The Decline and End of Apartheid
- for over 20 years, it seemed that the National Party government and its policies of apartheid were immune to the normal processes of economics and politics. Especially, in the 1960s with the savage repression following Sharpeville and the State of Emergency, the government seemed able to determine the future with absolute certainty. It ignored a great deal of international condemnation and suppressed almost all opposition at home.
- as surprising was the immunity from economic factors. Growth rates were good during the 1960s and inflation remained very modest. White living standards rose quite dramatically, at least partly because of the fact that African living standards remained very depressed near the low levels to which they had been pushed during the 1950s.
- the one glaring failure of apartheid was the fact that although African migration to the cities had undoubtedly been slowed, it had not been stopped, let alone reversed. In fact, economic integration was continuing, stimulated significantly by government policies. In order to reduce the impact that economic sanctions might have if they ever came to be applied, the government stimulated the development of manufacturing and an oil from coal industry. The result was a growing need for Africans both as labour and as customers.
- nevertheless, by the beginning of the 1970s, problems were beginning to mount, although it took almost another 20 years before it completely unraveled. We cannot give a complete analysis of all the factors, but we can give an outline of the more important ones.
Economic
- although the National Party government claimed to be committed to capitalism, apartheid involved massive interference in the market; there was little ‘free market’ under apartheid. The colour bar was a massive undermining of free markets. It is true that the government tried to ensure that employers had large quantities of cheap labour as compensation, but contrary to marxist analyses, it was not business who wanted it. Moreover, because business was required to maintain a ratio of white employees to black employees, business growth created a growing demand for white employees that drove white wages and salaries to very high levels. Because of the high incomes paid to whites in private business, government employment became less attractive. That is why beginning in the 1960s, the government eventually came to break its own laws by employing non-whites in jobs that were supposed to be filled by whites. For many years, the government repeated the fiction that these non-white government employees were ‘temporary’ in spite of the fact that their numbers continued to grow steadily.
- however, by the early 1970s, the problems in private industry were becoming even more severe than that. Economic growth was greatly expanding the need for educated and skilled workers. By that point, the white population had pretty much reached its capacity for providing such people; apartheid was inhibiting the non-white population from filling the gap. The non-white educational systems were grossly underfunded; Bantu Education was especially notable for its inadequacies. Moreover, white unions controlled access to skilled trades by limiting apprentices to whites. The results were often enormous shortages of skilled workers. In 1971, one study concluded that South Africa was 6,000 auto mechanics short of its requirements. Researchers’ projections of future needs indicated even more horrendous shortfalls. Thus, the demands by economists and businessmen (including Afrikaners) began to be very insistent that the barriers be scraped. Big companies even began to raise quite large sums of money privately to build schools for Africans in the urban areas. This was not charity but self interest.
-however, in some areas (especially newly developing ones), Africans were increasingly doing semiskilled jobs. This was especially noticeable in construction which was mechanizing; most drivers and operators of heavy equipment and trucks were Africans or Coloureds.
- because of these and other problems, the economy began to perform badly—high inflation together with stagnation or ‘stagflation’. In the wake of the sharp rise in oil prices, most industrialized countries experienced this in the late 70s and early 80s. However, South Africa was already in this mode before the oil crisis; the latter just worsened it. South Africa has not really been able to get out of the mode. When the Rand was created in the late 1960s (half of its predecessor, the pound sterling), it was worth about $1.80. As of the end of 2006 it is worth about Can. $0.16-0.17 and worth even less in US funds. (However, the Rand has stabilized in the last couple of years and recently gained a bit against the US dollar.) The failure symbolized by the currency decline was already beginning to affect white incomes and wealth even in the 1970s.
- Afrikaner farmers had been an important source of political support for the National Party and the connection with the land had always been a fixation with Afrikaner nationalists. As a result, policies had favoured farmers with large marketing boards and other forms of protectionism. By the 70s, these farm protection measures were contributing noticeably to rising prices and inflation.
