A university that persists in its ambition to sustain an engaged relationship with its community, as Wits does, must in its turn be shaped by the same currents that move that community. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this important book by Professor Bruce Murray is his ability to capture the vapours of the social, political and academic moods that at the time were shaping South Africa as a country, Johannesburg as a city and the University of the Witwatersrand as a social institution. The period covered by Murray’s book and the events that he so carefully describes and interprets have had a profound influence on the University’s development and its institutional identity. I do not think it an exaggeration to say that the World War II years and the recovery period thereafter produced the bulk of the threads that continue to weave the wondrous tapestry of the Wits that we know today, in all of its core functions as a university in South Africa: transmission of knowledge through teaching; development of new knowledge and understanding through research; custodianship of knowledge through its libraries and archives; and engagement with its broad community, on whose behalf it often speaks.

I write this introductory note in the year of Wits’s first centenary. My personal association with the University has spanned 45 years, initially as a student and later as a staff member (barring six years in the civil engineering industry). I arrived as a first-year engineering student in 1977, suitably provisioned with one of the outcomes of the 1959 Extension of Universities Act: a letter of permission to attend a white university, handed to me by an official at a non-descript government office in Pretoria (I was a late applicant and had to make this application personally).