Looking back at the past: South African Apartheid (Part III: Bantu Education and the sustainability of Apartheid)

The Bantu Education Act of 1953 was a law passed by the Malan Government one year before his retirement. The Act made it mandatory for all school in South African territory to admito students from only one race. In other words, the Bantu Education Act stopped interracial education and founded the basis for the sustainability of the Apartheid System.

The Bantu Education Act also changed the way African people were educated. The new system left the non-Whites education in the hands of the Native Affairs Department, separating African education from the Ministry of Education. It is very important to note that the Minister of Native Affairs during that time was HF Verwoerd himself (the architect of Apartheid). Here is his speech as the Minister of Native Affairs regarding Bantu Education (7 June, 1954):

"It is the policy of my department that education should have its roots entirely in the Native areas and in the Native environment and Native community. There Bantu education must be able to give itself complete expression and there it will have to perform its real service. The Bantu must be guided to serve his own community in all respects. There is no place for him in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour. Within his own community, however, all doors are open.

For that reason it is of no avail for him to receive a training which has as its aim absorption in the European community while he cannot and will not be absorbed there. Up till now he has been subjected to a school system which drew him away from his own community and partically (sic) misled him by showing him the green pastures of the European but still did not allow him to graze there. This attitude is not only uneconomic because money is spent on education which has no specific aim, but it is even dishonest to continue with it. The effect on the Bantu community we find in the much discussed frustration of educated Natives who can find no employment which is acceptable to them. It is abundantly clear that unplanned education creates many problems, disrupts the communal life of the Bantu and endangers the communal life of the European.

For that reason it must be replaced by planned Bantu Education. In the Native territories where the services of educated Bantu are much needed, Bantu education can complete its full circle, by which the child is taken out of the community by the school, developed to his fullest extent in accordance with aptitude and ability and thereafter returned to the community to serve and to enrich it.”

There are many values (but also limitations) in this speech. A value coming from the origin of this speech is that it is a document from the Apartheid era, it's not a book written by a historian, or an interview years after those events. The document is a speech by HF Verwoerd himself, speaking as the Minister of Native Affairs of South Africa. The purpose of the speech was to inform the people of the country what were his plans for African Education, and to explain the reasoning behind this new Bantu Education System. Of course, there are some limitations for a historian with this; HF Verwoerd was a politician who was definitely inclined towards favoring the White population, and with the use of phrases such as "green pastures of the European", it is clear that Verwoerd thought that Europeans (Whites) where superior to the Africans. The limitation of this is that it doesn't give an objective viewpoint of the Apartheid era, but more of a personal viewpoint; but a value can also be found here, for the subjectiveness of the speech shows how the government was being led during that time, and who (and what kind of people) where the ones managing the country. This gives us a better understanding on how the Apartheid System was able to prevail for so long.

Going back to the Bantu Education System (and the speech of Verwoerd), we can see that one of the basis of this system was the twisted belief that entire the African population pertained to the rural and native areas, were they could lead their "tribal" lives. HF Verwoerd's plan was to start Grand Apartheid with this, and that intention can be seen when he mentions "There is no place for him in the European community...." and "unplanned education creates many problems, disrupts the communal life of the Bantu and endangers the communal life of the European." 

This last line leads to the next point about the Bantu Education: it's origin. Its origin goes back to 1948 and the victory of the Reunited National Party, and the reason of their victory: the fear that Whites felt regarding the Black people. The reason why the Bantu Education System was created was to separate the population so that White's jobs would be kept being secured for Whites only, and to send the non-Whites back to their native areas. 

As it was mentioned before, Education for Black people changed drastically with the intervention of the Ministry of Native Affairs. Before Bantu Education System, education was (to a certain extent) equal for every race, everyone had the opportunity to study and to gain the same knowledge, and to learn the same skills that would later be useful for getting jobs; but with the arrival of this new Act, these skills were now taught only to the Whites. The entire curriculum was changed for the African population, it was a curriculum tailored to the intellectual capacity of each racial group (going back to the wrong perception that Verwoerd had, that Whites are superior than non-Whites in every single way, even intellectually), and the reason for this was in order to avoid Africans from getting jobs in the city, which would of course lead to segregation of the whole country. The education for Africans now consisted in the learning of technical skills for domestic service (predestining most Africans to grow and serve the Whites) and the way in which unskilled labour worked. Bantu Education was preparing Blacks to become miners, or to work for manufacturers; it was also reinforcing a tribal identity, making them go back to their traditions, and heavily separating the cultures. 

