Education and the Struggle

8/11/2019 Education and the Struggle

1/220

Education and the Struggle for National Liberation

in South Africa

Essays and speechesby Neville Alexander

19851989)


2/220

Education and the Struggle for National Liberation in South Africa wasfirst published by Skotaville Publishers.

ISBN 0 947479 15 5 Copyright Neville Alexander 1990All 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 orstorage should be addressed to the publisher:The Estate of Neville Edward Alexander,PO Box 1384, Sea Point 8060, South Africa


3/220

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 considerin drafting a five-year plan 176

A democratic language policy fora post-apartheid South Africa/Azania 188

African culture in the context of Namibia:Cultural development or assimilation? 205


4/220

3

PREFACE

THE FOLLOWING ESSAYS AND SPEECHES have been selectedfrom among numerous attempts to address the relationship between education and the national liberation struggle. Allof them were written or delivered in the period 19851989,which has been one of the most turbulent periods in ourrecent history, more especially in the educational arena.

I hope, of course, that the documents speak for them-selves. In order to preserve the atmosphere in which theywere presented, very little by way of editorial changes has been made. A few paragraphs have sometimes beenomitted in order to avoid unnecessary and large-scalerepetitions. I have been emboldened to publish these essaysand speeches by the belief reinforced by friends and bymy publishers that at the very least some of them will giverise to lively and useful debates at universities, colleges,schools and elsewhere. If they generate this effect and evenif some of them are eventually judged to be hopelesslypropagandistic and inaccurate by the majority of readers, Ishall be perfectly happy. For, if there is one feature of thecurrent intellectual environment in South Africa whichought to concern those who are bending their minds to thepost-apartheid era (however we define that!), it is the lackof serious debate. We are surrounded by sloganising andViva shouts. Litanies with their choric responses have takenthe place of the fructifying dialogue that comes out of theconfrontation of independently conceived but divergentvisions, ideas and arguments.

If this little volume could help to bridge the gap betweenthese two modes of articulation, it will indeed be an impor-tant contribution to the intellectual and cultural life of SouthAfrica/Azania.

Cape Town, June 1990


5/220

4

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 Africahas been caught up in the general crisis of the worldcapitalist system. The ways in which this crisis has shownitself in South African economic life are many and difficultto understand. However, every worker knows about thefollowing things which we have experienced, especially inthe last two years or so:

Disinvestment: Long before this became a politicalissue of the first order in the USA and elsewhere,major foreign companies had begun not to invest newcapital in South African enterprises and generally torun down their interests in the country. The mainreason for this was directly less political thaneconomic. 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 onnew investments, one of the results of disinvestmenthas been to make worse the problem of unemploy-ment in South Africa. Foreign capital has alwaysplayed an important role in stimulating growth and

therefore employment opportunities in the SouthAfrican economy. For many reasons, South Africasexport performance during most of the last five yearshas been extremely weak so that growth could not bestimulated in this way either. It has been calculatedthat in order to increase the living standards of all


6/220

What is happening in our schools?

5

sections of the population, it is necessary that theSouth African economy should expand at an average

of 5% per annum. In actual fact, during the last fewyears growth has been either negative or well below3% per annum. The result has been the large-scaleunemployment that has become so typical of SouthAfricas cities and of its rural areas. In certain citiessuch as Port Elizabeth up to half of the adultpopulation is unemployed. In the country areas, thesituation is disastrous.Inflation: Those who have the good fortune to be in aregular job have not escaped the edge of the crisis. AsSouth African money has lost its value mainly becausethe government has printed more and more money inorder to meet its own commitments, the prices ofalmost every basic item on which the lives of workersand their children depend have gone up almost on amonthly basis. Rents, bus fares, train fares, electricity,heating materials, food prices, clothing, just abouteverything has become more and more costly everyyear. While the price index has shot up by over 15%per annum for the past few years, the wage index hasnot kept pace with it at all. In fact, trade unions havehad to concern themselves more with keeping theirmembers in employment than with the wage levelitself!

The capitalist system is periodically and more and morefrequently subjected to such crises and South Africassystem of racial capitalism cannot escape this fate. In order

to restore profitability to the system, a great deal ofresources has first to be destroyed or aborted. Onceinventories have been run down and supply and demand brought into line with each other, the system can functionnormally again. But these periods of normality becomeshorter and shorter. The long-term prospects for the SouthAfrican economy are, to say the least, dismal. Even if we go


7/220

Education and the struggle for national liberation

6

into short-term mini-booms, the fact of the matter is that theSouth African economy, given the present system, will not

be able to employ all our employable people, pay them aliving wage, make it possible for them to live in decentadequate houses at prices they can afford, give theirchildren free and compulsory education up to the age of 16or matric. And so forth. None of those things that we, theworking people of this country, are fighting and strugglingfor will be ours under the present regime of crisis. Only acompletely 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 outsideSouth Africa have rendered unrealistic the racist vision ofthe 1940s of independent Bantustans where the Blackpeople would largely live out their lives except when theywere needed to work in the towns and cities of SouthAfrica. 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 inseparate ethnic pockets within the same ghetto. All of lifewas to be regulated and regimented, books and the mediacensored so that only sound and healthy Christian-Nationalideas would be available to people. In short, South Africawas to be turned into the bureaucrats and racists utopia, akind of human zoo.

For a while, right into the early 70s, the rulers pursued

this policy with a large measure of success and it wassupported by the vast majority of whites, some middle-class blacks and the major imperialist powers despite certainritual criticisms, simply because it remained profitable andappeared to be stable. Then, from 1973, and especially from1976 onwards, the whole edifice began to crumble. Thegreat Soweto uprising starting in June 1976 was the


8/220


7

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 SouthAfrican ruling class coincided with and was reinforced by aprofound political crisis.

A new constitutional dispensation had to be worked outand new class alliances had to be forged in order to save thesystem of racial capitalism. The increasing industrialisationof the economy, proletarianisation and urbanisation of thepopulation had taken place in spite of all efforts to preventthe latter and had produced political and ideological resultsthat ran directly counter to the plans of the ruling party.Under P.W. Botha, who became Prime Minister of SouthAfrica in 1978, the attempt was to be made to reform theunreformable.

To cut a long story very short: as we all know, the resultwas the racist monstrosity of the tricameral parliamentwhich excluded statutory Blacks from the formerly whites-only parliament!

Progressive people, of course, rejected the whole conceptof a racially qualified franchise and not merely the fact thatBlacks were excluded. However, even this doomed andcrude attempt at political reform was still tainted by thelegacy of Verwoerdian fascist and Herrenvolk thinking.Only at the end of 1985 after epic struggles conducted by black workers, students and youth did P.W. Botha seem tosay that this tricameral fraud was no more than an interimmeasure and held out the empty prospect that Blackswould at some point be included in the system.

This was a belated but, of course, completely inadequateattempt to respond to the events of the past year and morewhich have spelt final doom to the new constitutionaldispensation. The black people of Azania have rejectedalmost 100% this pernicious scheme of the racists tomaintain white domination by buying off the black middleclass and dividing up the black working class. In a sense,


9/220


8

the events since September 1984 are forcing the ruling classto go back to the drawing board in order to probe other

constitutional solutions. The latest magic formula that is being whispered aloud all over the place is some kind ofcombination of a federation and a confederation. The rulingclass are desperate for a set of constitutional clothes thatwill cover the nakedness of their greed and their lust forpower.

Another significant feature of the recent and continuingstruggles has been the very clear indications that the blackpeople in general and the workers in particular have beenradicalised beyond all expectation. It is undoubtedly correctto say today that the majority of the people of this countrydo not believe that apartheid can be reformed. They areconvinced that it has to be overthrown. One of the mostspectacular demonstrations of this conviction is theconsistent and often extremely violent manner in which alltertiary and many other collaborationist structures have been destroyed. To serve on a community council, amanagement or local area committee or even to be apoliceman today has become an act of suicidal folly. Therulers are hard put to salvage their system of collaboratorsand sell-outs at all levels. Ideologically, the people arearmed to the teeth; they are no longer taken in by anythingthe rulers or their agents try to sell them. Bothas reportedclaim to Van Zyl Slabbert that he has the support of morethan 50% of the black people is one of the most patheticexamples of gobbledygook in modern political history!

