50 years ago, I fought apartheid. Now I'm horrified to see the term bandied around about Israel

Police and snarling dogs surrounded us. The 51 of us who refused to disperse were crammed into one large van and driven to the cells. Every time we started singing the universal protest song We Shall Overcome, the driver would slam on his brakes and many of us, including me, would be thrown forward and bang our heads on metal bars that protruded from the van’s ceiling. We managed to confuse the police driver, though, by also singing the national anthem in Afrikaans, the language of the racist regime. Released on bail that night, we returned the next day to protest further.

This time, with the agreement of the anti-apartheid Anglican Church authorities, our venue was the steps of the Anglican cathedral, St George’s. Though adjacent to a big main street, it was private property. Despite that, the police suddenly charged and we scampered inside — feeling relatively safe because, surely, Protestant Calvinist white Afrikaans-speaking policemen would not actually use violence inside a church.

Instead, they created a commotion at the side of the building. Then, as we students went to save whoever was being attacked, we were shoved out the side door by plain-clothes police who had infiltrated inside. I was the first to reach the exit and was attacked with heavy batons. I am still somewhat ashamed about the words I yelled as they dragged me on the pavement by my long hair: “Ek is jammer!” I shouted in Afrikaans. It means: “I’m sorry!” Sorry, I still wonder, for what?

Blood streaming from my head and huge welts on my back and shoulders, I was driven in a police van to the same police station as the day before. Calling us white “kafferboeties” (a sneering term using the Afrikaans version of the N word, “******-lovers”): the police locked us up in the “Non-White” police cells, which to them was the ultimate insult (apartheid extended even to criminals). “Oh, so you’re here again,” said a policeman.

Seeing I was staggering, dizzy and gasping for air, he took me outside and gave me a handkerchief and some water. Suddenly he whispered: “You mustn’t think we are all like that.”

The beating of white students — and of a white lady, aged 50, who had remonstrated with the police — made headlines worldwide. It was reported with open shock by the English-language newspapers in South Africa, which to their credit had remained critical of apartheid even at its height.

One MP came to our aid at the police station: Helen Suzman, the only genuine member of the Opposition, who was also Jewish.

At a protest rally three days later, our ranks had swelled from the previous Friday’s few hundred protesters. We were joined by around 10,000 fellow students and by other outraged Capetonians. Five minutes before our march was due to begin, the government declared it a riotous assembly and banned it. We ignored the megaphone announcement. The crowd was attacked again and dispersed with very strong tear gas and more batons, eliciting more massive publicity locally and worldwide.

In parliament, the minister who accused Jewish parents of failing to control their children also ludicrously informed the nation that we male students had been “hiding behind the girl students’ dirty long skirts”. We were charged with “obstructing the police in the course of their duties” .

All of this would probably have led to nothing very significant, had not the government vastly over-reacted by declaring what amounted to a state of emergency across the whole country. We held a sit-down demonstration on the steps of our own university but the police arrived, threatening to attack and arrest all of us if we did not disperse — by now, a familiar pattern.

More arrests followed, but, to the credit of our judges, no convictions. Months later, however, eight student leaders nationwide were placed under orders banning them from universities and from meeting more than one person at a time. In the mid-1970s, I spent several more short but unpleasant spells in police custody and eventually chose to escape to Britain rather than to accept post-university conscription into a national “defence force” that was suppressing black people, both nationwide and beyond South Africa’s borders.

Political experts now believe the attacks on white students in 1972, and the expanding willingness of some (but by no means all) liberal English-speaking students to stand up against apartheid, were the thin end of a wedge that eventually led to a collapse in white racist morale. That in turn helped undermine apartheid, culminating in the unbanning of major anti-apartheid organisations such as the African National Congress (ANC), and the release of Nelson Mandela on 11 February 1990.

The world’s most famous political prisoner later revealed he had read in a smuggled newspaper on Robben Island about our student stand against apartheid and the beatings we had taken. “It gave me and my fellow ANC prisoners hope for our shared future,” Mandela told me in one of six interviews I had with him after his release. He also acknowledged that Jews played a significant role in the fight against apartheid.

The person most hated by the regime was Joe Slovo, whose Jewish immigrant family had come to Johannesburg in the 1920s from Lithuania. He got a lowly job in the clothing industry, became a trade unionist, then a Communist Party leader, and eventually became the intelligence chief of the exiled ANC’s military wing. In other words, from the apartheid government’s point of view, a white traitor, and a commie Jew to boot. In the first official meeting between antagonistic negotiating teams in 1990, a sneering regime minister asked Slovo: “Are you still a communist?” “Oh yes,” he replied, “from my head to my toes”. He promptly lifted his trouser legs to display red socks. The joke broke the ice and Slovo turned out to be the key peacemaker.

In fact, a vastly disproportionate number of the activists who battled apartheid were drawn from a Jewish community numbering just 120,000 out of a total white population of four million. Yet in today’s South Africa, many Jews feel deeply aggrieved to be labelled racist simply because they believe in the right of Israel to exist.

On the steps of my university, where police dispersed us 50 years ago, present-day students annually stage a so-called Anti-Apartheid Week. The target now is the Middle East’s only democratic state.

Agitators vilifying Israel bandy about the word apartheid, knowing they are on a winning propaganda trail. They prey on students who are too young or too gullible to be able to contrast the ghastly reality of South Africa’s past with the complexity of the Israel-Arab conflict. The students are not aware that Mandela himself never talked of Israel as an “apartheid” state — even though he criticised some of its actions. Seeing today’s students demonstrating and sloganeering in a misconceived cause makes me sad, but also in a way heartened. After all, I console myself, they have the right to protest peacefully. Decades ago, we certainly did not.

Our actions were an early impetus to secure freedom for our country — and for these modern-day students.

It’s an outcome that, despite South Africa’s current political corruption, makes me feel quietly proud.

Paul Cainer is a foreign correspondent.