Stellenbosch University

The Neo-Classical Old Hoofgebou (1886) is the main building of Stellenbosch University.

Stellenbosch University (the students are known as maties and the campus as Matieland) is the oldest and most celebrated university in South Africa. Founded in 1866 as a small grammar school, it was renamed Victoria College in 1887, Queen Victoria's Jubilee year, and raised to university status in 1918. Here the Boer intellectual elite studied and taught, among them future prime ministers, heads of state and ministers (Hans Strijdom, Daniel Malan, Jan Smuts, etc.). Here, it could be said, racism was given an academic consecration. But the University was also the source of progressive ideas: in 1958 a memorandum signed by 28 professors and lecturers called for reforms, some of which found expression in President de Klerk's "Rubicon" speech of 1990. The university refers with pride to the enormous increase in the number of black students between 1989 and 1993 - a percentage increase of no less than 228%; but it should be noted that in 1993 there were still only 151 black students out of a total of 14,387 - just 1.05%.