These, and other, consequences of the uprising spell

doom to the rulers of this country and to the ruling class ingeneral. Under these circumstances, they know,revolutionary ideas find ready access especially to theminds of young unemployed workers and students. Thishas been the main reason for the open and apparentlycounter-productive brutality with which they have tried to beat down the uprising.


10/220


9

The education crisis of the ruling class

Schools, generally speaking, reflect what is happening insociety at large. The vast majority of black secondary schoolstudents are the children of the black working class. Thereis no way that they can be unaffected by the devastationand desolation around them in the ghettos. As idealisticyoung people with a measure of formal education andmany opportunities to compare their situation to that of

white students and more especially to that of students inrecently liberated countries, they are less restrained bycaution than their parents are. This is a universalphenomenon.

But the economic and political crises of the rulers arealso reproduced in the educational arena and theconsequent conditions in the schools themselves are the

most immediate cause of the anger of black students and oftheir willingness to make so many unprecedented sacrifices.Thus, even though the racist state has spent relatively moreon the education of blacks since 1976 than it did before thatdate, very little has in fact changed. This is largely becausetoo little is spent per annum, the apartheid separateeducational facilities devour three or four times the fundswhich a unitary system would require and because noserious attempts were made to upgrade the skills ofteachers in black schools. The result is the same old dismallist of educational statistics that we were used to before1976: very high pupil-teacher ratios, pupil-classroom ratios,a majority of under- or unqualified teachers, school fees, books, uniforms and travel expenses that have to be paidfor by the poorest section of the working class, anti-educational environments inside and outside of schools, apaternalistic, chauvinistic and authoritarian pedagogy: inshort, all those material and ideological conditions whichwe know to be at the bottom of the student uprising.

As far as the ruling class is concerned, the appointment


11/220


10

of the De Lange Commission as the direct result of the198081 uprising was clearly a time-buying device. Even

the harmless liberal, technocratic and ethnicrecommendations of that commission were partiallyrejected. Hardly any of them was implemented. It has takenthe present explosion to move the governing party from1976 to 1981! Only now are they willing to implement someof the less controversial recommendations of that veryinadequate commission.

The rulers will undoubtedly attempt to defuse theseriousness of the education crisis once they have spent theforce of their repression. They will spend proportionatelymuch more money on education for blacks than they havedone hitherto. Teachers will be subject to even largerfinancial temptations and they will allow the private sectorto start some of the most attractive education and trainingprogrammes in order to siphon off those students whoshow initiative and ability. The capitalist class and theirforeign backers are motivated by both economic andpolitical considerations. For the expanding andmodernising economy of South Africa they will needincreasing numbers of skilled and semi-skilled workers,civil servants, professionals and small-business people.Hence they are about to invest billions in the education of blacks.

It is quite possible that certain concessions will be maderegarding Students Representative Councils although, aswith the trade unions initially, attempts will be made tolimit their effectiveness and their democratic functions. In

the area of the content of education, we can expect majorchanges in syllabi and curricula, simply because the old-style apartheid/racist stuff no longer washes even withrelatively uninformed black pupils and students.

More and more education or training for specialpurposes will be introduced in line with De Lange. That isto say, we must expect that most pupils will be forced to


12/220


11

specialise from the moment they enter the secondaryschool, to the detriment of the general level of education

and culture in South Africa. An attempt will be made toproduce well-drilled and competent but extremely limitedtechnicians and technocrats who will tend to be eitherapolitical or anti-political. The vast majority of the workerswill continue to be barely literate in any language.

All these adaptations of the system are doomed to fail because they are based on the false assumption that the newgenerations of youth can still be won over to support thediscredited slightly black-washed system of whitesupremacy which we know as racial capitalism. NoNational Party government will ever be able to win the battle for the hearts and minds of the black youth. Onemight as well ask a Hitler-Goebbels-Himmler regime togovern the Israeli state with the consent of the Jewishpeople there!

The crisis of the oppressed

The national liberation movement has made progress inthese brief months beyond the expectations of even themost nave and sanguine enthusiasts. That cannot bedoubted. For the first time in our history, we can speak of agenuine national movement which links up all struggles ofthe people irrespective of which ghetto they come from andregardless of whether they are taking place in the towns orin the rural areas. Amid many signs of real or potentialdivisions, this one fact has stood out for all to see. The

movement has been profoundly strengthened especially bythe addition to it of tens of thousands of activists who haveemerged out of the struggles of the recent past. The morethe rulers try to repress, the more they produce their owngravediggers in the form of dedicated, disciplined, highlymotivated, politically conscious young cadres.

And yet, there are grave problems, serious weaknesses,


13/220


12

which threaten to pull us right back to square one unless wemanage to solve them within the next few months. Most of

these problems have become obvious within the education-al arena. One could demonstrate the point with countlessexamples drawn from all parts of the country. For ourpurposes here, however, it will suffice if we remind peopleof a few important recent developments that have seen theschools boycott end up in an education crisis not only forthe oppressors but also for the oppressed.

To begin with: there has developed a tendency indifferent parts of the country (except perhaps in the EasternCape) to divorce the struggle of the students from that ofthe workers, their parents. The view has becomewidespread that education is a matter that concernsstudents only and one, therefore, about which studentsalone must make all the decisions. This is a recipe forisolation, division and defeat. For nothing can be furtherfrom the truth. By its very nature, education alwaysconcerns all three of the sectors that are involved in it,namely, students, parents and teachers. While the interestsof these three sectors in the educational process are notidentical, they have to be brought into line if theeducational struggle is not to degenerate into counter-productive conflicts and clashes between the sectors. This isa complicated question because none of the sectors ishomogeneous; there are contradictions in and between allof them. Yet, it remains correct to say that in anyeducational struggle, it is the progressive community as awhole (parents, students and teachers) that has to take the

major strategic decisions.Many students have become the victims of the romanticillusion that the students are the vanguard of the nationalliberation struggle and that they can make decisionswithout any reference to the workers movement. This is adangerous delusion and it will lead to disastrous defeat forthe most heroic actions of the student mass. Let us state it


14/220


13

clearly once again: the workers alone, as an organised body,have the strategic strength to bring about fundamental

change in our society. All other struggles, no matter inwhich arena they start, whether it is a struggle begun bywomen, youth, the churches, students or by other groups,have got to link up with the struggle of the organisedworking class if they are not to be defeated or to bedeflected into reformist and even collaborationist paths.

Another major weakness that has become evident in thestudent movement is the fact that the student leadership,speaking generally, is lamentably unclear about the natureof the boycott as a weapon of struggle. Students have begunto use this weapon in ways that can only be called suicidal.This matter is so important that we discuss it in detail below. One of the most unfortunate aspects of this questionis the now almost automatically accepted view that one canput preconditions to the ruling class in matters where theyin fact control our prospects of success. Politically consciousactivists have begun to use the formula: unless you do thisor that, we shall continue to boycott school, etc. This is likehanding over our weapons to the enemy and inviting themto fight us! This approach to political struggle must berooted out if we are not going to continue to programmedefeat into all our campaigns.

Strategic perspectives

Many of the obvious mistakes that have been made in therecent and continuing struggles can be traced to the view

that the National Party government is about to fall. This is,to put it bluntly, a completely false reading of the situation.There is no doubt, of course, that the apartheid governmenthas never been as vulnerable and as open to pressure as it isat present. But to imagine that it is about to be toppled byrevolutionary mass action speaks of total ignorance aboutthe nature of the state and the nature of revolution.


