Janis Grobbelaar had us read the Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Written by the sociologist Barrington Moore Jr, the book is regarded as a classic in comparative historical social science analysis, focused on the social origins of democratic, fascist and communist regimes. Moore argued that for liberal democracies to emerge, pre-existing feudal communal relations and traditional authorities had to be torn asunder and turned into a modern dynamic commercial environment led by bourgeois classes. The lesson to us was clear: South Africa was in the grip of reactionary classes that used feudal-like labour control instruments to serve their interests. Readily available was a racial wedge by which society’s property, infrastructure and educational assets could be monopolised by the white minority. Race was just the outward manifestation of a society led by classes with feudal-like features.

Who was Janis Grobbelaar and who were we? We were third-year sociology students at a university set aside for South Africans officially classified as “coloured” – the University of the Western Cape (UWC) – located on the outskirts of Cape Town, an area that included the entities of indirect racial rule, the reviled “toy telephone” Coloured Representative Council in particular. 

It was the early 1970s and trouble was brewing. Black consciousness was sweeping through university campuses and UWC student leaders were very active drivers of protest. 1973 was particularly confrontational and the student leadership decided to walk off campus mid-year, and I and our sociology fraternity joined in. Many of us returned to campus in 1974 but this was part of the build-up to the 1976 student revolt that engulfed the country.

Janis was one of two (Joachim Ewert was the other) freshly recruited lecturers from the University of Stellenbosch who joined UWC in the early 1970s. They were both new-generation thinkers from the Afrikaans world. Stellenbosch sociology was led by two legendary reform-minded individuals – SP Cilliers and Dian Joubert – and they more recently were joined by two exceptionally bright individuals – Simon Bekker and Jeffrey Lever – the latter who became a lifelong friend. Janis and Joachim were breaths of fresh air. They did not patronise us with the normal paternalism we had come to expect. The same standards and expectations they set for white students at Stellenbosch were set for us. We rose to the challenge and loved it.

She was not a fence sitter. In her being and conduct she was a democrat and visceral human rights campaigner.

Some among us ended up in prison. I was one of them. Janis visited my distraught parents and gave them comfort. I later learnt that she pressed the head of the sociology department to petition for my early release (I was held under the provisions of the Internal Security Act which allowed for detention without trial) and she succeeded. Earlier she had encouraged Leila Patel (the first director-general of social welfare in Nelson Mandela’s government) and I to apply for a Fulbright scholarship, which we both received. With her encouragement and extraordinary persistence, Leila and I found the confidence and courage to get on a plane and leave our protected homes to travel to the US via Brazil. We landed in Rio de Janeiro the day Elvis Presley died.

After my return from the University of Wisconsin in 1982, Janis was party to establishing the first integrated professional association of sociologists in South Africa. Blade Nzimande, then a fellow sociologist from the University of Natal, became president and I served as his vice-president. Earlier, when we were students, Janis took her students to the meetings of the multiracial regional association of sociologists held outside of apartheid South Africa, typically in Swaziland. Ivan Evans, today a provost at one of the University of California San Diego’s colleges, Yvonne Muthien, currently a board member at the Reserve Bank, and Elrena van der Spuy, a former deputy dean in the School of Law at the University of Cape Town, were all part of her special community of students. In the early 1980s, Janis played an active part in the formation of the Union of Democratic Universities of South Africa that affiliated with the United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1984.

Professionally, Janis became a full professor and head of the department of sociology at the University of Pretoria. She researched and published on the white right in South Africa, the title of one of her monographs being the ringing Vir Volk en Vaderland. Performing her democratic civic duties included working for the Independent Electoral Commission during the founding 1994 democratic elections. She gave two years of her professional life to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an experience she described as “harrowing”. She was not a fence sitter. In her being and conduct she was a democrat and visceral human rights campaigner. Not one to shy away from criticism, hers was direct and freely given. She once berated me for not reigning in the late Kader Asmal who, as minister of education, was criticised for his plan to consolidate our universities, shutting down our teacher trainer colleges on the way. I asked her to appreciate the fact that to reign in Asmal on anything was of course an impossibility.

Janis Grobbelaar changed our lives. She pushed and encouraged many of us to work hard and do our best. For every class she taught, she would identify the most promising students and work with them to achieve success. It wasn’t only about academic achievement. She served as a mentor to many, provided personal counselling and, perhaps sounding odd today, did some serious cultural grooming along the way. Janis was always reading an interesting book. She was always pleased to see one. She was a superb hostess, would take out her best wine, and prepare at a moment’s notice a wonderful meal. 

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She had a love for Alfa Romeos. She drove her bottle-green Alfa Romeo Giulia to UWC’s campus. It stood out. Being an Alfa, her car, ahead of its time, had twin overhead camshafts and a spectacular, well-spaced, if difficult, gearbox. She did not let me drive the Giulia. Perhaps I was too wild at the time for her to trust me with her Italian chariot. But she let me drive the Alfa that came after, I think it was an Alfa Junior, not so sure. 

Over time, we partied together, fought the fight for human decency together, cried together, shared many friends together, and navigated through life together. She was a real mensch and a great South African. Here was a person of Afrikaner background who walked a very different path. We will miss her greatly. DM

Janis Grobbelaar: 31 October 1949 to 12 December 2023.

Wilmot James, a former student of Janis Grobbelaar, is a professor at the School for Public Health, Brown University, Rhode Island. He held an honorary professorship of sociology at the University of Pretoria during Grobbelaar’s tenure as head of department.