Anthony Naidoo
Psychology Department
Stellenbosch University
2 September 2020

After a fire destroyed the roof and top storey of the Wilcocks Building on the 10 December 2010, a unique opportunity was afforded Stellenbosch University to reconsider its heritage, legacy and its future. The university was also fast approaching its centennial milestone. At the time, the building was academic home to the departments of Psychology and History and the University Archive. Erected in 1966, the impressive building had been named in honour of Prof Raymond William (R.W.) Wilcocks.

Born in in Vryburg on 23 January 1892, Wilcocks completed his primary and secondary education in Stellenbosch, before enrolling at the Victoria College (today Stellenbosch University) for a bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences. Upon graduating in 1912, Wilcocks received funding to further his academic interests at the University of Berlin, where he obtained a doctorate in Philosophy (cum laude) in 1917, at a time when Germany was undergoing deep social foment as the First World War was drawing to a close. In this same foment the stirrings of German social nationalism were seeded that would be fertile ground for the later emergence of the ideas, doctrine and manifestations of Nazism and its concomitant ideology.

Wilcocks returned to South Africa in 1918 to take up the position as Professor of Logic and Psychology at the newly-founded Stellenbosch University, equipped with the scientific pragmatism and empiricism of his European positivist training. One of his first projects was to oversee the construction of the country’s very first experimental laboratory for psychology (du Toit, n.d.). It was fashioned after the renowned Leipzig laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt, and helped lay the foundation for the local development of a distinctive positivist approach to social science at SU– helping to pave the way for related fields such as industrial psychology, psychological testing, clinical psychology and later sociology and social work. During 1930, Wilcocks was instrumental in developing and standardising the first Afrikaans group intelligence test. Since its introduction, cognitive assessment in South Africa has been mired in controversy. In his book, Educability of the South African Native (1939) M.L. Fick argued that the differences between racial groups were due to race differences, and not external factors. This conclusion would have far-reaching implications for the legitimacy of psychological testing in South Africa (See the History of Psychometric Testing). Wilcocks’ initiative was the forerunner for the later National Institute of Personnel Research which was established to assist the mining industry with assessments for the placement of uneducated, unskilled, and semi-skilled Black workers for the emerging white capitalist economy.

As the social sciences took root, the discipline of psychology gained momentum and influence through national intelligence tests, conducted with twin aims: to ameliorate white poverty and determine appropriate training for the practical education of African labourers (Dubow 2006). It was the kind of psychology and psychologists to be later labelled by Webster (1986) as being the servants of power and more specifically as “servants of apartheid.”

According to Allsobrook (2014), the application of technical and scientific knowledge was readily embraced by modernising Afrikaners, several of whom began to look to the United States for inspiration, especially in the fields of agriculture and economics, where the centralisation of factual knowledge seemed crucial to effective control of resources. Allsobrook’s illuminating article details how positivism as an intellectual tradition, was complicit in South Africa’s historical shift from an initial poorly co-ordinated segregation to a radically (and brutally) administered apartheid. The history of positivism in South Africa is coextensive with the formation of the Apartheid state (Kruger, 2018). Allsobrook posits, despite its pervasive hold, this way of understanding the world is often taken for granted as common sense. Moreover, the need for positivism to remain invisible is vital to its intellectual reach. “As a mode of ‘objective legitimation for extreme forms of social differentiation, this emphatically anti-ideological ideology has been deployed more effectively and, often, with more brutal effects in South Africa than the overt ideologies of religion or empire”.

Wilcocks was an influential member of the Carnegie Commission that looked into the matter of poor whites in South Africa (1929-1932) and he compiled the report’s psychological findings. He also served on the Commission of Inquiry regarding the Cape Coloured population (1938). His protégé, HF Verwoerd2 was entrusted in 1934 with the leading role in the Kimberley Volkskongres convened to discuss the growing problem of poverty among South Africa’s white population. Verwoerd served as chairman of the Socio-Economic Committee of the conference, and then was appointed to head the Continuation Committee charged with following up its recommendations. In the meantime, Wilcocks was appointed Chair of the Stellenbosch University Senate in 1933, and the following year became Rector of the institution. During his two-decade term in office (he retired in 1954), the university experienced impressive growth overall (Du Toit, n.d.). In the corresponding period, the architecture for apartheid was being designed and systematically implemented supported by the enabling social scientists of the university. Giliomee (2003) reckons Wilcocks to be have a pivotal player in the apartheid intelligentsia.

Wilcocks passed away on 16 March 1967 not before a building at SU was named after him in the preceding year.

It is well known that R.W. Wilcocks was a significant contributor to the university’s heritage and legacy. It is less visible how instrumental he was in setting up the academic apparatus that was harnessed by SU academics to shape and give form to apartheid ideology and policy in the guise of addressing the “poor white problem”. While this was of significant importance and benefit for Afrikaner South Africans in particular and white South Africans in general, for those othered South Africans this led to their disenfranchisement and oppression under the apartheid system. This is the underbelly of the colonial legacy that RW Wilcocks played a seminal role in establishing.

Moving beyond Wilcock’s apartheid legacy would be a significant turn in the transformation processes underway at the university and in the department he founded (Kruger, 2018).

Notes:

1. I wrote this paper while serving on the university committee tasked with renaming the R.W. Wilcocks building.

2. R.W. Wilcocks was the academic supervisor and mentor of Henrik F Verwoerd who has been characterised as the architect of apartheid. Following in his mentor’s footsteps, Verwoerd chose to study both at Berlin and at Wilhelm Wundt’s renowned psychology laboratory at Leipzig, which had provided the model used by Wilcocks when he established the psychology laboratory at Stellenbosch on his return from Germany. See R.B. Miller (1i993) for more on Verwoerd’s early career

References

Allsobrook, C. (2014). A Genealogy of South African Positivism. In P. Vale, L. Hamilton, & E. Prinsloo (eds), Intellectual Traditions in South Africa. Ideas, Individuals and Institutions (pp. 95-118). University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Pietermaritzburg.

Dubow, S. (1989). Segregation and Apartheid in South Africa. London: Macmillan.

Dubow, S. (2006). Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919–36. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Du Toit, S. (n.d.). Prof. RW Wilcocks. https://www0.sun.ac.za/100/en/team/prof-rw-0wilcocks/

Giliomee, H. (2003).The Making of the Apartheid Plan, 1929-1948. Journal of Southern African Studies 29(2), 373–392.

History of Psychometric Testing in South Africa (n.d.). http://histories.jvrpsychometrics.co.za/history-of-psychometric-testing-in-south-africa/

Kruger, L-M. (7th May, 2018). Purist positivism and delusions of “relevance”: disreputable origins and unpalatable functions. Electronic Departmental Newsletter, Psychology Department, Stellenbosch University.

Miller, R.B. (1993). Science and society in the early career of H.F. Verwoerd. Journal of Southern African Studies, 19(4), 634-661.

Webster, E. (1986). Excerpt from ‘Servants of Apartheid’. Psychology in Society, 6, 6-28.