First Cracks
- the first cracks in the government’s ability to enforce its will absolutely appeared in 1971-72. Two incidents, although not very big in themselves, were portents:
The South West Africa Strike
- the strike arose because of opposition by the Ovambos to the government system of labour control. Workers who signed on to go to work in Windhoek or the mines had no say in what jobs they would get. They were simply assigned arbitrarily by the bureaucrats. It could make a huge difference. Domestics received only about R10-15 per month in addition to room and board. Mine workers, although it was much harder physical labour, were paid R30-40 per month. The system ensured that white madams had a continuing supply of very cheap servants.
- the government responded to the strike in its usual fashion by firing all strikers and shipping them back to the reserve—over 4,000. Then, it had to find replacements. White boys stepped in to help collect the garbage for a few days, but the novelty soon wore off and they went back to school. After searching high and low throughout South Africa, the government was able to come up with barely 2,000 replacement workers. Soon employers, especially mining companies, were demanding a solution. Finally, the government had to negotiate and make some concessions. The concessions were not large, but this was the 1st time in 20 years that the government had ever negotiated or made concessions.
The Durban Municipal Workers Strike
- this took place only a couple of months later. Again, the government tried to fire everyone. Durban is located in a warm, humid area (like Florida). As the garbage piled up, the stench mounted also. Finally, the government agreed to increase wages by a small, but significant amount. Again, the significance was that it was forced to do it at all. By experience, Africans had learned not to put forward leaders or spokesmen who could be arrested; instead, they had learned to act together.
- strikes began to take place in private industry. Construction was early hit. Strikes, whether or not described by that term, were illegal, but increasingly, arresting and prosecuting people did not get results. Buildings did not get built if the workers were locked up in jail. Nor could the drivers and operators be quickly replaced. It would take months or even years to train new ones. The key point was that workers were beginning to acquire leverage—not a lot, but enough that the government could no longer absolutely enforce its will. Although it was a number of years before the government changed the laws and began to allow Africans to form trade unions of their own, it increasingly was having to recognize reality.
- white trade unions too began to see the writing on the wall. With the shortages in many trades, it was clear that sooner rather than later, non-whites would have to be allowed into the trades (in fact most of the real work was already done by non-whites anyway; the white tradesmen mostly just supervised non-white workers). Union leaders began to argue that it was better to take non-whites into the unions than to see the non-whites form their own unions; the former would at least give them a bit of control. As a result, some of their voices were added to those demanding change.
- at first, in making changes, the government was trying to maintain apartheid as much as possible. Thus, rather than abolish the colour bar, they tried to get by with simply raising it. Thus, they altered laws and regulations in semiskilled jobs or government jobs that were already being filled by non-whites anyway and maintained that apartheid was still alive and well. Of course, white domination was not immediately threatened by these early changes. The significance lay in the fact that the government was beginning to lose its ability to control the future and how it was evolving.
Afrikaner Unity Cracks
- there had always been a few Afrikaner dissidents: a handful of communists on the one hand; on the other, a Rev. Beyers Naudé (a former NGK clergyman), a few writers and artists, etc. Nevertheless, Afrikaners had been remarkably united. Two solid bastions of support had always been the poor whites and the farm vote. The poor whites were rapidly disappearing as education, government programmes and the colour bar gave them high incomes. Also, most of them were now urbanized for 2 generations. Although the ideology of Afrikaner nationalism was that the Afrikaner nation was basically rural and tied to the land, it increasingly was at odds with the realities of their lives. Even more significantly, with the stagflation in the 1970s, urban Afrikaners’ incomes began to be affected negatively by the subsidies and protectionism given to Afrikaners in agriculture. Thus, there was a growing conflict of interests between these two pillars of the National Party.
- other splits began to occur as well. As a result of the programmes favouring Afrikaner owned and managed business (some was voluntary, but some was a result of government programmes), many more Afrikaners were involved in business. These business people were confronted by the same inefficiencies and hindrances created by apartheid as English business people; they also began to react the same way in urging changes. Thus, Afrikaners in business began to urge modification and even dismantling of apartheid.
- there was also growing disenchantment of Afrikaner intellectuals. Afrikaner social scientists, many educated abroad, began to investigate the social consequences of apartheid and migratory labour. Their work began to build a growing body of critical research showing not only the economic and social consequences of apartheid, but also the moral consequences (the disruption of African family life, infant mortality rates that in some reserves reached over 30% in the first year of life, high incidence of nutritional deficiency diseases, high rates of tuberculosis linked to poverty, etc.). Proponents of apartheid had always claimed that there were short term costs, but that in the long run everyone would be better off (short term pain for long term gain—of course, critics had pointed out that all the pain was being borne by the non-whites). By the 1970s it was clear that the ideal of separate development was farther away than when apartheid was started in the late 1940s. The only results of apartheid had been to increase the suffering of Africans immensely.