15/220


14

Before we reply to this view, however, it is necessary tomake the point that those who hold this position feel

morally justified in demanding that students should beprepared to sacrifice a year or even two or three years ofschooling in the interests of the liberation struggle. And,indeed, if it were in fact true that the National Partygovernment is about to be toppled even if not by arevolutionary movement, even if only by some more liberalcapitalist government, then, of course, there would be verylittle to argue about. Most people would immediately beprepared to consider such an argument.

The logic of the argument is faultless if we accept thecorrectness of the premises on which it is based. It leadsinfallibly to the slogan: Liberation before education(inkululeko ngoku, idegree ngomso). If, on the other hand,the premises of this argument are wrong, the slogan becomes a death trap for a whole generation of students. If,in other words, it is not true that the National Partygovernment is about to fall, then the words Liberation BeforeEducation are turned into a false prophecy which one canonly compare with the fateful events connected with thename of Nongqause and known in South African historytextbooks as the national suicide of the amaXhosa. The story ofNongqause is still shrouded in mystery but there is nodoubt that she prophesied that if the amaXhosa slaughteredall their cattle and refused to plant any crops (the very basisof life for the people at the time), then the White men, i.e.,the colonial oppressors, would on a certain day disappearinto the sea from where they had come. When the fateful

day came and a large majority of the people hadslaughtered their cattle and were dying of hunger under thespell of the prophecy and led on by certain chiefs, nothinghappened: the white men did not disappear into the sea andfreedom did not dawn. Instead, the brave men and womenof the amaXhosa had to seek refuge in the very CapeColony they hated. Most of the able-bodied young men and


16/220


15

women ended up on the labour market enslaved as wageworkers to the new colonial-capitalist system.

If we do not stop in our tracks, if we do not get awayfrom the idea of so-called indefinite boycotts of schools andsimilar institutions, we are going to re-enact, in a modernform, the tragedy of Nongqause! Already thousands ofyoung men and women, who have not been able tocomplete their studies, are walking the streets looking forwork in an economy which is increasingly retrenching eventhose who have completed their studies. Already, after justmore than a year of the school boycott in most parts of thecountry, serious divisions have appeared in the studentmass, divisions that could have been avoided by properattention to strategy and by proper leadership.

For the simple fact of the matter is that the NationalParty government is not about to fall. One can say thiswithout being a supporter of apartheid even though somenave people dont believe this. If one is at all serious aboutthe struggle for liberation, then one has to say this. For nostruggle can be successful if it takes as its point of departurea clearly wrong assessment of the strength of the enemy. Ifyou believe that the giant you are challenging is a baby, youare bound to end up in abject defeat. We can say thiswithout in any way detracting from the heroism and fromthe constructive actions of our youth who have in manycases gone into battle against the apartheid state with thisfalse slogan on their lips. What is important is that weshould have the political and personal courage to admit thatit is a false slogan, that our assessment of the balance of

forces was wrong. And we should then be willing to reviewour strategy and to work out a different set of tactics tomeet the new situation.

Internally, the National Party is still supported by themajority of whites who still have a virtual monopoly ofmilitary power, industrial and scientific skills and ofmaterial resources (wealth). As against this there is a


17/220


16

majority of black workers with few skills, hardly anyresources and a minimum of military power. This is the

present balance of forces stated very simply. That balance ischanging all the time in favour of the forces of liberation.While the oppressed people are undoubtedly in a positiontoday to dislocate the economy and the society of theapartheid state for longer or shorter periods of time, theyare not yet in a position to overthrow the present order.This fact we should accept for the moment in the fullknowledge that even though the struggle will still be long,it is going to be victorious. Once we realise that we stillhave to struggle for many years and that we are still goingto have to make many sacrifices, we will necessarily changeour tactics on the day-to-day level.

Internationally, again, there is no doubt that the racistPretoria regime has never been as isolated as it is today.Even its best friends, such as Reagan, Kohl and Thatcher,are forced to criticise it publicly and to take certainsymbolical actions against it in order that they will not becondemned as supporters of racism in the world. Despitethis, however, there can be no doubt that as long as there isno prospect of a viable alternative capitalist government inSouth Africa, international imperialism is going to makesure that the National Party together with all its repressive brutalities remains at the helm of affairs. What theimperialist powers (and local business tycoons, despite allthe rhetoric) will not do is to undermine and topple theBotha government in favour of some unstable uncertaingoverning group that may not be able to confine the radical

upsurge of the masses within the framework of thecapitalist system.For a number of reasons that cannot be entered into

here, the Nats are the only possible bourgeois governmentin South Africa at present. Liberals inside and outside SouthAfrica know that unless the Nats reform the existingapartheid-capitalist system rapidly, it will be overthrown


18/220


17

sooner or later by the radicalised movement of theoppressed and exploited people who will be inspired by an

anti-capitalist programme since they have begun tounderstand that apartheid and other forms of racialinequality and racial discrimination (segregation, separatedevelopment, homelands policy, etc.) are the mode ofexistence of capitalism under the peculiar historicalconditions of South Africa.

The liberals, therefore, are trying to push the NationalParty government to introduce certain major reforms suchas the abolition of influx control, freehold rights for allSouth Africans, a unitary system of education, abolition ofthe Group Areas Act, etc. Their ideal is a government ofnational unity that would include all those parties that havesignificant support among the people of this countryincluding the Nats, the PFP, Inkatha and sections of thenational liberation movements. In this way they hope torestore legitimacy to the South African government. This,they hope, will come out of a national convention. Hencethe most recent moves of the liberals led by the ProgressiveFederal Party. Hence, also, Van Zyl Slabberts and Borainesmigration out of the parliamentary into the extraparliamentary arena.

For many reasons, this particular option is not going towork in the very short term. In fact, if the South Africangovernment is placed under too much pressure internallyand/or externally, the country will be placed under amilitary government openly and the economy will beallowed to shrink back (the so-called siegeeconomy) in the

belief that this would be the only way to save SouthAfrica, i.e., capitalism in South Africa. The ruling class willnot take this route lightly but they will do it if they see it asthe only option. Whichever way things develop, from thepoint of view of the national liberation movement, it is veryclear that the struggle is going to continue for a long timeand that we have to inspan all our energies in order to


19/220


18

change the balance of forces systematically over the longterm in our favour.

Against such a background, the slogan Liberation BeforeEducation can clearly be seen to be against the interests ofgenerations of young people. Against such a background,the indefinite boycott leads students on to the labourmarket long before they have to go there and, for many, to acondition of political apathy which becomes an obstructionto the liberation movement. Already we hear many voicescomplaining bitterly that it is through politics, i.e., the boycott of schools, that our children are now walking thestreets, taking to drugs, etc.

The boycott as a weapon of struggle

Once it is clear that the struggle for liberation fromapartheid-capitalist slavery is still going to continue formany years, the tasks of the student movement presentthemselves to us in a different light. We shall return to these below. Let us first throw some more light on the question ofthe boycott as a weapon of struggle.

To start with, we have to stress that the boycott is not theonly weapon of struggle in our arsenal. There are very manyother ways in which we can conduct the struggle forliberation inside and outside of the schools, the colleges andthe universities. In fact, the boycott is a weapon that has to be used very sparingly precisely because, under certaincircumstances, it can easily be turned against those who aredeploying it.

