Apartheid, Education, and Oppression in South Africa

Introduction: South Africa in Transition

As Paulo Freire observed in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the interests of oppressors lie in "changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them," for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated. To achieve this, oppressors use the banking concept of education in conjunction with a paternalistic social action apparatus, within which the oppressed receive the euphemistic title of "welfare recipients." They are treated as individual cases — as marginal persons who deviate from the general configuration of a "good, organized and just" society. The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of a healthy society, which must therefore adjust these "incompetent and lazy" folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals need to be "integrated" and "incorporated" into the healthy society that they have "forsaken."

The nation of South Africa is a nation in flux (Van Der Linde, 2002, p. 511), as the revolutionary changes that began with the abolition of Apartheid and the restructuring of society created a volatile environment of change. The nation will clearly take longer to recover from this abhorrent institution — fifty years in the making — than the time it took to conceive of or abolish it. The seeds of oppression ran much deeper. The official abolition of Apartheid occurred in 1994, and more than a decade later South Africa remained a nation in transition.

Sadly, the history of South Africa and the discussion of how far it has progressed away from the legacy of colonization and Apartheid cannot occur without an honest account of its oppressed past. Many people around the world believe that once the legal apparatus of oppression is eradicated through official means, most or all of the oppressive conditions disappear. Yet as those in the United States are aware — having experienced Black slavery, the Civil War, the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, and the long, arduous process of civil rights reform — this is decidedly not the case. The only way to understand a current set of problems regarding oppression is to understand how the oppression was won, developed, and, hopefully, eventually eradicated — as a process. That process is still unfolding in South Africa, and the conditions today are those associated with a period of transition: from a state of almost complete oppression to one that is only now attempting to undo the hundreds of years of damage it has caused.

Brief History of Apartheid

The history of South Africa contains important facts well worth examining within the broader discussion of racism and oppression. The political and social reality of South Africa has a long history that evolved through the heavy period of colonialism and is forever scarred by that system. Colonization began in the 17th century, with the Dutch and English precariously maintaining a shared system of control for many years. Racial disparity was clearly accepted — both between the English and Dutch colonizers against each other, and between the English and Dutch (Boers or Afrikaners) against the native populations, which comprised many ethnicities of Black nationals and some Asian populations brought there through the colonial system, usually for the purpose of labor.

The English experienced periods of dominance over the Dutch, and vice versa. The Dutch established separate colonies during this period, and until the discovery of diamonds in Dutch-controlled regions there was at least marginal peace, where most parties were afforded the opportunity to work and provide for their families — though this work frequently involved separation from their homes and dangerous, poorly paid employment for Black workers. This system of subjugation through labor intensified exponentially with the discovery of diamonds and other natural resources. The Boer Wars were fought between the Dutch and the English as a result of the discovery of rich resources in Dutch-controlled territory; the English eventually prevailed.

Following eventual independence from England, the two descendant groups — English descendants of colonizers and Dutch descendants of colonizers — shared precarious control for many years, until the 1940s, when the Afrikaner governmental representation gained control at the national level and began asserting Apartheid to maintain and regain their control over the means of production and the utilization of resources. In short, the infighting of the two privileged white minorities created a situation of absolute dependency and disenfranchisement for the native Black population, which worsened an already unjust system by establishing a de facto and de jure system of white dominance over Blacks and of racial separation.

Rather than improving over time, the situation actually worsened, as fear became pervasive among the white minority that the system of control would collapse without an aggressive assertion of power. As part of this system, "all blacks were required to carry 'pass books' containing fingerprints, a photo, and information on access to non-black areas" (Chokshi et al., 1995). In the 1960s, the plan of "Grand Apartheid" was executed and territorial separation enforced by police repression became the reality of daily life (Chokshi et al., 1995). The archaic identity classification system designated individuals as white, black (Africans), or colored (usually Indians and Asians), entrenching racial hierarchy into every aspect of governance and civil life.

There is no single place in the modern world that provides a better example of the foundations described in Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed than South Africa, and more specifically South Africa's historical education system. The culture's foundation, up to the point of the first aggressive movements away from the marginalized majority, depended on the complete control of the native South African peoples. From the moment of political and economic conquest by colonialists, an attempt was made to subvert the expression of independence and to assert a paternalistic "banking" system of education — one in which the official curriculum taught only the history, language, and belief system of the oppressors, with no regard for native language, culture, or history. "Before Black rule in South Africa, education was used as a means of social control and to reproduce a docile labor force since the first school was established in 1658" (Hlatshwayo, 2000, p. 1).