The curriculum wasn't the only thing that was changed. The quality of the schools was also different. The facilities, and the resources at school were worse and more limited for Blacks. Multiple photos of the Apartheid Era show that after the Bantu Education Act, classrooms of Black schools were completely full, there wasn't enough space for all of them. Additionally, there were not enought teachers. The curriculum even changed the language in which Blacks were taught; now they were first taught in their mother tongue, after that in Afrikaans, and only until they were in the last years of school they wouldn't be taught English. This made the parents really mad, and it was one of the reasons many African children stopped attending school. 

Now, it is interesting to see how Verwoerd tried to justify in a moral way the Apartheid System. It's important not to forget that Grand Apartheid wanted to have a moral legitimacy, and that is what Verwoerd tried to make the people believe: that the Bantu Education Act was for the better, that it was going to benefit both the Whites and non-Whites. The way Verwoerd tries to communicate this in his speech is by arguing that Bantu Education will open all kinds of doors for Africans in their own community,  making it richer; and it will help to make their culture grow and not be lost. These is of course not even part of what motivated Verwoerd to start the Bantu Education System, but it was his poor attempt to give an excuse for Apartheid.

There were a lot of consequences of the Bantu Education Act. The main one was the changing of the school systems in South Africa, now school were for Whites-only or Blacks-only, there were not interracial schools anymore. Even the Mission Schools in the country were forced to abide this new law, so the Black students who were receiving quality education from those schools were forced to leave. Another consequence was that many African children stopped attending school; one of the reasons for this was the aforementioned anger of the parents towards the changing of the curriculum, but sometimes it would be because it was impossible to study in a decent environment (schools were over-flooded with people). The African schools found themselves in the position of having to contract  people without qualifications to be a teacher. This was because many teachers quit because of the huge difference in salary, and no option was left but to contract non-professionals. The statistics say that around 85% of all Black teachers had no qualification at all. Another consequence of the Bantu Education system was that the ANC decided to protest against it; the African National Congress announced and started on April of 1955 a permanent boycott (even when they didn't have the resources to do it in a sustainable way). The government heavily threatened all school that took part of the boycott, which resulted in many people being afraid of participating. Nonetheless, it was a small success, for Verwoerd ordered the curriculum to be redrafted, in exchange of the ANC stopping their protest.

Finally, the most important effect that the Bantu Education System had was in the whole country. It was the basis of Apartheid's sustainability. It made the new generation of South Africa to grow up in a completely separated environment; there are countless testimonies of White South African people who were students back then, who clearly state that they grew up without having any interaction of people with a different skin color, they grew up unaware of their realities, and simply didn't know that much to care or to do something about it. It was the basis for Grand Apartheid to grow and establish itself in the future, to make the future generations have a mentality that they were two completely separate groups, and that it was something completely normal. It also separated the people in the sense that now there were employed in two very different sectors of industry; Africans now had only opportunities in the primary sector, or the tertiary one, where they would offer their services for White people (domestic service) or extract natural resources (mining, farming, etc.). But the separation that Bantu Education produced in South Africa was not only between Whites and Blacks, but it also caused division among the Blacks themselves. The tribalism that Bantu Education was teaching the new Black generation caused conflicts in African communities and townships that would lead to violence (Inkatha Freedom Party inspired by Zulu tribalism) and even an internal conflict among African parties: the ANC and the Inkatha, during the 90s.

So, in conclusion, the Bantu Education Act of 1953 can be summarized with the following bullet points:

• It was a law passed by the Malan Government that ordered all South African schools to admit children from only one racial group.
• The Act changed the curriculum for the African children, tailoring it to their mental capacity, and reinforcing the ideas of tribalism.
• The Act left African Education in the hands of the Ministry of Native Affairs, led by HF Verwoerd.
• The new education system would teach African kids skills for serving the Whites or working for the primary sector.
• There were 4 main consequences of Bantu Education: the changing of the school system (including curriculum and rules of admission), reinforcement of the principal ideals of Apartheid, predestination of the jobs that the racial groups would be able to get, and division among the Black community (leading to violence and separation between them). 

Image Source: Timetoast