I was hard pressed to know whether to laugh or cry on reading Professor Giliomee's article ‘Education in SA: Is Verwoerd to blame?' which was subtitled, equally provocatively, ‘Bantu Education: Destructive intervention or part reform'. Laugh, because the opening proposition is so outrageous, and cry, because revisionism of this nature is dangerous.

Let me explain why I had this response to this article, and in so doing counter Giliomee's arguments. Giliomee details the merits of the Bantu education system and, by implication Verwoerd's policy, as its use of home language for the first eight years of schooling (prior to 1976), its rapid expansion of access for black children to both primary and particularly secondary education in the 1980s, the increasing budget spent on black schooling, the fact that at senior levels of secondary school black students were taught with the same syllabi as white children and more black learners passed Matric.

He also, with gob-smacking sophistry, praises the Bantu education system for clearing away the mission schools. In each of these assertions there is some truth: remember the art of untruth is to put a grain of truth at the heart of the lie.

Kathleen Heugh[1], who Giliomee cites extensively, points out that use of home language in Afrikaans and black schools during apartheid, was good practice. It meant that black learners built their conceptual understanding of the world in their own language. However, this was not a stroke of progressive genius on Verwoerd's part, but a very deliberate attempt to create two systems in South Africa: one populated by blacks who could only access the other, white system, in a subordinate role due to language and educational barriers.

Similarly, the fact that more black children started accessing school was part driven by a need for a larger subordinate workforce after the rapid economic expansion in the 1960s, which was likely to founder on a lack of semi-skilled labourers who could read and communicate enough to be productive without being dangerous in an increasingly sophisticated workplace.

Also, in part, it was effective on the international stage, where the apartheid regime loved pointing out that more blacks accessed secondary school in South Africa than in many post-independent African states. 

As for spending more of the budget on black education, this was driven by increasing access and the important figure is not the overall budget spent on black schools but the per capita amount spent on each black learner compared to each white learner, and this margin stayed fairly steady at about 1:10 during the apartheid era (Unterhalter, 1991)[2].

As for seeing a benefit in black senior secondary school learners having access to the same syllabi as white learners, surely this is the norm in any normal education system and cannot be praised as progressive. The question is how well prepared were black learners linguistically and conceptually for these syllabi?

The high drop-out rate in secondary schools for blacks compared to whites indicates that black learners struggled with the work, due to poor earlier preparation, and obviously as they dropped out the Matric pass rate was raised. Not exactly progressive or reformist, Professor Giliomee.

However, this discussion misses the key issue, which is what sort of schools did these black children access as a result of this policy and how well did they prepare them for active critical citizenship and employment?  This is where Dr Mamphela Ramphele's argument that ‘children under apartheid's ‘gutter education' were better educated than children are today', which Giliomee quotes, is wrong.

Dr Ramphele is confusing schooling and education. She may well be right, many black children were probably schooled better in apartheid era schools than in many of the poorest performing schools now, in that they could read and write in mother-tongue and some in English and Afrikaans.

The problem is that this ‘success' was achieved in a system that served a particular political segregationist purpose. In student rejection of that purpose, starting with the Soweto uprising of 1976 and continuing through the school boycotts and burnings of the 1980s, the basis for the present parlous situation in the education system was born. 

The Bantu school system, while it may have been technically relatively sound in the teaching of the basic literacy (but not so much numeracy) skills, contained a segregationist and iniquitous logic that was unacceptable to many black students and was psychologically damaging. It is on this basis that present leaders see many of our present educational problems coming from Verwoerd's time as Prime Minister.

That is not to relieve the present education departments of responsibility for the textbook chaos, and EduSolutions and other providers are certainly not a product of that era, but the fact remains that it was the couching of the Bantu schooling system in a particular political context that led to its rejection and with it the rejection of much that educationally we could argue was sound. 

However, one cannot differentiate between the two, as the expansion of access, use of mother-tongue schooling, the (under-) training of black teachers in rural teacher training colleges, along with the much discussed lack of well-trained black maths and science teachers, were all part of the attempt to sustain the apartheid system.

So, ironically, the very educational successes of the Bantu schooling system, as defined by the good Professor, were the causes of its rejection by students and parents. We live with the after-effects of that rejection till today, which is why any discussion about extending mother tongue teaching to Grades 4 - 7 is so fraught with difficulty, even though educationally it makes sense.

