Learning from the legacy of
Overcoming the burden of our history is essential for the country’s future
The nation seems to have learnt very little from the lessons of its own history. This is according to Dr Mamphela Ramphele, who delivered the keynote address at the seventh Es’kia Mphahlele Annual Memorial Lecture on September 30 at The Ranch Protea Hotel, south of Polokwane.
Ramphele said Mphahlele had warned about the current issues facing South Africa, but that we had failed to listen.
She said: “He must be distraught about our failure to heed his advice in his graduation address at Wits University in 1995.”
Ramphele quoted from Mphahlele’s graduation speech: “In the heat and crush, push and shove, urgency, preoccupations, panic and heartburn of the times, it is easy to lose sight of the essence of the dramatic events and issues that have come to the forefront of our consciousness these days around tertiary institutions.
“We are afraid to come to terms with the burden of our history, which bedevils the education crises we are in. This crisis, we observe, brings out the ugliest in us as academics, students, workers and administrators, and often belies the best we can bring to the hammer and anvil on which we are currently trying to reshape the present into the future.”
The struggle continues
Ramphele cautioned that the goals of the past — which are very much like those of the present — are yet to be achieved.
“The 1976 high school student uprising demonstrated the power of young people to risk all for the ideal of high quality education, free of the ideological burden that sought to perpetuate their dehumanisation and inferior status in the land of their birth.
“[From] 1995 to 2000, tertiary student protests were about aligning the tertiary institutions with our political settlement and the demands for fundamental transformation at the national level.”
Bemoaning the state of education in South Africa, she said people should acknowledge that the education system today both at the basic and tertiary levels has failed to grasp the opportunity to become the fountain of talent development and idea generation that was envisaged as part of a transformed system.
“Our distress at the violence and destruction of public property is understandable as it is in stark contrast to our failure as a nation to express outrage at the continuing destruction of talent and hope in successive generations of young people.
“What nation can normalise the theft of hope from so many of its young? Twenty-two years after our political settlement, children are still facing high infant and child mortality rates in a middle-income country such as ours. Twenty-two years into democracy, more than 50% of our children still drop out of school, and of those who survive