The boycott is essentially a political weapon. It dependsfor its effectiveness in this arena on the fact that anygovernment needs the cooperation and consent, or at thevery least the neutrality, of those whom they govern. When,for example, government wants to get support for a newscheme, a new constitution or a new institution, the peoplehave the advantage if they are opposed to the new thing


20/220


19

because they can make it unworkable or ineffective by boycotting it. The most recent example in South Africa is, of

course, the effective boycott of the tricameral parliamentelections for Coloureds and Indians. But before that, aswe know, the urban Bantu councils and recently thecommunity councils and management committees were boycotted out of existence or into ineffectiveness by themasses of the oppressed people. In fact, the oppressedpeople of South Africa have a long history of deploying theweapon of the boycott successfully in the political sphere. Inthe economicsphere, it is more difficult to use the boycottsuccessfully except for the short periods of time or undervery favourable political and economic circumstances. Thereason for this is that the oppressed and exploited peopledo not have control over the sources of economic power.Even if they can temporarily dislocate things and even senda few smaller firms to the wall by means of a consumerboycott , unless the circumstances are exceptionallyfavourable, the people are always forced to go back to buyfrom the big firms and supermarkets because they have toeat and to live and they cannot afford to go without certainnecessities. The nature of the capitalist system is such,moreover, that no matter which firms one is boycotting, thewholesalers and manufacturers in any case pocket themoney (wages) of the workers since all but a very few shopshave to get their goods from the manufacturers or thewholesalers. In the Eastern Cape recently, especially in PortElizabeth, both the economic and the political conditions forthe conduct of a consumer boycott were extremely

favourable and this explains the large measure of successthat the movement had there. In other parts of the country,especially in the Western Cape, these favourable conditionsdid not exist, with the result that the consumer boycottnever really got off the ground.

These basic considerations are equally relevant when welook at the boycott of educational institutions in an


21/220


20

oppressive society. The question we have to consider is:Who needs schooling of the children of the working class,

the ruling class or the children themselves? The answer isnot always straightforward and that is why the boycott cannever be more than a tactical weapon.

Through the schools in a modern industrialised society,the new generation of youth is indoctrinated to fit into theold, tried and tested pattern of things. In this way, the rulingclass, which controls the levers of power in any society, manages

to reproduce the existing order. (The school is not the onlyarena where this process takes place even though it isprobably the most important of these reproductiveinstitutions.) Besides the correct attitudes, values and beliefs, students are also taught certain skills at schoolwhich they need in order to follow a particular trade orprofession. These skills are not only necessary to reproduce theexisting order; they are also necessary to reproduce the individualstudents/persons within the existing order. Or, to put it moresimply, unless the students get this necessary training, they willend up on the unskilled labour market as long as the existingorder continues. If we had some superior knowledge of theexact date when the existing order will pass into history, wecould, of course, advocate an indefinite boycott and hopethat our students will get the necessary skills shortly afterliberation. Since we do not and cannot have such exactknowledge in social affairs, to advocate indefinite boycottsis clearly a suicidal policy. It is a kind of grand delusionwhereby we sacrifice a whole generation of youth in thechild-like belief that the day of freedom is about to break,

even though we have no scientific basis for such aprediction.Since students do not have the power to force the state to

do their bidding, unless their struggle is integrated with the broader national liberation struggle under the leadership ofthe working class, an indefinite boycott becomes in fact adeath trap in the context of a protracted, long-term struggle


22/220


21

for liberation.This is also the problem about unrealistic preconditions.

To say to the authorities We shall not return to schoolunless you do (a), (b) and (c) may be a good form ofpropaganda and even an effective method of mobilising thestudent masses. But to believe that we can seriouslychallenge the state in this way unless we have the militaryand economic might to paralyse or to overthrow it, or atleast to create an alternative system (e.g., guerrilla schoolsin Vietnam, Zimbabwe, etc.), is to disarm ourselvescompletely. As we have said previously, it is like handingyour weapons to the enemy and inviting them to fight us. Ifwe cannot in fact force the government, for example, torelease all political prisoners and detainees, to withdraw thetroops from the townships, etc., we may be walking into aself-made trap if we put these demands as preconditions fora return to classes. These are extremely serious questions.We cannot raise demands and preconditions in a light-minded fashion without consideration of the balance offorces in the country. To do so, as we have seen recently, isto inflict serious wounds on ourselves, to sow unnecessarydivisions among ourselves, and even to put the struggle back by several years.

The opportunity of the oppressed

No government on earth can control the process ofschooling completely. In fact, the schooling system is one ofthe Achilles heels of any ruling class. The beginnings of

trouble in any modern society usually make themselves feltin the schools before they become evident in otherinstitutions precisely because it is so difficult in a modernstate to control this process completely. Teachers, as theinstruments of indoctrination, play a decisive role in theeducation process. If they are not loyal to the state, theruling class in that state is confronted with a fifth column


23/220


22

that undermines its authority and the values on which thesystem is based. Under these circumstances, it is a mere

matter of time before the first explosions take place in theschools.

Indeed, this is in large measure the explanation for theexplosions of 1976 and subsequently. In spite of the manyretrogressive and reactionary effects of Bantu education, theruling class failed hopelessly to produce the mindlesslabour units of Verwoerds Christian National mythologyprecisely because the black teachers and their students ingeneral rejected the system and felt no loyalty towards it.Even the gutter education of the racist system could notproduce the slaves that the rulers wanted. It is, therefore, aself-defeating and historically inaccurate approach that saysWe dont want gutter education and therefore we wont go toschool. This is merely a convenient and opportunistic sloganworthy only of being used by drop-outs. History teaches usthat the very system of the rulers can be transformed into aweapon against them provided we have politically conscious, i.e.,really educated teachers and a disciplined and organised studentbody and student leadership. Rather than vacate the schoolsand abandon a major terrain of struggle to conservativesand reactionaries, we have the task of transforming theterrain to suit our liberatory purposes.

And we all know that the struggle for liberation can be andis carried out every day in our classrooms, in our schools. For, letus remember, these are our schools, not theirs. It is our taxesthat are used to build these schools. We should make surethat the rulers control of the state does not turn the schools

into weapons against us. We can and should turn theweapon of education against the ruling class as a whole.That it can be done is attested to by generations of studentactivists who have emerged from Verwoerds educationfactories to continue the struggle in all the different arenasof struggle.

Without going into any detail here, we all know that we


24/220


23

can, inside the classroom, tackle the curriculum, thesyllabus and the textbooks in such a way that our students

know exactly what is true, what is half-true, what is simplyfalse, what has been omitted, and why. A good, politicallyconscious teacher and, especially in the higher standards,disciplined, conscious and organised students can turn anylesson, no matter what the subject, into an awarenesssession, at least in part. And precisely because students gaingreater insight into the subject (the hidden agenda) theytend to understand even the textbook matter better and,thus, to do better in their examinations!

Even the question of students rights can be tackled inthis way. Democratic procedures in the classroom can beinitiated either by enlightened teachers, or by enlightenedstudents, or by both acting together. The relations betweenteachers and class representatives or students represen-tative councils, and between these structures and the rank-and-file students are extremely important as a basis forsimilar democratic practices outside school. If they arepractised consistently their radicalising effects must carryover into the society at large and eventually affect all socialrelations.

Alternative education

One of the consequences of the slogan Liberation BeforeEducation has been to throw into high relief the demand foralternative education. The advocates of the slogan realisethat if you call on students to boycott classes indefinitely,

i.e., until freedom day, you have to provide them with aprogressive alternative. Most people, incidentally, have begun to use other terms instead of alternative education,since this term has simply come to mean any education thatis not state-aided or state-controlled, no matter howconservative it is in form and content. In this pamphlet weuse the term liberatory or progressive education, since we


25/220


24

understand the concept of alternative education to meanthat education which is directed towards the liberation of

the oppressed and exploited people.Here, again, we are faced with a major dilemma. If

students are going to boycott classes indefinitely and if thestruggle will take many years still, how are we going toprovide our children with a systematic progressive orliberatory alternative? Even if we leave aside the question ofstate repression of any liberatory education programmesand projects outside the formal schools, where are we tofind the human and material resources with which toprovide a constructive alternative to the millions of high-schoolstudents and university and collegestudents whowould be on boycott? Is it, in principle, correct to try to dothe basic skills training functions of state-providededucation?