- during the 1970s, the growing splits began to be reflected in the National Party. The 2 sides came to be dubbed the ‘verligtes’ (enlightened ones) and the ‘verkramptes’ (closed, cramped ones). The verkramptes wanted to hold the line and maintain apartheid as much as possible. For many of these people, apartheid had never been about separate development anyway; it had always been about domination and baasskap (‘bossship’—’white man boss’). Thus, the fact that apartheid had always been a pipe dream did not matter; domination was still the goal to be maintained. In 1981, some of the leading verkramptes, led by Dr. Treurnicht (the man responsible for the Afrikaans language policy that sparked the SOWETO riots in 1976) were forced out of the National Party and took over the recently formed Conservative Party. Its support was concentrated heavily in rural areas.
Foreign Involvements
- South Africa tried to build and maintain a barrier along its borders against possible attacks from independent Africa. Thus, it resisted an insurgency led by South West Africa Peoples’ Organization (SWAPO) in South West Africa for many years. It supported the Ian Smith regime in Rhodesia. With the end to the Portuguese empire in Mozambique and Angola, South Africa supported guerrilla groups in both countries against leftist governments which came to power. These involvements cost quite a bit, especially for an economy that was already having difficulties.
- however, even more serious was the cost in lives; especially by the 1980s, even some Afrikaner young men began to resist conscription and Afrikaner parents were showing unwillingness to see their sons coming home in body bags.
- also, after excluding them for so long, the South African Defense Forces began to accept non-whites into the military in the 1970s. Soon the logic of that began to be expressed; how can we expect them to fight and die for the country if they are second-class citizens? This had been a major reason why they had been excluded, but the needs of the military had forced a change.
Foreign Pressures
- foreign pressures began to have some effect; campaigns, especially in the US and Britain, were launched against companies that did business in South Africa. A number of them began to sell out and leave South Africa. This disinvestment further had negative effects on the Rand and on the economy generally. I don’t think it caused the growing economic problems, but it certainly added to what was already there.
- as an alternative to disinvestment, pressure was put on foreign companies to agree to abide by a code of conduct in their South African operations—e.g., move to equal pay for non-whites doing the same work as whites; employment and promotions based on ability, not on race.
- boycotts were also launched in Europe and North America against South African products (fruit, wines, etc.).
- finally, when South Africa was forced to borrow money abroad (the output of gold had enabled South Africa to avoid having to do this for many years but balance of payments deficits had become persistent in spite of the gold), demands for more changes in policies could not be resisted and options were running out.
Internal Resistance
- the generation that had fought apartheid in the 1950s was exhausted, in prison or in exile during the 1960s. In the face of government repression, it was impossible to gain any momentum. The police seemed able to bribe or to coerce informers and were able to infiltrate most organizations or groups trying to organize any opposition or resistance to apartheid. Even white opponents, who had more leeway than opponents in other groups, were constantly harassed and intimidated, many ultimately being driven into exile as the alternative to imprisonment.
- the emergence of Steve Biko and the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) in 1969 was a big step in renewed resistance. Biko seems to have been influenced by Anton Lembede as well as the Black Power movement in the United States in the 1960s. He was banned and then arrested and charged under the Terrorism Act; although he was not convicted of the most serious charges, he was jailed briefly.
- then in June 1976, the school children in SOWETO began demonstrating and then clashing with police in what became known as the SOWETO riots. These were very significant because African resistance, which had been largely stomped out and suppressed after Sharpeville, burst out again and was never able to be suppressed again. What was especially significant is that these teenagers and young people were entirely products of Bantu Education, a system designed and intended as indoctrination. We’ll return to discuss the long term effects, but the outbreak of the protests and riots were an indication of the failure of Bantu Education to indoctrinate Africans into accepting the roles and status intended for them by the formulators of apartheid.
