attacked Van Niekerk, right in the office where we now sat.
“It turned out not to be a big deal […] the poor guy died, I think, four or five years later. And the interesting thing is, shortly before his death, he called me, and he apologised, formally, to me, which he did not do up to that point. And I appreciated that he did that.”
Nonetheless, the sentiment that the man represented still exists, says Van Niekerk, even though it may not be shouted from the rooftops. He has nothing against Afrikanerdom – he is proud to have published more academic articles in Afrikaans than most lecturers at the university. But Afrikaners, he says, tend to bear a kind of historical insecurity.
“That’s the thing that bothers me the most about Afrikaners, is that they do not account adequately for their own history,” he says.
Even calling himself an Afrikaner is often awkward.
“I can’t see why it is really important. I mean, our task is to transform the society into a place where people of different backgrounds, and different interests, and different cultural orientations live,” he says.
“We don’t have a choice about that. We are – to use a phrase that I used in a rubric the other day – ons is saam in Afrika. We are together in Africa. The fact that we have an Afrikaner background – it’s all interesting and whatever, but that is not the future. The future is to make this society work.”
Does South Africa need philosophy?
Van Niekerk has made it his business to immerse himself within popular discourse by writing articles for various media publications over the years. He believes in the importance of not only having good ideas, but in conveying those ideas to the public in ways that are understandable.
While such a task sometimes feels Sisyphian when he reads some of the less well thought-out comments under his online articles, he has high hopes for the media as a medium of fighting the good philosophical fight, and hopefully continue to influence people’s minds.
“Students poke fun at me because of my love of the image of Hegel, ‘the owls of Minerva fly when the dusk falls’. But it is one of the best images for philosophy that I have ever come across. It means that the concepts and ideas that we have throw light on the world,” he says.
“Sometimes that light that falls on the world loses its luminosity. The light does not yield a light world anymore, but further contributes to the darkness. It’s exactly when that experience occurs, the loss of reason – then the owls of Minerva fly – the seekers of wisdom.”
While Stellenbosch University philosophy professor Anton van Niekerk’s love of historical hermeneutics and bioethics may seem to contrast with his interest in philosophy of religion and theology, he insists that his shared interest in these fields spring from the same origin: the desire to interpret, and to understand. PHOTO: Marthinus Botes