Should we not, instead, continue, as we have donehitherto but much more consciously, much moresystematically to use the schools to train the newgeneration in the necessary life-skills for today andtomorrow but make sure that we spread liberatory politicaland cultural education among teachers, students andparents so as to subvert the reactionary content and form ofthe existing syllabi and curricula? We should, instead, seeliberatory education as a spectrum of practices some ofwhich can be implemented in the government schools,colleges and universities while others, for the present, haveto be implemented extramurally. As the general struggleintensifies, we shall find that more and more of the

practices that can now only be implemented extramurallywill be accepted by the government of the day andintroduced in a more or less distorted fashion into theschools. By way of comparison, one can look at the way inwhich the right of existence of the progressive trade unionshas had to be accepted by the government. Today, becauseof the recent and continuing upheaval in the schools, we are


26/220


25

in a position where we can give much more systematicattention to the question of alternatives to the present

system. This is, however, a very large subject that requires aseparate discussion.

A national programme of action for 1986

As in any other large and complex country, the struggle inSouth Africa is characterised by uneven development as

between one region and another. Because of regionaldifferences and because of the artificially imposed ethnicdifferences, we find that in most arenas of struggle, affectedpeople tend to concentrate on local and regionallyimportant matters. There is nothing wrong with this, ofcourse, but we have to be careful that we do not fall into aregional or ethnic approach to the education crisis or toother problems. We have to force ourselves at all times totake a national perspective and to try to harmonise ourapproach with that of other areas or communities in ourcountry.

Besides tackling immediate local or communityproblems, we should be part and parcel of a nationallyagreed upon programme of action for 1986, the tenthanniversary of the Soweto uprising. Parents, teachers andespecially students organisations should agree on aprogramme of concrete action that will have the fullsupport of the community of the oppressed and exploitedpeople. Such a programme of action cannot consist of thesimplistic call to boycott formal schooling and to participate

in some vague alternative education programme. This, aswe have stressed before, is a recipe for disaster.Let us, instead, between now and the end of March meet

in thousands of workshops throughout the country to workout a serious, realistic but radical programme of actionwhich can be agreed to nationally at the conference to beheld in April 1986. In this way, every single student, teacher


27/220


26

and parent will be united against the state withoutinterrupting the continuity of the necessary aspects of the

education process!And let us remind ourselves: whatever we plan to do,

the rulers will always try to confound us by undertakingactions that will sidetrack us. For example, we undertakesome protest action, let us say, to demand a democraticallyelected SRC. The police intervene, someone may get shot ordetained. And what happens? Because we have no clearidea of strategy, we allow ourselves to be sidetracked by,for example, refusing to go to school until the person(s)concerned have been released. In this way, we placeourselves at the mercy of the enemy, instead of pursuingour goal as one does in a battle even if ones best friend andcomrade is shot dead beside one. By allowing ourselves to be sidetracked, we relinquish the initiative to the enemy. Bynot leaving ourselves room for retreat, we end up insuicidal battles of attrition against an enemy that has vastlysuperior resources at present.

What should we do?

The National Forum Committee, after extensiveconsultations throughout the country with the organisa-tions associated with it, has arrive at the followingrecommendations: Appropriate forms of commemorating the tenth

anniversary of the great uprising of 1976 have to beworkshopped, agreed upon regionally and where

possible, nationally. These should then be implementedwith a maximum of discipline and consistency. Besides local reasons, which might dictate otherwise, we

should not get drawn into any long-term or indefiniteschool boycotts.

We need to involve every single student of theoppressed and exploited people in a constructive


28/220


27

national programme in order to enhance unity andsolidarity. We recommend an English language

programme at different levels. The entire nation shouldgo to school and learn, improve or perfect English andtheir knowledge of other South African languages. Itwould be historic irony if in commemorating the greatuprising of 1976, which started with the rejection ofAfrikaans as a compulsory medium of instruction, ouryouth should tackle a language programme that willincrease our national unity and help to put an end toAfrikaner chauvinism and imperialism.


29/220

28

TEN YEARS OF EDUCATIONAL CRISIS :

THE RESONANCE OF 1976

(Address delivered at the National Consultation on Education for Affirmation 27 August 1986 Wilgespruit Fellowship Centre, Johannesburg.)

Introduction: From protest to challenge

IN THE SEAMLESS WEB of South African history, the 16th of June 1976 represents both an end and a beginning. Thosegreat events, which began as innocently and undramaticallyas most significant moments in the history of a nation, werethe culmination of decades of relatively peaceful protest by black students against the inequities of segregation andapartheid in the educational institutions of South Africa.The most striking feature of all the years of protest andresistance since the introduction of a modern system ofschooling for black people after the inauguration of theUnion of South Africa, was the fact that all the studentsactions were motivated by the desire on their part forequality of the conditions of learning and of the content ofeducation with those enjoyed by whites. (For a schematicand general account of the resistance to separate andinferior schooling, see SACHED The Right to Learn , Chapter9.) This feature was enhanced after the introduction ofBantu education and other forms of tribalised schooling.The systematic and provocatively articulated Verwoerdianpolicies of retribalisation of the oppressed, industriallyorientated people of South Africa generated the mostintense opposition ever on the part of almost all blackparents, teachers and students at all levels of the schoolingsystem. So much so, indeed, that even the paternalistic


30/220

Ten years of educational crisis

29

missionary education of previous years began to seemdesirable. Some of the middle-class beneficiaries of that

system, in fact, began to present it as a kind of golden age of black schooling by blurring over all the reactionaryelements that inhere in all golden ages! Be that as it may:the fact of the matter is that the rifles and ammunition thatlaid low Hector Peterson and his comrades and that sent theTsietsi Mashininis into exile and the Dan Motsitsis intoprison, put an end to all illusions about achieving equalityof conditions and of educational content as long as thesystem of racial capitalism obtained in South Africa.

But they did more than that. In a dialectical fashion,those events made ordinary school students begin toexamine more attentively what it was that they werefighting for. The very hopelessness of the struggle for thewill-o-wisp of educational equality made students andeventually many progressive educationists believe thateducation, properly so called, was only going to be possiblein a liberated South Africa. Education and liberation wereseen to be clearly related, the struggle of students for betterconditions in the schools, colleges and universities was seento be inseparable from the struggle for liberation (i.e., thestruggle for democratic rights for all) and eventually fromthe struggle for class emancipation. And, as these things go,once this link had been established in the consciousness ofthe new generation and in the concrete fact of thousands ofSoweto students fleeing into neighbouring territories to findrefuge in the guerrilla training camps of the AfricanNational Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress as well

as in transit and other shelters run by South Africanpolitical organisations or by international relief agencies,the Freirian idea of education for liberation came to expressprecisely the dialectical shift that had, quite unintentionally, been brought to the surface by the volleys of rifle fire thatdrowned in blood one of the most heroic episodes in thehistory of our people.


31/220


30

From that moment, protest changed into challenge. Theclass of 76 and every subsequent generation of black South

African school students rejected even the superficiallegitimacy on which South African governments had untilthen prided themselves and in the faded garments of whichthey strutted about on the stage of world politics. What iscalled the battle for the hearts and minds of the black youthwas finally and decisively lost on the streets of Soweto andof every other major city in South Africa in the course of1976 and 1977. And let it be said here once and for all: thereis simply no way in which this government or any other whiteminority government is going to regain the trust and the consentof the black youth. Neither the sjambok (now called the quirt)nor the casspir, and no amount of cooing and wooing isgoing to undo or reverse the thorough demystification of black schooling begun by the bullets of 1976. Instead, thechallenge to state power, state legitimacy inherent in theconcepts and practice of liberatory education, peopleseducation or even alternative education will continue togrow ever stronger, no matter how many retreats will haveto be made, no matter how many reverses are suffered.