Bantu Education Act 1953
Background
- education for Africans had been an area of growing concern and criticism in the 1930s. This is the description from the Oxford History of South Africa (II, pp. 224-5):
In 1936 the Interdepartmental Committee on Native Education noted the link between education and social stratification: ‘The education of the White child prepares him for life in a dominant society and the education of the Black child for a subordinate society.’ It asked the question: ‘what are we really driving at in education the South African Native. Are we to Europeanize him as quickly as possible so that he can take his place in our pattern of Western civilization with as little trouble as possible? Or are we to prepare him for an isolated Native Civilization, or . . . to “develop him along his own lines”? Segregationists, like D. F. Malan, pointed to the political dangers of a rising, educated class of non-Whites. Knowledge, he said, was power. The Voortrekkers had had to deal with uncivilized and ignorant non-whites but now ‘for a white minority to face a large majority of civilized and educated non-whites, wishing to share our way of life and striving for equality in all respects, [was] something quite different. It made the fight for a white South Africa immeasurably more difficult for the present generation than it had been for the generation of Piet Retief and Sarel Cilliers.’ Others condemned the existing system of African education. It ‘denationalized’ and ‘detribalized’ Africans, facilitating the assimilation of black and white. Afrikaner nationalists criticized the widespread use of English in African schools for spreading English culture and making the total environment more English in character, thereby handicapping Afrikaners in their struggle against anglicization.
- very early after coming to power, Malan’s National Party Government set up a Commission on Native Education in 1949
to formulate ‘the principles and aims of education for Natives as an independent race, in which their past and present, their inherent racial qualities, their distinctive characteristics and aptitude, their needs under the ever-changing social conditions are taken into consideration.’ It was also to suggest how the existing system should be reformed to conform with these aims, and ‘to prepare Natives more effectively for their future occupations.’ (Italics added.) The Commission’s major recommendation was that all education, except in the case of a foreign language, should be through the medium of the mother-tongue for the first eight school years and mother -tongue instruction should gradually be extended upwards to secondary schools and training institutions. But both official languages should be taught from the earliest school days ‘in such as way that the Bantu child will be able to find his way in European communities; to follow oral and written instructions; and to carry on a simple conversation with Europeans about his work and other objects of common interest’. Handwork taught in the first few years of school should aim at inculcating ‘the habit of doing manual work’.
Dr. Verwoerd and the Act
- Dr. Verwoerd, then Minister of Native Affairs (the name of the department had not yet been changed to Bantu Affairs), guided the Bantu Education Act (BEA) through parliament. The act showed both the older aspect of segregation and the early effects of apartheid theory.
- Verwoerd and the National Party government felt that dissatisfaction and resistance to its policies were the result of the education Africans received; they wanted and intended to get complete control of African education. There was a pretty clear assumption that the education system could be used to indoctrinate the population with the right ideas and to accept the roles that the government specified for Africans in its apartheid policies.
- education of Africans had largely remained what it had been in the 19th: schools were built and maintained and education provided under the direction of missions and churches; costs were subsidized by grants from the government and state inspectors were responsible for ensuring that standards and quality were maintained. The curriculum and examinations were the same for all schools regardless of race with minor exceptions; for example, in African schools,vernacular African languages were substituted for Latin. Not all schools were segregated by race, although most were.
- under the BEA, the state would take over full control and responsibility for education of Africans (missions and churches were finding the costs increasingly onerous, especially with the growing desire and demand for education among Africans).
- henceforth, segregation was to be made complete. Initially, the government seemed to suggest that state aid would be withdrawn, but schools could continue to operate if they wished. In fact, most schools could not continue without grants from the state; therefore, most systems were (often reluctantly) turned over to the government or a few decided to close rather than turn them over to the government.
- however, some schools which had intended to continue without state aid found that they were not allowed to. It was argued that education was so crucial to society that the state could not allow just anyone to teach; it was made illegal to operate a school without a permit from the state. The famous Adams College in Natal is the best example. Adams had been founded in the late 19th by Rev. John Dube, using Booker T Washington’s Tuskegee Institute as his model. It had established an outstanding reputation. It was denied a permit, but it was not allowed to close. The government expropriated it. The famous Lovedale Institution was also taken over; both became government teacher training institutions.
