How power changed hands to shape country we have today

IN YOUR readers’ column, August 4, you carried a letter from E Dale, conveying what is generally (and covertly) said about the state of our country, and the next day you had the politically correct tendentious views of Guy McLeod and Suhail Suleiman.

What all three correspondents overlook, perhaps disingenuously, is that the Constitution of the Cape Colony was unique. If one qualified, either through property or earnings, one could acquire the franchise as this constitution was colour blind. This colour blindedness was not welcome in certain quarters, and vociferous opposition to it was led by JH Hofmeyr, the member for Stellenbosch, and Le Roux, the member for Victoria West.

Notwithstanding the opposition forces led by these two Neanderthal troglodytes, the number of voters of dark pigmentation was increasing and it was only a question of time before they would earn the honorific of Honourable and take their seats in the House. The first candidate shirked his duty and shied away at the jump.

Then the Republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State embarked upon a pre-emptive attack upon the citizens of the Natal and Cape colonies. Hampered by the ineffectual dilettantes of the Imperial Army, the doughty colonists of the Cape and the other selfgoverning colonies throughout the world drove off and then conquered the invaders. The war of 1899-1902 is foolishly termed the last of the gentlemen’s wars for there was no gentlemanliness on the part of the republicans who embarked upon unrestrained guerrilla activity and reaped the rewards.

The fighting, but not the war, ended on May 31, 1902. In 1906, the Liberal Party came to power in England and Winston Churchill, an ill-educated romantic, lead the Union of South Africa bill through the House of Commons. He insisted on paying the Boers for attacking the colonies, refranchising all rebels irrespective of those in the Transvaal, Orange River or the Cape colonies.

Ultimately, he arranged the franchise that it favoured the backward rural areas over the progressive urban areas and deprived the black folk of the Transvaal and Orange River of the vote as enjoyed widely by the black folk in the Cape and restrictively in Natal.

Under the Union of South Africa, education was a provincial responsibility. The black folk paid very little by way of taxes, and in Natal, even objected under Bambatha to paying the low Poll and Marriage taxes. The socialistic concept of transference of tax income, so heavily punted by the present administration of the Cape Province, had not yet become widespread.

The economy of the Union of South Africa was poor, there were widespread droughts, locust and rinderpest plagues, poor roads, no dams and potable water, and the Boer folk were struggling to adjust to modern civilisation – what there was of it in the 20th century. The result was that education for the black folk was left to the churches, primarily the Anglican Church.

Under William Govan, education for blacks had concentrated on producing classical scholars fluent in Latin and Ancient Greek. The Presbyterian Church, especially, felt it was throwing good money after bad, so Govan was retired and replaced by James Stewart, who introduced a more vocational education approach which produced journeymen such as Tengo Jabavu.

Hitler’s war interrupted things and the manpower crisis in South Africa (1943-1946) required a change in educational policy. Smuts was in his dotage and incapable or unwilling to lead his party, so the United Party rightly lost the 1948 election to the coalition of the Afrikaner and National parties.

The new government rightly appreciated that a radical policy for black folk education was required. The Black Training Colleges and mission schools were moribund, and the Anglican Church, for example, was cross-pollinating its income by not spending on the colleges and mission schools, preferring to divert its income to the stipends of its archbishops and bishops.

The new minister of People’s Affairs introduced a new vocational education policy and expropriated the training colleges and mission schools of the churches, particularly those of the Anglican Church. The response from Joost de Blank and Trevor Huddleston was an endless litany of lies and denunciations of vocational education, and yet Verwoerd’s education policy for the people was only a continuation of Stewart’s educational philosophy which had produced the Jabavus.

The attacks by De Blank and Huddleston on Bantu Education caused so much unwarranted dissatisfaction with a system that was assisting empirically the majority of the black folk that the events of 1976 occurred and a whole generation of black youth, and a country, paid dearly for the foolishness of De Blank and Huddleston.

Under the Union of South Africa, education was a provincial responsibility