It is not part of my brief to look back at the causes of theuprising of 1976; I am not expected to repeat the now well-known and even well-worn phrases about the role of theBlack Consciousness Movement, of organisations such asSASO and SASM, or even of the link between the renewedstirrings in the urban black proletariat and the actions andsentiments of their children in the schools of the rulingclass. These and other relevant questions have been

repeated ad nauseam in one conference after another and inone publication after another. Instead, I have been asked tosummarise as succinctly as possible what we consider to bethe most significant consequences of the uprising of 1976and of the subsequent actions of black students, parents andteachers in the educational arena. By way of explanation, itis necessary to stress that this introduction to the subject is


32/220


31

intended to do no more than to draw your attention to whatI consider to be the most relevant resonances of those

events. I have deliberately refrained from overloading thetext with tables and graphs, since these are readilyaccessible in numerous publications. Moreover, I have tostress that this introduction represents no more than asummary of conclusions and ideas reached by very manyscholars and activists in countless workshops andconferences. While I take full responsibility for theformulations I use, I want to insist that this is not anoriginal document in the monadic sense of that term.

The crisis

It is as well to begin with a statement of principle. For thesake of analytical convenience, we isolate particularphenomena in order to identify their specific qualities andfeatures. In reality, however, all things are interconnected.The events in the educational arena since 1976, important asthey obviously are, cannot be treated in isolation from thecritical developments in the rest of the social formation andin Southern Africa as a whole. Any monocausal approachleads to blatant distortion of reality and inevitably todisastrous interventions. In short, we have to be clear at alltimes that the then years of crisis in the educational arenarepresent at the same time ten years of crisis of the systemof racial capitalism as a whole. The crisis in education bothreflects and reflects back on the larger crisis in which thesystem is encoiled politically, economically and

ideologically.Again, even though there are a few competing analysesof the crisis, the broad outlines are known well enough topermit us simply to state the obvious briefly. There is, firstof all, the crisis of capital accumulation. The intensifiedlabour-repressive option represented by apartheid in 1948and chosen by the white electorate as against the gradualist


33/220


32

liberalisation option recommended by the FaganCommission in 1947, pushed up against ceilings inherent in

that option, in particular shortages of skilled labour, aseverely restricted domestic market that led to recurrentcrises of realisation of value, and shortages of new(especially foreign) investment because of internationalpolitical pressures against a regime that was seenincreasingly as not only racist and genocidal but alsodangerous to world capitalism insofar as it bred conditionsconducive to socialist revolution in the industrial heart ofAfrica. This economic crisis has deepened to the extent that by the mid-eighties, the once unstoppable South Africaneconomic engine had not only come to a grinding halt butin some years was even going in reverse.

Socially, this has meant that the increasingly proletarian-ised black population has been locked into the vicious circleof a kind of third-world hell of unemployment and poverty,terrifying in the urban ghettos, unbearable in the ruralslums. As is well known, even in some cities such as PortElizabeth, unemployment among black youth (under 25approximately) is placed as high as 70%. And this is notexceptional today. Indeed, as I shall point out presently, thislayer of young, mostly semi-schooled, unemployed blackworkers is going to be the nemesis of our liberationstruggle, the rock on which the solid future of a socialistAzania will be built or upon which the entire struggle willfounder.

The existence of this layer of people reminds us that therapid economic growth of the 1950s and 1960s brought

about the major changes in the class structure of SouthAfrica. Today, only a few nostalgic analysts would stillinsist that the peasantry (however defined) constitute themajority of the oppressed people and thus the driving forceof the struggle for liberation. Proletarianisation (andincreasingly the urbanisation of the proletariat) has been thevisible feature of social development in the post-war period.


34/220


33

By way of precluding any analytical short circuits, let mesay parenthetically that the acknowledgement of this

indisputable fact of South African history does not in anyway detract from the importance of the agrarian question inour struggle or alter the fact of national oppression. Newdemands, new aspirations, new methods of struggle wereplaced on the agenda through this process of socialevolution. The workers demanded a share of thecommodities and facilities which their labour produced;they, therefore, demanded higher wages and betterworking and living conditions. In this, they were nodifferent from workers anywhere in the world. But, indoing so, they were challenging one of the pillars of thealliance between maize and gold that ruled supreme beforeWorld War II. That is to say, they were demanding that therestrictions on the growth of the domestic market for theproducts of secondary industry be lifted, that the politicaleconomy of cheap black labour be jettisoned and that theimportance of the manufacturing sector be given legislativerecognition. The trajectory of these demands andaspirations tended in practice towards the manymanifestations of class struggle that have become the veryambience in which we live today. I refer, of course, to thestruggle for the right to form independent trades unionsand all the struggles attendant on that, the struggle forfreedom of movement, for efficient and cheap transport, fordecent and cheap housing and health care and, above all,for free and compulsory education for all our children aswell as for continuing education for those who are forced to

leave the schools prematurely because of poverty and racialoppression.These demands were, as we all know, made more urgent

and more dramatic by historic events in the subcontinent.The victorious liberation struggles in Guinea Bissau,Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe in the mid- to late 70sand the ongoing saga of Namibia, have lent to the demands


35/220


34

of the urban proletariat of South Africa, and especially ofthe more than 50% of them who are younger than 20 years,

an urgency and an impatience that were unknown in theprevious decades. South Africa is often portrayed as thelast colony. This analogy happens to be very wrong andmisleading, for we are not involved in an anti-colonialstruggle but rather in a civil-war situation. Analysts andtheoreticians may differ on this point but there is no doubtat all that the anti-colonial struggles against Portugal,Britain and South Africa in neighbouring Southern Africancountries have resonated in the liberation struggle beingwaged by the oppressed and exploited people of SouthAfrica against the system of racial capitalism. They have, inshort, made the black people impatient to get rid of theracism that springs from the same colonial regimesoverthrown between 1975 and 1980 on our borders.

The strategic answer of the ruling class to these socio-economic developments has been the inept attempt toencourage the growth and the co-option of the various black middle-class elements ranging from Bantustan andother ethnic politicians to the upper echelons of theirrespective civil services, a large segment of their teachersand other professionals as well as the traditional middleclass of small shopkeepers and other business people. Ineffect, the state has attempted to counter the strategicleverage which the black working class has acquired withinthe South African economy by building up a black middleclass as a buffer. This has meant, among other things, doingaway piecemeal with various aspects of Verwoerdian

apartheid that are immediately repugnant to middle-classpeople. This, in turn, has meant effectively downgradingthe white workers who were previously the junior partnersin the class alliance that constituted the power bloc in SouthAfrica.

We are living through the many tragi-comic contradic-tions that arise from this attempt to construct a neo-


36/220


35

apartheid system that will successfully co-opt the blackmiddle class and simultaneously make the white minority

regime more acceptable in the community of nations. Nevermind that this is an impossible dream. It is one of thoseunavoidable adaptive mechanisms imposed by thedynamics of the unique history of nations by which rulingclasses desperately attempt to salvage the old order.Sometimes, as in our own case for reasons that are tooobvious to recite, such transitional moments seem to last aneternity. But this is all the more reason why it is essential todivine the limits as well as the possibilities of the historicalmoment. Miscognition so often leads to suicidal action orretreats along the line of march that previous generationshave painfully established. There is no need for me toanalyse all the manoeuvres and deceptions of a Heunis or aPik Botha on the one side or of a Le Grange or a De Klerkon the other side by which the regime is trying to make theworld believe that Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum aretotally compatible elements of its total strategy of benevolent despotism. Suffice it to repeat that far fromgaining legitimacy, this leprous regime instead taintseverybody that chooses to collaborate with it. That is a storywhich every Bantustan leader, every community councillor,every member of a management committee and even thereprobates in the tricameral parliament and in thePresidents Council can tell in great and vivid detail.

Hegemony, according to Gitlin, is a relationship betweenthe dominant and the dominated class in a social formation.It refers to

the successful attempt of a dominant class to utiliseits control over the resources of state and civilsociety, particularly through the use of mass mediaand the educational system to establish its view ofthe world as all-inclusive and universal. Throughthe dual use of force and consent, with consentprevailing, the dominant class uses its political,


37/220


36

moral and intellectual leadership to shape andincorporate the taken-for-granted views, needs and

concerns of sub-ordinate groups. In doing so, thedominant class not only attempts to influence theinterests and needs of such groups, it also containsradical opportunities by placing limits onoppositional discourse and practice. (Cited by SuePhilcox in an unpublished seminar paper:Understanding the school boycotts of 1980, p. 3.)

