Soweto uprising made struggle unstoppable
HAVING won the elections thanks to the weighting of the rural vote in June 1948, DF Malan’s government established the Commission on Native Education to investigate African education in January 1949. Werner Willi Max Eiselen, a dyed-in-the-wool apartheid ideologue who was appointed secretary (director-general today) for native affairs when the National Party assumed office, headed the commission.
Descended from German missionaries who had settled in the Transvaal, Eiselen trained as an anthropologist and linguist, earning his doctorate at Hamburg University during the early years of the Nazi regime. He saw the commission as the first step in an elaborate plan of social engineering, later dubbed “grand apartheid”.
Eiselen and his political principals proceeded from the racist premise that human aptitudes, competencies and capacities are racially determined.
In the submission it made to the commission, the Cape African Teachers Association rebuked it: “In any given state, the aims of education must be the same for all its citizens, since there cannot be two or more kinds of citizenship within a state. Any such term, therefore, as ‘native education’ is untenable, because it immediately violates the principles of education.”
Eiselen tabled his report in 1951. He had ignored the views of these African educators; instead he provided the rationale for the Bantu Education Bill tabled by new native affairs minister HF Verwoerd.
Verwoerd, like Eiselen, was a product of German academia during the 1930s.
It was during that debate that Ver- woerd brazenly proclaimed the regime’s objectives: “When I have control of native education, I will reform it so that natives will be taught from childhood to realise that equality with Europeans is not for them…. People who believe in equality are not desirable teachers for natives.”
In other words, “Bantu education” was designed to indoctrinate Africans into submission and thus was catapulted into the maelstrom of political struggle.
Before Bantu education’s imposition in 1955, African education was funded by missionary churches, communities or friendly societies. The state agreed to pay African teachers’ salaries, but on a racially differentiated scale after 1930. Beyond that, communities, churches, friendly societies and parents bore the burden of constructing and maintaining the buildings and providing teaching materials and equipment.
Consequently, African communities and liberals had long demanded that the government assume responsibility for the education of all and invest specifically in African education.
Eiselen presented his recommendations as a positive response to such demands.
When the more conservative African teachers bought into Eiselen’s deception, the Transvaal African Teachers Association, led by Isaac Matlare, Es’kia Mphahlele and Zeph Mothopeng, split.
In the Cape, most African teachers rejected it but were unable to organise resistance beyond a boycott of the Bantu school boards established in terms of the act.
Like many other National Party strategies, Eiselen’s was full of empty promises. Instead of the state funding African education, Eiselen recommended that African parents pay for the education of their children and that they be offered the illusion of control through elected “Bantu” school boards.
All efforts to mobilise against Bantu education failed dismally until that challenge was taken up by African pupils themselves in 1976.
At one or two Soweto schools, pupils began a class boycott in opposition to an arbitrary departmental ruling that a number of subjects would be taught in Afrikaans.
Opposition snowballed during the first two quarters, erupting in a huge demonstration by pupils on June 16 1976.
After June 16, the revolt spread, first to the East and West Rand, then like a veld fire at the beginning of the third school term, until it had engulfed the entire country.
From the African schools, it spread to coloured schools.
Hindsight tells us the 1976 Soweto uprising was the watershed, when the strategic initiative passed from the apartheid regime to its opponents.
Although still capable of brutal countermeasures, the apartheid regime was on the defensive.
The collapse of 400 years of Portuguese colonialism in southern Africa had stimulated rising expectations and suggested new possibilities.
The setbacks the liberation movements suffered during the 1960s had resulted in almost a decade of apparent political tranquillity. Beneath that surface, however, the black universities, colleges and seminaries had become centres where liberatory ideas, strategies and theories from around the world were debated, dissected and explored.
New generations of determined fighters to swell the ranks of all liberation formations emerged from 1976. It is a generation that produced a roll call of outstanding martyrs – some were sent to the gallows, some were murdered in police custody, some were the victims of assassins and hit squads and some fell on battlefields across our subcontinent.
The events of 1976 made the freedom struggle unstoppable. We dip our banners in homage to those who fell on June 16 and the subsequent years. Z Pallo Jordan is a former arts and culture minister