- nevertheless, there were always a few private schools which had some integration, predominantly white schools which had a few non-white students; most were Catholic schools.
- the principle of segregation was also applied to different African groups also; schools were demarcated as being for a particular ethnic group and were prohibited from enrolling other students. Teaching in the vernacular would have made this necessary in any case.
- however, even more significant was the intention to provide an education that was very different from that provided to white children, one that would prepare African children for the subordinate, limited role that Africans would have in South Africa. Verwoerd made this clear in his speeches regarding the BEA in parliament:
Race relations cannot improve if the result of Native education is the creation of frustrated people. . . . Education must train people in accordance with their opportunities in life, according to the sphere in which they live. . . . Education should have its roots entirely in the Native areas and in the Native environment and Native community. There Bantu education must be able to give itself complete expression and there it will have to perform its real service. The Bantu must be guided to serve his own community in all respects. There is no place for him in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour. Within his own community, however, all doors are open. For that reason it is of no avail for him to receive a training which has as its aim absorption in the European community while he cannot and will not be absorbed there. Up till now he has been subjected to a school system which drew him away from his own community and partially misled him by showing him the green pastures of the European but still did not allow him to graze there.
- also significant was the directive that henceforth, up to the end of Standard 6 (Grade 8), all instruction was to be in the African languages. This was justified on the basis that children learned better and faster in the mother-tongue. Only in this way could they imbibe their own language and culture and thus develop ‘along their own lines.’ It was also argued that this was important from a psychological point of view.
- however, critics pointed out a number of problems with this approach: there were no textbooks in the African languages and it would be extremely expensive to produce complete ranges of textbooks in all the African languages in all standards, especially for those languages with smaller numbers of speakers. Secondly, there were and are real problems in some areas, e.g., arithmetic and mathematics. Most African languages have only a limited range of terms for numbers, especially larger numbers and great problems with fractions and decimals; in the 19th C it had been decided that arithmetic and mathematics would have to be taught in English virtually from the beginning. Science too posed problems of lacking scientific terms.
[Even in Afrikaans, there were problems teaching science; terminology in science tended to come via English and this raised the anxiety about anglicization. (Of course, in the sciences and generally, English borrows extensively from a raft of languages—German, Latin, Greek, French and more recently, even from Russian without anyone being concerned; in fact as a result of this borrowing, English has the most massive vocabulary of any language. This allows flexibility and enormous subtlety and is almost certainly a good thing, even if it makes the language extremely difficult to master,) In any case, to avoid infiltration of English into Afrikaans, many linguists were employed in Afrikaans universities making up scientific and technological terms in Afrikaans to replace foreign ones, especially from English.]
- another requirement was that both official languages, Afrikaans and English, must be taught equally as second languages from the very early standards. This was both a matter of pride (Afrikaans must have equality with English) and a practical matter to resist anglicization (Afrikaner employers must be able to use Afrikaans in their communications with their African employees and servants).
- finally, under Bantu Education, the use of European languages for instruction was to be permitted only at the secondary school level (i.e., Standard 7 and after). It was implied that the two official languages would be used equally so that as many subjects would be taught in Afrikaans as in English. (In fact, this could not be and was not enforced, but we shall return to this.)
- it was also suggested that the curriculum be very different in Bantu Education. For example, in rural areas, rather than spending all their time in academic studies boys should spend time in gardens and be given instruction in agricultural practices; girls should be instructed in homemaking and child rearing rather than exclusive focus on academic subjects.
Bantu Education in practice
- it was promised that the state would greatly expand the percentage of children who were receiving some schooling. However, financial and other resources were never promised or provided on a commensurate level. In fact, there were strong political pressures against doing so. One of the major pillars of support for the National Party were the poor whites and working class Afrikaners. They usually resented any money being spent on Africans and other non-whites. They used a phrase from the Bible about ‘taking the children’s bread and giving it to the dogs’ in voicing their opposition. In fact, the mentally unstable man who assassinated Verwoerd accused him of doing too much for Africans! As a result, the gap between per student spending for white and African children grew drastically.
- class sizes ballooned and it was fairly common to have 60-80 children in a classroom with one teacher. Moreover, in many places, children attended school in two shifts daily with the teachers teaching two shifts. This would apparently allow doubling of numbers with relatively small increases in expenditures. Even basic school supplies were limited or nonexistent.
