Education and the Struggle for National Liberation in South Africa

Education and the Struggle for National Liberation in South Africa Essays and speeches by Neville Alexander (1985–1989) Education and the Struggle for National Liberation in South Africa was first published by Skotaville Publishers. ISBN 0 947479 15 5 © Copyright Neville Alexander 1990 All rights reserved. This digital edition published 2013 © Copyright The Estate of Neville Edward Alexander 2013 This edition is not for sale and is available for non-commercial use only. All enquiries relating to commercial use, distribution or storage should be addressed to the publisher: The Estate of Neville Edward Alexander, PO Box 1384, Sea Point 8060, South Africa Contents Preface 3 What is happening in our schools and what can we do about it? 4 Ten years of educational crisis: The resonance of 1976 28 Liberation pedagogy in the South African context 52 Education, culture and the national question 71 The academic boycott: Issues and implications 88 The tactics of education for liberation 102 Education strategies for a new South Africa 115 The future of literacy in South Africa: Scenarios or slogans? 142 Careers in an apartheid society 152 Restoring the status of teachers in the community 164 Bursaries in South Africa: Factors to consider in drafting a five-year plan 176 A democratic language policy for a post-apartheid South Africa/Azania 188 African culture in the context of Namibia: Cultural development or assimilation? 205 PREFACE THE FOLLOWING ESSAYS AND SPEECHES have been selected from among numerous attempts to address the relationship between education and the national liberation struggle. All of them were written or delivered in the period 1985–1989, which has been one of the most turbulent periods in our recent history, more especially in the educational arena. I hope, of course, that the documents speak for themselves. In order to preserve the atmosphere in which they were presented, very little by way of editorial changes has been made. A few paragraphs have sometimes been omitted in order to avoid unnecessary and large-scale repetitions. I have been emboldened to publish these essays and speeches by the belief – reinforced by friends and by my publishers – that at the very least some of them will give rise to lively and useful debates at universities, colleges, schools and elsewhere. If they generate this effect and even if some of them are eventually judged to be hopelessly propagandistic and inaccurate by the majority of readers, I shall be perfectly happy. For, if there is one feature of the current intellectual environment in South Africa which ought to concern those who are bending their minds to the ‘post-apartheid’ era (however we define that!), it is the lack of serious debate. We are surrounded by sloganising and Viva shouts. Litanies with their choric responses have taken the place of the fructifying dialogue that comes out of the confrontation of independently conceived but divergent visions, ideas and arguments. If this little volume could help to bridge the gap between these two modes of articulation, it will indeed be an important contribution to the intellectual and cultural life of South Africa/Azania. Cape Town, June 1990 3 WHAT IS HAPPENING IN OUR SCHOOLS AND WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT? The economic crisis of the ruling class FOR MANY YEARS NOW it has been obvious that South Africa has been caught up in the general crisis of the world capitalist system. The ways in which this crisis has shown itself in South African economic life are many and difficult to understand. However, every worker knows about the following things which we have experienced, especially in the last two years or so: Disinvestment: Long before this became a political issue of the first order in the USA and elsewhere, major foreign companies had begun not to invest new capital in South African enterprises and generally to run down their interests in the country. The main reason for this was directly less ‘political’ than ‘economic’. It has been calculated that profit on foreign investment in South Africa has fallen ± 30% to ± 7% during the last few years. Unemployment: Since economic growth depends on new investments, one of the results of disinvestment has been to make worse the problem of unemployment in South Africa. Foreign capital has always played an important role in stimulating growth and therefore employment opportunities in the South African economy. For many reasons, South Africa’s export performance during most of the last five years has been extremely weak so that growth could not be stimulated in this way either. It has been calculated that in order to increase the living standards of all 4 What is happening in our schools? sections of the population, it is necessary that the South African economy should expand at an average of 5% per annum. In actual fact, during the last few years growth has been either negative or well below 3% per annum. The result has been the large-scale unemployment that has become so typical of South Africa’s cities and of its rural areas. In certain cities such as Port Elizabeth up to half of the adult population is unemployed. In the country areas, the situation is disastrous. Inflation: Those who have the good fortune to be in a regular job have not escaped the edge of the crisis. As South African money has lost its value mainly because the government has printed more and more money in order to meet its own commitments, the prices of almost every basic item on which the lives of workers and their children depend have gone up almost on a monthly basis. Rents, bus fares, train fares, electricity, heating materials, food prices, clothing, just about everything has become more and more costly every year. While the price index has shot up by over 15% per annum for the past few years, the wage index has not kept pace with it at all. In fact, trade unions have had to concern themselves more with keeping their members in employment than with the wage level itself! The capitalist system is periodically and more and more frequently subjected to such crises and South Africa’s system of racial capitalism cannot escape this fate. In order to restore profitability to the system, a great deal of resources has first to be destroyed or aborted. Once inventories have been run down and supply and demand brought into line with each other, the system can function ‘normally’ again. But these periods of ‘normality’ become shorter and shorter. The long-term prospects for the South African economy are, to say the least, dismal. Even if we go 5 Education and the struggle for national liberation into short-term mini-booms, the fact of the matter is that the South African economy, given the present system, will not be able to employ all our employable people, pay them a living wage, make it possible for them to live in decent adequate houses at prices they can afford, give their children free and compulsory education up to the age of 16 or matric. And so forth. None of those things that we, the working people of this country, are fighting and struggling for will be ours under the present regime of crisis. Only a completely new order can change the situation. The political crisis of the ruling class Verwoerdian apartheid has come to the end of the road. Economic and political changes both within and outside South Africa have rendered unrealistic the racist vision of the 1940s of independent Bantustans where the ‘Black’ people would largely live out their lives except when they were needed to work in the towns and cities of South Africa. In that vision, all the people of the country were to be neatly divided according to ‘racial groups’ and were to be schooled separately, live in separate ghettos and even in separate ‘ethnic’ pockets within the same ghetto. All of life was to be regulated and regimented, books and the media censored so that only sound and healthy Christian-National ideas would be available to people. In short, South Africa was to be turned into the bureaucrat’s and racist’s utopia, a kind of human zoo. For a while, right into the early ’70s, the rulers pursued this policy with a large measure of success and it was supported by the vast majority of whites, some middle-class blacks and the major imperialist powers despite certain ritual criticisms, simply because it remained profitable and appeared to be stable. Then, from 1973, and especially from 1976 onwards, the whole edifice began to crumble. The great Soweto uprising starting in June 1976 was the 6 What is happening in our schools? warning signal that the racist fantasies of the Verwoerd- Vorster era were about to be blown away by the winds of change. The onset of the economic crisis of the South African ruling class coincided with and was reinforced by a profound political crisis. A new constitutional dispensation had to be worked out and new class alliances had to be forged in order to save the system of racial capitalism. The increasing industrialisation of the economy, proletarianisation and urbanisation of the population had taken place in spite of all efforts to prevent the latter and had produced political and ideological results that ran directly counter to the plans of the ruling party. Under P.W. Botha, who became Prime Minister of South Africa in 1978, the attempt was to be made to reform the unreformable. To cut a long story very short: as we all know, the result was the racist monstrosity of the tricameral parliament which excluded statutory ‘Blacks’ from the formerly whites- only parliament! Progressive people, of course, rejected the whole concept of a racially qualified franchise and not merely the fact that ‘Blacks’ were excluded.

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