Giliomee goes on to cite research which shows that black parents in the dark days of apartheid wanted their children to be educated in English or English and Afrikaans in senior secondary school, but not in their home language. His argument, that this shows a rejection by blacks of home language learning (unlike Afrikaners) and therefore, by implication, an illogical rejection of the good education that the regime was offering, is insulting.

What black parents and their children were rejecting was schools teaching in a language which was under-resourced (unlike Afrikaans), appeared to restrict their children's life chances in the white language dominated system (unlike Afrikaans), did not lead to university education in that language (unlike Afrikaans) and had not developed an academic vocabulary and glossary so was ill-equipped (without considerable investment, as Afrikaans had) for secondary and post school education.  Surely, Professor, this rejection is very logical?

Giliomee further argues that those who accuse Verwoerd of racism are basing this on one speech he made and not on the whole breadth of his (largely positive) impact on black education.  This is not the case. What is being rejected is the politicisation of schooling under Verwoerd which led to the school boycotts and rejection of mother-tongue education and to low performing, poorly resourced township and rural schools - in fact many of the same problems that still plague the education system.  Is it a coincidence that these problems still plague our schools? No, of course not, Professor.

One could argue the post apartheid education planners and policy makers should have cleared all these vestiges of the previous system away. However, the devaluing of African languages, the inherent weakness in the teaching of maths and science, the inherited suspicion of the black population of any changes in the schooling system, the trauma the latter period of apartheid visited on teachers and learners which is seen in trauma-related behaviour in the present generation of teachers and learners (as both Dr Ramphele and I have noted) with their lack of confidence and self-esteem, are very much still with us and they are making any improvement in the schooling system extremely difficult.

It is therefore highly problematic and ahistorical to argue that black schooling under apartheid was a reflection in another mirror of white education. The fact is that Bantu education rationalised iniquitous segregation - any black person could see that the development of the various ethnic communities in parallel was clearly not equal.

It is therefore disingenuous to argue, as Giliomee does, that black leaders should have responded positively to Verwoerd's approach to them in late 1950 which, the Professor argues, would have led to a black educated elite which would have had something close to autonomy in townships and rural areas where they would place ‘their knowledge exclusively at the service of their own people'.

Giliomee seems to blame the black elite for a lack of vision in turning down this once in a life time offer and so creating what he calls a ‘fateful turning point in South African history'. Apart from the fact that this argument is extraordinarily patronising and is tantamount to blaming the victims for the situation that they found themselves in, it also again ignores the political context.

On what basis would a black elite have sat with a Minister, who they had every reason to distrust, and agree on a two state solution which would have made the complexity of the land issue in Palestine seem like child's play? Unfortunately for Verwoerd and for Giliomee's argument the black elite in 1950 were politically aware and were not seeking the bantustanisation of South Africa.

So, Professor, to answer your question, Verwoerd and his regime are to blame for the present parlous situation in our education system. This is not an excuse, and it is only a partial explanation, for the present situation in schooling. It is however a historical fact and cannot be airbrushed out through a revisionist attempt to rehabilitate a man who is rightly condemned. 

Giliomee quotes Francis Wilson and I want to end by quoting him, as Wilson neatly summarises why the Professor is wrong,

‘The destructive impact of the ‘Bantu Education' system wrought damage that will take decades if not generations to repair... the mean-spiritedness which underlay the philosophy of ‘Bantu education'; the inadequacy of funds made available throughout most of the apartheid years; and the crippling effect of job-reservations and the colour-bar on the acquisition of skills and experience by the majority of workers could almost have been designed to prevent them from being adequately prepared for the challenges of globalisation in the 21st century' [3]

Footnotes:

[1] It is important to note that Kathleen Heugh was making a very different point in such works as , Heugh, K. (2002). Revisiting bilingual education in and for South Africa. PRAESA Occasional papers no.  9, as to that expounded by Giliomee. She is arguing for multi-lingual schooling and late exit from home language and that the Afrikaans experiment under apartheid shows it is possible.

[2] In Unterhalter, E. 1991, Apartheid education and popular struggles p51-52, Elaine shows that for every rand spent on a black child's school about ten times as much was spent on each white child's schooling and that this was fairly consistent throughout the apartheid era.

[3] Francis Wilson, (2001), Employment, Education and the Economy, in South Africa Survey 2001/2, p 3.

Martin Prew is Director of the Centre for Education Policy Development (CEPD)

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