Tiro’s ‘Turfloop Testimony’ Speech Raises Vorster’s Ire
On 6 June 1972, the Johannesburg newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail, wrote the following in its first page, “… we have policemen who … may well have to believe that every baton blow they strike is a blow against communism.” This was in reaction to the banning of public meetings and demonstrations through a proclamation issued by the apartheid Prime Minister B.J. Vorster following students’ protests in universities throughout the country.
Vorster characteristically used the Nazi big lie and ascribed the student unrest to “foreign agitators”, “Communist agitators”, while the Principal of the University of Durban-Westville attributed the students’ unrests there to “extraneous forces” – the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) and the South African Students Organisation (SASO).
This whole episode began on 29 April 1972, during a graduation ceremony at the University of the North (now University of Limpopo), which is conversationally known as Turfloop. The then President of the Students’ Representative Council (SRC), Onkgopotse Abraham Tiro, made a critical speech of the apartheid tertiary education system that resulted in widespread demonstrations and strikes at all Black universities and some White campuses as well.
Much publicity was given to police brutality, and rightly so. But what was significant was the root causes of the unrests, which gave a correct perspective of the students’ s