Though education is not the only domain where this occurred — in fact it occurred in a far more sweeping sense across the whole country — everything was affected: where people were allowed to live, where they were allowed to work, whom they were allowed to marry, and even something as foundational as citizenship was effectively stripped from native peoples. The three most important issues to discuss with regard to how South Africa established its pedagogy of the oppressed are education, employment, and citizenship. As Hlatshwayo (2000) notes, "Education cannot be studied in a vacuum; it must be located within the broader context of linked political, social, and economic changes. In South Africa each of these aspects of social life is violently demarcated by ethnicity or 'race'" (p. 1).

Education Under Apartheid

The system of Apartheid was pervasive, and the only way to maintain such a system, according to the white minority, was to foster a sense of "lesser" and "other" in the majority population. The most effective instrument for doing so was a segregated and deliberately inferior school system that taught only the pedagogy of the oppressor — in stark contrast to the white minority's education system, which in isolation was in many respects better than almost any in the world in terms of infrastructure, per-student spending, and student-to-teacher ratios.

Though statistics, graphs, and charts cannot fully capture the real effect of a culturally void school system, they do much to explain the official rule of the white minority over generations of Black South Africans. As Hlatshwayo (2000) explains:

"Formal educational knowledge can be considered to be realized through three message systems: curriculum, pedagogy, and evaluation. Curriculum defines what counts as valid knowledge, pedagogy defines what counts as a valid transmission of knowledge on the part of the taught. The term educational knowledge refers to the underlying principles which shape curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation. This process occurs under integrated codes which depend on explicit ideology." (p. 20)

Formal education in South Africa was officially modeled on a European curriculum, teaching nationalism oriented toward the oppressor's country of origin rather than embracing any form of multiculturalism. One of the clearest examples of the mentality behind the pedagogy of the oppressed, with regard to education, is the evolution of the official restriction of curriculum to only that which the African would need to survive in a labor economy. Hlatshwayo (2000) describes how:

"Verwoerd emphasized that the African 'school must equip him [the African] to meet the demands which the economic life of South Africa will impose on him' (Mbere 1979, 106). The relationship between production and what is learned in schools reproduces unskilled and semiskilled labor power that allows domination and exploitation to occur. According to CNE policy, Whites were perpetual parents who had to guide their 'children,' the Africans. This relationship of superiority and dependence is an essential part of the outlook and function of the ideology of CNE [Christian Nationalist Education], which basically sees schools for the Africans as a necessity in the transmittance of the dominant culture and to reproduce the relations of production necessary for the exploitation of the African labor force." (p. 60)

There is no clearer example of the way in which the majority formed its opinions and developed its educational plan to meet the needs of its oppression of a very large and diverse population. Though educational reforms did take place — some would cite the Bantu Education Acts — they were stifled by the inability of native representatives to gain any real ground on multicultural education, and ended up largely ratifying the status of Black South Africans as members of an inferior labor force who should be taught accordingly, as vocational students. The ideology went so far as to suggest that the existence of poor white people in Africa could be partly blamed on the system's failure to support whites in their supposed innate superiority — hence the reaffirmation of separatist and racially delineated elite education.

Conclusion: Myths and Assumptions

Many observers who look at the remarkable and significant changes that have taken place over the last twenty or so years in South Africa fail to recognize several persistent misconceptions regarding the past and present state of race-related conflicts within the country. Three assumptions are most basic: that Apartheid was a very old legal institution, that Apartheid was a system that developed in isolation, and that Apartheid is over and therefore no longer an issue for the development of multiculturalism in education and elsewhere.

Myth 1: Apartheid was a very old institution.

Reality: Though Apartheid has roots in more than a century of oppression, it was formally established in the mid-twentieth century as a means for the Afrikaners to reassert social, political, and economic control over all others in the aftermath of the Boer Wars. Apartheid was actually the oppressors' response to their fear of a breakdown of less formal systems of control (Chokshi et al., 1995).

Myth 2: Apartheid was an isolated system that developed independently.

Reality: Apartheid was supported by many nations through both de facto and de jure complacency, as well as through more direct means — such as a whites-only tourist entertainment industry that many Americans participated in, and the sale of billions of dollars' worth of computer equipment by United States corporations to help South Africa organize its system of racial segregation (Chokshi et al., 1995).

Myth 3: Apartheid has been legally eradicated and is therefore over.

Reality: Apartheid, along with the hundreds of years of oppression that preceded it during the colonial and post-colonial eras, raised generations of Black and white South Africans to internalize — through a pedagogy of oppression lasting centuries — a deeply debasing set of beliefs and social relations. These will not disappear simply through the symbolic acts of leaders publicly reconciling or enacting new legislation (Seidman, 1999, p. 419).

Multicultural studies encompasses a complex set of needs and realities. South Africa is in a period of serious reformation, and the impact of years of oppression will likely be visible to even the casual observer for many years to come. The goal of developing a truly multicultural system of education will require sustained effort in both law and practice, and South Africa has made a meaningful start. South Africa and the many nations that have stood by her through this process would be wise to look to history to identify best practices for inclusion and for the fair reconstruction of a lost culture and history.