- there were major barriers to doing it any other way. Where would they get the teachers? It was too expensive to get whites; besides, this would clash with the idea of ‘along their own lines’ and few whites were proficient in African languages. Training teachers is a long process. This was especially difficult in South Africa because so few Africans progressed beyond the early primary standards. Even when teacher standards were lowered (for example, some were accepted as teachers for the early primary standards after completing elementary levels equivalent to grade 8 and receiving some teacher training), it was difficult to get enough teachers.
- both domestically and internationally, the government was receiving enormous criticism about Bantu Education so it pushed ahead in its attempt to create good statistics, especially to raise the proportion of children who received some education to very high levels (such numbers were collected by the UN). In this, the government was successful and liked to contrast its statistics with the newly independent African nations in the 1960s. However, the statistics were very misleading as few of the children remained in school for very long. Thus, the profile showed very high levels of attendance in the first year, but dropping off drastically in the 2nd and subsequent years. It is hard to believe that most children received any benefit because those early primary grades was where the overcrowding was the most severe.
- teaching as a career was also greatly depreciated and became less appealing. Henceforth, African teachers were dismissible at will by the state; moreover, with only one employer now (previously, there had been a number of different church and mission systems), teachers who fell out of favour had nowhere else to go for a job.
- theoretically, control of teachers was to be turned over to local committees, supposedly controlled by parents; this was to allow community wishes and needs to predominate. However, the committees were only advisory and never had any significant influence. They were always threatened that if they did not like what they had, they would get nothing.
- in fact, an elaborate bureaucracy was built up in the Department of Bantu Education. Africans were only at the bottom initially and for a long time. Overwhelmingly, the bureaucrats were Afrikaners and whites who believed in apartheid. Only in the 1970s did they begin to promote some Africans to higher positions; however, even in Bantu Education Department the rule was that an African must never be superior to a white person.
- in order to carry the ideology of Bantu Education to its logical limits, post-secondary education was also officially and forcefully segregated in 1959 with the Extension of University Education Act. Creating several new universities for Africans, which all had greatly inferior facilities (especially libraries and laboratories) and often inferior faculty, gave the rationale for excluding most Africans from those white universities where limited numbers had been allowed to enroll.
- it should be noted that the government was never able to implement its intentions completely. The outcry against Bantu Education, both domestically and internationally, was enormous. It was the subject of at least 3 reports to the United Nations in the 1950s alone. The government was thrown a bit on the defensive, especially in regard to the charges about the inferiority. Its spokespersons tried to argue that it was different but not inferior. Thus, while the curriculum was watered down, it was never put in the form that some of the Christian National Education theorists had been advocating and Verwoerd suggested in 1953.
- nevertheless, it was clear that African students did not get anywhere near the level of education received by white students. The effects could be seen starkly at the secondary school level. To matriculate (graduate from secondary school) in South Africa, students had to pass nationwide examinations. Africans had to write the same exams as whites. However, the Africans who got that far (a tiny remnant of the very brightest African students) still had an extremely low success rate as compared to white students who represented a very much larger proportion of white children who entered the system. This revealed the inadequacies of Bantu Education as well as the severe extra difficulties for Africans—learning and taking instruction in a second language, the cultural handicap in a system designed for whites, etc. However, it should be noted that right from 1953, Africans in their opposition to Bantu Education had insisted that they wanted exactly the same curriculum and education system as whites had even though it meant that Africans would be at a disadvantage as compared to white children.
[I would like to inject a personal anecdote. About 1964 as an undergraduate, I did a seminar paper on the Bantu Education Act. I argued that the government was very likely to be badly disappointed in their objectives for Bantu Education and that they were creating a monster for themselves. All of my classmates disagreed very strongly with me. Our professor, Dr. Keppel-Jones, did come to my aid; I don’t know if he agreed with me, but he did say that some thoughtful people made similar arguments.
