Renfrew Christie and St Antony’s

William Beinart, Emeritus Professor, African Studies Centre and St Antony’s

St Antony’s should record the passing of Renfrew Christie (1948-2025), a South African, and a student from 1976 to 1979. His academic work was a doctoral thesis on the history of electrification, published as Electricity, Industry and Class in South Africa (1984). This was an important contribution to the anti-apartheid revisionist historiography at the time, exploring the centrality of the state electricity corporation (Eskom) in facilitating mining, urban power supply, industrialisation and the formation of the apartheid state.

But Christie went further than most as a committed anti-apartheid scholar. He had been a leading student activist in South Africa, deputy president of the National Union of South African Students. When he returned to the country for his thesis research, he spent considerable time in the Eskom archives, and this enabled him to get access to material about the nuclear power programme that the country was developing. The first generator was being built at Koeberg, near Cape Town, largely with French assistance. South Africa had become a major producer of uranium, a byproduct of gold mining, exported to Western countries. Christie was able to collect information about uranium enrichment within the country that was fuelling a secret nuclear weapons programme, largely with Israeli help.

In an interview with Olga Smirnov, for the BBC Witness History series (2018), Christie suggested that he chose his topic not least because it might assist the anti-apartheid movement to learn more about these programmes. Whatever the case, his analysis covered the twentieth century as a whole and analysed the links between electrification and white power.

Soon after his return to South Africa, Christie was arrested under the Terrorism Act, one of the draconian pieces of legislation passed by the apartheid state to control and silence opposition. The state claimed to have evidence that Christie was passing information to the banned African National Congress, whose leadership had largely gone into exile. Christie was placed in solitary confinement and held initially on death row. Hanging in this prison was a very public moment. As he recalled in the interview, the prisoners sang a well-known, and resonant, struggle song in support of condemned men: Senzeni Na (in isiXhosa) or What have we done (to deserve this)? He was ‘forced to listen to three hundred people being hanged, which was … gruesome’.

Christie’s arrest was widely publicised. Raymond Carr, the College Warden (1968-1987) sent a telegram of support although he did not know Christie’s precise role. The Afrikaner National party government had arrested many activists on trumped up charges. Carr connected with senior university figures, with politicians and the foreign office to ensure that the South African state knew that the trial was being carefully watched. He had got to know Christie during his spell at St Antony’s, and he sent a highly supportive testimonial emphasising both Christie’s academic contribution and his personal integrity. It was read in court. Christie received a ten-year sentence; it could have been more.

Christie had pleaded guilty and wrote a confession in great detail which was also part of the court proceedings. This placed on public record further information about the government’s programme and this in turn assisted two white activists, Rodney Wilkinson and Heather Gray, to detonate four limpet mines in the Koeberg station and considerably delay its completion. They escaped South Africa and returned after the political transition.

The College also set up a fund to support Christie, for which Carr sought contributions in the University. Academic staff became involved, including Gavin Williams at St Peter’s, who later helped to edit Christie’s thesis for publication in the St Antony’s/Macmillan series. A file in the St Antony’s archives records some of the College’s activity and includes letters from Christie to Carr. By the end of 1982 he had been moved and his conditions had improved. He was allowed to write and receive letters, carefully monitored, more regularly, and to register for an undergraduate degree by correspondence at the University of South Africa.

In early 1983, Christie heard via a letter to his mother that the College was reserving the fund to support a Junior Research Associateship, with salary, when his sentence was complete. When he wrote to Carr in February 1983, there was some optimism in his tone: ‘I happily accept the offer … I loved my time in Oxford before and feel I could make a positive contribution to the College’s work now’. He thought the offer itself, a temporary post in ‘a College as unimpeachable as St Antony’s … may confirm a ‘’good prognosis’’ (the official requirement)’ for early release. The letters were not only hugely important to him but strategically conceived for whoever was reading them. He spoke of specific research topics that did not focus on South Africa and informed Carr that Dorothy Hodgkin, Nobel laureate, and Chancellor of the University of Bristol, was also corresponding.

Ruth Evans, a BBC journalist who had been a student at St Antony’s with Christie, managed to visit him in the Pretoria jail in 1983. Their meeting was highly constrained with a warder present, but her letter to Carr afterwards gives some idea of the strategies that Renfrew was requesting. ‘Renfrew is thrilled and much encouraged by the offer. It really is very important to him.’ And he spoke about the possibilities for parole or remission. These were very limited under the Terrorism Act and he managed to convey that the best strategy was ‘to put pressure on the British government/authorities to try to influence the South African government’.

While public campaigns to free South African political prisoners, notably of course Nelson Mandela, were reaching a crescendo at the time, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was not sympathetic to the African Nationalist Congress nor to the broader British-based Anti-Apartheid Movement. Christie recognised this. Carr followed a strategy of working through government and private channels for parole or remission and thought a public campaign was potentially counter-productive. Maria Gonzalez, Carr’s biographer, notes that the College was insufficiently united on the issue to commit itself to a clear anti-apartheid stance.

The terms of conviction under the Terrorism Act were restrictive and Christie spent seven years in prison, given only 3 years reduction in his sentence as part of a more general amnesty. But he later spoke with warmth about the College’s engagement, the many letters he received, and credited Carr’s support as contributing to reducing his sentence. Christie subsequently spent much of his career at the University of the Western Cape, as a highly effective Dean of Research. The institution, serving mostly black students, identified strongly as an academic and intellectual centre for post-apartheid South Africa, and Christie played a major role in raising its research profile.