By this or by any similar definition, it is clear that eventhough the South African ruling class continues necessarilyto be dominant, it has, since 1976, become progressively lesshegemonic. Barring exceptional historic developments, thisis a situation that cannot be reversed.

Too little too late

The campaign of 19761977 was followed by the even moredeep-going crisis in the schools in 1980. Since 1980,schooling for blacks has been in a state of permanentdisruption even though the focal points of the crisis haveshifted from one region of the country to another and therehas not yet been a situation where all regions have been

equally disrupted. The climax, for the moment, was reachedin 1985 when large parts of the schooling system simplycollapsed under the sustained assaults of students andmobilised working-class communities. These are well-known facts. It is more important for us to understand,however, that the organic connections between the differentarenas in which the crisis of the system becomes manifest

lead to the intensification of contradictions in each of thearenas of struggle and thus to ever more radical solutions orproposed solutions. This has been the story of the strugglein the education arena since 1980.

Early on, i.e., before the emergence of the large tradeunion federations and the national political fronts and their


38/220


37

active participation in the hurly-burly of townshipstruggles, one of the consequences of this radicalisation was

the belief among many students that students as a groupconstitute the vanguard of the struggle. In some respects,this was a legacy of the epoch of black consciousness and ofthe particular history of SASO during the repression of thesixties and early seventies. We are all familiar with thelament on the part of students that if their parents had actedwhile they were young, there would have been no need forthem to wage the struggle as they were doing. In a forumsuch as this, where some knowledge of the history of SouthAfrica may be presupposed, it is unnecessary to discuss thisassertion. The point to be made here is simply that therewas, in historic-ideological terms, a long march ahead of thestudents out of this student-centric universe through theplains of the student-worker alliance into the hard realitiesof the worker-student alliance.

Those who are interested in what one may call thephenomenology of student boycotts in South Africa couldhardly do better than to read the journalistic gem by BrianPottinger and Siphiwe Ralo in Frontline of March 1981,entitled The Eastern Cape Boycotts. Where Crisis has become a way of life. Here is set out concisely butmeticulously the causes, course and consequence of aparticular regionally defined boycott of schools, a processdescribed in a framework that could be applied to almostany similar boycott anywhere in South Africa since 1976.Here we find the stubborn statistics of educationaldeprivation and inequality from which all boycotts start,

the general background of turmoil in the black schools ofthe country, the specific grievances at a specific school inthe region that become the proximate cause of the regional boycott campaign, the inept intervention of the authoritieson the one side and/or the activation of an existing orsubmerged infrastructure of pupil/student representation,often the deposit of previous school boycotts and usually


39/220


38

including student activists from neighbouring bushcolleges, the rapid escalation of the conflict, the formation

of a parents (crisis) committee, often leading tonegotiations or talks with the authorities to defuse thesituation, generational conflict between parents andstudents over such supposed collaboration, and so forth.The rest of the story and all its repercussions must bepresent to the mind of every member of this audience!

As in the struggles of the black workers at the point ofproduction or in the townships, the response of the state from the point of view of the exploited and oppressed iseither too little or too late. Of course, it has never been theintention of the rulers to satisfy the needs of the workers.What is for Botha and his National Party a giant leap is noteven a small step towards the realisation of the goals towhich the oppressed and exploited people of South Africaare committed!

Essentially, the actions of the generation of Sowetoimprinted on our minds the invaluable lesson that the blackworking class is the primary source of all radical change inSouth Africa. It marked the beginning of the end of theepoch of mere reactive strategies and tactics in which theliberation forces had been held captive for six decades andmore. Parliament was no longer seen as the fons et origo ofall socially significant initiatives. Instead, the ruling classwas forced to react overtly to the initiatives of the workingclass. Reform was placed on the order of the day. Theliberal antennae of the ruling class in the guise of the SouthAfrican Institute of Race Relations picked up the signals

from the turmoil on the streets. They established the first ofthe series of reform-orientated ruling-class commissions toinvestigate the education provision for blacks. The report ofthis (Bozzoli) commission was entitled Education for a NewEra and was published in 1979. Neither the subsequent DeLange Commission Report published in 1981 nor theButhelezi Commissions report, completed in 1982, despite


40/220


39

their volume and detail, went beyond the reformistprinciples established by the SAIRRs Bozzoli Commission.

Of these, the most relevant for our purposes is the stipulationthat the acknowledgement of the multicultural nature ofSouth African society (p. 7) should be the point of departurefor all educational reform. Moreover, the Commissionassumed that some form of consociational structure willevolve, possibly for a transitional period preceding theestablishment of a unitary political system (p. 4).

It is tempting to consider in detail the various panaceasthat have been put forward by those who wish to reformthe unreformable. But this would be a waste of the time ofthis gathering. These voluminous documents havegenerated numerous academic and political analysesaccording to the law whereby all paper produces morepaper. We need not get onto that particular merry-go-round! More important, of course, is the fact that for thepresent the ruling party, out of a consideration of its power-political position, is not even prepared to transform all thispaper into some kind material reality. On the contrary, ithas itself produced white papers in order to negate for the present , let us repeat, the recommendation of its owncommissions! The point at issue is no more and no less thanthat the rulers have been forced to react to the historicinitiatives of the oppressed and exploited even if only toconjure up the mirage of a slightly different future. In doingso, they have unwittingly strengthened the forces ofliberation. The very recommendations of their commissionsare found to be too little. Alternatives are, therefore,

necessarily put forward and in this completely objectivemanner, the process of radicalisation is intensified. Theregime, as has been often said, is in a no-win or catch-22situation. It is a pre-revolutionary regime, clinging to thesteering wheel of power for as long as it may but in noposition to alter radically the fatal course on which its ownpolicies have set the ship of state.


41/220


40

AK47s, petrol bombs, drivers licences andmatric certificates!

Bearing in mind that we are always speaking of a situationof uneven development both in space and in time, it is nonethe less possible to maintain that in the present state ofeducation in South Africa, schooling for blacks has becomedevalued to the extent that only a very few black studentsin the urban areas expect to complete their secondary

schooling. Apart from the normal economic politicalmechanisms that push out whole phalanxes of black pupilsat the annual points of exit from the system of tribalisedschooling, since 1976 economic, political and ideologicalpressures generated by the crisis of the system and thematuration of the struggle for national liberation have putin question profoundly the legitimacy and usefulness ofsecondary schooling for the majority of black pupils.

There is, first of all, the rapidly growing army of youngpeople who leave school in order to join the guerrillafighters, those who have come to the conclusion that theywill serve both themselves and their people best by takingup arms. This group of young men and women, most ofwhom go directly out of school boycotts into exile and usually into training camps (which include furthereducation, of course) numbers several tens of thousandsalready and has become in many a township the rolemodels for our children. For them, sitting around in DET orother tribalising schools is a waste of time; they representthe most conscious and impatient vanguard of the alienatedpost-76 generation and will become a factor of increasingsignificance in the overall situation. Their option, oralternative, will present a challenge to all other proposed orexecuted alternatives and it is, therefore, of nationalimportance that those of us who are concerned for thefuture socialist dispensation we believe in consider the mostappropriate ways and means whereby this vanguard


42/220


41

element can be synchronised with other equally importantand equally inevitable groups and layers of young ( and

older) South Africans.A second alternative is that in which more than a

million young black South Africans find themselvestrapped willy-nilly at any given moment. This is the rapidlygrowing army of unemployed black youths who have begun to take control of the townships and rural slums ofSouth Africa at night and increasingly also in the day time.Insofar as their way of life is not the result of a consciousdecision, it does not represent an alternative in the normalsense of the term. On the contrary, they are the pathetic by-products of the system of racial capitalism just as much asare the fascist-minded young toughs that gravitate towardsthe Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), the vanguardorganisation of the counter-revolution. Some allegedlyliberal journalists and commentators have compared thisarmy of young men and women with what they call theKhmer-Rouge youth (a myth of modern journalism if everthere was one)! In doing so, they deliberately evoke thepicture of a brainwashed, moronic, ant-like mass ofyoungsters who at a command from (usually ANC)activists will kill and destroy anything, even their nearestand dearest, a kind of debased, dehumanised mass that actsin a paroxysm of self-delusion for freedom, democracyand for all the other noble words that we read in thepamphlet literature of every organisation engaged in theliberation struggle.

