Police invasion of UCT campus

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see UCT April

Student unrest at South Africa's ivy-league campuses is nothing new. What is unique about the Police invasion of the University of Cape Town's upper-campus, an event also known as UCT April because it occurred during April, 1987, is that it marked the first time since 1972 that South Africa's police services dared to cross a line separating the country's "bush" colleges and their predominately white counterparts.

Until then, most unrest had occurred on "black campuses". When the South African Police's riot brigade invaded the University of Cape Town's upper campus. "Large parts of the University of Cape Town campus were at times uninhabitable ... and some lectures were disrupted as a result of actions of certain people which may not be reported in terms of state-of-emergency press censorship," read the article in the Cape Times the following day.

PW Botha's apartheid government refused permission for the Cape Times to publish the full facts concerning the event. They also refused the newspaper permission to publish three photographs taken during the afternoon, including one of a burnt out South African Breweries vehicle.^[1]

A four-hour confrontation between police and about 150-200 students followed a lunchtime meeting attended by about 700 students at which various members of banned organisations appeared and anti-apartheid slogans were chanted. Reference was made to "a non-racist, non-sexist, nuclear-free continent"

"I remember teargas, helicopters, rubber bullets and a lot of chaos. Police shambokked women in the library and some Sasco students set an SAB-Miller truck on fire.", says one student who was there.

The extent to which there has been a cover-up of this event can be seen by the fact that an online exhibition of "protest at UCT" totally ignores one of the most shattering events to occur on campus in recent times. Not only were student activists involved in the revolt, but innocent bystanders were caught up in a stand-off between police and the administration, which resulted in lectures being cancelled, papers being lost, and marks dropped from the careers of those who merely wanted to exercise academic freedom.