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he was relatively old for a first-year. Once again he registered to study law. He stayed in Wilgenhof, the oldest men’s residence (koshuis) in town. The koshuis – known among its residents as ‘Willows’ or simply ‘Die Plek’ and which is jokingly called ‘Bekfluitjie’ because of its resemblance to a harmonica – is steeped in tradition and had been home at one time to rugby legend Danie Craven.

      Wilgenhof, in those days, was a relatively enlightened place among the Stellenbosch residences. Dagbreek, further up the road, had a reputation as an incubator for National Party politicians such as prime ministers Hendrik Verwoerd and John Vorster. Wilgenhof’s best-known political figure is the anti-apartheid activist Beyers Naudé. Wiese landed in res with the future leader of the parliamentary opposition Frederik van Zyl Slabbert. Later James Wellwood Basson, a blond boy from Porterville nicknamed ‘Whitey’, was also in Wilgenhof with Wiese.

      Just as in Upington, Wiese was soon busy, becoming involved in student affairs. He was a first-years’ representative on the Law Society. He also joined the Debating Society and served as its treasurer in his second year. Here was a man who could clearly think on his feet. His contemporaries describe him as a very effective public speaker.

      Wiese was elected to Wilgenhof’s house committee in his second year. That same year he stood as a candidate for the Students’ Representative Council (SRC). In an election issue of the student newspaper Die Matie, he undertook, as part of his policy statement, ‘to establish a basis for closer cooperation between English- and Afrikaans-speaking students on a foundation where they can cooperate without sacrificing their own principles.’

      Wiese attracted enough votes to be elected as one of the SRC’s 14 members. He was handed the portfolios of Societies and Public Relations. Part of Wiese’s job was to make submissions on behalf of the student societies that applied for funding from the SRC. But general policy, leading ideas and matters of the day were also discussed at council meetings.

      At an SRC meeting in 1965 Wiese suggested a tour to Angola in the June–July holiday.14 Still part of the Portuguese colonial empire, Angola was a very exotic destination for a group of Afrikaner students in the mid-1960s.

      At the next meeting of the SRC, a matter of greater political importance was discussed. Wiese proposed that the SRC reject an application by the National Union of South African Students (Nusas) for official recognition as a student society at the university. Nusas was a liberal, mainly English-speaking student organisation that campaigned across South African campuses for multiracialism and political change. The SRC decided that Stellenbosch was no place for Nusas.

      The SRC, at the same meeting, expressed its dissatisfaction with another society that had invited the American civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King to speak on campus. The SRC unanimously accepted a motion to inform the society in question: ‘That this dissatisfaction is based on the fact that Dr King is in essence a mischief-maker who commits bloody crimes in the name of freedom.’

      This was the year after King had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

      During the third term of 1965 Wiese was re-elected to the SRC. Once more, he was a busy man as Wilgenhof also chose him as its primarius – the head student and chairman of the house committee. It was around this time that he woke up one morning, as he recalled years later, with the realisation that he would never again live in Upington.15

      Amid all of this Wiese was also a real student, because in September he left an SRC meeting early ‘due to academic pressures’, as the minutes show. At another meeting he said that his studies had ‘taken a turn for the worst’. And so he took a little longer than usual to finish his BA (Law) degree, only graduating at the end of his fourth year of studies.16

      Wiese served on the SRC with a gaggle of theology students – known in Afrikaans as tokkelokke. Campus politics was then greatly influenced by the men studying to become dominees in the Dutch Reformed Church.

      In stark contrast to the freewheeling 1960s at universities in most of the Western world, Afrikaans campuses were quite conservative places. There was still debate about whether female students should be allowed to smoke in public. Die Matie also carried opinion pieces about the university’s so-called Christian-national character, in line with National Party ideology, and, more directly, the unacceptability of premarital sex.

      In June 1966 Wiese was one of the proponents of a motion that the SRC should be elected by students organised by faculty and not through the open nomination of candidates. He made his point at a monstervergadering, a mass meeting of students where they could vote directly, in the Ou Hoofgebou. Die Matie’s take on it was this:

      The implications? The influence of the kweekskool [the theological seminary] on student politics should be limited. But such things are never said openly – therefore the other speakers need to point out to the proponents [of the motion] that their actual motive is to pull the rug from under the tokkelokke, the bastion of Christian principles on the campus.17

      The Matie students firmly rejected Wiese’s plan for proportional representation. The tokkelokke would continue to rule the roost.

      That same year the SRC hosted a formal dinner and on the menu for the event the organiser printed a photo of each member of the council. ‘On top of every member’s head was a halo, but on top of Christo’s head was a Goodyear tyre,’ recalls Boy Geldenhuys, himself a student of theology and that year’s SRC chairman.18

      The year 1966 was one of great turmoil on South African campuses. By that stage the government had already passed a law to segregate the universities. English-speaking higher institutions, which had once been relatively ‘open’, allowing students of all races to attend, could now admit black students only under strict conditions. Race relations at universities were a constant source of news. ‘Ikeys [UCT] elect non-white to SRC’ ran a headline in Die Matie that year.19

      In June the United States senator Robert Kennedy, a strong contender for the US presidency, travelled to South Africa at the invitation of Nusas. Stellenbosch’s SRC was opposed to his visit. Wiese warned at a meeting that the SRC should be ‘careful’ on the Kennedy issue not to create the impression that the left-leaning Nusas was the only representative of students’ views in the country. Eventually the men’s residence Simonsberg hosted Kennedy in Stellenbosch. Two years later the senator, brother of President John F Kennedy, was killed by an assassin’s bullet in 1968. When the Kennedy family came to the country thirty years after his speech at Simonsberg to commemorate his South African visit, Wiese was their host.

      In July 1966 the Afrikaanse Studentebond (ASB), a nationwide organisation for Afrikaans-speaking students, held its annual conference in Stellenbosch. Afrikaner students from all corners of the country gathered to discuss the issue of ‘unity’ and elected Geldenhuys as ASB president. As part of the proceedings, the ASB approved a controversial motion, in which it thanked and praised one SED Brown, editor of a right-wing monthly publication called the South African Observer. In a recent edition Brown’s publication had gone so far as to insult several prominent Afrikaners by calling them something considered incredibly unsavoury. Businessman Dr Anton Rupert, Stellenbosch rector Professor HB Thom and the industrialist Hendrik van Eck were among those singled out. The insult? They were called ‘liberal’.

      For Wiese this would not do. With the support of Simonsberg’s primarius, Willem van Drimmelen, he started a petition and soon gathered more than a thousand signatures demanding the ASB withdraw its motion of thanks to Brown. More than a quarter of the university’s students supported the petition, Van Drimmelen told the Rand Daily Mail.20 And in the process Wiese also got his first national media exposure. ‘We do not dissociate ourselves from the ASB or from any other motions taken at the ASB conference but I will not tolerate attacks by Brown on people like Mr Piet Cilliers [Cillié, editor of Die Burger] and Etienne Rossouw [Rousseau, MD of Sasol],’ Wiese was quoted as saying in the newspaper.

      Geldenhuys did not want to accept the petition – with its 1276 names – as it was apparently ‘unconstitutional’. But Wiese brought a motion before a mass meeting of students and so Brown’s comments regarding the prominent Afrikaners were condemned and a committee was appointed to investigate the matter further. Die Matie described it in this way: ‘The

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