This is not only adding insult to the injury inflicted on

our youth by the system; it is, in fact, a counter-revolutionary misreading of the sociology of modern SouthAfrica. For this youth, as we all know, constitutes the basisof the militancy of the townships. They are the ones whowield petrol bombs, stones and even more lethal weaponsusually in self-defence against the system and its agents.That some of them have on occasion been exploited and


43/220


42

misled by criminal elements or by agents provocateurs doesnot detract from the overwhelming reality of the fact that

they are the ones who have pushed the struggle across theRubicon and that they and their successors will be in thefront ranks of the victorious struggle. I shall show presentlywhy I believe that they, more than any other groups ofpeople, represent the most appropriate audience for anyserious liberatory education projects regardless of thenames by which they are called. There is certainly no reasonto accept fatalistically that all these young people should become criminalised members of anti-social gangs as in theperhaps not untypical case of The Hobos in Bonteheuwelin the Western Cape, whose members were too clever forthe gangsters because they were school boys dropped outof school during the demonstrations (see George Gibbs, Acommunity in crisis: the need for overall involvement inplanning. University of Cape Town Centre for Extra-MuralStudies, Educational Crisis in the Western Cape in 1980 , p. 25).

For this group, clearly, formal schooling does notrepresent an option anymore. They are the ones who have begun to realise that even a matric certificate does not leadto a guaranteed job as it did even ten years ago. They seetheir older brothers and sisters struggling to help theirparents make ends meet in the situation of the well-knownadvertisement where the system is constantly pulling theends further and further away from each other. Those whocontinue to try to find a job have realised that a driverslicence is more useful in South Africa today than is a matriccertificate (see Colin Bundys brilliant vignette entitled

Street sociology and pavement politics: some aspects ofstudent/youth consciousness during the 1985 schools crisisin Greater Cape Town unpublished mimeo, 1986, p. 10).

There remain the lucky few who make it to and remainin the senior secondary courses of our schools, includingour schools in the independent and self-governingBantustans, let me stress, since the insidious process of


44/220


43

talking about our country as though we accept thepartitionist strategy of the ruling party has to be countered

actively if we are not to aggravate our problems. This has become one of the most analysed and written about groupsof people in South Africa since black students (besidesunionised black workers) have been so visibly in thefrontline of the resistance against the consequences of thesystem of racial capitalism. Indeed, it is difficult tosummarise in a few paragraphs the complexity of thedynamics that structure the situation in which blacksecondary and tertiary students find themselves today.However, certain features are crystal clear.

It is clear, for example, that the pressures on thesestudents to discontinue or disrupt their schooling areconstant and increasing. Conditions of crisis both insideand outside the schools simply make it impossible for blackstudents in South Africa today to enjoy the luxury of eventhe segregated inferior normality of yesterday. There arevery many analyses of the reasons for this situation and I donot intend to repeat these here. Besides some of the reasonsthat have been implicit in what I have said hitherto, Ishould like to draw your attention to two factors thatcontribute to the shaping of the schooling environment ofour children.

The first of these is, of course, the socio-political context.Schooling is seen to be, and is in fact, so inseparably part ofthe total situation of unequal life chances which definesracial capitalism, that almost anything can spark off aschools boycott. The then president of COSAS, Lulu

Johnson, is reported to have said in October 1984 in aninterview with the Financial Mail:

Before they are students ... the students aremembers of their community. Students are affected by rent hikes because it affects the amount of moneytheir families have for their schooling ... The schoolsand the community are inseparable. (Cited by


45/220


44

Monica Bot in School Boycotts 1984: The Crisis in African education, p. 5.)

What had been in the 1950s and 1960s an insight sharedonly by a few thousand educated black people, viz., thefact that a democratic and adequate system of education isonly possible in a democratic non-racial and united SouthAfrica, has become a fact of mass consciousness today. Somuch so indeed that it is spelt out clearly by academics atmost universities, those seats of higher learning whichhave so often obfuscated the simple truths of the SouthAfrican situation. In the words of Professor Owen van denBerg:

Equal education is a fiction in an unequal society:schooling any brand of schooling will always beunacceptable to the majority if it occurs within aneconomic, social and political framework that isunacceptable to the majority. And that is the crux ofthe education debate. (See his article: Educationequality: Central issue in the education debate?,University of Cape Town Centre for Extra-MuralStudies, The Education Debate.)

The demands put forward by progressive studentsorganisations of all political tendencies have become moreand more overtly political. Some, indeed, have becomeexplicitly socialist or anti-capitalist. In such a context, giventhe reactionary intransigence of the ruling party, periodicdisruptions of schooling for black adolescents anduniversity students are unavoidable. The bush colleges ofyesteryear that were deliberately designed to mass-produceEiselen men and women have instead become the centres ofstudent militancy and political activism. Just as theirAfrikaner counterparts of the thirties and forties producedthe Herrenvolk leaders of the fifties and after, they areassiduously producing the political and cultural leadershipof a free Azania. So much for the good intentions ofpoliticians and social engineers! Because so many of these


46/220


45

students come from remote rural areas, their interventionssimply guarantee that the political resistance and upheaval

will continue to have a national, albeit uneven, spread.The radicalisation of the student movement is

predictable in the circumstances I have sketched. This is asit should be. Our students are no different from any othergroup of students similarly placed in other parts of theworld. However, we would be failing in our duty if we didnot point out certain dangers inherent in the relationship between the schools and society. False perceptions oranalyses of what is going on in the society at large, aeuphoric desire to see only the possibilities in the situationand to ignore its limits, can wreak havoc among themillions of our children at school. It has been said again andagain by various progressive organisations and individualssince October 1985 that the optimistic perception of theSouth African regime as one that is ready to be toppled canonly lead to demoralisation and apathy among ourchildren. This false view of the situation generated, amongother things, the Nongqause-like slogan Liberation BeforeEducation and beliefs such as that indefinite or long-term boycotts will weaken or even topple the regime.Fortunately, saner counsels have prevailed. A pamphletunderwritten by more than 100 organisations in theWestern Cape in January 1986 put the matter clearly andprophetically:

Although most students have decided to return toschool, there is much confusion about whether ornot to return to formal classes. One view is that the boycott should continue until all our demands aremet ...

This view is based on a completely false readingof the political situation in South Africa, since itsupposes that the National Party government isabout to fall and that an indefinite schools boycottwill hasten this fall. While it is true that the


47/220


46

apartheid state has never been as weak and as opento internal and external pressure as at present, it is a

disastrous illusion to believe that the government ison its knees. We believe, instead, that the govern-ment will be forced to make certain reforms butthat it will be kept in power by its imperialistsupporters in the Western world until a moresuitable liberal government become possible. If thisshould prove not to be possible, we should prepareourselves for an open military government

supported in deed, if not in words, by all theimperialist powers for the salvation of capitalism inSouth Africa. In other words: let us not be misledinto believing that freedom is already within ourgrasp. The struggle is going to be a long one yet andis going to demand many more sacrifices from us.

This may not be the popular thing to say but it isthe correct and responsible thing to say. There is nomoral, political or education reason for continuingthe boycott of classes indefinitely. Indeed, to do sowould be like plunging a knife into the heart of ourstruggle. The boycott is one of the most importantweapons of an oppressed and unarmed people. But

Education and the Struggle

Documents