The Bantu Education Act was passed by the government in 1953 over popular opposition. We didn't want to give our kids this subpar education. This Bantu Education Act was created to ensure that our children only learned things that would prepare them for jobs that the government desired for them, like as working in factories, and that they did not receive the same quality education as white children. To allow more children to receive some education without the government having to spend more money, our children were only required to attend school for three hours each day, split into two shifts of students each day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Hawu! The behavior itself was abhorrent.
Baard and Schreiner, My Spirit is Not Banned, Part 2
The 1953 Bantu Education Act was one of apartheid's most offensively racist laws. It brought African education under control of the government and extended apartheid to black schools. Previously, most African schools were run by missionaries with some state aid. Nelson Mandela and many other political activists had attended mission schools. But Bantu education ended the relative autonomy these schools had enjoyed up to that point. Instead, government funding of black schools became conditional on acceptance of a racially discriminatory curriculum administered by a new Department of Bantu Education. Most mission schools for Africans chose to close rather than promote apartheid in education.
School officials, parents, and students were not inherently opposed to consolidating schools under a new government department. The establishment of a distinct and unequal black educational system as opposed to a single public schooling system for all South Africans was something that the African community passionately resisted. Regardless of a person's aptitude or aspirations, the white government made it abundantly obvious that Bantu education was intended to train Black students to be "hewers of wood and draws of water" for a white-run economy and society. Minister of Native Affairs Dr. Hendrik F. Verwoerd described the government's new educational strategy to the South African Parliament in these now-famous words:
In the European Community, he [the "Native"] has no place above some types of labor. Due of his inability to be absorbed, receiving training that is intended to help the European Community absorb him is useless. He had until to this point been subjected to a school system that alienated him from his neighborhood and led him astray by showing him the better-paying meadows of European Society, where he is not permitted to graze. (cited on page 92 of Kallaway)
The ideological framework for Bantu education had its origins in a manifesto crafted in 1939 by Afrikaner nationalists. Based on the racist and paternalistic view that the education of blacks was a special responsibility of a superior white race, this document called for "Christian National Education" and advocated separate schools for each of South Africa's "population groups"-whites, Africans, Indians, and Coloureds. Segregated education disadvantaged all black groups, but was particularly devastating for Africans. In a pamphlet released in 1948, the organization asserted: "... the task of white South Africa with regard to the native is to Christianize him and help him culturally... [N]ative education and teaching must lead to the development of an independent and self-supporting and self-maintaining native community on a Christian National basis" (quoted in Hlatshwayo, 64).
Bantu education served the interests of white supremacy. It denied black people access to the same educational opportunities and resources enjoyed by white South Africans. Bantu education denigrated black people's history, culture, and identity. It promoted myths and racial stereotypes in its curricula and textbooks. Some of these ideas found expression in the notion of the existence of a separate "Bantu society" and "Bantu economy" which were taught to African students in government-run schools. This so-called "Bantu culture" was presented in crude and essentialized fashion. African people and communities were portrayed as traditional, rural, and unchanging. Bantu education treated blacks as perpetual children in need of parental supervision by whites, which greatly limited the student's vision of "her place" in the broader South African society (Hartshorne, 41).
The neglect of the government had a terrible impact on Bantu education institutions. Black children' education suffered because of huge budget gaps between white and black schools and from low student-teacher ratios. Making problems worse, the Bantu Education Account of 1955 mandated that African education be paid for through the general poll tax received from Africans rather than through the General Revenue Account, which was previously used to pay for white education. Even after the separate account was abolished in 1972, Black children's education continued to be gravely underfunded, receiving only one-tenth of the funding available to white students and contending with student-teacher ratios of 56:1. (Hartshorne, 41).
African education was hampered by dilapidated school structures, crammed classrooms, insufficient instruction, inadequate teacher preparation, and a lack of textbooks. Under these circumstances, students found it difficult to learn. Even the sports facilities were significantly nicer at white schools than at black schools, according to former instructor Eddie Daniels: "The vast expanses of green fields were the first thing that caught my attention at both [white] schools. Oh my God! And there is nothing in black schools; when I consider this, the gap is simply enormous. Tennis courts and large playing fields are available. It hurts so badly." [Watch the interview with Daniels]
Obed Bapela detailed his experiences at overcrowded Bantu education schools in Alexandra township (in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg) in an interview from 2006:
the school that I went to was an overcrowded school, there were quite many of them in Alexandra that were overcrowded, there were not enough schools to take care of all of us so we used to share classes. There would be a morning class that goes up to 11 o'clock and then we'll go home and then other kids of the same grade will come after 11 o'clock up to 2 o'clock and therefore the teachers will then run two sets of class … in some situations they will even use a tree in the schoolyard… We were around 70 to 80 [pupils in class] when I was in grade 1 and grade 2. [Watch Bapela interview segment]
A racist educational system perpetuated South Africa's social hierarchy in which skin color was very closely correlated to class. But Bantu education also brought a huge increase in the number of pupils attending primary (and later secondary) schools. Black students rose in protest in 1976 when the Department of Bantu Education mandated that higher primary and junior secondary students would have to learn some key subjects in Afrikaans – the language of the oppressor. This decision sparked a youth uprising in Soweto, which then spread nationwide and become a watershed event in the struggle against apartheid.
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