While the government gave itself lots of power and seemingly absolute control, de facto control of a large system is not so easy, especially when they were committed to using Africans as much as possible and almost entirely at the teaching level. I had been a teacher and knew how difficult it would be to monitor what teachers said and even more how they said it in the classroom. Moreover, there is the old adage, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” This is even more true in the realm of intellectual processes. Not being able to read students minds means that you have no way to monitor what they think. You can force people to express the ‘right’ point of view verbally or on examinations if you have severe penalties (for example, the threat of failing grades), but you can’t force them to agree within themselves short of massive brainwashing and torture; however, these are not practical on a large scale or in a school system. Attempts to force a point of view down students’ throats is usually self-defeating; young people are prone to adopt an opposing view just as a means to assert their independence.
The Soviet Union is a prime example of the failure of such endeavours. Seventy years of indoctrinating the party line in the schools did not convince most people of the blessings and rightness of communism. Widespread cynicism, especially amongst the young, was noted for decades before the fall of the Soviet Union. Even more, I did not think that Bantu Education could persuade Africans that they were inferior or that they should voluntarily accept subordination as right. The SOWETO riots were a vindication of my view.]
SOWETO Riots
- some of the language regulations of Bantu Education had never been enforced. Instruction in English infiltrated often at elementary levels in some subjects and was used almost exclusively at secondary school level. Rarely was Afrikaans used as a language of instruction, to a large extent because few African teachers were competent to do so. Changing this provided the initial spark that ignited the riots.
- provinces in South Africa were not autonomous and sovereign as they are in Canada. Although each province had a Council of elected representatives, the head of the provincial bureaucracy, called the Administrator, was appointed by the national government. Dr. Treurnicht, a leader of the ‘verkrampte’ wing of the National Party (he later became leader of the Conservative Party), was Administrator in the Transvaal. As a nationalist hard-liner, it was his administration that announced that the ignoring of the language regulation would no longer be allowed and that in future, at least half of the subjects currently taught in English must be taught in Afrikaans. This would of course greatly increase the obstacles and difficulties facing African students in their attempts to matriculate. It was to protest this policy change that the first rally was called. It is clear that the call for a protest and the response was entirely at the initiative of the students themselves. No adults were involved. The early clashes with police with injuries and fatalities quickly escalated the unrest into much broader areas of concern and opposition to the entire system of white domination and apartheid.
- for me a main significance was that the children and young people who participated and produced the unrest, who protested and fought at the risk of their lives, were all products of Bantu Education. They had been subjected to the system that was supposed to make them accept the role in life that the National Party government had allotted to them. Bantu Education failed to achieve that objective.
- of course, it was not accidental that the protest movement occurred in the most urbanized area among young people who were born in and were totally oriented to urban life; the reserves and Bantustan areas, where they might or might not have any close relatives, were nothing to them.
- these riots were the start of a re-emergent and growing resistance that could not be put down. Increasingly, the government was reduced to trying to keep a lid on the situation but were not able to put out the fire. The state’s resources were increasingly being taxed just to keep the lid on.
- however, it should be noted that there were heavy costs. First, there was a cost in lives, during the SOWETO riots themselves and in the years of recurring protests that followed. Secondly, education for Africans was profoundly disrupted; schools in SOWETO and many other areas of South Africa became targets and were often vandalized and destroyed. Discipline practically disappeared so little real education could any longer be accomplished. Large numbers of children stopped going to school entirely. Most of a generation of Africans lost out on schooling almost entirely. With the coming of majority rule and the end of apartheid, few of that generation had the ability to take advantage of the opportunities that began to open up.
- this domestic resistance is a major reason for the end of apartheid and majority rule. Non-whites were becoming more unified. Steve Biko’s movement had attracted the support of large numbers of Coloured and other non-white young people who increasingly described themselves as ‘black’ and identified with Africans. Those trends continued. On the other side, disillusionment was spreading among Afrikaners and splits were appearing. Finally, a core of more moderate Afrikaners emerged who recognized that the path they were on could only lead to intensifying violence and hatred. While some commentators attach a great deal of weight to international pressures as an explanation for the end of apartheid, I attach greater importance to these internal developments in South Africa. After all, in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, leaders of the two most important foreign governments for South Africa, were still contending that Nelson Mandela and the ANC were communist and were unwilling to support any strong action against the South African government which they preferred because it was ‘anti-communist’! International pressures were certainly a factor, but I am not convinced that they were the main factor.