ABSTRACT
During the early 1950s, at a time when only the most constrained and mutually impoverishing association existed between the structurally and socially separated communities, students at the anglophone universities of South Africa had the extraordinary opportunity of meeting across boundaries policed by law, custom and convention. For some of us these interactions provided an escape from a culture of compliance and conformity, opening new perspectives on the condition which we all differentially lived, and whose template had been set long before apartheid. More, we became aware that the beginnings, institutions and ethos of the mad South Africa into which we had been born, needed to be made public through political discourse and political activity, if a situation which we found socially outrageous, intellectually disgraceful and morally repugnant was to be contested and transcended.
